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Hmmm…the link works fine but should it be appearing as a grazr within a post ?

BARNETT ON NON-STATE WARFARE

Dr. Barnett dives into the nonstate conflict paradigm with two posts:

“The clearest proof this is no state-on-state war in Lebanon“

and

“The new COIN is progress, not perfection“

“Call Nasrallah what you want, but his impact is little different from any other Arab despot. We’re just watching him on the rise. In that sense, while I find Hezbollah’s tactics quite 4GW, his ends are eminently predictable and familar”

An important data point – there are no 4GW warriors around fighting for greater connectivity, no Global Guerillas for an Open Society, just open-source warfare. The implications of that are longitudinal as well as normative.

UPDATE:

John Robb was kind enough to comment on my post and on another one of Tom’s as well.

From the latter:

“Unfortunately, Tom’s voice/your’s/and mine, will mean little. This war is going to be launched on the cheap or through mistake and will escalate quickly to regional scale from that point on. Think counter-insurgency from the Med to the Hindu Kush. “

THE GRANDFATHER OF STRATEGIC INFLUENCE

Found this nice summative post about Edward Bernays at Maximum Advantage.

For those who are unfamiliar with Bernays exceptionally long career, he deeply influenced the advertising industry and developed the cardinal strategies of influence in a mass-media age.
An excerpt:

“When a person would first meet Bernays,” says Cutlip, “it would not be long until Uncle Sigmund would be brought into the conversation. His relationship with Freud was always in the forefront of his thinking and his counseling.” According to Irwin Ross, another writer, “Bernays liked to think of himself as a kind of psychoanalyst to troubled corporations.” In the early 1920s, Bernays arranged for the US publication of an English-language translation of Freud’s General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. In addition to publicizing Freud’s ideas, Bernays used his association with Freud to establish his own reputation as a thinker and theorist—a reputation that was further enhanced when Bernays authored several landmark texts of his own, most notably Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923, ISBN 0871409755), Propaganda (1928, ISBN 080461511X) and “The Engineering of Consent” in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (March 1947).”

Read the whole thing here.

FACING UP TO THE REAL NATURE OF THE HARD LEFT

I usually steer clear of writing on purely domestic politics because the issues are always more complex in reality than committed partisans are willing to admit and because the difficulty of having having an intelligent dialogue about hot-button issues. Granted, it is the hyperpolitical blogs that have the big audiences but if I wanted to preach to the choir, I’d get myself a church.

Nevertheless, in the last few days a couple of figures with impeccable credentials as men of the Left awoke to the realization that the broad American Left tolerates and includes people with a very dangerous mindset. Not that this is a revelation to those of us on the Right or the Middle ( or who have been following the history of the past century) but it is a fact about which many liberals, some of whom are intelligent people for whom I have much respect, are in deep denial. To admit that their side openly welcomes -and regularly defends- the sort of unsavory hater or dedicated authoritarian that they regularly condemn on the Religious Right is viewed as an unacceptable concession to conservatives -instead of being a simple concession to the reality of human nature. I guess nobody reads Eric Hoffer these days.

Here are the pieces in question:

“Liberal McCarthyism Bigotry and hate aren’t just for right-wingers anymore.” by Lanny Davis in the Wall Street Journal.

“Has the Left Gone Mad?” by Dr. Mark A. LeVine at HNN.

Lanny Davis is a well known public figure, attorney, Democratic activist and former official in the Clinton administration who was, for a time, the chief attack dog against the ” Vast Right-wing conspiracy”. Dr. LeVine is less well-known, being a MENA scholar of the kind of far Left, anti-Israeli, academic politics that, say, David Horowitz, loves to attack. These are not moderate Democrats or centrists, Davis and LeVine are both anti-war progressives.

Yet they have, for various reasons, decided to break the unspoken rule against calling attention to the existence of the Marxoid hardliners, the wingnuts and the radical haters who pollute the otherwise liberal and democratic politics of their Party. Here are snippets of what they had to say:

First, Lanny Davis:

“I came to believe that we liberals couldn’t possibly be so intolerant and hateful, because our ideology was famous for ACLU-type commitments to free speech, dissent and, especially, tolerance for those who differed with us. And in recent years–with the deadly combination of sanctimony and vitriol displayed by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Michael Savage–I held on to the view that the left was inherently more tolerant and less hateful than the right.

Now, in the closing days of the Lieberman primary campaign, I have reluctantly concluded that I was wrong. The far right does not have a monopoly on bigotry and hatred and sanctimony. Here are just a few examples (there are many, many more anyone with a search engine can find) of the type of thing the liberal blog sites have been posting about Joe Lieberman:

• “Ned Lamont and his supporters need to [g]et real busy. Ned needs to beat Lieberman to a pulp in the debate and define what it means to be an AMerican who is NOT beholden to the Israeli Lobby” (by “rim,” posted on Huffington Post, July 6, 2006).

Unsurprisingly, DailyKos was at hand to provide examples of rancid anti-semitism for the Davis op-ed.

Now for Mark LeVine:

“Of course, I am fairly certain that this isn’t the kind of support that was intended. And like myself, most progressives I know have been using “all the means at our disposal” (as the letter signers pledge to do) to help spread the word about this utterly disastrous, and yes, criminal, war. But the ill-chosen (one can hope) words by my illustrious colleagues reflects a very disturbing trend within the Left that has emerged the last few years, and which has come to a head with the latest war: Many leaders of the movement are moving away from the commitment to non-violence that defined the struggle against the Vietnam War and the vast majority of protests against corporate globalization and the invasion of Iraq, and towards embracing violent resistance (think the Red Brigade, Bader Meinhof Gang or the Weather Underground) as a viable, and even the best way to check the capitalist war machine.

I saw the first glimmers of the change right after the US invasion, when senior members of the biggest anti-war coalition in the US told me that “it’s all America now” and that the movement had to shift from anti-war to anti-imperialism as its focus. It’s hard to endorse violence when you’re anti-war, but if you’re anti-imperialist there’s a long history of violent struggles to “inspire” you (although supporters of this path seem to forget the most successful anti-imperialist struggles, such as Gandhi’s in India and Mandela’s in South Africa, were almost entirely non-violent, while others, like Algeria or Vietnam, produced corrupt and violent regimes in their wakes).“

The American Left has, since the 1920’s contained its share of Stalinists, Trotskyites, Anarchists and various other totalitarian loons inclined to worship violent revolution abroad and despise American liberties at home. For a time, these fellow-travellers had access to the highest reaches of the Democratic Party but after the embarrassment of the exposure of Alger Hiss as a Communist spy, the Democratic Party did a thorough housecleaning. I’m not talking about Joe McCarthy’s ranting idiocy but of Arthur Schlessinger’s ADA combatting anti-democratic ideologues and the AFL-CIO leadership battling to remove CPUSA networks from key union locals. The revolutionaries were shown the door in the forties and fifties.

The emergence of the New Left in the 1960’s relegitimized wingnut partcipation in the Democratic Party and its associated groups. Most former Vietnam era activists have mellowed. A few have not and the internet has allowed them to recruit and energize like-minded followers. They are a nasty bunch with an anti-American ideology and they are determined to play a pivotal role in the future of the Democratic Party. It took some bravery on the part of Davis and LeVine to criticize these people – fanatics brook no disagreement and will view the criticism they levelled as “treason” to ” the movement”. These articles will raise hackles in a way a piece from a conservative or Republican figure would not.

Davis and LeVine are the canaries in the mineshaft, but I’m not sure if anyone is listening.

ADDENDUM:

On a directly related line of thought ( “Great minds…”) , my friend Bruce Kesler contemplates “The Not-Great Divide” at Democracy Project

ADDENDUM II:

Marc at American Future links and expands on the post with “ Hezbollah’s fellow Travellers“.

Must be Day of the Blogfriend ! LOL !

HEZBOLLAH AND THE GHOST OF GIAP

General Vo Nguyen Giap

Colonel W. Pat Lang , making an observation about Israel’s war in Lebanon with both immediate as well as historical implications.

“The Lebanese Hizbullah “Arab Guerrilla Army” is something different. What Newsweek describes is a force in transition, a force becoming a real army. Vo Nguyen Giap wrote in “People’s War, People’s Army” that a national resistance movement’s armed force must “evolve” from political agitprop activities to guerrilla war and eventually to the status and capability of regular armed forces if it is to succeed in defeating its enemies and seizing ” a place at the table” in its country’s future.”

The interesting thing about this observation is that, while Giap is a military leader of the first rank, his theory of guerilla warfare has rarely been borne out by history, including that of the Vietnam War. It is exceptionally rare for irregulars or guerillas to ” transition” or “evolve” into full-fledged conventional military operations against a modern, first-rate opponent. Generally, guerilla forces beat state opponents by becoming more effective at guerilla warfare and causing a psychological and moral collapse of the state’s will to resist; and only after seizing power, do the new rulers transform their guerilla fighters into professional soldiers.

At Dien Bien Phu, the Viet Minh army under Giap inflicted a conventional military defeat upon the French. Conditions were ideal in the sense that the French themselves had helped Giap immeasurably by intentionally isolating their forces geographically. When Giap attempted to bring the Viet Cong into an open clash with American forces during the Tet Offensive, the political victory of the surprise attack was purchased at the cost of the physical decimation of the Viet Cong. The Southern cadres could not ” evolve up” against that kind of concentrated firepower and never recovered from having tried. As a result, the costs of the war on the Communist side were increasingly carried on by North Vietnamese regulars, culminating in a conventional invasion of the South and Saigon’s fall in 1975.

( Nor did the Communist side ” evolve” in Vietnam under their own power. Hanoi was willing to bear enormous costs in blood but a considerable amount of the treasure for their effort was supplied by the Socialist bloc. It must be noted that all of the military aid supplied by the Soviets and China bought these powers remarkably little leverage over Hanoi’s war policies. The Soviets, to their embarrassment, cound not even get North Vietnamese to agree to refrain from provoking the United States during the few days of Kosygin’s state visit)

Mao’s experiemce as a guerilla leader during the long Chinese civil war is probably the the closest example to ” transitioning up” a guerilla army to conventional military status. Here again though, the caveats loom large. The Nationalist army was not a first or even a second rate military power and the Kuomintang regime, itself shot through with corruption, had almost destroyed Mao’s Communists during the democidal 1930’s extermination campaigns, carried out with the help of Wehrmacht advisers. Added to the general incompetence of the Nationalists was the stress of also fighting Imperial Japan, of which Chiang’s army bore the brunt. Only under these conditions, did Mao’s army manage to successfully” evolve” ( and only some units at that but that was enough to win).

Hezbollah has cetainly “evolved” in terms of its sophistication but not in moving toward open, set-piece battles with the IDF, which would result in Hezbollah getting creamed. Instead, Hezbollah appears to have acquired elite units adept in a blend of clandestine intelligence and special forces activities, capable of operating on their own in an adaptive, pro-active, manner. Advantages that depend upon the employment of stealth, secrecy and speed in order to be most useful against the Israelis.

The importance of state sponsorship in “guerilla evolution” should not be ignored. In Hezbollah’s case Iran and Syria are the main patrons. Depending on your perspective such aid could be considered trivial ( no battalions of Revolutionary Guards) or large ( training, intelligence, rockets). If the aid provided is a catalyst in changing the operational parameters of Hezbollah, then in my view, the effect is significant even if it isn’t buying Teheran or Damascus tactical control. Either a strategic balance is being altered or it isn’t – in geopolitics there is no such thing as just being a little bit pregnant.

Evolution requires a change in the environment. Shaping the battlespace is a strategic move and Iran and Hezbollah have done that.

ADDENDUM:

I have to recommend this post by Kingdaddy at Arms and Influence.