zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — taqiyya, diplomacy, or theology? ]

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I understand that Robert Fisk is viewed differently by different segments of the public, and hope we won’t get entangled in that discussion here – because I want to quote a story he tells, with an eye for two or three significant details.

The first detail, which you’ll find right at the end of the story, has to do with a leader’s standing when he must “withdraw” in front of his men – in other words, it’s a matter of honor and shame, and Fisk clearly feels that’s a motif of significance in his tale, though we might miss it if we weren’t specifically looking for it…

Here then is the story as Fisk tells it:

19 March 1997. There was a sudden scratching of voices outside the tent, thin and urgent like the soundtrack of an old movie. Then the flap snapped up and Bin Laden walked in, dressed in a turban and green robes. I stood up, half bent under the canvas, and we shook hands, both of us forced by the tarpaulin that touched our heads to greet each other like Ottoman pashas, bowed and looking up into the other’s face. Again, he looked tired, and I had noticed a slight limp when he walked into the tent. His beard was greyer, his face thinner than I remembered it. Yet he was all smiles, almost jovial, placing the rifle which he had carried into the tent on the mattress to his left, insisting on more tea for his guest. For several seconds he looked at the ground. Then he looked at me with an even bigger smile, beneficent and, I thought at once, very disturbing.

“Mr Robert,” he began, and he looked around at the other men in combat jackets and soft brown hats who had crowded into the tent. “Mr Robert, one of our brothers had a dream. He dreamed that you came to us one day on a horse, that you had a beard and that you were a spiritual person. You wore a robe like us. This means you are a true Muslim.” This was terrifying. It was one of the most fearful moments of my life. I understood Bin Laden’s meaning a split second in front of each of his words. Dream. Horse. Beard. Spiritual. Robe. Muslim. The other men in the tent were all nodding and looking at me, some smiling, others silently at the Englishman who had appeared in the dream of the “brother”. I was appalled. It was both a trap and an invitation, and the most dangerous moment to be among the most dangerous men in the world. I could not reject the “dream” lest I suggest Bin Laden was lying. Yet I could not accept its meaning without myself lying, without suggesting that what was clearly intended of me – that I should accept this “dream” as a prophecy and a divine instruction – might be fulfilled. For this man to trust me, a foreigner, to come to them without prejudice, that was one thing. But to imagine that I would join them in their struggle, that I would become one with them, was beyond any possibility. The coven was waiting for a reply.

Was I imagining this? Could this not be just an elaborate, rhetorical way of expressing traditional respect towards a visitor? Was this not merely the attempt of a Muslim to gain an adherent to the faith? Was Bin Laden really trying – let us be frank – to recruit me? I feared he was. And I immediately understood what this might mean. A Westerner, a white man from England, a journalist on a respectable newspaper – not a British convert to Islam of Arab or Asian origin – would be a catch indeed. He would go unsuspected, he could become a government official, join an army, even – as I would contemplate just over four years later – learn to fly an airliner. I had to get out of this, quickly, and I was trying to find an intellectual escape tunnel, working so hard in digging it that my brain was on fire.

“Sheikh Osama,” I began, even before I had decided on my next words. “Sheikh Osama, I am not a Muslim.” There was silence in the tent. “I am a journalist.” No one could dispute that. “And the job of a journalist is to tell the truth.” No one would want to dispute that. “And that is what I intend to do in my life – to tell the truth.” Bin Laden was watching me like a hawk. And he understood. I was declining the offer. In front of his men, it was now Bin Laden’s turn to withdraw, to cover his retreat gracefully. “If you tell the truth, that means you are a good Muslim,” he said. The men in the tent in their combat jackets and beards all nodded at this sagacity. Bin Laden smiled. I was saved.

I’m interested in the honor / shame angle because I have just been reading my friend Richard Landes‘ paper Edward Said and the Culture of Honour and Shame: Orientalism and Our Misperceptions of the Arab-Israeli Conflict and his blog post Game Theory and Social Emotions… I may not always agree with Richard, but he certainly sets me thinking…

The second point of interest here — which I’ve noted before — is the emphasis in the minds of bin Laden and his followers on the prophetic nature of dreams.

It is the third that is, if Fisk is accurate in his recall here, the most interesting – that bin Laden would utter the words “If you tell the truth, that means you are a good Muslim.” Fisk is not threatening him, so this is not an occasion for taqiyya as I understand it – perhaps it is an occasion, as Fisk himself suggests, for diplomacy.

But how does that remark sound as theology in the mode of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab?

One of the nicest things about ZP is the quality of the commenters. In a post by Charles Cameron, 2083 – Breivik and the Qur’an, deception and warfare, there was this exchange between Joseph Fouche and Seydlitz89 after the latter disputed the utility of looking at the Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Breivik through the lens of strategy:

Joseph Fouche:

From Clausewitzian perspective, Breivik’s actions are the conjunction of the three poles of the Trinity, two of which have nothing to with Breivik’s rationality. If CvC can’t be applied to madmen, criminals, mass murderers of children, or men trapped in their own little world, then Van Creveld’s contention that the actions of madmen can’t be considered political (in noted Clausewitzian Christopher Bassford’suse of the word) is correct. War would be “nontrinitarian“.

The words and ideas of murderous stooges have consequences as well as their actions. CvC can shine as much light on them as he can on any other field of human conflict.

Can Breivik’s actions can be considered war? Can an individual wage war? By his own sinister lights, Breivik considered himself at war, the Pied Piper of a host of other Breiviks born and unborn, even if that host only existed in his fevered imagination.

Can an individual have a strategy? Or can an individual only have a strategem? Breivik had a plan that had a tactical expression and apolitical effect (as here we comment on the doings of an otherwise obscure Norwegian). Does the jumbled mass of tissues that connect his evil ends with his evil means rise to the level of strategy?

In her recent book The Evolution of Strategy, noted CvC scholarBeatrice Heuser examines the modern history of the word strategy since Guibert revived it in the mid-eighteenth century. Even the core understanding of the word, the art of connecting political ends with (operational or tactical) military means, has shifted since CvC as the scale and ambitions of campaigns increased. Heuser herself chooses to refer to strategy as understood by Clausewitzians (connecting political ends with military means) with a capital S to differentiate [it] from other current uses.

In that light, was Breivik a Strategist or a strategist? Where do we put the raid on Harpers Ferry or the Beer Hall Putsch, two events that were equally ridiculous and equally consequential? What’s the cutoff point between crime and war? What’s the cutoff point between Strategy and strategy? John Brown’s 21? Herr Hitler’s 100? Or Breivik’s one?

Fouche, who it must be said, is no fan of eminent Dutch-Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld, is referering to MvC’s theory of the decline of the state and “non-trinitarian” warfare of non-state or non-Westphalian entities that van Creveld articulated in The Transformation of War, The Rise and Decline of the State and other books and articles since the 1990’s.  The 4GW school adopted van Creveld’s ideas of state decline and to significantly varying degrees, his critical attitude toward Clausewitzian theory (van Creveld’s own assessment of Clausewitz also seems to vary in his works).

Seydlitz89, himself a noted Clausewitzian, responded:

You’re mixing apples and oranges.  Clausewitzian strategic theory pertains to collectives, all concepts pertain to collectives – victory, defeat, strategy, tactics . . . and a very particular collective at that – political communities.  “War” does not consist of one individual fighting against a political community, that is criminality, and always has been.  This is the very definition of what being a criminal, an outcast, or a traitor is all about .  .  . “War” on the other hand is organized violence within or between political communities which involves once again collectives.  These collectives would have to enjoy both moral and material cohesion within them which in turn allows them to use violence as an instrument in their political actions.  The Nazis, as repugnant as they were, did gain “legitimacy” (yet another collective concept) over time and formed a political community around them of Germans dissatisfied with the “system” of their time, and their political takeover did constitute a revolution. 

ABB is all about ABB and nothing more.  Assuming that his “message” or rather mad rant is going to draw an audience and a following is an assumption, based on what exactly?  Great knowledge of how “Europeans” feel about immigration?  Define “Europeans” and how this act is going to mobilize concerted action against immigrants, draw a political community around it?

Even if he did appeal to a selection of alienated loners who bought his sorry soap, that would not constitute them as a political community nor make their struggle war.

If ABB is a “warrior” fighting a “war”, than so was Charles Manson.     

[ Sidebar: Seydlitz has, BTW, previously undertook a formal two-part paper at the old DNI site on this subject, one very much worth reading, that serves as a Clausewitzian rebuttal to van Creveld :The Decline of Strategic Theory – the Influence of The Transformation of War  and part II. The Continued Existence of the State: The Clausewitzian Concept of Cohesion ]

The discussion of whether or not an individual can wage “war” is interesting because it takes place largely at the level of fundamentals. Politics, polities, policy, the State, war. All terms with somewhat different meanings depending on the philosophical tradition brought to the table. Or lack thereof. Strategic discussions are frequently impoverished because of the extinction of systematic education in the Western canon in this country, it is almost dead, even at the university level, which means that those interested in matters of strategy and diplomacy need to dedicate themselves to personal programs of professional reading and reflection.  Some things need to be read firsthand and more than once to be understood.

Can an individual “wage war”? Can they have ” a strategy”? Some very meandering thoughts from me on the subject [Joseph Fouche and Seydlitz are cordially invited to guest-post here in response, if they so desire]:

Historically, this was usually a moot point. The ability of private individuals to use violence that could have a strategic effect on a whole political community was virtually nil – with one exception – assassination. While seldom fully successful, tyrannicide or regicide was celebrated and feared in the ancient world because in highly personalized polities with absolute rulers, such a decapitation attack could paralyze a society as heirs of the ruler struggled for succession or plunge it into anarchy and civil war. Walter LaQueur devotes the first part of his Voices of Terror to examples of ancient assassination for this reason.

Assassination, it should be said, is still more likely to be associated with personal grievance, mental illness or political protest than strategic intent. Brutus and Cassius and their fellow conspirators had a strategic intent in assassinating Julius Caesar, namely reversing the fortunes of civil war as well as the political intent of ending Caesar’s Dictatorship as a regime and restoring the Republic under the dominance of patrician Optimates. By contrast, Charles Guiteau who assassinated President Garfield was merely insane, while Soghomon Tehlirian’s motive for killing Talaat Pasha was vengeance for the Armenian Genocide.

However, as the potential for using assassination at a strategic level exists, then the possibility that an individual may do so of their own accord, instead of as an agent of a state or out of personal grievance, also exists. It’s just quite rare once a society ascends from the Hobbesian hunter-gatherer stage of development to true chiefdoms or kingdoms because two things change: first, a chiefdom or kingdom is a political community that creates and enforces all kinds of constraints, incentives, rules and specialization of tasks related to warfare on individuals in the tribe. Secondly, the scale of society in a chiefdom or kingdom or state vs. a hunter-gatherer band makes an individual’s one-man war impractical. Society has grown far too large. Even if the head is willing, the reach exceeds the grasp.

Now, this truism of war being a collective endeavor, which Seydlitz rightly identifies as being the case and has been so for thousands of years, is now in jeopardy with the acceleration of technological capabilities and ever cheaper productions costs disseminating them into many hands. This is the theory of  the “superempowered individual“, that technology that can permit one person to inflict damage on an enormous scale was becoming too common, as is information about where such technology could be leveraged to best effect. We are not quite there yet, but we have had some serious foreshadowing of SEIs with Ted Kaczynski, the unknown Anthrax mail terrorist and the partially successful WMD terrorist efforts of the Aum Shinrikyo cult. Right now, it is still collectives that are the likeliest culprits for waging a mass casualty attack but those collectives have gotten uncomfortably small in size. Nation-states are far more dangerous and versatile entities, if slow moving and obvious, but they are no longer required if your intent is to inflict strategic damage and eventually, all you will need is one unusually resourceful and intelligent individual.

With individuals and, more commonly, very small substate groups waging war, the nature of warfare will change from the culture of warfare that typified the era of Westphalian nation-states with their centralizing hierarchical bureaucracies, mobilized industrial economies, conventional armed forces and populations bristling with nationalism. Smaller entities that lack the vast resources of states are going to be idiosyncratic in their approach to warfare because their capacity to sustain conflict, what motivates them to stand, fight and die, how they conceive their “Ends” differs from that of states.

Can you use Clausewitz’s general theory to  analyze them? Sure, Clausewitz proposed, after all, a general theory of war, but if you operate with the implicit assumption that the non-state adversary will “do strategy”just  like a state your analysis is likely to be off. The utility of van Creveld’s theory is his emphasis on their non-Westphalian characteristics of these combatants and their blurring of war with crime, religion, culture and politics which goes to the heart of what might be the nature of warfare in this epoch; where the irregulars are no longer marginal players but represent the new normal and interstate conventional war among great powers is the outlier.

[ by Charles Cameron — no mil/intel stuff — the sacred, architecture, nature, books, imagination ]

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This post began with a photo my friend William Benzon took of an abandoned passenger terminal in Liberty State Park:

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Without the greenery, I don’t think I’d feel this was “special” in quite the same way.  I might see it as prison-like, akin to those magnificent Piranesi prints in his Carceri series:

… vast, haunted — the anti-cathedral.

Yet the grasses and small trees are there in Benzon’s photo, green and vibrant — and in their presence, the prison becomes a cathedral… not unlike the great ruined abbeys of England, Tintern, Calder, Whitby, Walsingham, Fountains.

Here’s Tintern Abbey by JMW Turner, for a sense of how ruins were viewed in his day:

Somehow, in the workings of the human mind and heart, nature’s grasses can keep a ruined space sacred…

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But what of books?

The effect is austere by comparison, but the hush of the library slips into the high-vaulted silence of the cloister, and when I saw Bill Benzon’s photo above, this photo of a bookstore in Holland was the first analogy to cross my mind…

The Selexyz Dominicanen bookshop is housed in an old church in the centre of Maastricht. A beautiful listed building, this former Dominican church was transformed into a bookstore by architects Merkx+Girod, resulting in an extraordinary combination of bookselling complex and church interior, preserving the unique landmark setting. It was praised by British newspaper The Guardian as ‘possibly the world’s finest bookshop’. Earlier, Selexyz Dominicanen had already received the prestigious Lensvelt Architecture Interior Award 2007 for the décor of the store.

Of course, not everyone thinks a bookstore is sacred, and a lot might depend on what books you browsed, or caught your neighbor browsing. Here’s one negative report:

When your church community gets bored of reaching out with the love of Christ and doesn’t like to meet together anymore, don’t cry over it! Build a bookstore and coffee shop out of your unwanted worship space. The chancel is great for a cappuccino… And the worship space would house a nice collection of bargain-priced books, and kitten calendars:

So next time you despair that the church has lost its way, relax and sooth your aching conscience with a steaming latte – you can even sit at the crucifix table and plug into the WiFi. There are so many uses for old churches, why bother with renewal in the Church at all?

Even a ruined bookstore can have something of a sacred quality, though, as this London library photo clearly shows:

Surely, that’s the last word in books — what more could one ask for?

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Still — look.  There’s some sort of disaster, atrophy, ruin or sea-change in each of these images.  What happens when an architect — as skilled as the folks from who designed that bookstore — builds a chapel in the forest?

With all the contemporary emphasis on modern sustainable architecture, sometimes we seem to forget that environmentally friendly architecture has existed for a long time. Built in 1980, Thorncrown Chapel was created with the idea of highlighting the natural setting, which was, and still is, an attractive natural setting for tourists in the area. The owner of the site, Jim Reed, hired well known architect, Frank Lloyd Wright alumni E. Fay Jones to design and build the site which used native timber to match the setting around it, and the result was a fantastic expression of architecture that was awarded the “Twenty-Five year award” by the American Institute of Architects.

It is as lovely by winter light:

as it is by light of spring and summer:

and yet I’d say there is something not ascetic but arid there: it has tried a great deal, but not died a little.

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Nothing there is any which way ruined.  And it is out of ruins that our hopes grow these days, as grass at times breaks through tarmac.

Tarkovsky’s great film Nostalghia closes with a breathtaking shot…

a sacred space in pure, delivered, imagination — a single shot which to my mind, having seen the film and left the movie theater speechless, must be accounted the greatest single work of surrealism yet…

in which the protagonist, a Russian exiled in Italy, sees finally the lonely Italian abbey that has come to symbolize his loss of hearth and home, all loss, all absence — with his home nestled inside it, the little pond, himself, his dog…

Blog-friend David Ronfeldt, until recently Senior Social Scientist with the RAND International Policy Dept., is author / co-author of such seminal works as Networks and Netwars; In Athena’s Camp; In Search of How Societies Work: Tribes — the First and Forever Form; and The Zapatista “Social Netwar” in Mexico. Today he offered a detailed comment on Zen‘s post, Skulls & Human Sacrifice — the central portion of which we felt deserved to stand as a post of its own, and attract its own body of discussion. We are accordingly delighted and honored to offer it here as David’s first guest-post on Zenpundit. –CC

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For months, many arab commentators have observed that the uprisings are mainly about “dignity”: e.g., identity and dignity, or dignity and freedom, or some other combination — but always dignity.

In contrast, American observers keep saying the uprisings are mainly about “democracy” — freedom and democracy in particular. some Arabs include a call for democracy with their call for dignity; but Americans only occasionally acknowledge their parallel pursuit of dignity. in fact, Americans rarely think about dignity; we’re raised to assume it. Language about dignity slides right through our modernized minds.

Yet, in many cultures, dignity is a more crucial concept than democracy. Dignity (along with its customary companions: respect, honor, pride) goes to the core of how people want to be treated. it’s an ancient tribal as well as personal principle. indeed, it’s central to the tribal form. tribal and clannish peoples think and talk about dignity far more than do americans and other westerners in advanced liberal democratic societies.

In the Arab spring, what many arabs seem concerned about is thus more primal than democracy. They’re fed up with the indignities inflicted by corrupt, rigged patronage systems, by rulers and functionaries who act in predatory contemptuous ways, by the endless abuse of personal rights and freedoms — in other words, by all the insults to their daily sense of dignity. Of course, many Arabs seek democracy too; and dignity and democracy (not to mention justice, equality, and other values) overlap and can reinforce each other. But dignity and democracy are not identical impulses, nor based on identical grievances. in some situations, the desire for dignity trumps the desire for democracy.

This interplay between “dignity” and “democracy” may have implications for US policy and strategy. I’m not exactly sure what they are, but it seems to me that we ought to be analyzing and operating as much in terms of dignity as democracy. I bring this up not only because americans tend to overlook the significance of the dignity principle, but also because I detect a dignity-democracy fault-line among the Arab-spring’s protagonists — a fault-line that may relate to whether the Arab spring ends up having democratic or re-authoritarian consequences.

My sense is that the younger modernizing protagonists of the Arab spring may well be pursuing democracy (along with dignity) as their strategic goal, but the older, more traditionalist elements operating alongside them are more interested in pursuing dignity, without necessarily favoring democracy. and the latter may be stronger than we have observed. if so, the quest for dignity may be satisfied by outcomes that have little to do with democracy: say, for example, a shift in tribal and clan balances, an enhanced appeal for islamic law (shariah), or a charismatic call for strong government devoid of foreign influence. It may be easier, and more popular, to gratify a quest for dignity than a quest for democracy.

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I’m led to these observations via the TIMN framework about the four major forms of organization that lie behind social evolution: tribes + hierarchical institutions + markets + info-age networks. the young modernizing protagonists of the arab spring express the nascent +N part of TIMN, while the older traditionalist elements remain steeped in the ancient pro-T part — and therein lies the fault-line I mentioned earlier.

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For further details of Dr. Ronfeldt’s published work, see his RAND portfolio.His current interests include in particular:

• Development of a framework (TIMN) about the long-range evolution of societies, based on their capacity to use and combine four major forms of organization: tribes, hierarchical institutions, markets, and networks
• Development of a framework (STA) for analyzing people’s mind-sets and cultural cosmologies in terms of basic beliefs about the nature of social space, social time, and social action

He blogs recent thinking on both frameworks at Visions from Two Theories.

[ by Charles Cameron — the importance of undertows, archaisms, blind-spots ]
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Zen writes, in a comment on his post, Skulls & Human Sacrifice:

What amazes me is the *speed* of the moral descent.

Yup. Bingo!  Yes!! Exactly…

That’s why I think it’s so important to track undertows as well as tides – the archaic rituals and myths, the archetypal dreams and nightmares of people like AQ, or La Familia, or even Harold Camping.

They’re below the surface, beneath our radar – until they “show”. And then they blow our minds.

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That’s why I think apocalyptic movements are so significant.

By the time the Chinese Government found ten thousand or so qi gong practitioners protesting at Zhongnanhai in 1999, there were arguably as many practitioners (70 m) across China as there were members of the CPC (60+ m) – and any number of them might be listening to Li Hongzhi‘s Falun Dafa tapes while cultivating themselves in the park… The recognition that the Party might have a movement on its hands to compare with the Taiping rebellion (20 m lives lost) was what drove the fierce repression that followed…

It was as though Falun Gong came out of nowhere.

And who knew that Harold Camping’s prophecies broadcast out of a radio station in Oakland, CA could move “several thousand Hmong followers of a sub-Christian messianic cult” to gather for the end in Muong Nhe district, Dien Bien Province, Vietnam – conflating the prophecies of their own messiah figure, “a 25-year-old man named Zhong Ka Chang, now renamed Tu Jeng Cheng, meaning ‘the important one'” with Camping’s returning Christ, and expecting him to “appear and establish a pan-Hmong kingdom” (quotes from Compass Direct).

We laugh at Camping. But he touched a nerve.

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Pretty much by definition, societies are and choose to remain unconscious of their unconscious contents until it’s too late, so they always surprise us.

They’re in our blind-spot, by definition.