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.

Recommended: The Flight From Reality

Robert Samuelson has another important article today in the Washington Post: The Flight From Reality. Samuelson points out that while Democrats and Republicans battle over their (relatively minor) issues, neither party is paying any real attention to the truly critical problems that face us as the nation ages (making Social Security and Medicare as they stand now economically unsustainable in the long run), as the continuing flow of unskilled immigrants keep our poverty levels high (whereas we are turning away the skilled immigrants we really need to keep the economy healthy), and as structural issues in the job market (like increasing automation) are hollowing out the middle class.

I would add to his list the looming worldwide social and economic disruption that will come over the next few decades from climate change, and perhaps as well the increasingly poor education that Americans are getting (that keep them from being functional and productive  in an increasingly technological and complex world).

Recommended: Democrats are in denial. Their party is actually in deep trouble.

Matthew Yglesias has an important article today in Vox: Policy and Politics.  It is entitled  Democrats are in denial. Their party is actually in deep trouble and it is well worth reading. Yglesias points out that although the Democrats have controlled the White House, that is almost the only thing they control in the nation's political system - they don't control either chamber of Congress, and the majority of state governors and state legislators are controlled by Republicans - and Republican control has been increasing even during Obama's terms in office (and perhaps because of his terms in office).

So although the liberal media talking heads have had a field day making fun of the current Republican disarray in the House, and the fact that Donald Trump currently leads in the polls for Republican presidential candidates, in fact the Democrats are in far worse shape nationally without even considering Hillary Clinton's continued troubles.  If the Democrats somehow manage to retain the White House in this upcoming election, there is still little chance that they can advance much of their increasingly left-wing agenda.  If they lose the White House they are almost completely locked out of government at the federal level, and in a majority of the state legislators.  

I think much of the left-wing agenda, while emotionally appealing, is economically unsustainable, but I am not happy to see the Democrats in such trouble, because their weakness allows the more extreme right-wing to advance its agendas without effective opposition or debate.

Recommended: The Right Way to Lose a War: America in an Age of Unwinnable Conflicts

Up through World War II America had gained decisive victories in almost all its wars. Since World War II America has essentially failed to win all but one of  the wars it entered  (the first Gulf War is the exception). This is in part because these were all different kinds of wars from the traditional big army meets big army wars at which the American military excels – these are guerrilla wars or insurrections, far from home. And we haven’t learned yet how to extricate ourselves from these when we unwisely get ourselves trapped in them.

Tierney., who also wrote the excellent book How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War (2010), proposes a rational way to approach the problem of disengagement from a war we have no realistic chance of winning (or at least are not willing to commit the lives, time and money needed to win), summarized by “Surge, talk and leave”.  This is a book I wish our political leaders would “read, learn and inwardly digest”, and soon, before they waste more lives in a fruitless effort!

More in gun control

Given, as I argued in my last post, that it is probably not possible to get guns out of people’s hands in this country, what can we do that would help the situation? Well, the NRA bumper sticker “Guns don’t kill; people do” is accurate, so let’s stop focusing on banning certain types of weapons – after all one can get killed just as dead with a cheap handgun as with an “assault weapon”, whatever that is. Let's focus instead on people - on the gun owners and users.

It seems to me that automobiles offer a good model. Automobiles, handled carelessly, can cause a lot of damage and kill people.  So we require that autos be registered and inspected, and we also require that drivers be licensed and pass a test.  We also (in most states) require owners of automobiles to carry adequate liability insurance as a condition of car registration, and we hold owners of cars liable when they cause damage, injury or deaths – sometimes to the tune of millions of dollars.

So suppose we required that all guns be registered annually, for an annual fee that covered the cost of administering the program. Suppose also that on first registering any firearm the owner had to provide a sample bullet and casing, fired at the registration office (so they can’t bring in a fake one), so that there was a record of the ballistic fingerprint  that could be used to trace any bullet fired from that weapon back to the weapon and owner. Registration would also require proof of liability insurance taken out against that weapon. Owners would be expected to protect their weapons at all times - a weapon stolen because it was inadequately protected (locked in an approved  gun safe, for example)  while not in use would make the owner liable for any damages that weapon does.

Suppose similarly that we licensed all gun owners and/or users, for an annual fee that covered the cost of administering the program. Licensing would require taking and passing a course in gun safety, and a periodic refresher course.  Those who cannot pass a background check for criminal records and/or mental problems cannot be licensed.

Now, possession of an unregistered firearm would be a serious felony, and besides criminal charges they would be barred from ever owning or being licensed to use a firearm (since they would have been convicted of a felony).  Possession of any firearm, registered or not, when not licensed would similarly be a serious felony, and besides criminal charges they would be barred from ever owning or being licensed to use a firearm.

Criminals, of course, will ignore this, but the law already makes criminal sentences stiffer if a firearm is involved.

For law-abiding gun owners this allows them to own and shoot as many guns of as many varieties as they like, provided all their guns are registered, but does require them to be licensed, trained, and fiscally responsible for any damage the weapons might do, whether in their possession or not. People who want to own high-capacity automatic weapons might find that their insurance costs are higher, but then their liability is higher as well.  Insurance companies will have a strong incentive to assure that the people they insure are well trained and careful about protecting their firearms.

This wouldn't be an easy law to write. Are air guns and BB guns included? What about home-made guns (since there are plans on the web for using a 3-D printers to make a gun)? What about guns stolen while being transported (say, from one's airline luggage)? It will take some work to make a consistent law, but it would be worth it.

It’s not a perfect system, but it seems to me it would be a workable one, and perhaps (barely) palatable to the American gun-owning public.  It is, after all, not much different than what we already do with automobiles.