Cultural Sensitivity
Four American and two British servicemen died last week from “insider” attacks — they were killed by Afghan security forces — while an attack on Camp Bastion destroyed 6 Harrier attack aircraft and damaged more. The assault on an aviation base also killed two more men. Bill Roggio writes:
The members of the jihadist assault team were “dressed in U.S. Army uniforms and armed with automatic rifles, rocket propelled grenade launchers and suicide vests.”
Once inside the perimeter, the assault team “attacked coalition fixed and rotary wing aircraft parked on the flight line, aircraft hangars and other buildings.”
Fortunately, as the Bangkok Post reports, the United States is taking steps to combat insider attacks by issuing a culture guide. “Five thousand copies of a hastily written 28-page brochure have been distributed among 195,000 members of the Afghan army, most of them illiterate, in the latest attempt to clamp down on a phenomenon known as insider killings.” In the estimate of NATO, 3/4 of the attacks are spontaneous.
NATO attributes around 75 percent of the attacks to grudges, misunderstandings and cultural differences, so the Afghan ministry has taken matters into their own hands with avuncular advice for soldiers, even if they can’t read.
More than 10 years after NATO troops came to Afghanistan, Western habits — like winking, swearing and raising the middle finger — need to be spelt out to make sure Afghan troops in the deeply religious country do not feel offended.
“Even minor cultural differences can cause friction and misunderstanding,” says the “Brochure for Comprehending the Culture of the Coalition Forces” before listing taboos in Afghan culture that are seen as perfectly normal in the West.
“A coalition soldier might well walk in front of someone who is praying without realising it, or put their feet up on a table or desk so that they point at people in the room — do not take offence,” the pamphlet said.
Another is blowing your nose in public.
“This practice is very common among coalition member countries. If a coalition force member blows his nose in your presence do not consider it an insult.”
A further cross-cultural minefield is chatting about relatives and showing off pictures of wives and daughters.
One US officer says it is possible to give offense without even knowing it. All you have to do is make the locals realize that you don’t live in a straw hut at home and it fills them with rage.
Army Special Forces Maj. Fernando Lujan, who is currently a visiting fellow at the Center for a New American Security, said these rogue incidents could have been predicted based on lessons from years of working with Afghans. “Everyone is talking about green-on-blue attacks. That is something that we have had a lot of direct experience with in the field,” Lujan said Sept. 4 during a panel discussion hosted by the Center for National Policy, in Washington, D.C.
“Friction [has been] generated as a result of a large force presence,” said Lujan. The contrast between NATO and Afghan force size and wealth, too, can be overwhelming for some recruits, he said.
“When you have a force ratio of 100 Americans sitting on a base to 20 Afghans living in straw huts,” a sense of humiliation could drive an Afghan to commit a violent act, Lujan said. “We forget they’ve been living there for six or seven years with limited opportunities to see their families. And we’re there with all the advantages that we have,” he said. “It gets very easy to forget about what they think, consider their opinion and bring them onboard for planning,” Lujan said.
Incidents in Libya suggested that anything can set off a wave of murderous hatred in America. Ambassador Susan Rice called the attacks on the US consular offices there “spontaneous”. They just happened when the locals heard of a YouTube video which they presumably could not watch themselves for lack of a computer and Internet connection. Perhaps it was the inability to watch it due to the lack of WiFi that ‘humiliated’ them.
A deadly assault on a U.S. consulate in Libya was a spontaneous reaction to an anti-Muslim video, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations said Sunday, even as Libya’s president insisted the attackers spent months preparing and carefully choosing their date — the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks….
Rice’s depiction of the chain of events contrasted with one offered by Libya’s Interim President Mohammed el-Megarif, who said Sunday there was no doubt the perpetrators had predetermined the date of the attack.
“It was planned, definitely. It was planned by foreigners, by people who entered the country a few months ago,” el-Megarif said. “And they were planning this criminal act since their arrival.”
There are signs that another spontaneous event is brewing in Syria. Reuters reports cites a French physician from Doctors Without Borders who says that foreign fighters are pouring into the burgeoning civil war from all points of the compass.
In an interview with Reuters in his central Paris apartment on Saturday, the 71-year-old said that contrary to his previous visits to Homs and Idlib earlier this year about 60 percent of those he had treated this time had been rebel fighters and that at least half of them had been non-Syrian.
“It’s really something strange to see. They are directly saying that they aren’t interested in Bashar al-Assad’s fall, but are thinking about how to take power afterwards and set up an Islamic state with sharia law to become part of the world Emirate,” the doctor said.
The foreign jihadists included young Frenchmen who said they were inspired by Mohammed Merah, a self-styled Islamist militant from Toulouse, who killed seven people in March in the name of al-Qaeda.
Assad himself has consistently maintained that the 17-month-old insurgency against him is largely the work of people he refers to as “foreign-backed terrorists” and says his forces are acting to restore stability.
If a US consulate is sacked and burned in Syria after the fall of Assad it will doubtless be spontaneous. Another future surprise may be in the offing in Iran. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu says “Iran was just six to seven months away from being able to build a nuclear bomb, adding urgency to his demand that President Barack Obama set a clear ‘red line’ for Tehran in what could deepen the worst US-Israeli rift in decades.” He shouldn’t worry. Another culture guide will be issued and all will be well. Without the dastardly provocation of a YouTube video the Israeli-Iranian situation can be managed by buying the world a Coke.
The real culprit for everything — the producer of a YouTube video — is shown below.
I Ruined the President's Genius Plan
Although it has not received much play, a report from NBC relates the efforts of young Pakistanis who disagree with the spontaneity theory. They believe it is necessary to oppose the rise of theocracy and um, ah … outrage against America … in their own countries to prevent their countries from becoming entirely toxic.
Ali Abbas Zaidi knows all about that anger. When he went to school on September 12, 2001, he was shocked by what he found.
“Some of my friends, they were congratulating each other,” Zaidi says. “They were like, ‘Congrats — 3,000 people have died in America.’”
Zaidi, a soft-spoken 26-year old who was studying to become an aeronautical engineer, smiles in disbelief as he recounts the story.
“That was the changing point for me,” says Zaidi. “I was like, ‘How can you be so sick,’ you know? Being a human being that you’re happy on the death of 3,000 innocent people?”
Zaidi worked to trace back the dominant collective mindset he saw in so many of his peers. He found elements perpetuated early in life by the educational system, and reinforced at various stages by religious, social, and political leaders. It is a mindset, he says, that glorifies violence and conservatism, and leaves the country’s youth vulnerable to manipulation by ideological and cultural forces.
These Pakistanis are risking their lives for a delusion. There is no toxic meme threatening their countries. It was all spontaneous. There was probably YouTube in Pakistan back in 2001 but the West didn’t know about it.
Zaidi is obviously the victim of Islamophobia and will probably receive sensitivity training as soon as he can be helped. Nor should he work with Americans lest his name be recorded on some computer or file stored in a US Embassy which may then found by persons spontaneously attacking and burning the diplomatic compound. Fortunately for the United States, the adults are in charge and the success of President Obama’s Middle Eastern diplomacy is momentarily expected. To Zaidi: go to Bulgaria. It’s safer there.
We've Got the Jihadis Surrounded Now
Yes, another culture guide and the enemy won’t be able to escape.
Lay Thy Healing Hands Upon Them Barack, That They Mayest Forget YouTube
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But shouldn’t such a moderate Muslim stay in Pakistan to reform his religion? Isn’t that the plan – to work with the moderate Muslims?
My God I wish the world would wake up from its slumbers and confront this nightmare.
Sort of makes one wonder if turning the entire place into a large smoking hole would offend them any less.
1.) The “Zaidis” of the world are good human beings who want to make the most of themselves and do their part to leave things better than they found them.
2.) The “Zaidis” place and power in their home countries and native culture is small and, in light of recent events, is shrinking at an accelerating rate. Whatever slim chance they may have had of turning things around within that cultural context appears to be non-existent. Indeed, to even speak out is to make oneself a target.
3.) Through the gross strategic errors that we are compounding right now, -1 x 10E9 may become the only option left on the table at some point in our lifetimes.
Question: How do we keep the “Zaidis” of the world out of the middle of it, not to mention, the “Aysels”, the “Dalshads” the “Ameens” and so many others?
I made a point a few days back that a leader should not necessarily be assumed identical with the people he has control over. However, one must ask (and I am going to come across as “Captain Obvious” to a number of folks here) are these people identical with their culture? This is a stickier issue.
When some of my ancestors came to America from Ireland and Sweden a bit over 100 years ago, there was a uniform American culture with a clear set of distinctives, and most everyone knew what they were, regardless of education, social status, etc. The immigrants were (more or less) welcome but many of the “old ways” had to be left at the door as the price of admission, if you will. The name for this has become a dirty word: assimilation. Well, we can all see where the alternative has brought us with multiculturalism and the “salad bowl” model, where old and often negative cultural elements are not only preserved but encouraged at the expense of traditional American culture.
If we are to admit true refugees here, refugees from a sick, dying, and pathologically insane culture, how do we grant them refuge and at the same time remove that seed, or extinguish them here where they may have taken root while staying true to that foundational set of ideals and honoring our Constitution? I think that this is one of the really important questions of our time.
Big Brother had Emmanuel Goldstein. Barack Obama has N.B. Nakoula.
IMHO: this is all more than a _mystery_, 2Thes 2:
3 Let no one in any way
deceive you, for it will not come unless the
apostasy comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction, 4 who opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, displaying himself as being God. 5 Do you not remember that while I was still with you, I was telling you these things? 6 And you know what restrains him now, so that in
his time he will be revealed. 7 For the
_mystery_ of lawlessness is already at work; only he who now restrains will do so until he is taken out of the way. 8 Then that lawless one will be revealed whom the Lord will slay with the breath of His mouth and bring to an end by the appearance of His coming; 9 that is, the one whose coming is in accord with the activity of Satan, with all power and signs and false wonders, 10 and with all the
deception of wickedness for those who perish, because they did not receive the
love of the truth so as to be saved. 11 For this reason God will send upon them
a deluding influence so that they will
believe what is false, 12 in order that they all may be judged who
did not believe the truth, but took pleasure in wickedness.
“The real culprit for everything — the producer of a YouTube video — is shown below.”
Obama is showing a lack of cultural sensitivity to America’s 1st amendment.
Someone hand him a pamphlet.
Men in brown shirts arrive at midnight to haul away the “film maker” accused of (embarasing the pResidnet) making the video clip wich offended muslims
If we are to admit true refugees here, refugees from a sick, dying, and pathologically insane culture, how do we grant them refuge and at the same time remove that seed, or extinguish them here where they may have taken root while staying true to that foundational set of ideals and honoring our Constitution? #3 Highlander
Excellent observation.
Step 1 would be to return to a world view that appreciated and respected Western (Judea-Christian) tradition. Something special happened to bring about this “America” that Obama’s Democrats so much revile. That “special-ness” is what America must advocate and promote without apology. We cannot lead because our “leaders” do not believe in America.
What’s the alternative to American leadership based upon historic American values? Chaos. Babel
Welcome to the Obamanation future.
3. Highlander
In being gracious – “the immigrants were more or less welcome” – you are glossing over an important point about assimilation. Up here in Canada at least, when the Famine Irish staggered off the ships in Montreal they were spat upon. When the Clearance Scots arrived they were spat upon. When the Ukrainians arrived they received a similar treatment.
In spite of a rough reception, those who survived the journey did assimilate, did interbreed with immigrants from other places and from other cultures. They did this because assimilation brought survival, acceptance, social mobility and eventually prosperity and freedom.
Yes they were bitter at their initial treatment and they nursed grudges. Those largely went away in the generation that followed them. (Only Presbytarians and Methodists continued to fight each other for generations to come
).
My point is those immigrants felt and were looked down upon but they shouted a collective “screw you” and made something of themselves. Assimilation worked even for immigrants who were not made welcome.
You are right about multicultarism. It encourages immigrants to use real or imagined insults as barriers that reinforce social immobilty, diminish freedom and that produce inward looking mindsets that deny prosperity. Barriers whose disincentives are the exact opposite of the sometimes harsh incentives of assimilation.
Nice photo of the three stooges at the UN. That would be a great movie theme if it didn’t result in a world wide apocalypse. How many stupid overrated liberal genius women does it take to destroy civilization? We should know the answer soon.
Excellent article Richard. My only complain is that the sarcasm was so thick that it left stains on my screen. Oh well, that screen has had worse on it.
Highlander;
“I think that this is one of the really important questions of our time.”
For you maybe. The old and jaded don’t care. We just want them to stop killing us. If necessary killing all them will accomplish that. America and Islam are two scorpions in a bottle. One will live, one will die. I vote them. I’m not sure about you. Do you still maintain the delusion that we can talk it out?
Ever played fetch with a rabid dog? Way back in the dark ages a famous man said “You cannot reason a man out of a position he wasn’t reasoned into.
Islamic nutters are on a mission from Allah.. No amount of talking will change that.
My lad, you have gone native as the brits would say.
Current geopolitical theory is formed around the Peace of Westphalia. That creates the criteria used to determine what a nation/state is. Citizens share responsibility for the conduct of their nations and are legitimate targets. The Geneva conventions tried to change that by dividing citizens into combatants and non-combatants. Those concepts are slowly taking hold among nations that wage war every other century or so. The rest of the world honors them mostly in the breech.
I’m sure your buddy is a nice guy. I’m just as sure Britney Spears is no longer a virgin. The 2 kids were the clue. I don’t care what clued you in, since it is no more relevant to affairs between Islam and America then the status of Britney’s hyman. The World is full of nice guys. That isn’t the point. The point is killing them before they kill you. Winning hearts and minds is Bullshit. Scorch and salt the earth, leave the bodies for the crows. That is how you win. That is how you survive. Channel Attila the Hun not Petreus the Pussy.
“Grab ‘em by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow.”
- Gen. Curtis LeMay
Multiculturalism is nasty on a variety of levels.
It isolates ethnic groups from the mainstream culture. The are surrounded by “others” to whom they cannot relate and cannot trust. It renders them powerless as individuals and requires a professional caste of community organizers to mediate between them and the larger polity. This “helper caste” becomes permanently entrenched as they are mostly paid with taxpayer money, hence they have a vested interest in keeping the ethnics isolated, powerless and afraid. They are then prime candidates for political manipulation by politicians who can mobilize them for partisan advantage. To the extent that these communities balkanize they weaken the larger society among which they live but do not belong.
It’s sickening! Western Culture is so perverted and backwards, compassion thru strength is the only universally excepted method of earning respect thru Cultural barriers of any kind. It really is time for the West to fall or at least receive a solid knock down to bring back common sense!
““It’s really something strange to see. They are directly saying that they aren’t interested in Bashar al-Assad’s fall, but are thinking about how to take power afterwards and set up an Islamic state with sharia law to become part of the world Emirate,” the doctor said.”
I said it last year too, there was a report from a french intelligence agency that said that the rebellion wasn’t from genuine people anymore, like it was at the begining, but by islamists from foreign countries
http://www.cf2r.org/images/stories/RR/rr11-syria-report-january-2012.pdf
It really is time for the West to fall or at least receive a solid knock down to bring back common sense!
To learn any sort of lesson you need humility. You need to accept the supremacy of reality, or as some put the idea in the past, the omnipotence of God. Without humility you just blame reality, double down on your failed efforts to impose an arbitrary will on the universe.
Did Hitler learn after Stalingrad? Did Tojo learn after Midway? Did the Soviets learn after sixty years of failure? Will the Left learn after 100 years or more of catastrophe. No. Nein. Nix. Jamas. Never.
That’s cause they’re the only god in their universe. There’s nothing to “learn” except they didn’t try hard enough; didn’t raise taxes sufficiently or borrow enough money. The only lesson they learn is “it’s Romney’s fault”. It is some LA YouTube producer’s fault. But that it should ever be the result of their failures will never occur to them.
For elites that have gotten into this mode, there is no cure but the Wrath of God. This is not an especially Christian idea. You can use Karma or the Consequences of Reality as a reasonable synonym for the concept. The Wrath of God is what happens when you step off the Empire State building convinced that by flapping your hands you can fly.
Ironically the men-gods never learn their lesson at all, unless you count the millisecond before impact. They are just steamrollered by reality. Turned into motes of dust, their teleprompters, hangers-on, toadies and sycophants clustered around in useless array. They wind up in denial listening to the artillery come closer in a damp bunker. Or staring out of an office while the B-29s rain pretty fire from the sky.
The people who want to escape the Wrath of God have two options. First, preach Repentance, otherwise known as “wake the f**k up” or exercise Lot’s final gambit which is get the hell out of Dodge and Head for the Hills. Escape and evade. Don’t look back or you turn into a Salt Shaker, now banned in politically correct restaurants. If fifty righteous men can’t be found in Sodom — now translated to 50 bigoted men — then try to survive. So that, when all the smart geniuses have splattered themselves on the sidewalk, you can get a job as a street sweeper.
That’s the way it has been through history. Real simple but nobody ever remembers.
A commenter on another thread says, “I will come out and address the elephant in the room. The world will not know peace until Islam had been destroyed.”
I disagree. In the 19th and for the most of the 20th century Islam was a moribund faith. The Turks tried abandoning it, or curbing it to survive. What might be true is this:
This transformation happened in living memory. Islam was then the religion of pirates or backward men. Now it is beyond reproach; it’s holy objects must be handled with white gloves; dukes and duchesses in Britain and models in the West vie for conversion to Islam. It’s all the rage,like hair gel or jeweled headbands. Heck, maybe even senior American officials are secretly sympathetic or have converted to Islam.
Why? Well why not? What’s the alternative? Xenu? Any belief is awesome to the man who believes, functionally, in nothing. Nihilism is a vacuum and anything will fill it. Modern political correctness hates the West because secretly it hates itself.
That must change, not by learning to love nihilism but by leaving it. We need to look to the heavens and not into people’s anuses to advance as a civilization. There is an urgent need to seek truth from facts instead of dredging it out of Talking Points. There is vital requirement to exalt those those make rather than those who leech.
Until that is fixed, Islam will gain. Gain not because of its strength but on account of the superlative imbecility of modern politically correct culture. The West has lost its mind. It has gotten dementia. So if it’s pocket is being picked by the no-account grifter who had a flea circus in the corner, the root cause is not the grifter. It’s the dementia.
The real sources of the Western malaise are mimetic. I hesitate to use the word “spiritual”, but mimetic will do. Once we recover ourselves, all will be well. Even the hardest core Muslims will avoid the West. But if it doesn’t recover its senses, nothing can save it.
You could also argue that the seculars have not considered ‘natural selection’.
wretchard: I hope you don’t mind me re-posting a version of the poem I posted last month….But.
——————————
The End of [an] History
That Pharaohs so great worked their magical slates to build upon shifting dead sands,
The ages serve up the lash and the grime of ten million invisible hands.
Bold god-kings hath shewn how their soaring bright tombs might resist millenia and Moor,
But their polished pyramid stones were stripped clean an’ fed whole, for the homes of new holy lords – ‘midst the hovels of Cairo’s sad whores.
Though the glare of a Sphinx watches o’er and winks, at the works of those turned to dust,
A bronze cannon shot blew out its snot by a crew, of some artilleryman emperor’s lust.
Lo those proud ancient tombs, in whose shadows and gloom, had shaded both great and the small,
Face a brotherhood of hate who in rancor debate, Pharaoh’s most pious and final of falls.
From Bamiyan’s ghosts and Timbuktu roasts, to the green shores whence Dutch spicers sailed,
From even the city renamed once anew on the Byzantine bones of empires that failed.
As our epoch awakes, Sauron’s Mordor remakes steel Nazgul and legions of trolls,
Fresh worm-tongues rise forth, and spew up their discourse, to the howls of wargs who relish their roles.
So what will arise from the rubble heaped high should the hot-headed dim-witted wolves seize the day?
No one can tell but for the ‘orrible smell, as the stories of Egypt go to hell and away.
…And everywhere else the crescent moon god is hailed, for a lack of folk who’ll stand tall,
Our children will weep as the darkness doth creep, ‘cross a world transfixed in its thrall.
There may yet be a thing, o’er Kipling gods crack a grin, with sardonic “I told ya so” smiles,
…It’s that “souls who submit to what false gods permit, are surely forever reviled”.
At the junction of de-Nile and the sharks of red seas – where injustice meets up with man’s sin in its glee,
A bound englishman sits still on his cloud with his chips – intent upon drowning in gin that is free.
It really is sickening, Middle Eastern countries (Muslim) believes the West backwards and Twisted, practicing the Damned Pagan practices from eons ago, Jews and Christians who fought tooth and nail against those Pagans Practices as they expanded their territories and “spread” God’s Word, Now Christians guarantee that which their founds die against, they (Muslim) surely must believe our fore fathers spin in their graves! God laughs as he Stabs at Western Culture from the gates of Heaven…
The arrogance of Western liberals. They tell muslims what Islam is. They tell christians, jews and buddhists what their religions are. They tell conservatives what conservatism means. They tell the people on the ground that a coordinated series of attacks using American uniforms were spontaneous. They feel free to opine on every subject from finance to meteorology, with no regard to the facts.
If there were consequences they wouldn’t do it. We are regressing from the Age of Science to an Age of twisted faith. It is as if Newton Gallileo and William of Ockham were blown up with the Baniyam Buddhas.
The way Libyan President al-Megarif is defining the problem would seat Libya in the War on Terror, thus demanding greater American involvement in Libya as the solution and calling into question Obama’s hands-off strategy to the Arab Spring. Whereas Ambassador Rice is attempting to define the problem so the incident is a one-time ‘spontaneous’ incident and therefore no basis for greater American involvement beyond the incident itself nor indictment of Obama’s strategy. Last year, Obama pointedly contrasted the American roles in Libya and Iraq. But Libya is now taking a step closer to asking the US to intervene on the ground. The US seems to be running from that approaching entreaty for help. Does this remind anyone else of the US State Department spokesmen during the Rwandan genocide who did their best to label the genocide as anything but “genocide”?
Stoicheon #11:
“Islamic nutters are on a mission from Allah.. No amount of talking will change that. My lad, you have gone native as the brits would say.”
Wow, thanks for going easy on me. I was fully expecing to get hammered :0)
I will grant you that one of the great dangers of my line of work in CA is “going native.” Obviously, we may feel differently about the issue but I respect your right to say something to put me in check if you think that I am out of line. Thank you for speaking up.
I tried to lay my first post out as a good logical argument. Our range of strategic options is closing, leaving us to be driven by external events. My intent with the question is two-fold: 1.) to clearly define the present set of circumstances, and 2.) to pose a question to much better minds than mine and ask if there is a way to diminish the closure of those existing strategic options and, by the grace of God, possibly expand that range again someday.
On a more personal level, let’s say that I get called up and sent to some garden spot in the next few months to find my happy rear behind a MK-19. To be honest, if somebody sent me to Benghazi with one right now, my only question would be, “So who is going to be bringing me more truckloads of ammo and how fast can you get it to me? Oh, and can you give me the biggest MRAP you can find so I can crush the life out of their twitching bodies, too?” Those bastards have had their chance, and only thing they deserve to see is my 5-megawatt smile as I mow down every single thing for 1,500 meters in front of me. Yeah, they lose.
I am a huge fan of Curtis LeMay, by the way. The Russians weren’t that afraid of JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but they were scared to death of LeMay, and they had every right to be. My grandpa was in SAC back in the day and he loved him, too.
However, say I was ordered back into my previous location in Iraq with orders to do the same, in an area where from my experience I have only been provided courtesy and the same sense of humanity that I experience every day here at home, I would ask another question: “Provide me a moral justification for opening fire with that MK-19 and mowing down hundreds of people, just because of their religious affiliation.”
Without making a distinction between individuals and their leaders, individuals and their cultures, and individuals and their religions, this is where we find ourselves. Is there an opportunity to provide the good, the humane, an “out” prior to showing the rest of the indigenous population why the American way of war always prevails in the end? Or, as was the case in World War Two, do we deal with those individuals among the surviors?
I had a girlfriend whose family in Japan (she was 5th-Generation Japanese-American) was incinerated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On the other hand, my great uncle had just fought for Manila with the 11th Airborne, and my maternal grandfather, who had survived four combat drops as a glider pilot in the ETO was on leave and with orders to report to the Pacific afterwards. None of them expected to ever see home again. Mel was a sweet, sweet, girl. I did not and will never shed a tear for her family. That is war, and all I have to say is they never should have bomber Pearl Harbor and dragged us into the mess. If there were any doubts, sir, you now know where I stand.
I really have no opinion about it either way. I would be very happy to go stack some bodies right now (although goodness knows why anyone would want to call back this fat old man!) I just want to be clear about the prospects for the aforementioned strategic options, whether the reaction you posit is necessary at this time, and what justifies that course of action? As a soldier yourself, I think that you can appreciate that I do not like having to be in a position to “react” to a situation. I like to have a range of plans and opportunities to control the initiative instead. So I don’t see my case as “going native” as much as wargaming things in my head and trying to understand our full range of options and try to expand them.
V/R
Highlander
Don’t look back or you turn into a Salt Shaker, now banned in politically correct restaurants. If fifty righteous men can’t be found in Sodom — now translated to 50 bigoted men — then try to survive.
We need to look to the heavens and not into people’s anuses to advance as a civilization.
Once we recover ourselves, all will be well. Even the hardest core Muslims will avoid the West. But if it doesn’t recover its senses, nothing can save it.
You’re in fine form this week. This is good stuff. From time-to-time I flatter myself, thinking that I can cut loose with some good preach’in, but this is a notch above.
By the way, what have you been putting in that pot of coffee?
Remember this video of our powerful Sec. of State giggling after she and her sorority sister’s,(Rice, Poweres)personally killed Gadhafi.
http://youtu.be/Fgcd1ghag5Y
Leslie Stahl seems downright orgasmic.
My (ex?) girlfriend is ethnic Han. She will cry loudly if you insult her heritage in any way. I rather consider myself white, in spite of everything, so it’s hard for me not to upset her on matters regarding culture.
“What’s the alternative? Xenu?”
The entire Old Testament is a space opera. According to Rabbi Chasdai Crescas, the Talmud claims “God flies through 18,000 worlds”, whatever that means. So perhaps the stories told by LRH are a fair interpretation of our past.
Highlander,
The dilemma you post brings to mind the Marc Sageman article you recommended: http://www.fpri.org/enotes/20041101.middleeast.sageman.understandingterrornetworks.html
Sageman concludes, “So in 2004, Al Qaeda has new leadership. In a way today’s operatives are far more aggressive and senseless than the earlier leaders. The whole network is held together by the vision of creating the Salafi state. A fuzzy, idea-based network really requires an idea-based solution. The war of ideas is very important and this is one we haven’t really started to engage yet.”
The “war of ideas” is a Gramscian approach, and according to Sageman, it should be prominent in the War on Terror. To compete in a ‘war of ideas’, we first need a good story – a social-political narrative for the Middle East. Second, we need to stick to our story. When the narratives clash, we need to proselytize our narrative with full conviction. The Islamists obviously are good at telling their story, with as much blood as they need to ‘show not tell’. We have been poor storytellers, especially when the illiberal Democrats were viciously sabotaging the liberal narrative Bush tried to tell the Middle East.
The pretextual manufactured outrage over a months-old obscure, buffoonish youtube clip is a battle in the ‘war of ideas’. It should have been used by Obama as an opportunity to counter-attack with a ‘teachable moment’. The same Democrats and MSM who aggressively reframe everything associated with Romney and the Republicans should have reframed the controversy to advance the liberal narrative and confront the Islamist narrative. Instead, our first reaction was to apologize for our values within the enemy’s frame and back away from the competition of ideas.
In the war of ideas in this clash of civilizations, our liberal Western civilization must be progressive again, as when our ideas shaped the 19th and 20th centuries. Don’t apologize to them. Don’t concede their narrative. Be missionaries and convert the people to our civic religion.
Not to go all Freudian on y’all, but most of this crap in the Islamic world has its roots in one thing: sex. Islamic society has developed so that the lion’s share of money, power, and the sexual rights to women are held by a minority of wealthy older men.
(For example, are any of you aware that the bride price in Khost Province of Afghanistan is between $15-20K USD? Do you know how long it takes your average unskilled laborer to make that amount of money? Even if they go to Dubai?)
In this way, there are always hordes of poor, angry, ignorant, sexually frustrated young men available for deployment to go fight jihad. I think that’s one of the underlying issues with these Green on Blue attacks in Afghanistan. Having served as a female Army officer I have witnessed firsthand what sexual jealousy can do to men in a combat zone – and it’s ugly. So if I’m Mahmoud from some goat herding, mud hut village with no electricity or running water in the middle of nowhere Afghanistan and you suddenly plunk me down near some US super FOB, I’m going to have a hard time adjusting to watching Western male and female soldiers interacting. I am also going to feel inadequate looking at the amount of wealth on display at one of those FOB’s because it represents everything I’ll never have, including enough money to afford a wife.
The solution? There isn’t one. These societies have been this way for hundreds of years and aren’t likely to change anytime soon. Containment and isolation is our only option at this point.
Eric @ 26:
Quoting Sagemann: “The war of ideas is very important and this is one we haven’t really started to engage yet.”
Marc Sagemann has been controversial in counterterrorism circles, but I have always respected his work because of his unique background and qualifications and his use of sophisticated statistical and network analysis to test hypotheses and come up with well-corroborated conclusions that are subject to disproof, and therefore meet a scientific standard. One may argue with the quality of his data and models (I don’t) but it is not all based on subjective feeling or twitching amygdalae. I like hard facts and data. But some of his conclusions remain subjective.
The problem is that the world has changed immensely in the eight years since he wrote that article. Where there might have been hope to get a convincing message out to the masses of the Islamic world at that time, the balance has tilted against us and the damned thing is now sliding off of the table. Br0 may impress himself in front of the mirror with his flowery words and he may still tingle Chris Matthews’ leg, but the hard men of the Middle East and elsewhere are not impressed. And like it or not, they are the ones that call the shots, define what is acceptable in their culture, and that drive the local narrative.
There are a lot of people there who would like to buy into our message, but they have seen like-mided neighbors kidnapped, shot, raped, dismembered, burned out of their homes, forced to move, etc. by that small percentage of thugs, under the control of the “hard men.” “I win, you lose.” That is how it ususally works over there. I think that one important point where Stoicheon and I might agree is that any sort of Gramscian “War of Ideas” will not work in this instance. The West was uniquely vulnerable to the Gramscian model due to our liberal values and tolerance. The hard men will just stick a knife in your throat. It may have worked if begun decades ago when the West, and the US in paticular operated from a position of strength and almost universal respect. Through the choices of our national leadership, we no longer command that respect from our target audience who know that, at worst, they only have to wait us out. Also, time is not on our side before somebody miscalculates over a perceived vulnerability and kills a lot more Americans than they did on September 11th. The week after that is really going to suck for a lot of people, should that happen.
The Wilsonian model has been our preferred method of fostering democracies, but as I have recently noted elsewhere on BC, based on my own limited experiences I must conclude that this model has failed and is just burning up money we don’t have and lives that we will never replace. The conclusion, which I arrive to reluctantly, is that the nations of the Middle East will not be reformed before their culture drives someone in power there to do something that will ensure their utter and merciless destruction.
Increasingly, I am thinking about those caught in the middle. I am not sure if I would say that many of the people I met in Iraq love America, but a great many of them are absolutely smitten with the IDEA of America. I think that ANY of them would make better citizens than the despicable TWANLOC calling the shots right now in the administration, faculty lounges, and so many of our cultural institutions. All that I am asking if there is any way to bring them here, out of harm’s way, before the multi-megaton hammer falls on that area of the world. Unless there is an absolute miracle like a democratic revolution in Iran, this is where we are headed. But, we can all see where a plan for change based on “Hope!”(TM) has gotten us. Hope isn’t a &$@#*%$ plan.
As Old Salt pointed out, our only long-term hope is to renew that idea of America, and take it back from those who have stolen the narrative and replaced it with something that a thorazine addict would blush at. This transformation could occur in a much shorter timeframe than “messaging” the Middle East could hope to achieve, but it is still an uphill battle. Our respect in the world was not based solely on our military strength. The Soviets had the same strength, greater in some ways. Our respect was based on our restraint in using that strength when possible, and our ruthlessness in using it when no other recourse was possible. But after it was all over, we were the first ones in to put the pieces back together, and those are the only instances when the Wilsonian model worked for us. That restraint was driven by our unique national character, our historical narrative. If it turns out that we have decoupled our national character, our American “soul”, from our mind-boggling military strength, where will that leave us at the end of the day?
Looking at the short-term, the only hope is for the “Stupid Party” to grow some sack and start beating Obama and cronies over the head, for the US to undertake calculated punitive strikes against selected targets (note that I did not say “proportionate”), and let the hard men of the world know that they have one last chance to quit screwing with us and play ball. Now. We are harder than they can even imagine. That is a quality that they will respond to, but only if they are absolutely convinced that we will follow through.
Since short-term options are the only ones open to us for preserving or having the prospect of expanding strategic options, calculated punitive interventions (i.e.–boots and bayonets, not cruise missiles) are probably the only realistic option open. Count on the clown posse to either chicken out or be so absorbed in their mutual arrogance to let this option slip away, too. In that case, where will the remaining strategic options leave us once we have taken them, and how will our more sophisticated enemies in the world use that resiulting position to their advantage and marginalize us? This is what we need to be thinking about, and nobody is doing it.
On second thought, the smartest thing anybody can do is keep me as far away as possible from that MK-19. I’m starting to get old and senile and might forget which way I am supposed to point it. But, by God, it sure looks pretty when those 40-mm grenades just flower all around your target! :0)
E2 @ 27:
As Ralph Peters pointed out a few years ago, the Muslim world is “afraid of the girls”, and as you have experienced to a degree that I will never fully appreciate, it a huge driver of the problems that we face. I just fear that we are long past the point where containment and isolation may be effective.
Thank you for your service, ma’am, and come home soon.
That’s four and I am out.
This is incomplete and I doubt it is all that well-thought, but it seems now to me that the West has four choices. One is what we are doing now; gradually turn our side of the world into Oceania, with surveillance of every aspect of our lives and jackbooted thugs of subhuman intelligence infesting every transport terminal in the name of security – and failing to stop the violence because PC stops anything sensible such as profiling.
Next is to submit to the mediavealists of Islam, and for all our women to get used to wearing burkhas. (Yes, I know it’s unacceptable.) Option 1 shades into this, if only because the barbarians breed faster than we do.
Third option is Armageddon. It would work, no doubt at all. However, I don’t like it. One reason is the unpleasant side-effects such as fallout, and the other is the psychic shock caused by slaughtering 1.5 billion people in the name of freedom. In other words, I don’t give a **** what it would do to the enemy but do fear what it would do to us.
Fourth option is to cut down the money tree that feeds the monster. This IMHO does not mean “drill baby drill” for two reasons. One is that fossil fuels do have an unquantifiable effect on the climate – or will if we use enough, and we don’t know what “enough” is even approximately. The other is that even with much lower oil prices there will still be plenty of cash to cause trouble with – especially as the people in the ME currently causing the trouble don’t care about investing to help their own people. In fact, they would rather not.
So where does that leave us? We need to get the world off the oil teat altogether. Which means doing some really serious work on workable alternatives; this does not include wind, ground solar or tokamak fusion, but does include wave and tidal power, OTEC, biomass growth, oil-bearing algae, thorium fission (and the reactors can be made failsafe!), Polywell and/or focus fusion, and the great grandaddy of them all – SSPS.
The last of these options gives civilisation billions of times the resources it now has, and living space for quadrillions, as a byproduct – and also safety from various disasters that might affect Earth. But whether or no, once oil has been made irrelevant we can then confiscate all the assets bought with unearned oil revenues, mine the Gulf, blow up all the pipelines leaving the ME – and let them try to find a way to eat oil. The confiscation could easily be justified (should we want to bother) as reparations for 1,388 years of war.
Highlander @29 -
I don’t think it’s just “fear” of girls, it’s an overall inability to form a normal relationship with a woman, any woman, that screws these guys up so badly. From the day they are born, Muslim boys are often treated like little princes, especially by their mothers, and allowed to lord it over their sisters. I have witnessed Afghan boys beating the crap out of their sisters and other little girls their age while adults looked on unconcerned. In Arab culture, it’s common for women to really dominate their sons’ lives, culminating in picking their wives for them later on down the line. Talk about emasculating.
There is no cultural handbook in the world that can prepare our troops to deal with these kind of psychological/sociological/cultural differences. We might as well all be from different planets. And that’s why these Green on Blue attacks are only going to increase.
Oh, and I’m out of the Army now (but still in a war zone…how’d that happen?), but you’re very welcome, it was my pleasure to serve.
Fletcher #30:
OPtion 5: A genetically engineered disease that will reduce Arab birth rates to near zero. Get rid of the Arabs and the Muslim problem either goes away or becomes manageable.
I am convinced this will occur. It is just a question of who does it first. The alternative is the Marching Morons soution in which the intelligent people exterminate the other 90% of the humna race.
“Zaidi worked to trace back the dominant collective mindset he saw in so many of his peers. He found elements perpetuated early in life by the educational system, and reinforced at various stages by religious, social, and political leaders. It is a mindset, he says, that glorifies violence and conservatism, and leaves the country’s youth vulnerable to manipulation by ideological and cultural forces.”
Let’s try a little rewrite;
Joe the Plumber worked to trace back the dominant collective mindset he saw in so many of his peers. He found elements perpetuated early in life by the educational system, and reinforced at various stages by religious, social, and political leaders. It is a mindset, he says, that glorifies violence and liberalism, and leaves the country’s youth vulnerable to manipulation by ideological and cultural forces.
Annoy Mouse – Notice that Joe Plumber was savaged by Fox News for saying we should build a fence and start shooting, a sentiment shared by millions of conservatives. No one honestly believes he meant shoot indiscriminately, but to give ample warning and apply stand-your-ground principles against fence jumpers. That’s reasonable.
Fox did what it was designed to do: suck in the rightwing, then castrate them at key moments. Anyone who threatens the agenda of think-tank occultists who decide America’s fate over sushi and golf games will end up like Joe did. There is no true political system in the US. It’s a sham worse than Iran, Iraq, and North Korea combined.
@ 28. Highlander
“The problem is that the world has changed immensely in the eight years since he wrote that article. Where there might have been hope to get a convincing message out to the masses of the Islamic world at that time, the balance has tilted against us and the damned thing is now sliding off of the table.”
Reminds me of one of my first blog-posts, also from 2004: http://learning-curve.blogspot.com/2004/10/contextualizing-argument-over.html. I believed Iraq, not Afghanistan, was the central battle in the War on Terror and the key to winning the war of ideas. It was a race and it was critical to create a liberal foundation in Iraq within the ‘golden hour’ (medical sense) after we took down Saddam’s regime.
What if in hindsight we had transitioned immediately in 2003 from major combat to the 2006-07 COIN ‘Surge’, instead of fumbling away the ‘golden hour’ with Bremer’s CPA? What if the military that handily defeated Saddam’s forces wasn’t also handicapped by the ‘Powell Doctrine’ in our post-war occupation capability?
“The West was uniquely vulnerable to the Gramscian model due to our liberal values and tolerance.” / “I must conclude that this model has failed and is just burning up money we don’t have and lives that we will never replace.”
The Asian countries that reformed in the 20th century on our watch didn’t start by sharing our values, either. For example, few believed in 1950 that South Korea, with its alien culture and corrupt government, would ever justify our sacrifices defending it. We stuck it out, though. But then, we didn’t compete with political Islam in Asia, just another Western ideology in Communism. Qutb’s political Islam has the narrative advantage of adjusting for its liberal and Marxist rivals.
Sustainability has been an unsolved hurdle from the start. That’s a problem when even optimistic projections for liberal peace-building call for decades of close engagement. I wonder whether a smarter, more efficient and cheaper, and sustainable liberal intervention model can emerge from the past decade’s experience – peace-building with Moneyball.
“how will our more sophisticated enemies in the world use that resiulting position to their advantage and marginalize us? This is what we need to be thinking about, and nobody is doing it.”
Yes.
“As Old Salt pointed out, our only long-term hope is to renew that idea of America, and take it back from those who have stolen the narrative and replaced it with something that a thorazine addict would blush at.” / “let the hard men of the world know that they have one last chance to quit screwing with us and play ball. Now. We are harder than they can even imagine.”
These two go together. In the Why We Fight, Western progressives need to be self-superior and competitive again like we were in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Can we be progressive if we do not allow ourselves to degrade our competitors as regressive? If, as it stands now, Western progress is discredited for the forceful displacement of native cultures like the American Indian tribes, then what is the ethical difference between that shamed history and championing a liberal world order today against autocratic and/or Islamist regimes like Syria, Iran, Saddam’s Iraq, or the Taliban in Afghanistan and their fellow travelers like al Qaeda? To compete, liberals must believe again our civilization is the vanguard of social-political evolution and the regressive enemy must be made to submit to our world order.