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[ by Charles Cameron — how ISIS imitates the French state ]
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Laïcité! Jahiliyyah!

Once again, the jihadists are borrowing our western ideas, only to turn them against us — this time, after a lapse of fours years.

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My title? How could you forget..

[ by Charles Cameron — with a Magnus Ranstorp squib in its tail ]
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The issue is complexity, and how you represent it. The case in point is Syria.

Here’s a diagram that suggests complexity as a sort of crazy weaving, all straight lines and colors:

This *simple* chart shows all states of hostility currently being played out on #Syria’s territory#IntractableWar pic.twitter.com/1inprNB6U0

— Charles Lister (@Charles_Lister) February 13, 2016

Daveed’s diagram has a network feel to it, with actord as nodes and the tensions between them as edges:

A pretty good graphic on the Syrian conflict (though quibblers gonna quibble). It illustrates ISIS's weak strategy: https://t.co/j1ccZpvGjT

— Gartenstein-Ross (@DaveedGR) August 26, 2016

Karl Sharro’s tackling the wider context, but his illustration at least gives the sense of a ball of twine after a cat has carefully re-arranged it:

Following recent event, updated diagram of geopolitical relationships in the Middle East pic.twitter.com/3QmDxZtnSn

— Karl Sharro (@KarlreMarks) March 26, 2015

Juan Cole simply provides a screenshot from Google Maps —

— the headline America’s Syria SNAFU: Pentagon’s Militias fight Turkey & CIA’s Militias — which is effectively friendly fire framed as paradox — and some paras beneath it using words to describe the tangle:

The Turkish incursion into Syria at Jarabulus was advertised as an attack on a Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) stronghold and smuggling station in conjunction with (fundamentalist) remnants of the Free Syrian Army.

But the southern outskirts of Jarabulus had already fallen to the Pentagon-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, which are majority Kurdish but have a significant Arab component. The Arab, non-Kurdish SDF brigades such as the Seljuk brigade, the Army of Revolutionaries, and Northern Sun Brigade had fought to liberate the northern Syrian city of Manbij, due south of Jarabulus from Daesh. They have an outpost in the village of Amarna just a few miles south of Jarabulus, where they call themselves the Jarabulus Military Council.

The Turkish army, having secured Jarabulus itself with the help of fundamentalist militias, moved down to Amarna, where they met fierce resistance from the Syrian Democratic Forces, who are allied with the Kurds. The Turkish air force bombarded the SDF positions in Amarna and the militias responded by destroying two tanks and killing one Turkish soldier. Fighting continues there.

To be honest, I’m not sure which of those means of modeling a complex system leaves us best able to understand the situation on the ground.

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Maybe this one’s the best:

Sir Mark Allen once told me to fully understand Syrian conflict is like playing 3D chess under water with all pieces moving simultaneously.

— Magnus Ranstorp (@MagnusRanstorp) September 9, 2016

[ by Charles Cameron — irresistible but sad, sad, sad ]
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Gary Johnson, Libertarian Party presidential candidate, flubbed a question about Aleppo in an interview:

That’s not great.

The New York Times then corrected him:

Gary Johnson, the former New Mexico governor and Libertarian Party presidential nominee, revealed a surprising lack of foreign policy knowledge on Thursday that could rock his insurgent candidacy when he could not answer a basic question about the crisis in Aleppo, Syria.

“What is Aleppo?” Mr. Johnson said when asked on MSNBC how, as president, he would address the refugee crisis in the Syrian city that is the de facto capital of the Islamic State.

That’s not great either.

The Times then had to correct its correction of Mr Johnson:

Correction: September 8, 2016

An earlier version of this article misidentified the de facto capital of the Islamic State. It is Raqqa, in northern Syria, not Aleppo.

That’s having to eat your words.

The Times then had to correct its correction of its correction of Mr Johnson:

Correction: September 8, 2016

An earlier version of the above correction misidentified the Syrian capital as Aleppo. It is Damascus.

That’s having to admit that when you had to eat your own words, you didn’t even chew them properly.

Ouroboros!

**

For the record, everyone concerned has my sympathy. Eating one’s own words, eating one’s hat, eating humble pie is seldom pleasant — or in the case of the serpent, eating one’s own tail!

Full disclosure: I too have blind spots, am vastly ignorant, and am prone to error. Plus I’m terrible at geography.

[ by Charles Cameron — you could start from this polarity and build out to cover the tensions of the world ]
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This:

Saudi Arabia’s top cleric says Iran’s leaders ‘not Muslims’ https://t.co/rPNjqo9x6g via @WSJ

— El_Grillo (@El_Grillo1) September 6, 2016

is an instance of this:

When Iran's regime criticizes KSA's regime, or KSA's regime criticizes Iran's regime pic.twitter.com/GqRuswXVfq

— Iyad el-Baghdadi (@iyad_elbaghdadi) September 6, 2016

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And if these two don’t suffice, there’s always Charles Mortimer:

And so it’s all explained at last,
There’s nothing more to know.
Chameleons are pink and fast
Because they’re green and slow.

[ by Charles Cameron — on a quote from my fellow whacky Brit, Geoffrey Pyke ]
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Whacky? From a short description of the man by his biographer, Henry Hemming:

Geoffrey Pyke, an inventor, war reporter, escaped prisoner, campaigner, father, educator–and all-around misunderstood genius. In his day, he was described as one of the world’s great minds, to rank alongside Einstein, yet he remains virtually unknown today. Pyke was an unlikely hero of both world wars and, among many other things, is seen today as the father of the U.S. Special Forces. He changed the landscape of British pre-school education, earned a fortune on the stock market, wrote a bestseller and in 1942 convinced Winston Churchill to build an aircraft carrier out of reinforced ice. He escaped from a German WWI prison camp, devised an ingenious plan to help the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, and launched a private attempt to avert the outbreak of the Second World War by sending into Nazi Germany a group of pollsters disguised as golfers.

Whacky!

And for good measure, here’s Jami Miscik on oddballs:

To truly nurture creativity, you have to cherish your contrarians and give them opportunities to run free. Leaders in the analytic community must avoid trying to make everyone meet a preconceived notion of the intelligence community’s equivalent of the “man in the gray flannel suit.”

and Reuel Marc Gerecht:

And the service can ill-afford to lose creative personnel with a high tolerance for risk.

It’s a sad fact that the folks who are in government, especially in the “elite” services of the CIA and the State Department, aren’t what they used to be. They are, to be blunt, less interesting. There are vastly fewer “characters” -— the unconventional, often infuriating, types who give institutions color and competence.

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Okay, here’s Geoffrey Pyke in his own capital letters:

EVERYTHING IS IRRELEVANT TILL CORRELATED WITH SOMETHING ELSE

And why does that interest me?

Well first, today it corroborates my comment just now on David Barno and Nora Bensahel and the importance of their suggestion that “The Army should also reinstate the requirement for every career officer to develop skills in two specialties.”

And then second, because I have been saying for a while that:

Two is the first number

and quoting along the way Aristotle, Jung, and the tenth-century Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa’..

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For these reasons, and with a hat-tip to Bryan Alexander, I cherish the contrarian intelligence of Mr Pyke.