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HNN is running a symposium on Jonah Goldberg’s recent book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning:

While I know a great deal about the historical period in question, I have not read Goldberg’s book, so I am not going to comment on his core proposition except to say that IMHO, I tend to find arguments that the intellectual roots of Fascism and Nazism are located exclusively on one side of the political spectrum are flatly and demonstrably wrong. Goldberg’s polemical thesis though, yields a hysterical reaction because he is jubilantly shredding the hoary (and false) assertion of the academic Left, going back to the pre-Popular Front Communist Party line of the 1930’s, that Fascism is a form of radicalized conservatism and a secret pawn of big business capitalism.

Therefore, the following series amounts to an intellectual food fight between Goldberg and (mostly) a band of clearly enraged Leftist professors. Enjoy!:

HNN Special: A Symposium on Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism

• Neiwert: Introduction
• Paxton: The Scholarly Flaws
• Griffin: An Academic Book - Not!
• Feldman: Poor Scholarship, Wrong Conclusions
• Berlet: The Roots of the Book
• Michael Ledeen Responds to Liberal Fascism
• Goldberg: Definitions and Double Standards
• Feldman: An Open Letter to Mr. Jonah Goldberg
• Griffin: Definitions and Double Standards - A Rebuttal
• Neiwert: Goldberg’s Response Fits His History of Evasion

After all, who doesn’t like an intemperate, online argument about Nazs?

Charles Cameron has been guest blogging here in a series on radical Islamism and terrorism. A former researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University, his most recent essay, an analysis of the powerpoint presentation of Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan, appeared in the Small Wars Journal.

This post is a follow up to the previous Guest Post: On al-Awlaki: Constants on the Path of Jihad:

RAND Islam, and CIA Islam too…

by Charles Cameron

i

I came across a phrase today that al-Awlaki originated, and it intrigued me. The phrase was “RAND Islam” and it has a sibling, “RAND Muslims”. My source for the first term is an interview al-Awlaki gave to a California Muslim news journal, InFocus, from which I’ve extracted the following:

IF: One of your most recent lectures is titled “Battle of the Hearts & Minds,” in which you talk about lies and propaganda. Would you briefly summarize the point of this lecture for our readers?IA: There has been a plethora of reports from governmental and non-governmental sources on how to defeat what they perceive as the Islamic danger. For example RAND Corporation, which is a think tank affiliated to the Pentagon, has issued a couple of reports on this. They have openly stated that they are unhappy with the way Islam is and want to change it. They then proceed to delineate the characteristics of their version of Islam and how to promote it. They also describe the type of Muslims that they think might be willing to prescribe to this “Rand Islam.” Because they understand that the masses in the Muslim world have lost trust in the US, they state that the US hand in this effort should be hidden and that their Muslim stooges should be in the forefront.

IF: What tips would you give to Muslims living in the U.S. to win this battle of the hearts and minds?

IA: Muslims need to be able to tell the difference between the real Islam and the RAND Islam and they need to know who their enemy is. Living in the West, they also have a responsibility of refuting such attempts of changing the religion of Allah.

The second can be found in the lecture series titled “Battle of the Hearts and Minds” about which al-Awlaki was questioned in the IA
interview excerpted above, eg on p. 19:

We talked about some of the recommendations that were in the Rand report and how to deal with this issue of separating between the modernists or the Rand Muslims, and the extremists or the real Muslims, true Muslims.

and p. 25:

So it is our duty just as they are intending to change our religion and promote falsehood and to turn us to Rand Muslims, we need
to promote Al Haq.

And the phrase “RAND Islam” has a cousin,”CIA Islam” — which was applied, curiously enough, to al-Awlaki himself by a one-time rival,
Al-Faisal, as Brian Fishman noted in a post on Jihadica yesterday.

Al-Faisal’s lecture on al-Awlaki is listed as “CIA Islam - Sheikh Faisal’s Takfeer of Anwar Awlaki” on www.archive.org. On the recording, Faisal explains that his lecture is about a preacher named “Anwar” from the Masjid al-Rabat in San Diego. He then proceeds to play sections of Awlaki’s lecture for his audience before refuting its points. The voice on the tape seems to be that of Anwar al-Awlaki.

ii

I am going to concentrate on “RAND Islam” here, because al-Awlaki’s lecture series titled “The Battle of Hearts and Minds” takes off from a RAND corporation publication, “Building moderate Muslim networks”, quoting its two opening sentences run together as one, “The struggle under way throughout much of the Muslim world is essentially a war of ideas, its outcome will determine the future direction of the Muslim world” — and references another, “Civil Democratic Islam” (RAND monographs MG574 and MR1716 respectively).

To give his readers a sense of what he’s talking about, he quotes a 2005 piece from US News & World Report:

Today Washington is fighting back after repeated missteps since the 911 attacks, the US government has embarked on a campaign of political warfare unmatched, since the height of the cold war. From military psychological operations teams and CIA covert operatives to openly funded media and think tanks, Washington is plowing tens of millions of dollars into a campaign to influence not only Muslim societies but Islam itself.

That’s the overview, that’s what concerns him in this lecture –that’s his evidence that the US is attacking Islam itself, and not just two
nations that happen to be majority Islamic.

A couple of notes: Al-Awlaki seems at times to confuse the two RAND reports he’s reading, since he references RAND author, Sheryl Benard (five times mentioned and five times mis-spelled “Bernard” by al-Awlaki’s transcriber), and her report, “Civil Democratic Islam”
immediately before quoting from another RAND report (unnamed at that point) which he quotes to show the kind of Muslim that Benard herself, and presumably the RAND corporation, Department of Defense and US Government likewise, wish to encourage: “RAND Islam” in short.

And Sheryl Benard really annoys al-Awlaki — he says she’s “a Jew married to an apostate, it can’t get any worse!” And he’s prepared to
mis-quote her, as when he suggests that one of her recommendations is “We should publish and distribute the works of Rand Muslims at subsidized costs” (p. 14) — when Benard had written (under the heading “Support the modernists first”) “Publish and distribute their works at subsidized cost”. But I don’t think there was an intent to deceive there, just a quiet in-joke for his readers — he had quoted the same bullet-point correctly earlier (p. 9) .

Here’s one specific thrust in al-Awlaki’s lecture that I think would merit detailed study on its own:

From that second RAND monograph, “Building Moderate Muslim Networks” (of which Sheryl Benard is second of four co-authors) al-Awlaki extracts what is effectively a catechism for the mode of Islam he opposes. Indeed, he manages to turn the RAND listing of “Characteristics of moderate Muslims” into both a “RAND Muslim” catechism and, via his responses to the questions she posts, into a counter–catechism for his own version of Islam (RAND MG574 pp. 66 - 70).

I believe this double catechism deserves serious consideration.

iii

I would be failing in my self-imposed duty to ferret signs of end times thinking in jihadist literature if I didn’t mention that there’s at
least one passage in “Battle of the Hearts and Minds” (p. 20) where al-Awlaki not only makes use of the Qur’anic citation I’ve noted before to the effect that while those who oppose him may scheme, Allah is “the best of schemers” (Qur’an 3.54) — he also makes a quiet reference to the (Khorasan and Mahdi-related) tradition of the march of the black flags on Jerusalem:

 So they are failing, and Miss Bernard and her cronies at Rand and Pentagon should know that their plan would fail because Allah is the best of planners! And that the fundamentalists and extremists, whom they despise, are not only going to win in Afghanistan and Iraq, but they will continue their march, until they drag your people, the Jews, out of the Holy Land and plant their black banners on the roof tops of Jerusalem.

iv

The most serious issue raised by this first, hasty skimming of al-Awlaki’s “Battle of the Hearts and Minds” is that of the impact of US (”kufr”) attempts to turn Islam away from the jihadist path (to use a shortcut phrase for now) on the sort of da’wa (preaching :: da’wa or “call” :: recruitment) that al-Awlaki is doing.

If he had read the rest of the paragraph he quoted from US News, he’d have found the words “U.S. officials say they are wary of being drawn into a theological battle” — and so they should be — imagine for a moment the response if the Saudis poured “tens of millions of dollars” into an attempt to remake Christianity or the US Constitution in a manner more to their liking… by means both overt and covert.

The analogy is not exact by any means — the US is attempting to bring acts of horrific violence to a close, the Saudis have no comparable need to change Christianity or the Constitution — but it may give one a sense of the emotion that a well-placed description of US attempts to support “RAND” — ie “moderate” — Islam might draw forth from impressionable young believer…

v

Given time, I could go on. In effect, this post is either a note to myself that further research would be profitable, or a plea for further
research on the part of others, perhaps at RAND — or CIA?

This is simply amazing and the ultimate in Orwellian thought police technology ( Hat tip to Bill Petti).

A part of a comment from Jay@Soob:

“This was likely compounded by the chronological assignment (that Mao was the first to conceptualize 4GW is an assertion that Ethan Allen might have something to swear and swing fists about)”

The frequent and casual association of Chairman Mao with 4GW is something that has always puzzled me as well ( though, if memory serves, William Lind was always careful to explain that 4GW isn’t simply guerilla warfare). I think it can be attributed to the likelihood that most people who are somewhat familiar with 4GW theory tend to think first of guerillas and Mao is regarded as a great innovator there. However, is there merit in placing Mao in the “4GW pantheon” (if there is such a thing)?

In the ” yes” column I’d offer the following observations:

Mao, whose actual positive leadership contribution to Communist victory in the civil war was primarily political and strategic rather than operational and tactical ( his military command decisions were often the cause of disaster, retreat and defeat for Communist armies) had a perfect genius - I think that word would be an accurate description here - for operating at the mental and moral levels of warfare.  Partly this was skillful playing of a weak hand on Mao’s part; the Communists were not a match on the battlefield for the better Nationalist divisions until the last year or so of the long civil war but Mao regularly outclassed Chiang Kai-shek in propaganda and diplomacy - turning military defeats at Chiang’s hands into moral victories and portraying Communist inaction in the face of Japanese invasion as revolutionary heroism. Yenan might have be a weird, totalitarian, nightmare fiefdom but Mao made certain that foreign journalists, emissaries and intelligence liasons reported fairy tales to the rest of the world.

In the “maybe” column:

Regardless of one’s opinion of Mao ZeDong, China’s civil war, running from the collapse of the Q’ing dynasty in 1911 to the proclamation of the People’s Republic in 1949, is a historical laboratory for 4GW and COIN theory.  The complexity of China in this era was akin to that of Lebanon’s worst years in the 1980’s but it lasted for decades. In a given province of China ( many of which were as large or larger than major European nations) then there might have been operating simultaneously: several warlord armies, Communist guerillas,  Nationalist armies, the Green Gang syndicate, White Russian mercenaries, Mongol Bannermen, rival Kuomintang factions, common bandit groups and military forces of European states, Japan and the United States. Disorder and ever-shifting alliances and fighting was the norm and Mao was the ultimate victor in this era.

In the “no ” column:

Mao ZeDong, whatever his contributions to the art of guerilla warfare, intended, quite firmly, to build a strong state in China, albeit a Communist one in his own image. He was never interested in carving out a sphere of influence or an autonomous zone in China except as a stepping stone to final victory. Moreover, the Red Army’s lack of conventional fighting ability for most of the civil war related to a lack of means, not motive on Mao’s part. When material was available, particularly after 1945, when Stalin turned over equipment from the defeated  Kwangtung army and began supplying a more generous amount of Soviet military aid to the Chinese Communists, Mao tried to shift to conventional warfare. When in power, he sent the PLA’s 5-6 crack divisions into the Korean War to face American troops in 2GW-style attrition warfare, not guerilla infiltrators behind MacArthur’s lines. 

Finally, Mao’s personal political philosophy of governance, taken from Marxism-Leninism and Qin dynasty Legalism, are about as radically hierarchical and alien to 4GW thinking as it is possible to be.

In sum, Mao is and should be regarded as a major figure in the  history of the 20th century and that century’s military history but he isn’t the grandfather of fourth generation warfare.

ADDENDUM:

Congratulations to 4GW theorist and blogger Fabius Maximus for being picked up by the BBC.

CHILDREN OF LIGHT, CHILDREN OF DARKNESS

Reinhold Niebuhr

The Atlantic Monthly has a sometimes thoughtful, at times irritating, article by Paul Elie on the late theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the political struggle being waged by the Left, Middle and Right over his intellectual legacy. An excerpt:

“The biblical sense of history can make Niebuhr seem like something other than a liberal. In the ’60’s, his religiosity made him suspect on the New Left, and in the years after his death, his work resonated with the thinkers who were turning against that era’s liberal reforms”

It wasn’t Niebuhr’s religiosity that made him suspect with the New Left but his anti-totalitarianism, something that a movement deeply afflicted with an authoritarian certitude and spasmodic nihilism could ill abide; indeed, they still seem to despise Niebuhr for his unwillingness to equivocate about Leftist tyranny. Elie is correct though, that the original Neoconservatives (the ones who actually made an intellectual journey from Left to Right) such as Norman Podhoretz had high regard for Niebuhr’s writings. I myself first heard of Niebuhr from reading David Stockman’s bitter memoir The Triumph of Politics. Stockman may have repudiated Ronald Reagan but he remained true, almost adulatory, to Niebuhr:

“The scales fell from my eyes as I turned those pages [ of Children of Light, Children of Darkness - ZP] Niebuhr was a withering critic of utopianism in every form. Man is incapable of perfection, he argued, because his estate as a free agent permits-indeed ensures -both good and evil…Through Niebuhr I dimly glimpsed the ultimate triumph of politics” ( Stockman,24).

I do not profess to be an expert on Reinhold Niebuhr or his philosophy, having read only one of his books, but the polemical war over Niebuhr that Elie critiques has, in my view, an air of ahistoricality to it. Perhaps with not the completely unhinged lunacy of the similar debate over Leo Strauss, but like Strauss, Niebuhr has been lifted by both sides out of the mid-20th century intellectual context that illuminated his ideas, in order to serve as a barricade for the political battle over Iraq and the Bush administration.

My gut reaction is that Niebuhr, were he alive today, would be writing things that would not sit well with some of his would-be reinterpreters and with more nuance and wisdom than for which his contemporary critics give him credit.

ADDENDUM:

Peter Beinart, who comes in for much criticism from Elie for the following link, on Reinhold Niebuhr.