The War on Terror

Musing #63 “Learning from the Strengths of Daesh”

(N.B. I am very ambivalent both about writing this musing, and about sharing it.  This “musing” may turn out to be worth less the paper you’ve printed it on.)

I have said before and will continue to maintain that the “War on Terrorism” is a misleading fantasy generated by George W. and his team after 9/11.  To what end, for what purpose?  I don’t know.  Maybe just to cover his ass as he prepared to finish what he thought his daddy had left unfinished (one hazard of dynasties).  The fact remains that coping with Al Qaida and the Taliban and now Daesh is not a war.  And I’m not just nitpicking word choices, I’m taking the broad view.  We are not confronting massed, armed forces on battlefields.  Nor even guerillas behind trees or in tunnels.  We are engaging (or failing to engage) militias which are less and less territorial, are more and more driven by ideologies (which, while couched in religious language, are not really religious, just camouflaged as such), complicated with ages-old tribal and sectarian disputes, and are increasingly regressive (striving to return to some fantasized golden era of some imagined past.)  Like the “war on drugs” and the “war on poverty” we have mis-identified the struggle and thereby have deluded ourselves into using the wrong tools to engage the struggle...so we are misdirected and unsuccessful.

The Middle East is an unmitigated disaster rooted first in the last century’s history and second in fighting out millennia-old struggles, both of them fueled by cultural forces and dynamics of which we cannot even conceive.  And Daesh’s technological tools (which are ironically its ideological enemies) are increasingly unconventional, such as social media.  This is not ‘war’ as we have even known it, and we cannot fight it with conventional battlefield weapons.

What I’ve just said is all repetition.  I’ve said it all before.  But in the middle of the night I had a thought.  We’re been struggling with Daesh and denying it any validity.  What if we grant it some validity?  I don’t mean approval, or agreement, or even toleration, or anything like that... but grant that it is a movement (however much we abhor its direction), not simply a headless monster, take a deep breath, and ask, “How does it work?”  Might we learn something...even from this monster Daesh?

The first thing I notice is that Daesh has learned how to build community.  I probably notice that first because I’m looking around at our fragmented, fractious, divisive, crumbling, increasingly self-destructive ‘community’ and muttering “This won’t do.”  For sure, Daesh is not building any kind of community we would want (apart from what Donald Trump promises to craft for himself), but it is building a community strong enough, cohesive enough, compelling enough that its members are willing to do brutal and endless murder and ultimately to blow themselves up individually into ‘kingdom come’ (they hope).  Actually, that’s pretty powerful stuff !!

This much I learned decades ago: to increase the bonds, commitment, cohesion within the community the simplest (and often first) thing you do is invent an enemy and threaten the community with it.  A great builder of cohesiveness; tyrants, fascists and demagogues (Oops, Donald Trump’s head pops up again) have used it successfully ever since Pericles.  Rally the people by posing an enemy and magnifying the differences between them and us.  That’s an obvious gimmick, and Daesh has used it well; the whole rest of the world is their enemy, not just the non-Muslim ‘infidels,’ but also the “gray Muslims’ (those not sharing Daesh’s radicalism and zealotry-cum-brutality).  That’s a considerably daunting enemy.

Perhaps the second thing you do is provide the community with an ideology, a rationale, that both helps bind the community together, and gives the sound of reasonableness to the actions you want the community to take.  In Daesh’s case, they wave Allah around a lot much like a flag (though from the little I’ve read they don’t really waste much time worshipping Allah, just screaming his name as they commit their mayhem), along with claims of doctrinal purity (a sort of very regressive reform movement) shaped by an ideology that affirms immorality, brutality, inhumanity and self-immolation.

Now I’ll say one more time, for the record, that I’m utterly convinced that there is absolutely nothing Islamic about Daesh.  I learned more than half a lifetime ago not to take literally the schizophrenic’s religious ideation and babbling; he thinks he’s talking about religious matters, but I know that he’s simply using religious language (because he does know how else to say it) to try to tell me what is tormenting his mind, something he himself is not able to not understand.  I realize it’s usually inaccurate and misleading to try to explain a social process in terms of individual psychology, but in this one case I think the analog is useful and fairly accurate.  So I state, pretty unconditionally, that Daesh is NOT a religious movement, NOT a radical form of Islam: Deash is a bunch of thugs who have formed a community to enable themselves to do what they love doing (murder, brutality, misogyny and mayhem), what they get great joy in doing, and are simply using the language of a minor, giving-permission-to-violence, and historically suppressed interpretation of an unseemly edge of Islam to give themselves justification for doing it...and in the process shoving their thumb (or their ass) in the eye of Islam.  Pay no attention to their words; watch their behavior...it’s neither Islamic nor humane

That’s as far as I can go in trying to divine what Daesh has learned about community-building; I‘ve reached the limit of my understanding.  I’d love to hear the observations of someone well versed in social processes and well informed of the available intelligence about Daesh.  I think (perhaps wrongly) that we could learn some things by closely observing Daesh in addition to trying to contain, diminish and destroy them.  Anybody like that out there?

One more thought occurred to me in this cluster of thinking, though I’m not clear how it fits in here...but my intuitions says it does.  As a young preacher I quickly became aware how discomforted parents get in church when their small child makes some noise they think distracting to the congregation.  It became one of my missions to convince those parents that their child was not bothering this preacher, and had as much place in that worship service as any annoyed adult might, and that the children’s presence was vital, life-giving to the community.  While I did put a lot of emphasis on the ‘sermon,’ I never thought that what this preacher had to share was all that important; I understood the role of the ‘sermon’ as establishing a safe arena for people to be distracted, to wander off mentally and to do some meditation on whatever they needed most to be carefully considering.  Further, I’d once did a small piece of research about people’s earliest remembrances of church, and from that study I’d concluded that earliest childhood experiences in church are crucially important to adults’ faith-lifes.  It’s important for those children to be comfortably in church, and their parents as well.  So, childhood memories of church need to be a plus in their faiths.  What does this have to do with community-building?  I don’t know how, but I’m sure it does.

So, what might we learn from the Daesh incident that’s more helpful than hateful?  Suggestions?