The Strategy of the Adversary’s Networked and Surprising Combinations

by Professor Robert D. Hickson, 12 November 2002

Let us imagine a Muslim grand-strategic thinker like Hassan al-Turabi applying against the United States two insights of B. H. Liddell Hart about grand strategy, namely:

It should be the aim of grand strategy to discover and pierce the Achilles’ heel of the opposing government’s power to make war…. His true aim is not so much to seek battle as to seek a strategic situation so advantageous that, if it does not of itself produce a decision [e.g., “strategic paralysis”], its continuation by battle is sure to achieve this.[1]

To what extent are we, at least in the U.S. Special Operations Command, trying to understand an actual adversary’s intelligent, long-range strategy against us? Moreover, to what extent do we consider how our supposed Zionist Allies in Israel and their own grand-strategic thinkers like Sharon and Netanyahu analyze the strengths and weakness of the United States in order to manipulate us and to serve their larger grand-strategic interest in the Middle East? To what extent are U.S. forces “proxies” (surrogate forces) for the Israelis, especially in the Middle East, really, no kiddin’?! Many of our allies and adversaries, like the Israelis and the British and the Chinese, know much more about us than we know about them, and they often know more about us that we do about ourselves. (And, it is not only because they know our language well, and we are clueless about theirs, for example, Hebrew and Chinese.) For, they acutely see our illusions and self-deceptions more often than we may be willing to face them ourselves with unflinching candor.

An analogy may be useful here. Just as when we are involved in “a living thing like an argument,” says G. K. Chesterton, and are trying to have a real debate about matters of moment, we just cannot do it rapidly, much less superficially, without thereby promoting our illusions and self-deceptions. G.K. Chesterton said, with his characteristic wit and charm, “It is impossible to have real debate without digression…[even] about the atmosphereand implication of each term” which is essential to the argument; and, he adds, “I cannot answer quickly if I am just discovering slowly that the man [or even a nation!] suffers from a series of extraordinary delusions.”[2] Indeed, he continues, “No man can controvert with many foes without going into many subjects, as everyone knows who has been heckled.”[3] And, as in our currently (and characteristically) overheated, over-hasty, and indeliberate debates about U.S. Foreign Policy and Grand-Strategy, we must strive to argue ad rem, and not ad hominem—i.e., to answer the substance of the argument, not to psychoanalyze the person or to attack the psychology of the arguer by calling him, for example “an anti-Semite” or “frigid-souled Holocaust-Denier.” Chesterton’s own moral imagination charmingly reminds us that, “As a matter of psychology, it would be foolish to insult even an unfeminine feminist in order to awaken a delicate chivalry towards females”![4]

We, however, in our current debates about war and empire and global hegemony, tend to see our declared or undeclared enemies as frigidly inhuman, as well as viscerally unintelligent. And, thus, we do not patiently try to understand their motivation and mentality, their culture and strategy. Nor do we consider or sufficiently anticipate their resourceful combinations of “high-tech means” and “low-tech means” to surprise and shock us, whether to punish us in retaliation or to bring about our strategic paralysis and the hamstringing of our hypertrophied (and often over-extended) forms of power. We often act like an Empire without wanting to call ourselves one. (And we monkey with our Constitution and increasingly de-construct it, which further flaunts our hypocrisy before the world, as well as our imposition of “a double standard” in our favor.)

But, in reaction to this provocative insolence and sign of our arbitrary power, imagine that T. E. Lawrence of Arabia were working together with some “modern Sun Tzus,” like the Senior Chinese SOF Colonels, Qiao and Wang, who wrote, Unrestricted Warfare: Assumptions on War and Tactics in the Age of Globalization.5 And, imagine their trying to design a strategy for our mental dislocation and strategic paralysis in the United States. What might it be? How might they make use of jiu-jitsu (or judo) against us, and especially against our centrifugal over-deployment, for example?

Remembering one of the corollaries to Murphy’s Law, namely that “Friends come and go; enemies accumulate,” the U.S. Special Operations Command must glean as well as harvest SOF-specific intelligence that would help us understand the subtle strategies that are being developed against us, to include their subtle use of time, being well aware of our national lack of patience! (We might profitably recall in this context the purported “Swiss National Prayer”—“Dear Lord, Give me patience, immediately!”).

The “combining-capacity” of an intelligent mind—one’s “synthetic” intelligence--is especially acute when brought to bear in the synthetic (as well as analytic) field of strategy and grand-strategy. Lest we become uneconomically diverted and distracted and hastily over-extended in Latin America, the Middle East, Central Asia, the Horn of Africa, Indonesia, and the Philippines (and elsewhere), we in the Special Operations Forces must give genuine prior attention to understanding: “Who is the enemy?”; “What are their war aims and peace aims?”; “What are their definitions of war and peace?”; and “What, therefore, are their long-range strategies for dealing with the United States as the primary enemy?”

Analogous to the Soviet Union’s “two-zone doctrine,” the Muslim world also, for example, divides the globe into “the zone of Islam” and “the non-Islamic zone of war”: “Dar al-Islam” and “Dar al-Harb,” respectively. These categories of war and peace are important, but very different from the West’s still primarily legalconceptualization of war and peace, as the strategic thinker James Burnham will now help us to understand.

In his 1967 book, The War We Are In, James Burnham noted how

Nikita Khrushchev used the phrase “peaceful coexistence” to describe the state of global affairs that was expressed and symbolized in the dual Hungary-Suez episode [in the pivotal year of 1956!]. The meaning of “peaceful coexistence” must be understood within the system of revolutionary dialectic. So translated, it is seen to be equivalent to “the Cold War,” or what I have called “the Third World War.” “Peaceful coexistence”means the revolutionary struggle against the non-communist world, conducted as this struggle [i.e. the revolutionary dialectic Kulturkampf] has in fact been conducted since 1944: that is by all the means of multi-dimensional warfare [ to include “psycho-political operations” and “propaganda”—p. 14] except for general and thus (in our age) nuclear combat. The concept of “peaceful coexistence”includes the two-zone doctrine that I have discussed: it is a violation of peaceful coexistence if the West attempts to stir up opposition within the communist sphere (zone of peace); it is a defense of peaceful coexistence when the communists attempt to stir up opposition right to the point of revolutionary struggle (“war of liberation”) within the non-communist sphere (the zone of war). Such struggle is “for peace” because it is against “the imperialist warmongers and their puppets” and in defense of “the peace-loving masses,” and also because it advances the development of the world socialist society [now the spread of Islam?] in which war will be impossible. The “defense of peace” is identical to the struggle against the non-communist forces, above all to the struggle against the United States.[6]

The “asymmetry” of “the two-zone doctrine” may also be usefully applied to Islam and its long-range strategic culture and “multi-dimensional warfare.”

Just as the Western “imperialists” had betrayed the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, because (says Burnham) they had “swallowed a doctrine cooked up for them by the [Communist] dialectician: the doctrine of ‘the two zones’,” so, too, could we nowbe intellectually disabled and morally disarmed and strategically sabotaged if we do not fully grasp how both the Muslims and the Zionists of Modern Jewry also have a “double standard” and divide up the world, and apply one standard to themselves and another standard to others—as their own writings so clearly and candidly enunciate!

If we substitute either “Muslim,” or “Zionist,” or even “neo-Trotskyite Socialist” for “Communist” in Burnham’s following (as well as previous) quotation, we will learn much about our parasitical and subversive “Fifth Columns,” and about our new adversaries’ asymmetrical world-views and their consequently strategic networks of surprising combinations of “multi-dimension warfare,” to include “psycho-political methods,” against us! For, it is still very important for us to understand that “psycho-political operations” and “psycho-political methods of POLWAR” (political warfare) constitute a real weapons system, butwithout firepower.

Burnham, writing of the Communist “two-zone doctrine”—now especially applicable to Zionists as well as Muslims, and even to the Trotskyite Socialists who still advance “the Permanent Revolution”--said the following:

“The zone of peace” corresponds to the acreage already brought under Communist [now Muslim or Eretz-Israel Zionist] rule, and is off limits to disturbers; opposition seeking to change or overthrow the government is counter-revolutionary treason, to be crushed by all necessary means. “The zone of war” [also the “Dar al-Harb” or sometimes even the incompletely servile dependents of "the Muslim Dhimmi System”!] is the acreage still free from communist rule. Within the zone of war, opposition—from the [Revolutionary] Left—that seeks to change the government is “progressive”; its actions constitute a struggle for national liberation,” deserving support by “all freedom-loving peoples.” This doctrine of the two zones, it may be added, is the essence of the “policy of peaceful coexistence.”[7](That is to say, the policy of “deceitful peace.”)

Lest we be “useful idiots” in the larger and long-term cultural-religious war we are now in, we must be attentive to the reality as well as the language of deceitful peace. And we must be aware of how our adversaries see our own deceitful abuses and misuses of what we call “democracy” and “human rights” as being a dissolvent “cultural offensive” against other people and their way of life. They too, could often rightly accuse us of having a deceptive and bellicose “two-zone doctrine”: those who are “democratized” and those who are not. (There are only two kinds of people: those who put others into one of two categories; and those who don’t!) Many of our “under-secularized” religious (or cultural) adversaries, however, do not want to be either forcibly or seductively “narco-democratized”! We must, therefore, understand their deeply resistant strategic convictions and martial passions against us.

We in the Special Operations Forces, with our characteristic attentiveness to “ground truth,” may come to help our own country understand these momentous and ardent matters better—and we should. We should bring these deeper discernments to bear on our own grand-strategic deliberations and actions, not only in our “global war on terrorism,” but also in the larger, protracted cultural-religious war that we are now in. That is our duty.