Dennis Hollingsworth

Study War

I went to the UCLA antiterrorism conference last week and took a few videos, the one above was taken by someone else who had a better shot from a seat closer to the podium. You can see my videos here, here, here, and here., such as they are. Wafa Sultan is an amazing speaker, forceful and without pretension. While Daniel Pipes and Yaron Brook emphasised war (that the only way to prevail is to possess the willingness to prevail... implacability), Wafa Sultan insists in her own quiet way that Islam/the Muslim world needs a reformation, that only Muslims can fight Islamfascists. I have long thought that we can only fight a holding action until a true civil war erupts in the Ummah itself.

After the conference came the horrible shooting at Virginia Tech. If one can put aside the mediated political dimension of suicide bombing (it's probably wrong to do so, but I'm exercising artifice here to make a point), it is striking how the Virginia event resembles a terrorist action. Columbine, the Oklahoma City bombing the list gets uncomfortably long. In terms of sheer mayhem, the high bar has been set by Beslan and there is no reason not to anticipate a monster with ambition would try to surpass that standard. I used to read New Perspecitves Quarterly back in the late 80's and I remember the assertion there of the idea that since we are living in an age where people can do more with less, they/we can also do more damage with less as well we can do good. Once you yoke this potential with a utopian ideology to get closer to Allah via global sharia law, you have the classic force multiplier that brings on a 21st century perfect storm. Grimly, I am suggesting a continuum-- from teenage revenge fantasies to axe grinding atavistic throwbacks, that "doing more with less" is going to get extremely vivid as time goes on... this might sound cloying or superficial but today the question has to be asked: is there any way to maximize the good and minimize the bad creative potential here? What safeguard can we devise to protect us from human potential gone bad?

This morning, I read Ralph Peters' recent article with this deadly spectrum in mind:

This is where terror gets personal, in a variety of ways. First, virtually any target is fair game, invading the personal sphere of the average citizen. And when anything can be a target, everything must be protected - an impossible mission for any government.

Second, the mission is the suicide bomber's reward from his terrorist masters.
It's incomprehensible to us that even the maddest fanatic invoking any god's name can bomb a clinic, market or school and enthusiastically kill himself in the process, but his action springs from a general anger at life and an indiscriminate desire for vengeance.

By taking the lives of others, the suicide bomber acts to assert his identity and to escape his personal unhappiness. The religion with which he has intoxicated himself just flashes the green light.

The dark men steering him from above understand his psychology perfectly. We don't.

In today's "asymmetrical conflicts," this is a fundamental asymmetry - between the state's need to provide collective security (the one essential commodity every government must offer) and the terrorist's intimate need to violate that security. At a time when our expensive arsenal is poorly matched to our patchwork strategy, our enemy's ultimate weapon, the suicide bomber, precisely matches the strategy of his masters.

And in this contest of commodities, he's cheap, expendable and grimly reliable.

As we try to "flood the market" with security in the hope that we'll eventually drive down its cost, the problem is that the price will never stabilize. There's no "now we can relax" answer to Islamist terror - a phenomenon in which impossible ambitions employ logical strategies that rely on irrational actors.

But we have to go on fighting. We have no choice.

Think of the world as a security marketplace, where the state's monopoly is constantly challenged by everyone from terrorists to private security companies (in some states, such as Zimbabwe or Sudan, the monopoly should be challenged). Healthy governments may suffer, but they'll survive. The crucial battleground lies in the many states whose futures are up for grabs.
The state that can't provide legitimate security to its citizens today will threaten our own security tomorrow. And the suicide bomber will be there.

(Emphasis Mine.)
As we get closer to the end of history, it should not surprise us that our dream come true will still have monsters in it, and yet some of us believe that tehy are not in the dawning liberal democracy of Fukuyama and certainly nor in the car wreck of the classless utopia of Marx. Denying violence in mankind will only have it coming out the seams. Better to know it's there, especially when life is hunky-dory. The "dark men" are everywhere*.

Everywhere.

Be ready. Study war. It will never go away.

A PostScript:

Now this guy's mug probably doesn't grace any art critic's refrigerator, but consider what he is saying:

"I would hope that the administrators and folks that are making the decisions would understand that it?s difficult to negotiate with a bullet," security consultant Allen Hill told TODAY. "A person that comes into your facility with a gun intends to kill and do you harm."

The founder of Response Options, a Texas-based security company, said, "Get past this paralysis of fear over liability issues. Our country is so litigious and concerned about doing the wrong thing and about doing the politically correct thing that we don?t do anything."

That only helps people like Cho Seung Hui. "The bad guys are counting on Americans to sit still and do nothing," Hill said.

Students and others need to realize that they do have options, Hill said.

The "bad guys" plan their attacks. Schools need to plan and rehearse their defenses and responses just as aggressively.

"The training should be just as intense and be taken just as seriously as the bad guy takes their mission to kill," he said.

At Virginia Tech, Cho Seung Hui walked into classrooms and simply shot people. There are reports that he even lined up victims to shoot them one by one. But in one Norris Hall classroom, student Zach Petkewicz led his classmates in barricading the door, saving all inside.

Petkewicz? response was instinctive, prompted by "adrenaline and fear."

Hill?s company teaches acting from knowledge and a well-rehearsed plan.

"Once the bad guy?s inside, how hard is it to hit a non-moving target?" Hill observed.

"Get up and move," he advised. "Do whatever it takes to create chaos and mayhem. Disrupt them. Make them go into a protective mode themselves. We feel that we can become actively aggressive for our own benefit, whether that?s actively running out of the classroom, having to face the gunman and take him down, breaking out windows and escaping that way."

You can?t wait for something to happen and then try to form a response, he said. It?s got to be done in advance.

Security systems are passive, he said. But those under attack can be active.

Said Hill: "There are things that you can do to take the initiative away from the bad guy, to disrupt their plan and to create a situation that?s winnable for you."

PostScript Prescript 2: It'd be good to brush up on your first aid too, you first responder you.

Postscript 3: What's this post doing in an artist's blog? There will be resonances to pay when the issue of represention in the world of our imagination becomes a matter of life or death. Don't like surveillance culture? It's going to get a lot worse unless we all get implacable, on the same side of civilization.

Posted by Dennis at April 18, 2007 5:46 PM