Category Archives: Counter-insurgency war

Good enough for government work.

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What follows is the sort of quibbling over details that appeals only to scholars. However, historians believe that human affairs are “contingent.” That is, even if humans are storm-tossed in some vast sea of historical processes, the actions that individuals take or do not take always have consequences.

Commenting on the troubles in Yemen and Libya, Professor Daniel Benjamin (US State Department counter-terrorism co-ordinator, 2009-2012, and now a professor at Dartmouth) said that “The forces that drove the Arab Spring [of 2011] were of such enormous dimensions that it’s unrealistic to think any president or any group of leaders could steer these events.”[1] It is possible to take a different view.

For one thing, the “forces that drove the Arab Spring” have been totally mastered. Protests in Morocco, Algeria, Jordan, Oman, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Djibouti, and Somalia all soon ended after largely cosmetic concessions by the authorities.   Something harsher was required in in Egypt and Syria. Under pressure from the crowds in a few urban areas and from the United States, the Egyptian military dictatorship bent but did not break. Now it has reasserted its power, using the threat of Islamism as its justification. Seeing what was happening in Egypt, the far more ruthless Assad government in Syria took a strong line with the urban malcontents.   They malcontents are mostly in refugee camps at the moment. What the Syrians were left with was an uprising among conservative Sunni Muslims who have been joined by a flood of Islamist foreign fighters, just as the insurgency in Iraq attracted hordes of Islamist jihadis. What does Islamism have to do with the American liberal vision of the “Arab Spring”?[2]

For another thing, the United States played an active role in creating the chaos that now engulfs both Libya and Yemen.   The Obama Administration exceeded its mandate from the UN when it expanded its involvement in the Libyan rebellion from protecting civilian lives to toppling the Gaddafi regime through air-power.[3] Then the U.S. walked away when the overthrow of Gaddafi opened a Pandora’s box of troubles. Much more reasonably, the U.S. also supported the initiative by the Saudi-dominated Gulf Co-operation Council to push “president” Ali Abdullah Saleh out of office. Here alone the Americans had a clear goal: to preserve the ability to hunt Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula jihadis.

As the NYT headlined the story in which Daniel Benjamin was quoted, “Killing Terrorists May Be Best U.S. Can Hope For.” That’s a modest goal. Not transformative of the entire Middle East. Not a lasting solution to the problem of radical Islam. Not the sort of thing to win someone a Nobel Peace Prize. But manageable within the limits of our power.

[1] Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane, “Killing Terrorists May Be Best U.S. Can Hope For,” NYT, 17 June 2015.

[2] See: “Arab Youth,” September 2014.

[3] It also helped poison Russian-American relations. See: “Obama versus Putin,” September 2014.

What would Bismarck drive? 2.

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Israel (and therefore the United States) is going to have to decide some things pretty soon.[1] First, would Israel rather have a whole Syria under Assad (weakened for a long time by its terrible civil war) or would it rather have a Syria partitioned between a mini-state headed by Assad and the rest of Syria run by ISIS? Second, is there anything that Israel can do to shape the outcome? I don’t know. Israeli intervention might bring down on the head of Israel all sorts of hostility from the Arabs, just because. The governments of Jordan, Syria, and Egypt probably wouldn’t object to Israel beating up on ISIS. How would Saudi Arabia view such action? Then, there is the tension in many Arab countries between “the Street” and “the Palace.” How would ordinary people respond to Israeli attacks, regardless of how sensible those attacks might seem to the rulers?

What will happen inside the Cauldron? ISIS can (but may not) tear apart the carcasses of Iraq and Syria. Then its advance slams up against both strong states (Turkey, Iran, Jordan, Israel) and hard cores of enemy peoples with their back to the wall (Kurds, Shi’ite Iraqis, Alawite and Christian Syrians). At this point, the going will get a lot tougher. Will ISIS pause to regroup or will it attempt to maintain the momentum? I don’t know. They’re a bunch of fanatics. They might try to topple a bunch of other governments. On the other hand, the original armed expansion of Islam came in stages. Maybe that analogy will authorize ISIS to pause to consolidate its base in preparation for a renewed advance. If ISIS does pause to consolidate its base, it isn’t going to have a lot with which to work. The caliphate will consist of landlocked desert without much oil. Most of the world will be hostile toward the caliphate. Still, in their own particular way, they’re “Goo-Goos.”[2] Perhaps they’ll find a way.

If ISIS can’t swamp the surrounding strong governments, does that mean it can’t do any harm? That’s hard to tell. Governments find it useful as a heuristic device to link every new outburst to some earlier example. Start listening to the newspeople on the Devil Box, count how often they refer to an “Al Qaeda-affiliated” or “ISIS affiliated” something or other. On the other hand, radical Islam has a wide appeal in certain geographic and psychological realms. (See: The Islamic Brigades I, II.) So it is hard for me to tell what ISIS or Al Qaeda really controls. What does seem clear is that Islamist uprisings will continue to occur and that “foreign fighters” will continue to flow toward where the fighting is taking place. Libya, northern Nigeria, and Mali already have their share of troubles. Cameroun, Niger, and Chad are feeling the effects. Tunisia is a small place with limited ability to defend itself. Algeria survived one bloody civil war between secularists and Islamists: it could flare up again. (If that happens, the fleets of refugees crammed on fishing boats will be headed for Marseilles instead of Sicily. See: The owl and the pussycat I, II.) Whatever the formal links between ISIS and the Islamist movements in these countries, ISIS will do whatever it can to support them. Pretty much on the principle of setting fire to a neighbor’s barn so that they themselves can sleep better at night.

[1] One of those things is NOT the creation of a Palestinian state. There isn’t going to be one. The current version of Fatah is a spent force. There is no way that Israel will agree to put a Hamas-controlled government endowed with all the trappings of national sovereignty in charge of the West Bank. No Arab government has ever shown a real concern for the fate of the Palestinians. If Egypt and Jordan, for example, had wanted a Palestinian state, they could have created one on the West Bank and Gaza when they controlled thos territories between 1948 and 1967.

[2] “Goo-Goos”: derisive late 19th Century American reference to “Good Government” reformers who preceded the Populists.

What we learned from Seymour Hersh 3.

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Between the end of the Cold War and 9/11, the C.I.A. had declined in some areas while growing stronger in other areas. The areas of its strength did not match well with the immediate needs of counter-terrorism. The areas of its weakness were just those areas where competence was in high demand. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld[1] knew very well the weaknesses of the C.I.A. because he had served on several task forces on intelligence during the previous Bush and Clinton administrations. It would take several years to bring the C.I.A. back to full strength. The terrorists were not going to wait in a neutral corner until the Americans got back on their feet and the referee allowed the fight to continue. If the C.I.A. could not fill the leadership role, then some other organization would have to lead.

Very soon, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld began to press for “the civilian leadership in the Pentagon, and not the C.I.A., [to get] the lead in fighting terrorism.” (p. 17.) What Rumsfeld wanted was “to get the U.S. Special Forces community into the business of what he called…”manhunts,”…” (p. 16.)

Immediately following 9/11, Rumsfeld ordered General Charles Holland[2], commander of Special Operations, to come up with a list of known terrorist targets for immediate attack. (p. 265.) In October 2001, numerous cases occurred where either Air Force pilots or Special Forces teams were prevented from striking at suspected Al Qaeda targets by various bureaucratic and/or legalistic restrictions. (pp. 48-49.) At about the same time, Holland provided a list, but warned that there was a dearth of “actionable intelligence” to support any rapid attack. (p. 266.) Rumsfeld suggested that Special Operations be made a “global command” directly under the command of the Secretary of Defense, with responsibility for all military operations against terrorists. (p. 271.)

In late 2001 or early 2002, President George W. Bush signed a legally required “finding” that authorized the Department of Defense to create a special unit to attack Al Qaeda. Henceforth, Hersh identifies this program as the SAP (for “special access program”).[3] (p. 16.) This “highly secret program….was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate high-value targets…..The program would recruit operatives and acquire the necessary equipment, including aircraft, and would keep its activities under wraps.” (p. 49.) “In theory, the operation enabled the Bush Administration to respond immediately to time-sensitive intelligence: commandos crossed borders without visas and could interrogate terrorism suspects deemed too important to for transfer to the military’s facilities at Guantanamo. They carried out instant interrogations, often with the help of foreign intelligence services—using force if necessary—at secret C.I.A. detention centers scattered around the world. [4] The intelligence would be relayed to the SAP command center in the Pentagon in real time, and sifted for those pieces of information critical to the “white,” or overt world.” (p. 50.) In July 2002 Rumsfeld ordered General Holland, commander of Special Operations, “to develop a plan to find and deal with members of terrorist organizations…The objective is to capture terrorists for interrogations or, if necessary, to kill them, not simply to arrest them in a law-enforcement exercise.” (p. 265.)

The Defense Department was going to collect and analyze intelligence on terrorism.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Rumsfeld

[2] See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_R._Holland

[3] See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_access_program The Wikipedia entry illustrates some of Hersh’s problems. There are a host of “Special Access Programs.”

[4] On the “black sites,” see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_site

What we learned from Seymour Hersh 1.

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Seymour Hersh (1937- ) is an investigative journalist and—on occasion—a Holland Tunnel of an ass-hole in the eyes of American government officials. His parents were Lithuanian Jews who got to the United States before the Holocaust. He got a BA in History at the University of Chicago, then drifted into reporting. His politics leaned left and he was hard to corral.[1] His first big break came when he broke the story of My Lai (1969). Then he worked in the Washington bureau of the New York Times during the Watergate events (after which he wrote a highly critical book about Henry Kissinger). More books critical of American foreign policy followed. Hersh became controversial not only for his sharp stabs at alleged government wrong-doing, but for his use of anonymous sources. Richard Perle called Hersh the “closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist.” Hersh has won five George Polk Awards for investigative journalism and a Pulitzer Prize. In 2004, Hersh published a book on the enormities arising from the intersection of intelligence and policy-making in the run-up to the Second Gulf War.[2] What did we learn?

After the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the CIA had gone into a steep decline. One factor in this decline had been the change in the nature of the target. CIA case officers were overwhelmingly European-language speakers used to suborning treason on the part of Soviet bloc officials while operating under diplomatic cover. The implosion of the Soviet target and the liberation of the eastern European satellites had rendered most of these men redundant. Emerging dangers in the post-Cold War scene were difficult to identify with certainty; it was even more difficult to create new cadres of officers to deal with these dangers. These factors led to a considerable decline in the over-all number of Operations Directorate officers, rather than a shift of human resources to new targets. Instead, there took place a shift of resources from gathering human intelligence to gathering signals intelligence and remote observation. To compensate for the loss of case officers, the Directorate of Operations shifted to relying upon liaison relationships with foreign intelligence services. (pp. 76-77.)

Later, in 1995, the public revelation that the CIA had employed a Guatemalan involved with the death squads as an informant led to an order that “assets” who might be considered to have criminal or humans rights problems in their records could only be recruited with prior approval of CIA headquarters in Langley. Hundreds of existing agents all around the globe were simply dumped and new ones rarely recruited. (pp. 79-81.) One case officer of the time fumed to Seymour Hersch that “Look, we recruited assholes. I handled bad guys. But we don’t recruit people from the Little Sisters of the Poor—they don’t know anything.” Bob Baer recalled that “It did make the workday a lot easier. I just watched CNN.” (Hersh, p. 81.)

By 9/11 the C.I.A. lacked the personnel to respond effectively. In summer 2001–before the 9/11 attacks–former Middle Eastern case officer Reuel Marc Gerecht warned of the dangers in an article in The Atlantic Monthly. He quoted officers saying things like “For Christ’s sake, most case officers live in the suburbs of Virginia….Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don’t happen.” (Quoted, p. 77.) As one now-retired clandestine service officer put it to Hersh, the decision-making was dominated by people who “wouldn’t drive to a D.C. restaurant at night because they were afraid of the crime problem.” (Quoted, p. 81.) So, that’s concerning.

[1] D’un: the highly-educated child of Jewish immigrant parents living in Chicago. Gene McCarthy’s press secretary in 1968.

[2] Seymour Hersh, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (HarperCollins, 2004) based on a series of New Yorker pieces.

Terrorists in Palestine.

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In the 1930s, which country posed the greater danger to the Jewish people? Was it Nazi Germany, which seemed bent on making the lives of Jews miserable in order to prompt their emigration? Or was it Britain, which seemed bent on blocking Jewish immigration to Palestine? In retrospect, with our knowledge of the Holocaust, the answer is obvious. At the time, however, some Zionists regarded Britain as the greater danger and more proximate enemy. In 1932 some of them found the Irgun to drive the British out of Palestine by force. When the Second World War broke out and, in Summer 1940, when German victories left the British standing alone, most Zionists saw Germany as the greater enemy. Most decided to support Britain in what amounted to an alliance-of-necessity. That included most of the members of the Irgun.

Most isn’t all: in August 1940 a small group splintered off under Avraham Stern formed a terrorist group called Lehi.[1] Stern tried publishing a newspaper, but his men also robbed banks to fund the organization. One of Stern’s chief subordinates was Yaakov Banai (1920-2009), who had recently arrived from Poland by way of Turkey. Banai took charge of the fighting organization. In January 1942, one of these bank robberies led to a shoot-out in which Jewish civilians were killed. Later that month, Lehi used a bomb to kill three policemen. This put the British police over the edge. In February 1942, British police killed Stern. Yitzhak Shamir (1915-2012) took over as leader of Lehi, then rebuilt it.

By early 1944 the Second World War appeared to be turning decisively against Nazi Germany, while news of the Holocaust had filtered out to the Jews in Palestine. The alliance-of-necessity with Britain began to be contested once again among the Zionists. Irgun decided to join Lehi in armed struggle against the British. Irgun’s early actions were essentially non-violent: they bombed government buildings when they were empty and seized weapons from police stations.

Lehi pursued a different course. Eliyahu Hakim (1925-1945) wasborn in Beirut, Lebanon, then under French rule. In 1932 his family moved south along the coast to Haifa, Palestine, then under British rule. In early 1943, Banai recruited Hakim. Soon, the organization ordered him to enlist in the British Army. After training, Hakim was posted to Egypt. He quickly deserted and went into hiding. On 8 August 1944, he formed part of a Lehi group that tried to kill Harold MacMichael, the High Commissioner for Palestine. On 29 September 1944 Lehi caught up with one of the policemen blamed for the death of Stern. Two gunmen shot him eleven times. In October 1944 the British began deporting hundreds of captured Irgun and Lehi men to camps in Eritrea. In November 1944, Lehi paired Hakim with Eliyahu Bet-Zuri (1922-1945) to kill Lord Moyne, the British Minister of State in the Middle East. The two young men shot Moyne on 6 November 1944.[2] The gunmen were captured, tried, and hanged in 1945.

Hard pressure from the British fell on all the Jews in Palestine. In response, the Jewish Agency quietly co-operated with the British, but also launched its own “hunting season” that targeted members of Irgun and Lehi. The “hunting season” warded off British action against the Jewish Agency, but it also thinned the ranks of the agency’s chief political rival. The “hunting season” came to an end in early 1945 and the Second World War in Europe ended soon afterward. All the Zionists began to focus their energies on the struggle to create the state of Israel. Quarrels of the past and of the future were put aside.

[1] Bruce Hoffman, Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947 (Knopf, 2015).

[2] One of the pistols used to kill the policemen was also used in the Moyne shootings, so it is possible that one of the gunmen had participated in more than one shooting. Or Lehi just hasd a small arsenal that had to be reused.

Days of Rage.

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The Civil Rights movement in the South encountered a lot of violent resistance. (Birmingham, Alabama became known in some quarters as “Bombingham.”) The United States began to escalate its military commitment to South Vietnam. JFK, RFK, and MLK all were assassinated. Nothing in conventional politics seemed able to stop the momentum. In response, in Summer 1969, things began to boil over on the American Left. Outside the South, the Black Panthers were formed. Some people began to contemplate the “propaganda of the deed,” as the pre-revolutionary Russian dissidents had called bombings and assassinations. Perhaps a 100,000 young people had signed-up with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) by 1968. A radical fringe broke away from the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) over SDS’s rejection of violence. They called themselves The Weathermen. When the Weathermen, called for supporters to stage so-called “Days of Rage” in Chicago in October 1969, only about 200 people showed up. The disappointed Weathermen promptly went underground and launched a terror campaign. Independently of the Weathermen, Sam Melville planted dynamite at a disused United Fruit warehouse in New York. Soon afterward, the Weathermen went underground themselves.

There was a great deal of savagery as well as a great deal of foolishness in the campaign that followed.[1] “Protests and marches don’t do it. Revolutionary violence is the only way,” said Bernardine Dohrn. “We could do [non-fatal fire-bombings] until we were blue in the face, and the government wouldn’t really care,” recalled one Weatherperson years later.[2] So, they opted for something more dramatic. Bombings followed in Berkeley, Detroit, Cleveland, and New York City. In February 1969, a secretary at Pomona College was wounded by bomb. In August 1969, one of Sam Melville’s bombs wounded twenty people in New York. In March 1970 one plan went wrong when a Weather Underground bomb factory in Greenwich Village blew up, killing three dissidents. The Weather Underground announced that it would shift back to non-lethal bombings. Apparently it was safer (for them) that way. In August 1970 a bomb at the University of Wisconsin killed a researcher named Robert Fassnacht. Between May 1971 and January 1972, a “Black Liberation Army” (BLA) killed five policemen around the country and badly wounded two others. In February 1974, the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped Patty Hearst. In May 1974, the Los Angeles police caught up with most of the group. The SLA got shot to bits on live television. In January 1975 the FALN, a terrorist group advocating Puerto Rican independence, launched a campaign that would run for eight years and set off 130 bombs. Finally, in October 1981, the BLA tried to rob a Brink’s armored car outside New York City. In the robbery and in a confrontation with the police afterward, three police officers were killed.

Brian Burroughs charitably describes the Weathermen, Symbionese Liberation Army, the Black Liberation Army, and a group of Puerto Rican nationalists as “young people who fatally misjudged America’s political winds and found themselves trapped in an unwinnable struggle they were too proud or too stubborn to give up.” That could be. In “The Searchers” (1956, dir. John Ford), the character played by John Wayne explained why he could not take an oath as a Texas Ranger: “I figure a man’s only good for one oath at a time and I took mine to the Confederate States of America.”

[1] Bryan Burroughs, Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence (Penguin, 2014).

[2] It strikes me as odd to complain that a government one accuses of putting property rights ahead of human rights doesn’t really care about property, but does care about harm to humans. I’m probably missing something.

Munich.

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In 1967 Israel lashed out against a gathering flock of vultures (Egypt, Syria, Jordan). In an astonishing triumph, this “Six Day War” put Israel in possession of the Sinai peninsula, the West Bank of the Jordan River, and the Golan Heights. It also put them in possession of a large population of Arabs and Palestinian refugees cast up by the agony of Israel’s initial creation in 1948. The problem became what to do with the conquered lands and people. Israel offered to “trade land for peace” with its neighbors. The neighbors showed little interest. Meanwhile, the Palestinians launched their own war on Israel through terrorism. In 1972, members of the “Black September” group kidnapped eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Summer Olympics. Most of the captors and all of their captives died in a botched rescue operation by the Germans.

In revenge, Israel launched “Operation Wrath of God.” In theory, the objective was to kill eleven of the “Black September” leaders who were responsible for Munich. The operation went on for years. It killed many more than eleven men. Eventually, the operation wound down.

In 1984, Yuval Aviv, one of the assassination team leaders who then was living in New York and no longer working for Israel’s intelligence agency, became the source for a book about the operation.[1] Soon afterward, HBO brought out a movie based on the book.[2] Then the story languished for almost twenty years.

Then, early in the 21st Century, Steven Spielberg bought the rights to the book and made his own version, “Munich.” Why did Spielberg want to re-make somebody else’s movie? There are a couple of possible answers.

On the one hand, Spielberg has made a bunch of historical movies that can be thought of as grouped in pairs. The pairs deliver different perspectives on the large historical subjects. Thus “The Empire of the Sun” (1987) and “Saving Private Ryan” (1998) consider the legacy of surviving traumatic events in the Second World War; “Amistad” (1997) and “Lincoln” (2012) deal with the fight against slavery, a problem which continues to haunt America; and “Schindler’s List” (1993) and “Munich” (2005) turn on the struggle for survival by Jews in a hostile world. In the case of the latter two movies, “Schindler’s List” made an argument for Israel as a Jewish refuge; “Munich” asked how Israel differed from other states.

On the other hand, maybe the movie isn’t about Israel at all. Maybe it’s about America. At the end of “Munich” the World Trade Center’s “Twin Towers” are visible in the backdrop. On 9/1101 Al Qaeda terrorists attacked sites in Washington and New York, most famously the WTC. The United States responded by invading Afghanistan in an effort to get Al Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden. Missing their punch, the Americans became bogged down in a long struggle that hasn’t yet ended.[3] Then, in 2003, the Americans invaded Iraq on the grounds that the country possessed a program for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and that contact had been alleged between al Qaeda and Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein. Here the Americans became embroiled in an even worse conflict than in Afghanistan.[4]

Where does vengeance lead? Does it lead to “justice” and “closure”? Does it lead to an open-ended conflict with an ever-rising death toll? Are we captives of our past experiences? Are we even conscious of how our views of the past shape our present actions and our future?

[1] George Jonas, Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team.

[2] “Sword of Gideon” (1986, dir. Michael Anderson). See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvemVhD_M3k

[3] See: “Zero Dark Thirty” (2012, dir. Kathryn Bigelow); “Lone Survivor” (2013, dir. Peter Berg).

[4] See: “Generation Kill” (2008, HBO); “The Hurt Locker” (2008, dir. Kathryn Bigelow); “Green Zone” (2010, dir. Paul Greengrass); “American Sniper” (2014, dir. Clint Eastwood).

The Islamic Brigades II.

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In 2007, more than twenty men—most from the large Somali immigrant community in Minneapolis–went to join Al Shabab, the Somali Islamist militia. Federal authorities launched an investigation. They ended up prosecuting eight men as facilitators and recruiters.

In recent years, eight young men from the Norwegian town of Frederikstad have gone to Syria. Norwegian authorities have investigated the role of an Islamist group called Prophet’s Umma for its role in recruiting jihadis and facilitating their movement toward the battlefront.

Investigating the recruiters and facilitators is important to the fight against radical Islamism. So, too, is trying to understand why some people are open to recruitment. There aren’t any good answers here so far. Mostly, there are just some anecdotes about human beings. Can we learn anything from looking at them?

Two friends from the same neighborhood in Minneapolis; high-school drops outs; in minor trouble with the law; converts to Islam; and soldiers of jihad.[1]

Troy Kastigar (1981-2009) went from being a funny, energetic, boundary-testing kid to smoking weed, drinking, and failing his high-school classes.[2] He dropped out of high school, later got a G.E.D., and worked fitfully between bouts of unemployment. He went back to school to become an X-Ray tech, but he was told that it would be difficult for him to get a job in the field because of his criminal record. His friend, Doug McCain, also dropped out of high school, then had some run-ins with the law over drugs, moving violations, and theft.

In about 2004, both men converted to Islam. There is a large Somali community in Minneapolis, so Islam presented itself more prominently there than in many other American cities. After a while, they moved beyond Islam to Islamism. In November 2008, Kastigar went to Kenya. He said he was going to study the Koran. In fact, he soon crossed the border to join Al Shabab. He was killed fighting with the group in September 2009. In 2009, Doug McCain moved to San Diego. He had family out there, he worked in restaurants, and he took some classes at a community college. In 2014 he went to Syria. In August 2014 he was killed fighting with ISIS.

At least one other man from the same social circle also traveled to Syria. Abdirahmaan Muhumed, worked at the airport from November 2001 to May 2011. At different times he worked at refueling planes and on cleaning crews. Acquaintances had seen him as a more secular than a religious man. He worked out a lot and played basketball. Then he started to become exercised over the fighting in Gaza and in Libya. Muslim people suffering under assault from Western powers. Muslim or not, Muhumed drank—and to excess—on some occasions. Drinking just enflamed him all the more on the issues. He went to Syria and died in the same fight as did Doug McCain.

The little town of Frederickstad, Norway, is south of Oslo. It is a more diverse place than one might expect of a small town. The Muslim community is largely made up of Somali refugees, but there also are immigrants from Algeria, Pakistan, Kurdistan, and Chechnya.[3]

The Chaib family came from Algeria to Frederickstad. Their son Abdullah (1989-2012) grew into a popular figure in his school and neighborhood. His ability at soccer enhanced a general “cool guy” demeanor.   At some point and by some means, Abdullah Chaib became committed to jihad. A then-radical Norwegian Muslim who visited Frederikstad recalled Chaib as “a real fanatic…[who] talked about jihad all the time.” In November 2012 Abdullah Chaib went to Syria. In December 2012 he died fighting there.

Chaib’s death in battle set an example for some other boys in the town. Among them was Adu Edelbijev. His parents came to Norway from Chechnya in 2002. He attended the same school as Chaib and, like Chaib, was a good athlete. He didn’t feel estranged from Norway, but his hopes to join the army were foiled by bad eyesight. He began to take religion seriously. By 2013 he had begun to prepare to go to Syria. He left in August 2013. In November 2014, he died while fighting with ISIS near Kobani.

Rebecca Sanchez Hammer was a Filipina who came to Norway and married a Norwegian who later died. They had a son, Torlief Sanchez Hammer. A group of goofy dopers used Torlief Hammer’s basement as a place to bake their heads. For several years, the police regularly broke up their parties and confiscated their drugs and pipes.

When, before he left for Syria, Adu Edelbijev lectured Torlief Hammer about his bad habits, the boy listened. Hammer converted to Islam, took the new first name Abdul, and suddenly stopped using drugs. His run-ins with the police ended, but his satisfaction with life did not improve. “”I have no friends, no job, nothing,” he told his mother. This did not cause him to reject Islam however. It only deepened his commitment. In December 2013, the young man took the road to Syria.

The parents of Samiullah Khan (1991- ) came from Pakistan to Norway, but did not prosper. His father murdered someone, did a stretch in prison, then accidentally killed someone else while driving drunk. This background left Khan feeling marked and excluded by native Norwegians and Pakistani immigrants. He went to fight in Syria, was wounded, returned to Norway, and was arrested for belonging to a terrorist organization.

It is easy to write off these people as failures who made foolish—and fatal–decisions. But is it possible that there foolish and fatal decision reflected an aspiration for a more satisfying life than what the larger societies in which they lived could offer?

A friend of Kastigar and McLean argued that “They just wanted to be a part of something. They were just trying to find something that just accepted them for who they were.” A friend of Abdirahman said that “He always wanted to be a freedom fighter, he always wanted to be a hero,” recalled a friend.

“None of them ever even mentioned religion when we knew them,” recalled one policeman speaking about the group around Torlief Hammer. “The only thing they had in common is that they did not function in society. But they wanted to be able to do something, to be good at something.” Torlief Hammer told his mother that “he wanted to fix himself after too much disco, too many girlfriends and too much smoking.”

In March 1940, George Orwell published a review of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. In it, Orwell argued that Hitler “has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all “progressive” thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life.”[4]

As the United States lugubriously embarks on the election campaign of 2016, will any of the candidates offer voters “struggle and self-sacrifice”? Or will they promise “ease, security and avoidance of pain”? That is an easy question to answer. But what if there are a lot of people who would never consider radical Islam, yet still feel some longing for something more ennobling than the next entitlement or the next tax cut?

[1] Jack Healy, “For Jihad Recruits, a Pipeline From Minnesota to Militancy,” NYT, 7 September 2014.

[2] I wondered if these were signs of Depression. His mother describes him as having had a “sadness and a darkness” move into his life.

[3] Andrew Higgins, “A Norway Town And Its Pipeline to Jihad in Syria,” NYT, 5 April 2015.

[4] http://genius.com/George-orwell-review-of-mein-kampf-annotated

Doomed Nigeria?

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If you think about it, Nigeria is an artificial state. European statesmen drew the boundaries between British territory and French territory in the late 19th Century. In the mid-20th Century those colonial-era territories became independent within the boundaries drawn by later European statesmen. In Nigeria, there is oil in the south; there are dessicated grasslands in the north. The northern part of the country is poorer, the southern part of the country is richer (well, less poor). The north is predominantly Muslim, the south is predominantly Christian.[1] How could one forge a single “nation” out of such disparate materials?

Broadly speaking, they did not succeed at this task. Most post-colonial countries in West Africa are plagued by economic stagnation, bad government, and corruption. Citizens are disaffected, to put it mildly.

In 2010, Goodluckwiththat Jonathan, drawing the bulk of his votes from the south of the country, won election as president of Nigeria. Since then, per-capita income among Nigeria’s 170 million people has risen from $4,740 a year to $5,360 a year. That’s about a 12 percent rise. So, people should be dancing in the street. However, that rise in national income did not flow on anything approaching an equal basis. For one thing, the money tended to stick in the southern regions that produced oil. Hence, northern Nigeria profited but little. Incomes in the south are now twice those of the north.

This disparity may have helped fuel the Boko Haram insurgency. Boko Haram recruits around the tattered edges of Nigerian society, among poor people, among young people, and among poor young people with no prospect of landing a job. In 2009 and 2010, Boko Haram attacked a dozen places; in 2011, twice that; in 2012, more than 60 attacks; in 2013, more than 50 attacks; and in the first quarter of 2014, about forty attacks. In April 2014, Boko Haram kidnapped 200 school girls from the town of Chibok in northeastern Nigeria.

The Nigerian government is riddled with corruption. Graft and the abuse of authority are endemic. It runs up and down through every level of society. In 2014 the head of Nigeria’s central bank announced the $21 billion in oil revenues had disappeared from the bank. President Jonathan fired him. Every interaction between a government official and a citizen involves a pay-off. It’s impossible to get through the airport without paying-off some official.[2]

What to do to encourage prosperity in the north? Northern Nigerians believe that President Jonathan’s government has starved them of their share of the national income. Spokesmen for people there urge infrastructure spending. The north lacks reliable electrical power and has a deficient road network. So, over the years the bonds between northern and southern Nigeria have frayed.

The insurgency threatens to spill over into neighboring countries like Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Benin. All of the neighboring countries are what amount to French protectorates. Hence, the French are insistent that Boko Haram be crushed. Radical Islamism has already troubled the French at home and abroad. The “Charlie Hebdo” massacre demonstrates the danger from home-grown Islamists, while the insurgency in Mali can be construed to constitute and Islamist threat in the territories of the old French empire.

Is Nigeria doomed to disintegrate, like the post-colonial states of the Middle East?

[1] Maia de la Baume and Alissa J. Rubin, “West African Nations Set Aside Their Old Suspicions to Combat Boko Haram,” NYT, 18 May 2014; Heidi Vogt and Patrick McGroarty, “Nigeria’s Divisions to Test Nation’s New Leader,” WSJ, 6 April 2015.

[2] See: “Dogs of War” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZbg5AdlO70

The Muslim Civil War.

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With the “Arab Spring” of 2011, the “corrupt and dysfunctional Arab autocracies that had stood for half a century in places like Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya lost credibility because they had failed to meet the needs of the citizens.”[1]

Well, no. The “Arab Spring” counted not at all compared to American interventions. The corrupt and dysfunctional autocracies of Iraq and Libya were overthrown only by American attack. The corrupt and dysfunctional autocracy in Egypt quickly reasserted itself after a moment of panic induced by an American moment of panic. The corrupt and dysfunctional autocracy in Syria has retained the loyalty of many of its citizens and the Obama administration has tacitly abandoned its intemperate demand that Bashar al-Assad leave power.

Now, “an array of local players and regional powers are fighting skirmishes across the region as they vie to shape the new order, or at least enlarge their share of it.”

Well, no. We’re witnessing the outbreak of a Muslim civil war.[2] Sunni Saudi Arabia never got around to sending air or ground forces to battle the radical Sunnis fighting against the Shi’ite-dominated government of Iraq, but it has now intervened in the fighting against the Shi’ite Houthi rebels in Yemen. Shi’ite Iran is the principal supporter of the Shi’ite governments in Baghdad and Yemen and of the Alawite government in Damascus.

The Obama administration has claimed that there are “moderate” forces with which it can work to create stable states, if only people will get with the program.

Well, no. The Shi’ite-dominated government of Iraq began persecuting the Sunnis the minute the Americans were out the door. The Syrian “moderates” were virtually non-existent and unwilling to fight. Yemen is a primitive tribal society which a thin shellac of Western government titles could not disguise. Now Iranian forces have been introduced into Iraq’s fight against ISIS.

The administration claims to discern a difference between “moderate” and “hard line” forces in Iran. It hopes to strike a deal with the moderates over Iran’s nuclear program. The American drive to get a deal with Iran has most publically angered Israel’s prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu. However, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are just as concerned as is Israel that the United States has started to tilt back toward Tehran as its chief partner in the Middle East.

Iran is trying to obtain nuclear weapons to shift the balance of power in the Persian Gulf region. Saudi Arabia doesn’t want Iran to get nuclear weapons. Israel doesn’t want Iran to get nuclear weapons. Neither country places much trust in the fair words and promises of a distant United States. Both have modern American supplied air forces and airborne control systems. Aside from American objections, the chief impediments to an Israeli pre-emptive strike against Iranian nuclear facilities have been that the Israelis don’t have enough planes and they would have to over-fly Saudi Arabia. You do the math. (While you’re at it, Israel has nuclear weapons.)

If a “Muslim Civil War” does break out in flames, what course should the United States pursue? Intervene or stay neutral? Intervene against the country that already hates us (Iran)? Intervene on the side of those most likely to win in the short run (Saudi Arabia if backed by Israel)? Do a lot of off-shore drilling and tell the Middle East to solve its own problems? Head it off?  There’s no clear guide here, but there is the need to choose.

[1] Mark Mazzetti and David D. Kirkpatrick, “Policy Puzzle in the Middle East,” NYT, 27 March 2015.

[2] Or perhaps just a renewal of the long wars between the Shi’ite Safavid Empire of Persia and the Sunni Ottoman Empire.