A Belly Full of War

Now, a publication based in Lebanon, analyzed “the personal testimonies of 49 ISIS members, as broadcast on various Arab and international television stations” to determine what motivated them to join. “Its findings challenge much of the conventional wisdom currently prevailing: most notably, it found that earthly, material motivations – e.g. the pursuit of social status and financial wellbeing – are at least as significant in drawing recruits as religious ideology, and possibly even more so.”  Some of the testimonials apparently gave multiple results and are shown in the tables below

To the question what the ISIS recruits were seeking the answers were for the most part the old standbys of young men: fame, money, thrill, revenge.  Only 2 out of 46 testimonials emphasized “justice”.  Just the one came seeking redemption.

The proximate motivation of the fighters was also at variance with the conventional Western wisdom.  The biggest reasons were religious belonging (as opposed to metaphysical conviction).  If only one came for salvation, by contrast many acted from a sense of belonging to a social group.  They perceived themselves as defending their branch of Islam, performing the duty Jihad,  affirming Muslim solidarity.  They were fighting for the ashes of their fathers and the temples of their gods. In a world that preached multiculturalism, the ISIS recruits went to war for the most monocultural and sectarian of reasons.

Interestingly only 5 out of the 68 analyzed responses traced their anger to imprisonment or hatred of Eurocentric culture.  More people came in reaction to the War in Syria or the chance money than from some perceived beef at the hands of the West. In the hierarchy of provactions, Gitmo doesn’t even rate.

Interesting too were the differences in motivations by place origin, ISIS fighters from the MENA region came mostly for  status (22%) or thrill (22%), while Western recruits came to address a profound sense of alienation. Sixty two percent came to find their “identity”. This makes sense, the fighters from the region were poor, rootless men; “soldiers of fortune” as it were.  By contrast, the Westerners were more affluent youths looking to find themselves, have lost their identity somewhere in the Western schooling system, where they were waiting one supposes for another to be issued to them, only to find a blank stare.

Almost none of actual reasons for joining the Jihad correspond to the narratives pushed vigorously by the Western Left.  For example, Palestine (which figures so prominently in the Western narrative) is absent from the picture.  The enemy seems less the Jew than the other kind of Muslim.  The psychopathic element also plays a big role. A disturbing number of recruits came to kill people for the thrill of it.  Many came for whatever money they could make. Only among the Western recruits was there any motivation resembling the “root causes” the Western academia peddles with such certainty.

Of nearly equal interest to the psychology of conflict is an article in the Telegraph which challenges yet another common Western misconception: the idea that Muslims or Arabs are fundamentally indifferent to pain and suffering, a characteristic once ascribed to the black African.  The article says that after years of fighting, the Alawites of Syria are almost ready to throw in the towel because they just cannot go on. The hardship is just too great. “The Alawites, the Assad family’s sect, have seen up to a third of their young men killed in the Syrian conflict and mothers are now refusing to send their sons to war.”

In the Assad regime’s heartland, dead officers are sent home in ambulances, while the corpses of ordinary soldiers are returned in undecorated pick-up trucks.

Then come the press gangs: military recruiters raid houses to find replacements by force for the dwindling ranks of Syria’s military. ..

The scale of the sect’s losses is staggering: with a population of around two million, a tenth of Syria’s population, the Alawites boast perhaps 250,000 men of fighting age. Today as many as one third are dead, local residents and Western diplomats say.

Many Alawite villages nestled in the hills of their ancestral Latakia province are all but devoid of young men. The women dress only in mourning black.

“Every day there at least 30 men returned from the front lines in coffins,” said Ammar, who spoke to the Telegraph using a pseudonym to protect himself and his family.

“In the beginning of the war their deaths were celebrated with big funerals. Now they are quietly dumped in the back of pick-up trucks.”

The ultimate motivation for dodging the draft isn’t idealism, it’s escape from certain death. Through history commanders have been aware of the “breaking point”. It was calculated after World War 2 by army psychiatrists that 100 days of combat or 30% casualties were enough to disintegrate the average unit. William Tecumseh Sherman would have understood.  So would Joe Syria.  The Alawites have by now had such a belly full of war that they almost don’t care if they lose any more.  The scale of suffering has tipped the balance against the claims of patriotism, group identity and even pride.

Both Sherman and Curtis Lemay believed what modern journalism steadfastly rejects: the idea that enemy surrender, hence victory, is a product of the direct and immoral process of inflicting unbearable suffering.  In the pithy formula of Curtis Lemay: “if you kill enough of them, they stop fighting.”

Perhaps one of the reasons modern conflict lasts so long is that the mythmakers persistently  spread a narrative at variance with the facts.  The Obama administration is furious over apartments being built in Jerusalem, but pays scant attention to the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians trapped in the Yarmouk refugee camp, near Damascus.

Hundreds of Palestinians are believed to have been killed just since last week, when ISIS stormed the camp and took over nearly all of Yarmouk.

The UN’s ability to halt the fighting and allow the aid workers to deliver food, water and medicine to the increasingly desperate people of Yarmouk, Pierre Krähenbühl, commissioner general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) said on Monday, is “a test of the entire international system.”

As such, it has also become a test for the left.

In the past, when Israeli operations directed against Hamas claimed large numbers of Palestinian civilian casualties, the response from leftists abroad has been immediate, vocal, and keenly felt.

Protests against the prolonged Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip and the widespread injustices of the occupation of the West Bank have spread to campuses and institutions worldwide.

Leftists have organized mass demonstrations and a range of high-profile activities aimed at focusing attention on the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.

For Yarmouk, voices of protest have been all but nonexistent.

And the “voices of protest” will continue to be nonexistent until the narrators are themselves engulfed by the flames they had heretofore only viewed at a distance. When the trucks start delivering returning corpses to Marin County or the press gangs become active in Chevy Chase, that’s when the lies will stop.  Until then the Western way of war will be one of giving the foe time to recover, or hanging back precisely when he suffers the most. Unfortunately for the population in Yarmouk and most of the Middle East, the current crop of combatants are fighting old Sherman-Lemay way. Consequently they are going to gas, crucify, behead, barrel-bomb, burn, and ethnic cleanse each other until one side or the other quits.  They are going to fight in the same old, same old way.

The sad truth is that the people who join ISIS are the very same sort who thought that having a snazzy SS uniform and marching in parades were fun, which it was until it lost its luster by contact with the Red and US Armies. Human beings do not change much from one generation to the next. They only think they do — until they sit on a tack. George Santayana, a naturalized American who taught at Harvard, is widely remembered for two quotes: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” and “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

The latter is a restatement of the former.

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