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By Charles Cameron 

It has been a while since I posted an entry in my “Games of War and Peace” series, but I just came across a quote in Stephen Ulph’s Towards a Curriculum for the Teaching of Jihadist Ideology that brought back memories…

The epigraph to Ulph’s Introduction quotes from Rosie Cowan and Richard Norton-Taylor’s piece, Britain now No 1 al-Qaida target – anti-terror chiefs from the (UK) Guardian of 19 October 2006, and I’ve added a couple of earlier paragraphs for context:

Even though the police and M15 have disrupted terror plots and groups influenced by al-Qaida, they describe the networks as very resilient.They say there is a frightening number of young men willing to step up and replace those who have been arrested or gone to ground.

“It’s like the old game of Space Invaders,” said one senior counter-terrorism source. “When you clear one screen of potential attackers, another simply appears to take its place.”

I don’t think there’s a deep strategic insight there, the way there may be with Mao and the game of Go, although the question of what drives the continuing recruitment of those young men is an important one.

But I’d like to ask — what other game-related insights do you find of value in understanding contemporary jihadism?

Historyguy99, who has a lot of “in-country” experience, offers up a nice blog round-up and commentary on China.

Would DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano ever tolerate Border Patrol agents using the TSA “security” procedures on arrested illegal aliens that she demands American citizens submit to in order to catch a plane?

The woman really thinks she’s a central committee secretary of a small Eastern Bloc country circa 1982. Perhaps her view of ordinary Americans as dangerous security threats will change somewhat if she leaves office to become one of them again.

Then we can get a DHS Secretary who will take notice of the giant failed state to our South imploding under the attack of a rapidly expanding narco-insurgency instead of making it a top priority to get Mexican officials to use naked scanners at their airports. WTF?

What planet does she live on?

ADDENDUM:

Apparently it is “Planet Oligarchy”.

Former DHS Secretary Chertoff has a lot of business riding on the USG enforcing the use of scanners on an unwilling public, which explains the TSA’s militant but politically inept position on scanning and groping. One of the bigwigs is trading on his government service and expects to feed at the public trough, so the bureaucrats are going to “hang tough”. Who the hell are we to dare to complain anyway?

After an extended hiatus, Summer Series 2010: Reviewing the Books! re-starts……

Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism by Michael Burleigh

British historian Michael Burleigh brings the same kind of unsparingly brutal prose to the history of terrorism that he previously delivered on National Socialism in his acclaimed, The Third Reich: A New History. There is a wealth of detail about terrorists, their casual atrocities and the warped morality that terrorists habitually employ to rationalize their crimes; a nihilistic mentalite shared with their intellectual groupies in universities and political law firms that will shock and inform the reader. The scattered nature of the case studies that comprise modern terrorism though, makes Blood and Rage more of a kaleidescope than microscope.

Burleigh set out to chronicle a comprehensive examination of the evolution of terrorism in the last two centuries. There are Feinians and radicalized Russian Narodniks, murderous FLN Algerians and their pied noir OAS blood enemies, Irgun gunmen and Black September, ETA, IRA and Baader-Meinhoff gangsters consorting with Palestinian radicals and Herbert Marcuse. Burleigh dissects the psychopathology of ultraviolent degenerates like Hugh “Lenny” Murphy, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Andreas Baader. Terrorists, statistically speaking, are generally not madmen in a clinical sense, but Burleigh records a noteworthy exception regarding Germany’s Baader-Meinhoff Gang:

….With their numbers by now reduced to about a dozen people, the group was desperate for new recruits. Salvation came from an unlikely quarter. The mad. A radical psychiatrist at Heidelberg University, influenced by the anti-psychiatry of R.D. Laing and the anti-institutionalisation theories of Franco Basaglia, had formed a socialist collective among the mainly student clientele he was treating for various mental disturbances common to that age cohort including depression, paranoia and mild schizophrenia. In early 1971 Baader and Ensslin visited Heidelberg where they met some of the radicalized patients. In the following years, about twelve of the latter, including Gerhard Muller, Siegfried Hausner, Sieglinde Hofmann, Lutz Taufner and others became the second generation of RAF terrorists, initially under the slogan “Crazies to Arms”.

Blood and Rage makes for a grim read, with the recurring pattern of terrorism and counterterrorist response erupting to demoralize societies until the terrorists in question are either dead, imprisoned or mellowed by paunchy middle-age and political irrelevance as the times pass their maniacal political passions by. Only in a few instances, notably South Africa and Northern Ireland are political settlements a more feasible option than methodical police and intelligence work followed by tough-minded prosecution and a steely societal rejection of grandiose moral claims of terrorists and their fellow-travelling left-wing lawyer-advocates. Burleigh also makes clear his disdain for militarized CT and multiculturalist enablement alike.

The weakness of Blood and Rage, unlike some of Burleigh’s other works, is a lack of a strong analytical theme, focus or grand theory to explain and unite the relentless and gory march of geographically diverse case studies in terrorism, though an intelligent reader should be able to discern patterns present well enough for themselves. Given Burleigh’s stature as a scholar, one can envision him having taken the ball further down field for a deeper level of analysis of terrorism as a societal phenomena. Burleigh would probably reply that such is not the proper job of a historian, which while true enough, still leaves me wishing he had.

As a popular history, Blood and Rage makes a page turner out of rancorous destruction.

Military consultant and ardent Clausewitzian, Wilf Owen contacted me today to alert me to the launch of Infinity Journal, “a peer-review electronic journalzine dedicated to the study and discussion of strategy “:

Infinity Journal views strategy as the use of any or all instruments of power to secure political objectives. IJ is concerned mainly – though not exclusively – with the use of force. Strategy must both pursue policy objectives and be viable via tactics. Beyond that there are no sacred cows within the pages of the Infinity Journal.

Critically, and beyond doubt, is the fact that the practice and application of strategy has life and death outcomes for people living in the world today. The fate of nations and peoples still rests in the realm of strategy and as such, it is a vitally important area of study.

Infinity Journal aims to make the discussion of strategy accessible to the widest possible audience, because today strategy is widely misunderstood not only by the layman but also by students, senior soldiers and politicians. Therefore, we aim to keep rigid language and complexity to minimum and comprehensible language and simplicity to a maximum. 

Wilf has an impressive line-up of current and future issue contributors including TX Hammes, Martin van Creveld, John Mackinlay, Colin Gray and many other strategists, soldiers, academics and “students of war” who share a deep interest in strategy. 

An excerpt, from Col. TX Hammes in the current issue of Infinity Journal, available online (registration is free!):

Assumptions – A Fatal Oversight

….In short, in every plan there will be key factors that are unknown to the planners. For instance, we can’t know for certain how a population will react to a U.S. invasion or how much of the international development assistance promised at a conference will actually be delivered. However, to continue planning, the planners must make an educated guess – an assumption – about such key unknowns. While some may see this as a bureaucratic process of little value, recent events show assumptions are central to all planning. For instance, General Tommy Franks assumed the Iraqi government would remain in place after we removed Saddam. Thus Iraqis would deal with the problems of getting their nation back on its feet after the war. And because they would, the United States could invade with a much smaller force than that recommended by the previous CentCom Commander, General Anthony Zinni. In contrast, Zinni assumed the government would collapse and he would need large number of U.S. forces (380,000) to provide security and services.[v] This single, unexamined assumption dramatically altered the war plan.

Check it out.