What ISIS Really Wants

I have to admit I began reading this examination of the motive-set of our opponents with considerable skepticism. I quickly scanned and noted the spirited arrival of the Caliphate in our midst (Mullah Omar won’t be happy!), the second coming of Jesus Christ no less, the last stand of the martyrs at the Temple on the Mount, the Sword of Truth that slays the anti-Messiah blah, blah, fucking blah.

I doggedly pressed on but they broke me when the essay’s three wise men lamented the fact they were prevented from achieving their passage to heaven when the black-dog anti-Christ lurking in the bowels of the UK Home Office “took my passport away”. Damn!

On the list of fantastic excuses for avoiding combat that one rates up there with Bill Clinton’s forgetting to post his letter asking to be drafted in 1969. I’m somewhat puzzled why the author failed to mention the Schengen Agreement that enables anyone to legally travel across the EU without showing your passport.

Perhaps a brief tweet to three British schoolgirl Jihadist could have enlightened our three errant would-be martyrs (as well as the author’s good self) as to the ways, means, ends the true-believer needs to employ on the road to Damascus and salvation

I have no doubt folks have been citing the supernatural as the reasons for inflicting so much violence in this part of the world for tens of thousands of years. History has given us written and chiseled descriptions of these supernatural motivators as far back as 7000 years but I’m sure they're been spooking up the battle ecosystem since one cave-man wanted another cave-man’s stick, stone, food, wife, fire, hilltop, treetop, sea-shell etc. since the dawn of time.

I read on with the hope of finding a more contemporary manifestation of the supernatural – say something like Spiderman, Ironman, Superman or if we’re talking bad guys - Riddler, Doctor Doom (my favorite), The Joker or even the Penguin. But no, it was all old school – very old school.

Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of very religious people who spend a great amount of time and energy adhering to their faith in this part of the world. Millions suffer for their beliefs and many have paid with their lives. But following a leadership that advocates murder, rape, chopping people’s heads off on the internet, blowing up women and children cuts very little mustard with the thousands of mosque, temple or church goer I have encountered in my 30 years in the region.

IMHO from a purely religious perspective you would get more motivational traction with the natives if you suggested the ‘Holy War ’ was being inspired by the X-Men, Fantastic Four, The Avengers or the marionettes from Team America.

I had the opportunity to challenge a very senior fruitcake leader as to the veracity of his personal quest for the martyrdom as described in this essay. I drew his attention to the location of his eminent self, the location of the men dying for the cause and the hundred kms between the two positions. He was not a happy bunny when we parted company – guns, knives, sticks, stones and sandals were all drawn and at the ready.

I enjoyed a similar encounter with a more lowly fruitcake who often expressed a similar desire for a heaven-bound death. Along with several of my team we duly pointed out the edge of the enemy minefield at the base of our hilltop position and the mile deep killing zone surrounding a dug in mechanized infantry regiment. Someone helpfully fixed a bayonet to the end of his rifle and pointed the way to paradise.

Like his boss (and so many other Wahhabi) he flew into an incandescent rage but he was careful not to point his weapon at anyone. No doubt he was mindful that front-line troops the world over, of every color, creed or faith share a loathing of assholes who dance about casting the light fantastic at the prospect of a violent death from shot, shell or mine.

In a different place, time and war I explored a similar God-person take on events with an old Indian soldier. I spent an interesting few weeks with a retired Indian Army Sargent - Major who had been forced from his ancestral home near Lahore when NW India was partitioned to create West Pakistan.

He reminisced upon the motives behind the mass slaughter he and his family experienced during the partition in August 1947. Unlike the historical narrative that claims the fissures separating the major faiths in the region (Hindu, Sikh and Muslim) was the root cause of the slaughter; nearly everything he experienced was a consequence of unbridled human greed for other people’s wealth and possessions.

His personal experience left no doubt in his mind that folks from within all the communities saw partition as an opportunity to seize someone else’s’ ancestral property, business, job, savings, women-folk, bonded labor, livestock, farmland, water source, social standing, debt-settling etc. by foul means without fear of communal recrimination nor legal prosecution.

Obviously it shouldn't come as a surprise to any of us that the western historical record was hopelessly misguided but the native historians from all faiths also chose the more ‘heavenly’ explanation to the murder of half a million people and the spontaneous displacement of 15 million homeless.

No doubt the native Intelligentsia, not wanting to besmirch the birth of the world’s largest democracy (India) nor the sanctity of the newly formed Land of the Pure (Pakistan), chose to ignore the strategic implications shaped by naked greed, lust, vengeance, wrath etc. And instead inserted the supernatural God option for the historical record.

The first-hand accounts as experienced by the old soldier and millions of others was simply ignored. It is an interesting historical question as to how different might the 65 fraught years of Indo/Pak relations been if the truth had been exposed, examined and reconciled back in 1947.

Similarly the US experience in VN. What may have happened had we not abandoned our Viet Minh WW2 allies and taken up a dying French Imperialist cause. Rather than embrace the truth of Ho & Giap’s ambition to liberate their country from French colonialism we chose to ignore reality and threw in our lot with colonialism and attempted to reverse a War of Independence.

The bright shining lie of a Red Chinese menace threatening an imaginary country dreamed up by a bunch of deluded Europeans in Geneva in 1954 has yet to die a death.

Formulating the truth is something the supernatural explanation really struggles with. The whole rationale of explaining (in a factual manner) questions and answers pertaining to the actions of someone or something that requires the suspension of the laws of the universe is an impossible one.

Contrast the horns of that dilemma with the argument espoused in Wong and Gerras essay for the Army War College’s SIS titled ‘Lying to Ourselves: Dishonesty in the Army Profession’ (posted on SWJ) as to why so much is going wrong.

Unlike the above God is Great essay their effort forwards a rational answer to every problem we have. Obviously there are many questions we are unaware of and as such the much needed answer remains a mystery but there are many important questions that have been answered with fact but we willfully continue to ignore.

Answers as to what drives IS, Taliban, Putin are as readily available as the folly of so much RMA mickey mouse, toxic careerism, micromanagement and the lousy internal ballistics of a S109 round in a Stoner rifle.

Wong and Gerras have shown the path that leads to many answers.The explanations featuring a Broadway Joe's take on the second-coming of Christ offers nothing.

RC

Definitely an important article.

As for whether they are religious or not, I ascribe to Sam Harris' views on this, they are not only religious, they are the MOST religious.

Dr. Geoff Demarest, I just finished reading your excellent book Winning Insurgent War. It has given me a clear new perspective on looking at strategy. (I am a 2 star theater SOC's J3)

I would be interested in your thoughts on strategy for C-ISIL after reading this article as I have one developing in my head (now full of your influence).

Would be interested in contacting you privately and perhaps inviting you to speak with us.

Blast from the past as some of us know this individual up front and personal.

Another Bucca Graduate first class---US intel seems to have never figured out the old AQI command structure especially since he was evidently tied to the Zarqawi network. The US Army Iraq military prison system has produced some of the finest trained jihadi's in Iraq.

Daesh top dog in Libya is an Iraqi: Wisam Abd al-Zubaidi AKA Abu Nabil al-Anbari, Bucca graduate, Zarqawi associate http://almasalah.com/ar/NewsDetails.aspx?NewsID=47815 …

THEN this today as well:

#ISIS continues to build support from tribal groups & defecting insurgents, says @faysalitani. Read more: http://buff.ly/1CSK7f7 @AP

Well worth the read--somewhat long but worth it in the end.

http://20committee.com/2015/02/19/why-the-west-is-losing/

Shall We Call ISIS Islamic or Not?
The issue is tough to unravel; I have not yet done so to my own satisfaction, nevertheless admitting its importance as an element of strategic communication. Some say a failure to correctly name a problem is to condemn ourselves to hit-and-miss prescriptions. Others hold that there is not so much in a name -- that we must concentrate instead on what to do -- while not offending a vast population of potential allies. Upon reading Graeme Wood’s article in The Atlantic titled, “What ISIS Really Wants” and a riposte by Jack Jenkins in Thinkprogress titled, “What the Atlantic Gets Dangerously Wrong about ISIS and Islam” some items came to mind all at once that together seemed to me somehow informative. Am I onto a useful path, or just nuts as usual? Here are the four items:
1. V.I. Lenin published What is to Be Done in 1903. The word ‘mere’, or its related grammatical forms, appears about fifty times in the book, with most memorable effect as a modifier of the term ‘trade unionist’, meaning that Lenin found trade unionism to have insufficient revolutionary resolve. Trade unionists, and those likewise irresolute, were not, in Lenin’s view, worthy of classification as Social Democrats. I suspect that those Moslems referenced by Jack Jenkins as the great majority of the faith are, in the view of ISIS leaders, similarly irresolute.
2. Spanish communist ‘republicans’ murdered José Antonio Primo de Rivera early in the Spanish Civil War. Primo de Rivera offered all the utopian promise of socialism that the Spanish communists were offering, but he included national destiny, and with the Catholic Church as moral guide. The architect and propagandist of such a competitively attractive product had to be destroyed.
3. Bruce Jenner, Olympic champion and pop culture curio, was recently involved in a car crash that proved fatal for a woman driving a car in front of a car in front of Mister Jenner’s. The fatality was hardly the result of the intentioned clash of two head-on forces. She was apparently killed by a third-order effect, being pushed into oncoming traffic.
4. An old quip offers why US Marine recruiters are always better than those of the other services at meeting quota. While the Navy might offer a chance to see the world, the Air Force a technical education and the Army a chance to be a trained graphic artist, the Marine recruiter goes to the High School and says, “Nobody here could make it as a Marine, you’re all a bunch of pussies.”
5. In the movie Die Hard, Hans Gruber dispatches twit businessman Harry Ellis; and in Braveheart, King Longshanks defenesters Prince Edward’s lover. In each vignette, the victim did not grasp the resolve of the leader with whom he was trifling.
As I say, I’m not there yet, but it seems we need to understand Islam from the perspective of existential leadership, and the direction in which said leadership is taking the broader faith. It is tough for me to understand how we might claim to look at the root causes of violence and not discover that a relationship might have been forged between religious masters and young men seeking personal conquest and a purposeful life. I wonder, moreover, why so many of us hold forth material comfort and the absence of struggle as a morally superior product to offer. I also can’t help but think I am watching some sort of ideological car wreck, the third order effects of which are yet to unfold.

A serious must read from first to last sentence and then couple it to the recent article from the inner circle of the IS also carried by SWJ.

Once one starts to "see" then "understanding" is not far behind and that is why the current NSS mentioned strategy for the IS is a failure as it does not address the underlying core issues in this region.

Bombing and boots on the ground will not address those issues.

Just a side issue "fundamentalists" are not confined to just the IS--all religions have them and we also find them in the ME and yet we pay far more attention to Islam--ever wonder why?