In Black and White and Red

That Mondrian reference is very funny.

Well, yeah. But I thought that London attorney’s quote was one of the dumbest things I’ve heard in a good while. It was like a Bushism of the left.

Still, I know what he meant, and I agree.

Lee Harris has a very interesting essay on al-Qaeda as a fantasy ideology, and how to cope with it:

But, Bush’s critics argued, the term “evildoers” dehumanizes our enemy. And again, the critics are both right and wrong. Yes, the term does dehumanize our enemy. But this is only because our enemy has already dehumanized himself. A characteristic of fantasy ideology is that those in the throes of it begin by dehumanizing their enemies by seeing in them only objects to act upon. It is impossible to treat others in this way without dehumanizing oneself in the process. The demands of the fantasy ideology are such that it transforms all parties into mere symbols. The victims of the fantasy ideology inevitably end by including both those who are enacting the fantasy and those upon whom the fantasy is enacted — both those who perished in the World Trade Center and those who caused them to perish; and, afterwards, both those who wept for the dead and those who rejoiced over the martyrs.

There is one decisive advantage to the “evildoer” metaphor, and it is this: Combat with evildoers is not Clausewitzian war. You do not make treaties with evildoers or try to adjust your conduct to make them like you. You do not try to see the world from the evildoers’ point of view. You do not try to appease them, or persuade them, or reason with them. You try, on the contrary, to outwit them, to vanquish them, to kill them. You behave with them in the same manner that you would deal with a fatal epidemic — you try to wipe it out.

All negotiation, all diplomacy with terrorists is useless. Everybody who thinks differently has not understood the true aims of Islamism, I fear.

The “heards and minds” reference is obviously a reference to the US war in Vietnam. Those of us who are old enough to have lived through that war can recall full well the thought coming from American politicians that the Americans were trying to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people. By bombing them, I guess.

That said. Bernstein is an idiot if he believes that there is any substantial parallel between WWII and the “war on (some) terror.” WWII was a war over the acquisition of territory–Nazi Germany trying to acquire domination over at least western and eastern Europe (and north Africa) and the US, USSR and others trying to acquire domination over Germany. (And, oh, yeah, there was a little activity in the Pacific, as well.) It is far from clear that that is the case with this “war on (some) terror.”

The “war on (some) terror” in many ways reminds me of the “war on (some) drugs”: those leading the war are not really sure who the enemy is, but they’re going to pursue it anyway. And, of course, they will use Goering’s observation to turn the war to their political benefit.

“You will never change the hearts and minds of terrorists by bombing them.”

The point is not to change the hearts and minds of terrorists. Hearts and minds involves getting people who aren’t terrorists onto our side, on the basis that in most third world counter-insurgency situations, the insurgents will have the active support of, say, 10% of the population, the government will have the active support of, say 20-30% and the rest of the population will be non-aligned types who just want to be left to get on with their lives. The non-aligned can end up shifting loyalty to either side of the fight depending on conduct. Hearts and minds involves undertaking a strategy to win over the undecided (this CAN incorporate “turning” terrorists/insurgents to work for government forces, but it is not the be all and the end all of the strategy).

Hans Ze Beemna: “All negotiation, all diplomacy with terrorists is useless.”
JoJo: “So what do you recommend? Extermination?”

Yes, I’m afraid. If they can’t be caught or incarcerated (which should be the ideal) then they need killing. A strategy of non-negotiation with terrorists is more or less anti-terrorism theory 101 and is emphasised by virtually every terrorism expert, including those who vigorously opposed the Iraq war (such as Paul Wilkinson of St Andrews university). Rewardng acts of terror with benefits and concessions only reinforces the bahaviour and sends out the message that terrorism works (as, indeed, it will have done if the terrorists receive concessions in exchange for violence). Now, there may be instances when it is simply not possible to maintain this ideal, but it is an ideal to be aimed at nevertheless and should not be sneered at.

There are millions of desperate and extrmeely poor people in this world. Most of them do not resort, not merely to violence, but to the deliberate targeting of innocent people in order to advance their situation. If we are to increase our aid to developing countries, would it not be apt for us to concentrate on those areas who have stoically borne their hardship without resorting to slaughtering children in cafes? You cheapen the suffering of millions of people who lead deprived lives without resorting to the deliberate massacre of innocent people, by equivocating for those who do. Poverty does not “cause” terrorism and you can say that it does as many times as you like, it will not make it so.

Me, I don’t consider this a religious crusade personally. However, a lot of the people flying planes into office blocks do. Bottom line is that in the Muslim terrorism game you’ve got two models of terrorist. The first group tends to be poor, badly educated etc. They can usually be recruited to terrorism in a couple of ways – the first through indoctrination (a programme of which the Palestinian Authority is actively engaged in, in spite of the fact that their supply of outside aid is meant to be linked to their ceasing to practice incitement), the second being through cash payments. A key example would be the rare case of female Palestinian suicide bombers – they are often mothers who have been given a guarentee that their children will be raised with a handsome annuity if they step up to bat, so to speak. This is one area in which it is viable to argue that raised living standards and equitable treatment can help. However, although they make up a not insignificant proportion (though not all – or even a majority) of Palestinian terrorists, most international terrorists (including, of course, Al Qaeda operatives) are drawn from the second model. The archetype of the second model will be from a wealthy, often at least upper middle class, background, ususally educated to at least degree level (often postgraduate – frequently educated at least in part in the West) and will be motivated by ideology (yes, by and large religious ideology) not poverty or “desparation”. These people cannot be bought off and to refuse to come up with equivocating explanations for their actions is neither bigoted nor narrow minded.

Mitch – what do I think of the Vietnam article? Not a lot. Strikes me as being a fairly typical example of the school of thought that absolves that US military of any blame and instead dumps the blame solely on the politicians (who deserve SOME of the blame) and the “liberal media”. I’m not terribly impressed. What point were you trying to make?

you can say that it does as many times as you like

if I had said anything remotely like that, your point might be relevant. since I did not and do not plan to, I will take leave to interpret that as your way of sidestepping my question. by the way, saying that poverty does not “cause” terrorism is the same kind of unhelpful truism as “advertising does not cause consumerism” or “TV violence does not cause real violence.”

This is one area in which it is viable to argue that raised living standards and equitable treatment can help.

isn’t the point of setting up a strawman to knock it down? not that I disagree with your conclusion or anything…

Ah, a fan of the Marxist immiserization hypothesis, if so possibly without being aware of it. The truth is: nothing averts people better from joining fascist structures than to efficiently destroy and uproot the latter.

very amusing. another rebuttal of the point I didn’t make and another lecture about the Islamist mindset, this time from someone who thinks of Islamism and fascism as having the same social structure. props for having a grip on some of the tactical issues surrounding the police stations though.

mitch: ah yes. The Dangers of International Communism™…

Anthony – people today are trying to interpret Iraq in the light of Vietnam. I wanted to see what people at this site had to say about that revisionist history of the Vietnam war, because it’s an outlook to which I, at least, was never exposed. When I was growing up (in Australia in the 1970s), no-one ever intimated to me that the winners in Vietnam might have been the bad guys of the conflict. And as you can see in the other two links I provided, Iraqi bloggers today are saying things which imply that the West has major misconceptions about the situation in Iraq. You could certainly put two and two together and conclude: the USA first deceived and then defeated itself in Vietnam, and the same thing could happen in Iraq – except that now the Internet exists, so there’s a chance for people to bypass the mass media and hear directly from Iraqis.

“Just as not every terrorist (as I, at least use the word) is not an “Islamist” (I am not sure exactly what “Islamism” is, except the Islam that the bad guys believe in), so not every “Islamist” is a terrorist, surely? (This isn’t a necessary truth, it merely seems likely to me.) Should we kill those too?”

A rough definition of Islamist is those Muslims sympathetic to violent jihad, against dissenters within the Muslim community (apostates) and infidels outside it.

And, in my opinion, yes, we should kill those who call for jihad as well as those who wage jihad. When Muslim groups march and demonstrate calling for war, jihad and martyrdom and Death to America and Death to Israel, they should be bombed, providing them martyrdom. In resolving any conflict, both sides have to get something they want. They want martyrdom and we want them dead.

This will reduce the number of terrorists, and perhaps make Middle Easterners more reluctant to call for jihad, martyrdom, resistance, war and death.

The fact that my reasoning would make me a legitimate target would be a good point, if it wasn’t irrelevant. I am already a target in their eyes, and so are you, because we are infidels.

The war has already begun. The question is, who will win, and what must happen for them to win. In a modern war, victory is achieved when one side decides that defeat is preferable to continued struggle, or when one side ceases to exist, as in the extermination of the Indians. In the Civil War, this required the destruction of the civilian areas of the Shenandoah Valley and Georgia. In World War I, no such outcome was reached. In World War II, the Germans preferred defeat and occupation by the western allies to resistance and eventual conquest by the Russians. The Japanese emperor decided that dishonor was preferable to nuclear annihilation. In Vietnam, the US decided that defeat was preferable to continuing the war.

By the way, under any just war criteria, Pearl Harbor and the Pentagon were legitimate military targets. And any halfway competent military lawyer could come up with communication facilities in the World Trade Center that would “justify” the strike. In my opinion, just war theory is not the be-all and end-all of military ethics.

“A strategy of non-negotiation with terrorists is more or less anti-terrorism theory 101 and is emphasised by virtually every terrorism expert, including those who vigorously opposed the Iraq war (such as Paul Wilkinson of St Andrews university). Rewardng acts of terror with benefits and concessions only reinforces the bahaviour and sends out the message that terrorism works (as, indeed, it will have done if the terrorists receive concessions in exchange for violence)”

Except that is not what happened in Northern Ireland , or Israel or India or anywhere else a terrorist problem has been solved. In any case it is the kind of argument that is applied selectively and over broadly.

Not giving the terrorists what they want rarely means showing no reaction even when that is obviously what is desired as Michael Collins and Nelson Mandela knew. At the same time it is often used indulgently to avoid having to deal with any grievance the terrorists may have.

Carelessly applied it can also rule out any positive incentives for the adversary which is a perfect recipe for entranched positions.

It is particularly hard to see where this draws boundaries in Iraq where it is hard to tell the difference between terrorism and legitimate military action and where one of the main terrorist objectives has just been realised — military withdrawal from Saudi Arabia.

In any case London Attorney does point out the lack of a real battle for hearts and minds. The puzzled Iraqi in the street is surely far more likely to meet an AQ sympathiser with ready answers than one of our guys. At the same time they will also be hearing stories from frustrated building contractors and the dismay of the rest of the Arab world. Our behaviour in Iraq would certainly have been enough to provoke the founding fathers into revolution and falls far short of our behaviour at home we don’t pull sacks over the heads of the arrested at home.

The greatest success story for the idea that terrorist conflicts can be managed and reconciled is Northern Ireland.

Points on the Northern Irish issue:
1. IRA/Sinn Fein has given up their totalitarian political fantasy, of a violent revolution overthrowing the governments of both North and South and establishing a United Socialist People’s Republic of Ireland. Part of this was patience on the part of the British, waiting long enough for the IRA generation of 1969 to age and mellow.

2. Even the IRA fantasy would not have threatened the existence of the British state and nation. (It would have threatened the existence of the Irish state, however) The IRA were making demands of the British, not demanding their liquidation.

3. The IRA fantasy did (does?) demand the liquidation of the Ulster Protestant micronation. Britain has moved to a position of near-neutrality between the Protestants and Catholics, playing a balancing and mediating role.

One could make a case that the Irish situation was resolved by the British giving in as soon as the IRA made it remotely possible to do so.

Umm, cool! didn’t know that the “terrorist problem” in Israel and India has been solved

The terrorist problem in Israel certainly was solved, with the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, and the co-option of Irgun and Stern Gang terrorists into the Israeli government. The fact that subsequent Israeli governments encountered terrorist problems of their own can hardly be blamed on the British.

As the one who posted the short Vietnam history linked above, a few comments.

First, it was not meant to be exhaustive. The main reason I posted it was to show how the will of the American people is a very crucial resource, and to show how that will was destroyed in that war, and the consequences (and my opinion) of that, and also to have a place to direct discussions that veered into debating Vietnam War history rather than doing it in other threads.

The relationship to the current war is strong: the public understood the need to attack *somebody* after 9-11, but it is hard to maintain that understanding over time – especially since we were duped by somebody at high levels of the Iraqi regime about their WMD status. Furthermore, as long as the terrorists are smart enough to nibble away at us, and the demagogues are busy, for political advantage or genuine disagreement, we will see a fading of support for the war. That is clearly what the Baathists are counting on. It is also probably a strong goal of Iran, who want to get their nuclear deterrent firmly in place before we turn our attention to them. There are many in the world who think they would profit from a demoralized and isolationist America.

Whether the Iraq attack was the best move at the time it was done is debatable. More interesting is what to do now, and especially, what to do about Iran and North Korea, given the relatively small size of our forces, and the nuclear danger represented by those countries.

And this war (WW IV as it is called in parts of the CIA and Pentagon) extremely important, far more important than the Vietnam or Korean war individually or collectively. It is a major war, being fought in an asymmetric fashion, but major nonetheless. And it could get much worse quickly – if Iran thought a nuclear deterrent would allow it to fight us without retaliation, or Pakistan, with its weapons, fell to the exteremists.

As far as parcelling the blame in Vietnam, I did indeed put it on the politicians. Certainly the military made some big mistakes (the biggest being the MACV follies, where they kept telling everyone that everything was okay – and they were only right some of the time – but even that may have been ordered by Johnson).

But the military could have defeated North Vietnam, and the South could easily have been pacified under those circumstances. Thus the parallel with Korea, where in fact the US and allies were able to preserve the South and it evolved into a prosperous democracy.

Finally, one more comment. We will never know exactly the effectiveness of the strategic bombing in Europe, because we don’t know what the German productivity would have been without it. Although many have claimed that the bombing was ineffective, it is a hard claim to sustain given the large amount of military force that was required to fight the bombing, and the actual destruction of vast amounts of productive equipment, supplies and infrastructure.

In this war, we are dealing with a more complex situation. We have friends and enemies and sideliners all mixed together. There is mass media which we do not control. There are weapons of mass destruction, and a willingness to use them by non-state actors who may covertly carry out the aims of state enemies like Iran. There is a virulent anti-Americanism running through the world, even in Europe which should know better.

Winning this war may not be possible, in the sense that populations may never again be secure against some of the WMD’s (such as bio weapons).