No forceful reaction to the terrorist murders in Paris is possible if we do not act intelligently. Stupid uses of force are no force at all. That’s the basic lesson of every classic of military strategy from Lao Tzu to Clausewitz and beyond. What changes, across the ages, is what counts as intelligence when the technology and organisation of violence change.
Unfortunately, there are disturbing signs that the popular reaction in Europe will pressure governments to repeat past mistakes, some of which aided and abetted the rise of Daesh (aka Isis) in Iraq and later in Syria.
It looks like some of the pressure, on both governments and publics, might come from the US.
Struggling candidates for the Republican nomination for the presidential election are trying to distinguish themselves from the crowded field by hyping up their war rhetoric; among the Democrat candidates Hillary Clinton has responded by upping hers. The most stupid thing we can do is base a military strategy for the Middle East on a political election campaign strategy for Middle America.
Not that Europe doesn’t itself provide a fertile environment for lush stupidity. The prize this week – I’m afraid there will be other worthy candidates in the weeks to come – must go to the incoming foreign minister of Poland. Witold Waszczykowski has said that the thousands of Syrian men in Europe (he has a particular grievance against those sipping coffee in leafy Berlin, as against the vast majority crowded into makeshift shelters) should be shipped back to Syria, after receiving military training from Europeans, to fight their own war.
In the same breath, he also says that all agreements on Europe’s migration pact are off following the revelation that one of the Paris killers was a recent immigrant who entered Europe via Greece. If he really believes that the vast numbers fleeing Syria include a significant number of Daesh sympathisers, why does he think it’s a good idea to give these men combat training and weapons?
Worse, Mr Waszczykowski is alarmingly uninformed for a man in his position, unless he’s boneheaded enough to believe you can keep trying the same thing and obtain different results. The US invested $500 million in training Syrian fighters to fight Daesh and other Islamist groups.
In September, the US Senate was flabbergasted to learn, from General Lloyd Austin of US Central Command, that the result was not quite the 5,000 fighters anticipated by the Pentagon late last year. It was more like four or five individuals, although around 120 are receiving ‘terrific training’ according to another witness.
Around two weeks later, the Pentagon conceded the truth of reports of US-trained fighters handing over weapons to the al-Nusra Front (the al-Qaeda franchise in Syria) in return for safe passage. Other reports spoke of other US-trained fighters defecting to the Islamists.
Daesh is a terrorist millenarian movement, not a state, which wants to trigger the apocalypse
In any case, the matter has already been taken out of Europe’s hands. Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin have just agreed between themselves to support peace talks between Syria’s ruling regime and the acceptable rebels.
Right now, therefore, the dangerous talk that can cost lives is something else. In all its variations, it is always posed as a telling of the unvarnished truth, even though it seriously distorts what the real experts know.
The first variation is to describe the Paris attacks as a clash of civilisations. To his credit, French President François Hollande explicitly ruled this out, saying Daesh represented no civilisation, only barbarity. Unfortunately, it’s unclear to what extent we have been ourselvesrepresented by civilisation. Multiple reports suggest that, in the conductof the war in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, the US and Europe were representedby barbarity.
According to a recent report carried in The Guardian, the US didn’t just stand on the sidelines while Nuri al-Maliki’s sectarian Shiite regime carried out indiscriminate brutal attacks on Sunni Muslims. The US played a part in organising the dirty war and trained the special police commando unit.
One particular colonel, James Steele, had close links to the then Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and army commander General David Petraeus. Steele helped oversee the systematic use of torture, whose immediate aim was simply to terrorise the local population.
The alleged ultimate aim was to keep Iraq too unstable to become a regional power. For this aim, the US was prepared to countenance a small radical Sunni emirate, inside a split Iraq, to counterbalance an Iraqi state allied with Iran. After 9/11, this was apparently seen as intelligent strategy.
These aims and operations were known to at least some European intelligence agencies, like MI6. So, let’s exercise some modesty when invoking our values.
It’s no coincidence that many of the Paris bombers were in their late twenties. So are many Daesh recruits in Iraq. It’s the generation that came of age in the violent chaos following the fall of Saddam Hussein. They don’t hate us because we love freedom but because they think we destroyed their lives.
Writing in The Nation last month, Lydia Wilson, a researcher at Oxford whose interviewed many captured Daesh fighters in Iraq, said they were drawn to the group for reasons other than religion; they often blamed the US for the lack of security after the Iraq invasion.
Doug Stone, a retired US general who spent two years in Iraq after 2003, said Wilson’s interviewees fitted 80 per cent of the profile in his experience.
Despite this, people like the presidential candidate Senator Marco Rubio insists the terrorists be identified as ‘radical Muslims’, not ‘violent extremists’.
He says we wouldn’t shy away from using the name Nazi even if it offended non-violent Nazis.
Right. So he’s effectively saying all one billion Muslims are like Nazis. The problem with this conclusion isn’t that it’s impolite but that it’s false.
Daesh are systematically carrying out atrocities against any Muslim who is not with them. It has declared it wants to eliminate any ‘grey zone’.
Malta’s Imam Mohammed al-Sadi wouldn’t be on anyone’s top-100 list of champions of Parisian values but he is right to say he would be one of the first victims of Daesh in the highly unlikely event of Malta falling under its control.
The real experts on Daesh recruitment say that recruitment is not primarily on the basis of religion.
It’s rather kinship, friendship and peers that really matter.
Daesh is a terrorist millenarian movement, not a state, which wants to trigger the apocalypse. Many of its typical recruits have given up on the hope of a future when they join it.
Fighting a millenarian sect is different from fighting a state and the last thing Europe needs is to follow the example of the boneheads whose post-9/11 policies helped create the current mess.
ranierfsadni@europe.com