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Posted by Charles Cameron

Here’s a meme worth noting when it crops up in the advocacy of religious violence:

You don’t need permission from a religious authority…

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This particular idea came up in the video of Anwar al-Awlaki that was released yesterday, Nov. 8th.

Flashpoint Partners translated the comment in question, “do not consult anyone in killing the Americans. Fighting Satan does not require a jurisprudence. It does not require consulting. It does not need a prayer for the cause. They are the party of Satan … It is the battle between truth and falsehood.”

The AFP translation of the key phrase here reads, “Killing the devil does not need any fatwa (legal ruling).”

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My interest was piqued because of the correspondence between this comment from al-Awlaki, and the case of Phineas in the biblical Book of Numbers, chapter 25.

Phineas is “the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest” – but when he recognizes that the Lord would be infuriated by the interracial and interreligious copulation of Zimri, “a prince of a chief house” in Israel, with Cozbi, the daughter of the “head over a people, and of a chief house in Midian”, he does not go to the priest his grandfather seeking permission to kill them – he knows it is his Lord’s wish that they should die, and so he takes the responsibility for his action entirely upon himself, and kills them.

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As I shall recount in greater detail in two future posts on the topic of Phineas, it is the fact that Phineas acts without first requesting permission that pleases his Lord so much that He grants to Phineas and his seed “the covenant of an everlasting priesthood”.

It is precisely this acting without requesting permission that is emphasized in modern Christian Identity writings on the topic of “Phineas Priests”:

So a Phinehas priest is a MAN who acts on personal initiative to execute Yah’s judgment on violations of Yah’s laws which are adversely affecting His people.

And according to Ehud Sprinzak, the eminent scholar of modern Jewish terrorism, it was reading the “Balak portion” of the book of Numbers, in which the story of Phineas is recounted, that convinced Yigal Amir that he could legitimately assassinate Yitzhak Rabin without first obtaining rabbinic approval (which would have put the rabbi who granted him permission at risk).

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So. We have one more piece of the puzzle by which a mind with its own interpretation of God’s will can come to the conclusion that some specific act or acts of violence – accurately termed “terrorism” by others – are not only divinely sanctioned, and indeed mandatory, but can be undertaken without the requirement of prior verification from an appropriate religious authority.

And in this case — the religious authority, such as it is, of Sheikh al-Awlaki proposes this.

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Aaron Zelin‘s post on the Qur’anic text invoked by al-Awlaki’s title and the commentaries on that verse by ibn Kathir and others, is well worth your time, if you have not already seen it.

Here’s two from the other side of the pond:

Offshore Balancer –Lecture Notes: Grand Strategy

….Bottom line up front: Grand strategy is a vision, not a plan. We tend to think of it nowadays as something institutionalised and  grandiose, written down in solemn declaratory documents, thrashed out by committees, created by new layers of bureaucracy. The word is rampant in public life. But just because we institutionalise and declare strategy, doesn’t mean we do it. Grand strategy is not necessarily the product of grand structures.

In fact, it might not be that at all. Systematic attempts to codify strategy often don’t work. The Princeton Project, for instance, which gathered a gang of experts on foreign policy, came up with an elaborate world view that was not very strategic, because in all the political gravitas and seriousness they forget to do the most important thing: prioritise, balance power and interests, give us an idea to organise around, and note how and where our power is limited. Committees and structures can be the enemies of strategic thought. They take ideas and disfigure them beyond all recognition. Just ask George Kennan, whose idea of containment – non-universal, pragmatic, selective – was in his own words ambiguous and lent itself to misinterpretation. It become militarised, universal and crusading.

So instead of thinking about the institutional home of strategy – the National Security Council, or the NSS – I want to return to the core of this discipline, of strategy not as a system but as a sensibility. t is a set of basic ideas and instincts about relationship between power and goals, strong enough to give us a sense of pattern in the chaos, but elastic enough to respond to crisis….

This is actually a very long post. I particularly like the last paragraph in the excerpt by Dr. Porter – the pragmatic sense of strategy there reminds me of the Greek classics, particularly Xenophon. Vision and aspiration without magical thinking.

Kings of War –Is politics the enemy of strategy?

The Faceless Bureaucrat writes…

….It is therefore interesting to wonder, as Gordon Goldstein does in his book Lessons in Disaster (references to which figure in Bob Woodward’s recent Obama’s Wars), if politics isn’t the enemy of strategy.  Because of the need to compromise, and the need to worry about mid-term elections, optics, spin, and implications, doesn’t politics just cloud what should be crystal clear?  Wouldn’t military action just be better if it were protected from the fog of politics? 

Clausewitz, of course, would disagree.  But let’s see if we can address this issue without referring to the Prussian. 

Politics has to deal with the real world, which can be larger and more complex than the battlefield.  Sometimes (a key word here) the battlefield, for all its dangers and pitfalls, can be deceptive.  Ideas like ‘clear and hold’, or ‘feed ‘em, don’t bleed ‘em’ make sense, if looked at narrowly, without reference to the need for resources, or the need to maintain support from allies, voters, and political opponents.  Sometimes military action is affected by what we might call political ‘externalities’-things that occur outside of a particular frame of reference, but which have enormous power to change the way things are viewed inside that frame of reference.  For instance, what military planner looking at a sand model of Helmand would have thought that American domestic spending patterns would factor into his or her strategy?  But, as Richard Haas and Roger Altman point out, ignoring this issue is not longer an option.  As Bill Clinton famously (and successfully) declared, ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’….

I look forward to reading seydlitz89′s reaction.

On the BBC:

Hat tip to SWJ Blog.

Charles Cameron is the regular guest-blogger at Zenpundit, and has also posted at Small Wars Journal, All Things Counterterrorism, for the Chicago Boyz Afghanistan 2050 roundtable and elsewhere.  Charles read Theology at Christ Church, Oxford, under AE Harvey, and was at one time a Principal Researcher with Boston University’s Center for Millennial Studies and the Senior Analyst with the Arlington Institute:

Zen here – I think Charles has hit upon a primal psychological mechanism that comes into full flower as societies break down and war begins to shade into warlordism. We have seen this repeatedly in history from Tamerlane’s mounds of skulls to Khmer Rouge killing fields. Mad Barons, Dogmeat Generals, Friekorps kapteins and butchers long since forgotten by history- there’s a gravitational pull toward atavistic, symbolic, destruction as social norms erode under the corrosive effects of escalating violence.

Mexico, Africa, Zarqawi?

by Charles Cameron

I’ve been struck by a couple of passages I’ve run across in my reading recently that remind me of what I can only call “brutality with religious overtones”.
1. Mexico

There have been a fair number of articles about the various Mexican cartels, but the excerpt from Ed Vulliamy’s book, Amexica: War Along the Borderline that’s now online at Vanity Fair is the one that caught my eye yesterday.

Here’s Vulliamy’s account of a conversation with Dr. Hiram Muñoz of Tijuana:

He explained his work to me during the first of several visits I have made to his mortuary. “Each different mutilation leaves a message,” he said. “The mutilations have become a kind of folk tradition. If the tongue is cut out, it means the person talked too much—a snitch, or chupro. A man who has informed on the clan has his finger cut off and maybe put in his mouth.” This makes sense: a traitor to a narco-cartel is known as a dedo — a finger. “If you are castrated,” Muñoz continued, “you may have slept with or looked at the woman of another man in the business. Severed arms could mean that you stole from your consignment, severed legs that you tried to walk away from the cartel.”<¶>Earlier this year, 36-year-old Hugo Hernandez was abducted in Sonora; his body turned up a week later in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, but not in a single piece. His torso was in one location, his severed arms and legs (boxed) in another. The face had been cut off. It was found near city hall, sewn to a soccer ball.

That’s the brutality — I haven’t see the book itself yet, but I gather it also gets into the narco-corrida music and the “quasi-Catholic cult of Santíssima Muerte” — which brings me to the second part of my interest – the religious aspect.

As Vulliamy mentions, there’s the cult of Holy Death, to be sure, a sort of shadow or inverse of the Blessed Virgin — a Dark Mother for dark times, or perhaps a revival of the ancient Mictlancihuatl, lady of the Dead? — with her own liturgy, too:

Almighty God: in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, we ask for your permission to summon Saint Death. Welcome, White Sister: we find ourselves gathered here at this altar of the Romero Romero family and of each one of us, to offer you a Mass that we hope you will like…

Which brings us to the Robin-Hood-like bandit and folk-saint, Jesus Malverde, to whom prayers such as the following [FBI .pdf, see p. 20] are offered:

Lord Malverde, give your voluntary help to my people in the name of God. Defend me from justice and the jails of those powerful ones. Listen to my prayer and fill my heart with happiness. For you shall make me fortunate.

There are even miracles attributed to him:

Oh Malverde! The Vatican did not believe you to be holy and would not canonize you, but when they brought the Caterpillars to tear down your hood, you broke one machine and nobody could move you away, you broke another, leaving those who disrespect you speechless — and when the third one broke, they said, “Let Malverde’s chapel alone.”

Right beside the syncretistic quasi-Catholicism, there’s also a Protestant angle: La Familia is the group that, in Vulliamy’s words, “made its ‘coming out’ known in a famous episode: bowling five severed heads across the floor of a discotheque.” Time magazine reported on what it termed Mexico’s Evangelical Narcos:

Federal agents seized one copy of La Familia’s Bible in a raid last year. Quoted in local newspapers, the scripture paints an ideology that mixes Evangelical-style self-help with insurgent peasant slogans reminiscent of the Mexican Revolution. “I ask God for strength and he gives me challenges that make me strong; I ask him for wisdom and he gives me problems to resolve; I ask him for prosperity and he gives me brain and muscles to work,” Moreno writes, using terms that could be found in many Christian sermons preached from Mississippi to Brazil. But on the next page, there’s a switch to phrases strikingly similar to those coined by revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. “It is better to be a master of one peso than a slave of two; it is better to die fighting head on than on your knees and humiliated; it is better to be a living dog than a dead lion.”

As I commented on Zenpundit a while back,

What’s troubling here is that there is only one undoubtedly “evangelical” phrase in all those that Time quotes, and it is one of then ones said to resemble the aphorisms of Emilio Zapata. “It is better to be a living dog than a dead lion” is a pretty direct borrowing from Ecclesiastes 9.4 in the King James Version: “To him that is joined to all the living, there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion.”

But that’s not actually all. I didn’t mention it at the time, but “I ask God for strength and he gives me challenges that make me strong; I ask him for wisdom and he gives me problems to resolve; I ask him for prosperity and he gives me brain and muscles to work” is almost word-for-word the same as a poem attributed to Islam — or Judaism for that matter. Indeed, it can be hard to tell who is borrowing from whom – but one final source for the La Familia bible is known – it’s the book Wild at Heart by John Eldredge, the pastor of a ministry in Colorado Springs, who must have been surprised at the uses to which his writings were being put.

In any case, as I said on Zenpundit: These people have a theology, and we should be studying it.
2. Africa

My thoughts turned to Africa when I read another paragraph recently, this one from Johann Hari’s review, The Valley of Taboos, of V.S. Naipaul’s new book, The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief:

I have stood in a blood-splattered house in Tanzania where an old woman had just been beaten to death for being a “witch” who cast spells on her neighbors. I have stood in battlefields in the Congo where the troops insist with absolute certainty they cannot be killed because they have carried out a magical spell that guarantees, if they are shot, they will turn briefly into a tree, then charge on unharmed. I have been cursed in Ethiopia by a witch-doctor with “impotence, obesity, and then leprosy” for asking insistently why he charged so much to “cure” his patients. (I’m still waiting for the leprosy.) Where do these beliefs come from? What do so many Africans get out of them? Can they be changed? These are questions that are asked in Africa all the time, but we are deaf to the conversation.

That sent me in search of some early military anthropology related to guerrilla warfare I’d come across in earlier readings.

James R Price and Paul Jureidini’s 1964 Witchcraft, Sorcery, Magic, and Other Psychological Phenomena and their Implications on Military and Paramilitary Operations in the Congo, and Roger D Hughes’s 1984 Emergency in Kenya: Kikuyu and the Mau Mau Insurrection are both of considerable interest here — but it is LSB Leakey, the world-class British archaeologist initiated as a boy into the Kikuyu ways, who has written the most provocative summary of the relationship between political and religious violence and ritual that I’m interested in tracking.

I’m quoting here from the chapter on “The Mau Mau Religion” in Maj. Hughes paper:

Leakey’s original hypothesis in Mau Mau and the Kikuyu: “Mau Mau was nothing more than a new expression of the old KCA … a political body that was banned … because it had become wholly subversive.” Furthermore, “Mau Mau was synomomous with the new body called the in school, Kenya African Union…” However, Leakey admits to a reversal of his original hypothesis in Defeating Mau Mau, and goes on to say, “Mau Mau, while to some extent synonymous with these political organizations, was in fact a religion and owed its success to this fact more than to anything else at all.”<¶>He then proceeds to attribute the origin of Mau Mau to an “ideology transfer,” wherein the religious beliefs of the Kikuyu transitioned from their ancient tribal religion to Euro-Christianity to Mau Mau. The first transition took place artificially, as the missionaries stripped away the traditional beliefs and supplanted them with “20th Century Europe’s concept of Christianity.” The second transition was more natural and evolutionary than the first. A reactionary hybrid of the old and the new developed, because the supplanted concepts would not hold up in their society. There were too many contradictions between the old and the new, mainly due to the 20th Century European “add-ons.”

Most of us have a pretty fixed view of what religion is, should be, or isn’t. Some of my readers no doubt hold to a evangelical Christian position, some are Catholic, some perhaps Buddhist, agnostic or atheist, and some perhaps Muslim. Each of us tends to take our own view of a particular religion as normative, but the reality is that the history of each of the great world religions contains sanctions for both peace-making and warfare — and human nature itself encompasses a range of behaviors that run from the kind of atavistic violence described above to the forgiving and compassionate impulse behind the Beatitudes…

And while economic pressures and political frustrations may be enough to power great struggles, when religious rituals, beliefs and feelings are added into the mix, it can quickly become even more lethal.
3. And Zarqawi?

All of which leaves me wondering how close the parallels are between the Mau Mau in LSB Leakey’s account, La Familia and the other Mexican cartels — and the brutalities of jihadists such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Andrew Exum on negotiation in AfPakland in Foreign Policy:

Smoke and Mirrors in Kabul

….But Afghans are perfectly comfortable talking while still fighting. So too, at least in practice, are the United States and its allies: In insurgencies from Vietnam to Northern Ireland, we have negotiated with insurgents while combat operations were ongoing. In the American public’s mind, however, wars take place sequentially: First, you fight; second, you negotiate a settlement. The word “negotiations” conjures up hopes for an end to the conflict in the minds of Americans and other Westerners — when all that really might be occurring is another round of jockeying for position between Afghanistan’s warring political forces.

….All that, to make matters worse, assumes the insurgent groups are independent actors. The reality, though, is that negotiations between the insurgent groups and the government in Kabul will only go so far as the Pakistani security services allow. Some Western analysts took heart in Pakistan’s decision in February to arrest Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. At the time, however, the arrest of Mullah Baradar, who was in negotiations with the government in Kabul, was interpreted by the Taliban rank and file to be a stark warning to those who would negotiate without the permission of the Pakistani government, under whose patronage and protection the Taliban has operated east of the Durand Line since 2005. Today it is widely accepted that this was indeed the case and that Pakistan deliberately thwarted negotiations between the Quetta Shura Taliban and the government in Kabul to serve its own parochial interests. Since that event, there is no sign that Pakistan’s powerful military has taken a softer line on negotiations between the Taliban and the government in Kabul.

Exum wrote a good op-ed. Go read it.

That said, the above paragraph makes me want to ask Andrew why the United States is not negotiating directly with Pakistan/ISI instead of wasting valuable time kabuki-ing around with plausibly deniable and expendable members of proxy groups over which Pakistan holds a demonstrated veto?
 
What is particularly curious in this situation is that  Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, in his memoir From the Shadows, made laudatory remarks about George Schultz (with whom Gates bumped heads) as “the toughest secretary of State I knew” who was willing to negotiate with the Soviets in one part of the world while bleeding them in another ( paraphrasing here). A lesson from history that bears revisiting.

Pakistan is our real adversary in Afghanistan and the party with the power to actually make agreements that stick. Negotiations 101: bargaining should not take place with powerless intermediaries.