Streets Without Joy: A Political History of Sanctuary and War, 1959–2009. Michael A.K.G. Innes. London: Hurst Publishers, 2021.
Michael A. Innes’ Streets Without Joy: A Political History of Sanctuary and War, 1959–2009 is the definitive history of the shifting understandings of the concept of sanctuary in American security thought from the middle of the Cold War through the end of the George W. Bush administration. Grappling with the challenge of enemies that exploit national borders or hide amongst civilian populations is not only a challenge today, but also one for policy makers and soldiers during the Cold War and in its wake when the United States confronted a variety of threats beyond the reach of its military force. In addition to its specific examination of sanctuary, the book models how a scholar might examine the reexamination of a concept to assist policymakers in formulating and articulating policy in an emerging crisis. Innes traces the concept of sanctuary from the writings of Cold War defense intellectuals who grappled with insurgencies, refugees, terrorism, and nuclear threats through the deployment of the loaded term after the attacks of 9/11.
Innes’ model for his own project is Bernard Fall’s Street Without Joy. Fall was a French resistance fighter turned academic who wrote a study of the last years of the French war effort in Indochina. Fall’s books were read, but not fully understood, by policy makers in the 1960s and were twice rediscovered by the American military in the 1980s and again at the beginning of the occupation of Iraq. According to Innes, Fall’s understanding of sanctuary was both contingent and misunderstood by readers of his work. If Fall’s work on sanctuary was subject to misinterpretation or oversimplification, it is unsurprising that Innes determines that at least three subsequent generations of thinkers and practitioners have struggled to understand it as well.
Like Fall’s study of the conflict in southeast Asia, Streets Without Joy is “not a war history, nor a tragedy, nor an adventure story, but an amalgam of all three.”[1] For his analysis, Innes draws on his personal experiences as an advisor to NATO during the first decade of the 2000s, but he also combines history with political science to trace the concept of sanctuary through the past fifty years. The central idea of Innes’s work is that the concept of sanctuary was flexible enough to be useful to multiple generations of policymakers. The very flexibility of the term permitted policy makers to reach back to previous crises to invoke what they judged had been the lessons that should have been learned, constructing a thread of apparent continuity in American foreign policy thinking conducive to their predilections. Policymakers in the Bush administration would employ a profoundly indeterminate understanding of sanctuary, drawn from their shallow reading of the Vietnam War and related conflicts, that would shape the origins and course of the Iraq War.
The Bush administration’s preparation for and conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is where Innes presents his arguments about the flexible nature of the concept of sanctuary in greatest detail. He notes that in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks President Bush strived to use rhetoric that echoed his father’s rhetoric in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, even though the enemy in this case was still undetermined. Within a week of the attacks, senior leaders within the Department of Defense had formed a mental and policy framework that emphasized countering the sanctuary from which these attacks occurred. The framework was derived in large part from the president’s initial understanding. Seeking to create continuities not just with the actions of his father but the longer history of American warfare, Bush's speechwriting team presented the need to challenge Al Qaeda's sanctuary while attempting to create parallels with Roosevelt’s address to Congress on 8 December 1941 in crafting the President's rhetoric.
Bush’s invocation of the need to destroy Al Qaeda’s sanctuary filtered down even further. In terms of operational planning, by October, two-thirds of the goals of the campaign in Afghanistan were rooted in the idea of ending the enemy’s sanctuary. Innes analyzes how Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other senior officials tried to explain to the American public that Iraq’s leadership, both in 1991 and 2003, sought to exploit the concept of sanctuary by putting civilians next to targets. Iraq’s leadership was also accused of providing sanctuaries where terrorists could plan their attacks in safety. The war in Iraq quickly morphed from a conventional assault into a broader insurgency against the Iraqi government and the United States' forces. Despite the shift in what was happening on the ground, figures from the Bush administration still used the idea of denying enemy forces a sanctuary in their rhetoric on the evening news. Wolfowitz articulated that the general American strategy in these years focused on denying sanctuary as defined in terms of hostile political ideas, hostile societies, and hostile spaces on the internet.
As the wars ground on, DoD documents began to speak of sanctuary not just as something to deny to enemies but also something to provide to U.S. partners, such as the Kurds. Through the Cold War, sanctuary had largely been spoken of in context of enemies such as Central American Marxists or Gaddafi’s terrorists—as an obstacle to American ends. Published early in the post-9/11 wars by the U.S. Army, Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency, created a military manual that allowed sanctuary to be considered both as a doctrinal space where insurgent networks operated and as a physical location.
Innes does not claim to provide the definitive study of the origins of the problems in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but he conclusively demonstrates the power of presidential rhetoric—even when unclear in meaning or unscripted in delivery—and the challenge of coming to a common understanding of concepts across multiple agencies, to say nothing of allies. If winning modern counterinsurgencies requires a whole of government approach, the prospective challenges in simply creating a shared understanding of the strategic environment ought to present a sobering caution against overly sanguine expectations of success. Given the importance of Presidential rhetoric for analyzing both the Obama and Trump administrations, Innes' framework could be of use in examining how the Global War on Terror evolved after 2008.
Innes’ work is also applicable to grey-zone conflicts of the future. Russia’s campaigns of conquest since 2008, but prior to their bloody assault on Ukraine, have been limited in aim and hybrid in nature and are the most obvious model of this kind of conflict. A diverse array of tools have emerged that have expanded the scope of any future conflict. These tools span finance, biology, and technologies that undermine the very nature of truth, reality, and social trust. As the developments of recent years have made clear, physical sanctuary offers no shield against the transmission of ideas.
Mariupol. Ukraine, 2022 (Reuters)
The book makes several intriguing observations on how the concept of sanctuary continues to evolve by examining how the United States has applied this concept as an affirmative aspect of its own operations rather than that of its enemies. Innes provides some analysis on how nuclear strategists such as Bernard Brodie and Herman Kahn saw the bombing of homelands as a factor in the escalation of a nuclear exchange as illustrative of a Cold War notion of sanctuary. Advocates in the United States invoked the rhetoric of sanctuary in their efforts to settle Vietnamese refugees after the fall of Saigon.
Despite the long duration of its recent wars, the United States has enjoyed a condition as a sanctuary from violence across the levels of war. At the tactical level in forward operating bases, American and allied forces could plan, prepare, and command operations from a secure and static location. At the strategic level, American forces could refit, rearm, and retrain with impunity in between deployments. Neither their enemies nor their indigenous allies enjoyed this level of respite. Further exploring the dynamics up from the field and down from the White House on how the idea of sanctuary manifested in American operations, not just in Vietnam and Iraq but also the peacekeeping operations of the 1990s, would further illuminate how this concept was understood during and after the Cold War. Critically examining how the conceptualization and reality of the United States as a sanctuary has driven security policy is one of many prompts for future research raised by Innes through his book.
Innes’ work is an important starting place for any scholar or practitioner seeking to understand the significance of sanctuary as a guiding concept as well as the evolution of Cold War thinking through the era of globalization and the U.S. Global War on Terror. His book is a superb example of blending real world experience with in-depth research and analysis. Its insightful examination of the shifting definitions and uses of the concept of sanctuary offers important cautions for the present as it reveals the blind spots of the past.
Andrew J. Whitford is a U.S. Army officer and is currently assigned to the Department of History at the United States Military Academy. He deployed twice to Operation Iraqi Freedom and earned a PhD in History from Columbia University. The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Army, Department of Defense, or the US Government.
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Header Image: The Great Mosque of al-Nuri and the streets of Mosel after the city was retaken from ISIS (Getty)
Notes:
[1] P.J Honey, “Review – Street Without Joy,” Pacific Affairs 36, no. 4 (Winter 1963-1964), 443-444 in Michael A.K.G. Innes, Streets Without Joy: A Political History of Sanctuary and War 1959-2009 (London: Hurst & Company, 2021), 88.