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| How America can win the intelligence war |
| 2004-06-15 |
| For originality, "Spengler" rocks Departed US Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet tried to ascertain whether available intelligence justified a war, I observed last week. The late president Ronald Reagan’s CIA chief, Bill Casey, knew that if you want intelligence, first you start a war. If you ask the wrong question, you will get the wrong answer. Reagan’s people had the courage to ask the right question to begin with, namely whether the Soviet system could keep pace with America’s drive for strategic superiority. The diplomatic and academic establishment asked the wrong question, that is, how detente might be perpetuated with a seemingly eternal Russian empire. Was communism merely a somewhat obstreperous partner, or an enemy to be defeated? Every US intelligence assessment of Soviet military strength and morale available in 1981 was dead wrong. Washington learned better by putting Moscow under stress. How adaptable was Russian weapons technology? Start a high-tech arms race with the Strategic Defense Initiative and find out. How good were Russian avionics? Help the Israeli air force engage Syria’s MiGs in the Bekaa Valley in 1982, and the destruction with impunity of Russian-built fighters and surface-to-air missile sites would provide a data point. How solid was Russian fighting morale? Instigate irregular warfare against the Russian army in Afghanistan and learn. The United States lacks the aptitude and inclination to penetrate the mind of adversary cultures (Why America is losing the intelligence war. In the so-called war on terror, it lacks the floating population of irredentist emigres who provided a window into Russian-occupied Eastern Europe back during the Cold War. But the best sort of intelligence stems not from scholarship but from decisiveness of command and clarity of mission. "War is not an intellectual activity but a brutally physical one," observes Sir John Keegan in Intelligence and War, published last year. President George W Bush might do well to read it carefully before choosing the next CIA director. It was not the intellectuals but the bullyboys of the Reagan administration who shook loose the relevant intelligence. In 1981 the CIA enjoyed a surfeit of Russian speakers, in contrast to today’s paucity of Arabic translators. But William Casey routinely ignored the legions of Russian-studies PhDs, reaching out instead to irregulars who could give him the insights he required. Intelligence in warfare presents a different sort of intellectual challenge than academics are trained to address. President Reagan, no intellectual in the conventional sense, nonetheless formed a clear assessment of what the enemy was, what it wanted, and how it might be defeated. Without the courage to define and then engage the enemy, intelligence services will wander randomly in the dark. If in 1981 the enemy was the "evil empire" of Soviet communism, who is the enemy of the West today? A number of Washington’s critics, for example Dr Daniel Pipes, observe that it is senseless to speak of a "war on terrorism", for terrorism is a tactic, a mere method to achieve a strategic goal. But what is the goal and who wishes to achieve it? Without defining the enemy, how can one define the mission? Pipes and others propose instead to declare war upon "radical Islam", a formulation that leads to just as much confusion. No one, least of all the vast majority of the world’s Muslims, can say with any clarity what distinguishes radical Islam from "moderate Islam". Western polemicists felt at home on the moral high ground against communism, along with president Reagan. But they are tongue-tied before radical Islam, fearing to offend a religion with more than a billion adherents. Inadvertently they give credibility to the radicals. It is difficult to assess what proportion of today’s Muslims are "radicals", because neither the world’s Muslims nor the West has a clear definition of what is radical and what is not. Vitriolic sermonizing is so commonplace under the eyes of "moderate" regimes, for example Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt, that the label of "radical Islam" has worn thin. In reality, the West sooner or later will have to draw a bright line between "radicals" and "moderates". Under the circumstances there can be nothing in between. Islam’s encounter with the West leaves room for nothing but radical jihadists on the one hand, or radical reformers. Islam is expansionist by construction and political by its original design. It is a fact of history that jihad, by which I mean specifically the propagation of the faith by violence, is a mainstream tradition. Even communal prayer in Islam has at its center the alignment of the individual believer to jihad (Does Islam have a prayer?, . Identifying the enemy in 1981 was far easier than in 2004, and President Bush deserves a modicum of sympathy in the inevitable comparison to Ronald Reagan. By 1981 no communists still lived within the confines of the Soviet Empire, only careerists. The emperor had no clothes, such that when Reagan spoke of an evil empire and a warped idea destined for the ash can of history, the truth of his remarks resonated among the Soviet elite. By contrast the Islamic world is full of Muslims. It was much easier for Russians to separate national aspirations and Marxism than it is for Arabs to separate ethnic loyalty and Islam. That is less so for South Asians. The problem actually is quite simple. To advocate jihad today is the hallmark of the radical Islamist, and it is there that the West must draw a line in the sand. But to repudiate jihad in turn implies radical revision of the religion’s mainstream, and that is the hallmark of the radical reformer. Like other religions, Islam has reached a point in world history - or rather world history has caught up with Islam - such that it must undergo a fundamental change. By way of comparison, the Catholic Church accepts separation of church and state as well as religious tolerance, but it did so only after the likes of Count Camillo Benso Cavour in Italy stripped the papacy of temporal rule over anything but the square mile of the Vatican City. Western leaders must not attack Islam; to take sides against any religion runs counter to the traditions of religious tolerance upon which the United States was founded. But they must denounce the use of force to propagate religion, and make it clear that they will match force with force. The enemy is not "terrorism", but any form of violence, including conventional warfare, in the service of religious expansionism. What does that mean in practice? First of all it changes the subject and shifts the battleground. The issue is not whether Middle Eastern governments will adopt democratic reforms - that is not within the power of the West to dictate - but whether Muslims will employ violence in the service of territorial irredentism in the Kashmir or Palestine. There simply is no more room for the jihadist dogma that Muslims may not abandon a square meter of the Dar al-Islam. Violence to reclaim lost territory is a characteristic of radical Islam and the hallmark of an enemy of the West. The first step should be to remove Yasser Arafat to exile in some inaccessible locale. Further steps should be action - not protests - to protect Nigerians, Indonesians, or Sudanese against violent attempts to further the Islamic cause. Black Sudanese are the victims of genocide encouraged by the radical Islamic regime in Khartoum. Washington should send them not only food, but also weapons and Special Forces advisers. Stern warnings, backed if necessary by a reduction in foreign aid, should be delivered to US clients in the Middle East that jihadist rhetoric on the part of government newspapers and government-sponsored clerics simply will not be tolerated. Enemy is radical Islam In short, the West must give the Islamic world a clear choice as to who is with it, and who is against it - words that President Bush has used but with muddled meaning. That would change the character of the intelligence war utterly. It may be harder to define who is friend and foe today than it was in 1981, but by the same token, it will be far easier to tell friend from foe once the West carves its criteria in stone. The bane of US intelligence in the Middle East from Somalia to Iraq has been its inability to know whom it can trust. Victory has many fathers, while defeat is an orphan, although sometimes attended by paternity suits. The unseemly public exchange of charges between the CIA and the Pentagon over Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi is the most flagrant example. The CIA has placed stories in the press claming that Chalabi is an Iranian provocateur, heatedly denied by Chalabi’s friends in the Pentagon civilian establishment. This removes all doubt that America’s intelligence effort is an orphan. The only question is, whose? It would be convenient if US universities trained prospective spies in Middle Eastern and South Asian language skills and culture. But the United States can obtain all the spies it wants with all required skills: it simply has to persuade Muslims to join its cause. Once the US determined to win the Cold War, enough Russians and Eastern Europeans switched sides to give the US the winning hand. Existential despair is the result of the West’s tragic encounter with the Islamic world, but it can cut two ways; it has produced suicide bombers, but it also can produce radical reformers who repudiate their own culture in favor of the West. If Washington were to make repudiation of jihad a condition for friendship with the United States, the demand would have unpredictable and destabilizing consequences for the Islamic world. Just as the race of Sovietologists viewed Reagan’s determination to destabilize the Soviet Empire with horror, the whole profession of Mideast studies would rear up in horror against such a stance. But wars are won by ignoring the fat and complacent commanders of garrison troops, and forcing the burden of uncertainty on to the other side (Ronald Reagan’s creative destruction, ). Decisive intelligence stems from destabilization of the opposing side, through defections and similar events. Bush might as well shut down the CIA and re-create something like the wartime Office of Strategic Services, for which Casey parachuted agents into occupied Europe. Most of the CIA amounts to a make-work project for second-rate academics, drawn from an academic environment generally hostile to US strategic interests. Even if US universities still produced strategic thinkers rather than multicultural mush-heads, and even if the CIA could recruit them, little would change. In spite of the academics, Bill Casey won his intelligence war because the US convinced enough players on the other side that it would win. To win to its side the best men and women of the Islamic world, the United States must make clear what it wants from them. |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #21 It's not so simple as he says. We can't draw a line between radicals and moderates because we're trying to -create- the moderates, as such, first. |
| Posted by: someone 2004-06-16 12:37:55 AM |
| #20 I can neither confirm nor deny... But IMHO we were much more agressive in the 80's. We were also much more well funded. the mid 1990's were when the 3 letter agencies got raped in order to provide a "peace dividend". Ask Senator Kerry about all those intelligence budgets he voted NO on. |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2004-06-16 12:13:44 AM |
| #19 Dave D: I don't think that the congress will approve any additional military action in the ME until/unless we are attacked again in a significant way. The preemption doctrine is not widely supported and as Tresho points out, going deeper into the ME to convert the heathen as it were is going to prove a non-starter with the locals. If we are hit hard, then we will have the will to wage total war and that is the only thing that will force change within Islam. Until then, I don't think either party's president would be able to take significant action. Note that this is not what I would like to see, just what I believe is the current reality. |
| Posted by: remote man 2004-06-15 2:37:53 PM |
| #18 This article's not very helpful, inasmuch as violent jihad is a cornerstone of Islam and that apostates from Islam are to be put to death. Having the US and its western allies declare to Muslims "you are either with us or against us", is basically the same as declaring war on Islam. The major political & religious changes necessary are really up to the Islamic world, and not under US control. The bromide that "Islam is really a religion of peace" is useful like a pain pill is against a ruptured appendix. The profound ignorance of the average US citizen about Islam and the scarcity of non-Muslims who are intimately familiar with Arabic & Muslim languages and cultures is something that can be remedied on our side. To some extent, this is already happening as US military personnel are rotating out of Iraq and Afghanistan and passing their experience around, but this will take years. |
| Posted by: Tresho 2004-06-15 2:31:07 PM |
#17 Two important points:"...an academic environment generally hostile to US strategic interests..."IIRC, somebody once termed the chattering-class support of Communism the "treason of the intellectuals." Hostility to one's own culture isn't new: "...the idiot who praisesbut, given the current circumstances, it's a luxury that's becoming less affordable. [Insert your own time-to-clean-out-the -academy rant here. I don't have the energy :-)] |
| Posted by: Old Grouch 2004-06-15 2:24:51 PM |
| #16 That's a good question. For Kerry, I doubt the answer could possibly be "yes". And if he is elected, I will take it as a signal that the U.S. is not going to be able to muster the will to fight this fight in earnest-- at least not until the jihadis do something spectacularly heinous like nuking one of our cities. On Bush, I think the question is still open. It may really be that he, too, lacks the courage to do what must be done; but more likely, I think, is he is waiting until we've finished doing our groundwork in Iraq and waiting, also, for our quadrennial period of domestic tribal warfare (i.e., the November elections) to run its course. Those elections will also determine the makeup of Congress, and only Congress can authorize the President to use military force. The present Congress had a difficult enough time authorizing force against Iraq, and I doubt it could be persuaded to give a mandate for action against Iran, Syria or Saudi Arabia. To do that, major political changes would be needed and they certainly won't happen before November. People who are fond of bitching at us because we invaded Iraq instead of [insert favorite target here] often overlook the political realities in the U.S., and ignore our constitutional separation of powers as well. If Bush were to order an invasion of Iran without Congressional authorization, he would be out of the White House within a week. |
| Posted by: Dave D. 2004-06-15 12:10:03 PM |
| #15 Great article... but question is : will your president, either Bush or Kerry, have the moral clarity to "carve the criteria in stone"? |
| Posted by: Anonymous5089 2004-06-15 11:51:28 AM |
| #14 "In reality, the West sooner or later will have to draw a bright line between "radicals" and "moderates". Under the circumstances there can be nothing in between. Islam’s encounter with the West leaves room for nothing but radical jihadists on the one hand, or radical reformers." Sooner or later we're going to have to get down to brass tacks: I can understand the need to employ this "War on Terror" euphemism that we've used so far, so that we don't put ourselves into a confrontation with all of Arabian Islam before we have firmly established Iraq as a regional base for American military operations. And I can understand if we continue that obfuscation a bit longer; after all, we have our hands full right now stabilizing Iraq and getting it to some semblance of self-governance. But eventually we're going to have a direct confrontation with this dysfunctional and toxic culture and force Islam to make the leap that Christianity made many years ago: that submitting to God must never mean submitting to man. And if they cannot make that leap, and jettison their expansionist impulses, we will have to destroy them-- every last one. |
| Posted by: Dave D. 2004-06-15 11:50:04 AM |
| #13 From the link "Why America is losing the intelligence war": Today's intelligence war with radical Islam comes down to a contest for the loyalties of the population of individuals who can move between both worlds. The vast majority of these are university students from Islamic countries in the US or Western Europe, and the remainder are students of Oriental languages in the West. For several reasons, the US is at a vast disadvantage. Unlike other immigrants, Muslim students in the US neither are poor nor politically disenfranchised. They are there precisely because they belong to the elite of their country, for whom foreign study is a privilege. Few are prepared to abandon their culture, while many resent the West. Because of the cultural divide, the vast majority of Muslims who study in the West read sciences or mathematics. Indian and Chinese foreign students dominate these faculties. No Arab has become a scientist of note since the early Middle Ages, while the universities are full of Indian and Chinese Nobelists. Hell hath no fury like an elite slighted. These circumstances tend to provoke the resentment of Arab and other Muslim foreign students toward the West. Muslim students attending the most prestigious Western universities, moreover, hear nothing of the merits of Western culture. Instead, what they learn from post-colonial theory, deconstructionism, and post-modernism is that all culture is a pretext for the assertion of power by oppressors. No qualitative difference separates Dante and Goethe from the meanest screed of the cheapest propagandist. What matters is the sub-text, the expression of power relations buried beneath the rhetoric. They learn of the evil US that slaughtered its native population, oppressed blacks and other minorities, degraded women, marginalized the poor, and operates on behalf of plutocratic financial interests. Interesting. |
| Posted by: Bomb-a-rama 2004-06-15 11:18:36 AM |
| #12 Now I've gotta go change my shoes... |
| Posted by: Seafarious 2004-06-15 9:57:36 AM |
| #11 Valentine, excellent retort, unfortunately lost on the mentally barren landscape that is NotMikeMoore (but just as fat and stupid). .com, hilarious. Love the comparison and it is so apt. |
| Posted by: AllahHateMe 2004-06-15 9:15:42 AM |
| #10 Thanks for the link, tipper. I had never read Spengler before, and promptly got lost in his back catalog, starting with his take on the Civil War, and then was delighted to see he had written about one of my favorite stories, Dashiell Hammett's Red Wind. I like how he tied both into what's going on in the here and now, namely the WOT. Looking forward to reading more ... |
| Posted by: docob 2004-06-15 8:54:39 AM |
| #9 Most of the CIA amounts to a make-work project for second-rate academics, drawn from an academic environment generally hostile to US strategic interests. heh, heh. |
| Posted by: B 2004-06-15 7:53:01 AM |
| #8 .com - Funny, I just gave the same advice to Charles, only a bit less prosaicly. |
| Posted by: Bulldog 2004-06-15 6:14:22 AM |
| #7 Valentine - If you don't know him, NMM is like one of those small obnoxious dogs. He shows up at the very end of the day and posts DU Talking Points (aka screeches) - noisy little "Yip! Yip! Yip!" sounds, scatters a few turds, and then pees on your shoes. When he is dry, he runs away. No one can quite figure out why he has adopted this pointless and retarded behavior - save that he must be same. Your post, a very nice reasoned piece is, indeed, appreciated by the RBers but, alas, 'tis lost on NMM. Sorry! |
| Posted by: .com 2004-06-15 6:08:07 AM |
| #6 NMM and your logic for blaming Reagan for 9/11 would be what exactly? Aiding the Afghanis in training and weapons transfers to fight off an invasion of their country? Or perhaps you meant Reagan should have let Russia expand further through Afghanistan, thereby creating a buffer zone for its own internal territories and having a base for expansion towards central asia? Or perhaps you meant bin Laden who at the time wasn't even a minor lieutenant in the resistance forces of Afghanistan? Or perhaps you mean the Taliban who first appeared in 1994? Reagan and the CIA didn't have a hand in producing these guys, they came into their own cognizance. Blaming Reagan and the CIA for it is denying reality. They appeared because of the power vacuum that resulted after the Soviet pullout and the tribal infighting. They appeared not because of poverty but because they wanted power, absolute power in some cases. Look at the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, the Taliban wanted to rule Afghanistan in the way it believed was true Islamic teachings, ignoring the essence that the Afghanis had their own variations of islam as part of their culture they (the Talibs) imposed a harsh Wahhabist style approach that was very totalitarian. Lets look at Osama now, he wants the caliphate to come back, and who does he see as bringing it back? Yep that'd be himself, is he egomaniacal? Possibly as well, nonetheless it is true, its also the one thing that Islam (moderate and radical share), namely the trait of a select few (in most cases the clerics and/or the male population to a much smaller extent) are the only ones gaining the power. Under sharia law only muslims have recognition and at that only muslim males, to declare any laws you need to be a cleric, so now you got muslim male clerics in positions of absolute power. And what do we know about absolute power? It corrupts absolutely. Yup..these little things called facts tend to escape you guys it seems. |
| Posted by: Valentine 2004-06-15 5:00:49 AM |
| #5 Good article but he misses the point - But they are tongue-tied before radical Islam, fearing to offend a religion with more than a billion adherents. - The problem is a post-modern world view that precludes making statements about identifiable groups. Like most people I am generally in favor of this when it is something over which people (note the use of people and not individuals) have no control like race, I do not extend this to religion - this means all religions. I consider all religions bad, but some are less bad than others and all have beneficial aspects. In a modern society the onus should be on the religion to demonstrate that it should be tolerated. So I would go further than Pipes and say we should declare war on all forms of Islam, with the exception of those that prove they should be tolerated (and only while they maintain that proof). |
| Posted by: Phil B 2004-06-15 3:16:15 AM |
| #4 "Instigate irregular warfare against the Russian army in Afghanistan and learn. " OH HELL YES we learned on 9/11 how that paid off |
| Posted by: Not Mike Moore 2004-06-15 3:08:01 AM |
| #3 Pipes and others propose instead to declare war upon "radical Islam", a formulation that leads to just as much confusion. No one, least of all the vast majority of the world’s Muslims, can say with any clarity what distinguishes radical Islam from "moderate Islam". Horseradish! Let's draw the line right here: [Mufti] Shamzai was the principal exponent of International Islamism which holds, firstly, that the loyalty of a Muslim is first to his religion and then only to the country of which he is resident or a citizen; secondly, that Muslims do not recognise national frontiers and hence have the right and the obligation to wage jihad anywhere to protect their religion; and, thirdly, that the Muslims have the right and the religious obligation to acquire and use weapons of mass destruction to protect their religion, if necessary. If your cause is carried on irrespective of international borders, your host nation's laws or with an unwillingness to tolerate any other culture, you are the enemy. Western polemicists felt at home on the moral high ground against communism, along with president Reagan. But they are tongue-tied before radical Islam, fearing to offend a religion with more than a billion adherents. Inadvertently they give credibility to the radicals. If we are "tounge-tied before radical Islam," then they have already won the battle. It must be made excruciatingly clear, per "The Three Conjectures," that all Islam will face extinction by nuclear anihilation should its radical component be permitted to attain ascendancy. There must be a price attached to neglecting the need for peaceful coexistence. If Islam is unable or unwilling to rein those who advocate its expansionist doctrine, the entire religion as a whole will meet with fiery death and naught else. This is what is known in law enforcement circles as, "The Riot Act." |
| Posted by: Zenster 2004-06-15 2:48:24 AM |
| #2 Great article. We need a lean, mean, intelligence-gathering machine. We need to get out of our hang-ups of getting our hands dirty. Ceasing apologies to Islamists would be a good start. Then we need to start gathering intelligence on the BMIs the Big Mouth Imams. They need to know that they who preach for the destruction of the United States will be targets. Once some just plain joes see what happens, then we might get some people to turn and get intelligence. The Israelis seem to be able to do this. Not all the situations will be the same by any means, but we could sure learn. We have to harden for the long haul war. |
| Posted by: Alaska Paul 2004-06-15 2:35:36 AM |
| #1 Very cool, very cool indeed! |
| Posted by: Lucky 2004-06-15 2:16:26 AM |