zenpundit.com

I don’t think of STRATFOR as a cyber shop, generally, but this is worth a look.

Here is something for the learned readership to chew on.

As you are probably all aware, in the hard sciences it is common for research papers to be the product of large, multidiciplinary, teams with, for example, biochemists working with physicists, geneticists, bioinformatics experts, mathematicians and so on. In the social sciences and humanities, not so much. Traditional disciplinary boundaries and methodological conservatism often prevail or are even frequently the subject of heated disputes when someone begins to test the limits of academic culture

I’m not sure why this has to be so for any of us not punching the clock in an ivory tower.

The organizer of the Boyd & Beyond II Conference, Stan Coerr, a GS-15 Marine Corps, Colonel Marine Corps Reserve and Iraq combat veteran, several years ago, developed a very intriguing analytical outline of thirty years of Afghan War, which I recommend that you take a look at:

The Eagle and the Bear: First World Armies in Fourth World Insurgencies by Stan Coerr

the-eagle-and-the-bear-11.pdf

There are many potential verges for collaboration in this outline – by my count, useful insights can be drawn by from the following fields:

Military History
Strategic Studies
Security Studies
COIN Theory
Operational Design
Diplomatic History
Soviet Studies
Intelligence History
International Relations
Anthropology
Ethnography
Area Studies
Islamic Studies
Economics
Geopolitics
Military Geography
Network Theory

I’m sure that I have missed a few.

It would be interesting to crowdsource this doc a little and get a discussion started. Before I go off on a riff about our unlamented Soviet friends, take a look and opine on any section or the whole in the comments section.

[ by Charles Cameron — LRA, Muslim influence, biblical literalism, Machine Gun Preacher, the biker and the nun ]

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There is much to be said about Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army, and I intend to write about the importance of a worldview imbued with magic — both in driving the LRA’s ferocious violence, and in providing subsequent healing for the victims and absolution and reconciliation for the perpetrators — in an upcoming post.  But there are a few things I want to have dealt with first — to clear the decks, so to speak.

Here, I want to mention three points briefly: (a) confirmation of a possible Muslim connection, or perhaps merely syncretism, in the LRA; (b) a fiercely literal form of biblical interpretation; and (c) the question of the “Christian Rambo”.

1.

In my recent post on the topic, I quoted Maya Deighton‘s DFID report about Kony’s “much-proclaimed conversion to Islam”.

My friend Jim Lai very kindly pointed me to another and richer datum on the topic. It comes from the 1997 Human Rights Watch report, THE SCARS OF DEATH: Children Abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda:

There is, of course, an apparent irony in Sudan’s support for the Lord’s Resistance Army: the Sudanese government is militantly Islamic, while the Lord’s Resistance Army is at least ostensibly Christian. But over time, it seems clear that the beliefs and practices of Kony and his followers have changed: in 1987, Kony’s group was closely identified with Alice Lakwena, and like Lakwena, Kony appears to have enjoyed substantial popular support among the Acholi. Huge crowds would gather to hear him preach. By May 1997, when we conducted most of our interviews, the testimony of the children we met suggested that many of the rituals common in Lakwena’s time had been abandoned or were only sporadically followed. Many children also reported rebel practices that appear to have been adopted from Islam: for instance, the rebels pray while facing Mecca, respect Friday as a holy day, and forbid the keeping of pigs.

The New York Times published LTC Richard Skow’s highly informative notes on the LRA, and these included (page 9) more than one injunction with a specifically Christian orientation, and at least one that seems to fit more closely with the Muslim model: “Wounded personnel are administered three sips of water mixed with shea butter oil – one sip for each of the trinity” (cf. Christian baptismal doctrine and Matthew 28.19) and “Before prayer they must wash at least their hands, feet and face” (cf Muslim wudu (ablutions) before prayer, and Qur’an 5.6).

As Jim points out, what’s being described here may best be described as syncretism rather than Islam.

So while I don’t think that paragraph by any means proves that the LRA is a “Muslim” organization, it certainly makes Limbaugh‘s portrayal of the LRA as “Christians … fighting the Muslims” – not to mention his headline, Obama Invades Uganda, Targets Christians — look even more clueless.

Thanks, Jim.

2.

My second point has to do with Biblical interpretation of the most literal sort.

Mark 9.43- 47 reads:

And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched: Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched. And if thy foot offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter halt into life, than having two feet to be cast into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched: Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched. And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire.

There are, I imagine, more than a few Christian men who have looked on a woman to lust after her, and have therefore presumably committed adultery with her already in their hearts (see Matthew 5.28), but who have not seen fit to pluck out their eyes as a result. There are many modes of Biblical interpretation, and the application of Mark 9 to Matthew 5 in a literal sense does not appear to have been a popular one.

Joseph Kony, on the other hand, not only refers to that passage in Mark, he appears to suggest that one might need to apply it to others, not just oneself.

Mr. Kony tells his followers that he is in direct contact with God, and that God says it is right to kill in the cause of toppling Mr. Museveni’s evil government, which is accused of hostility toward the country’s north. (The government’s sins, however, remain unstated.)

In 1988, when the government tried to train villagers in self-defense, Mr. Kony was quoted as saying: “If you pick up an arrow against us and we ended up cutting off the hand you used, who is to blame? You report us with your mouth, and we cut off your lips. Who is to blame? It is you! The Bible says that if your hand, eye or mouth is at fault, it should be cut off.” The rebels began cutting off the lips, hands, noses and breasts of civilians, intending that their victims survive as constant warnings to others.

I don’t have access to Els De Temmerman‘s book about the LRA, Aboke Girls: Children Abducted in northern Uganda, but she quotes that passage from St Mark, and apparently confirms that Kony has used it. As one of her readers reports:

One of the commandments LRA leader Joseph Kony enforces is from St Mark 9, 43, 45, and 47: And if thine hand offend thee, cut it off … and if thine foot offend the, cut it off … and if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out…

If the army ran into villagers riding a bike, they would cut their legs off. If the new rebel recruits could not watch the beating and killing of their classmates, families, or friends, they would pluck their eyes out.

I don’t believe even Origen would have gone that far.

3.

Lastly, I’m obliged to Richard Bartholomew of Bartholomew’s Notes for pointing me to Mark Moring‘s article in Christianity Today, which describes in some detail the claims made by Rev. Sam Childers – hero of the recently released film, Machine Gun Preacher – concerning his own efforts on behalf of children and against Kony and the RLA:

The 49-year-old Childers is a former biker and gang member who found God as a young man and felt called to help orphans in Sudan, where he has been working off and on for more than a decade. Machine Gun Preacher, starring Gerard Butler in the lead role, has received positive buzz at screenings and film festivals, but CT has learned that some of its depictions — as well as some of Childers’s claims in his 2009 autobiography — are untrue.

Childers is known as the “Machine Gun Preacher” because he says he fights, often with an AK-47 assault rifle, against the infamous guerrilla leader Joseph Kony and the rogue Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), whose war crimes have left thousands of African children orphaned. In his 2009 book, Another Man’s War: The True Story of One Man’s Battle to Save Children in the Sudan (Thomas Nelson), Childers writes that he has “rescued more than 900 refugees of all ages. More than half of them were children who had been captured by the Lord’s Resistance Army.” He founded a group called Angels of East Africa, and he writes of “leading a rescue with an AK in my hands and a pistol on each hip.” He claims to have fought alongside the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) to liberate many of these children-and the movie depicts as much.

But an officer in the SPLA denies any association with Childers, and has asked Childers to stop “staining our names.” According to a letter obtained by CT dated April 8, 2011, Lieutenant General Obuto Mamur Mete told Childers that he had become “a problem,” and urged him to stop “using the names of our authorities, me in particular, to manipulate your wrongdoings.” Mete also told London’s Daily Mail that Childers’s “claims to have fought alongside us are a lie. He has never even seen the LRA.” Childers disputes Mete’s claims, saying that he has fought with the SPLA and against the LRA.

The film makers might have done better to portray Sister Rachele Fassera, the heroic nun who tracked girls abducted by the LRA from the school where she taught, and managed to secure the release of more than a hundred of them – the story told in Els De Temmerman’s book.

But I don’t believe she was carrying an AK-47…

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Edited to add: aha! It appears that there will in fact be a film about Sr. Rachele –it’s to be titled Girl Soldiers, and will star Uma Thurman.  Good.

[ by Charles Cameron — Limbaugh, “Christianity” of the Lord’s Resistance Army, Uganda, sectarianism, RJ Rushdoony ]

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flag of the Lord’s Resistance Army — Wikipedia

Matt Yglesias trumpets “Rush Limbaugh Endorses The Lord’s Resistance Army” on ThinkProgress today, and goes on to say:

I don’t have a really strong view on whether or not it’s advisable to dispatch a small number of US combat troops to help fight the Lord’s Resistance Army. My instinct is to be skeptical. I want to see less military intervention, not more. But Rush Limbaugh’s instinct is to embrace brutal murderers…

That last sentence is an over the top ad hominem attack, if you ask me. But Limbaugh himself is so far over the top he’s almost reached the bottom.

Limbaugh may not be embracing or endorsing Joseph Kony‘s Lord’s Resistance Army, but this is some of what a transcript of his show has to say about them:

Lord’s Resistance Army are Christians. They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan. And Obama has sent troops, United States troops to remove them from the battlefield, which means kill them.

The transcript shows that Rush draws at least some of his knowledge of the subject from a report by Jacob Tapper of ABC News, which is mentioned in Limbaugh’s second sentence with a link provided at the end of his transcript.

1.

The Limbaugh transcript ends after a caller has apparently updated Limbaugh on some of the facts:

Is that right? The Lord’s Resistance Army is being accused of really bad stuff? Child kidnapping, torture, murder, that kind of stuff? Well, we just found out about this today. We’re gonna do, of course, our due diligence research on it. But nevertheless we got a hundred troops being sent over there to fight these guys — and they claim to be Christians.

Due diligence? Isn’t that something you do before you blurt?

If Limbaugh had continued to the end of the 12 paragraph ABC report he referenced, he’d have read this quote from the 2010 Statement by the President on the Signing of the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009:

The Lord’s Resistance Army preys on civilians – killing, raping, and mutilating the people of central Africa; stealing and brutalizing their children; and displacing hundreds of thousands of people. Its leadership, indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, has no agenda and no purpose other than its own survival. It fills its ranks of fighters with the young boys and girls it abducts. By any measure, its actions are an affront to human dignity.

Is Limbaugh in need of an intern to do some fact-checking, perhaps?

2.

Here’s Limbaugh again:

Now, up until today, most Americans have never heard of the combat Lord’s Resistance Army. And here we are at war with them. Have you ever heard of Lord’s Resistance Army, Dawn? How about you, Brian? Snerdley, have you? You never heard of Lord’s Resistance Army? Well, proves my contention, most Americans have never heard of it, and here we are at war with them.

I know I’ve been tracking them for quite a while myself, because I quoted the estimable Helena Cobban‘s JustWorldNews piece announcing a “second-stage peace accord” between the Ugandan government and LRA in May 2007 — but I also have a 2002 article from the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) magazine Developments, buried in among the files I brought over from an older computer, which contains one striking piece of evidence that I’d love to follow up on.

In this article, no longer available at the DFID site, but which can now be retrieved from the Internet Archive — DFID Media Fellow Maya Deighton reports as though it’s common knowledge that Kony at one point converted to Islam:

The rebels’ leader is a religious fanatic called Joseph Kony, who hides out for most of the time in southern Sudan.

Kony manages to combine a heady blend of occultism, born-again Christianity, and most recently, a much-proclaimed conversion to Islam, with his campaign of terror and child abduction.

3.

Muslim, Christian, spiritualist, shamanic, syncretistic, tribal, or merely incoherent in belief, the LRA has long been known for its brutality. Deighton continues:

Known as the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), the force of 10,000 recruits is a rag-tag one. It is made up of highly powerful commanders, who roam in the vast, wild bushlands of northern Uganda and southern Sudan, with bands of abducted children, forcing them to take part in brutal raids on their own communities.

The commanders instruct the children to take part in arcane rituals, including smearing their bodies with shea nut oil, which they claim will magically protect them from enemy bullets.

In sprees of frenzied violence, the children burn and loot whole villages, raping women, abducting more children of both sexes and killing men, as they rampage through.

During the attacks, the rebels leave their unmistakable trademark by cutting off their victims lips, ears and even legs.

If Limbaugh is so far over the top as to be close to bottoming out, Kony is crazed enough for me to forgo my usual scruples and apply the nauseating term, batshit.

4.

And hey – even JR Rushdoony‘s Chalcedon Foundation has known about this for ages. Their magazine featured an interview by Lee Duignon with Uganda’s Ambassador to the US, Edith Ssempala, in May 2005, titled Uganda’s War with ‘the Devil’. I don’t think Rush Limbaugh or his people had read that piece, either.

It begins by setting the time-frame – and remember, this was published in 2005:

“We need your prayers” to bring an end to “a spiritual war” that has ravaged northern Uganda for 19 years, Uganda’s Ambassador to the United States appealed to American Christians.

It’s not every day you see the “spiritual warfare” meme more readily associated with C Peter Wagner and the NAR cropping up in a Rushdoony publication…

In an exclusive interview with Chalcedon, Ambassador Edith Ssempala discussed her country’s war against the Lord’s Resistance Army – a terrorist organization that has, in the name of God, murdered tens of thousands, driven more than a million people from their homes, and abducted many thousands of children to be slaves or “soldiers.”

“I prefer to call it the Devil’s Resistance Army,” the ambassador said. “It’s blasphemous to call it ‘the Lord’s.’ All those atrocities in the name of God.”

[ … ]

Self-proclaimed “General” Joseph Kony, who claims he has supernatural powers conferred on him by the Holy Spirit, created the LRA and still leads it. The government has tried many times to negotiate with him, Ms. Ssempala said – but it’s impossible to negotiate with a madman.

“Those who’ve met with him say they can’t make any agreement with him,” the ambassador said. “He always says he needs to consult the spirits.”

5.

Okay, here’s another interesting bit:

Publicly, Kony says his mission is to impose the Ten Commandments on Uganda as law. Uganda’s Christians, of course, already believe in the Ten Commandments.

“He says he wants to establish the Ten Commandments as the nation’s law, and he violates every one of them,” Ms. Ssempala said. “Nobody knows what he really wants. He’s motivated by pure evil. He maims, he murders, he rapes. He makes children do these things as their initiation into his army. It’s demonic.”

Also of interest is the LRA’s statement of intent, which Limbaugh quotes approvingly:

Lord’s Resistance Army objectives. I have them here. “To remove dictatorship and stop the oppression of our people.” Now, again Lord’s Resistance Army is who Obama sent troops to help nations wipe out. The objectives of the Lord’s Resistance Army, what they’re trying to accomplish with their military action in these countries is the following: “To remove dictatorship and stop the oppression of our people; to fight for the immediate restoration of the competitive multiparty democracy in Uganda; to see an end to gross violation of human rights and dignity of Ugandans; to ensure the restoration of peace and security in Uganda, to ensure unity, sovereignty, and economic prosperity beneficial to all Ugandans, and to bring to an end the repressive policy of deliberate marginalization of groups of people who may not agree with the LRA ideology.” Those are the objectives of the group that we are fighting, or who are being fought and we are joining in the effort to remove them from the battlefield.

Nothing much to argue with there.

But hey, Rushdoony must have felt a little confused by these guys.  His massive Institutes of Biblical Law is dedicated to the proposition that now and for ever, Old Testament law should be the foundation of civil law – on page 18 he writes that “one God, one law” propounded in Deuteronomy 6.4 (the Shema Yisroel) is “the declaration of an absolute moral order to which man must conform”.  Joseph Kony as quoted above seems to be pretty much in agreement with that.

6.

But then in the LRA’s own official presentation, A Case for National Reconcilation, Peace, Democracy and Economic Prosperity for All Ugandans, we find:

3.4. Propaganda by the Museveni regime and the media that the LRA is a group of Christian fundamentalists with bizarre beliefs whose aim is to topple the Museveni regime and replace it with governance based on the Bible’s ten commandments are despicable and must be rejected with all the contempt it deserves.

Hunh?

Then again, we’re talking about Uganda here, which also gave us the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God – the Catholic splinter group which set fire to its church with four or five hundred adherents locked inside on March 17, 2000 – after their December 31st 1999 end of days had been postponed in a vision by the Virgin Mary.

So perhaps it’s understandable if Kony’s emisary seeks to distance himself from the associations brought up by mention of the “Ten Commandments” in a Ugandan context, and sets forth a list of LRA objectives that sounds passable enough that Limbaugh can quote them with approval.

7.

And Rush, we’re still waiting for that overdue diligence…

The US Attorney General Eric Holder, supported diplomatically by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, charged the Iranian government earlier today with a plot to enlist a Mexican narco-cartel to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the United States. SECSTATE Hillary Clinton, the FBI Director and President Barack Obama have all weighed in on this issue with strong public statements:

U.S. authorities said they had broken up a plot by two men linked to Iran’s security agencies to assassinate Saudi Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir. One was arrested last month while the other was believed to be in Iran.

Iran denied the charges. But President Barack Obama called the plot a “flagrant violation of U.S. and international law” and Saudi Arabia said it was “despicable.” Revelation of the alleged plot, and the apparent direct ties to the Tehran government, had the potential to further inflame tensions in the Middle East, and the United States said Tehran must be held top account.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in a Reuters interview, expressed hope that countries that have hesitated to enforce existing sanctions on Iran would now “go the extra mile.” At a news conference, FBI Director Robert Mueller said the convoluted plot, involving monitored international calls, Mexican drug money and an attempt to blow up the ambassador in a Washington restaurant, could have been straight from a Hollywood movie.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder alleged that the plot was the work of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is the guardian of Iran’s 32-year-old revolution, and the Quds force, its covert, operational arm. “High-up officials in those (Iranian) agencies, which is an integral part of the Iranian government, were responsible for this plot,” Holder told the news conference.

“I think one has to be concerned about the chilling nature of what the Iranian government attempted to do here,” he said….

I confess that I am not quite sure what to make of this story. 

If accurate – the case originated with a DEA confidential informant in Mexico – it would amount to a new stage of reckless boldness by Iran’s hardline Pasdaran clique of security and intelligence agencies run by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and their retired leadership that have a semi-hegemony over the Iranian regime. It also points to the danger to American national security of a long, basically open, border with a failing state Mexico that is deeply embattled in a polycentric counterinsurgency war with the rapidly morphing narco-cartels (that said, I do not expect the administration to move a policy inch to repair the latter). Why would Iran do this – and in such a harebrained manner?

Some possible motives:

* Internal factionalism – Iran recently released imprisoned American hikers, albeit after a substantial ransom payment. Potentially, this could be viewed in the topsy-turvy world of Iranian Islamist politics as a “goodwill gesture” toward the United States. Historically, such gestures provoke rival factions in Iran to initiate anti-American actions, including acts of terrorism, usually via proxies. If an intel operation was “factional” rather than blessed by a wide elite consensus, it might very well be a marginal idea carried out on a shoe-string.

* Counterpressue – Indirect Iranian skirmishing against the US which is drawing down in Iraq and is pressuring Iran’s ally Syria. Also against the Saudis who brutally suppressed a predominantly Shia “Arab Spring” rising in Bahrain which, if it had succeeded in toppling the regime, would have added Bahrain to the regional “Shia Revival”.

* Opportunism – The Pasdaran leadership may have  believed the stories of American decline, assessed our extensive military commitments and budgetary problems and taken the Obama administration’s temperature and concluded that the benefits of carrying out the assassination outweighed the remote risk direct  of US military retaliation.

Some points to consider:

* Proximity – Iran could more easily, with less risk and with far greater likelihood of success, carry out acts of anti-American terrorism closer to home in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan the Gulf States, even in Saudi Arabia or Egypt.  Acts of terrorism in the American homeland risk a massive overreaction by Washington ( the US only needs the Navy to deal out severe consequences to Iran) which might welcome a legitimate pretext to bomb all of Iran’s suspected nuclear facilities and national security sites.

* Self-Preservation by the Mexican narco-cartels make such cooperation with Iran less likely, having the example of their Colombian predecessors in the 1980’s before them when they raised the ire of the USG sufficiently. The narcos have their hands full fighting the Mexican Army and one another without adding the CIA, Global Predator drones or the SEALs to their plate.

* Friends of MeK – By some miraculous deus ex machina, the cultish, 1970’s era Iranian Marxoid terrorist group, the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (MeK) have spent a wealth of funds to buy the lobbying services of a glittering array of former top US national security officials and general officers – despite being on the State Department’s official terrorist list.

….Among the new faces: former Indiana Congressman Lee Hamilton (D), who once chaired the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and who served as vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission; Ambassador Dell Dailey, who was the State Department’s Coordinator for Counterterrorism from July 2007 to April 2009; General Michael Hayden, director of the CIA from 2006 to 2009; and not one, but two former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Walter Slocombe and ex-Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-NJ) also spoke.

In what should be a national scandal, those names are not even a comprehensive list of the very influential former politicians, K Street lobbyists and Beltway law firms accepting payments to whisper in the ears of current officials in the national security community, regarding Iran, on behalf of the MeK. Not sure how it is legal to do so either, since aiding a group on the State Department’s list by providing services normally can get you hauled into Federal  court pronto, if you are an ordinary American citizen. A most curious situation….

I have no brief for Iran, the regime is a dedicated enemy of the United States, but a group of exiled Iranian Marxist-terrorists who used to work for Saddam Hussein hardly have our best interests at heart.

It will be interesting to watch this case unfold, but in the meantime, opinions are welcome in the comments, particularly on the Mexican narco-cartel angle.

Hat tip to James Bennett.