Defeat: A self-fulfilling prophecy

I happen to be reading a British Army document on counterinsurgency at the moment. It says in one place that

Experience has shown that in any insurgency about 90% of the population do not support either side and generally remain neutral in their affiliations until one side is perceived to be winning.

This makes execellent intuitive sense: you have momentum so long as people think that aligning their wishes with yours is more likely to lead to their fulfillment than aligning them with the other side. In practice establishing common goals is fiendishly difficult particularly when your own strategic narrative is incoherent. Listen to this fascinating interview with Dr David Kilcullen, counterinsurgency advisor to Gen Petraeus, on the issueof winning te battle of competing narratives.

Getting back to the doctrine, it seems to me that the statement does not go far enough. It's not merely the perceptions of those in the theatre of conflict which are vital; the perceptions of one's own domestic base is equally important. AQ understands very well that insurgency and counterinsurgency are Information Operations with a military annex and plans and chooses its battles accordingly; I think we are begining to understand this but there's a long way to go yet. For obvious reasons the military is chary of any talk of the management of the domestic perceptions of the conflict. But the fact is that the real target of AQ's operations is the frontal lobe of the Western voter; that being the case ceding this vital battlefield is strategically suicidal. Clearly soldiers grasp this. On a tour through Marine outposts in Al Anbar province Gen Mattis* was asked by a sergeant

How are we supposed to fight a war when people back home say we've already lost?

Read the article. Mattis gave the best answer he could under the circumstances: believe your own eyes, ignore the press. But at the end of the day, or rather at the end of the coming months when the success or failure of the 'surge' is judged, the morale state of the Marines in Anbar won't count for much if the people at home have been convinced the thing is a lost cause.

*Incidentally, I met him at a conference last week. He was, as a colleague put it, as charming as only a hard-bitten Marine can be.

One other thing, aside from our own Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman whose recent Adelphi paper The Transformation of Strategic Affairs is a must read, the guru of 'strategic narratives' is the Johns Hopkins Professor Michael Vlahos. His article on the bankruptcy of the Long War and GWOT narratives, The Long War, A self-defeating prophecy, is very worthwhile, as is his longer piece in The American Conservative, The Fall of Modernity which begins

We are losing our wars in the Muslim world because our vision of history is at odds with reality. This is a well-established condition of successful societies, a condition that inevitably grows more worrisome with time and continuing success. In fact, what empires have most in common is how their sacred narratives come to rule their strategic behavior—and rule it badly. In America’s case, our war narrative works against us to promote our deepest fear: the end of modernity.

'For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that...'

If you are not reading Michael Yon's dispatches from Iraq then you are missing something very good. At the moment he is embedded with the Queen's Royal Lancers on the border near Iran. The latest dispatch Death or Glory Part III of IV begins rather depressingly with:

American soldiers think our press is bad to them, but we get off light compared to the Brits. One British soldier told me that when he made a journey of several hours across London, in uniform, not a single person acknowledged him. I said he should go to America where British soldiers are always welcome.

I must admit this observation rings true with me. The British public does not seem to care to be very aware of the remarkable bravery and professionalism of it's citizens in uniform which is, well, it's just appalling. On the other hand I can't remember the last time I saw someone in military uniform where I live or near where I work in Central London. I wonder if there's some cause and effect there?

This site Support our Soldiers seems a worthy way to make your thanks count. Of course the Americans always seem to take these things to the next level. That said, I think Adopt a Sniper is also a worthy effort. I wonder if my vicar will let me put their flyer up? Hmmm...

Wolfowitz resigns. Who is to head the World Bank?

Paul Wolfowitz is to resign as head of the World Bank. Personally, I think it is a stitch up as is described in this Wall Street Journal feature The Wolfowitz Files from a while back. Oh well. So the question is who should be the next head of the World Bank. There is someone qualified who is in between jobs: why Tony Blair should head the WB.

Keep up the good work!

Via a friend who has been feeding me things to post on my poor negelected blog:

Professor Sees Parallels Between Things, Other Things

I've not yet achieved the illustrious rank of Professor so I'm picturing my esteemed colleague Theo Farrell, Professor of War in the Modern World, demonstrating the parallels between things and, ummm, other things with the appropriate hand gestures.

Wikipedia

Oliver Kamm, Stephen Pollard, whom I read regularly and admire, and many others, including Wikipedia itself have weighed in recently with criticism of Wikipedia. Previously I have written approvingly of Wikipedia and I remain generally positive about it. The only thing that I would change in that earlier post would be to emphasize more strongly that Wikipedia is not about to overtake Britannica or any other encyclopedia any time soon, if ever. The point remains, however, that it is always a bad idea to cite encyclopedias which are superb starting points for research but not enough on their own.

I think that the critics are missing some important points, however. The most important in my mind being the fact that like it or not Wikipedia, or something like it, is not going away so long as we have the Internet. Collaborative knowledge-building via the Web is here to stay. Whether or not it displaces established encyclopedias remains to be seen--I doubt it will, as I said above. Therefore critics are pissing against the wind which is a good way to get your trousers wet but bothers the wind not at all.

Pollard says that Wikipedia is inaccurate on every topic he knows something about. Yet he declines to correct any of it, even the entry on himself which contains glaring errors. Which is sort of a problem. If elites can't be bothered to input even minimally, then they haven't got much of a platform for complaining about it. There's an interesting discussion/debate on wikipedia on languagelabunleashed. Just over halfway through one of the discussants says 'it is incumbent upon us to engage with Wikipedia and a mistake to step behind and let it pass.' I have to agree.

I recall immediately after the 7/7 bombings occurred here in London Professor Michael Clarke called an emergency meeting of the War Studies Department staff to compare notes on what had happened as, naturally enough, journalists in large numbers began to call looking for commentary and analysis. (My moment of surreality came when asked urgently by a BBC reporter over the phone what I thought was happening while I was scanning the BBC website trying to figure out what I thought was happening.) After the meeting I looked at the Wikipedia entry on '7 July 2005 London bombings' in the first few hours afterwards was by far the best and most comprehensive account available.

In short, Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia although it has some value as one, and it's not a news source although it had an edge as a collector of links over traditional sources in that instance (and presumably others), it's something else which by and large I think is significant and useful and bound to get more so. On the other hand, one thing that bothers me is the tendency I have noticed recently for Google searches on all sorts of topics to return Wikipedia entries as the first hit. What's up with that? Given that is happening, however, it makes it all the more important that those who want to lead and inform debate get more involved in this sort of social media instead of just bitching about it and hoping it will go away.

Stop coming to work and save the planet

As I'm working at home today and have spent the morning happily and productively teaching on-line, marking and clearing up some administration this proposal makes perfect sense to me:

The Institute of Directors is calling for flexible hours and more home working to help tackle global warming.

For what it's worth I think the Cult of Global Warming is increasingly, well, cult-like, and therefore my desire to work from the comfort of my sofa has nothing to do with 'saving the planet' and everything to do with the facts that: a) I get more done, and b) it doesn't require me to contribute a penny to the bulging coffers of First Great Western, undoubtedly the worst rail company in Britain.

Boris Yeltsin dies at 76

At the risk of turning this blog into a series of none-too-positive notes on the passing of various figures Boris Yeltsin has died. I frequently wonder whether Russia's chances for real democratic change were ever very good. There is an awful inertia in Russia's political history towards autocracy and the reification of the power of the state over the individual which suggests the chances were always iffy. But what chances there were squelched by this drunken vandalous buffoon of a president whose historic contributions include precipitately dismantling the USSR to obtain primacy of 'democratic' power in his own corner of it, bombing his own parliament in October 1993 when it challenged him and subsequently rewriting the Constitution which enshrined the president as Tsar-in-all-but-name, selling off the choicest assets of the state at fire-sale price to the bare-knuckled 'entrepreneurs' we now refer to as the 'Oligarchs' while impoverishing everyone else, launching, and then bungling, and then eschewing any responsibility, for the Chechen war which goes on still, and finally anointing as his successor Vladimir Putin, who while a man whose sobriety is a welcome contrast has as his major achievement the imposition of a veneer of competence to a basically kleptocratic authoritarian Russia headed slowly but inexorably from the ash-heap of history to the ash-heap beneath the ash-heap of history.

Kurt Vonnegut dies: 'So it goes'

Kurt Vonnegut has died. I remember being impressed by Vonnegut, particularly his 'searing' anti-war novel Slaughterhouse Five, because my teachers were so wholeheartedly of the belief that it was to be impressed by and I was eager to please. It took me a while to screw up the courage to tell my High School English teacher that I thought the book was full of empty aphorisms, incomprehensible and dull (well, I paraphrase, what I probably said was 'this sucks. I'm getting a lot more out of this Conan book', literary criticism not being my forte. I think Catch 22 by Joseph Heller, a colleague of Vonnegut, was a much better satire of World War 2. But the all time best satirical book on war was Jaroslav Hasek's Good Soldier Svejk.

BBC!

Every Briton who owns a TV is required to pay a licence fee of £127 per year. It's a legal mugging that enrages me more and more. Wonder why? This says it all.

Sun Tzu's Art of War

Yesterday I was part of a panel discussion on Sun Tzu's classic The Art of War on BBC Radio 3's excellent programme Night Waves. I'm told it will air on the Thursday after Easter if you'd like to listen. It should be available on-line as well. I haven't heard it so I hope I don't sound too daft. But I had a lot of fun doing it. Night Waves is rather like a very good seminar.

I hadn't actually thought much systematically about Sun Tzu before I went on so I wrote a little essay (as one does) on it. I think I said a few of these things, but sadly I think I write more clearly than I speak.

Sun Tzu’s Relevance to Contemporary Warfare

Talking points for BBC R3 ‘Nightwaves’

Dr David J. Betz
Department of War Studies,
King’s College London

3 April 2007


The importance of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War to contemporary military operational matters rests on three famous and well-known quotes. This is not to say that there is not much else in the work of great worth, but one can be tolerably certain that most strategists nowadays will be well familiar with three maxims particularly.

The first,

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
The Art of War, Chapter III

This quote is often repeated approvingly in military circles because it captures the essence of the currently very popular idea that in modern warfare information is the ‘force multiplier’ par excellence. If you take two opponents equal in every way in terms of numbers, quality of equipment, and tactical technique, except one is equipped with profoundly superior and more accurate information, or ‘dominant batttlespace knowledge’, to use the jargon, then you may expect that side to win handily. This is, for instance, in part how the lopsided outcome of the 1991 Gulf War and the March-April 2003 ‘main combat operations’ phase of the Iraq War have been explained: the blundering military ineptitude of Saddam Hussein merely heightened the lopsidedness of what was an entirely predictable outcome.

Essentially, this first maxim fits very well with the until-very-recently quite popular in military-analytical circles idea that we are in the midst of a ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’. Just as our economic, political and social systems are being transformed by the advent of the Information Age so too are our military forces being transformed. This concept has lost some of its luster in the wake of the Iraq War where the relatively small and light, fast-moving and hard-hitting US and UK forces which so adroitly caused the collapse of the regime of Saddam Hussein found themselves with feet of clay in the aftermath. Nonetheless, it is still current in policy and drives thinking on military procurement decisions in most Western countries (and China). The gist of the Revolution in Military Affairs concerns three key factors or enabling technologies:

• Precision guided weapons which allow attacks to be conducted highly precisely and selectively;
• Advanced sensors which are integral to the generation of a sophisticated, accurate and near real time awareness of all militarily significant movements on the battlefield; and,
• Advanced communications which permit the dissemination of this knowledge throughout one’s own force with the effect that it develops a common situational awareness.

Together, it is argued, these three things give advanced military forces immense advantages over less advanced ones. To illustrate: Imagine a chess game in which one player can see all the pieces while the other can see only his own—and not always even that much reliably. In such a situation you would expect that the side with a better view would win every time, even if it deployed fewer and less individually effective pieces. That is the thrust of the Revolution in Military Affairs: it’s the ultimate hilltop observation post; armed forces can get lighter and less numerous without sacrificing the ability to generate raw combat power if they possess a distinct knowledge advantage over their opponents. It should be obvious why those who advocate this position now find what Sun Tzu said more than 20 centuries ago about knowing oneself and one’s enemy highly congenial.

Of course this line of argument has lost much rhetorical force since April 2003 when the conflict in Iraq shifted into an unconventional mode in which the other side ceased to move and fight in a manner which ‘advanced sensors’ could discern as militarily significant. Insurgents blend into the landscape both geographic and human and in this sort of situation numbers—‘boots on the ground’—still count for a great deal. Stand-off firepower is a superb tool for killing people and breaking things at low cost to oneself, but it’s not much use in securing an area of operations and returning a semblance of civil life to an area which combat operations have disrupted. Unfortunately, for the US and UK it is this which will determine victory in the war in Iraq because the winning of battles does not, ipso facto, mean the achievement of one’s desired political outcome.

One might expect that Sun Tzu had lost a measure of appeal as a result of this. In fact, that is not the case because his appeal and special relevance has other dimensions which can be seen in his second oft-quoted maxim:

Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.
The Art of War, Chapter III

To understand why Sun Tzu wrote this one needs to understand the environment in which he was writing which was a time of constant strife between the various Chinese kingdoms. In his time the enemy of the day could be the ally tomorrow and the enemy again the day after. Defeat was never final and the constant shifting of alliances made it vital that one carefully preserved one’s forces and did not gamble them on a single throw of the dice—because there was never a single throw! Moreover, force had to be applied in a much calibrated way, enough to achieve one’s aim without unduly inflaming the desire for revenge on the part of the defeated or too much fear and envy on the part of onlooking other powers. History, contrary to the old adage, never repeats itself; but it does show recurrent patterns and in a certain sense Sun Tzu’s time shows commonality with our own.

The zeitgeist of our time, at least in the West, is to a greater or lesser degree characterized by a sensitivity to casualties, both our own and the enemy’s, and an eagerness to avoid the disruption of ‘normal’ affairs on which our prosperity rests and which combat, particularly major combat, inevitably entails. This makes Sun Tzu for us an appealing prism through which to look at and conceptualize contemporary warfare. Certainly, most strategists would now take the view that the ‘Long War’ against ‘Islamic Fascism’ with which we are now faced is not going to be won purely, or even principally, by military means. Sun Tzu speaks to that part of ourselves which sees fighting and killing the ‘enemy’ (itself an ambiguous concept now) as insufficient on its own and in fact in some ways when crudely applied somewhat counter-productive.

There is a tendency here to draw a contrast between Sun Tzu and the 19th century Prussian Carl von Clausewitz on this point, not surprisingly because Clausewitz famously wrote that,

War therefore is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will.
On War, Book I, Chapter I

The most efficacious way to do this, Clausewitz suggested, was to destroy the enemy’s army, to disarm him and remove his ability to resist. Traditionally, ‘Clausewitzeans’ have shown great concern with ‘decisive battle’, a single engagement in which the maximum force is brought to bear in order to bring the war to a conclusion and thereby achieve the aim for which it was fought. On its own this proscription is problematic. In its raw state it rings home less truly than does Sun Tzu’s admonition. I’d hasten to add, however, that this should not be taken as an excuse to throw aside Clausewitz or to criticize ‘Clausewitzeans’ because in fact Clausewitz’s meaning is more complex and his intentions more nuanced. The ‘headline’ understanding of Clausewitz is, however, superficially cruder than the ‘headline’ understanding of Sun Tzu. In fact, speaking as a scholar of warfare I would argue strongly that Clausewitz’s On War is the canonical work with Sun Tzu’s Art of War as an increasingly useful companion. The contrasts and putative juxtapositions are more apparent than real.

There are in comparison to other fields such as economics or politics precious few ‘philosophers’ of war. Politics has Plato, Hobbes, Locke and so on. Economics has Smith and Marx and Friedman. War has just Clausewitz and to a lesser extent Sun Tzu (maybe Machiavelli crosses over too). In other words, the field is not large. Amid the multitude of tactical manuals and quasi-philosophical ruminations of famous generals from Vegetius to Napoleon only Sun Tzu and Clausewitz stand out for the attempt to understand war as a whole phenomenon. This explains why they have such a prominent place in military education where they are both much talked about, albeit less frequently read. Sun Tzu obviously has much influence on contemporary Chinese military thought. The Art of War was also highly admired in Russia, having been translated into Russian and put to use by the Imperial General staff by the 1860s. While the recognition of Sun Tzu’s merit came later in the West the enthusiasm for him has been no less. His third famous maxim is particularly important here,

In all fighting, the direct method may be used for joining battle, but indirect methods will be needed in order to secure victory.
The Art of War, Chapter V

Sun Tzu could fairly be described as the originator of the ‘Indirect Approach’ in warfare, a notion popularized and expanded by the British strategist Basil Liddell-Hart, which has since become what we now refer to as ‘manoeuvre warfare’ which is essentially the doctrinal orthodoxy of all the major military powers today.

Sun Tzu is also highly relevant to ‘small wars’ (ie., ‘unconventional wars’). Indeed, one of his most influential translators was the US Marine Brigadier General, and student of Oxford University, Samuel B. Griffiths who was a leading figure in the ‘Small Wars’ community of the Marine Corps (and therefore, since the US Army has habitually eschewed such forms of warfare, could be described as a leading figure in American thought on small wars). Among Griffith’s other translations was Mao Zedong’s classic book On Guerrilla Warfare which, unsurprisingly, is also steeped in Sun Tzu’s thinking. Indeed, Mao is reputed to have memorized The Art of War. One could argue that the manner in which Mao fought and won the Chinese civil war constitutes the prototype of modern insurgency of which the current ‘Global Insurgency’, emblemized if not led, by Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda is an evolved descendant. In other words, it would not at all shock me to learn that on the shelves of his cave in Waziristan or wherever else he might be that Osama bin Laden has a well thumbed copy of Sun Tzu’s Art of War.

Iran to Release Sailors, Marines

LONDON: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran said Wednesday that he would immediately release 15 British sailors and marines who have been held captive in Iran since March 23.

Diplomacy is best defined as the art of building a ladder for the other guy to climb down. I was not hopeful that it would turn out thus so I really must tip my hat to British diplomacy here. Great ladder building

.Ahmadinejad said at a news conference in Tehran that he was giving the British military personnel amnesty and a pardon.

"I announce their freedom and their return to their people," he said. "They will be free after our meeting. They will go to the airport and will join their families."

The Iranian president said the decision to release the prisoners was not part of a swap with Iranian prisoners in Iraq.

"Our government has pardoned them, it is a gift from our people" he said.

A gift! Thanks Captain Blackbeard Let's get these guys back on HMS Cornwall as soon as possible doing their jobs which I rather hope will involve a rather more proactive approach to Iran in the very near future.

Great speech at the UN

UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuel speaks inconvenient truth to the UN Human Rights Council. The response of the Council's president is all too predictable.



Pathetic.

Electronic Jihad Part 3: Great Information Operation

This video was just sent to me by a friend. It is extraordinary how sophisticated AQ's propaganda is. Do we do Information Operations this well? This is very professional work

The Fall of Modernity

I have been discussing two things in class lately: the nature of the 'Long War'; and how progress in it can be assessed. On top of that I have been preoccupied with the topic of 'strategic narratives' as I'm writing an article on how social media is used to generate and sustain compelling strategic narratives which I would argue constitute the real centres of gravity in this conflict. Probably this makes me unduly susceptible to this article by Michal Vlahos in the latest American Conservative, 'The Fall of Modernity'. There's a lot of food for thought in it. (And, incidentally, observe the footnotes--that's how it should be done). But what caught my attention particularly was this:

So we are, as our own government tells us, in a war of civilizations—a national testing in which we will emerge triumphant, the true beacon and best hope of humankind or else find ourselves destroyed, the detritus of history. This is not simply inflated rhetoric. It is avowed American policy.

In the president’s own words, it is nothing less than “the unfolding of a global ideological struggle, our time in history,” pitting “progress” and “freedom” against a “mortal danger to all humanity,” the “enemy of civilization.” Moreover, “the call of history has come to the right country,” and “the defense of freedom is worth the sacrifice.” Ultimately the “evil ones” will be destroyed, and “this great country will lead the world to safety, security, and peace,” a millennial world where “free peoples will own the future.”2

Here inevitably, rather than reflecting actual conditions, it is more important for reality to fit the sacred narrative. So for nearly four years, it has been “the Iraqi people” vs. “the killers,” or more broadly in the world of Islam, “good moderate Muslims” vs. “evil.”

Does it matter whether we pursue grand drama for wholly narcissistic reasons, as long as we win? What if we don’t? Failure might lead to the collapse of friendly tyrannies like Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia or even to economic crisis and an expansion of the war. Longstanding alliances could come apart. But even then our military power, our vast economy, and the strength of the American people would still be intact. Strategic recovery should still be possible. The old narrative might be in tatters, but that might turn out to be a good thing because we could then build a more modest national story.

Such recovery is foreclosed, however, in a script of civilization and its enemies. Not only did American leaders go for the existential War of History instead of dealing with reality, they chose the worst possible dramatic vehicle for restaging the national passion play. For what we are experiencing is no war of civilizations. It is not even a war.

Because the national narrative is a sacred retelling of God’s message and His American mission, its periodic restaging always assumes the form of a great war—revolution, civil war, world war. But after 9/11, there was no great war to be had, so we created a simulacrum. Up to a point, we might keep it looking like a war. But at last it will not perform for us. It cannot support the demands of the drama we require. What we needed was a grand yet simple story with easy enemies and a ringing ending called victory. But our drama has shape-shifted from a war into an uncontrollable force accelerating larger world transformations.

The “war” is revealing the distant contours of the end of modernity.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

She's got my vote!

Well, if I had a vote that is. From the New York Times, 'If Elected ...Clinton Says Some G.I.’s in Iraq Would Remain':

WASHINGTON, March 14 — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton foresees a “remaining military as well as political mission” in Iraq, and says that if elected president, she would keep a reduced military force there to fight Al Qaeda, deter Iranian aggression, protect the Kurds and possibly support the Iraqi military.

This is almost exactly my view with the caveat that I would aim by fair means and foul to actively destabilize, subvert, and undermine Iran rather than merely to 'deter it' (the deterrability of Iran being open to question, I think). It perfectly encapsulates the least-bad-response to what seems to me the case that:

1. The counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq is probably beyond recovery; but,
   
2. the consequences of packing it in leaving Iraq a failed state maelstrom which sucks in the rest of the region (even more than it does already) are too high a price to pay.

Electronoic Jihad Part 2

According to this Times On-Line article 'Al Qaeda plot to bring down UK internet'. In my earlier post on this I speculated that AQ's cyberwar innovation looked to be combining physical coercion with cyberattacks. This is a slightly different, but rather more ambitious, variant: physical attacks designed to take down information systems. Clearly, somebody's been reading up on Effects-Based Operations.

Hitchens on Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I am currently reading (devouring rather) Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book Infidel. I highly recommend it. Which is why I found rather underwhelming Timothy Garton Ash's not terribly favourable review of it in the New York Review of Books. Christopher Hitchens takes on the critics much more eloquently than I can in this Slate piece 'Ayaan Hirsi Ali is no Fundamentalist.' Have a read.

Update: Good article here at the Wall Street Journal covering the 'Secular Islam Summit' in Florida, 'Islam's Other Radicals'. The author mentions Irshad Manji, the Canadian-Lesbian-Muslim-Feminist (how's that for identity politics?) whose book The Trouble with Islam is also good reading.

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. -- At this landmark Summit on Secular Islam, there are no "moderate" Muslims.

There are ex-Muslims: People like Ibn Warraq, author of "Why I Am Not a Muslim," who doesn't want an Islamic Reformation so much as he does a Muslim Enlightenment. There are ex-jihadists: people like Tawfik Hamid, who, as a young medical student in Cairo, briefly enlisted in the Gamaa Islamiya terrorist group and who remembers being preached to by a mesmerizing doctor named Ayman al-Zawahiri.

There are Muslim runaways: People like Afshin Ellian, who in 1983 fled Iran -- and the threat of execution -- on camelback and is now a professor of law at the University of Leiden in Holland. (Now threatened by European jihadists, he lives with round-the-clock police protection.) There are experts on Islamic law: People like Hasan Mahmoud, a native Bangladeshi who, as director of Shariah at the Muslim Canadian Congress, was instrumental in overturning Ontario's once-legal Shariah court last year.

There are even a few practicing Muslims here, such as Canadian author Irshad Manji. Ms. Manji, whose documentary "Faith Without Fear" airs on PBS next month, describes herself as a "radical traditionalist" and draws a sharp distinction between Muslim moderates and reformers: "Moderate Muslims denounce terror that's committed in the name of Islam but they deny that religion has anything to do with it," she says. "Reform-minded Muslims denounce terror that's committed in the name of Islam and acknowledge that our religion is used to inspire it."

The difference is not trivial. For more than five years, the Bush administration has been attempting to enlist the support of the so-called moderates in the war on terror -- its definition of "moderate" being remarkably elastic, to put it charitably. To take one example, administration emissary Karen Hughes has "reached out" to such figures as Sheikh Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, head of al-Azhar theological university in Cairo, with whom she had a "wonderful meeting" in September 2005.

Sheikh Tantawi, adept at talking out of both sides of his mouth, had earlier approved a fatwa calling on the Iraqi people to "defend itself, its land, and its homeland [against the U.S. invasion] with all means of defense at its disposal, because it is a jihad that is permitted by Islamic law. . . . The gates of jihad are open until the Day of Judgment, and he who denies this is an infidel or one who abandons his religion."

Undersecretary Hughes is not at this summit, of course, nor is anyone else from the State Department, nor is the U.S.-funded al-Hurra Arabic TV station -- facts archly noted by the conferees. In the quasi-official U.S. view, the speakers at this conference amount to an exotic, publicity-seeking fringe group, with whom close association is politically unwise.

Al-Jazeera, however, is here, suggesting that the real Arab mainstream better appreciates the broad interest the conference's speakers attract in the Muslim world, as well as their latent power. Perhaps this is the flip side of the appeal of extremist Islam, an indication that what Muslims are mainly looking for are radical alternatives to the unpalatable mush of unpopular autocratic governments, state-approved clerics like Sheikh Tantawi, and Saudi-funded "mainstream" organizations such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Radicalism, at least of a kind, is certainly what this summit provides via Wafa Sultan. Dr. Sultan, a Syrian-born psychiatrist now living in the U.S., came to widespread public attention last year after she debated a Sunni cleric on al-Jazeera. "Only Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches," she observed. The televised clip, translated by Memri, has been downloaded on YouTube more than a million times.

Dr. Sultan, whose outspokenness has forced her and her family into hiding, is here to receive an award from the Center for Inquiry, the summit's organizer and lead funder. She accepts it by saying: "I don't believe there is any difference between radical Islam and regular Islam."

The view is shared by some, though by no means all, of the conferees. "Salafists cannot imagine Islam without the killing of apostates," says Dr. Hamid, who also now lives in hiding. "To them, the religion is a house of cards: Remove one element, and the whole structure collapses." Another conferee subscribes to the Salafist logic, though he dissents from the religion as a whole. "Truth is," he admits, "to be a Muslim democrat you have to be a bad Muslim."

In this view, the baggage of Shariah and hadith -- the traditions in which some of the most violent Islamic injunctions are to be found -- are as central to Islam as the Quran itself. Hasan Mahmoud disagrees. "Most Muslims don't even know what the Shariah laws are," he says. "The moment you actually show them what the laws are, they can understand they're unjust." Mr. Mahmoud illustrates the point by observing that, under Shariah, a husband does not require a witness to divorce his wife. "But the Quran says that if you want to divorce your wife, you need two witnesses. With Muslims, this kind of thing works magic."

Mr. Mahmoud spreads his gospel partly by way of cheaply produced DVDs, which seems pretty crude until one recalls that Ayatollah Khomeini, during his exile in Paris, spread the gospel of Islamic revolution by way of audiocassettes. Other conferees also have their Web sites: Alamgir Hussain, from Singapore, has islam-watch.org; Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi, the conference's moving spirit, puts out IranPressNews.com; other conferees write for MiddleEastTransparent.com and so on. These are the "frugal chariots," to borrow a phrase from Emily Dickinson, that bear the Muslim reformer's soul.

A fair bit of U.S. government money is being spent on conference security, including from the FBI. Still, it's remarkable that the government, given the huge resources available from places like the National Endowment for Democracy, provides no funding or support for this conference or its various participants.

Here are two questions for the government: If Mr. Warraq, Dr. Sultan et al. are really irrelevant to the larger Muslim debate, why are the jihadists so eager to kill them? And if the jihadists want to kill them, don't they deserve support as well as security?

Think Beyond War

'Don't send a lion to catch a mouse' Says Shankar Vedantam in The Washington Post in summarizing the thrust of a recent study by Col Isaiah Wilson III of West Point and Jason Lyall of Princeton University of some 250 conflicts since the Napoleonic era:

Two political scientists recently examined 250 asymmetrical conflicts, starting with the Peninsular War.

Although great powers are vastly more powerful today than in the 19th century, the analysis showed they have become far less likely to win asymmetrical wars. More surprising, the analysis showed that the odds of a powerful nation winning an asymmetrical war decrease as that nation becomes more powerful.

The analysis by Jason Lyall at Princeton University and Lt. Col. Isaiah Wilson III at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point shows that the likelihood of a great power winning an asymmetrical war went from 85 percent during 1800-1850 to 21 percent during 1950-2003.

The same trend was evident when the researchers studied only asymmetrical conflicts involving the United States. The more industrialized a powerful country becomes, the more its military becomes technologically powerful, the less effective it seems to be in an asymmetrical war.

Essentially, what Lyall and Wilson are saying is that if you want to catch a mouse, you need a cat. If you hire a lion to do the job because it is bigger and stronger, the very strength and size of the lion can get in the way of getting the job done.

"A lion is built for different prey," Lyall said. "A lion is built to take down an antelope, and a cat is designed to take down a mouse. Now [in Iraq] we are a lion trying to take down a mouse.

We were lucky enough to have Colonel Wilson visit the Department of War Studies at King's College London last week to make his case, and am impressive case it was. Wilson cuts an impressive figure intellectually--and tellingly he more than held his own in the debate which followed in the pub afterward (the true test of a scholar, IMHO). I suspect and hope that we will hear very much more from him. Have a look at his website Think Beyond War which I recommend highly.

I very much buy his argument so far as I have seen it thus far. And I'd like to see more. What's the future for the 'lion'? Is it all mouse-catching from here on? If so the lion better give birth to some kittens asap. How to make that happen is something that interests me greatly.

Update: Reading it over that last sentence seems an invitation to a bunch of bad jokes. Fire away in comments.

Warning: Graphic!

Have you ever wondered what flies look like close up after they've hit your windscreen? Wonder no more.

Guardian report on Iraq

The Guardian yesterday posted a gloomy assessment of the situation in Iraq, 'Military chiefs give US six months to win Iraq war', based on an unnamed sources insight into the allegedly pessimistic views of the 'Baghdad Brains' Trust', Cols Kilcullen (ret), McMaster and Mansoor, brought in by Gen Petraeus to advise him on a new counterinsurgency strategy. This morning I see that Kilcullen has strongly refuted the article in the Small Wars Journal 'Guardian article misrepresents the advisers' view'. Extract:

And yes, there is a risk that home-front political will might collapse just as we are getting things right on the ground. Given some commentators’ overall negativity, one suspects that their efforts may be directed to precisely that end. You may not like the President, you may be unhappy about the war. But whose side are you on? The Iraqis trusted us, and this is their fight. They deserve our support.

Buried in the article, though, are some references to real-world progress:

• Progress has been made on oil-wealth sharing legislation – a major development

• Joint operations are beginning in Baghdad, and are going well so far

• Iraqi community leaders are reporting somewhat improved morale and public confidence among the civilian population, though this is tempered by previously unmet expectations

• Numbers of political murders have fallen (precipitously) since the operation began, though these are still too high in absolute terms

• Iraqi forces are turning up, and performing well, though not always at 100% strength

• In al-Anbar, tribal leaders have realized extremists have nothing to offer them – a huge development, as influential community leaders have "flipped" from AQ's side to support the Iraqi government

• Regional diplomatic efforts, including with Iran and Syria, are apparently underway

Unfortunately most of these developments are buried in the last paragraph of a long article.

The Guardian is entitled to its own view of the war, and reasonable people can differ on these issues. But the Guardian’s view is not ours, and the anonymous source misrepresents our views. It is really too soon to tell how things will play out, though early signs are encouraging so far, and the advisers as a group remain cautious realists, not pessimists.

Actually I'd describe my own view on Iraq as cautiously pessimistic, my gut feeling is that the counterinsurgency is lost and we need to be think now about how to limit the fallout from that; but as ever I think Kilcullen is worth listening to. I am impressed moreover with the speed with which he got this rebuttal out because he hits the nail on the head when he says 'there is a risk that home-front political will might collapse...' Indeed I think that it has already here in Britain in no small part because of the relentless chipping away of the Guardian, and the BBC for that matter.