Be-bop Galula
Caroline Glick at the Jerusalem Post explains how Hezbollah prefers to work through a form of control without governance where it is possible to remain both in power and in opposition. Caroline writes:
It only took Hizbullah a week to bring the government of Lebanon to its knees. The Saniora government's decision Wednesday to cancel its decisions to ban Hizbullah's independent communications system and sack Hizbullah's agent from his position as chief of security at Beirut Airport constituted its effective acceptance of Hizbullah's preeminent role in Lebanon.
What is interesting about Hizbullah's successful overthrow of the elected government in Lebanon is that after his forces defeated their foes, Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah ordered his men to retreat to their customary shadows. Why didn't Hizbullah just overthrow the government? Understanding why Hizbullah refused to take over Lebanon is key not only for understanding Hizbullah but also for understanding Hamas, Fatah and the insurgency in Iraq.
A compelling answer to this question is found in David Galula's classic work, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice. ... As Galula explained, one of the main advantages that insurgents have over the governments they seek to overthrow is their lack of responsibility for governance. Far from seeking to govern the local population, the goal of insurgents is simply to demonstrate through sabotage, terror and guerrilla operations that the government is incapable of keeping order. And it is far easier and cheaper to sow disorder and chaos than to maintain order and secure public safety.
In Hizbullah's case, Nasrallah and his Iranian bosses have no interest in taking on responsibility for Lebanon. They don't want to collect taxes. They don't want to pick up the garbage or build schools and universities.
The goal of seeking power without responsibility isn't confined to insurgents and Galula's theory might just as well have been a critique of the modern media as much as Hezbollah. A generation of public intellectuals found it was possible to have both a decisive influence over policy yet remain exempt from accountability for its effects. The next time someone asks how it is possible to simultaneously be a rebel and celebrity, a critic of Global Warming and owner of an executive jet, or become a successful hate-America pastor living in a multimillion dollar mansion, refer him to Galula.
But Glick asks whether there is any way to to spoil this game; to keep the puppet master from retreating into the shadows after he has pulled his strings. One obvious method is the shockingly simple expedient of making information warfare a part of operations. To patiently label every roadside bomb; every massacre as the work of the hidden hand. The success of the Surge is in large measure due not only to kinetic action but information action. It is not enough to arrest terrorists, it is equally important to connect them to their acts. AQI failed in the Sunni Triangle where Hezbollah continues to succeed in Lebanon partly because MNF-I, like a waiter who refuses to let a patron walk out without paying his bill, simply refused to let them escape with a free lunch.
But the task wasn't easy because at every step of the way AQI's cheering squad yelled "foul". Power without responsibility has been a time honored tradition of the professional critic for so long it's almost a constitutional right. Therefore when Bob Owens at Pajamas Media documents the use of Iranian EFPs against American vehicles some will call it "beating the drums of war against Iran". But he's just connecting the dots. When bloggers replay clips from Jeremiah Wright's all time hit sermons, they'll be accused of character assassination or worse. But they're just connecting the dots.
Accepting the terms under which an opponent chooses to engage in conflict is first and often the worst concession one can make. And it's a concession that many traditionally accord to the left. Now one wonders whether John McCain has read Galula. It's better than even odds after all, that some of his political opponents have read Hezbollah.
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posted by wretchardthecat at 5/16/2008 10:43:00 AM
43 Comments:
Don't you think that Hizbollah looked at what Hamas has accomplished once it quit being just a bunch of thugs and became an elected government? And decided that looked WAYYYY too hard, and besides that, it would make them unpopular.
If you come out of the shadows and set yourself up as a leader, then you're easier to pinpoint, too, for other sanctions like having your bank account shut down, your passport taken away from you, and your relatives bugged. Assassination isn't the only way of making a "leader" think twice about whether or not it's a job he wants to continue to pursue.
Ah yes, It is much easier to hate and oppose "the man" than to be "the man". Serve the people or serve the mullahs? Everyone is accountable to someone, Hizbollah is just trying to be "progressive".
Glick is God.
Terrorists are parasites who cannot allow their hosts to die and cannot live without them. Their only goal is their stinking death-cult glory. Bin Laden from his bat-ridden den derives his only pleasure from the fear he inspires in others. Fatah and Hamas leech off Israel and the EU and whoever else will give them money. They are not men, they are tapeworms. Bush was right to talk about appeasers in Israel, but he should have turned right around and pointed to Olmert and Livni as the worst of them.
In Hizbullah's case, Nasrallah and his Iranian bosses have no interest in taking on responsibility for Lebanon. They don't want to collect taxes. They don't want to pick up the garbage or build schools and universities.
One large reason Hiz doesn't want to collect taxes is because they've got a sugar daddy in Tehran who does it for them.
DB2
I doubt that Hezbollah is insensitive to the economics of insurgency, which sooner or later has to be attentive to monetary gain as much as ideology, since the latter doesn't buy food or Rolexes.
For a fine analysis of the "stationary bandit" state, see Mancur Olson, "Power and Prosperity: Outgrowing Communist and Capitalist Dictatorships."
Here's a sample: "No metaphor or model of even the autocratic state can therefore be correct unless it takes account of the stationary bandits' incentive to provide public goods while maximizing his rate of tax theft" (p.11).
The current services/intimidation activity of Hezbollah do not seem inconsistent with the the economics of stationary banditry. In addition, as DB2 notes, Hezbollah has a sugar daddy in Teheran, which seems to investing heavily in Islamic warlord economics. It's not a good model for long-term prosperity of the greatest number of citizens, as Olson argues, but it serves the interests of the bandits very well.
Someone should extend the Galula idea to include the effect of identity politics. Identity politics has the effect of increasing the authority of the identity spokesman not simply vis a vis the general polity, but also with respect to their allies.
Being inside the Big Tent is in some respects like being inside the Big House. It's important to join a gang in order to survive. And the more gangs you admit into the tent the more important it is to join a gang.
The conservative insistence on the individual who stands aloof from the gang carries with it certain disadvantages when it goes up against identity politics. But the man in the Big Tent/Big House is also hobbled a different way. He must "get with the program". Survival is purchased at the cost, paradoxically, of conformity.
Joining the Left, as many will have discovered shortly upon joining it, is not a passport to being a rebel. It's admission into a chain gang. "I owe my soul to the company store."
Hezbollah-type activities are going on much closer to home for Americans than they realize, as they will see if they read the news from Mexico, and how the drug cartels are effectively using money and terror to destroy local government and civic life in that country. (Google Los Zetas). Those of us California, Texas and other places, take note, if Mexico goes, we are next.
You know, I think it will be nice to have a President in Barak Obama that no one will be allowed to criticize. We are not suppose to criticize him as a candidate, so I assume that will apply "squared" once he's in office.
President Obama will redefine the job. In his administration the President will be the "assigner of blame" in chief. Something goes wrong in the White House, he'll sniff out the culprit. It will turn out to be someone who never really worked for his administration -- just one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of informal advisers. But somehow this individual's faulty ideas made their way into the administration like sewage sludge leaking into the potable water supply. We will come to understand that such things happen in government. It's quite complex, you know.
But more exciting is the use "blame fixing" can be put to in the private economy. He can blame the auto industry. He can blame the insurance industry. He can blame big oil. Sure, that's all been done plenty, but not with style. He can blame George Bush for everything, forever. It used to be a president could blame the former administration for a year, max. But we so enjoy blaming George Bush that it has been decided to wave any artificial timetable.
President Obama can blame "Big Computer" and "Big i-Anything." On second thought, that's were he gets a lot of his support. How about the teachers unions? OK, I'm kidding. Bitter clingers who won't get with the program? Some real possibilities there. Because when you get right down to it, it will be the voters fault.
I'm always amazed at the intimate familiarity with American culture that Wretchard demonstrates, up to and including an old Tennessee Ernie Ford song from the 1950's.
Nit-picky detail: Except it wasn't a chain gang - it was a coal mine.
if Mexico goes, we are next.
We've got bigger guns than Mexico does. Always have had. Texas alone could handle Mexico with the rest of us standing back and yahoo'ing their efforts and being unpleasant to the Mexicans in our own neighborhoods.
Something goes wrong in the White House, he'll sniff out the culprit.
Oh, I think that job would be delegated to Michelle. She seems much more temperamentally suited to witch-hunting.
if Lebanon wasn't so ghastly serious, it would look like old Arizona Territory Tombstone. The Clantons were the Hezbos, and everything was fine as long as everybody looked the other way and stayed shut up about the cowboy gang crime syndicate. Then the Earps came along and the Gunfight at the OK Corral went down in history.
seriously, today's Lebanon mess would be less horrid if an errant cruise missile had hit gov't house in Damascus the day after every one of the half-dozen recent murders of Lebanon's leaders. we could start asking ourselves WWPD? --what would Putin do?
buddy larsen said...
"if Lebanon wasn't so ghastly serious, it would look like old Arizona Territory Tombstone. The Clantons were the Hezbos, and everything was fine as long as everybody looked the other way and stayed shut up about the cowboy gang crime syndicate. Then the Earps came along and the Gunfight at the OK Corral went down in history."
Yes but that was a heavy hand, so was Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is no heavy hand in sight.
The notion of Hezbollah as being in a permanent state of control without governance reminded me very much of Robert D. Kaplan's "The Media and Medievalism" in The Hoover Institute's Policy Review Dec 04 issue. This is another of the Left's techniques for wresting control from competent authority without really having a viable alternative to offer.
In the end the goal is to break down the structure of authority and accountability that keeps society functional, whether that be done in the name of 'freedom' or of some other agenda. The net result is a continuing breakdown of civilization. In reality, the fight seems to me to be between the forces of civilization and chaos, between a stable society and tyranny, whether of the despot or the tribe/gang. Not all tyranny wears the face of a strong man such as Hitler, Stalin or Mao, it can just as well be a ski mask.
Civilizations work to create and extend security, trust and order, tyrannies for the reverse.
Buddy I think the Hezbollah is more like the Wild Bunch, and Israel is the Pinkerton Detective Agency, just like in Butch Cassidy. Eventually when the pain level is high enough, and enough trains have been robbed, they're going to come after the Hezbos with an implacable posse and the mullahs will be forced to shoot it out or jump for it.
Susan, you may be right.
Bush was in KSA today "to talk to the Sauds about raising oil production" (yes, they will bump it up a few *yawn* hundred thou bpd).
Then just this afternoon the biz shows mentioned that Treasury Sec Paulsen too is off to the mideast, May 30-June 02, to "confer privately" with heads of state of Persian Gulf oil producers, to "promote open investment".
Wait a minute. Presidential private meetings, over there, with the heads of state of our allies on the periphery of Iran?
The President first, followed in two weeks by his Treasury Secretary, to chat about what are normally staff-level issues?
Speculation: He confers with Israel first, then personally carries the Israeli word to the Sauds. Paulsen will follow in two weeks to set up the war management of the oil markets.
Things may be fixin' to get hot for the Iranian Revolutionary Party.
"Terrorists are parasites who cannot allow their hosts to die and cannot live without them."
"the fight seems to me to be between the forces of civilization and chaos"
Well stated men. Terrorists and other Mafioso types live by the rule of the jungle. They are simply intelligent, very aggressive and dangerous animals; and we, in order to preserve our life, liberty, and creative pursuit of happiness, must treat them as such.
Here is their Declaration of Independence from Civilization:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are not equal, that the fittest and most ruthless are endowed only by nature with certain reversible rights, that among these are the rights to the life and liberty of others, and to the destructive pursuit of happiness."
Here's hoping,
Buddy and Susan.
A holy trinity, al-bob?
al Ama Gordo
Tony Badran at MichaelTotten has a different take on the coup attempt, I think. He's suggesting that all the non-Shia confessional groups put the government troops up front as bait in order to show that 1) Hizbollah was traitorous, and 2)the government troops were worthless. He says that in the Shouf(?), where confrontation was more direct, Hezbollah was beaten badly, and that's the real reason that they walked away from the Sunni region in Beirut.
In Hizbullah's case, Nasrallah and his Iranian bosses have no interest in taking on responsibility for Lebanon. They don't want to collect taxes. They don't want to pick up the garbage or build schools and universities.
How is this different from how the British East India Company treated the Chinese Empire in the First Opium War? How is this different from Pablo Escobar’s war against Columbia? Sometimes wars are fought in order to impose a state of lawlessness onto a society because lawlessness is far more profitable for rogues.
Buddy, don't forget that Cheney was there, too, just two months ago in March. Also supposed to be begging for more oil production.
I'd say we're in the count-down phase of whatever we're going to do to Iran and the Saudi's are being kept very up-to-date on what the plans are.
Once it's done, they'll be expected to step up to their Arab microphones and tamp down any ululating from other terrorist-producing Arabs, like Khaddafi and Yemen.
I wonder if we'll be taking out the chinless wonder at the same time. Or maybe that's what the visit to Israel was for, to make sure Olmert has his assignment.
"Someone should extend the Galula idea to include the effect of identity politics."
"In the population the effort is made to separate the soft from the hardened fellows, otherwise..."
One of the bigger problems in Algeria was the fear of the insurgents, and the grip they held on the local population. Especially in the political arena...
"Although I have already gone into considerable detail, I think it would be useful before ending to give an account of a concrete case of the destruction of a rebel political cell in a village, a success made possible because I resigned myself to using harsh methods, disregarding my own abhorrence of police work.* This case constitutes the exception
mentioned at the beginning of this report.
November 1956
Captain Galula
Commanding "
Hum-m-m, somehow I don't think folks will along for the harsh methods, but it sure is tempting. Otherwise a campaign to counter a piss poor press seems the better angel. Key in on showing not the failures but the successes. "If the people don't know about the victories"..., how can they expect to change from fear to cooperation to overt opposition and rejection of identity politics.
I have faith in the majority of the American people and what i think they are thinking is "yes take out the nukes but DON'T F*CK IT UP!!" Meaning having all the fixes set up for the collateral problems that will follow, unlike the perceived poor planning for the Iraq aftermath. What normal decent American would be upset by the destruction of the Mullah’s Nuclear weapons factories while simultaneously not effing up the economy?
"What happens to the Republicans in 2008 will likely be dictated by what didn't happen in 2005, and '06, and '07. The moment when the party could have broken, on principle, with the administration – over the thinking behind and the carrying out of the war, over immigration, spending and the size of government – has passed. What two years ago would have been honorable and wise will now look craven. They're stuck.
Mr. Bush has squandered the hard-built paternity of 40 years. But so has the party, and so have its leaders. If they had pushed away for serious reasons, they could have separated the party's fortunes from the president's. This would have left a painfully broken party, but they wouldn't be left with a ruined "brand," as they all say, speaking the language of marketing. And they speak that language because they are marketers, not thinkers. Not serious about policy. Not serious about ideas.
And not serious about leadership, only followership."
Buddy,
"Things may be fixin' to get hot for the Iranian Revolutionary Party."
It's odd how most see it as "oil"...
The Big Picture seems to be lost on the "many"...
Or, we're both wrong... You may not remember my premise that:
1. Russia will NEVER be our friend, and
2. The Afghan/Iraq war has always been about Iran (many years ago).
After admitting to myself that I was in error many times, my hypothesis seems to still stand... Albeit with a few thousand variables that are yet to be identified..
Nahncee, Dan, did you happen to catch the Bush/Abdullah video running on Fox News yesterday? They were outdoors, Bedouin music blaring, surrounded by a smiling throng of young House of Saud princelings, and doing a little dance shuffle to the music, smiling broadly at each other, faces inches apart, exchanging little bon mots and joshing like the oldest of comrades.
They were clearly and deliberately acting out for the cameras something extra ordinary, and each had in his right hand, blade upright and resting on right shoulder, a four-foot long Arab scimitar.
It looked like a war dance.
It looked like they had specifically decided to show (to any concerned parties) a couple of chieftans girding for battle.
In an earlier post, some attention was given to the islands in the Persian Gulf that Iran controls but UAE claims. A little investigating dredges up the datum that in fact the disputed islands were occupied in 1971, during the rule of Mohamed Reza Palahvi, Shah of Iran.
Another words (as they say in Pogo) the Iranian seizure of those islands antedates the rule of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Government.
It reminds that the expansionist imperative transcends the demarcation between successive regimes, regardless of contrasting philosophies. Russia was expanding under the Tsars, continued to seize and acquire territories under the Soviet system, and --- in case you hadn't noticed, since it didn't get a lot of press stateside --- last year (2007) claimed 470,000 square miles of the Antarctic regions.
Turns out that area contains enormous oil, gas, and mineral reserves under the ice cap that seems to be disappearing.
That relates tangentially to the thema here, in the sense that the spoilers in Lebanon --- Hamas, Hizb'ollah, etc. --- are merely the current incarnations of the persistent outlaw element that always lingers on the margins, preying on a larger productive population, stirring things up when necessary, but never creating or building anything useful or lasting.
Predatory parasites.
Without the productive society they harry, they would die out as if an electrical switch had been thrown. But they persist, re-appearing with different names, costumes, professed beliefs, etc. But these pig-lice have much more in common with each other as parasites than any of'em would admit. It is absurd to honor them as fulfilling any requirement of Islam; they violate it with all their atrocities against the innocents of their own faith, as well as the murders and atrocities against others.
another take on Hezbollah and the Lebanese situation, this by Michael Young, writing for NOW Lebanon.
Pity Lebanon’s Shia community
I think it may overstate Hezbollah's troubles a little, and the truly scary part predicting that lots of Sunni Arabs will come kick Shia led Hezbollah butt. However the main thread, that people are just not buying Nasrallah's options. Rejecting the strife promised by following Nasrallah's lead. There have been a number of mixed blessings resulting.
The Druze had united to fight Hezbollah in the hills, and stopped their advance, and while the destruction of that communications system has been rethought, it will remain operating under the supervision of the Army (I don't know what to make of that). And while the Shia chief of the Airport will retain his office, the rest of Lebanon is so thoroughly steamed at Hezbollah that it would not take too much for most to greet with open support an Israeli resumption of hostilities against Hezbollah.
I have noticed that Reuters International has taken to referring to the Lebanese Government as the "US Supported Government", and Hezbollah occasionally gets tagged with being "Iranian backed". But not much is made of the destabilizing and fracturing nature of Hezbollah style political maneuvering. it appears to be a two edged sword, it just take a long time for the trailing edge to make its cutting run.
Jumblatt was interviewed during the fighting -- he looked bad -- shaken, demoralized. He mumbled something about the government simply not having the power to control the Hez.
Power without responsibility only goes so far. At best you have Somali or Lebanon or Afghanistan. Chaotic "Road Warrior" states that can't muster resources to be the kinds of dangers that Iran presents.
Khomeni certainly wanted and got power. But he also accepted responsibility because he understood that responsibility allowed him to exercise even greater power. That of a nuclear state.
His heirs now have the power and the responsibility and soon nukes.
Buddy, I didn't see the dance, no. However, I'm remembering some posts about Arab cultures some months ago, where there's a requirement that you slap your enemy across the face (so to speak) and holler "en garde" before you annihilate him. The posts were in regard to the wording of some of Ahmadinnerjacket's speeches lately, speculating that that was what HE was doing in subtly (and not so subtly) officially declaring war on the United States.
I hope Abdullah gave Bush his very own shiney sharp scimitar to bring back to DC, to be framed alongside of Saddam's liberated pistol.
RE: Doug's post by Peggy Noonan, increasingly she is auditioning to take over the part of "crazy aunt in the attic" once Helen Thomas finally goes to meet her Allah. Makes one appreciate Wm F. Buckley even more, in that he seemed to be able to age without going nuts towards the end.
There is nothing so satisfying as stating the obvious in trite cliches to the masturbatory grunts and groans of voyeurs and pretending that you just had good sex.
Mad Fiddler, so what if Russia claimed 470,000 square miles of Antarctica? They've already got many times that area in Siberia that's not under ice, yet they can't develop it because there's no petrochemical company in the West that would risk investing in a kleptocracy like that, and the oil wealth from pre-existing wells in Russia is flying out to Swiss bank accounts like nobody's business rather than getting re-invested in new exploration. If they want to start a race in Antarctica I'd bet on US oilmen every time.
Nahncee, if Peggy Noonan is our crazy aunt in the closet what does that make Ann Coulter, Miss Manners?
Ann Coulter's a blonde and we've been ignoring them since before Marilyn Monroe.
The thing about Noonen and Helen Thomas is they've both got this pessimistic sky-is-falling world view that's just suicide-making. Coulter rages and rants, but she's not a pessimist.
Re Arctic claim, Churchill once said something to the effect that if the world was a hotel, the Russian would be always roaming the hallways, trying the doorknobs.
He said this during the soviet era, of course (*cough*).
Isn't Ann Coulter in it for the money (she baits moonbats so appreciative conservatives will buy her books and pay for her lectures)? Why do people take her seriously?
"Jumblatt was interviewed during the fighting -- he looked bad -- shaken, demoralized. He mumbled something about the government simply not having the power to control the Hez."
That doesn't sound good at all. Jumblatt has been shifty over the years but right now he's a "good guy" by default because he opposes Hez domination of Lebanon. We know the "root cause" for all this is Iran. Of course everything will be hunky-dory, though, once Presiden Obama gets to sit down and talk to Ahmedinejad. Yeah, that's the ticket.
PS Buddy, thanks for the support on the "ghosts of history" thread.
Gary -- right, the Levantine peoples can rest easy, once the Obama administration straightens out all those slight misunderstandings. Re that 'ghosts' thread, i finally gave up -- couldn't get thru -- don't think other party understood Doheny Street (i mispelled as 'Dulaney'), Texas, or watermelon stories. After those i wuz outta ideas, fizzle.
Hizbollah are political bindweed. Like bindweed, they need a previously existing host plant to stand up. Also like bindweed, destroying the weed is also liable to destroy the host plant.
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