Middle East

Can the USA successfully engage in 4GW? (Or even 5GW whatever that may be?)

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Who was it who said “how can I know what I think until I say it?” Substitute “say” with “blog”.

I had a comment on my own post about Iran recently. I said something off the seat of my pants, which I have been mulling since then:

The United States has suffered at the hands of what are called Fourth Generation Warfare opponents for some time now. Iran presents us with the opportunity to wage 4GW ourselves. John Boyd said that war is fought on the moral, mental and physical planes, and that the physical is the least important and least decisive. The Mullah regime is morally and intellectually bankrupt. It needs to be attacked on that level. The end game is something like 1989, where there are no NATO troops on the street, but the Warsaw Pact evaporates. A strong background military threat is imperative.

Now, what I mostly see about 4GW is stuff from William Lind or his spiritual father Martin van Creveld, in which the nation state is basically doomed to lose to 4GW opponents, assisted by knowingly or foolishly complicit people in civil society who are duped and coopted by the 4GWarriors. John Robb seems to think the global guerrillas will get more and more powerful until our current political organization crumbles and is replaced by something networked and post-Westphalian. Thomas X. Hammes at the end of his book suggests at least the possibility of a 4GW type of military which could be networked and agile, but it is more of a sketch than a full-blown set of proposed reforms. Other writers suggest various sensible reforms the military might adopt — e.g. Donald Vandergriff, and sometimes Ralph Peters.

But what I want to know is this: Can the US military, with or without the engagement of other parts of the government, with our without the assistance of other countries, initiate, wage and win a 4GW campaign? More narrowly, what would a U.S.-led 4GW campaign against the Iranian mullah regime look like? or, rephrased, can the “soft kill” or the “non-kinetic kill” be a set of actual policies with a viable chance of success, rather than (potentially) a mere cover for inaction? And finally, whatever set of policies, strategies, tactics and tools are employed to do the non-kinetic kill against the Mullah regime, does the 4GW or 5GW terminology add anything of value? Does it lend clarity, cause confusion, or do nothing at all?

Oren — Power, Faith, and Fantasy

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Oren, Michael B., Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present, Norton & Co., New York, 2007. 778pp.

History, at its most useful, steadies the nerves and provides perspective on the events splashed daily across TV screens and PC monitors. It should also give us a feel for the problems amenable to solution and those that are permanent (or, at the very least, enduring).

By these criteria, Michael Oren’s Power, Faith, and Fantasy is a history book that should be on the shelf of most American homes … and available at every public library.

The author has made an explicit attempt to write a history of America’s relations with the Middle East that serves the general reader rather than just an academic audience. Practically speaking, this means drawing more extensively on biography and the popular culture of each period of American history to illustrate relations with the Middle East. To better organize the book’s contents, he employs the three themes listed in the title. Power references American trading initiatives, commercial interests, and security concerns. Faith refers to the Christian and Jewish religious interests in the Middle East (as home to Holy Places, putative location for Christ’s reappearance, potential source of converts, and national homeland for the Jews). Fantasy describes the American representations of the Middle East, first triggered by the anonymous 1706 English translation of the Arabian Nights, and elaborated in subsequent years in many books, exhibitions, social fashions, and movies.

Oren weaves the impact of these three themes through the different eras of American history … from the turbulent post-Revolution, pre-Constitution time up to our own. Post-WW2 American involvement in the Middle East is already very thoroughly documented in English, so Oren provides a quick summary of the most recent period in his book. It’s a worthwhile coda but primarily serves those not already familiar with the details. The bulk of Power, Faith, and Fantasy focuses on the period 1776 to 1950.

Risking gross over-simplification of a very large and careful summary, I’d like to highlight the historical phases in America’s relations with the region, as presented by the author.

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“Is London’s future Islamic?”

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Via Rand Simberg comes this essay by Michael Hodges.

I can’t tell if the Hodges piece is parody. If not, he reminds me of a leftist anti-Semitic high-school history teacher I had. He too used that “people of the book” line, to knock Christendom for being more hostile to Jews than Islam is and to explain away Muslim mistreatment of Jews.

In fact the Muslim record, particularly the recent Arab-Muslim record, only looks good in isolated cases or by comparison with the worst abuses of old Christendom. The modern Christian world is astonishingly tolerant by historical standards. Christian institutions have shrunk away from national government while radical Islam seeks to perpetuate Islam’s historical political totalism.

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IEDs, Back in the Day

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Everything old is new again. Via Richard North comes this interesting discussion of innovative mine-detection and -clearing techniques used by the white Rhodesians against Mugabe’s insurgents.

See also this post and this post for an insightful and much broader discussion of British military capabilities and political/military errors in the Iraq war. (These posts are not recent but remain highly relevant.)

We are not proud of them

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Let me list all the people we are not particularly proud of in Britain at the moment. First off, are the politicians. Nothing new there, you might say. Whoever could be proud of politicians? Still, they seem to have messed up the aftermath of the Iranian hostage-taking and release in a particularly noxious fashion, not least because of their pusillanimity with regards to the boys in uniform. No, I don’t mean the Iranian Revolutionary Guard but our own boys in uniform, specifically the First and Second Sea Lords.

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