This is a propaganda war – and we are losing!

After the Paris attacks, people in places like Washington and London are understandably nervous, games are being cancelled, extra police are being hired, political figures are striving to outdo each other in proposals to “smash” ISIS militarily (at a cost of how many billions more dollars?), and there are serious debates about how much to trust our Muslim neighbors.  All of it exactly what ISIS wants, and what feeds and supports its recruiting drives.

Come on folks, let’s get real.  ISIS has perhaps at most 100,000 mostly poorly-trained and poorly-equipped fighters with a tenuous grip on a few of the more populated places in a wasteland desert in Iraq and Syria and a few small outposts in places like Yemen. It has no industrial base, no advanced weapons, no aircraft or even anti-aircraft guns, a few tanks it captured but no spare parts for them. It is led by a few charismatic sociopaths who are wonderfully effective at selling the fantasy ideology, but are unlikely to be world-class military strategists. It wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell against a real Western army on the ground in a straight-up army to army faceoff. But of course it is smart enough never to get into such a faceoff (as we discovered in a decade of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan).

What it does have is an enticing vision and narrative – enticing at least to frustrated and disillusioned out-of-work young Sunni Muslim men – and a wonderfully adept propaganda machine on social media to recruit new members around the world. It is of course these locally recruited fighters that are of real concern to Europe and the US.  The Boston marathon bombers were locals, apparently radicalized over the web. Most of the Paris attackers identified thus far appear to be French or Belgium citizens, again probably radicalized over the web and through social media. If there are more attacks in places like the US, they will probably be launched by local citizens who have been recruited and radicalized, and perhaps even largely trained and organized and directed, over the web and/or through social media.

Even if the very worst imaginable scenario – a nuclear weapon smuggled into a major city and detonated – were to happen, it couldn’t defeat the US or any major European power. This is not like facing a fully armed Nazi German or Soviet Russia with a massive army and an industrial base to support it.

What can defeat us, though, is succumbing to the propaganda and failing to mount an effective propaganda counterattack against ISIS. We will begin winning when our own propaganda efforts begin seeding fear and distrust and disillusionment among ISIS followers, rather than the other way around. So far Western governments, including our own, seem not to have understood that. We are so wonderfully adept at selling people things they don't need through advertising, and packaging flawed political candidates into election-winning images that I can't believe we can't do this job better.

Recommended: How to Beat ISIS: The President Is Partly Right

Walter Russel Mead has an excellent article in The American Interest this week: How to Beat ISIS: The President Is Partly Right. His argument is summarized right at the beginning: 

 To cut the flow of recruits and funds to ISIS, we must make ISIS look unattractive and weak—drab. This is what we have to teach our enemies and those tempted to join them: disenchantment.

It supports my argument that we in the West need to get better at managing the media and social media aspects of the war, so that we can effectively counter the "fantasty ideology" that ISIS promulgates.

The Paris Attacks

What is there to say about the Paris attacks?

First of all, France had a wake–up call in January with the Charlie Hebdo attack in which radical gunmen in Paris killed 11 people and wounded another 11. There was worldwide angst about that at the time, at least for a few days, but France doesn’t appear to have changed any of its security policies significantly as a result of that attack.

For the world at large, clearly there is a double standard running – we are all aghast at the Paris attacks on Friday, in which 128 people died.  On the other hand the world news barely mentioned the attack on the college in Kenya last Thursday in which jihadist gunmen killed 147 people. And of course the world hasn’t shown nearly the same level of angst about the tens of thousands ISIS has been killing steadily within Syria and Iraq. Perhaps that is to be expected. Despite the rhetoric, the world’s actions clearly show we don’t care that much about what ISIS does, as long as it doesn’t do it in our own countries.

Yes, the President has authorized a few bombing attacks – 10 or 20 a day – but that is clearly just a token effort to show that the administration is “doing something”. It is hardly a strategy, despite the president’s repeated assurances that it is. Now that we are beginning to supply effective arms to some of the rebels, perhaps we are beginning to do something more effective, but clearly the administration doesn’t have a real strategy yet. President Obama has apparently underestimated the ISIS threat all along, as his “Junior Varsity” comment in January 2014 showed.

At a strategic level, there are at least five things to note:

1. Modern open Western societies are incredibly vulnerable to these sorts of attacks against soft targets like sports events and concerts and shopping malls and other places where lots of people gather. And these societies are also pretty vulnerable to infrastructure attacks against power grids, communications facilities, transportation systems, water supplies, etc, etc. It is hard to see how this can change without becoming a Soviet-style police state. So “defending” against these sorts of attacks in an open society will always be difficult, and not always successful.  Get used to it.

2. The more zealous right-wingers are all for going into Iraq and Syria and just wiping ISIS out.  It sounds great, but in fact we had half a million American and allied troops in Iraq and Afghanistan for more than a decade, and had no more luck stamping out the extremists than the Russians did in 1979-1989, or than the British did in 1839-1842. The right-wing ought to learn its history, lest it is forced to repeat it – yet again!

3. The root of the problem is a swelling population of young Arab men with no realistic prospects of a job or family or purpose in life, who are ripe for recruitment by charismatic extremists into a movement that gives them some purpose and stature in their own eyes. This whole problem will not go away until the world finds some solution to the underlying economic impoverishment in these Arab countries, and in the ghettos of the diaspora in Europe.  Of course the autocratic kleptocracies that rule most of the Arab nations make the problem worse.

4. The problem is not the Muslim religion.  The Muslim religion (somewhat distorted) gets used because they are already Muslim, and there is an existing sectarian divide between Sunnis and Shia that can be exploited, so it is a convenient lever.  If these young men were all Christians, no doubt these same charismatic leaders could find ample support in the Bible for their purposes (remember “an eye for an eye”?).  We certainly have had enough bloody Christian extremists though history to prove the point. If religion wasn’t available as a tool, no doubt nationalism or some political ideology like communism or fascism would work as well.  Once the unrest is there, waiting to be used, charismatic leaders can always find a plausible cause to drive recruitment and fire up the troops.

5. This war is being waged as much in the public and social media as on the battlefield, a fact which ISIS clearly understands but which the West seems not yet to have fully grasped.  To win this war (and war it is) we in the West need to get as good as ISIS at using media in the battle. In fact, future wars in general will probably incorporate media manipulation as a key weapon, and we had better learn that and prepare for it.  President Putin, in his Ukrainian adventures, has been quite effective using the media to keep the West divided in its response and therefore largely ineffective.