zenpundit.com

There is legitimate room for debate if there could have been an effective military reaction to the attack in Libya by al Qaida terrorists that killed Ambassador Stevens and other US personnel.  One was apparently never seriously entertained  by senior White House, State Department and Pentagon officials. I think there ought to have been an effort to move heaven and earth and far, far greater willingness to inflict massive casualties on an attacking Libyan mob than existed, but in fairness to the Obama administration, a seat-of-the-pants, unsupported, undermanned response could also have been a replay of Blackhawk Down or Desert One. It’s a tough judgment call for any President.

That’s not why the Obama administration is in trouble today.

Poorly supported security and inept decision making by the State Department in Libya was likewise, disappointing but politically survivable and sadly, unsurprising.. We have seen similar bungling before and after 9/11 by most of our major national security departments and agencies at one time or another. It is a bipartisan phenomenon, albeit one we take far too lightly.

No, as damning testimony today made clear, the Obama administration is in trouble because their poor but not remarkably so handling of Benghazi was shielded by a ridiculous lie told entirely for partisan gain and to protect the overrated reputations and overweening egos of various administration bigwigs, most notably the former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.

Is there anyone today – anyone at all – who still believes that Benghazi occurred because of an obscure crackpot’s video on youtube?

Had the administration manfully said “This attack is a terrible tragedy and we dropped the ball but you can believe we won’t make a similar mistake tracking down the people who did this and make them pay” most Americans would have accepted that. No, not rabid partisan Republicans, but most Americans would have wanted to back the President, any President, in the wake of such terrorism which is directed, in the last analysis, at all of us.

They did not – and much of the rest of their reaction indicates that the real concern at State and the White House was and still is with the temerity of their political opponents in daring to demand they account for their actions as if we lived in a Republic or something.

In American politics, it is the self-inflicted wounds that fester and turn gangrenous

The End by Sir Ian Kershaw

I am currently reading The End, about the last year of the Third Reich and the Nazi death spiral toward Germany’s absolute destruction. It is a fascinating, mass suicidal, political dynamic that was mirrored to an even greater degree of fanaticism by Nazi Germany’s Axis partner, the Imperial Japanese. Facing the prospect of certain defeat, the Germans with very few exceptions, collectively refused every opportunity to shorten the agony or lighten the consequences of defeat and stubbornly followed their Fuhrer to the uttermost doom. It made no sense then and still does not now, seven decades later.

Adolf Hitler’s personal authority over the life and death of every soul in Germany did not end until his last breath. When surrounded by Soviet armies, trapped in his Fuhrerbunker in the ruin of Berlin, all it took for Hitler to depose his most powerful paladins, Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler was a word. They still commanded vast military and paramilitary security forces – Himmler had been put in charge of the Home Army as well as the SS, Gestapo and German police – but when Hitler withdrew his support and condemned them, their power crumbled. Goering, the glittering Nazi Reichsmarchal and second man in the state, was ignominiously arrested.

Even in Gotterdammerung, the Germans remained spellbound, like a man in a trance placing a noose around his own neck.

Currently, the chattering classes of the United States are uneasily working their way toward a possible war with Iran, or at least a confrontation with Teheran over their illegal nuclear weapons program (some people will object that, technically, we are not certain that Iran has a weapons program. This is true. It is also irrelevant to the diplomatic dynamic created by Iran’s nuclear activities which the regime uses to signal regularly to all observers that they could have one).  There is much debate over the rationality of Iran’s rulers and the likely consequences if Iran is permitted to become a nuclear weapons state. There is danger and risk in any potential course of action and predictions are being made, in my humble opinion, far too breezily.

In the run-up to war or negotiation, in dealing with the Iranians and making our strategic calculations, it might be useful to recall the behavior of the Germans.

A Terrorist’s Call to Global Jihad: Deciphering Abu Musab al-Suri’s Islamic Jihad Manifesto by Jim Lacey (Ed.)

Previously, I read and reviewed Brynjar Lia’s Architect of Global Jihad, about Islamist terrorist and strategist Abu Musab al-Suri. A sometime collaborator with Osama bin Laden and the AQ inner circle, a trainer of terrorists in military tactics in Afghanistan and an advocate of jihadi IO, al-Suri was one of the few minds produced by the radical Islamist movement who thought and wrote about conflict with the West on a strategic level. Before falling into the hands of Pakistani security and eventually, Syria, where al-Suri was wanted by the Assad regime, al-Suri produced a massive 1600 page tome on conducting a terror insurgency,  The Global Islamic Resistance Call, which al-Suri released on to the jihadi darknet.

Jim Lacey has produced an English digest version of al-Suri’s influential magnum opus comprising approximately 10 % of the original  Arabic version, by focusing on the tactical and strategic subjects and excising the rhetorical/ritualistic redundancies common to Islamist discourse and the interminable theological disputation. There are advantages and disadvantages to this approach.

First, Lacey has produced a concise and readable book from a large mass of sometimes convoluted and repetitive theorizing that al-Suri strung together piecemeal, sometimes on the run or in hiding. For those interested in getting to the heart of al-Suri’s nizam la tanzim strategic philosophy, A Terrorist’s Call to Global Jihad is an invaluable resource for strategists, counter-terrorism specialists, tactical operators,  law enforcement and laymen. Secondly, it is also a useful reference for policy people to see through al-Suri’s eyes the internal political and philosophical divisions within the radical jihadi community. al-Suri himself writes very ambivalently about 9/11 as a great blow against America and yet a complete calamity in it’s effects for the “jihadi current” that destroyed everything the Islamist revolutionaries had so painstakingly built, including the Taliban Emirate. Thus a climate was created by the American counter-attack where old methods of struggle were no longer useful and jihadis must adopt radically decentralized operations ( what John Robb terms Open-Source Warfare; indeed it is clear to an informed reader that al-Suri, a wide-ranging intellectual rather than a narrow religious ideologue, was influenced by Western literature on asymmetric warfare, 4GW, Three Block War  and COIN).

The drawback to this approach is more for scholars looking at the deeper psychological and ideological drivers of jihadi policies, strategy and movement politics. The religious questions and obscure Quranic justifications cited by Islamist extremists that are so tedious and repetitive to the Western mind are to the jihadis themselves, of paramount importance in establishing both the credentials of the person making an argument but also the moral certainty of the course of action proposed. al-Suri himself had some exasperation with the degree to which primarily armchair ideologues, by virtue of clever religious rhetoric, could have more influence over the operational decisions of fighting jihadis than men with field experience like himself. By removing these citations, an important piece of the puzzle is missing.

The Musab al-Suri whose voice appears in A Terrorist’s Call to Global Jihad is consistent with the one seen in Lia’s book, dry, sardonic, coldly hateful toward the West and highly critical of the jihadis own mistakes, laden with overtones of pessimism and gloom. al-Suri did not envision a quick victory over the West and wrote his manifesto as a legacy for future generations of Islamist radicals because the current one was nearly spent after the American onslaught and poorly educated in comparison with predecessors like the generation of Sayid Qutb.

Strongly recommended.

[ by Charles Cameron -- prophecy, Warren Jeffs, FLDS, Zion in the US, the future, mapped ]

.

Well, there you have it: a map of where Warren Jeffs, the imprisoned president of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), prophesies there will be major problems soon, if his life sentence for child sexual assault isn’t quickly rescinded.

I’ll bet our meteorologists, intel folks and policy-makers wish they had this kind of insight into just where and what will happen next.

*

Let’s take a closer look.

That’s Africa, the Middle East and a good bit of Asia and Australasia, with not a whole lot going on to be honest.  Turkey?

Turkey helps Israel

“Let Turkey aid Israel in day of great attack against my Israel, lest you also fall and become a subject nation. Amen.”

Iran?

Iran warning

“Let the nation of Iran cease all aggressive power against neighboring lands and peoples, lest you become a nation no more; only to be of subjugation to a foreign power, to no longer be of aggression”

And that’s it for the ever-contentious Middle East.

*

And there’s good reason for that.  The Middle East isn’t where Zion is.

Take a look at the US  now, and see how much more dire the prophetic warnings are here…

An earthquake and tidal wave in Seattle, a “melting fire of such powers to cleanse my land of all evil” in Idaho, a tsunami off the East coast (Californians should be relieved) in which “great and noticeable cities on the coast shall be swept off the land ” — and more.

And that’s because the center of gravity shifts to the US when (a) Christ appears here as well as in Israel, according to the Book of Mormon, and (b) Joseph Smith receives his revelations and founds the Mormon church here.

And if that’s not enough, here are two especially significant events to be on the lookout for:

An attack on Washington, the destruction of Phoenix, and volcanoes across Arizona and Utah…

…which points us to the sites especially sacred to the FLDS — and indeed other churches in the tradition of Joseph Smith:

So that’s the hub of this whole thing, what the Temple Mount / Noble Sanctuary is to potent prophetic and apocalyptic influences in the Middle East: New Jerusalem in  Missouri.

*

So that’s your update on our future prospects as Warren Jeffs sees them.

The map was kindly provided by Lindsay Whitehurst on her Salt Lake Tribune blog, and can be found here.  Three of Jeff’s recent prophecies, containing materials used in these maps, have been made public by the Utah Attorney General’s office, and can be downloaded here and here.

Coming up shortly: Apocalyptic Updates II: Iran, the Mahdi and the Vilayat

There’s been some new analysis of the Ahmadinejad / Khamenei split at MEMRI that makes it clear that Ahmadinejad’s Mahdist claims are very much at the root of the issue, so that we have what is essentially a Mahdist vs Velayat standoff on the theological level, and a clerical elite vs populist standoff on the political.  Watch this space…

[ previous version deleted for tech reasons, now reposted -- pls comment if you were unable to do so before ]

[ by Charles Cameron -- importance of suiting language to intended audience, importance of graphics, Tajikistan, Yemen, importance of poetry in conflict and conflict resolution ]

.

Et voila! Two publications issued this month by the Centers for Disease Control.

I’ve already stated the two lessons that I think we can draw from these, in the parenthetical header where I try to warn ZP readers of the approximate through-line and likely detours of each of my posts:

• graphics, graphics, graphics!
• talk the talk your intended audience can hear!

But why?

Of course I’m mildly amused at the CDC using zombies — just like Daniel Drezner — to get a serious point across. And I like the play between the seriousness of the Morbidity Report and the morbid fascination of the undead…

But I am going somewhere with all this, and on this occasion the CDC’s sense of presentation is the detour, and my through-line leads to the importance of poetry in conflict resolution.

*

I want to borrow a story from the keynote speech delivered by John Paul Lederach at the Association for Conflict Resolution’s 2004 Conference, as told to him by a Tajik professor named Abdul:

“I was tasked by the government to approach and convince one of warlords, a key Mullah-Commander located in the mountains to enter negotiations,” Abdul begins. “This was difficult if not impossible, because this Commander was considered a notorious criminal, and worse, he had killed one of my close friends.” Abdul stops while the translation conveys the personal side of his challenge.

When I first got to his camp the Commander said I had arrived late and it was time for prayers. So we went together and prayed. When we had finished, he said to me, How can a communist pray?

I am not a communist, my father was, I responded.

Then he asked what I taught in the University. We soon discovered we were both interested in Philosophy and Sufism. We started talking Sufi poetry. Our meeting went from twenty minutes to two and half hours. In this part of the world you have to circle into Truth through stories.” In the hallway Abdul’s gold capped teeth sparkle with a smile as he relays his message: “You see in Sufism there is an idea that discussion has no end.”

His point well conveyed, the Professor picks up the story again.

“I kept going to visit him. We mostly talked poetry and philosophy. Little by little I asked him about ending the war. I wanted to persuade him to take the chance on putting down his weapons. After months of visits we finally had enough trust to speak truths and it all boiled down to one concern.”

“The Commander said to me, ‘If I put down my weapons and go to Dushanbe with you, can you guarantee my safety and life?’” The Tajik storyteller pauses with the full sense of the moment. “My difficulty was that I could not guarantee his safety.”

He waits for the translator to finish making sure I have understood the weight of his peacemaking dilemma and then concludes.

“So I told my philosopher warlord friend the truth, ‘I cannot guarantee your safety.’” In the hallway Professor Abdul swings his arm under mine and comes to stand fully by my side to emphasize the answer he then gave the Commander.

“But I can guarantee this. I will go with you, side by side. And if you die I will die.’ The hallway is totally quiet.

“That day the Commander agreed to meet the Government. Some weeks later we came down together from the mountains. When he first met with the Commission he told them, ‘I have not come because of your Government. I have come for honor and respect of this Professor.’ “You see, my young American friend,” Abdul taps my arm lightly, “this is Tajik mediation.”

Think about it. Think about the Yemen.

Consider that Steven C. Caton of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard suggests:

Every day in the Middle Eastern country of Yemen, battles are being waged that don’t involve bombs, guns or even a raised fist. Rather in Yemen, where physical violence is considered an inferior form of honor-conflict, poetry is one of the preferred weapons of choice.

If Yemen is important to you — or conflict resolution — I have a question for you:

Are you fluent in poetry?

*

Your copy of the Zombie Pandemic awaits you here. For those more interested in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly, here’s the report.

Hat-tip to Tony Judge for his paper, Poetic Engagement with Afghanistan, Caucasus and Iran: an unexplored strategic opportunity?