Shades of old Saigon?
Senior military and intelligence officials have inappropriately pressured U.S. terrorism analysts to alter their assessments about the strength of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, three sources familiar with the matter told The Daily Beast. Analysts have been pushed to portray the group as weaker than the analysts believe it actually is, according to these sources, and to paint an overly rosy picture about how well the U.S.-led effort to defeat the group is going.
Reports that have been deemed too pessimistic about the efficacy of the American-led campaign, or that have questioned whether a U.S.-trained Iraqi military can ultimately defeat ISIS, have been sent back down through the chain of command or haven’t been shared with senior policymakers, several analysts alleged.
In other instances, authors of such reports said they understood that their conclusions should fall within a certain spectrum. As a result, they self-censored their own views, they said, because they felt pressure to not reach conclusions far outside what those above them apparently believed…
Meanwhile over at Tablet, Paul Berman responds to the “bafflement” over ISIS recorded by an anonymous official in the New York Review of Books (FWIW, I blogged about the NYRB article here).
Berman concludes:
Only, why do they slaughter people? The Islamic State in particular, with its Baatho-Islamist cadre—what is its motive? On this point, too, there is no mystery. The Islamic State has been eager to reveal its own thinking. The Islamic State slaughters for religious reasons—which is to say, for reasons that are bound to seem incomprehensible to us. It is piety that requires the efficiently organized jihadis to slaughter the poor unoffending Yazidi minority in Iraq; and to slaughter the Shia, which they have been doing for many years now, one suicide bombing after another; and to slaughter Christians; and would surely require them to slaughter the Jews, if only the Israeli Defense Force would do them the kindness of getting out of the way. Given the opportunity, the Islamic State would slaughter most of the world, if I understand the takfiri doctrine correctly. Slavery, too, is piety, in these people’s eyes. They pray before raping.
And they have prospered! Their successes bear out political theory on a few points, but mostly they are a rebuke to political theory. They are the enemy and conqueror of every doctrine that has ever supposed human behavior to be predictable. This is the bafflement. Anonymous is right. They have scored a triumph over every theory of human progress that has ever been proposed. They are not the first people to score such a victory. We have needed their reminder, though. In recent decades we have liked to tell ourselves that, after the Nazis, mankind has learned its lesson. But mankind is not a lesson-learning entity. Civilizations can learn lessons. But civilizations come and go. Impassive mankind remains uninstructable and stupid, such that, if once upon a time the barbarities of the 7th century thrilled and inspired a substantial portion of mankind, we can be confident that 7th-century barbarities will remain forevermore a viable possibility.
Indeed they will. The permanence of progress has always been an illusion. And we should be clear that this is not just about Islam (although to be sure, it is about Islam too). Berman refers to the Third Reich, but we do not have to travel back as far as 1933-45 to find other precedents for ISIS, notably early Maoist China (and then again the China of the Cultural Revolution) and the Cambodia of the Khmer Rouge, each instances of possibly the most murderous phenomenon of all, the millennialist state, which is clearly what ISIS has become.
To be clear, not all those who live within ISIS’s borders are gripped by the same fervor. There are—as there were in previous millennialist states—those who are prepared to go along, and not just because they are scared not to.
Berman:
The ordinary Sunnis in those pockets may dislike the Islamic State’s Quranic crucifixions, beheadings, lashings, and amputations, and may recoil at the mass slaughters. But the Sunnis have been terrified by the rise of Shiite power, and they see in the Islamic State a force that is willing to protect them. The Islamic State’s anti-crime policing goes down well, too. Weiss and Hassan quote a resident of the Syrian town of Deir Ezzor: “We never felt this safe for twenty years.” The Islamic State eagerly executes its own militants whenever they are accused of corrupt or criminal behavior, which counts as another grisly point in its favor, among the local Sunnis. The Islamic State sweeps the streets, protects the fisheries, controls the warlords, and regulates the economy. Oil revenues come its way because it understands the business. And it maneuvers cleverly among the tribes.
In an article for the Washington Post, Costantino Pischedda makes a similar point, but also expands on ISIS’s military strategy, and finds it a lot less chaotic than often portrayed:
Though the Review of Books article claims the organization defies the conventional wisdom on asymmetric warfare laid out by Mao Zedong and others, the group’s actions actually reveal a sophisticated understanding of asymmetrical combat. In fact, Mao envisioned three stages of revolutionary war: in the first one, insurgents focus on popular mobilization and assassinations of key individuals on the government side; in the second phase, they escalate to guerrilla warfare proper, with systematic hit-and-run attacks on security forces; finally, after they have acquired sufficient power and their opponent is correspondingly weakened, the insurgents graduate to conventional warfare and engage government forces in pitched battles, with the ultimate objective of inflicting on them a decisive defeat and seizing power.
The Islamic State may have adopted positional warfare sooner than most groups—Stathis Kalyvas suggests that this might have occurred to due to a combination of flat terrain and military weakness of its opponents—but it has moved seamlessly along this spectrum of tactics depending on the conditions faced on the battlefield….
[T]he Islamic State [has] rapidly adapted in the face of U.S. precision air power, eschewing the deployment of large formations of armored vehicles and using instead small-unit maneuvers skillfully exploiting opportunities for cover and concealment…
Not bad for what Obama described as a “JV team”.