A Different Kind of Strategy

Abu Nopal has been thinking about our strategy in this war and has come to the conclusion that the Democrats may be right.

Remarkably, at least for me, I am coming to agree with Democrats on a few things regarding the war on terror, particularl that it must be fought in a subtle way. What is driving my new thinking is my growing awareness that the ideology of the jihadist is nurtured by humiliation (he does well if he can provoke you to fight, and does even better if you thrash him to pieces).

If you look at the penchant for ritualized death, both for themselves and for their victims, it's clear that jihadi behavior and their cultish fetishism are even more disturbing than their religious and political views. Disturbing, but also disturbingly familiar. When we see behavior like this outside of a war context, our thoughts inevitably turn to child abuse, sexual or worse. In an oppressively conservative and religious atmosphere, as we know well enough from examples in our own culture, the abuser is often protected and even powerful, leaving the victim helpless and worsening his torture.

I discussed some of those psychosexual causes of the war in The Origins of Islamic Rage.

Abu Nopal goes on to state:

It's ironic that the best way to fight a war with a genocidal foe may be to "manage the problem". Israeli PR rhetoric frequently alludes to the idea of Hizbollah being like a cancer and of the Israeli goal being to put it in remission, not necessarily to cure it altogether. I think those statements should be taken literally as a statement of Israel's strategic goals. Such is our enemy.

If you're old enough to remember the toy Flex Armstrong, you know that the harder you hit him, the stronger he becomes. This is how Jihad behaves psychologically. Since psychology is such a critical element in this conflict, however, the enemy needs to be understood to have this quality in broader terms as well.

I'm beginning to appreciate the John Kerry view of the matter, to put it bluntly. We should be 'managing' the problem on the premise that history itself will soon enough dispense with Jihad, as we are obviously on the cusp of a global cultural revolution.

This is not a defeatest strategy as I see it, although it may well have been as it was articulated by Democrats during the last general election. Its goal is to constantly place the jihadist in the most awkward and compromising position possible, keeping him on the defensive in moral terms, and starving him of any means of gaining legitimacy. You kill him, to be sure, but opportunistically. This is a strategy that Israel appears to be working against Hamas, with so far some notable success.

It is obvious that no matter how well Iraq turns out it is a way of fighting the war that cannot be repeated very often. So maybe Abu is on to something.

Perhaps psychological humiliation and frustration will work better than military humiliation. Military is something they understand. Their own psychology is something they do not. They are not big on introspection. Something I discussed obliquely in Tribalism.