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There is much buzz right now about whether the cruel Syrian Baathist-Alawite regime of Bashar Assad, struggling to hold on to power in the midst of civil war against rebel Sunni forces, crossed   President Obama’s “red line” by using Sarin gas, a war crime. That is not really the important point for Americans. There are two things to consider here.

First, specifically how would intervening militarily in Syria’s awful civil war be in American national interest?

It is important to get a clear cut answer here because everyone arguing that Assad has “crossed a red line” that we will “not tolerate” is making a de facto argument for some kind of intervention on our part. Maybe if no one can define such an interest it is because there isn’t any and intervening will bring the US nothing but costs in blood and treasure without gaining anything of strategic value. I’m not against intervention per se but there really ought to be a coherent reason so we can rationally measure it against the potential costs which, from where I sit, look rather large.

Secondly, in important matters of state, you don’t negotiate in public with a potential adversary if you really hope to gain a concession from them and if you reach the point of issuing a public ultimatum, you don’t bluff.

The people who have advised President Obama to make these “red line” statements to Syria through the media instead of quietly through diplomatic channels are either professionally incompetent at statecraft or they were hoping to manipulate the President by getting him to back himself into a corner with tough rhetoric so that if Assad did not blink then Obama would have the choice of looking weak and foolish or of approving some kind of action against Syria. Either way, the President was poorly served by this advice. Maybe he needs some new foreign policy and national security advisers who actually know something more about the world than domestic politics and being lawyer-lobbyists.

As a result that the President never really had any intentions of, say, invading Syria this year, we are now being treated to nervously asserted, lawyerly parsing of what really counts as “red lines” and what technical level of Sarin gas particulates constitutes “use”. It is an embarrassing climb down for the administration but also for the United States that never needed to happen. Empty posturing is not a substitute for a policy. Saying “Do something!” is not a strategy.

This is no brief for Assad’s regime. He’s definitely a bad actor and runs a nasty and now democidal police state he inherited from his mass-murdering father, Hafez Assad. I’m open to hearing why the US should aid in a regime change because the outcome will be in our interests in some concrete and definable way. Oh, yeah, and it might help if the person making the pitch knew something about Syria and regional geopolitics, or was at least consulted about it.

Let’s think long and hard this time.

[ by Charles Cameron — with a little help from the Buddha, fake quotes, self-referential paradox, a pinch of salt, and two tbsps of anthropology ]
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Over the last ten days we have seen a whole lot of speculation, misinformation, spin and gossip masquerading as analysis and journalism, and that was on my mind when I ran across an alleged Buddha-quote that told me to use my common sense — and since my common sense told me there probably wasn’t a phrase in Pali, the language of the earliest Buddhist texts, that would correspond too closely to the highly idiomatic English usage, common sense, I thought I should check it out with Fake Buddha Quotes, my go-to place for checking what the Buddha is supposed to have said:

I’m pretty sure the Buddha never said “Pretty sure I never said that” too, for much the same reason.

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But what delights me most about all this is just how self-referential this all is: the Buddha allegedly warns us against trusting what we read even when it’s attributed to him, in what turns out to be a faux quote attributed to him, based on a real quote that reads (in one translation):

Any teaching should not be accepted as true for the following ten reasons: hearsay, tradition, rumor, accepted scriptures, surmise, axiom, logical reasoning, a feeling of affinity for the matter being pondered, the ability or attractiveness of the person offering the teaching, the fact that the teaching is offered by “my” teacher. Rather, the teaching should be accepted as true when one knows by direct experience that such is the case.

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Fpr what it’s worth, the abbreviated version doesn’t mean the same as the original. From Koun Franz at Sweeping Zen:

his is a very different idea. The original says we need to verify through direct experience; the popular version says that we can stand back from the practice, at a distance, and use reason to determine its authenticity.

Or this, from Bodhipaksa, the Fake Buddha Quotes guy, :

The Buddha of course isn’t saying we should jettison reason and common sense. What he’s implying is that both those things can be misleading and what’s ultimately the arbiter of what’s true is experience. It’s when you “know for yourselves” that something is true through experience that you know it’s true.

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Another comment on the same page led me to this first comment on cultures and languages —

which in turn reminded me of the second, a long-time favorite of mine from the time when I was some sort of Anthro professor in dreamy Oregon…

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And, y’lnow, both those quotes in my second pair give you a visceral sense of what today’s SWJ article by Robert R. Greene Sands and Thomas J. Haines, Promoting Cross-Cultural Competence in Intelligence Professionals is very rightly on about, though it’s all phrased in a manner so abstract you might easily miss the point…

Mitigating cognitive, cultural and a host of tradecraft biases is essential for intelligence professionals to navigate through today’s culturally complex environments. Adopting the perspective of contemporary cultural groups, including nation-states, often defies understanding because the intelligence professional is challenged to both appreciate and consequently discern meaning of behavior that is predicated on vastly different beliefs and value systems. Fundamental to this dissonance is a markedly different cultural reality resulting from different histories, traditions and the stasis of culture. The professional’s western and deeply seated worldview impedes either the analysis itself, or is perjured by the cognitive restrictions imposed by the structured analytic strategies used.

The quote about the Wintu — it’s from Dorothy Lee, Linguistic Reflection of Wintu Thought, Chapter 9 in Dennis and Barbara Tedlock‘s Teachings from the American earth: Indian religion and philosophy — goes on to say:

The Wintu relationship with nature is one of intimacy and mutual courtesy. He kills a deer only when he needs it for his livelihood, and utilizes every part of it, hoofs and marrow and hide and sinew and flesh. Waste is abhorrent to him, not because he believes in the intrinsic virtue of thrift, but because the deer had died for him.

Now there‘s “a markedly different cultural reality” for you!

[ by Charles Cameron — powered by a 2009 post from Ibn Siqilli ]

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As you know by now, I am fascinated by the oblique-angled windows on current affairs offered us by mythology, folklore, iconography… and for the record, I’ll specifically include flags under iconography.

Thus Amjad Jaimoukha‘s The Chechens: A Handbook (available here for Kindle at $135, a price every scholar can surely afford) caught my eye with the following quote:

The wolf (borz) is a potent national symbol, and its character traits are considered paragons to be emulated. Chechen men would be proud to be compared to wolves. ‘He was nursed by the She-Wolf,’ is a compliment implying adroitness and courage. Legend has it that it was the wolf that redeemed the world by standing heroically in face of the fury unleashed on doomsday. According to the Chechen ethos, the wolf is the only animal that would enter into an unequal match, making up for any disadvantage by its agility, wit, courage and tenacity. If it loses the battle, it lies down facing the foe in full acceptance of its fate — Chechen poise equivalent to the famed British ‘stiff upper lip’. This wolfish analogy is a depiction of how the Chechens have dealt with outside invaders for millennia.

According to mythology, god had created sheep for the wolf to enjoy, but man tricked it out of its ‘patrimony’, so it had to resort to ruse and robbery to reclaim its right.

That’s Chechen wolf-imagery in the upper flag, above.

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Three things to note in those two paragraphs from Jaimoukha:

What calling a Chechen a “lone wolf” does to self-esteem:

Chechen men would be proud to be compared to wolves.

the deft touch of apocalypse:

Legend has it that it was the wolf that redeemed the world by standing heroically in face of the fury unleashed on doomsday.

and asymmetric warfare:

According to the Chechen ethos, the wolf is the only animal that would enter into an unequal match, making up for any disadvantage by its agility, wit, courage and tenacity.

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As to prayers, the use of the takbir, “Allahu Akbar” above the swords in the lower flag is part of the muezzin’s call to prayer, and recited during the prayers themselves.

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It was Ibn Siqilli‘s post, Portraits of Resistance & Jihad in Chechnya & the Islamic Emirate of the Caucasus with its three flags at the head of the post that set me off on this pilgrimage — and I’d also like to pay tribute to the sincerity of belief which gives rise to such a photo as this one, also taken from that post:

We’re back at prayer again…

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On the topic of lone wolves — as I hope the quote above illustrates, word choices can have unintended impacts! Of note, Brian Michael Jenkins in Stray Dogs and Virtual Armies: Radicalization and Recruitment to Jihadist Terrorism in the United States Since 9/11 makes a distinction between stray dogs and lone wolves:

Analysts have tended to call such individuals “lone wolves,” in my view, a romanticizing term that suggests a cunning and deadly predator. A few of those recorded here display this kind of lethal determination, but others, while still dangerous, skulk about, sniffing at violence, vocally aggressive but skittish without backup. “Stray dogs,” not lone wolves, more accurately describes their behavior.

JM Berger talks about lone wolves in The Utility of Lone Wolves, or lack thereof:

If there were any doubts that lone wolves can be deadly, they were dispelled by Anders Breivik, the Norwegian anti-Muslim crusader who in July killed 69 young people in a coordinated attack using guns and a car bomb.

and again in The Boy Who Cried Lone Wolf:

Does it matter that some (but not all) of the terrorist network members described above were actually undercover law enforcement agents or informants? It doesn’t change the fact that none of these individuals was working alone. They were receiving advice, concrete assistance, and passive reinforcement from people they believed — rightly or wrongly — to be part of larger terrorist organizations.

None of this means that these guys aren’t dangerous, and none of this is to argue that they shouldn’t have been arrested. But they are not lone wolves. They are essentially al Qaeda volunteers …

But I’ll let Tim Furnish have the last word on nomenclature. In a comment here on Zenpundit he told us he’d originally entitled his HNN blog post “The Brothers Tsarnaev: Hyenas in the Service of the Mahdi” — and in the post itself he writes:

But viewing them from outside, analytically, as lone wolves may give them too much credit; while classifying them as stray dogs neutered of religious ideology gives the Islamic element too little. Perhaps a new paradigm, one of roaming hyenas, best describes the Tsarnaevs — characterized by anomie (fitting into neither domestic nor foreign contexts), the ability to feign surrender when necessary, and a propensity for attacking only the defenseless.

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And oh, by way of cosmic irrelevance, my googling brought me here:

It’s a web-wild-world we live in!

Top Billing! HNN Dr.Tim Furnish –The Ideology Behind the Boston Marathon Bombing 

…..Much of the world, including the twittering class, woke up to the relevance — if not existence — of Chechnya this past week. (The Tsarnaev brothers’ parents were Chechen, but Dzokhar was born in Kyrgyzstan and Tamerlan in Russia proper; both had also lived in Dagestan.) Still a part of Russia, despite violent efforts at independence, this small region is home to about 1.3 million people, mostly Sunni Muslims, and is located between the Black and Caspian Seas. Islamic militancy has been part of this Caucasus Muslim culture for at least two centuries, until recently mostly in the guise of the various Sufi jihads waged against their Orthodox Christian (or Marxist) Russian overlords — exemplified by that of Imam Shamil (d. 1859). (The Sufis are the mystics of Islam, usually peaceful but never pacifist.) Throughout the twentieth century the Sufis in Chechnya, Dagestan and environs — predominantly two orders known as the Naqshbandis and Qadiris — increasingly eschewed jihad and, in recent decades, their Islamic militancy mantle has been taken on by Muslims (both indigenous Chechen and foreigners, such as Arabs) of the more Wahhabi/Salafi tendency (who have even killed Sufi leaders there). Salafis are Sunnis who believe in emulating the salaf, “pious ancestors” of Muhammad’s time — think Primitive Baptists, but wielding swords. Wahhabis are a specifically Saudi Arabian type of Salafi, intellectual heirs of the Sunni fundamentalist Ibn Abd al-Wahhab (d. 1792) who had resurrected and repopularized the strict Sunni teachings of Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) which, inter alia, included a dislike of Sufis (for their love of saint veneration, seen as shirk, “idolatry”) and the duty to fight jihad against any rulers deemed insufficiently Islamic as well as, a fortiori, non-Muslims.

This was the Chechen Islamic context which incubated both Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev before they came to the U.S. as young men and, after over a decade here, seemingly assimilated. However, Internet sleuthing by various outlets indicates that the elder Tsarnaev, at least, was being pulled back into strict Islamic norms: he was a purveyor of the online sermons of one Feiz Mohammed, whose views were so Islamically “extremist” they might have made Ibn Taymiyya blanch; he may, as well, have become enamored with the ideas of a Pan-Islamic Caucaus Emirate and may have received training from jihadists of that self-styled polity; finally, perhaps most tellingly, Tamerlan was influenced by Islamic eschatological teachings about the coming of the Mahdi.   

Foreign Policy J.M. Berger –Boston”s Jihadist Past 

….It will take time to discover whether there was a militant connection and, if there was, to what extent it is pertinent to the Tsarnaevs’ decision to bomb the marathon.

But if the lead pans out, it won’t be Boston’s first brush with that faraway war. During the 1980s and into the 1990s, Islamist foreign fighters operated robust recruiting and financing networks that supported Chechen jihadists from the United States, and Boston was home to one of the most significant centers: a branch of the Al Kifah Center based in Brooklyn, which would later be rechristened CARE International.

Al Kifah sprang from the military jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Through the end of the occupation, a network of centers in the United States helped support the efforts of Afghan and Arab mujahedeen, soliciting donations and recruiting fighters, including at least four from Boston who died in action (one of them a former Dunkin Donuts employee). When the war ended, those networks did not disappear; they refocused on other activities.

In Brooklyn, that network turned against the United States. The center’s leaders and many of its members helped facilitate the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and they actively planned and attempted to execute a subsequent plot that summer to blow up the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels in New York, which would have killed thousands.

When the FBI thwarted the tunnels plot, the Brooklyn Al Kifah office and most of the other satellite locations were shuttered. But in Boston, the work continued under a new name and with a new focus: supporting foreign-fighter efforts in Bosnia and Chechnya. 

Dr. Chet Richards –Is 4GW dead? 

….The 9/11 attacks, by a transnational guerrilla movement, seemed to confirm 4GW in both of its forms. In the last few years, however, everything has gone quiet. Transnational insurgencies, “global guerrillas” as John Robb terms them, have not become a significant factor in geopolitics. “Continuing irritation” might best describe them, whose primary function seems to be upholding national security budgets in frightened western democracies. The state system has not noticeably weakened. So it might be fair at this point to conclude that although 4GW was a legitimate theory, well supported by logic and data, the world simply didn’t develop along the lines it proposed.

….The conditions for insurgency, as described by Boyd in Patterns of Conflict, had been defused by reforms in the early 20th century. Within the last 25 years or so, these conditions have returned. The austerity measures in southern Europe, the decline in living standards and economic polarization in the United States, and the enormous increase in firepower available to the general citizenry (at least in the US) will combine to produce abrupt changes in political organization. So long as the democratic process remains uncorrupted, these changes will be largely peaceful. In non-democratic states, and in those democracies where the beneficiaries of highly-skewed income and wealth distributions attempt to hang on to their gains by whatever means they deem necessary, we should expect higher levels of violence.

Social Evolution Forum – How to Overthrow an Empire and Replace it with your Own

Registan.net –Contextualizing Media Claims in Boston, About the Central Asian Link to those Boston Bombers, Freedom and Fear in Central Asia: How the Security Assistance Debate is Asking the Wrong Questions

Haft of the Spear -Explaining Computer Security Through the Lens of Boston 

Global Guerrillas –OPEN SOURCE WARFARE never goes away 

Marine Corps Gazette Blog – Marine Corps End Strength: 100k and End Strength 100k: Fixed-Wing Air 

Hmmm…America wants more than a tiny Marine Corps

Dr. David Ronfeldt –Further points about “tribes” (T) — plus a new proposition about TIMN as a whole

WPR Dr. Steven Metz –Strategic Horizons: U.S. Professional Military Education on the Chopping Block 

Campaign Reboot – Kill Chain 

SWJ El Centro – How to Win the Mexican Drug War 

Jamestown Foundation  – Shattering the al Qaida-Chechen Myth 

Nick Carr – Augmentor and Augmentee 

Presentation Zen –Should we be suspicious of stories?

That’s it!

[ by Charles Cameron — juxtaposition offers us a potent way to connect “equal but opposite” dots ]
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Jimmy Chen at HTMLGiant captures the griefs and joyful reliefs of war by juxtaposing two war photos that had separately become iconic — and their joint impact is precisely the kind I’m reaching for with my DoubleQuotes. I’ve re-framed them accordingly and slipped them into my DQ format, and here they are:

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In Chen’s own words:

Time may be a sedative, for it’s always harder to know who exactly the bad people were, yet so easy to tell — in the incessant now from which we cannot run — who the bad people are. Either moral clarity diminishes with time, or we simply stop caring, the euphemism being humility. Prisoner of war Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm is greeted by his family at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, California on March 17, 1973, about a year after Phan Thi Kim Phuc, aged 9, was photographed running from a South Vietnamese napalm attack on their own land after it had been occupied by the North.

The specifics of those two photographs may be slowly eroding in memory, as Chen suggests — but I don’t believe their power to evoke joy or grief will fade — and I am grateful to Jimmy Chen for reminding me, once again.

Beautifully.