Johnston, Gorka and the need for specialist knowledges
[ by Charles Cameron — religious knowledge, foreign policy, military ]
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Dr. Douglas M. Johnston just posted a piece titled Religion a crucial tool in U.S. foreign policy in the Washington Post’s On Faith blog, and in it he quoted Dr. Sebastian Gorka‘s recent testimony to the HASC Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities:
It is very difficult, if not impossible, to provide the contextual knowledge we need to understand and defeat our enemy if we rely solely upon anthropologists and social scientists…. Today our multi-disciplinary analysis of the enemy and his doctrine just as much requires — if not more so — the expertise of the regional historian and theologian, the specialist who knows when and how Sunni Islam split from Shia Islam and what the difference is between the Meccan and Medinan verses of the Koran. We should ask ourselves honestly, how many national security practitioners know the answers to these questions, or at least have somewhere to turn to within government to provide them such essential expertise.
I do appreciate that this was written by Dr Gorka for an audience that needs to keep up to speed on many, many topics. What dismays me here isn’t the idea that “national security practitioners” should know these things — they should indeed, and should certainly also know specialists who know a great deal more — but that the bar is set so low, “a specialist” being, for that audience, someone “who knows when and how Sunni Islam split from Shia Islam and what the difference is between the Meccan and Medinan verses of the Koran”.
Let’s back up a bit. Here’s a report on the Senate hearing on the appointment of GEN. Dempsey as Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army.
Gen. Martin Dempsey, tapped by the White House to be the next top military officer, acknowledged Tuesday that he and other senior officers failed to grasp the power dynamics among Islamic-based groups in Iraq.
After the U.S. military toppled the Saddam Hussein-led regime there in 2003, a powder keg erupted that was driven, in large part, by centuries-old power struggles and distrust among Iraq’s various Islamic sects.
It took American civilian and military leaders years to adapt and understand these dynamics, which experts say played a major role in both the length and violent nature of the Iraq war.
Driving the lack of understanding was a tendency of the military to “take five minutes to understand” an issue while immediately spending the next “55 minutes trying to solve it,” Dempsey said during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Those “five minutes to understand” might get you the basic difference between the Meccan and Medinan suras — but a specialist knows a little more than that, as one can gather from comments Dr Timothy Furnish posted just the other day on his MahdiWatch blog, commenting on Dempsey’s remarks:
One might reasonably wonder whether the US military and intelligence community (not to mention the State Department) truly does, finally, realize the importance of sectarian differences in the Islamic world. For example, the Syrian case pitting the pseudo-Shi`i Alawi rulers against the country’s Sunni majority only recently came to Washington’s attention; neither Libya’s history of Sanusiyah Sufi jihad against occupation, nor Mua`amar al-Qadhafi’s heretical Islamic teachings and rule, has been fully considered or acknowledged by the American government; and there are still commanders deploying to and from Afghanistan who seem blissfully ignorant of the fact that that country is 19% Shi`i (and that a substantial subset of that is not Twelver but Sevener, or Isma’ili, Shi`i).
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