Morality and Philosphy

Embracing the Crazy

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Only two strategic practitioners have covered themselves with glory in the past month:

If we accept  Professor Lawrence Friedman’s recent proposition that “strategy is the creation of power”, both now and in the present, than no one has strategized better than Mad Mo and Crazy Carlos. They both show an intuitive grasp of this piece of ancient strategic maxim: if all you have is the Crazy,  be the Crazy.

Your enemies will be so mesmerized by someone showing the Crazy in public that they’ll be drawn into your trap like lemmings to a lemming-zapper.

Mad Mo and Crazy Carlos look to be having the last laugh.

An honorable mention goes to Saddam Hussein, Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, and  James Tiberius Clapper. While Saddam and Kaddaffi are proven losers in making war on the people of other countries, they’ve done banner work making war on the people of their own countries. Odierno  successfully drew on Saddam’s plan for crushing a revolt in Baghdad during the battle for that city in 2008:

At about the same time Odierno was targeting the Baghdad beltway, he tasked his staff to find out how Saddam Hussein had defended Baghdad against the many secret cells and gangs that wanted to upend his regime. The answer came back: Saddam had always maintained a complex perimeter around Baghdad that on paper looked like a series of concentric circles. Saddam had posted his Republican Guard in various towns that ringed the capital, and inside the city, he had stationed his Special Republican Guard. If it had worked for Saddam, thought Petraeus and Odierno, it might work for them against the insurgents.

Saddam peaked before his time. He might have made a living as a COIN lecturer at COIN seminars with a few different career choices.

Hosni Mubarak was  apparently trying to run a play from the  Saddam playbook too but he’s no Muammar Qaddaffi.

James Tiberius Clapper wins his asterisk for  accidentally speaking the truth in a congressional hearing. Take pity on Clapper when he’s begging for COIN around downtown Washington after losing his own battle of the beltway.

The president may have made the list if he’d merely repeated the line “We expect all parties to respect the  Universal Declaration of Human Rights to which they are a signatory.” and refused to do anything more without a UN Security Council Resolution. Unfortunately BO gave into political pressure and indulged in his Nerd Quotes Eighties Action Movie Lines schtick which always falls flat. If he’d ducked behind the principle of  Wilsonian collective security he would have achieved the only certain strategic result Wilsonian collective security  ever guarantees: collective  inaction.

And that’s what his strategy was all along.

Maybe he’ll have better luck with his NCAA bracket picks.

Honor killings

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I had occasion today to give myself a quick refresher course on honor killings, one form of which is already present in the Torah as of Leviticus 21.9:

And the daughter of any priest, if she profane herself by playing the whore, she profaneth her father: she shall be burnt with fire.

and found myself once again noting that there is a substantial swathe of regions of the world where honor killings are found, and that where it is found (including in immigrant communities from those parts of the world) the practice is not confined to any one religious group.

Hence this DoubleQuote:

I think it is appropriate to consider honor killing a form of religious violence when the claim is made by those who do the killing that they are acting in the name of their religion — but that it is also important to distinguish such acts committed in a cultural context in which they are practiced across religions from acts that are the exclusive province of one religious tradition.

There are examples of honor killings which are performed in the name of Islam, and/or advocated by Islamic scholars — and the same could no doubt be said of other religious traditions — but honor killing as a genre is fundamentally more cultural than religious.

Sources: Brandeis study — BBC — Sydney Morning Herald

The analytic point:

From my point of view as an analyst, it is important to note and compare both religious and cultural drivers — neither avoiding mention of the one out of “correctness” — nor overlooking the other for lack of comparative data.

Obviously, Leftists’ “Hate Mongering” Caused the Frankfurt Shooting

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A shooter has opened fire on a bus carrying US military personnel at the Frankfurt airport. It looks like he killed the civilian bus driver and one American soldier. The killer reportedly “shouted Islamic slogans” as he fired.

In the past, I would have thought only the shooter himself, and perhaps some radical clerics from the Islamic world, bore any moral responsibility for the crime. However, our intellectual betters on the Left have graciously condescended to explain to us all that even seemingly innocuous political speech can drive individuals to lash out violently, and that therefore we all must hold those who engage in violence-promoting political speech strictly responsible for the violence itself.

For example, prior to the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords on January 8th of this year, I would have naively assumed that merely using the common motif of a crosshair in a political graphic could not possibly influence anyone enough to actually cause them to commit murderous violence.

Boy, was I wrong. The Left were nobly quick to educate us.

No less a luminary than that Nobel Prize-winning engine of reason Paul Krugman leaped into action within a couple of hours of the shooting itself. Krugman tore himself away from his glorious work to eruditely link the deceptively innocent graphic, and other non-leftists’ criticisms of the Left,  to the motivations of the shooter. Who can forget his sage sermon admonishing us inferiors to accept moral responsibility and mind our tongues?

You know that Republicans will yell about the evils of partisanship whenever anyone tries to make a connection between the rhetoric of Beck, Limbaugh, etc. and the violence I fear we’re going to see in the months and years ahead. But violent acts are what happen when you create a climate of hate. And it’s long past time for the GOP’s leaders to take a stand against the hate-mongers.

Krugman and the other leftists really opened my eyes. Who knew that political speech was so dangerous? I certainly didn’t but then I was educated in the sciences and not the liberal-arts, so my mind is obviously too puny to understand these things.

So, when I read about a European Muslim shooting at American soldiers, I immediately applied the lessons taught to me by the wise and benevolent Krugman.

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Gene Sharp

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[ cross-posted from Zenpundit, with thanks to Lex for the nudge ]

I was impressed by him in London in the early sixties.

Okay, I was young and impressionable. But others have noticed him more recently, too: Hugo Chavez accused him of being a conspirator with the CIA, and the Iranians thought he, George Soros and John McCain were in cahoots.

gene-sharp.jpg

Gene Sharp has been in the news quite a bit recently [1, 2, 3, 4], because he pretty literally wrote the book on non-violent resistance.

The young leaders of the Egyptian revolt that toppled Mubarak studied tactics with members of the Serbian Otpor youth resistance who topped Milosevic, Otpor studied tactics in the writings of Gene Sharp, specifically his 90-page pamphlet From Dictatorship to Democracy [download as .pdf]. Sharp wrote that handbook for use in Burma, where it was apparently translated at the request of Aung San Suu Kyi — who once cautioned her readers that that phrase they kept hearing wasn’t “jeans shirt”, it was “Gene Sharp”.

And before that, he’d penned his masterful 900-page, three-volume work, The Politics of Nonviolent Action…

I told you he was impressive.

Recommended reading:

From Dictatorship to Democracy is now available in Amharic, Arabic, Azeri, Belarusian, Burmese, Chin (Burma), Jing-paw (Burma), Karen (Burma), Mon (Burma), Chinese (Simplified Mandarin), Chinese (Traditional Mandarin), English, Farsi, French, Indonesian, Khmer (Cambodia), Kyrgyz, Pashto, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Ukrainian, Tibetan, Tigrigna, and Vietnamese.