The Trump Phenomena

Donald Trump made yet more outrageous proposals this week – this time proposing to ban all Muslims from entering the country – and the result (besides hysterical attacks from the liberals and the media) was that his poll numbers climbed even higher. Something significant is going on here.

I used to think that Trump was just a spoiled clown. Now I am beginning to think he is actually pretty clever.  He uses his outrageous statements (a) to preempt the daily news cycles, keeping all his opponents, Republican and Democrat alike, out of the news, and (b) to tap into a deep unease in the American public, the majority of whom (again, Republican, Democrat and Independent alike) think American domestic and foreign policy is on the wrong track, and that our political system is broken, run by an out-of-touch political elite in Washington who care more about keeping their seats and satisfying their corporate or union backers than about the good of the nation.

This is not a phenomena affecting just the Republicans. Hillary Clinton may well be the Democratic nominee in the end, but the challenge from Sanders shows that the Democrats aren't all that happy with their establishment leaders either. Nor is she particularly well liked, even among Democrats.

There is clearly something unusual going on here.  I wish I could read what political and social historians will say about this epoch fifty years from now, when it is clearer what is going on. Right now it is puzzling and murky.

Nat Silver, the most successful pollster in recent times, predicts that in the end, Republican primary voters will get serious and dump the Donald for a more “reasonable” Republican candidate (“reasonable” is a relative term here, since most of the other Republican contenders are not so reasonable on some issues, like climate change).  He argues that Trump’s high poll numbers are a result of having so many candidates in the field, and being still so far from the point when primary voters really begin paying attention to the candidates.  Thus far, he argues, Trump’s high poll numbers mostly just reflect his success at dominating the daily news cycle. He may be right, but the talking heads have been predicting Trump’s imminent decline for months now, and they are still wrong.

This is not a new rebellion – the election of a cadre of Tea Party candidates to the House is part of this populist rebellion against the Washington elite, and they have caused a good bit of havoc in Congress already. And the continuing success of conservatives in capturing governorships and state legislatures is also part of the rebellion. Clearly there is a significant political shift occurring in the country, but it is more subtle than just a move to the right. It is a rebellion against the political establishment, Republican and Democrat alike.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Strongly Recommended: What ISIS Really Wants

Probably the single most important military doctrine is to “know your enemy”.  It is pretty clear that the current Western governments don’t understand ISIS.  The media, for the most part, seem equally in the dark, and so is the general public.

The left is blinded by its political correctness, its need to be “ecumenical”, and is unable to understand the depth of religious conviction that drives the core of ISIS (The left in general has trouble understanding religion conviction). The president continues to assert that ISIS is “not Islamic”, when in fact it is indeed VERY Islamic – hewing tightly to the medieval roots of Islam and the literal words of the Prophet. Fortunately most Muslims are not such fundamentalists, just as it is fortunate that most Christians are not fundamentalists. But a fundamentalist Christian is certainly a Christian – motivated by the literal interpretation of the scriptures - even if not our type of Christian.  Just so a fundamentalist Muslim is certainly a Muslim – motivated by the literal words of the Prophet -  even if not practicing the kind of Islam that most Muslims practice.

The right, on the other hand, is driven into a frenzy of mindless illiberal, un-American, and unconstitutional suggestions such as registering all Muslims, or refusing immigration by any further Muslims, none of which would have any impact whatever on constraining ISIS, and would probably be a major boon to their recruiting efforts.

The best, most coherent, and probably the best researched discussion about ISIS that I have read is Graeme Wood’s article What ISIS Really Wants in the March 2015 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. I strongly recommend it.  He has gone to some of the most important sources – Islamic leaders who speak for ISIS and have a major role in recruiting for ISIS – in order to understand the appeal of ISIS worldwide, the reason why Muslims from around the world are streaming into ISIS by the thousands.

Until we all – public and political leaders alike – have a better understanding of exactly why ISIS exists, what it seeks,and how it thinks our attempts to counter if will continue to be expensive but largely ineffectual, as they have been to date.

Recommended: The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-vision of Capitalism

Among some on the left, capitalism gets a bad rap. They object to the inherent unfairness in which some get richer than others, and some lose their jobs in the incessant "creative destruction" that capitalism drives. But Howard Bloom argues – persuasively - that in fact capitalism ( The "Beast" in this book)  is simply one more expression of a basic driving force in nature, and that the boom-and-bust cycle typical of capitalist economies is in fact a natural, if brutal, driving mechanism for evolution seen throughout nature – evolution of organisms, evolution of societies, and evolution of cultures. The boom and bust cycle, Bloom argues, is really nature's way of exploring all possibilities, a cycle of expansion followed by a cycle of retrenchment, digestion, and reshaping based on what was learned in the expansion. Yes, capitalism is unfair - nature is unfair. But, Bloom would argue, the very instruments that the dissenters use in their dissents - language, printing, cell phones, TV, airlines, etc, etc, are all the fruits of this brutal but effective system.

Bloom is a wonderful out-of-the-box thinker (see his first book, The Lucifer Principle, 1995), and this book is well worth reading.

ISIS, Islam and Christianity

I have argued in a previous post that Islam is not the cause of ISIS and the other brutal Jihadist movements killing thousands around the world; the real cause is the mass of poor, purposeless, unemployed, poorly-educated young men in the Middle East ripe for exploitation by charismatic leaders. Islam is simply the convenient lever by which they can be recruited and motivated by power-hungry leaders, since they are already Muslim.

Having said that, it is still in fact the religion of Islam, or at least one particularly harsh Sunni version of it (Wahhabism), that is being used for this purpose by ISIS and the many associated jihadist movements. And in fact Islamic traditions and Islamic history support many of their brutal acts.  The Prophet was not a nice man by current Western standards. He led a brutal army of conquest, practiced ethnic cleansing, and encouraged his followers to kill unbelievers. ISIS is in fact following fairly accurately in the footsteps of the Prophet. The fantasy ideology which ISIS follows envisions returning the entire world to a 9^th century Islamic empire ruled by harsh Sharia laws. It is, of course, ridiculous to think of returning the Middle East to a medieval prehistory based of what unlettered and uneducated desert people a thousand years ago believed, or didn’t understand.

And yet…..and yet Christianity in some of its forms is just as extreme, just as brutal, and just as ridiculous. We certainly had our period of ruthless crusades, murdering everyone in sight without regard to their religion, plundering cities, and raping women, all in the name of our own version of a primitive Middle Eastern desert religion of two thousand years ago. Here in New Mexico the Spanish Christian priests in the original conquest were just as ruthless toward the native Americans as ISIS is today. In Europe Catholics and Protestants happily fought wars and burned each other’s leaders at the stake for hundreds of years.

Lest you think this is all old news - past history that we can feel bad about for a moment and then move on - consider what is still, this very day, going on in the name of Christianity:

Christian groups throughout the country are attempting in every way they can to prevent women from controlling their own reproductive plans by denying them not only abortions, but in some cases even birth control (need I mention that if men could get pregnant this would not even be an issue?) – all based, not on anything Jesus is reported to have said, but just on the misogynistic speculations of some sexually-repressed medieval male clerics as to when something speculatively called “the soul” entered the body of a fetus – and this by people who didn’t even understand the anatomy and physiology of the human body!  And on the basis of these unscientific speculations a thousand years ago, some modern day Christians oppress women, and the more extreme even bomb or shoot up Planned Parenthood clinics, as just happened again this week.

(And no, one can't invoke the 6th commandment to support this position.  Christians have always been more than happy to kill when it is convenient, and still are.)

Christian groups throughout the country are attempting in every way they can to obstruct and oppress people whose sexual orientation is not straight heterosexual. Why?  Based on some clear modern understanding of human physiology and psychology?  No, based rather on cultural norms of a certain group of Middle Easterners who lived thousands of years ago, and reinforced once again by those sexually-repressed Medieval male clerics.

There are other examples, but these will suffice to make the point. Yes, ISIS is following a particularly brutal form of Islam based on a relatively primitive and unlettered culture centuries in the past. But some Christians  - a good many of them – are doing exactly the same thing, trying to impose on everyone concepts from a primitive culture centuries in the past and completely out of touch with either modern knowledge or modern culture.

Remember Matthew 7:4: “How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye”

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.