The Nature and Mentality of the Adversary and His Long-Range Strategic Culture

A suicide dies in order to die, a martyr dies in order to live. This distinction between a suicide and a martyr is a distinction not so easily grasped, much less defended, by a secularized mentality. Nor is it very easily understood anymore in our increasingly secularized culture and in the atmosphere of our rather pervasively post-Christian West. Many would even say, and have often said already, for example, that “the hope of the Christian martyrs” was an illusion and even a form of psychopathology and fevered dementation. Although the implications are stark and hard to face, such enlightened critics may themselves really believe that “there is nothing finally to hope for.” But, such a view is not common in Islam. And that religious-cultural fact has strategic implications for us.

How, therefore, is the West likely to view the concept and reality of a “Muslim martyr”? How are we likely to view one who, bearing witness to truth in the light of his own faith, is ready to die in order to live? Such a martyr--such a “blood witness” to the truth of his Faith--willingly dies with the expectation of a higher fulfillment in another life in the perduring presence of God. The Muslim world also still fosters large families and does not deliberately kill its pre-born children. They still affirm the goodness of creation, in itself and as a whole, despite the existence of moral evil, such as the killing of children in the womb. The Muslims also see the increasingly secularized West tend to reduce morality to legality: i.e., “if it’s legal, it’s moral, and it works for me.”

However, even if one believes Islam to be a false religion and not at all to be (as they believe) the final perfection of Divine Revelation, and not even (as Muslims also significantly claim) a suitable and fitting correctionof the deep distortions to be found in both the Jewish Revelation and the Christian Revelation, one must nonetheless strive to understand such convictions of belief and such courage and such hope. We will thereby better know their motivations and mentality, their culture and strategy. Indeed, we must know their mentality and culture in order to grasp their long-term strategy, as is also the case with Modern Judaism and Grand-Strategic Ideological Zionism.

However, in the de-sacralized West and its growing “Narco-Democracies,” many persons—and more and more, it would seem—believe that “nothing finally matters.” That is to say, that there is “nothing finally to hope for,” and they even implicitly believe, in Bertrand Russell’s own famous anddefiant words, that “a free man’s worship must henceforth be built upon a firm foundation of final despair.” Russell’s bold formulation of belief (and faith), first uttered in 1904, well expresses modern Western “liberation theology,” or what Tom Wolfe called “the Fourth Freedom”—i.e., “freedom from religion, not freedom ofreligion.”[1] But such a view, such a mentality, certainly does not pervade the spreading Muslim world. They see such illusionary beliefs and defiant despair to be a blasphemy. But, do we really understand their views and their counter-Faith with empathy?

Long-standing friends and colleagues in our Strategic Intelligence Community have told me over many years (since 1964) that we “pragmatic” or “practical” Americans are not very good in understanding foreign languages and the deeper roots and concepts and ethos of foreign cultures, much less to understand, with empathy and objectivity, alien, philosophical or theological World-Viewswhich inform and foster a pervasive religious culture and sense of the sacred. These incompetences or innocently well-meaning inabilities—to include our lack of intimate knowledge of foreign languages and their revealing embodiments in their resonantly symbolic literatures—will always constitute grave impediments to our deeper strategic understanding in the protracted cultural-religious war we now apparently are in. And now we do not have the same margin of error and domestic security that we once had.

Like the Polish Professor, Feliks Koneczny (1862-1949), in his masterpiece On the Plurality of Civilizations (1962), Professor Adda Bozeman, in her book Strategic Intelligence and Statecraft: Selected Essays(1992), is just one American example of someone who tried throughout her life to help us understand distinctive foreign mentalities and cultures, to include foreign strategic cultures—political and military cultures—such as the strategic political culture of Chinese Legalism (or Realism), from which subtly intelligent culture Sun Tzu himself springs.

The historical novel, The Bridge on the Drina, by Ivo Andric, is another example of how strategic intelligence (i.e., understanding) can be informed by good literature, so as to savor from within “the living memory” and continuity of foreign mentalities and religious cultures in conflict. Ivo Andric’s novel, properly read and savored, would probably be worth many pounds of learned books (especially “social science” books!) on the Balkans and their history, and on their deeply conflicted and competing world-views and mentalities, hence strategic cultures. Nikos Kazanzakis, author of Zorba the Greek, also teaches us much about the contrastive mentalities and cultures of the modern Greeks and the Turks in his own autobiographical novel, Report to Greco, which is set on the Island of Crete, over which prize the Greeks and Turks fought for many passionate years, and the deadly conflict of these two NATO Allies is not yet over, and not only on Cyprus.

As is to be found in the eloquent non-fictional literature of T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom (privately printed in 1926 and first more widely published in 1935) and in his succinct August 1917 Strategic-Cultural Report to the British Arab Bureau, entitled Twenty-Seven Articles, we in the United States, especially in our U. S. Special Operations Command, have much wisdom to learn and savor from these sources of insight about other cultures and mentalities, and traditions of statecraft, as well as their traditions of secret intelligence and of military secret societies (and not only in the Arab and wider Muslim world). But, we must have a prerequisite love of wisdom, from whatever source it comes, in order to sustain our love of learning and disciplined unflinching appetite for the candid truth, however much it hurts or disabuses us of our “fragile secular ideologies” and “beautiful illusions” or “comfortably ethnocentric slogans and arrogances.” We will need such deep dispositions to wisdom very much in the current war we are in, or we will be wandering in the dark like “a lost patrol.”

The field of “strategic-cultural intelligence” should be cultivated by all of our Special Operations Forces, in light of our chartered grand-strategic missions (not just military-strategic missions) for the U.S. State Department and its Ambassadors and Country Teams abroad, as well as our larger special missions for the U.S. Department of Defense. By taking a longer-view of “the Chinese Triad Phenomenon,” for example, and the place of these multifarious and long-standing secret societies in Chinese culture, both at home and abroad among “the Overseas Chinese,” we might also thereby come to understand the Triad Networks as an actual or potential strategic network of covert Chinese Special Operations Forces. These “special mission units” or “national mission units” already have “strategic interior lines” on the inner front of our Homeland, and are to be found “in diaspora” not only in Canada and Cuba, and on other “Offshore Islands”!