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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.

From the auspices of The Warlord, an interesting paper:

UK Ministry of Defence – The Future Character of Conflict (PDF)

Deductions from Themes in Future Conflict

• Future conflict will not be a precise science: it will remain an unpredictable and uniquely human activity. Adversaries (state, state-proxies and non-state) and threats (conventional and unconventional) will blur. The range of threats will spread, with increased proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), cyberspace, and other novel and irregular threats.
• Even during wars of national survival or the destruction of WMD, conflict will remain focused on influencing people. The battle of the narratives will be key, and the UK must conduct protracted influence activity, coordinated centrally and executed locally.
• Maintaining public support will be essential for success on operations. Critical to this will be legitimacy and effective levels of force protection.
• Qualitative advantage may no longer be assumed in the future. Some adversaries may be able to procure adequate quality as well as afford greater quantity, whereas we will be unable to mass sufficient quality or quantity everywhere that it is needed.

I have a great fondness for the British.

They are culturally our close cousins and are a greater people than their recent governments would imply ( the same can largely be said of Americans as well). The current and former administrations have not nurtured the “special relationship” as they should have.

This is of course, an gross understatement: the Obama administration has been at special pains to kick British Prime Ministers in the groin in public ever since they came in to office in 2009. Now, in a fit of ill-considered budgetary niggardliness,  the British are merging part of their military power projection capability with that of France, in order to form something that will be, in case of “future conflict”, completely undeployable. Great.

Just wait, by 2012-2014, the cry in American politics will be ” Who Lost Britain?”

Perhaps we will be too consumed with Mexican narco-insurgency in Texas, Arizona and California  by then to care.

Have not done one of these in quite a while. Overdue.

Top Billing! Robert Paterson – Is America Ruled by an Aristocracy Now? Of course it is!, Politics in America – It is not the Right vs the Left – It’s Them vs Us and The “Dunbar Science” Behind Twitter & Social Leverage

A trio of good posts from Paterson, an excerpt from the last

….All social systems are in effect “Biological Markets” we need other people to care about us to get things that we want.

This is, in effect, what Twitter does, allowing us to do this over time and space at a very low cost in time, effort and dollars.

This realization raised another “aha” for me: we have been here before… the prevailing ideas about how language itself began are rooted in humans finding a cheaper way of grooming. Language enabled us to groom at a distance and left our hands free and our eyes on the look out.

Robin Dunbar (Dunbar Numbers etc) has a theory about the evolution of language that enables us to see tools like Twitter in a new light….

Thomas Ricks –Dueling historians: Lt. Col. Bob Bateman’s takedown of Victor Davis Hanson

Most ZP readers will enjoy this one as the debate between prolific scholar and pundit Victor Davis Hanson and the influential military officer and historian Robert Bateman manages to feature a clash of politics ( conservative vs. liberal), field ( classics vs. military history), historical epoch ( ancient vs. modern) and methodology.

The Glittering Eye – Federal Chief Operating Officer?

Dave Schuler artfully dismantles a superficially clever proposal that is the domestic equivalent of George W. Bush’s “war czar”.

Lexington Green – Before, During and After the Election

An interesting and thoughtful essay from Lex on his experience as the political analogy to the Maytag Repairman – a GOP poll watcher on the mean streets of Chicago’s West Side.

Steve Hynd – The Rich Ate All The Pie – Whatcha Going To Do About It?

In a nod to our friends on the Left, here is Steve at Newshoggers.com en fuego about the exact same data as is Rob Paterson up top.

Thomas P. M. Barnett – Trying to unwind this demonization trend  and Whither Russia: the latest tilt to the West

It seems that Tom’s move to join Wikistrat  has freed him to focus on what he does best – serious geopolitical strategic analysis. While I have always concurred with Dr. Barnett’s emphasis on geoeconomics as an analytical cornerstone, ever since Great Powers his thinking has steadily incorporated greater and deeper historical context. Economics gives the connections and universals, history the particulars and the exceptions. A snippet of Tom on Russian political schizophrenia:

It used to be that these tilts, one way or the other, went on for decades–centuries!  But since Cold War’s end, it seems, like everything else in this networked world, to come and go so much faster.

Yeltsin’s time was an age of aping the West, then Putin led the return back to Russian-ness.  Now Medvedev and others sound the age-old alarm about “falling behind the West/world” and needing to modernize once again.  It’s the same old Westernizers versus Slavophiles debate:  Russia is a failure in its isolation and backwardness and must adopt the ways of the West versus Russia is not a failure but unique and wonderful and the champion of Slavs everywhere and we must stand up to the West and protect our brothers . . . by sucking them into our empire and putting a big wall around them!

If the last bit sounds like some modern-day Islamic radical fundamentalist impulse, it’s because it is very similar.  It’s just an earlier version of rejecting the capitalist west.

That’s it.

A lighthearted exchange in the comments section here last week prompted a reconsideration of the future of this blog. In a modest way, Zenpundit as a personal solo project had a good run.  It is time to move forward and initiate some changes. Perhaps, many changes.

First and foremost, I would like to start by welcoming Charles Cameron as co-blogger. Over the past year or so, Charles has been an increasingly frequent guest poster here, introduced with the short bio:

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

There is more to Charles than that, which he will make evident in due time. His deep knowledge of theology and comparative religious culture, social psychology and powers of horizontal thinking would make Charles Cameron a welcome addition to any blog, magazine, editorial staff or university faculty. I am extremely pleased to have him here as an author because the insights that Charles can bring to bear on contemporary issues will extend the analytical reach and audience of Zenpundit.

 His body of work here simply speaks for itself.

I’d like to thank Joseph Fouche, T. Greer and Scott Shipman for nudging me in this direction. Also, Lexington Green, who years earlier encouraged me to bring the period of solo blogging to an end and who cordially invited me to break bread at his home with Charles. Sage advice, all.

Welcome aboard, Mr. Cameron.