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A Terrorist’s Call to Global Jihad: Deciphering Abu Musab al-Suri’s Islamic Jihad Manifesto by Jim Lacey (Ed.)

Cross-posted at zenpundit.com

Previously, I read and reviewed Brynjar Lia’s Architect of Global Jihad , about Islamist terrorist and strategist Abu Musab al-Suri. A sometime collaborator with Osama bin Laden and the AQ inner circle, a trainer of terrorists in military tactics in Afghanistan and an advocate of jihadi IO, al-Suri was one of the few minds produced by the radical Islamist movement who thought and wrote about conflict with the West on a strategic level. Before falling into the hands of Pakistani security and eventually, Syria, where al-Suri was wanted by the Assad regime, al-Suri produced a massive 1600 page tome on conducting a terror insurgency,  The Global Islamic Resistance Call, which al-Suri released on to the jihadi darknet.

Jim Lacey has produced an English digest version of al-Suri’s influential magnum opus comprising approximately 10% of the original  Arabic version, by focusing on the tactical and strategic subjects and excising the rhetorical/ritualistic redundancies common to Islamist discourse and the interminable theological disputation. There are advantages and disadvantages to this approach.

First, Lacey has produced a concise and readable book from a large mass of sometimes convoluted and repetitive theorizing that al-Suri strung together piecemeal, sometimes on the run or in hiding. For those interested in getting to the heart of al-Suri’s nizam la tanzim strategic philosophy, A Terrorist’s Call to Global Jihad is an invaluable resource for strategists, counter-terrorism specialists, tactical operators,  law enforcement and laymen. Secondly, it is also a useful reference for policy people to see through al-Suri’s eyes the internal political and philosophical divisions within the radical jihadi community. al-Suri himself writes very ambivalently about 9/11 as a great blow against America and yet a complete calamity in its effects for the “jihadi current” that destroyed everything the Islamist revolutionaries had so painstakingly built, including the Taliban Emirate. Thus a climate was created by the American counter-attack where old methods of struggle were no longer useful and jihadis must adopt radically decentralized operations (what John Robb terms Open-Source Warfare; indeed it is clear to an informed reader that al-Suri, a wide-ranging intellectual rather than a narrow religious ideologue, was influenced by Western literature on asymmetric warfare, 4GW, Three Block War and COIN).

The drawback to this approach is more for scholars looking at the deeper psychological and ideological drivers of jihadi policies, strategy and movement politics. The religious questions and obscure Quranic justifications cited by Islamist extremists that are so tedious and repetitive to the Western mind are to the jihadis themselves, of paramount importance in establishing both the credentials of the person making an argument but also the moral certainty of the course of action proposed. al-Suri himself had some exasperation with the degree to which primarily armchair ideologues, by virtue of clever religious rhetoric, could have more influence over the operational decisions of fighting jihadis than men with field experience like himself. By removing these citations, an important piece of the puzzle is missing.

The Musab al-Suri whose voice appears in A Terrorist’s Call to Global Jihad is consistent with the one seen in Lia’s book, dry, sardonic, coldly hateful toward the West and highly critical of the jihadis’ own mistakes, laden with overtones of pessimism and gloom. al-Suri did not envision a quick victory over the West and wrote his manifesto as a legacy for future generations of Islamist radicals because the current one was nearly spent after the American onslaught and poorly educated in comparison with predecessors like the generation of Sayid Qutb.

Strongly recommended.

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Cross-posted from zenpundit.com

Time for a bit of lighthearted, blogging fun.

I spend a lot of time reading and writing and I do so primarily within a specific environment – my home office. The space reflects the man, to some degree.

Surveying my office space here at home, I noticed that my desk has begun, like a coral reef, to accrete various objects, oddments and curious like a layer of bric-a-brac sediment.  Some objects change, others stay forever.  Exclusive of papers, books, printers and a computer, here’s what my desk holds:

• 1 lamp
• 6 photographs of family and friends
• Stapler
• Cup of pencils and ball points
• Two modestly priced non-disposable writing pens
• One expensive, handmade, writing pen in case
• A handmade, blue ceramic, pinchpot made by my Eldest in kindergarten (it holds some krazyglue and a metal skull keychain fob)
• Two Challenge Coins from the US Army War College and Small Wars Journal
• A Doctor Octopus figurine my son is now too old to play with (I like the mechanical arms)
• A ceramic coaster made by aforementioned Boy in pre-school with his handprint
• A brass dagger letter opener (Shiny!)
• A case of CD-ROMs of a very large comic book collection (graciously sent to me by Eddie Beaver for the Boy)
• A battered WWI French Army helmet
• A candle holder with a picture of my Eldest when she was approximately three or four
• A nondescript, lidless box holding post-it notes, business cards collected from various people, phone numbers on paper scraps, paper clips, spare ear buds and headsets for iPods/iPads
• One small ceramic seal figurine (origin unknown, think it was left here years ago by my Eldest)

I am officially “tagging” the following bloggers to describe what is on their desks in the same fashion – they may, if they wish, inflict this post on a new group of victims:

Lexington Green
J. Scott Shipman
Charles Cameron
Dave Dilegge
Joseph Fouche
Adam Elkus
Shane Deichman
Lewis Shepherd
Carl Prine
Crispin Burke
TDAXP
Dave Schuler
Cheryl Rofer
Shlok Vaidya
Steven Pressfield
Pundita
Seydlitz89
Doctrine Man
Sean Meade
The Meatballs

Readers are invited to list their strangest or most beloved desk object in the comment section. Have at it!

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[Cross-posted from zenpundit.com]

[NEW! Incoming link from Outside the Beltway - see addendum below]

There has been much ado about Dr. Anne-Marie Slaughter’s enunciation of “Responsibility to Protect” as a justification for the Obama administration’s unusually executed intervention (or assistance to primarily British and French intervention) in Libya in support of rebels seeking to oust their lunatic dictator, Colonel Moammar Gaddafi. In “R2P” the Obama administration, intentionally or not, has found its own Bush Doctrine, and unsurprisingly, the magnitude of such claims – essentially a declaration of jihad against what is left of the Westphalian state system by progressive elite intellectuals – are beginning to draw fire for implications that stretch far beyond Libya.

People in the strategic studies, IR and national security communities have a parlor game of wistfully reminiscing about the moral clarity of Containment and the wisdom of George Kennan. They have been issuing tendentiously self-important “Mr. Z” papers for so long that they failed to notice that if anyone has really written the 21st Century’s answer to Kennan’s X article, it was Anne-Marie Slaughter’s battle cry in the pages of The Atlantic.

George Kennan did not become the “Father of Containment” because he thought strategically about foreign policy in terms of brutal realism. Nor because he was a stern anti-Communist. Or because he had a deep and reflective understanding of Russian history and Leninism, whose nuances were the sources of Soviet conduct. No, Kennan became the Father of Containment because he encapsulated all of those things precisely at the moment when America’s key decision makers, facing the Soviet threat, were willing to embrace a persuasive explanatory narrative, a grand strategy that could harmonize policy with domestic politics.

Slaughter’s idea is not powerful because it is philosophically or legally airtight – it isn’t – but because R2P resonates deeply both with immediate state interests and emotionally with the generational worldview of what Milovan Djilas might have termed a Western “New Class”.

While it is easy to read R2P simply as a useful political cover for Obama administration policy in Libya, as it functioned as such in the short term, that is a mistaken view, and one that I think badly underestimates Anne-Marie Slaughter. Here is Slaughter’s core assertion, where she turns most of modern diplomatic history and international law as it is understood and practiced bilaterally and multilaterally by sovereign states in the real world (vice academics and IGO/NGO bureaucrats) on its head:

If we really do look at the world in terms of governments and societies and the relationship between them, and do recognize that both governments and their citizens have rights as subjects of international law and have agency as actors in international politics, then what exactly is the international community “intervening” in?
 
…For the first time, international law and the great powers of international politics have recognized both the rights of citizens and a specific relationship between the government and its citizens: a relationship of protection. The nature of sovereignty itself is thus changed: legitimate governments are defined not only by their control of a territory and a population but also by how they exercise that control. If they fail in that obligation, the international community has the responsibility to protect those citizens.

Slaughter is a revolutionary who aspires to a world that would functionally resemble the Holy Roman Empire, writ large, with a diffusion of power away from legal process of state institutions to the networking informalities of the larger social class from whom a majority of state and IGO officials are drawn, as a global community. In terms of policy advocacy, this is a brilliantly adept move to marry state and class interests with stark moral justifications, regardless of how the argument might be nibbled to death in an arcane academic debate.

As with Kennan’s X Article, which faced a sustained critique from Walter Lippmann who realized that Containment implied irrevocable changes in the American system, R2P has attracted criticism. Some examples:

Joshua Foust -Why sovereignty matters

Much as advocates of the “Responsibility to Protect,” or R2P, like to say that sovereignty is irrelevant to the relationship of a society to its government (which Slaughter explicitly argues), it is that very sovereignty which also creates the moral and legal justification to intervene. For example, the societies of the United States and NATO did not vote to intervene in Libya – their governments did.

Foreign Affairs – The Folly of Protection

….RtoP, responding to the sense that these domestic harms warranted international response, solidified the Security Council’s claims to wider discretion. Yet it also restricted its ability to sanction intervention to the four situations listed in the RtoP document — genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity — and thus precluded, for example, intervention in cases of civil disorder and coups. Although the resolution authorizing force against Libya will certainly further entrench the principle of RtoP, it will not completely resolve the tension between RtoP — in itself only a General Assembly recommendation — and the UN Charter itself, which, according to the letter of the law, limits action to “international” threats.

Dan Trombly -The upending of sovereignty and Responsibility to Protect Ya Neck

Beauchamp, along with Slaughter, have revealed R2P for what it actually is: a doctrine based on regime change and the destruction of the foundations of international order wherever practically possible. After all, are intervening powers really fulfilling their responsibility if they fail to effect regime change after intervening? This is exactly why I believe R2P is far more insidious than many of its advocates would have us believe or intend in practice. It is essentially mandating a responsibility, wherever possible, to seek the sanction, coercion, or overthrow of regimes which fail to meet a liberal conception of acceptable state behavior. Even if R2P is never applied against a major power, it is hard to see why such behavior would not be met with just as much suspicion as humanitarian intervention and previous Western regime change operations were. Indeed, a full treatment will reveal there is immense pressure for R2P to initiate the more fundamental, and more universal, impulse to revert to the potential ruthlessness inherent in international anarchy.

Understandably, such critiques of R2P are primarily concerned with sovereignty as it relates to interstate relations and the historical predisposition for great powers to meddle in the affairs of weaker countries, usually with far less forthrightness than the Athenians displayed at Melos. It must be said, that small countries often are their own worst enemies in terms of frequently providing pretexts for foreign intervention due to epic incompetence in self-governance and a maniacal delight in atavistic bloodshed. Slaughter is not offering up a staw man in relation to democide and genocide being critical problems with which the international community is poorly equipped and politically unwilling to counter.

But R2P is a two edged sword – the sovereignty of all states diminished universally, in legal principle, to the authority of international rule-making about the domestic use of force is likewise diminished in its ability to legislate its own internal affairs, laws being nothing but sovereign promises of state enforcement. Once the camel’s nose is legitimated by being formally accepted as having a place in the tent, the rest of the camel is merely a question of degree.

And time.

As Containment required an NSC-68 to put policy flesh on the bones of doctrine, R2P will require the imposition of policy mechanisms that will change the political community of the United States, moving it away from democratic accountability to the electorate toward “legal”, administrative, accountability under international law; a process of harmonizing US policies to an amorphous, transnational, elite consensus, manifested in supranational and international bodies. Or decided privately and quietly, ratifying decisions later as a mere formality in a rubber-stamping process that is opaque to everyone outside of the ruling group.

Who is to say that there is not, somewhere in the intellectual ether, an R2P for the the environment, to protect the life of the unborn, to mandate strict control of small arms, or to enforce “one child” policies, or safeguard the political rights of minorities by strictly regulating speech? Or whatever might be invented to suit the needs of the moment?

When we arrest a bank robber, we do not feel a need to put law enforcement and the judiciary on a different systemic basis in order to try them. Finding legal pretexts for intervention to stop genocide does not require a substantial revision of international law, merely political will. R2P could become an excellent tool for elites to institute their policy preferences without securing democratic consent and that aspect, to oligarchical elites is a feature, not a bug.

R2P will come back to haunt us sooner than we think.

ADDENDUM:

Doug Mataconis at Outside the Beltway links here in a round-up and commentary about R2P posts popping up in the wake of the Slaughter piece:

The “Responsibility To Protect” Doctrine After Libya

Read the rest here.

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Cross-posted from zenpundit.com

The following is a post by seydlitz89, a noted Clausewitzian commentator who has participated in three round tables here at Chicago Boyz, and who wanted to respond to a recent post of mine that discussed strategy and superempowered individuals, a discussion that also involved Joseph Fouche, Charles Cameron and others. For many readers in this corner of the blogosphere who are interested in strategy, Seydlitz should need no introduction, but for those that do:

seydlitz89 is a former US Marine and Army intelligence officer who served in a civilian capacity in Berlin during the last decade of the Cold War. He was involved as both an intelligence operations specialist and an operations officer in strategic overt humint collection and now blogs and posts on the internet and can be contacted at seydlitz89 at web.de. He lives with his family in northern Portugal and works in education. His writings have appeared at Clausewitz.com, Defense and the National Interest, Milpub and on three Chicagoboyz Roundtables.

Politics Requires People (a Response to “War, the Individual, Strategy and the State”)

By seydlitz89, 3 August 2011

I would like to first off thank Zen for this opportunity to guest post on his great blog.

I am essentially a small town Southern conservative who is dissatisfied with both US political parties. I search in vain for a conservative politics worth the name. So my politics are out of the way and any potential ideological influences indicated.

Strategic theory is a means to understand strategic reality (for lack of a better term). There are times when it’s just kind of interesting and times when it can help you literally survive, say if you and your Greek family lived in Smyrna in 1919 and knew that the Greek Army had just landed to fight the Turks, and that the Turks would probably win this war and treat the Greeks in Smyrna none too kindly. You would probably think it prudent to leave the city and go someplace safer, like Athens, Cyprus or Crete. Strategic theory is kind of like that, it provides understanding to events and possibly a general direction those events may take, although it is primarily a tool of military historical analysis. That is future prediction is not really part of the deal, but sometimes the relation between the stated political purpose and the military means available, not to mention the character of the enemy provide such a clear indicator of how events are going to turn out, that it becomes clear either figuratively or even literally that it is time to “get out of town”, so to speak.

Strategic theory uses a system of interlocking concepts which comprise for Clausewitzians Clausewitz’s General Theory of war. The General Theory postulates that there exists a system of common attributes to all wars as violent social interactions and that war belongs to a larger body ofhuman relations and actions known as “politics” (all wars belong within the realm of politics, but not all politics is war). While all wars share these characteristics, warfare, as in how to conduct wars, is very much based on the society and level of technology existing at a specific time. War doesn’t change whereas warfare goes through a process of constant change. Clausewitz’s General Theory need only be flexible enough to adequately understand war and act at the same time as a basis for war planning. It need not be perfect and is not expected to be so. Essentially , it need only be better than the next best theory, and so far we Clausewitzians are still waiting for this second-best theory to make its appearance.

Warfare is thus the specific “art of war” for a particular period ofhuman history, but would have to be compatible (following Wylie) with the General Theory. On War presents at the same time Clausewitz’s General Theory and his art of Napoleonic warfare, that is a theory of warfare for his time, which is one of the reasons readers find the book confusing. As new methods of warfare come into practice, new theoretical concepts emerge. It is one of these potential concepts that this particular paper and the discussion which initiated it is all about, that being the superempowered individual.

I do this by describing what is an ideal type of the superempowered individual.

To start I think it first necessary to provide the entire interaction that triggered Zen’s post and in turn this one. The discussion was on one of Charles Cameron’s threads concerning the recent act of the Norwegian terrorist Breivik (ABB) To save on space I won’t reproduce the entire interaction here but limit it first to four points that I made:

• Clausewitzian strategic theory pertains to collectives, all concepts – war, political purpose, military aim, victory, defeat, strategy, operations, the various trinities – pertain to collectives, and a very particular collective at that – political communities.
• The violent/destructive actions of an individual representing only himself (even a superempowered individual) operating against a state or other political community do not constitute war, they are rather by definition the actions of a criminal.
• The mindset of such individuals is a pathological condition of our times, the result in part of the age of TV, alienation, “reality” without context, and endless sensuous banalities.
• ABB and super empowered individuals do not constitute war or a political program, but could potentially be seen as a weapon of a foreign political program, one possibly at odds with the goals of the actual individual, making that individual into something along the lines of a false-flag suicide bomber.

Originally, I had included „tactics” in the mix of the first point regarding concepts. Tactics can be both individual (although in a different sense) and collective, as in the tactics of the individual soldier and the tactics of a rifle company, although the individual soldier always acts in relationship to the group. I have also added some addiitional concepts to indicate how universal this collective aspect in fact is.

The last point I have expanded just a bit by including the last concept mentioned “ffsb”.

Joseph Fouche in that same Cameron post commented in response to me:

From Clausewitzian perspective, Breivik’s actions are the conjunction of the three poles of the Trinity, two of which have nothing to with Breivik’s rationality. If CvC can’t be applied to madmen, criminals, mass murderers of children, or men trapped in their own little world, then Van Creveld’s contention that the actions of madmen can’t be considered political (in noted Clausewitzian Christopher Bassford’s use of the word) is correct. War would be “nontrinitarian”.
The words and ideas of murderous stooges have consequences as well as their actions. CvC can shine as much light on them as he can on any other field of human conflict.
Can Breivik’s actions can be considered war? Can an individual wage war? By his own sinister lights, Breivik considered himself at war, the Pied Piper of a host of other Breiviks born and unborn, even if that host only existed in his fevered imagination.
Can an individual have a strategy? Or can an individual only have a strategem? Breivik had a plan that had a tactical expression and a political effect (as here we comment on the doings of an otherwise obscure Norwegian). Does the jumbled mass of tissues that connect his evil ends with his evil means rise to the level of strategy?

These are all very good questions and fundamental as Zen points out, but from my Clausewitzian strategic theory perspective I would have to answer “no” to all -except the penultimate one – of them.

I also think these questions very tied to our particular time and place, the US in 2011 and our political context, or rather what I would refer to as our current “political dysfunction” which encompasses us, something along the lines of political determinism which is arguably Clausewitzian as well (see Echevarria’s third meaning of the term Politik). If modernity is seen as a series of crises involving renewed conflict between the individual and the collective, and how they relate to each other, going back thousands of years, to Thucydides who first described it, then this Is perhaps the final such crisis where the individual supersedes the collective as the ultimate focus, which means essentially in my mind the end of the collective as a social action orientation at least in the US.

This post is organized as a sequence of concepts and ideas which address the simple question as to whether the violent actions of an isolated individual acting alone can be described as “war”. To answer this fundamental question from a Clausewitzian perspective requires clear definitions of a whole series of related concepts and descriptions of how they are all interlocked with one another, forming a whole which is socio/political relations.

Let’s start off with a simple definition of politics. Politics is “the striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state” (Max Weber). Hans Morgenthau’s definition is even more to the point: “interest de?ned as power”. Harold Lasswell’s functional definition fits within this general concept as well: “who gets what, when and how”. Essentially politics is the sphere of power/the sharing of power within and between groups. Notions that “the purpose of warlike acts reaches beyond the state and politics” are incoherent from this strategic theory perspective since politics would involve all power relations between social groups of whatever kind, and would not be limited to the state, which is simply an apparatus of political control. It is for this reason that Clausewitz includes war as part of the nature of political relations. Even a purpose which reaches beyond politics, such as a believer serving God, has a political aspect, since the believer is part of a larger community and acts due to a range of motivations.

A political community is a group who share the same political identity, defining themselves as opposed to those outside this community. Different elements can go into this identity such as a common language, ethnicity, religion, geography, shared historical (or even mythical) experiences, a common struggle, but there are a few basic requirements according to Weber. For instance social action oriented towards the group which goes beyond economic activity, the claim of loyalty and sacrifice (even of one’s life) which the member feels towards the group and vice versa, and a collection of “shared memories”. It is important to note that the concept of the political, is the only secular value sphere where one’s death has meaning, “having died for one’s country”. Political communities go back to the dawn of civilization and can be states, but not necessarily so.

So the state is simply an apparatus by which the rulers of a political community achieve material cohesion and exercise control. A classic definition of the state is Max Weber’s an entity which has a monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a given territory. This is very simple definition which covers a wide range of institutions going back to antiquity, that is far beyond 1648. Two things here to consider: monopoly of force and legitimacy. Force here is essentially violence or the threat of violence (coercion) and legitimacy is how the people of the political community perceive that potential or real violence. A policeman motioning a car to pull over is legitimate coercion, whereas a mugger stealing someone’s wallet is illegitimate force.

What is important to consider though, is that legitimacy, force and especially coercion play a much larger role in political relations than we realize. In Classical Realist thought which includes Clausewitz, Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, Hans Morgenthau and many other thinkers/theorists, legitimacy and coercion are what hold political communities together As Niebuhr wrote in his famous Moral Man and Immoral Society of 1932:

Our contemporary culture fails to realize the power, extent and persistence of group egoism in human relations. It may be possible, though it is never easy, to establish just relations between individuals within a group purely by moral and rational suasion and accommodation. In inter-group relations this is practically an impossibility. The relations between groups must therefore always be predominantly political rather than ethical, that is, they will be determined by the proportion of power which each group possesses at least as much as by any rational and moral appraisal of the comparative needs and claims of each group. The coercive factors, in distinction to the more purely moral and rational factors, in political relations can never be sharply differentiated and defined. It is not possible to estimate exactly how much a party to a social conflict is influenced by a rational argument or by the threat of force. It is impossible for instance, to know what proportion of a privileged class accepts higher inheritance taxes because it believes that such taxes are good social policy and what proportion submits merely because the power of the state supports the taxation policy. Since political conflict, at least in times when controversies have not reached the point of crisis, is carried on by the threat, rather than the actual use, of force.

xviii

With this quote we can see how the concepts fit together, including the view that power relations between groups are politics by definition.

At this point we need to introduce two other important Weberian definitions, the first of which is power: “Power is the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which this probability rests”. Notice that power for us here is a social relationship between members of the same political community, although the concept is flexible enough to apply to any social relationship Notice too the similarity between Weber’s definition of power and Clausewitz’s definition of war , “war is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will”. (On War, Book I, Chapter 1, Section 2).

And the last concept, which I have mentioned repeatedly but not defined is legitimacy, which is the willingness of the ruled within a political community to accept this rule as personally binding. Illegitimate rule does not exist by definition, but would be simply force. What allows a political system, which need not necessarily be a state, to exist over time is the legitimate use of power. Still, as Niebuhr reminds us, the actual compliance can be a mixture of both acceptance (based on legitimacy) and coercion (the thread of force). It is useful to conceive of both power and legitimacy as being similar to sliding scales of very low to very high. The levels of both can vary over time.

Politics or simply who in a society gets what, when, and how is an art. The slow drilling through hard boards as Weber described it, hard work, talking, working out differences, long discussions into the night: in a democracy something that requires a vocation, a calling, to aspire to. Hard decisions over a long period of time and living with the consequences, that is what politics used to be like, even In our country . . . believe it or not.

How should politics be approached? Maybe like what the Norwegians were teaching their kids on that island, what the Norwegian terrorist wished to destroy?

If one takes just a moment to consider, what for instance the great questions were in 1917 (among people like Weber, Thomas Mann, Walter Lippmann, John Dewey and others) and approximately how far we are politically and intellectually from that standpoint, I think you start to get an idea of where I see us presently.

So, let’s consider that list of important questions from the year JFK was born. These, one would have to add (or put at the top of such a list):

• Given that democracy is the only permanent option for social stability, how do we set up a truly democratic system, that is where the various elite interests (traditional, economic) are not engulfed by the interests of the common folk?
• Can a modern mass state be democratic? Are bureaucratized political parties the answer? How should they be organized/structured? How should political leaders be trained? What experiences should they have?
• Is there an easier way?

So why bring this up? To give a feeling for where we are now and where we were. Also to point out the simple fact that the superempowered individual (SEI) does not act at the political level. This individual never really interacts with anyone politically at least in terms of social action. Since they are assumed to be isolated, alienated individualists with little traditional, affective or value-rational social contact, they will be almost by necessity radical egotists who preen constantly in their own assumed glory, emperors of their own little world. From their perspective, essentially every person is viewed as a tool, something to be manipulated in their search for gratification of whatever sort.

Nor does the SEI enjoy any sense of legitimacy. The government/state or even the people themselves are the victims of what they see as a criminal act. If the government were widely seen as corrupt and even dictatorial, such an act would probably provide them with legitimacy in how they dealt with the crisis as long as it appeared effective. The SEI gains notoriety through the act, any excuse provided will most likely come across as incoherent (due to the lack of any preceding dialogue).

The SEI’s situation is due to the demands of simple operational security. No one must know of what the SEI Is doing, let alone their motives. They must not call attention to themselves through any overt political behavior.

Only at a certain time will the act of mass violence occur. As it did in Norway recently.

So we have a (domestic) act of violence, in the Norwegian instance, terroristic violence used against the most innocent, trusting and precious of any society, lured in and massacred. One hits a society at all sorts of levels and in all sorts of ways with an act such as this. This act was horrible, I’ll leave it at this.

It is crucial to recall that the SEI is unknown up to the time of the act. Their act sweeps the society like a storm and leads to shock among the people. If the SEI is killed or arrested that ends their ability to interact independently of the state. Once the SEI has been unmasked the operation comes to an end. The ability of the SEI to communicate (the most important strategic capability following Svechin) strategically (and do everything else) ends.

The SEI is by definition an individual operating outside the political community they attack, but not part of another political group, so politics does not play a role, rather simply the ego of one person. Since the SEI’s act is by definition not political, how can it be the continuation of politics by other means, or simply war? From this perspective the SEI cannot be so described, but rather is the act of an individual acting alone against a political community/society, which makes the SEI simply an outlaw. The scale of destruction the SEI can cause does not change this situation.

Which means that the SEI is not only not operating in the political sphere of social action, but also has no capability of exercising coercion. The gunman on the street can force, but it takes the Mafia to coerce. It takes an organization, a bureaucracy, something that can last past the first operation, even for criminals to achieve this. Once it has passed into history the SEI’s act will only be seen as a tragedy caused by a sick idiot, which is the way it will be portrayed by the state. There is no social carrier present to “spread the word”, nor could there be given the requirement for absolute isolation. Who ever is the next SEI will follow exactly this same pattern, due to operational security, which all adds up to self-assured strategic dysfunction/failure from a Clausewitzian perspective.

Still in terms of politics and society, we are dealing with something much more basic here. Humans are social beings, it is our interactions with other humans which provide the foundation of civilization itself. Our identities as individuals are formed through a discourse with others. As Richard Ned Lebow, yet another Clausewitzian writes in his The Tragic Vision of Politics:,

Social reality begins as a conversation among individuals that ultimately leads to the creation of societies, and they in turn socialize individuals into their discourses. Individuals nevertheless retain a degree of autonomy. This is due in the first instance to the cognitive processes that mediate individual understandings of the values, rules, norms and practices of societies. Contrary to the Enlightenment assumption of universal cognition, people perceive, represent and reason about the world in different ways. These processes entail reflection, and this may lead individuals to some awareness of the extent to which they are products of their society. Such recognition is greatly facilitated by the existence of alternative discourses. In their absence, as Achilles discovered, it is difficult, if not impossible, to construct a different identity for oneself even when highly motivated to do so. For Thucydides, alternative discourses are initially the product of other societies (e.g., other Greek poleis and non-Greek states), which may become role models for disaffected individuals or the raw material from which new individual and social identities are constructed. Modern societies, as Shawn Rosenberg observes, are composed of many locales of social change, each with discourses that are to some degree distinct.

According to Thucydides, the starting points of transformation are behavioral and linguistic. Previously stable patterns of social interaction become uncertain and ill-defined, and this weakens the social norms that support them. Discourses also become unstable when identity and practice diverge. Language is subverted because people who reject old practices, or pioneer new ones, generally feel the need to justify them with reference to older values.

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So even (radical) social change is a discourse among members of the social/political community in question. These discourses can be confused since those desiring change can add new and self-serving meanings to words. Self-interest is decided in relation to the community as a whole and justice results. This is how social change takes place.

For the SEI however, the only discourses are going on inside their own heads. No politics, no strategy, no political community, no war. Only their “operations”.

One last point needs to be made in terms of politics. Zen is right, the only examples we have of individuals achieving strategic effect in prior history are to a large extent, political assassinations. Considering that since say 1860, probably before, anyone with a rifle could have killed a king. A rifle provides that ability. Have an independent means of monetary support, have a rifle and simply wait for your opportunity. Kings were all notorious hunters, so how difficult would it have been? Exactly up to JFK, how many heads of state, or even important political figures, were assassinated at long range with a rifle? Were in fact many of these assassinations up to 1963, all very political acts, with the assailants willing to trade their lives for that of the political leader they had targeted at close quarters? Was it considered necessary for them to do so to give their lives for the political community they claimed to represent? Consider, for instance the attempt on President Truman in 1950.

In terms of strategy, I come from a Clausewitzian strategic theory perspective, and since there has been so much confusion in the past as to what exactly “strategy” is, I’ve developed my own definition which I think true to this school of strategic thought. I use a specific definition of strategy, that being:

Focused adaptation of divergent sources of power assisted by control over time in pursuit of a political purpose through methodological theoretical construct (strategic theory) with the aim of creating strategic effect/a strategic dynamic greater than the sum of the individual power sources. For the strong political community, strategy can be an option, for the weak it is a necessity.

For the reasons stated above, it is difficult for me to see the SEI engaging in “strategy”. The way I understand the SEI concept it uses force and little else, which is not really a strategy in terms of my definition above, but simply force and personality. Force alone can produce strategic effect, which does not actually require a strategy. This does not preclude using a different definition of strategy, but I feel that one that includes individuals needlessly confuses the issue. That is one point in this regard, another is that the act of an SEI is an operation by definition. To be strategic this operation would have to essentially end the conflict with one act, but at the same time war is started by the defender who resists, an act of aggression without resistance is not war. Only by being able to carry out successive and connected operations towards a strategic goal would this be strategy.

In his comment, Joseph speaks of political effect that the terrorist has achieved, but that is not what it is, We are simply discussing a news story which does not add up to political effect. Whatever strategic/political effect exists is first of all up to the victim, that is the society which has been attacked. If the society that has suffered such an attack refuses to change their policies and educates the public as to the reason behind their stand, there is no political/strategic effect at all. In fact the opposite effect theoretically. From the perspective of the perpetrator, the act becomes thus meaningless, that is aside from mass murder. There could be a reaction among outside political communities, but each case would have to be studied separately. Could not a natural disaster create the same sort of response?

Zen has been kind enough to give me his current definition of an SEI

“To qualify as a superempowered individual, the actor must be able to initiate a destructive event, fundamentally with their own resources, that cascades systemically on a national, regional or global scale. They must be able to credibly, “declare war on the world”.

From what I have provided so far, I think there are at least two problems with this definition. First, “cascades systemically”. Does this not require the sequence of reactions of the target political community or communities? Or is this system beyond their influence? If not, then the target community can simply decide not to change their policies, to simply absorb the attack and treat the SEI as a criminal. This is what most societies do in relation to crime, the criminal’s family are not taken hostage, their property seized, their lives destroyed, the act is that of an individual and the individual suffers the consequences.

Second, “credibly ‘declare war on the world’”. What type of war? Limited or unlimited? How would the SEI be able to sustain operations over time? How would such a war be resolved? Is this not simply the technologically-driven ego of the SEI grown to monstrous proportions? I am reminded of the diary entry by Maxim Gorky in the 1930s who noted that Stalin had become a “monstrous flea” that state propaganda and mass fear had enlarged him out of all proportion to the very crude person he actually was. It seems that this SEI could be much the same thing, but divorced from any political community, unlike Stalin.

The true potential of the SEI is thus not as a maker of war or as a form of warfare, but as a weapon. Since the SEI does not act politically, they lend themselves to manipulation by actual political interests. What better way to attack a hostile state than to have them come across to their own people as impotent in dealing with the havoc spread by SEIs acting according to their own whims? SEIs thus could be used as powerful weapons by states which desire to hide their actual involvement. The interested state could approach likely recruits covering their actual identity relatively easily, providing support and assistance. By linking SEIs and their actions a state sponsor could initiate and sustain very destructive campaigns at little to no cost to themselves. This is the logical next step to what Bill Joy was talking about with KMD back in 2000.

–

In 1991, Martin van Creveld published his The Transformation of War, which predicted the crisis and eventual collapse of the state, but without considering what exactly would replace this apparatus of rule. Instead of this collapse of the state we have experienced something quite different, the state waging war as before, but for unspecified goals. Instead, propagandistic “war aims” for public consumption are concocted (as in the war in Iraq/the US intervention in Libya) or an act of war is perpetrated and never actually acknowledged (Pakistan and the Mumbai attacks). Wars strategically lost are carried on operationally since the state lacks the political will (and necessity) to end them, the public having been conditioned through state propaganda to see war as the norm (US involvement in Iraq/Afghanistan/the Global War on Terror and Russia in her own Muslim areas). Mercenary armies are employed at a high price (and high investor profit) to sustain what are essentially lost wars strategically, but are still economically profitable for investors.

All of this would be familiar to Clausewitz, who would see this as a collapse of not only strategic thought, but the material cohesion of the state in question.

I don’t see this as a new era of warfare, but possibly the end if it ever comes about of society as we know it: The end of the Hobbesian commonwealth and the emergence of a new dark age where political communities are at the mercy of psychopathic and monstrous fleas. That the fleas enjoy no political purpose is small compensation for the destruction they could bring about.

Copyright 2011

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[cross-posted at zenpundit.com]

Robert Haddick agrees with me, albeit with greater eloquence and length ( hat tip to Colonel Dave).

From SWJ Blog:

This Week at War: Rumsfeld’s Revenge

….Rumsfeld’s and Schoomaker’s redesign of the Army into a lighter, more mobile, and more expeditionary force seems permanent. Gone is the Cold War and Desert Storm concept of the long buildup of armor as prelude to a massive decisive battle. Instead, globally mobile brigade combat teams will provide deterrence, respond to crises, and sustain expeditionary campaigns. Gen. Martin Dempsey, the current Army chief of staff (and soon to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) recently described a sustainable brigade rotation system, an expeditionary adaptation that the Navy and Marine Corps have employed for decades. In addition, both the Army and Marine Corps have drawn up plans to shrink their headcounts back near the Rumsfeld-era levels. Rumsfeld’s concerns about personnel costs sapping modernization are now coming to pass.

There now seems to be a near-consensus inside Washington that the large open-ended ground campaigns that Rumsfeld resisted are no longer sustainable. The former defense secretary’s preference for special operations forces, air power, networked intelligence, and indigenous allies is now back in vogue. Even Gen. David Petraeus, who burnished his reputation by reversing Rumsfeld’s policies in Iraq, will now implement Rumsfeld’s doctrine in eastern Afghanistan. According to the New York Times, the U.S. will counter the deteriorating situation there not by shifting in conventional ground troops for pacification, but with “more special forces, intelligence, surveillance, air power … [and] substantially more Afghan boots on the ground.”

While we agree that this is “Rumsfeld’s revenge”, unlike Haddick, I would not choose “doctrine” to describe it. This is really about a “Community of Operators” across services , agencies and their White House superiors adopting a culture of punitive raiding for at least the medium term. A doctrine might come along later but there are downsides to institutionalizing punitive raiding that have already been very well expressed by others (see comments section at SWJ). I’d prefer punitive raiding remain a flexible tool rather than a reflexive response ( it might help if we created a “Community of Thinkers” before we get too comfortable as an international flying squad).

At this point, I will stop and recommend a fine piece by Adam Elkus on the subject of punitive raiding, From Roman Legions to Navy SEALs: Military Raiding and its Discontents. A good primer on the history, implications and drawbacks.

Why is this happening? Economics and the subsequent electoral politics of a finance-sector driven global depression. The same thing that brought COIN to an end and then finally killed it as an operationally oriented policy.

Punitive raiding is relatively cheaper. It permits defense cuts in the size of the Army and Marine Corps that are badly desired by the administration and Congress. It preserves and justifies investments in naval and air striking power that will bring joy to the Lexington Institute and satisfy many MoC concerned about defense jobs for constituents. On a point of genuine importance, this also hedges against near peer competitors (ahem…cough…China).

Is it a done deal? Unless the economy roars back, yes.

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[Cross-posted at zenpundit.com]

From Boing Boing:

A kindergarten teacher in Mexico seeks to protect her students and calm their fears as narco-cartel fighters conduct a raging gun battle outside the window of her school. The woman has nerves of iron.

But hey…..Mexico can’t have an “insurgency” because the narcos don’t have “political” goals. Or a unified political goal. Or because there are still good vacation deals there at all-inclusive resorts. Or….Or…Or…. whatever flimsy rationale helps policy makers continue to punt the war next door.

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[cross-posted from zenpundit.com]

Altars to Santa Muerte, “Saint Death” to the poor and the narcocultos

SWJ has been en fuego the last few days and this is the first of several that I recommend that readers give close attention.

Dr. Robert J. Bunker and Lt. John Sullivan are indicating that the canary in the coal mine phase of Mexico’s narco-insurgency has passed. Mexican society is entering a new and more dangerous period of accelerating cultural devolution. Narco-insurgent violence has shifted from the economically motivated and brutally instrumental of organized crime syndicates everywhere to culturally totemic and ghastly ceremonials out of tribal prehistory:

Extreme Barbarism, a Death Cult, and Holy Warriors in Mexico: Societal Warfare South of the Border? by Dr. Robert J. Bunker and John P. Sullivan

…Our impression is that what is now taking place in Mexico has for some time gone way beyond secular and criminal (economic) activities as defined by traditional organized crime studies.3 In fact, the intensity of change may indeed be increasing. Not only have de facto political elements come to the fore-i.e., when a cartel takes over an entire city or town, they have no choice but to take over political functions formerly administered by the local government- but social (narcocultura) and religious/spiritual (narcocultos) characteristics are now making themselves more pronounced. What we are likely witnessing is Mexican society starting to not only unravel but to go to war with itself. The bonds and relationships that hold that society together are fraying, unraveling, and, in some instances, the polarity is reversing itself with trust being replaced by mistrust and suspicion. Traditional Mexican values and competing criminal value systems are engaged in a brutal contest over the ?hearts, minds, and souls‘ of its citizens in a street-by-street, block-by-block, and city-by-city war over the future social and political organization of Mexico. Environmental modification is taking place in some urban centers and rural outposts as deviant norms replace traditional ones and the younger generation fully accepts a criminal value system as their baseline of behavior because they have known no other. The continuing incidents of ever increasing barbarism-some would call this a manifestation of evil even if secularly motivated-and the growing popularity of a death cult are but two examples of this clash of values. Additionally, the early rise of what appears to be cartel holy warriors may now also be taking place. While extreme barbarism, death cults, and possibly now holy warriors found in the Mexican cartel wars are still somewhat the exception rather than the rule, each of these trends is extremely alarming, and will be touched upon in turn.

Read the rest here.

Some of the anecdotes in this article read like the climax scenes of Apocalypse Now in the Cambodian lair of Marlon Brando’s insane Colonel Kurtz or a bloody reverie of Hannibal Lecter. While the scale in Mexico is not yet the same, the mad cruelty equals anything seen in the eastern Congo and seems to surpass everywhere else.

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Pundita, the DC based foreign policy blogger, is a longtime read for me due to her shrewd observations, usually expressed with tart sarcasm. Her post below is no exception:

Note to Pakistan’s armed forces: President Obama is throwing you a lifeline; better grab it

Even many Pakistanis believe the ISI was harboring Osama bin Laden, so there’s a lot of blame-shifting and finger-pointing going on in the government. And, as B. Raman details in his May 17 post, the armed forces feel humiliated because the U.S. was able to pull off the raid in Abbottabad right under their noses.

However, the military has told so many lies over the years to puff up their efficiency that several Qaeda-friendly jihadi groups in Pakistan don’t believe the raid could have been carried off without cooperation from a branch of the military. So those groups are on a rampage against Pakistan’s military.

In short, Rawalpindi is getting it from all sides in the wake of the Abbottabad raid. For that reason Raman is concerned that Rawalpindi might try to put a shine back on its tarnished reputation by directing terrorist attack at India. That would be a stupid move because it took everyone outside Syria all of 6 minutes to figure out that Syria’s government was behind the Palestinian ‘freedom protest’ against Israel on May 15 — 1 minute to realize what the government was up to (Bashy Assad’s attempt to deflect world attention from his brutal quashing of Syrian protests) and the remaining 5 minutes to attempt to figure out whether Bashy thought the year was 1990 or 1982. (1)

….The only people in Washington still pushing the line are influence agents in the pay of Pakistan’s government and U.S. defense analysts and NATO toadies who are so daffy they couldn’t find their hands with a flashlight. Either way, nobody’s buying the line anymore that Pakistan carries out atrocities because it’s scared of India.

Understand? Humpty Dumpty has fallen off the wall. If Islamabad and Rawalpindi think China can help put Humpty back together they’re not only behind the times, they also don’t understand the Chinese.(2)

More than they want to see India destabilized, more than they want to see the United States preoccupied with the war on terror, more than anything in the world, the Chinese want China to be a great nation and to be seen as such on the world stage. The Chinese know what it takes to be seen as a great nation. So, only provided the terrorists Rawalpindi nurtured kept it down to a dull roar was Beijing was willing to support Pakistan’s bloody-minded machinations against India and the United States. But if Pakistanis think the Chinese will risk everything they’ve sacrificed for, just to be seen by the world as supporters of a nation of anarchist terrorists, those Pakistanis need their heads examined.

If Rawalpindi doesn’t want to believe me, it needs to believe this: At the end of April, China’s government published in English) a white paper on the country’s planned next phase in its foreign aid policy . The government has more than a $1 trillion to lavish on aid. About half the aid is earmarked for North Korea but a large chunk of the remainder Beijing plans to lavish on investment in U.S. companies.

The plan is not made from the goodness of their hearts; the leaders want concessions from the U.S. government in return for their largesse. But the new policy also indicates that China’s government has listened to every criticism that’s been voiced about its earlier foreign-aid policy and is adjusting the new policy accordingly.

Read the rest here.

Pundita is spot on. If anything, she’s too nice about making her point ( must be mellowing).

I will be more blunt; Pakistan is an unfixable horror show and an enemy of the United States by any rational metric that can be applied. Worse than Iran. North Korea is a toss-up. We need to disentangle ourselves from a nation hell-bent on provoking a nuclear war with its giant neighbor, India and that plots terrorism against us with the intent of killing US citizens. I am no fan of President Obama but his moving multiple, nuclear-armed, aircraft carrier groups to Pakistan’s coast is the smartest move the US has made in regard to Pakistan in 10 years.

Bribery is an ancient tradition in foreign policy, and it is the policy the USG has followed in regard to Islamabad. But in the time honored tradition of Chicago Alderman, the recipient has to stay bribed. Pakistani generals welsh, and when bribery fails, that leaves only the gun. But we can begin by not cutting the ISI mafia any more billion dollar checks.

Today outgoing Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen held a press conference. Pakistan was one of the subjects raised by reporters.

I am an enormous fan of Secretary Gates. I would sleep better at night if he were the President. That said, he shoveled more horse manure today regarding the US-Pakistani relationship than in his entire career with the US government – including all the time he spent at the CIA.

I’ll lay odds of 50-50 that we’ll be at war with these people in under two years.

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[Cross-posted from zenpundit.com]

J. Scott Shipman, the owner of a boutique consulting firm in the Metro DC area that is putting Col. John Boyd’s ideas into action, is a longtime friend of zenpundit.com and Chicago Boyz and an occasional guest-poster. Scott has an important report regarding the “war of ideas” against the Islamist-Takfirist enemy in Afghanistan after attending a workshop hosted by DARPA.

DARPA, STORyNet and the Fate of the War

by J. Scott Shipman

I had the opportunity to attend a DARPA workshop yesterday called STORyNet. The purpose was to survey narrative theories, to better understand the role of narrative in security contexts, and to survey the state of the art in narrative analysis and decomposition tools (see below):

This STORyNET workshop has three goals:

1. To survey narrative theories.

These empirically informed theories should tell us something about the nature of stories: what is a story? What are its moving parts? Is there a list of necessary and sufficient conditions it takes for a stimulus to be considered a story instead of something else? Does the structure and function of stories vary considerably across cultural contexts or is there a universal theory of story?

2. To better understand the role of narrative in security contexts.

What role do stories play in influencing political violence and to what extent? What function do narratives serve in the process of political radicalization and how do theyinfluence a person or group’s choice of means (such as violence) to achieve political ends? How do stories influence bystanders’ response to conflict? Is it possible to measure how attitudes salient to security issues are shaped by stories?

3. To survey the state of the art in narrative analysis and decomposition tools.

How can we take stories and make them quantitatively analyzable in a rigorous, transparent and repeatable fashion? What analytic approaches or tools best establish a framework for the scientific study of the psychological and neurobiological impact of stories on people? Are particular approaches or tools better than others for understanding how stories propagate in a system so as to influence behavior?

I was alerted to the meeting by a member at one of my “groups” at LinkedIn and just barely made the registration cut-off. It was a good meeting, but not reassuring on our situation in Afghanistan—you’ll see why below.

As a “hobby” I’ve been tinkering with the implications of patterns with respect to language and communications. Just about every presumption I have articulated over the last several months is being pursued in one way or another—which is good news for our guys. While the on-going research is good, I do believe there is room for better and more imaginative thinking, although I didn’t say anything during the meeting for once, I kept my mouth shut and just listened.

This is exceptionally brief and decidedly non-techincal. Here are some observations of interest:

• In Afghanistan, stories (those who tell them and those who believe) are central to our geopolitical strategy and policies.
• There is underway, a “battle of the narratives,” where any “counter” narrative developed by the US must have credibility. This seems obvious, but the speaker observed the “story telling” was more important than the story. Given the high illiteracy rate, this makes sense.
• We [DARPA] are reviewing chants (which are wildly popular), video, magazines, poetry, the Internet, and sermons as thematic vehicles for analysis.
• The language of the Taliban is not secular, and not the language of the insurgency—for the Taliban everything hangs on the legacy of jihad and religious struggle.
• The Taliban not willing to negotiate on matters of jihad. They are using a unified vision of Islam giving their struggle a noble foundation against the corruption of outsiders who want to “Christianize” the nation.
• The Taliban uses symbology to portray the struggle as a cosmic conflict against Christian invaders and US puppets (those cooperating with the US). Framing this symbology to communicate clearly the frame of the righteous vs. the infidels.
• The Taliban manipulates the language to connect the current struggle to previous struggles of “warrior poets.” There is hope a “discourse” can be created that will counter this framing [personal note: I'm not optimistic]. The Taliban uses different language to subjugate rural and urban dwellers, and actually have standard operating procedures for dealing with villages that resist.
• The cognitive patterns of rural Afghanistan are “foreign” to most Westerners and they use alien methods of knowledge transfer (chants, often under the influence of hashish).
• We are adding a geospatial element to our analysis of local and personal narratives (which includes subject, verb, object) with respect to identified “master narratives.”
• Internet data is indexed, with an eye toward predictive analysis and situational awareness (and interestingly, “sentiment” analysis). We are finding predictive power from the topology of “networks” used in models.
• From a neuroscience perspective, there was an amazing talk on empathy. It turns out, based on fMRI testing that empathy is quite predictable across subjects. Research indicates people “care more” about an “in-group” to which they belong more than an “out group.” The speaker defined the brain as a “parliament” of competing parties and nuanced spectrums [personal note: this elegant description tracks with everything I've read on the topic.].
• One presenter observed that after 10 years of war, we’re finally “getting” the importance of Pashtun culture and language. This presenter also noted US is still in need of people with language skills sufficient to adequately support the effort.

- End

COMMENTARY:

Zen here:

First, I’d like to cordially thank Scott for letting me share his insights gleaned from the workshop here with ZP readers. This is one of those fascinating events largely unavailable to those folks residing outside a reasonable driving distance from the Beltway.

Secondly, I am heartened that the brilliant folks at DARPA are taking the theological-ideological discourse of the enemy seriously in analyzing the power of narrative. Charles Cameron makes that point here with regularity. Michael Scheuer, Gilles Kepel and Olivier Roy did so even before 9/11. Our political appointees and policy makers remain steadfastly allergic to this reality, unable to process or discuss in public with coherence how religious ideas are a root for political extremism. Col. David Kilcullen, who certainly understands political Islam better than most and whose creative and analytical acheivements in structuring a framework for countering insurgency are second to none, eschews dealing with the topic in his theoretical writings on COIN where it can be avoided. That is the cost imposed by the political correctness to which our ruling elite are psychologically welded.

It comes as no surprise to me that only after “10 years of war” are we finally “getting the importance of Pashtun culture”.

Maybe at the dawn of the 22nd century we will be “old hands”.

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Heh.

On a serious note, it would be a good idea if, say, Congressman Ron Paul were to investigate the role of Sovereign Wealth Funds in US Hedge Funds, related to the crash or their current activities today. These are not normal institutional investors. While SWFs do not set out to lose money, a Hugo Chavez, for example, makes investments with a different kind of strategic calculus than does Warren Buffet. Putting SWF dollars in Hedge Funds renders their investment decisions secret, or at least very opaque, behind the face of an American hedge fund manager. Investments that some of the SWF countries might not be allowed to make here directly and openly in specific corporations or industries for very good diplomatic and national security reasons.

Who is watching the store?

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Ronald Reagan’s monicker as President was always “the Great Communicator“, for his command of message and the medium of television, though Reagan had a considerable ability to read a live audience as well. Everyone acknowledged Reagan’s rhetorical wizardry, even his Democratic critics, who took some comfort in imagining that Reagan was “only a B movie actor” reading his lines. A nickname that would have pointed to one of his greatest political skills would have been “the Great Negotiator” because Reagan’s talent for winning favorable outcomes, legislatively and diplomatically, is rivaled among presidents only by FDR and LBJ. Yet few pundits give Reagan that credit of being a master of the art of the deal.

Reagan’s strategic insight has been alluded to previously in this roundtable and the ability to look at a big picture and construct a strategy for acheiving favorable ends, using acceptable and effective ways that are within your means is the cornerstone of being a good negotiator. Reagan’s career as an actor is frequently cited but it is forgotten that if they gave out Oscars for running the Screen Actor’s Guild, Reagan would have cleaned up at the academy awards. He was a tough union boss and Reagan’s deft handling of contract negotiations with the studios, winning substantial concessions for actors in a politically charged, anti-Hollywood atmosphere, led to his being elected president of SAG seven times:

“At the request of the SAG National Board, Reagan returned to the SAG presidency in 1959 in order to head 1960
theatrical negotiations that ultimately resulted in the first pension and health plan for SAG members, not to mention residuals on filmsshot January 31, 1960, and after (once they were replayed on television).”

Not having anticipated the advent of television, having little bargaining leverage and facing punitive tax rates, many early film actors lived hand to mouth in their old age while the studios raked in a fortune selling their performances to TV networks. Most had been paid a pittance and the lucky few who had made real money had found Uncle Sam claimed up to 90 % of their paycheck. Reagan never forgot that bitter experience and made decreasing marginal income tax rates a key objective in his economic program, which he managed to get through a Democratic-controlled House of Representatives under the Speakership of Tip O’Neill. How? He negotiated for it and afterward, liberal Democrat Tip O’Neill paid conservative Republican Reagan the ultimate compliment that a political opponent can bestow:

How am I doing? I’m getting the whale shit kicked out of me!

As the former Speaker explained in his memoirs, belying his image as a genial and somewhat lazy figurehead, Reagan was a shrewd but relentless bargainer. “You fellas tell me who I need to call and I’ll make the calls” Reagan told his staff. Reagan called. He worked the phones like the winner of a national sales award. Congressmen, Senators, their supporters and newspaper editors back home, he charmed the wives of members of Congress, asked after their children and hand wrote them personal letters of thanks and gave them photo ops at the White House. He shared the spotlight and made compromises with Democrats like Bill Bradley and Dan Rostenkowski who were willing to advance Reagan’s strategic goals. Walking in to the conference room to talk with the Democratic leadership, Reagan would frequently begin discussions having dozens of their Democratic members in his pocket and an equal number wavering. Reagan would at the last minute, take half a loaf in legislation if it moved the ball down the field. Then in the next negotiation, he’d return for the other half and often as not, get some of that too.

The Soviet politburo fared no better with arms control with Reagan than did the leaders of the Democratic party on tax cuts and tax reform. That Reagan was disinclined to make the sort of breezy, one-sided, concessions that had been the hallmark of Kissinger’s approach to SALT was made dramatically clear by Reagan’s appointment of Paul Nitze, the father of NSC-68 and co-founder of Team B, as his adviser on arms control and chief negotiator foe the INF treaty talks. Reagan’s propensity to treat the Soviets in his public speeches as if their Communist ideology were illegitimate and dangerous gave the Soviet leaders fits.

Longtime Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin remained a dedicated Communist apparatchik and a skillful advocate of the Soviet position even after the demise of the USSR, but his comments about Reagan in his memoir In Confidence, while laden with frustration and incomprehension, are not the picture often seen of Reagan in the MSM:

• • Brezhnev and his colleagus found themselves dealing with something truly new, a deeply disturbing figure who tenaciously advanced a course that profoundly offended and alarmed them.
  • To me, the directness and insouciance of his remarks confirms once again my belief that personal conviction underwrote Reagan’s approach to the Soviets and everything associated with us, and not just some political pose.
  • It was evident from Shultz’s Behavior during our White House conversation and long afterward that Reagan was the real boss, and that the secretary of state carried out his instructions. Shultz hardly intervened in the conversation and ostensibly agreed with Reagan throughout. I even had the impression, perhaps an erroneous one, that the secretary of state was somewhat afraid of the president.

As Dobrynin’s memois meander slowly, as diplomatic tomes are wont to do, the Soviets ultimately, by stubborn, painful inches born of endless meetings, bent to many of Reagan’s positions, orginally regarded by them as absolutely intolerable: the zero option, exit visas for Pentacostal dissidents, SDI research and most dramatic of all, consenting to the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, occurring the year Reagan left office.

Ronald Reagan, not Mikhail Gorbachev, understood the art of the deal.

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Big Peace blogger Sun Tzu has dug into the historical archives to post NSDD-32, the cornerstone document for coordinating the Reagan administration’s foreign, defense and intelligence policies ( Hat tip to Col. Dave).

“NSDD” stands for “National Security Decision Directive”. In essence, the document is an executive order issued through the National Security Council to executive branch agencies represented or under the supervision of the NSC. A NSDD (or “PDD” in Democratic administrations) carries the force of law and is often highly classified, frequently being used for presidential “findings” for approving covert operations, as well as to set national security policy.

NSDD-32: Ronald Reagan’s Secret Grand Strategy

CLASSIFIED: TOP SECRET

THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON

May 20, 1982

National Security Decision
Directive Number 32

U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY

I have carefully reviewed the NSSD 1-82 study in its component parts, considered the final recommendations of the National Security Council, and direct that the study serve as guidance for U.S. National Security Strategy.

Our national security requires development and integration of a set of strategies, including diplomatic, informational economic/political, and military components. NSSD 1-82 begins that process. Part I of the study provides basic U.S. national objectives, both global and regional, and shall serve as the starting point for all components of our national security strategy.

The national security policy of the United States shall be guided by the following global objectives:

To deter military attack by the USSR and its allies against the U.S., its allies, and other important countries across the spectrum of conflict; and to defeat such attack should deterrence fail.
To strengthen the influence of the U.S. throughout the world by strengthening existing alliances, by improving relations with other nations, by forming and supporting coalitions of states friendly to U.S. interests, and by a full range of diplomatic, political, economic, and information efforts.
To contain and reverse the expansion of Soviet control and military presence throughout the world, and to increase the costs of Soviet support and the use of proxy, terrorist, and subversive forces.
To neutralize the efforts of the USSR to increase its influence through its use of diplomacy, arms transfers, economic pressure, political action, propaganda, and disinformation.
To foster, if possible in concert with our allies, restraint in Soviet military spending, discourage Soviet adventurism, and weaken the Soviet alliance system by forcing the USSR to bear the brunt of its economic shortcomings, and to encourage long-term liberalizing and nationalist tendencies within the Soviet Union and allied countries.
To limit Soviet military capabilities by strengthening the U.S. military, by pursuing equitable and verifiable arms control agreements, and by preventing the flow of militarily significant technologies and resources to the Soviet Union.
To ensure the U.S. access to foreign markets, and to ensure the U.S. and its allies and friends access to foreign energy and mineral resources.
To ensure U.S. access to space and the oceans.
To discourage further proliferation of nuclear weapons.
To encourage and strongly support aid, trade, and investment programs that promote economic development and the growth of humane social and political orders in the Third World.
To promote a well-functioning international economic system with minimal distortions to trade and investment and broadly agreed and respected rules for managing and resolving differences.
In addition to the foregoing, U.S. national security policy will be guided by the operational objectives in specific regions as identified in Parts I and III of the study.

Read the rest here.

Normally, for important NSDD, there will be several preliminary meetings of principals (the statutory members of the NSC) or their key deputies, before the text of the NSDD is prepared by the NSC adviser or executive director (sort of the chief of staff of the NSC) and the White House Counsel before it is formally approved by the NSC and signed by the President. This however, is not set in stone. Presidents are free to determine the NSC procedures of their administrations or ignore them if it suits their purpose. It is hard to imagine Richard Nixon fully briefing his SECSTATE William Rogers on anything of importance, much less doing it through Kissinger’s NSC, or JFK permitting any kind of bureaucratic structure to constrain his prerogatives.

NSDD-32 was prepared under the auspices of Reagan’s second NSC Adviser, “Judge” William P. Clark, who succeeded the hapless William V. Allen. Clark was the most conservative of Reagan’s many NSC Advisers and, as a California political crony of the president, the only Washington outsider. As a result, Clark was in tune with DCI William Casey and UN Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, hostile toward the views of State Department Soviet experts and far more interventionist than the top officials at Cap Weinberger’s OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense). Clark had previously served at State as Deputy Secretary under Al Haig, an experience that did not leave him with a good impression of the loyalty of senior State Department officials to the administration’s foreign policy goals.

The activist “we win, they lose” strategy laid out NSDD-32 reflects Clark’s alignment with William Casey and it is very hard to credit Reagan’s national security strategy looking like NSDD-32 if it had been concocted by Colin Powell, Frank Carlucci and George Schultz, making Clarks brief tenure of critical historical importance. Powell, Carlucci and Schultz are all fine public servants but were disinclined by temperment and institutional loyalty to have articulated a strategy that “went on offense”; though, in fairness to Schultz, as SECSTATE he made very effective diplomatic use of Reagan Doctrine programs that State consistently opposed ( Contra aid, covert aid to the Afghan Mujahedin, UNITA and RENAMO) to extract concessions from the Soviets at the bargaining table.

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Command Posts, a group milblog in which a friend, Callie Oettinger, plays an important part, is featuring posts by Michael Reagan, commenting on his father’s 100th birthday.

I figured that if anyone from another blog deserved some space here at this roundtable, it would be Mr. Reagan. Here is a post of his that I particularly liked as it encapsulated his father’s determination as to the “ends” in the strategic trinity of “ends, ways and means”. Reagan was a rarity because as president he was the last to run an administration able to competently synchronize all three elements of strategy:

We Win, They Lose

….I took my father aside in a corner of the suite and asked him, “What are you thinking about, Dad?”
 
“Michael,” he said wistfully, “the thing I’ll miss most by losing this nomination is that I won’t get to say ‘Nyet’ to Mr. Brezhnev. I was really looking forward to arms negotiations with the Soviets. For years, the Soviets have been telling us what we have to give up to get along with the Soviet Union. I was going to let the General Secretary of the Soviet Union choose the place, the room, and the shape of the table, because that’s how they do those things. And I was going to listen to him tell me what we would have to give up to get along with them. Then I was going to get up from the table and whisper in his ear, ‘Nyet.’ It’s been a long time since the Soviets have heard ‘Nyet’ from an American president.”
 
Well, 1976 wasn’t Ronald Reagan’s year—but his time was coming.
 
A few months later, in January 1977, defense analyst Richard V. Allen visited my father at his office in Los Angeles. During their conversation, Dad said, “My idea of American policy toward the Soviet Union is simple, and some would say simplistic. It is this: We win and they lose. What do you think of that?”
 
One of the key behind-the-scenes players in Dad’s administration was Herb Meyer, special assistant to CIA Director Bill Casey. “Ronald Reagan was the first Western leader whose objective was to win,” Meyer once said. “Now I suggest to you that there is a gigantic difference between playing not to lose and playing to win. It’s different emotionally, it’s different psychologically, and, of course, it’s different practically.” Ronald Reagan’s actions toward the Soviets, Meyer said, “flowed from a decision to play to win.”

This is an aspect about Ronald Reagan that is not very well understood.

I do not mean his attitude toward communism or the USSR. These things are common knowledge and were, then and even now, part of his political appeal. I mean that as a statesman Reagan was a gifted strategist. I have no idea if Reagan ever underlined sayings of Sun Tzu or pages of On War, or as president if he found his military briefings stimulating or tiresome, but if he did not study strategy, President Reagan had an intuitive grasp of its nature. He also understood, far better than the manic micromanagers, the role of a President of the United States in shepherding a strategy from formulation to execution to results.

Reagan knew that in moving policy to reality meant that choices had to be made and that part of his responsibility as Chief Executive was knowing when to get the hell out of the away, even if it meant accepting risks and costs in order to get results. The perfect, cost-free, moment of statesmanship, where all the stars align and the wind is at your back, seldom if ever, comes. Opportunities multiply when they are seized.

The war in Afghanistan might be going better today if our risk-averse rulers considered taking a page out of Reagan’s book.

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by Kanani Fong

Well, there’s a lot of hullaballoo about what would have been Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday. I can’t remember a time when Ronald Reagan wasn’t part of the lexicon of California politics, even recollecting the time his face was printed on the DMV handbook. His signature even appeared on my school Report Cards. (Back then the Superintendent, the Principal’s sigs were also included).

Ronald Reagan was the sunny transplant from the midwest, the person who was proof that you could invent yourself here in the land of (then) orange trees, mild weather, and movie stars from Marlene Dietrich to Mae West. He was in radio, then movies, the president of SAG, a democrat, a republican, governor, and president. He even had a beautiful wife, and two children who were the kids he created –free thinkers. They even disagree with many of his viewpoints, but frankly, he would not have minded. Reagan was the kind of self styled rugged individualist that most people are comfortable with, one step removed from the suburbs. It was the Hollywood version of a ranch –horse trails, brush to clear, minus the livestock or orchards other ranchers depended on for their livelihood.

He was part of that golden era that I grew up in, where everything seemed possible. The state universities were very low cost, the schools were at the top of the nation, and the freeways (actually thanks to Gov. Edmund G. Brown), were smooth black lines that wound their way from mountains to desert and over to the Pacific Ocean. When I was growing up, we never asked about anyone’s religion, and it never occurred to us to casually pigeonhole anyone as liberal or conservative, democrat or republican. We were (above anything else) Californians –which was pretty damned swell. It is easy to get nostalgic for those days, but to marinate in it for too long, makes it difficult to see the changes he started and the challenges we have ahead.

One of the things he’s remembered for most during his time as governor was the closure of mental hospitals. It wasn’t only for economic reasons. There was a new classification of medications now available to people with everything from bipolar disorder to schizophrenia. The idea was that medication could control the raging symptoms, patients should be able to return to work or at least –to leading a peaceful life.

It was a theory that turned out to be imperfect and imprecise. To use a ranching metaphor: you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. Not only did the mental hospitals close, but services critical to long term patient care took a shaking. Social workers, psychiatric clinics, psychological services all became very poor step children as this trend started in on a Federal level in years to come. Mental health casework was added to the list of things that got shifted to the local cops.

Today, as we see more men and women return home from war, there’s a need to increase the amount of money we spend on both the state and federal levels to ensure mental health treatment and also enhance a sense of well-being. This isn’t limited only to psychotherapy, social work, and psychiatry, but expanded to ensure that our veterans can engage in a variety of therapeutic activities. Yoga, hiking, nature retreats, and the humanities. Even park lands are part of this landscape of wellness. Obviously, the level of awareness must be raised not only to increase and safeguard federal and state mental health offerings, but to encourage private organizations as well. We must be as passionate about their long term needs over the next 50 years, as we are about …well, for me, small businesses.

We need help returning them to the kind of world that Ronald Reagan personified, but perhaps was a bit too remote to fulfill it. Verdant green hills, a broad expanse of blue sky, and a friendly hand of help and protection when it is needed so that people can stand with others. A place where we we not only clear the brush on our land, but also create a trail for others. Is it a dream, a vision of Hollywood? Perhaps so. But we can only keep trying.

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by James Frayne.

On 7 October 1984, just a few weeks before the November election day, President Reagan’s campaign suffered a serious setback. Having put in an unconvincing performance in the first Presidential debate against Democrat challenger Walter Mondale, serious questions were being raised about the President’s age, health, and his ability to lead America through difficult times. To some observers, he did not appear to be in full command of the details of his administration. Attention immediately turned to the second debate, on 21 October.

The initial reaction of some campaign staff was to ensure that Reagan was prepared for the next debate by force-feeding him stats on every conceivable subject. But the campaign finally worked out that this approach risked getting in the way of what voters liked best – Reagan’s character and charm. They realized the best way of getting the President to put in a winning performance was by letting him be himself – by letting Reagan be Reagan.

In You are the Message, Republican media consultant Roger Ailes (now of Fox News) talks of being brought in to help prepare Reagan for the second debate. Ailes describes seeing Reagan forced to listen to endless advice, with consultants constantly rebuking him for not remembering detail. “Every time they finished a round, somebody in the audience would raise a hand and say, ‘Mr President, the tonnage on that warhead is wrong. The date of that treaty was so-and-so’”.

Ailes told the team to cancel the mock debates and give him access to the President for a couple of hours. “’If you give me that’, I told them, ‘he’ll win. If you don’t you’ll probably lose.’ I realized that sounded presumptuous, but actually I was gambling on Reagan and his innate gift of communication. I felt pretty sure that if I could get him back to being himself again, he’d be okay.”

In Ailes’ next session, he consistently encouraged Reagan to be himself. “For the next hour, we fired away at him. Every time he’d start to stumble, I’d ask, ‘What do your instincts tell you about this?’ and he’d come right back on track. He was very good.” The result was that Reagan’s performance was completely transformed in the second debate, with the President going on to famously deploy his killer line, completely dealing with suggestions he was too old for the job.

Letting Reagan’s character come through was a key reason why the campaign ended up winning a landslide. In results almost impossible to imagine now, President Reagan’s campaign took 49 out of 50 states, with only Mondale’s home state of Minnesota going Democrat. This is a crucial lesson for all modern American campaigns: character counts. In the US, to a very large extent people are voting on the basis of the candidate’s character. They want to know whether the candidate can be a competent leader and whether they understand the challenges facing ordinary people. The Reagan 84 campaign ultimately knew they had a brilliant candidate, and that they needed to do all they could to let him shine.

But there are other crucial lessons for modern campaigns from the 84 campaign. The second key lesson, and one that few campaigns get right despite its crucial importance, is that the 84 campaign was extremely disciplined in how it framed a clear choice for people. Lots of campaigns either fail to boil their message down sufficiently, or change it constantly, or they have too many. Reagan’s campaign developed a clear message early, and never moved. The media do not love campaigns like this, but they work.

The key campaign themes for Reagan were on the economy, focusing on how inflation and unemployment were both down, and on foreign policy, focusing on how the US was respected again in the world and how integral a strong defense policy was to that. But both themes were ultimately brought to life by the question: do you want to go back? Lee Atwater, the legendary consultant who famously ran Bush Sr’s brutal 88 campaign, and who was Political Director in 84, said you could sum up why the campaign in one sentence: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”

The 84 campaign is perhaps best remembered for the “Morning in America” ad, widely viewed as being one of the best campaign ads ever made. But the ad worked because it made people consider a choice. The images are stunning, but as the narrator says: “Why would we ever want to return to where we were, less than four short years ago?” And this choice drives the narrative throughout – lower interest rates than four years ago, lower inflation, and lower unemployment. At all points: choice.

Again, this stark choice came out in that other ad the campaign is known for: the “bear ad”. “For some people the bear is easy to see, others don’t see it all. Some people say the bear is tame, others say it’s vicious and dangerous. Since no one can really be sure who’s right, isn’t it smart to be as strong as the bear… if there is a bear. “ The choice: do you want a leader who takes defense strongly? Campaign insiders are said to have been particularly proud of this ad, making the point that even those who did not make the link between the bear and the Soviet Union still understood it was important to be strong.

Reagan put together the right campaign to deliver such a simple and effective campaign. Not only did he have communications genius Michael Deaver as his closest aide, Campaign Director Ed Rollins was a straight talking former boxer with an ability to cut through complexity. And Lee Atwater, his deputy, was basically uninterested in anything that could not be simplified sufficiently to fit on one of his index cards. Roger Ailes, well known for his simple and brutally effective ads, was also on the so-called Tuesday Team of creative consultants who produced the campaign’s TV spots.

The third key lesson from the campaign is that they completely ignored traditional political divides within the US electorate, going after every vote they could. These days, campaigns appear almost to accept that the electorate is split down the middle, that there are really only a few states in play during a general election, and that a very significant proportion of the electorate is extremely politicized and ideological. Reagan’s campaign did not accept this. They had their stronger areas and their weaker areas – in 84, they felt their weak points were in the agricultural Mid West – but they drove hard into the Democrats’ traditional heartlands.

The Reagan campaign secured the public endorsement of the Teamsters union, and the widespread support of ordinary union members. Of course, the campaign’s success in mobilizing voters outside the Republican Party’s traditional comfort zone was in part down to their strategy and tactics. But it was Reagan’s brand of politics and his public profile that ultimately made this work. Reagan instinctively understood that less affluent middle class voters are hard working, want the economy to do well and to boost the opportunities of their families, and have traditional values and are patriotic. For Reagan, it was a question of why wouldn’t voters with these values vote Republican.

Too many campaigns heavily determine the outcome of elections by assuming that voters do not change their mind or that few people can be persuaded to vote for the first time. They create complicated microtargeting campaigns designed to appeal to specific sets of voters while ignoring others. In other words, they deliberately create a very close and highly polarized race because they assume the electorate is static. While he was admittedly an extraordinary candidate, Reagan showed that the right campaign can appeal to significant numbers of voters who would not normally vote for a different party.

In conclusion, then, it is no doubt true that political and economic realities of 1984 made it highly likely that Reagan would secure re-election. But this should not obscure the fact that the 84 campaign was extremely well put together and well executed. Students of campaigns may look to Clinton’s 92 campaign for lessons on campaign structure; they might look to Bush’s 2004 campaign for lessons on voter turnout. But for lessons on character, clarity of message, and framing a choice, then you should look at the 84 election.

James Frayne is a London based communications consultant and edits the Campaign War Room blog.

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By Dr. Steven Metz

Those who claim to be the inheritors of the Reagan revolution badly misunderstand it. It was never about specific policies but tone and style. It won out over both Democrats and Communists because it offered better ideas and–importantly–a positive vision. Reagan was much less interested in discrediting his opponents than in inspiring supporters.

Led by Newt Gingrich and taken to hysterical heights by pundits such as Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck, Reagan’s better ideas and positive vision gave way to deep negativity. Rather than better ideas, they offer only an unending spew of attacks against Democrats and the political left.

The commentary on the Egypt crisis by those who would claim to be Reagan’s descendents is a perfect illustration. Nearly everything they say at least begins with a slam on the Democrats, especially Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama. Making the Middle East more stable and furthering American interests is almost an afterthought, tacked on after the flames directed at the Democrats.

Certainly this ideology of attack and insult has its constituency. One has only to look the audiences of Limbaugh, Coulter, Hannity, and Beck to see that. But it also has rigid limitations.

Many people–probably most people–are more attracted to a positive vision than diatribes. They want to be uplifted more than seeing their opponents belittled. That was Reagan’s genius. And this was the reason that millions of people uncomfortable with Obama’s policy positions voted for him nonetheless. In a real sense, Obama is more the inheritor of the Reagan revolution than most of today’s Republicans.

At this point, though, there are few true Reaganites on the political right in terms of those who offer better ideas and a positive vision rather than simply vitriol. A new Reagan on the right would face immense challenges since he or she would first have to rein in the powerful and vociferous hate industry before promoting a new, positive vision.

Until or unless this happens though, the Democrats are more Reagan’s descendents than the Republicans.

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Ronald Wilson Reagan (1911 – 2004) 40th President of the United States of America

Welcome to the Ronald Reagan Roundtable at Chicago Boyz.

A few presidents have put their stamp on this nation and even fewer have done so on the world. While the top tier historical position is held, by nearly universal accalamation, by Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a select number of presidents occupy the second tier of greatness, having by their words and deeds changed America and their times, for better and for worse. Among this group, I believe, is Ronald Wilson Reagan, who entered office as the oldest man ever to be elected to the presidency and left it when a new world was being born.

Ronald Reagan would be 100 years old today, having missed the mark by a mere seven years. It would be too much to say that this has been the century of Ronald Reagan, but we should take time on this anniversary to reflect on how Reagan impacted his century. What is the legacy of President Reagan? That is the question for this roundtable, one we hope to answer in the next ten days.

All Chicago Boyz bloggers, whose names appear on the margin – including but not limited to Lexington Green, Joseph Fouche, Jonathan, Charles Cameron, Onparkstreet and Dr Helen Szamuely -are free to weigh in on this question, but we are very pleased to also have some special guest bloggers as participants in this roundtable who I would like to take a moment and introduce:

Dr. Steven Metz: Dr. Steven Metz is Chairman of the Regional Strategy and Planning Department and Research Professor of National Security Affairs at the Strategic Studies Institute. Dr. Metz has a distinguished academic career and has served on numerous government and private sector advisory panels for national security and military affairs. He currently serves on the RAND Corporation Insurgency Board and blogs for The New Republic and National Journal. Metz. is the author of Iraq and the Evolution of American Strategy and is working on a book entitled “Strategic Shock: Eight Events That Changed American Security.”

Steve Schippert: is a co-Founder of ThreatsWatch and of the Center for Threat Awareness where he serves on the Board of Directors. Steve is the Managing Editor of ThreatsWatch and is the Producer of its FireWatch program. Steve served in the U.S. Marine Corps from June 1985 to June 1993, including service during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm to liberate Kuwait. Steve has also been published in the Washington Times and online at the Weekly Standard and the National Review and is currently a regular contributor at National Review Online’s MilBlog, The Tank. Steve is Crane Durham’s terrorism and national security expert on Durham’s Nothing But Truth daily national radio broadcast on the American Family Radio Network. Steve has also provided terrorism, security and military analysis on The Hugh Hewitt Show, The John Batchelor Show, The Martha Zoller Show and others, and his written work has been featured on MSNBC.

Joseph Guerra: is a former US Marine and Army intelligence officer who served in a civilian capacity in Berlin during the last decade of the Cold War. Guerra was involved as both an intelligence operations specialist and an operations officer in strategic overt humint collection and now blogs and posts on the internet under the moniker “seydlitz89″ and can be contacted at seydlitz89 at web.de. He lives with his family in northern Portugal and works in education. His latest paper is, “The Clausewitzian Concept of Cohesion as a Theory of Political Development,” which was developed from one of his posts on the Chicagoboyz Clausewitz Roundtable. His writings have appeared at Clausewitz.com, Defense and the National Interest and Milpub.

Shane Deichman: has spent nearly two decades in the national security field as both a scientist and a manager. He is a 1994 graduate of the U.S. Naval War College. He spent four years in the Fleet Marine Force as a science and technology advisor. Shane founded his own company in 2008 (EMC2 LLC, a consulting company focused on emergency management and disaster preparedness) and is a consultant at the National Missile Defense Agency. He blogs at Wizards of Oz, Dreaming 5GW, and Antilibrary and was a contributing author to The John Boyd Roundtable.

Historyguy99: is a historian, and U.S. Army veteran of the war in Vietnam. After having a 30 year career in global logistics, he earned an advanced degree in history and began to teach. Currently he is an adjunct history professor with the University of Phoenix and Axia College. He blogs as historyguy99 and hosts HG’s World, a blog devoted to history, connectivity, and commentary. He is a co-author of soon to be published, Activist Women of the American West and contributing author to The John Boyd Roundtable.

James Frayne: James Frayne is a London-based political consultant for Westbourne Communications who edits the blog, The Campaign War Room.

Kanani Fong: is the military outreach coordinator for the acclaimed Afghanistan war documentary RESTREPO and is a writer for PBS site Regarding War. The wife of an Army Surgeon, Kanani operates the popular and influential milblog Kitchen Dispatch

[Note: Cheryl Rofer has graced Chicago Boyz on several occasions and may participate in this roundtable as time permits]

Cheryl Rofer: Cheryl’s career has moved from the hard sciences to the social sciences, the hard sciences informing her analysis of international relations. With an A.B. from Ripon College and an M.S. from the University of California at Berkeley, both in chemistry, she has worked on the nuclear fuel cycle, fossil fuels, lasers, technologies for destruction of hazardous wastes and decommissioning of nuclear weapons, and management of environmental cleanups from New Mexico to Estonia and Kazakhstan. Her travels have taken her to both countries, and she is learning Estonian. She blogs at Phronesisaical.

Additional participants and bios TBA.

Let the roundtable begin!

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As previously announced, to commemorate the 100th birthday of President Ronald Wilson Reagan, there will be a Roundtable hosted here at Chicago Boyz starting February 6th, featuring all interested members of the stable of contributors at Chicago Boyz and an august panel of invited guest-posters from a range of philosophical perspectives and disciplinary backgrounds.

On Saturday night, I will put up the introductory post, highlighting our guest posters and making some remarks appropriate for the occasion, after which, participants are free to post as often or at whatever length they deem sufficient until February 16th, at which point the roundtable will come to a close. I will be linking to all posts here over at zenpundit.com and I will strongly encourage my readers to visit here and comment directly.

Sunday, is of course, aside from Reagan’s 100th birthday, the Superbowl. I think President Reagan would have liked that coincidence, given his most famous movie role, to have his centennial be associated with America’s hallowed day of football. It also allows me to say that with this Roundtable, regardless of the participants’ take or clash of views, we will accomplish one thing:

” WIN ONE FOR THE GIPPER!”

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I had intended to write an analytical post about the tumultuous events in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world and then I recalled that a) I do not speak or read Arabic b) am not versed in contemporary Egyptian politics c) am not an Arabist by academic training d) have never visited the Middle East and e) even those who are all of these things are often doing more news updating on twitter than deep analysis.

Egypt is the demographic and geographic center of the Arab Sunni world – but without the economic resources to make Egypt the power that Nasser once aspired that it would be in the heady era of postcolonial, nationalist, Pan-Arabism. So Nasser became a client of the Soviets, who could fund his ambitions and Egypt was a quasi- Soviet satellite until Sadat kicked the Soviets out for trying to undermine him in favor of a more pliant stooge, and accepted American patronage. Sadat’s assassination gave us Mubarak and his hated familial-military-party oligarchy (Ok, the military and party were largely there, but Mubarak’s rule has discredited them).

So, instead of my projecting what will happen next, I’ll devote this recommended reading to other bloggers and news sources who are freer with their conjecture:

Top Billing! Thomas P.M. Barnett Preliminary scenario voting results at Wikistrat’s Egyptian war room (updated 1630 EST Sun) and First ever Virtual Strategic War-Room Launched following Egyptian Chaos and the Wikistrat Virtual Strategic War Room site.

No Tom is not an Arabist either, but he does have experience with designing and participating in professional war games and futurism sessions inside the USG and out. The war room, to my casual observation, seems like an IT effort to synthesize expert analysis and crowdsourcing a primitive/structured prediction market. Interesting.

Abu Muqawama – An Open Letter to the Egyptian People, Egypt: A Humble Request.

Arabist.net The who’s who of the has-beens

Marc Lynch -Washington eyes a fateful day in Egypt and Obama’s handling Egypt pretty well

Col. Pat Lang-The Outlook for Egypt and the Middle East Is Grim By – Robert K. Lifton , More sensible attitudes on Egypt today, Omar Suleiman sworn in as VP

SWJ Blog - Days of Unrest (Update)

STRATFOR - The Egypt Crisis in a Global Context: A Special Report | STRATFOR

Fabius Maximus -Important information about the riots in Egypt and Why do we fear the rioters in Egypt?

HNN (Haider Khan) – Egypt, What Next?

Global Guerrillas – EGYPT: How to Lead and Open Source Protest , EGYPT: Mubarak’s Survival Strategy and EGYPT: Looting as Counter-Insurgency

Juan Cole -Egypt’s Class Conflict

Outside the Beltway -Egyptians Upset With U.S. Response To Crisis and Egypt and the Limits of US Power

That’s it.

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February 6th 2011 marks the centennial of the birth of America’s 40th president, Ronald Wilson Reagan and it is an appropriate time to reflect on the legacy of a man whose presidency altered the course of his party, his nation and the world. It is no exaggeration to say that events set in motion by the Reagan administration are still unfolding today and the ideas and values championed by Ronald Reagan continue to shape our public policies and frame our political discourse.

Therefore, to commemorate and debate this important legacy, the Ronald Reagan Roundtable, hosted here at Chicago Boyz will begin February 6th and end on the 16th.

Past Chicago Boyz Roundtables have featured discussions about specific books – On War by Carl von Clausewitz, Science, Strategy and War by Col. Frans Osinga and The Anabasis of Cyrus by Xenophon. They were well-regarded and thought-provoking enterprises. This roundtable will be a little more like the last one on Afghanistan 2050, in that there is no set book to evaluate but a wide-open and free-wheeling discussion of Ronald Reagan, his administration and the historical record.

Contributors will be free to address the topic narrowly or broadly, from Left, Center or Right, in scholarly or polemical tone, with a focus on the present or the past, at whatever length or number of posts they feel is required. Book reviews of the burgeoning number of titles related to Ronald Reagan and his times are also very welcome.

Participants will be encouraged to comment upon one another’s posts and interact with the readers who leave comments but that is not obligatory, contributions can also stand on their own.

Those interested in in joining the Ronald Reagan Roundtable should contact me, Jonathan or Lexington Green and we will make the arrangements with a final “head count” to be announced on or about February 1st

Hope to see you there!

“Do they mean peace, or do they mean we just want to be left in peace? There can be no real peace while one American is dying some place in the world for the rest of us. We’re at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it’s been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening. Well I think it’s time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers.”
– Ronald Reagan