The advantages of being nice to prisoners

New York Times
August 25, 2005
In Iraq's Prisons, Try a Little Tenderness
By SCOTT GERWEHR and NINA HACHIGIAN
Washington

WHEN Americans talk about "the lessons of Vietnam," they usually mean
failed policies and programs that shouldn't be repeated. But there were
some successes in the Vietnam War, including an initiative to win the
allegiance of captured and defecting Vietcong and North Vietnamese
fighters by treating them generously and reshaping their attitudes.
This idea - that harsh treatment of prisoners can be less effective
than showing compassion - now deserves a test in Iraq.

The program in Vietnam was called Chieu Hoi, roughly translated as
"open arms." While rarely effective against the most hard-core and
high-ranking insurgents, Chieu Hoi succeeded in winning the support of
nearly 200,000 fighters for the American-backed government of South
Vietnam.

Under Chieu Hoi, defectors and prisoners who proved cooperative
received clemency against treason charges as well as good food, health
care, vocational training and jobs. At the same time, they were
systematically indoctrinated with literature, classes and activities to
persuade them to support the South Vietnamese government.

Studies carried out during the war by the RAND Corporation found that
thousands of those former enemies who participated in Chieu Hoi became
good sources of intelligence on the Communist forces, provided American
advisers and troops with cultural and linguistic knowledge, enlisted
civilians to support the American cause, and even took up arms against
their former Vietcong and North Vietnamese comrades.

One unidentified Marine officer quoted in a 1973 RAND study said that a
Chieu Hoi participant named Truong Kinh, who worked as a scout with his
division, killed 55 Vietcong and North Vietnamese fighters in a single
day, saving American lives and gaining "the admiration and respect of
every marine in the company."

Captured enemy documents now in the archives of the Army Special
Operations Command discuss the powerful effect of Chieu Hoi on the
enemy. One Vietcong report from 1966 says: "The impact of increased
enemy military operations and 'Chieu Hoi' programs has, on the whole,
resulted in lowering of morale of some ideologically backward men, who
often listen to enemy radio broadcasts, keep in their pockets enemy
leaflets, and wait to be issued weapons. This attitude on their part
has generated an atmosphere of doubt and mistrust among our military
ranks." The Vietcong feared the program, and expended a great deal of
effort in attempting to thwart it through assassinations, infiltration
and counterpropaganda.

So what does this have to do with Iraq? While Chieu Hoi was geared to
counter a Communist threat, it was based on universal principles of
counterinsurgency that could easily be applied to the current struggle.
In fact, Chieu Hoi was something of an import in its own right: it was
the brainchild of three men with long experience battling rebels. One
was Sir Robert Thompson, who led the British Advisory Mission in
Vietnam and was renowned for his work in Britain's quelling of the
Communist insurgency in Malaya in the 1950's. The others were Rufus
Phillips, a former C.I.A. official working for the United States Agency
for International Development, and Charles Bohannan, a retired Army
colonel; this pair had led the American effort in late 1940's to stop
the Huk insurgency in the Philippines.

They designed Chieu Hoi to focus on changing the underlying attitudes
of the subjects, not simply on trying to control their behavior.
Empirical research in social psychology reveals that efforts to
directly control behavior through coercion or bribery usually leave
underlying attitudes intact, or even harden them. Thus putting a gun to
a man's head and instructing him to support a particular political
ideology will work only as long as the gun is present and he is being
watched. The preferred method for long-term change is instilling
sincere belief in the new political ideology, making the gun and
monitoring unnecessary.

American forces in Iraq would have nothing to lose in applying this
basic psychology and developing a pilot program based on Chieu Hoi. It
is an inexpensive and nonviolent approach that can aid the
counterinsurgency: there are some 10,000 prisoners being held in Iraq,
and "turning" even a small fraction of them could reap huge dividends
in terms of gaining intelligence for our forces, diminishing support
for the insurgents and reducing anti-American sentiment among average
Iraqis.

In addition, running our prisons under the Chieu Hoi model could help
reverse the terrible propaganda defeat suffered with the revelations of
torture at Abu Ghraib. Nongovernmental groups like the International
Red Cross and Amnesty International would praise America, bringing more
international support. And prisoners released by our forces would
return to their communities with stories of American generosity and
tolerance, increasing support for the United States' efforts.

Some Americans would undoubtedly criticize a program that treated
prisoners and defectors well, arguing that insurgents who kill our men
and women do not deserve kindness. This is understandable: during the
Vietnam War, Chieu Hoi was often derided as "rest and recreation for
the enemy." But we are up against a determined insurgency; a desire for
retribution should not be allowed to stand in the way of effective
policy and our ultimate success in Iraq.

Scott Gerwehr is a policy analyst and Nina Hachigian a senior political
scientist at the RAND Corporation.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Book: We Left POWs Behind in Vietnam
    ... We Left POWs Behind in Vietnam ... Unless you are prepared to learn how your government callously abandoned hundreds of your fellow Americans to decades of continued imprisonment at the hands of their brutal captors and jailers in Vietnam and Laos, you may prefer to ignore America's shame and avoid reading this shocking book. ... "An Enormous Crime - The Definitive Account of American POWS Abandoned in Southeast Asia" is a bone-chilling account of one of those crimes that call to heaven for vengeance. ... Acting on advice of the Fidel Castro, the North Vietnamese from the very beginning of the war set out to capture American servicemen with the intent of ransoming them for postwar reconstruction aid, just as Castro had ransomed the Bay of Pigs prisoners. ...
    (alt.politics)
  • @@ U.S. veteran: Torture is an American value @@
    ... Torture Is an American Value: ... I became aware of torture as a U.S. policy in 1969 when I was serving as a USAF ... Instead of the recent euphemism "illegal combatants", the United State in Vietnam ... claimed prisoners were "criminal" and therefore exempt from Geneva Convention ...
    (soc.culture.iranian)
  • Mr. Nguyen van Thieu ca` ro?m
    ... Two years after a cease-fire agreement promised peace in Vietnam; ... PRESIDENT NIXON, January 23, 1973: ... all American forces will be withdrawn from ... NARRATOR: The South Vietnamese government greeted the Paris Accords ...
    (soc.culture.vietnamese)
  • Re: a bedtime story for the Dougie Duo (not for the kids!)
    ... This thread is a cheap shit, as in 99% of what you attack with. ... personal attack to many of you, but bush and patriotism are not synonymous. ... Congress and the American people to make an informed decision about ... prisoners: The general in charge of all 18 POW camps that housed Iraq ...
    (misc.transport.trucking)
  • Re: John McCain - Traitor & Follower of Radical Right Wing America Hating Bigot Priests John
    ... John McCain continues to say he is proud of Reverend Hagee's ... George Smith and Claude McClure ... circumstances in the steamy, mosquito infested jungle of South Vietnam, ... The American prisoners in "Auschwitz" were placed in bamboo cages four ...
    (alt.politics.bush)