zenpundit.com

FEELING ARAFATIGUED

Yasser Arafat is dead. What can be said of a man who never once put the interests of his people above his own ?

Yasser Arafat could not have been more of a barbarian had he walked around with a bone in his nose. A gangster, a looter and a thug who counted as friends fellow thugs like Nicolae Ceaucescu and for periods of time crackpot dictators like Colonel Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein, Arafat never managed to do as much harm to Israel as he did to Jordan, Lebanon or the Palestinians.

As Palestinian children grew up in squalid refugee camps Yasser Arafat, surrounded by his beefy, East Bloc-trained bodyguards, squired away billions of dollars donated on their behalf. His signal service to mankind was showing up at the rostrum of the United Nations, gun on hip, to lusty cheers – demonstrating that the institution designed as the repository of the best values of the Liberal West was in truth little more than a commode for dictatorships.

In the end, addled, doddering about the ruins of his Ramallah headquarters, Arafat reigned over the unlimited misery of his people who clung to him only as a symbol of hatred – sort of a walking, talking slogan that screamed ” Death to the Jews !”. He could neither be removed nor gotten around, negotiated with or permanently defeated. He was simply there.

Good riddance.

ANONYMOUS NO MORE

The CIA author of Imperial Hubris is formally out of the closet. Micheal Scheuer, former chief of the CIA’s Bin Laden task force has resigned in order to speak publicly on the War on Terror, which he believes the United States is steadily losing.

I’ve read Imperial Hubris but I have not gotten around to writing a detailed review yet. Reader’s Digest version, if you keep in mind the Scheuer has a ” Forest-Trees” problem with context and he is too close to his subject – evincing the same grudging admiration for Bin Laden and Arab-Ialamic culture that plagued John Toland’s WWII books – Imperial Hubris can be a valuable book. Scheuer has a large number of pointed insights about both al Qaida and the dysfunctionality of the IC that bear repeating. Foremost among these is his identification of al Qaida as merely the spear tip of a global Islamist insurgency. I’m convinced he is quite correct on that score as well as on his numerous observations on al Qaida’s operational capabilities and structure.

Where Scheuer fails is as a grand strategist. The fact that pan-Arab nationalists and radical sharia state Islamists are unhappy with American pursuit of American interests is a truism. It is also a poor justification for either capitulation or doing to the Arab-Islamic world what Rome did to Carthage, the dichotomy Scheuer sees as our alternatives. Where Scheuer can contribute to the debate is elevating the public sense of urgency of dealing with al Qaida and a better understanding how it operates, recruits, infiltrates and attacks.

Speaking of Scheuer, today his take on Osama bin Laden and nuclear weapons:

“Even if bin Laden had a nuclear weapon, he probably wouldn’t have used it for a lack of proper religious authority – authority he has now. “[Bin Laden] secured from a Saudi sheik…a rather long treatise on the possibility of using nuclear weapons against the Americans,” says Scheuer. “[The treatise] found that he was perfectly within his rights to use them. Muslims argue that the United States is responsible for millions of dead Muslims around the world, so reciprocity would mean you could kill millions of Americans,”



Scheuer tells Kroft.Scheuer says bin Laden was criticized by some Muslims for the 9/11 attack because he killed so many people without enough warning and before offering to help convert them to Islam. But now bin Laden has addressed the American people and given fair warning. “They’re intention is to end the war as soon as they can and to ratchet up the pain for the Americans until we get out of their region….If they acquire the weapon, they will use it, whether it’s chemical, biological or some sort of nuclear weapon,” says Scheuer”

Were al Qaida to detonate a nuclear weapon of any size – perhaps even a significant biological weapon – I have no doubt the United States would retaliate with a nuclear attack across the Arab-Islamic world from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan. Mecca and Medina, Qom and Teheran would cease to exist within hours of a nuclear strike within the United States. Anyone who doubts this certainty seriously underestimates the magnitude of the political reality of, say, losing Manhattan. For two buildings we invaded two nations. For a city we will destroy a civilization.

If, by chance, the President of the United States were to be killed in such an attack, the U.S. military would be left on automatic pilot, relying on Cold War era and 1990’s ” worst-case scenario” contingency plans for nuclear war and our retaliation would most likely to be massive rather than selective. The Islamic world would end as a coherent entity for all time.

If the zealots of al Qaida do not understand this it should be made clear to their more reasonable supporters in KSA and Pakistan that they and hundreds of millions of Muslims will bear the price for such an attack.

I sincerely hope Scheuer is reporting nothing but empty Islamist bluster over the web but if he’s not, this is the direction that kind of event would take.

THE INEVITABLE CYCLE OF RADICALIZATION

In the GWOT the United States faces a foe – Islamism – that is a decentralized, radical, anti-staus quo movement that is now without a state, having lost their sanctuary provided by the Taliban. A post on H-Diplo the other day by John Zimmerman, on an unrelated topic of the 1960’s American Anti-war movement, spurred me to think about where the Islamists are likely to evolve ideologically over the next few years. Professor Zimmerman wrote:

“Edwin Moise writes: “Leftist political groups are notorious for the waythey attack one another, fighting over doctrinal differences.”



I also noticed this phenomenon among leftist groups. However, one needs tokeep in mind that, despite narrow doctrinal differences which would seem insignificant to an outside observer, there was hardly any difference inthe end results sought by these groups. A similar phenomenon is noticeable among Islamists, who differ only on issues such as tactics not end results.”

On-spot observation ! This process of evolving militancy and radicalization is observable in many historical extremist movements regardless of whether the premises of the particular movement are based on socialism, religion, nationalism or race. I would argue that this dynamic results from the movement possessing a general ideology that is sharply critical of the status quo without having a recognized authority who can be the arbiter of that ideology’s theoretical boundaries or tactical application.

In an attempt to establish such an authority, factions within such movements employ the rhetorical demonization against one another that previously were levied against the mainstream society. Lenin claimed ” majority” ( Bolshevik) status for his faction and set about abusing, bullying and hectoring the ” minority”(Menshevik) and moderate foreign socialists like Karl Kautsky. Within the Nazi Party’s early days before Hitler’s authority became suffocating, nationalist-volkische Nazis drove out Left-socialist Nazis from the movement (Strasser), converted them ( Goebbels) or killed them off in the Night of the Long Knives ( Rohm and SA leadership). Islamist extremists are in that stage right now and denunciations of religious apostasy ( which under the Sharia are a capital offense) are an important tool for the most radical elements to push the more moderate Salafist and Hanbali Islamists in the direction of consolidation behind the revolutionary Qutbist worldview proffered by al Qaida.

This dynamic is arguably to the great advantage of the more extreme elements within an already radical movement who tend to promote their position as one of “authentic” status and the moderate position as counterfeit, weak or even traitorious to the movement’s goals with such traitors being deserving of death. Note it is not always the most extreme factions who win the day. Hitler kept the extremists to his right – Rosenberg,Bormann, Streicher, the Austrian Nazi Party radicals – in check until late in his regime. Lenin ultimately destroyed his untrustworthy and anarchic-terrorist Left-S.R. junior parters – but the whole movement tends to be pushed further from the mainstream and radicalized by such internal struggles.

In the case of the American anti-war movement we saw the rise and radicalization of the SDS and ultimately the emergence of groups like the Weather Underground and the Progressive Labor Party – who would have been unimaginable on campus in 1962 or 1963. Unlike America’s priviliged radical chic of the 1960’s, the Islamists arrived on the scene with violence as part of their political culture and recent history. Further radicalization will likely take them in one of two directions – consolidation or entropy.

The first possibility is that the Islamists will consolidate into a more unified, coherent, disciplined movement as I suggested above and become a less decentralized foe in hopes of seeking recognized leadership as defenders of the Ummah. Zaqawri’s recent ” pledge of allegience” to Osama bin Laden may be evidence of this trend taking place. If this is the case their political legitimacy in Muslim eyes will come to depend less on their ideological militancy and spectacular gestures of resistance to America through Terror and more on their military competence to rack up some credible, lasting victories.

The second possibility is fratricidal infighting as radical factions engage in cut-throat, sectarian battles for power, prestige and leadership of the Islamist movement. This will lower the effectiveness of Islamists in carrying out high-magnitude terror operations against the United States on the level of 9/11 by diverting resources. But it will also spur them through competition to attempt more, lower-level, horrifying assaults like we saw in Beslan to garner attention for themselves and their groups. We can also expect that an ” entropic ” outcome is bad for Muslim Gap states that already teeter on Failed State status as competing Islamist groups migrate to places of weak authority in order to conduct their internecine struggles. We could easily see the replay of 1980’s Lebanon and 1990’s Somalia in Iraq and Pakistan under such a scenario.

This is why connecting the Arab-Islamic world Gap states is of overriding importance. Connectivity reduces room for the enemy to manuver under either scenario, mitigates some causes of discontent and gives room to non-Islamist civil society to provide alternatives to both Islamism and status quo authoritarian regimes.

PART VI -HOW DO WE DEAL WITH OTHER STATES DURING SYSTEM PERTURBATIONS ?

To continue the series on Dr. Barnett’s Deleted Scene on System Perturbations ( for previous posts go here.). As always my commentary is in regular text, Dr. Barnett’s is in bold font:

“How do we deal with other states during System Perturbations?



Rule #13: There is no statute of limitations on cultural blowback, so avoid providing future foes with chosen trauma.



Middle East experts will tell you 9/11 is twenty years of blowback from Afghanistan and the mujaheddin we supported there, half a century of blowback from the creation of the state of Israel, and even eight centuries of blowback from the Crusades. Like in your marriage, no “past sins” are ever forgotten, so it is crucial that in our responses to any System Perturbation, we do not simply plant a host of new historical grievances in the hearts of those we hope ultimately win over and integrate into the Core. This is, of course, the great danger of the Big Bang strategy of toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime. My Muslim colleagues from that part of the world have told me repeatedly that, immediately following 9/11, America had the chance to win over not just a small percentage of the Muslim world, but a very large one — depending on its response. These same friends tell me now that that share of potentially winnable Muslims is far smaller, and far more difficult to win, precisely because we have provided them with a new chosen trauma. What is our solution now? As Thomas Friedman likes to argue, America’s best hope now is to do whatever it takes to make Iraq a beacon of freedom and progressive change in the Middle East. In effect, we need to turn that chosen trauma into a chosen triumph — not ours, mind you, but the Iraqi people’s.

Earlier, commenting on Rule #8 I suggested that Blowback was not just a possibility but a range of probable outcomes from any major foreign policy event, much less a true System Perturbation, calling it the ” Law of Blowback”:

” For statesmen, every action has a probable set of opposite reactions “

This is something statesmen and geopolitical thinkers have understood intuitively since the Pelopennesian War ( reading Thucydides isn’t a bad idea to school oneself on the perils of statecraft). People will always resist the demands of power to the degree that they can do so safely ( at least) unless the incentives to yield are recognized as being measurably greater.

Those incentives include intangible variables – psychological and ideological factors. To return to our Ancient Greek example, the Melian Dialogue was a failure of the Athenians who considered only the material or practical considerations that faced the Melian leadership and not their sense of honor. Toppling Saddam Hussein certainly offended Muslims of radical Pan-Arab and Baathist sentiments but those Gatekeeper Elites were our enemies anyway and their demoralization was a desirable and intentional outcome of our post 9/11 ” Big Bang ” attack. What was not desirable was the Abu Ghraib scandal which – for whatever value in terms of interrogation and intimidation of such practices – they created a wave of horror and revulsion that extended far beyond the Arab world and discredited the entire occupation in Arab eyes and provided our enemies with decades of future propaganda.

The existence of blowback is not an argument for policy paralysis but for choosing options when we launch a System Perturbation against our enemies where we maximize our objectives while minimizing long-term costs. Horizontal systems with the highest degree of connectivity are also the ones most vulnerable to damage from a System Perturbation so they should be used sparingly and with great forethought. Choose your Blowback, do not let Blowback choose us.

Rule #14: In response to vertical scenarios, horizontal systems naturally come together, as do vertical systems.



This one we saw in spades following 9/11, as the world’s free states rushed to our support and joined our substantial multinational coalition that toppled the Taliban’s rule in Afghanistan. Horizontal systems naturally saw a common threat in the attacks, meaning something that could just as easily happen to them. But vertical systems, in general, saw something very different in 9/11. First, since many such states are not our friends, they saw America receiving her comeuppances for past sins. Second, since a few of these states have long been identified as state sponsors of terrorist groups, they knew they could soon be on receiving end of any general U.S. response. Of course, when President Bush identifies an “axis of evil” by name, then the U.S. simply drives this countries even closer together, furthering their collective disconnectedness from the rest of the world. I do not see anything wrong with that, because I believe in calling a spade a spade. It is just that once you generate such a list, expectations are immediately raised about what you intend to do about that list, so follow-through is crucial. In that way, you could say that the “axis of evil” is a self-declared “domino theory” for the global war on terrorism: America sets itself up for having to deal with the entire lot to demonstrate significant milestones in the war. Is this an aggressive approach to shrinking the Gap? You bet.

Dr. Barnett’s analysis here is interesting to consider when contemplating the existence of TM Lutas’ Implicit Villains within the Core.

The United States had a great deal of difficulty with France in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq and this was attributed to many things by the ” Freedom Fries” brigade – envy, a cultural predisposition to surrender, Jacques Chirac’s perfidy, financial corruption and so on. While this was amusing or had some smidgen of truth the popular fury tended to obscure the reality that France was acting in terms of it’s national interests which it’s elite generally has perceived for some time to be in counterbalancing American power and leveraging French influence via procedural strangleholds on international bodies like the EU and the UNSC. As early the Free French entry into Paris, DeGaulle was manuvering to create room for France in the world separate from ” the Anglo-Saxons” which is why he pulled France out of NATO’s military command in 1965 and developed nuclear weapons. French complaints over American ” hyperpower” began during the Clinton administration, not during Bush II.

France has a long political tradition of high-handed technocratic administration with an elite bureaucracy trained in select universities. Their political economy is statist and the French see their lavish welfare state as a viable alternative ideological model to American-style capitalism. In PNM terms, the French prefer Vertical scenario organization to a much greater degree than do Americans or even the British. Under steady French pressure, though by no means solely due to them, the EU which was originally conceived as a Horizontal scenario free trade zone of borderless exchange has been transmogrified into a more of a top-down, interventionist, bureaucratic superstate that suffers from a democratic deficit, a weak legislature and an uncertain executive. The EU has power without accountability at home and abroad in world, claims to share authority with the United States without accepting responsibility for the dangerous Leviathan chores. This is not a promising long-term situation for Core stability.

When we see ” nations making their choices” in the aftermath of 9/11, that includes members of the Core who see a strategic or financial interest in the Gap remaining non-integrated. We need to outmanuver those nations to establish the new Rule-set while appealing to the better angels of their nature.

AN IMPORTANT POST BY DIPLOMAD

It seems to have escaped the attention of the New York Times, usually they are quite breathless with these sorts of things but senior military commanders and diplomatic personnel have penned a public letter on the state of American Foreign Policy.

Had this letter criticized the Bush administration it would have been a headliner – but since it supported the administration it has been buried.