By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981), from the spring of 2020, excerpted and slightly condensed from America’s History of Failure in Unconventional and Asymmetric Warfare Is Instructive for Our War with the Coronavirus (itself an excerpt from a much larger piece) with a lengthy addendum written September 11, 2021; see related podcasts #7: Col. Steve Miska, U.S. Army (Ret.) on the U.S. Withdrawal & Our Duty to Our Afghan Allies and #8: Col. T. X. Hammes, USMC (Ret.), on Strategic Failure in Afghanistan.

SILVER SPRING—In the eighties and nineties in Lebanon and Somalia, American leaders rapidly drew down their involvement after a series of high-profile Hezbollah bombings in Beirut in 1983 and the notorious “Black Hawk Down” incident in Mogadishu in 1993 despite both missions having substantial international support.  Key humanitarian aims of the mission in Somalia were actually fairly well-accomplished and saved hundreds of thousands of lives before the withdrawal, and even in Lebanon with our problematic mission there, significant humanitarian achievements still occurred.

In between the unconventional, asymmetric challenges in Lebanon and Somalia, our overwhelming triumph in the conventional 1991 Gulf War actually helped lead us to be overconfident and over-reliant when it came to our conventional military abilities (and, to a lesser extent, the same could be said of the two air campaigns in the Balkans), setting us up for even greater failures in ensuing decades.  “Black Hawk Down” would be the first buzzkill of our post-Gulf War high, just the first of many setbacks in the wars to come.  And in the cases of both Lebanon and Somalia, terrorists—Hezbollah and al-Qaeda—took inspiration for future terrorist attacks from our withdrawals, with both Lebanon and Somalia devolving into prolonged periods of war that killed many people and terribly destabilized their respective regions.

As for al-Qaeda, its Osama bin Laden had several basic goals behind its asymmetric, unconventional 9/11 attacks that would come years later.  They looked at the world relevant to them as being divided into two major camps: the “near enemy”—all the regimes ruling Muslim populations that were not run by Islamic principles as defined by al-Qaeda: the monarchs, dictators, and democracies from Saudi Arabia to Egypt to Indonesia—and the “far enemy”—foreign governments propping up the near enemy, especially the United States.

With 9/11, bin Laden wanted to recreate for America the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan.  As he saw it, the Soviet invasion galvanized Muslims from around the world to fight off the atheist communist infidel invader, who got bogged down over years in a conflict that sapped its treasure and strength and led to the Soviet Union’s final collapse; with the invaders ousted from Afghanistan, an Islamic regime in al-Qaeda’s mold—the Taliban—came to power. 

Osama bin Laden’s dream with 9/11, then, was to bait the U.S. into one or more wars of attrition, rally Muslims from around the world to his banner to fight the occupying invader, force an American withdrawal after it expended so much blood and treasure, see the U.S. sour on supporting allied governments in the Middle East in the aftermath, and pull its bases out as a result or as a result of additional conflict with and attacks from al-Qaeda, flushed with recruits after already beating the Americans in one war.  In short, the endgame was to remove the presence and influence of the “far enemy”—namely America—in the Middle East and then topple the “near enemy” regimes there and elsewhere ruling over the Muslim world.   

As we know, 9/11 helped bin Laden goad the U.S. into two such wars, not just in Afghanistan but also in Iraq, and while we withdrew from Iraq after seven-and-a-half years on terms far better than the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, extremists’ policies against their own people on the parts of both the Syrian government and our allied Iraqi government empowered the unconventional and asymmetric ISIS—Zarqawi’s al Qaeda in Iraq’s rebirth and successor—to create a “caliphate” that ate up large parts of territory in both countries, forcing the U.S. reentry into Iraq and intensifying involvement in Syria.  While bin Laden expected us to invade Afghanistan, Iraq was something of a gift to him. 

The Iraq War resulted in the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, meaning Iran became our biggest enemy in the region.  But while in the beginning this was due mainly to a process of elimination, shortly after, it would also be because Iran grew considerably in power as a result of our actions, eventually playing dominant roles in Iraq and Syria and having major influence in Yemen, too, in, addition to having its longstanding leverage in Lebanon.  In short, Iran was the main victor of our Iraq War.  But especially considering how dynamics played out as war raged in Syria and up through today, Iran is hardly the only major U.S. foe to benefit from recent U.S. missteps and missed opportunities: the chief global U.S. antagonist, Russia, is also far stronger in the Middle East today at the expense of the U.S. (not to mention elsewhere around the globe). 

Ironically, as I have noted, counterinsurgency (COIN) worked well in the Iraq War after the negligent leadership of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and its gains held well until late 2013 in spite of a U.S. withdrawal that had been completed before the end of 2011.  Much of this effort was overseen by Rumsfeld’s replacement, Sec. Robert Gates, and the man in uniform he tapped to execute the mission, Gen. David Petraeus. But the earlier blunders of the U.S. had pushed to the center stage of a frightened, increasingly sectarian Iraq one Nuri Kamal al-Maliki as Iraq’s prime minister, who fed off division and increased it at the same time, playing somewhat nice while U.S. troops were still in-country but becoming increasingly unshackled as time went on and especially after the U.S. pullout.  Rather than the Obama Administration’s withdrawal, then, it was Maliki’s oppressive governing style that wiped out U.S. security gains and soon had ISIS governing a “caliphate” that included large portions of Iraqi territory right up to the gates of Baghdad by mid-2014, a situation demanding U.S. entry into the conflict to prevent a terrible situation from becoming far worse and far more genocidal, in spite of the Obama Administration’s reluctance to reinsert U.S. forces into Iraq after withdrawing them just a few years earlier.

And while the Obama Administration took a relatively large degree of care to avoid alienating local populations and inflicting civilian casualties while staying true to allies in its fight against ISIS, the Trump Administration has pretty much taken an anything-but approach—killing far more civilians—even as it relaxed its assault against ISIS when the group was close to losing all its territory in Syria and Iraq, allowing for ISIS to make something of a comeback.  Even worse, in October 2019, the Trump Administration abandoned our true allies there—the Kurds and others fighting alongside and inside the Syrian Democratic Forces (S.D.F.)–who had worked together for years against both ISIS and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s regime.  This betrayal was carried out so suddenly, and in such a way, that it dramatically undermined our ability to fight unconventional asymmetric warfare in the region, an ability that is so heavily dependent on trust and partnering with non-state actors on the ground who have longstanding, intimate relationships with the locals as members of their communities and know the landscape as only locals can.  This withdrawal was also done in a way that undermined our entire regional position, ceding much territory and influence to actors working against many of our interests: to an “ally” we could not trust (Turkey, seeking to pulverize both Kurdish forces that had fought alongside us and Kurdish autonomy as well as engage in “demographic engineering” against the Kurds) and our main rivals in the region (Russia and Iran, Assad’s top allies).  This withdrawal minimized what was already a minimal deployment (far from a costly or expensive one, especially relative to so many recent deployments) that was giving us an amazing payoff for the small amount of resources allocated.

As for the Afghanistan war, that “other” war that bin Laden’s 9/11 prodded us into, it has been a mess for nearly its entirety and still is, waxing and waning to one degree or another in its state of messiness, Afghanistan having been at war for decades before the U.S. toppled the Taliban.  Here, too, unconventional and asymmetric tactics wore down American will after American leadership’s initial projections of swift “victory” set up inevitable cynicism and disappointment, with Alec Worsnop highlighting for the Modern War Institute at West Point (MWI)  the Taliban’s particular skill at asymmetry.  Though the Obama Administration tapped Gen. Petraeus to recreate his successes in Iraq in Afghanistan with another surge, the far lower degree of national development there combined with U.S. political leadership not being committed to the resourcing required to achieve our stated aims—let alone try to sell Americans on a longer-term commitment—meant that, with that Petraeus surge or without it, that war would remain what it has been for years: an exercise in futility apart from preventing an unstable, violent status quo from becoming far worse.  Another surge under the Trump Administration also failed to significantly alter the overall negative dynamics on the ground for the better.  However President Trump describes his intent to pull out U.S. forces now, it is hard to objectively consider American disengagement after so many years as anything but a victory to the Taliban unless the Taliban suddenly becomes the opposite of what it has consistently been for the entirety of the conflicted, which is an extremist religious group that resorts to extreme methods to achieve its aims, relying almost wholly on violence and terror to “govern” and one that cannot be trusted to upholds agreements of any sort, let alone the type the Trump Administration is trying to reach with it. 

There has not anytime recently been and will not be the political will for a significantly better-resourced, medium-to-longer-term international effort in Afghanistan, the best approach to give that country its best chance to transition to overall to higher levels of stability and one that I advocated for in writing in 2009 as a graduate student. But that hardly means the failures in Afghanistan are all on the political-leadership side and that the military does not also shoulder significant blame, as the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan from 2003-2005, Gen. David Barno, wrote in 2019.  Still, senior military leaders seem to have been more careful with their use of language compared to political leaders, and it was the political leadership that either set expectations and parameters that were unrealistic or simply avoided engaging with the public on the war, hoping more to avoid having the war cause them political damage than have any seriously honest national public dialogue about Afghanistan.

What we have been engaging in there in an overall sense—open-ended long-term stalemate that prevents a worst-case scenario—can be a hard sell as the best option (not that it has been generally honestly sold as that), but that does not necessarily make it bad policy.  To quote Gen. Petraeus in a recent piece (one he penned with security-policy hand Vance Serchuk): “This strategy has been costly and unsatisfying—but also reasonably successful.”

ADDENDUM: September 11, 2021: A year ago—hell, even a month ago—I would have agreed with the previous analysis by Gen. Petraeus.  And I would not have made a bad deal with the Taliban along the lines of the one made by Trump and Pompeo, nor reduced our troop strength from about 13,000 to 2,500 from the signing of that deal to the final days of my presidency as Trump did even as the Taliban flouted the deal and helped marginalize and severely weaken the Afghan government, setting up its collapse.  I am still processing President Biden’s withdrawal and Kabul Airlift, and my criticism of its tactics were much harsher at first than it is now, given revelations that have been trickling out since the Afghan government’s rapid collapse. 

I still think it would have been wiser for Biden to delay beginning the withdrawing of the final 2,500 U.S. troops until November 2021-March-2022 instead of April-August of this year (provided the Taliban would have kept to not attacking U.S. troops, a big and unknown “what-if”) to coincide with the winter instead of the fighting season, thereby minimizing the ability of the Taliban to make gains during the final phase of our pullout and also giving us more time to process SIVs (Special Immigrant Visas, the visas designed to get our most vetted Afghan allies and their families out of Afghanistan and into the U.S.) in an orderly manner, but the speed at which the house of cards that was the Afghan government collapsed—faster by far than any intelligence estimate had predicted, exposing the hollowness of our twenty years of investment in rebuilding and remaking Afghanistan, of building up security forces and a government—has changed my thinking.

Perhaps the writing was on the wall for a long time, for many years, but it should have been obvious back in September 2019, when only about 1.8 million people voted in Afghanistan’s 2019 presidential election out of nearly 9.7 million registered voters, down dramatically from some seven million who voted in the country’s 2014 presidential election.  Considering that the country’s population overall in 2019 was some 38 million, this made the voting crowd in 2019 less than five percent of the population (admittedly consisting of many children, but still), thus, both the degree to which Afghans were not buying into this American project and the degree to which those who had previously at least in part bought into were giving up tells you just how “successful” our strategy in Afghanistan had been (I am still not yet sure if we were doomed from the start, but Col. T. X. Hammes, USMC [Ret.] makes a strong case that we were in my recent podcast discussion with him).

While Gen. Petraeus was certainly right in a military sense, just as he was in claiming success for the Iraqi surge, like in the Iraqi surge, the military campaign in Afghanistan existed to give life and development to the political side of things in the host country, and in both cases, those raison d’êtres for Gen. Petraeus’s detailed counterinsurgency campaigns—giving local politics breathing room to work—did not result in anything near what we were hoping for, making our efforts to support the existing systems quite problematic.

Biden concluded bleakly that sending American sons and daughters to fight and die for a government that was not respected or thought of as legitimate, nor bought into by anything like a critical (let alone growing) mass of Afghans (indeed, that mass was shrinking) was a fool’s errand, however noble.

I was one of those fools in the sense that I assumed after two decades of effort that we had built up something in Afghanistan that was on a path to sustaining itself to at least some degree, that what we were building there would not immediately crumble without our support, that out support was worth it and integral to maintaining a level of “success,” and it is clear that I was not alone and in good company.

But we were wrong.

Instead, our servicemen and servicewomen—sometimes our diplomats, contractors, and aid workers, too—were putting themselves at risk and dying for a house of cards that was so corrupt and so empty it only took a few days to collapse in full once cities started falling to the Taliban.  Sure, the very real gains—for human rights and women’s rights, for a free press and economic development—mattered, and they existed robustly in the Kabul Bubble, other cities, and even in the form of girl’s schools in rural areas outside Taliban control (only about one-quarter of Afghanistan’s population lives in cities).  But especially those rural girls’ schools were often under threat, and almost all the gains were shallow in that the system set to preserve them was unwilling, perhaps unable, to do so if they had to fight the Taliban on their own.

I take, in part, the points made along the lines that the U.S. withdrawal deprived the Afghan security forces of the air support, intelligence support, logistics, and maintenance support provided by U.S. and other NATO forces and contractors.

And yet, last time I checked, the Taliban did not have an air force, satellite or drone intelligence, M4 and M16 rifles, body armor, any large number of heavy vehicles, or night-vision goggles (they later acquired many American guns, body armor, and night-vision goggles, but not as much U.S. equipment as some claim and not prior to the rapid collapse of the Afghan government).

If the Taliban can fight without these things, surely the better equipped Afghan Army could have, as well (except when they ran out of supplies, and the Afghan government officials obviously should have much more highly prioritized supplying their troops).  Essentially, the Taliban were fighting with AKs, pickup trucks, and in outfits that look to Westerners like pajamas, so I find any arguments that all the modern, high-tech, Western-supplied advances were necessary for the Afghan security forces to put up a fight hard to accept. 

Now, this is not to denigrate the bravery and sacrifice of tens of thousands of Afghan security forces who died fighting the Taliban, nor their numerous wounded.  But when push came to shove, in the final battle for the very concept of everything ideally embodied by their uniforms, so many cut deals with the Taliban and/or melted away that it is clear the Afghan government, including its security forces, was, ultimately, a failure, meaning the entire U.S. mission beyond going after al-Qaeda and bin Laden was also a failure.

So while I fault Biden and his team on timing and not responding faster to unfolding events (though when they did respond after hesitating for a few days, it seems they did a pretty good job in horrible circumstances), they were far from unreasonable in thinking the Afghan government would give them more time and breathing space given what our intelligence had assessed and, in the end, I cannot disagree with the decision to pull the plug even if I do not fully actively agree with it.  It is hard to disagree with the decision to end our involvement on the ground militarily, and it is often the hardest thing to admit failure and cut your losses, never a glorious, feel-good decision with glorious, feel-good results.

Just writing about this has made me feel even more hollow and resigned to all this, more emptiness at trying to ascertain any kind of grander meaning to 9/11 and its offspring, the “War on Terror.”  It was hard to feel more so in that direction, but here, then, is to one effect of the past twenty years that is indisputable.  Historically, there is not much to see here, just another example of a major power’s imperial overstretch, like Persia’s Thermopylae and Plataea, Rome’s Dacia, the Arab-led Caliphate at Tours, Hideyoshi’s Korea, the Ottoman’s Vienna, Napoleon in Russia, Russia’s Tsushima and Mukden.  Some of these hastened or finalized imperial decline, others (Dacia for Rome and Japan’s late sixteenth-century invasions of Korea) would just be temporary setbacks that did not precipitate a larger collapse, and those predicting Afghanistan is somehow America’s zenith before an inexorable decline seem wildly premature (indeed, Afghanistan was a remote outpost, not in any way a major support for any of the rest of the so-called American “Empire,” and in and of itself is not likely to cause America any serious issues overall).  But like these other failed imperial offensives, there will not be much to show for it.  And yet, unlike some of these other disasters, Biden leaving Afghanistan now will greatly limit the fallout for America and its allies (apart, sadly, from our Afghan allies).

So as much respect as I have for Gen. Petraeus and his service, in light of what has recently transpired and what has been revealed of late, after two decades—set against the backdrop of a conflict of perpetual civil war that was killing an increasing number of Afghan civilians (on pace for a record high in 2021 through the first six months) in a country with a government we built up and invested much into but that held little faith among its 38 million mostly rural people, with the authority of that government rarely existing or held in high esteem in most rural areas—the idea that the mission of our troops in Afghanistan propping up that government could be characterized as “reasonably successful” is a tough sell.

In a United States where the sacrifices of these troops and the mission they serve are given little deep thought by the public, in which the three major national television networks devoted only five collective total minutes out of some combined 14,000 on their flagship nightly news broadcasts in all of 2020 to the war, and in which most Americans had given up on the war years ago, there may be some intellectual grounds to celebrate the decision to leave, but otherwise celebration seems a perverse notion.  As I watch the 9/11 ceremony at New York’s Ground Zero even as I write this, it is clear the memories of the terrorist attack’s fallen are still raw, wounds still unhealed, even twenty years later.  The exact same can be said for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and tens of thousands of Afghans whose untimely ends likewise haunt their loved ones.

Rather than look away, we should wallow in the misery of our mistakes, lest we repeat them.  But repeating our mistakes seems to be a cultural hallmark of late.  That we do this, that we sparked invasions that killed far more people than died from 9/11, that our nation is now as fractured and torn apart as any time since our horrific Civil War, is in no way honoring the dead of 9/11.  We owe them—our victims and the victims we created—more, far more than our collective sum total of our actions since that fateful day twenty years ago. 

I wrote of those sacred obligations years ago, but we still have yet to fulfill them (hell, it took a comedian, Jon Stewart, to begin to get first responders to the 9/11 attacks the support they needed).  What has happened to us, what we have done, since 9/11 is still solidly a net negative, and I noted this obvious truth years ago.  That ugliness is today only getting worse.

I wish with all my heart and soul I had something more positive than that to leave you with on this day, but that is all I’ve got, my heart and soul deeply colored by the actions we have undertaken over the past twenty years, many of which—despite many individual noble deeds of love, selflessness, and sacrifice embodied by firefighters running into burning towers and Marines taking babies over an airport wall in Kabul as terrorists targeted them—should fill our hearts and souls with shame, regardless of intentions.  In the end, what counts most is results, and Afghanistan should be a humbling lesson for all Americans, as should be the “War on Terror” and our whole reaction to 9/11 itself, an era the unfulfilling results of which for which we all bear some level of blame.

© 2021 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

See related article The Kabul Airlift in Light of the Berlin Airlift: Surprising Parallels and Important Lessons

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981)

• 1-A Brief, Non-Comprehensive Survey of Bioweapons, Biowarfare, and Bioterrorism History in Light of the Coronavirus Pandemic
• 3-Why the Coronavirus Pandemic and America’s Disastrous Response Will Inspire Future Use of Bioweapons
• 4-The Harsh Truths Coronavirus Has Exposed
• 5-Coronavirus and History, Russia and Italy, the War for Reality, and the Nexus of It All
• See also my proposal for a Cabinet-level Department of Pandemic Preparedness and Response (DPPR)

Not bad for a little furball, there’s only one left.

—Gen. Han Solo to Princess Leia Organa after a tiny Ewok lured three Imperial Scout Troopers away from guarding the Death Star II’s shield generator’s rear entrance on Endor’s moon, in George Lucas’s Star Wars: Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983)

Ironically, as Historian Max Boot noted, “today, we’re used to having American soldiers be the forces of the government. And, of course, in our revolution, we were the insurgents and the British were the role of the counterinsurgents, and, in fact, many of the strategies which the American rebels used against the British are similar in many ways to the strategies now being used against us around the world.”  There’s a reason for that current state of affairs, and it’s about our unmatched power.

America’s military might—by far the greatest on earth—is both a blessing and a curse. 

It is a blessing in that nobody can take us on militarily directly, nor can any plausible coalition of nations, especially when factoring in our massive alliance system, an “empire of trust;” this combination of hard and soft power is unlike anything in history since ancient Rome.

Yet this very power means that smart enemies do not even try to take us on in a traditional military sense; conventional, symmetric responses are, essentially, suicidal for our enemies, who, instead, opt for unconventional and asymmetric means. In the words of Gen. H.R. McMaster, “There are basically two ways to fight the US military: asymmetrically and stupid.”  Thus, mostly all our recent conflicts have been a.) primarily unconventional in that, for the bulk of the fighting, we are operating against forces that are not regular state military units in standard-range uniforms behaving within more traditional norms of warfare and  b.) primarily asymmetric in that this unconventional organization, equipment, tactics, and strategy on the part of our adversaries are products of those adversaries accepting the power imbalance between our stronger forces and their weaker ones and are designed to address this imbalance

And when facing unconventional and asymmetric warfare in recent decades, America’s track record is actually pretty poor.  Without a doubt, biowarfare falls under the category of unconventional since it involves illegal, rare, and atypically deployed weapons and is also asymmetric because few things besides bioweapons can reduce the advantages of a more powerful enemy with such relatively low cost and easy access. Thus, as our current coronavirus pandemic has many implications for bioterrorism and biowarfare, so, too, should the below analysis offer much food for thought on biodefense in the coronavirus era.

1.) A Brief History of America in Unconventional, Asymmetric Conflict

Throughout our history, it was basically in campaigns marked by sustained brutality—including massive forced population transfers and the killing of civilians—that American colonists and later the U.S. Army defeated Native Americans over several centuries, who themselves often employed what we would call unconventional and asymmetric tactics, as well as brutal ones.

Ironically considering our later history, we used unconventional, asymmetric tactics to great success against the British in our Revolution. 

But it was in massive failure that U.S. Army troops defending both civil rights for freed slaves and legitimate biracial state governments withdrew from the Reconstructed South (the final troops leaving in 1877) as white supremacist terrorist campaigns destroyed every one of those governments in the postwar South.  The Ku Klux Klan and others carried on an insurgency lasting years of unconventional, asymmetric warfare and terrorism against U.S. forces, local troops, state governments, the rule of law itself, and those citizens who worked with and supported the new order, whether they were white or black (and in this sense, their campaigns were hardly different from the terrorist insurgencies in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan).  The more just society being built in relatively modern terms was destroyed, and the ensuing Jim Crow reign of terror of the Klan, the noose, and corrupted local judicial systems in the American South and sometimes beyond would not begin to be seriously dismantled until the 1960s.  Thus, with the Civil War, the U.S. won the war in four years but lost the peace for about a century after.

With the massive unconventional and asymmetric insurrection in the Philippines, which the U.S. occupied in 1898 in the Spanish-American War, it was back to brutality and murder to achieve victory.  That is not to say that, to its credit, the U.S. did not start with a softer hand there, but that proved to be ineffective at stopping the Filipino rebels, and it was only when harsher and more robust measures were taken that the insurgents were truly defeated.

While American forces in the Vietnam war won all the actual big battles against the conventional North Vietnamese Army, the unconventional Viet Cong above all else eventually broke America’s will to keep fighting in Vietnam with an unconventional, asymmetric approach.  Our collective withdrawal from South Vietnam and, eventually, Saigon was an ignominious disaster for U.S. interests in the region and those of our South Vietnamese allies.  Leaving aside any debates on a “road not taken” and military tactical successes, the U.S. was, simply, defeated.  America won the battles, yet lost the war.

In Lebanon and Somalia, American leaders rapidly drew down their involvement after a series of high-profile Hezbollah bombings in Beirut in 1983 and the notorious “Black Hawk Down” incident in Mogadishu in 1993 despite both missions having substantial international support.  Key humanitarian aims of the mission in Somalia were actually fairly well-accomplished and saved hundreds of thousands of lives before the withdrawal, and even in Lebanon with our problematic mission there, significant humanitarian achievements still occurred.

In between the unconventional, asymmetric challenges in Lebanon and Somalia, our overwhelming triumph in the conventional 1991 Gulf War actually helped lead us to be overconfident and over-reliant when it came to our conventional military abilities (and, to a lesser extent, the same could be said of the two air campaigns in the Balkans), setting us up for even greater failures in ensuing decades.  “Black Hawk Down” would be the first buzzkill of our post-Gulf War high, just the first of many setbacks in the wars to come.  And in the cases of both Lebanon and Somalia, terrorists—Hezbollah and al-Qaeda—took inspiration for future terrorist attacks from our withdrawals, with both Lebanon and Somalia devolving into prolonged periods of war that killed many people and terribly destabilized their respective regions.

As for al-Qaeda, its Osama bin Laden had several basic goals behind its asymmetric, unconventional 9/11 attacks that would come years later.  They looked at the world relevant to them as being divided into two major camps: the “near enemy”—all the regimes ruling Muslim populations that were not run by Islamic principles as defined by al-Qaeda: the monarchs, dictators, and democracies from Saudi Arabia to Egypt to Indonesia—and the “far enemy”—foreign governments propping up the near enemy, especially the United States.

With 9/11, bin Laden wanted to recreate for America the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan.  As he saw it, the Soviet invasion galvanized Muslims from around the world to fight off the atheist communist infidel invader, who got bogged down over years in a conflict that sapped its treasure and strength and led to the Soviet Union’s final collapse; with the invaders ousted from Afghanistan, an Islamic regime in al-Qaeda’s mold—the Taliban—came to power. 

Osama bin Laden’s dream with 9/11, then, was to bait the U.S. into one or more wars of attrition, rally Muslims from around the world to his banner to fight the occupying invader, force an American withdrawal after it expended so much blood and treasure, see the U.S. sour on supporting allied governments in the Middle East in the aftermath, and pull its bases out as a result or as a result of additional conflict with and attacks from al-Qaeda, flushed with recruits after already beating the Americans in one war.  In short, the endgame was to remove the presence and influence of the “far enemy”—namely America—in the Middle East and then topple the “near enemy” regimes there and elsewhere ruling over the Muslim world.   

As we know, 9/11 helped bin Laden goad the U.S. into two such wars, not just in Afghanistan but also in Iraq, and while we withdrew from Iraq after seven-and-a-half years on terms far better than the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, extremists’ policies against their own people on the parts of both the Syrian government and our allied Iraqi government empowered the unconventional and asymmetric ISIS—Zarqawi’s al Qaeda in Iraq’s rebirth and successor—to create a “caliphate” that ate up large parts of territory in both countries, forcing the U.S. reentry into Iraq and intensifying involvement in Syria.  While bin Laden expected us to invade Afghanistan, Iraq was something of a gift to him. 

The Iraq War resulted in the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, meaning Iran became our biggest enemy in the region.  But while in the beginning this was due mainly to a process of elimination, shortly after, it would also be because Iran grew considerably in power as a result of our actions, eventually playing dominant roles in Iraq and Syria and having major influence in Yemen, too, in, addition to having its longstanding leverage in Lebanon.  In short, Iran was the main victor of our Iraq War.  But especially considering how dynamics played out as war raged in Syria and up through today, Iran is hardly the only major U.S. foe to benefit from recent U.S. missteps and missed opportunities: the chief global U.S. antagonist, Russia, is also far stronger in the Middle East today at the expense of the U.S. (not to mention elsewhere around the globe). 

Ironically, as I have noted, counterinsurgency (COIN) worked well in the Iraq War after the negligent leadership of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and its gains held well until late 2013 in spite of a U.S. withdrawal that had been completed before the end of 2011.  Much of this effort was overseen by Rumsfeld’s replacement, Sec. Robert Gates, and the man in uniform he tapped to execute the mission, Gen. David Petraeus. But the earlier blunders of the U.S. had pushed to the center stage of a frightened, increasingly sectarian Iraq one Nuri Kamal al-Maliki as Iraq’s prime minister, who fed off division and increased it at the same time, playing somewhat nice while U.S. troops were still in-country but becoming increasingly unshackled as time went on and especially after the U.S. pullout.  Rather than the Obama Administration’s withdrawal, then, it was Maliki’s oppressive governing style that wiped out U.S. security gains and soon had ISIS governing a “caliphate” that included large portions of Iraqi territory right up to the gates of Baghdad by mid-2014, a situation demanding U.S. entry into the conflict to prevent a terrible situation from becoming far worse and far more genocidal, in spite of the Obama Administration’s reluctance to reinsert U.S. forces into Iraq after withdrawing them just a few years earlier.

The same Obama Administration, reluctant to appear political in an election year, responded abysmally in 2016 to Russia’s game-changing asymmetric unconventional election interference that relied on propaganda, disinformation, hacking, and social media.  In short, we lost what I dubbed the (First) Russo-American Cyberwar, and it is worth noting (and I have noted) that, from the media to the government to the public, we are making many of the same mistakes we did in the 2016 election cycle in the 2020 election cycle, to some degree even willfully.  Russia is beating us at unconventional asymmetric cyberwarfare with advanced, pioneering approaches; the Second Russo-American Cyberwar is already underway and America is already losing.

And while the Obama Administration took a relatively large degree of care to avoid alienating local populations and inflicting civilian casualties while staying true to allies in its fight against ISIS, the Trump Administration has pretty much taken an anything-but approach—killing far more civilians—even as it relaxed its assault against ISIS when the group was close to losing all its territory in Syria and Iraq, allowing for ISIS to make something of a comeback.  Even worse, in October, 2019, the Trump Administration abandoned our true allies there—the Kurds and others fighting alongside and inside the Syrian Democratic Forces (S.D.F.)–who had worked together for years against both ISIS and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s regime.  This betrayal was carried out so suddenly, and in such a way, that it dramatically undermined our ability to fight unconventional asymmetric warfare in the region, an ability that is so heavily dependent on trust and partnering with non-state actors on the ground who have longstanding, intimate relationships with the locals as members of their communities and know the landscape as only locals can.  This withdrawal was also done in a way that undermined our entire regional position, ceding much territory and influence to actors working against many of our interests: to an “ally” we could not trust (Turkey, seeking to pulverize both Kurdish forces that had fought alongside us and Kurdish autonomy as well as engage in “demographic engineering” against the Kurds) and our main rivals in the region (Russia and Iran, Assad’s top allies).  This withdrawal minimized what was already a minimal deployment (far from a costly or expensive one, especially relative to so many recent deployments) that was giving us an amazing payoff for the small amount of resources allocated.

As for the Afghanistan war, that “other” war that bin Laden’s 9/11 prodded us into, it has been a mess for nearly its entirety and still is, waxing and waning to one degree or another in its state of messiness, Afghanistan having been at war for decades before the U.S. toppled the Taliban.  Here, too, unconventional and asymmetric tactics wore down American will after American leadership’s initial projections of swift “victory” set up inevitable cynicism and disappointment, with Alec Worsnop highlighting for the Modern War Institute at West Point (MWI)  the Taliban’s particular skill at asymmetry.  Though the Obama Administration tapped Gen. Petraeus to recreate his successes in Iraq in Afghanistan with another surge, the far lower degree of national development there combined with U.S. political leadership not being committed to the resourcing required to achieve our stated aims—let alone try to sell Americans on a longer-term commitment—meant that, with that Petraeus surge or without it, that war would remain what it has been for years: an exercise in futility apart from preventing an unstable, violent status quo from becoming far worse.  Another surge under the Trump Administration also failed to significantly alter the overall negative dynamics on the ground for the better.  However President Trump describes his intent to pull out U.S. forces now, it is hard to objectively consider American disengagement after so many years as anything but a victory to the Taliban unless the Taliban suddenly becomes the opposite of what it has consistently been for the entirety of the conflicted, which is an extremist religious group that resorts to extreme methods to achieve its aims, relying almost wholly on violence and terror to “govern” and one that cannot be trusted to upholds agreements of any sort, let alone the type the Trump Administration is trying to reach with it. 

There has not anytime recently been and will not be the political will for a significantly better-resourced, medium-to-longer-term international effort in Afghanistan, the best approach to give that country its best chance to transition to overall to higher levels of stability and one that I advocated for in writing in 2009 as a graduate student. But that hardly means the failures in Afghanistan are all on the political-leadership side and that the military does not also shoulder significant blame, as the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan from 2003-2005, Gen. David Barno, wrote in 2019.  Still, senior military leaders seem to have been more careful with their use of language compared to political leaders, and it was the political leadership that either set expectations and parameters that were unrealistic or simply avoided engaging with the public on the war, hoping more to avoid having the war cause them political damage than have any seriously honest national public dialogue about Afghanistan.

What we have been engaging in there in an overall sense—open-ended long-term stalemate that prevents a worst-case scenario—can be a hard sell as the best option (not that it has been generally honestly sold as that), but that does not necessarily make it bad policy.  To quote Gen. Petraeus in a recent piece (one he penned with security-policy hand Vance Serchuk): “This strategy has been costly and unsatisfying—but also reasonably successful.”

Yet, just as was the case in Syria, President Trump seems ready to just walk away in a way that leaves America, along with our local allies, exposed and weakened.

2.) UNDERSTANDING OUR FAILURE AGAINST NONTRADITIONAL THREATS AND HOW THAT RELATES TO THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

There’s an old saying in Tennessee—I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can’t get fooled again.

—President George W. Bush, September 17, 2002

Patterns and Themes of Failure

As Gen. Petraeus and Serchuk concluded in their piece on Afghanistan: “More broadly, history suggests that capitulation in the name of peace rarely succeeds in either curbing an adversary’s ambitions or moderating its behavior—at least not for long.”  Far more often than not, this has been proven repeatedly by rapid U.S disengagement in Lebanon, Somalia, and Syria, each of which preceded further disasters.

If one thinks of long-term American objectives in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia as they have stood over several decades now, the net results of our two massive wars there are massive setbacks right and left and up and down throughout those regions.  To a large extent, we did exactly what bin Laden wanted us to do: while he may have not have gotten the full collapse of the U.S. and long-lasting caliphate of which he dreamed, he still played us like a harp and saw huge portions of his goals realized from our myopia, not just in the Muslim world but also in how our two 9/11-prodded wars changed America by dividing Americans, draining national resources in a way that helped generate an economic near-collapse in 2008, and weakening our domestic democratic politics and institutions.  So perhaps, domestically, bin Laden’s plan is still a posthumous work-in-progress; we may very well make it out of these dark times with our system intact, but that is not guaranteed, and if we do not, 9/11 will surely be looked at as the catalyst for a chain of self-destructive events and trends that were accelerating well-before this current pandemic.  And the dynamics behind many of those events and trends are tied directly or indirectly with our failure to address non-traditional threats successfully. 

At the time of the peak of the “surge” COIN campaign that dramatically improved security conditions in Iraq, it might have been harder (though hardly impossible) to see possible failure and far harder to see an ISIS “caliphate” peaking some seven years later, but, conversely, at this peak of ISIS’s territorial gains, it is hard to look back at the surge and think that it ever had a chance to produce long-term success.  Perhaps the sectarianism and violence unleashed during Sec. Rumsfeld’s tenure, then, meant any positive impact from Sec. Gates and Gen. Petraeus, no matter how right-headed and brilliant they were, was doomed not to be as transformative as we wished, and probably from the start, especially since those Rumsfeldian dynamics installed Maliki in Iraq before the surge and well before the time we withdrew, helping him stay in power even when his heavier worsened.  Or, perhaps the surge era-effort was not doomed; to his credit, Gen. Petraeus saw, writing in late October 2013, that “this is a time for [American and Iraqi leaders of the surge] to work together to help Iraqi leaders take the initiative, especially in terms of reaching across the sectarian and ethnic divides that have widened in such a worrisome manner.  It is not too late for such action, but time is running short.”  He was all too right: time was running very short, as it was just matter of a few months until it would all come crashing down.   

I included the discussion and points in the previous paragraph here to illustrate the larger point that such is often how the U.S. finds itself: fighting demons of its own making, never really getting away enough from those demons to have a fresh start, succeed, and reach its ideals, however genuine those ideals may be.  If Sec. Gates and Gen. Petraeus were, in many ways, prisoners of the mistakes of the early years of the U.S. in Iraq and Sec. Rumsfeld’s legacy, then Obama and his team, as well as Iraq and Iraqis overall, were, in a similar sense, prisoners of the Bush Administration’s legacy.  In this world we live in, the U.S. is hardly unique here except perhaps sometimes in matters of degree, as other nations, whole peoples, even ourselves as individuals are often prisoners of our own past or those of our parents and ancestors.  We fall prey to the demons of the past and, in doing so, create demons of our own, ensnaring our very children, and their children, and so on, a generational, tragic spiral of trauma.  Indeed, trauma has a nasty habit of outliving its immediate effects (and exponentially so, at that).  It literally embeds itself into our very beings, down to our genes.

And our demons of failure with unconventional and asymmetric threats haunt us today and will for some time: the American government simply does not seem to get how to deal with the irregular and non-traditional.  For MWI nonresident fellow Max Brooks, there is something of a cultural deficiency in America that pushes us in this direction; in a mid-March interview discussing the problems with our current coronavirus response, Brooks remarked that “American culture has always had strengths and weaknesses, and one of our weaknesses has always been putting our head in the sand.  Not reacting to coronavirus—that’s just the latest one—but 9/11, Sputnik, Pearl Harbor … Americans are always the worst at proactive response.  That’s our weakness.”

So when confronted with such threats, the U.S. has failed and failed pretty miserably in a larger sense since the 1960s.  From the terrorism of the Taliban to the cyberwarfare of Russia, there are certain common denominators present in these asymmetric, unconventional situations to which we are not properly adjusting, ensuing that we keep losing again and again and again, allowing our own strengths and divisions to be played to cripple democracy at home (Russia’s election interference in 2016) and sometimes seeing the unraveling of our own notable own successes (the rise of ISIS in Iraq in 2014 negating the 2007 surge) or even undoing them ourselves (missions having positive impact turning into rapid withdrawals in 1984 in Lebanon, 1994 in Somalia, and 2019 in Syria).

COVID-19’s Deadly Impact Magnified by Recent U.S. Failures Facing Unconventional, Asymmetric Crises

If this seems unrelated to coronavirus, think again.

That withdrawal of most of a tiny contingent of U.S. troops in northern Syria has not only led to a reinvigorated ISIS but also a massive humanitarian crisis.  Millions of Syrians there are caught in what one article’s headline calls “the world’s worst game of Risk.”  In fact, even though Syria is now getting far less attention in the media because of coronavirus and a general ennui for Syria among other factors, the current situation in Syria is the worst humanitarian crisis of the entire decade-long war, with more people being driven from their homes than at any other time of the war.

The Idlib governorate on Turkey’s border is the last major rebel stronghold in Syria and has some three million people living in it now, but half those are Syrians internally displaced from their homes (IDPs) because of the war.  With the latest round of fighting in Idlib, some one million people have been recently displaced there, many not for the first time.  To make matters even worse, the region is experiencing an unusually harsh winter and displaced children are freezing to death in the cold. 

On top of war, a lack of supplies and aid coming in, and harsh conditions, now these desperate people must face coronavirus, a threat well-represented by the title of a recent Refugees International briefing, “A Crisis on Top of a Crisis: COVID-19 Looms over War-Ravaged Idlib,” which describes the situation there regarding coronavirus as being “like a tinderbox waiting for the match.”  The disease is spreading elsewhere in Syria and Turkey, surrounding Idlib, but conditions in northern Syria—with Syrian, Iranian, Russian, Kurdish, Turkish, S.D.F., and ISIS forces operating among other groups in a chaotic theater—mean tracking and treating the virus are themselves Herculean tasks.  Reporting on the virus can be slow, and that is if authorities are cooperating and being transparent, which in Syria and elsewhere in the region is hardly a given; in other words, we really have no idea how bad coronavirus is spreading in the area.  Furthermore, it is incredibly difficult getting aid into Idlib with all the fighting as the Syrian Civil War rages with the Assad regime’s forces’ latest offensive into Idlib, supported by Russian and Iranian forces; attacks against civilians are rampant.  The Syrian government is even blocking the transport of medical supplies to where they are needed, finding a way to weaponize the coronavirus even as aid workers and local medical staff are flat-out warning that they are not equipped or prepared to deal with coronavirus, with medical equipment and supplies being scarce in the area.

Even before this COVID-19 crisis, the local healthcare infrastructure had been decimated by the war, with some 80 hospitals taken out of commission in Idlib alone.  This has been by design, as, throughout the war, Assad regime forces with Russian backing have been deliberately targeting hospitals and other key civilian infrastructure related to food and water, as has the Russian Air Force.  Displaced civilians were already extremely vulnerable in Idlib, and now they face a pandemic with great uncertainty as to whether they will have the necessary aid to survive it alongside a host of other threats in a warzone (you can help them here).  The virus will certainly make (and already has made) their already extremely difficult lives significantly worse even if it does not infect or kill them.

These civilians in Idlib are often fleeing the Syrian’s government’s offensive to a Turkish border that has been sealed off to them—Turkey, already hosting some 3.7 million refugees, refuses to take in any more—with masses of people trapped with nowhere to go, a situation ripe for a coronavirus outbreak as they cannot practice social distancing since they live in crowded tents (if they even have shelter), nor do they have the ability to practice good hygiene since they lack proper amounts of soap and easy access to water.  Refugee camps there and elsewhere in the Middle East are teeming with people and short on necessary supplies, meaning they are potential disasters-in-the-making.

This conflict has only greatly intensified in Syria’s north lately in the absence of a stabilizing U.S. presence after the recent U.S. withdrawal discussed earlier.  It was because of that withdrawal that Turkey was able to carry out its destabilizing invasion of northern Syria, an invasion that itself displaced hundreds of thousands of people.  After its reckless invasion and engaging directly against Assad’s forces, Turkey—a NATO member state—has been furious that NATO is not supporting it as it takes casualties from attacks from Syrian forces getting support from the Russian government.  To pressure NATO states, Turkey is actively encouraging thousands of refugees it is hosting to migrate to Greece and Europe, even transporting them to the no-man’s land separating the Turkish and Greek borders—where desperate refugees caught as pawns have even clashed with Greek border guards—in a naked play to use these refugees as leverage against European NATO countries.  Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has made his intent in this regard explicit and clear and does not even try to deny he is weaponizing the refugees for political purposes.  If refugees in Turkey come down with COVID-19, this would be a far more ominous context for the dangerous game Turkey is playing with Europe.  For now, with coronavirus spreading in Turkey and Greece and refugees in camps in Greece coming down with the virus, the Turkish government late in March evacuated the makeshift camp that had popped up for the refugees it had sent to the Greek border and quarantined the refugees for two weeks. Those being released from the quarantine often end up sleeping in the streets, caught in limbo amid coronavirus, with Turkey indicating it will recklessly resend them to the closed Greek border once the pandemic subsides.

In Syria, Turkey, Greece, and all over the world, aid operations were forced to undergo massive, disruptive adjustments are being cut back drastically because of COVID-19, and with a field that was already spread thin amid a record number of people being displaced globally, the vulnerable populations the aid field was servicing cannot afford to be deprioritized.

But in particular, in northern Syria, President Trump’s Syrian withdrawal was the catalyst for the sad chain of events that has the situation there where it is now: far worse than it would have been otherwise and guaranteed to get even worse yet in the midst of a global pandemic.  The difference this all will cause in the number of dead from COVID-19 and its spillover effects will likely be in the thousands as U.S. incompetence in the face of one unconventional, asymmetric threat amplifies the harm from another unconventional, asymmetric threat.  Though the second is not man-made, the increase in the damage it will do is.

America’s Own COVID-19 Failures Mirror Its Failures in Fighting Nontraditional Threats

The issues surrounding the conflicts in Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria were complicated and difficult to understand, and many Americans preferred moving on and forgetting.  After all, most Americans could live their lives and not be affected by the nature of unconventional, asymmetric warfare in a distant land.  But the unconventional, asymmetric threats posed by coronavirus, pandemics in general, biowarfare, and bioterrorism are not something from which Americans can conveniently shrink away: they are dangerous to us here at home all over the country, not just a small portion of volunteer military personnel deployed thousands of miles away or one city or several targeted in a particular al-Qaeda/ISIS-style “normal” terrorist attack.  Thus, the approach that has created a pattern of failure for America regarding unconventional, asymmetric threats in the past is even more inappropriate, problematic, and unacceptable for our present pandemic and similar biothreats.

Whether in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, our leaders early on projected a supreme level of confidence and a belief in total victory even as they understood little about the nature of the threats they faced and what would be required to actually come out on top.  As these conflicts unfolded in their earlier phases, the political leaders initiating and running our military involvement never communicated to the public how truly difficult, open-ended, and indefinite our missions could or would be.  Because of these characterizations, proper resourcing was often a huge problem, especially given the tendencies to downplay the challenges we faced in these conflicts.  Instead, what we were told was that victory was usually just around the corner.  Furthermore, by focusing on short-term accomplishments for the sake of trying to boost public opinion, they very accomplishments themselves were made shallower and more likely to depress public opinion over time since they were more likely to come undone.  In the end, this meant that relatively short-term, technically successful increases in military deployments—ones leaders signaled ahead of time would be short-term and the goal of which was to improve security and stability enough for politics on-the-ground to move significantly in the right direction and not backslide—were always going to have a risk of history repeating itself just after or not long after the shorter-term surges; when these deployments’ effects wore off (or, even worse, the deployment itself failed to have the desired effect), it would be time for another deployment, with new deployments increasing frustration for a public that had been told we were “winning” and, over time, damaging that public’s willingness to support our military efforts as well as the Confidence of our local allies so crucial to the fight. 

Tragically, that is what happened in both of the major wars al-Qaeda sucked America into, with the same man (Gen. Petraeus) leading roughly the same surge strategy in both countries—first in Iraq, then later in Afghanistan—but the eventual hoped-for political resolutions never coming from local actors, who, having seen America’s inconsistency and mistakes up close, were more interested in sectarian and tribal agendas to bolster their positions than either allowing the U.S. to claim victory or making concessions necessary for multi-ethnic, religiously pluralistic territories to truly come together under one flag.

At the end of Invisible Armies, his seminal history on guerrilla warfare, Max Boot presents a series of major lessons from his study. One is that “most insurgencies are long-lasting; attempts to win a quick victory backfire”: 

The fact that low-intensity conflict tends to be “long, arduous and protracted,” in the words of Sir Robert Thompson, can be a source of frustration for both sides, but attempts to short-circuit the process to achieve a quick victory usually backfire.  The United States tried to do just that in the early years of the Vietnam and Iraq wars by using its conventional might to hunt down insurgents in a push for what John Paul Vann rightly decried as “fast, superficial results.”  It was only when the United States gave up hopes of quick victory, ironically, that it started to get results by implementing the tried-and-true tenets of population-centric counterinsurgency.  In Vietnam, it was already too late, but in Iraq the patient provision of security came just in time.

A particularly seductive version of the “quick win” strategy is to try to eliminate the insurgency’s leadership. …there are just…many examples where leaders were eliminated but the movement went on, sometimes stronger than ever—as both Hezbollah and Al Qaeda in Iraq did. High-level “decapitation” strategies work best when a movement is weak organizationally and focused around a cult of personality. Even then leadership targeting is most effective if integrated into a broader counterinsurgency effort designed to separate the insurgents from the population. If conducted in isolation, leadership raids are about as effective as mowing the lawn; the targeted organization can usually regenerate itself.

I have literally lost track of how many times the number-two or number-whatever leader of al-Qaeda or an affiliate or ISIS was proudly announced as killed by the U.S. (often from a drone strike), and I remember that political leaders and whichever-Administration spokespeople were usually quite eager to broadcast this as some sort of major accomplishment or an indication that things were going well even when they clearly were not.  The emphasis our government places on this tactic from a public-relations perspective when considering its ineffectiveness betrays that eagerness to present the public with quick fixes to complex problems that has so hampered our efforts in unconventional, asymmetric warfare.

Another lesson of Boot’s is that “conventional tactics don’t work against an unconventional threat”: 

Regular soldiers often assume that they will have no difficulty besting ragtag fighters who lack the firepower or discipline of a professional fighting force.  Their mindset was summed up by General George Decker, U.S. Army chief of staff from 1960 to 1962, who said, “Any good soldier can handle guerrillas.”  The Vietnam War and countless other conflicts have disproven this bromide. Big-unit, firepower-intensive operations snare few guerrillas and alienate many civilians.  To defeat insurgents, soldiers must take a different approach that focuses not on chasing insurgents but on securing the population.  This is the difference between “search and destroy” and “clear and hold.”  The latter approach is hardly pacifistic.  It too requires the application of violence and coercion but in carefully calibrated and intelligently targeted doses.  As an Israeli general told me, “Better to fight terror with an M-16 than an F-16.”

In this sense, too often we have favored the F-16, the metaphor for heavy firepower and advanced technology, including drones, missiles, and bombers, as a substitute for long-term policy, and, indeed, one of Boot’s lessons is that “technology has been less important in guerrilla war than in conventional war,” since

all guerrilla and terrorist tactics, from suicide bombing to hostage taking and roadside ambushes, are designed to negate the firepower advantage of conventional forces.  In this type of war, technology counts for less than in conventional conflict.  Even the possession of nuclear bombs, the ultimate weapon, has not prevented the Soviet Union and the United States from suffering ignominious defeat at guerrilla hands.  To the extent that technology has mattered in low-insurgency conflicts, it has often been the nonshooting kind.  As T. E. Lawrence famously said, “The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armory of the modern commander.”  A present-day rebel might substitute “the Internet” for “the printing press,” but the essential insight remains valid.

In an interview, Boot also notes our amnesia with these types of conflicts, how

this is a recurring problem, that armies do not like fighting guerrilla wars. They regard it as being beneath them, because they don’t regard guerrillas as being worthy enemies. Unfortunately, they keep getting forced into these guerrilla wars and what normally happens is they do learn how to fight after a period of trial and error, and after suffering costly defeats. But then as soon as they leave that war behind, they tend to forget what they’ve learned.

Former U.S. Army Lt. Col. Christopher Holshek—an old professor of mine in a class I took in Liberia, studying the United Nations peacekeeping mission there—perfectly summed up our failures in these conflicts in an article for Foreign Policy:

The phase-four [post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction] fates of Operations Iraqi and Enduring Freedom [the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, respectively] were due more to the sins of omission than of commission.  The U.S. government, in its haste to do in months what takes years, threw billions at hearts-and-minds boondoggles and into ministries yielding corruption, roads to nowhere, and teacher-less schools, among other counterproductive outcomes.  The vast waste has led to the current conventional wisdom that development, coded as “nation-building,” doesn’t work.  Of course it doesn’t, if you don’t do it right.

(In a way that should offer us no consolation whatsoever, it is worth noting that a large part of his article was demonstrating how ISIS was far worse at phase four than we were).

As then-President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Jessica Tuchman Mathews wrote about the Iraq surge in late 2007, “for America’s larger strategic interests, buying more time to continue the same strategy can achieve nothing. To do so is to ask American troops to fight to create breathing space for a corpse.”  In the short-term, that was not the case: the gains made in security from the surge were significant and improved and lasted over the next few years, but beyond that, it is impossible to deny that the political breakthroughs the surge was designed to encourage did not materialize nearly enough and that all the security successes came undone between the actions of Maliki and ISIS by 2014.  And unfortunately, Matthews’s quote reverberates far beyond Iraq and can sum up so many of our strategic failures in the era after World War II.

Our leaders were simply just not honest about what we were up against or did not know themselves, and, as a result, the public never really grasped what was going on and why things went the way they did.  When the productive measures were taken, they would often be too little and/or too late, with far more death and destruction happening in the long-run as a result.  As a society and a nation, we failed to properly address these threats, at great cost for ourselves and others.  Shorter-term commitments were advertised as quick fixes that were really just false fantasies, increasing and extending the pain and perhaps dooming us to repeat ourselves in wasteful, frustrating cycles that left us demoralized, diminished, and depleted.

Conclusion

If reading this, you are asking yourself if this sounds familiar and eerily current somehow, well, yes, it should, as our response to the unconventional coronavirus pandemic fits frighteningly and maddeningly all too well—even exactly—into these patterns and obviously so.  You can practically substitute “coronavirus” for “Iraq” or “Vietnam” and the same analysis would often apply.

When confronting potentially difficult and long struggles, yes, there is something to be said for optimism and a can-do spirit, but not being straight-up with the American people about the potential costs, pitfalls, and durations of major threats—whether pandemics or insurgencies—sets America up to have little appetite or commitment when things turn out much tougher than advertised and also erodes our government’s overall credibility and our trust in, and willingness to listen to, it.  These combine to set us up for failure and far more painful struggles because we do not set ourselves up with the right approach in the beginning, and, as we know with so much in life, starting off on the wrong foot only makes everything that comes after that much more difficult.  False hope births a false sense of security and only makes us more vulnerable, whether we are talking about our soldiers in Iraq or our citizens being out in public catching coronavirus, unafraid of a spreading pandemic because leaders did not signify the appropriate level of concern people should have by not ordering lockdowns early.

Now, because of early missteps, our experience with COVID-19 is going to look more like the Iraq War than the Gulf War.  Therefore, as we try to overcome this threat, understanding our past missteps and failures against unconventional, asymmetric threats is crucial.

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

See Brian’s full coronavirus coverage here and his latest eBook version of the full special report,Coronavirus the Revealer: How the Coronavirus Pandemic Exposes America As Unprepared for Biowarfare & Bioterrorism, Highlighting Traditional U.S. Weakness in Unconventional, Asymmetric Warfare, available in Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and EPUB editions.

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) May 26, 2020

This is a very complex, layered exploration, but patience in taking the time to go through these components to see how they fit together in the end will be rewarded. By looking at the history of biowarfare and bioterrorism, then looking at the history of our own failures at unconventional and asymmetric warfare and the patterns those failures reveal, we lay the groundwork for understanding both why the coronavirus pandemic is very similar to unconventional, asymmetric threats and why America has had such a spectacularly bad response to the coronavirus relative to many other countries. We can then understand how, even more terrifyingly, the coronavirus era has made bioweapons both more attractive to our enemies and more likely to be used by them, all this on top of the development of recent groundbreaking technology destroying so many barriers to making bioweapons and acquiring the material needed to do so. After that, we can understand how the coronavirus pandemic has exposed our weaknesses in ways that demonstrate how existentially vulnerable we are to anything worse, be it a natural pandemic or a man-made bioassault. Finally, we can see in the epilogue how all this comes together, including how history, coronavirus, and political warfare during the 2020 election are creating a true test for our democracy, our society, and our citizens, and how not only systemic structural shifts are necessary to protect our people and our democracy from these threats, but cultural and societal ones, too.

Bernard Lowe: We retired the two hosts in question.  You taught me how to make them, but not how hard it is to turn them off.

Dr. Robert Ford: You can’t play god without being acquainted with the devil.  There’s something else bothering you, Bernard.  I know how that head of yours works.

Lowe: The photograph alone couldn’t have caused that level of damage to Abernathy, not without some other, ah, outside interference.

Ford: You think it’s sabotage?  You imagine someone’s been diddling with our creations?

Lowe: It’s the simplest solution.

Ford: Ah, Mr. Ockam’s razor.  The problem, Bernard, is that what you and I do is…so complicated.  We practice witchcraft.  We speak the right words.  Then we create life itself…out of chaos.  William of Ockam was a 13th century monk.  He can’t help us now, Bernard.  He would have us burned at the stake.

—Westworld, “Chestnut,” Season 1, Episode 2 by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy (2016)

SILVER SPRING—As the world witnesses the terrifying spiraling effects of the gaping void in competent early-intervention leadership in what looks to potentially and likely be the worst global pandemic since the misnamed 1918 “Spanish” flu killed as many as 100 million people (up to six percent of the world’s population at the time), perhaps the biggest fear we should harbor has little to do with actual coronavirus. 

Part of why this virus and its disease is so terrifying is that it is new and confounding, with varied effects.  It might roughly be thought of as a megaflu/superpneumonia-like whole body virus, but even that description does not do justice to the novel (i.e., new) coronavirus, also known as SARS-CoV-2, about which there is quite a lot (so much) we do not know and for which there is currently no vaccine and against which no vetted medicine has yet proven in rigorous testing to be effective, nor even safe to use (remdesivir, the antiviral drug seems to speed recovery from the virus and has just been given a special exception by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration [FDA] for emergency use, still has not been properly tested, has not been formally approved by the FDA, and may damage the liver).   Even with a viable vaccine in the future, this is a rapidly branching, evolving, and mutating virus, and the coronavirus family of viruses has proven exceptionally difficult for vaccines, with the FDA never having approved an effective human-use vaccine for any type of coronavirus.  In short, there is no guarantee that such an initial vaccine or any vaccine would provide mass protection anywhere near the degree to which we would hope.

Yet just imagine that the current disease rapidly spreading was actually far worse and far deadlier than COVID-19, the sickness brought about by coronavirus and now creating so many fatal complications for so many people and hospitalizing so many others all around the world. 

Such a mental exercise would hardly be just an act of imaginative fiction: Richard Preston—author of the famous 1990s bestselling seminal book The Hot Zone that awoke the national consciousness of America to the threat of emerging infectious diseases—and other numerous experts and public figures have raised the alarm about potential pandemics for years, with Preston himself just recently warning that the next pandemic could easily be worse than this current coronavirus one.

Going back to our thought experiment, now imagine this even worse disease ravaging humanity was no act of nature, but a deliberate act of war or terrorism.

The horrible reality is there are, in fact, far worse things out there that mother nature has in store for us than this coronavirus, and, even scarier, as is always the case, is man’s perversion of nature.  As Iain Pears wrote in his poetic novel The Dream of Scipio: “…we are worse than beasts. Animals are constrained by their limitations and their lack of imagination. We are not.”

And in this case of perverting nature, we are talking about the weaponization and modification of infectious diseases by humans—as servants of governments or terrorists—to kill people, many people, in no way discriminating between military and civilian, adult and child, strong or weak, healthy or sick.  And in a world where such a threat exists, and where a natural pandemic has exposed glaring weaknesses that must be addressed, a dramatic change in policy is warranted.

We do not have to even try hard imagine such malintent: as one example, the FBI has found that American white supremacists want to pass on this very coronavirus deliberately as a bioweapon to target groups they do not like, a clear form of terrorism.  U.S. defense and intelligence officials are also worried about a more organized potential effort to weaponize coronavirus.

Yet the biological threats that have been and could be used as deliberate weapons against us are hardly limited to our currently omnipresent SARS-CoV-2 strain of coronavirus.

And so, as with understanding any issue, a little history is in order, as biowarfare and bioterrorism does not begin or with the above example, nor, sadly, will it end with it.

I.) A Brief, Non-Comprehensive Survey of Bioweapons, Biowarfare, and Bioterrorism History

Like the medieval system before it, science is starting not to fit the world any more.  Science has attained so much power that its practical limits begin to be apparent.  Largely through science, billions of us live in one small world, densely packed and intercommunicating.  But science cannot help us decide what to do with that world, or how to live.  Science can make a nuclear reactor, but it cannot tell us not to build it.  Science can make pesticide, but cannot tell us not to use it.  And our world starts to seem polluted in fundamental ways-air, and water, and land-because of ungovernable science.  This much is obvious to everyone.

—Dr. Ian Malcolm, in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990)

Premodern Biowarfare

The weaponization of disease goes back to the ancient world.  The behavior of modern primitive tribes dabbing their arrows in decaying biological matter (animal or human), in part, indicates that even before recorded history, humans were likely deliberately trying to infect other humans as a tactic.

The first recorded example is in the fourteenth century B.C.E. with the ancient Hittites—the scourge of ancient Egypt—sending sick animals (rams) to their enemies’ lands the hopes of spreading sickness there.

Ancient Romans and Persians sometimes poisoned the wells of their enemies by dumping dead animals into the water, allowing sickness to spread.

The bubonic plague came to Europe because a Mongol-led army that had been suffering from plague in its siege in the mid-1340s of a Genovese-settlement in Crimea decided to turn their disadvantage to their advantage by catapulting their plague-riddled dead into the city.  When some of the Genovese, fearing the mysterious disease that was afflicting their city under siege, fled to Italy, they brought the plague with them and the rest is history, the history of the Black Death, which spread to all of Europe and had killed at least a third of the continent’s population, some twenty-five million people at a minimum).  The Mongol-led army using artillery to hurl those dead plague-ridden bodies at enemy forces in Crimea was “a landmark in the history of” biowarfare, a technique for which we have decent evidence of repetition a few subsequent times, including 1422 in by the Lithuanians in Bohemia and by the Russians against the Swedes in 1710 and 1718.

Another fairly unique historical example is closer to home.  Besieged by Chief Pontiac’s Native American warriors, it seems a British-led garrison defending Fort Pitt (now Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) in 1763 gave blankets infested with smallpox as “gifts” to the Native Americans with the intention of infecting them with the highly deadly disease for military purposes.  British forces apparently did something similar in 1789 in Australia with that continent’s Aborigines.

At the height of the U.S. Civil War, one rebel Southern agent (and future Kentucky governor)—Dr. Luke Blackburn, a medical doctor with serious expertise and experience in treating fellow fever—hatched and set in motion a plot to infect Union military positions, Northern cities, and even President Abraham Lincoln himself with the deadly disease by trying to pass on clothing and bedding of people who had suffered and perished from the disease.  The plot was unsuccessful since, at the time, it was not known that people’s fluids did not spread the fever and that mosquitos were the vehicle of transmission.  It seems smallpox may also have been involved, and that aspect might have killed one Union soldier.

Despite suspicions of other similar incidents, evidence is mainly scant for other deliberate uses of biological warfare from this period and the centuries just before and after, with suspicious incidents more often than not seeming to be natural in origin and not deliberate, despite accusations to the contrary.

Modern Biowarfare

Dr. Robert Ford: I don’t think God rested on the seventh day… I think he reveled in his creation knowing that someday it would all be destroyed.

—Westworld, “Les Écorchés,” Season 2, Episode 7 by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy (2018)

It is in the twentieth century that we see the first large, organized, national-level government biowarfare programs.  Scientific advances in the late nineteenth century gave humans far more knowledge and ability to combat human disease but also to manipulate potential bioagents, including for military use.  Seeing what was to come, there were two international declarations coming out of Brussels in 1874 and 1899 banning the use of poison weapons on the battlefield, but there were no enforcing or inspections mechanisms. 

Germany during World War I by far had the biggest biowarfare program, though not much was put successfully to use as their culmination was in small and ineffective covert attacks targeting mainly animal populations crucial to war efforts in enemy nations using glanders and anthrax (a bacterial agent that can infect both people and animals but that is not contagious, i.e., able to spread person-to-person, so its spread is limited by where those using it as a weapon deploy it).  France engaged in research but did not attempt to implement any of it.

The use of chemical weapons on the battlefield during World War I—such as mustard gas, chlorine gas, and phosgene—produced a revulsion that led to have their use banned on the battlefield, along with that of bioweapons, with the 1925 ratification of the Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare, though their research and production were not banned.  The Protocol also had no binding enforcement or verification provisions, but still, here, we had the first explicit ban on the use of bioweapons in war for signatories.

All the major powers in World War II would engage in bioweapons research programs, the Western Allies, in particular, investing energy into anthrax research and production.  These programs often focused more on targeting beasts of burden and livestock, which were still so crucial to both the transportation and feeding of armies.  The efforts were not a top priority, and a joint U.S.-UK-Canadian anthrax program was never finished.  Despite concerns of a German bioweapons program, it seems the Nazi regime never prioritized such weapons.

It was Imperial Japan’s government that, by far, had the most extensive program during the war, led by Imperial Army Units 731 and 100 and one that ran for years, staffed by thousands of people in twenty-six centers and performing live experiments on prisoners that killed thousands of them, testing twenty-five different bioagents to see the effects of diseases on both prisoners and even, without their knowledge, Chinese civilians.  Up to 600 prisoners were killed per year in bioagent testing at just one of these facilities.  Outside of the biowarfare facilities, the Japanese Imperial Army dumped cholera and typhus into over 1,000 wells in Chinese villages to study the effects of the diseases.  Japanese planes dropped plague-carrying fleas onto Chinese cities or had agents spread the same to Chinese rice fields and roads.  The effects were so devastating that plague outbreaks were still killing tens of thousands of Chinese several years after World War II had ended.  The Japanese also used bioagents against Soviet troops, but available information on the effects of these attacks are inconclusive and these attempts may have been ineffective.  At the very end of the war, Japan was exploring a plan to spread plague into California using submarines and Kamikaze pilots, but the war ended before the plan’s start date of September 22, 1945.  One major member of the program even published scientific articles on his “research” in respectable journals and just referred to the human victims as “monkeys” to hide the atrocities.  While the Soviets convicted some Japanese biowarfare program personnel of war crimes, the U.S. offered amnesty and freedom to all the relevant staff under their jurisdiction in exchange for the data on their experiments.

This brings us to the U.S. program, which became much more robust after World War II, though its main beginnings were at Fort Detrick, Maryland, in 1943.  Activity increased in response to the Korean War and grew rapidly over the next few decades, becoming quite robust, producing many tons of bioagents and weapons systems to deliver them.  This reflected the Cold War-era shift from bioweapons being conceived of more as tools of sabotage to weapons of mass destruction (WMD).  In particular, the U.S. Air Force would have some of its aircraft equipped with highly sophisticated aerosol delivery systems such that a single B-52 bomber attack run could spread a biological agent over some 10,000 square miles while other systems for fighter-bomber aircraft could disperse bioweapons over 25,000-50,000 square miles in a single run.  Besides lethal bioagents, incapacitating and anti-crop agents were also major priorities.  Production capacity at just one major facility—the Pine Bluff Arsenal—would be 650 tons of bacterial agent a month, though that level of production never occurred.

Though the U.S. program worked on a wide variety of bioagent research and weaponization, it seems to have focused more on bacterial agents.  In the 1950s and 1960s, mass tests were conducted on unsuspecting American civilian populations, and while the intention was to use harmless agents, sometimes complications produced casualties.  One of the largest examples of this involved the U.S. Navy dispersing into the air off the coast of San Francisco enormous quantities of what it though was a harmless bacteria—Serratia marcescens—over the course of nearly a week in September 1950.  The idea was to see the degree to how an enemy bioweapon might disperse and be spread by releasing it into the air off the coast of a major U.S. city.  The bacteria spread with and into San Francisco’s famous fog and saturated the whole metro area, exposing some 800,000 people heavily to the bacteria unbeknownst to them.  At least eleven people were hospitalized with major urinary tract infections and another man, recovering from prostate surgery, died from heart complications when the bacteria infected his heart valves.  The public would not learn of this test until 1976.  Another major test involved the New York City subway system in 1966.  These were only two of the largest out of hundreds of similar secret U.S. tests carried out on domestic public populations without their consent in the 1950s and 1960s.

Alarmed by the real possibility of biowarfare and the relative ease with which non-superpowers could develop and engage in it, American President Richard Nixon halted the U.S. offensive bioweapons program in 1969 and had the U.S. sign the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction (BTWC or BWC) in 1972.  The Convention banned the use of biological and chemical weapons and bioweapons research.  Signatories also committed to destroying their existing bioweapons stockpiles and were prohibited from researching offensive dispersal technologies, though there were no enforced verification or control mechanisms.  Over 100 other nations initially signed along with the U.S., including the Soviet Union, and today, almost every nation in the world is a signatory.

But even as the Soviet Union signed the treaty, it was secretly ramping up its own biowarfare program into overdrive.  The Soviets had had an offensive biowarfare program going back to the 1920s, which greatly expanded in the 1930s and may have approached the Japanese program in scale, but it seems Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s purges disrupted it.  There is a small number of unverified claims of Soviet use of bioweapons in World War II as well as similar theories that Soviet-backed partisan guerrillas that used bioagents against occupying Germans obtained their bioweapons from the Soviets.  Additionally, it seems some Soviet agents spread typhus-carrying lice in a German-occupied Ukrainian town.  These operations killed dozens of Germans, but, still, in general and certainly compared to the Japanese, Soviet use of biological weapons during the war seems extremely rare and of minimal impact.

The USSR took biowarfare experts from Japan (like the U.S.) and industrial equipment from Germany as booty from the Second World War to help advance their program.  As the Korean War approached and unfolded, Stalin worried that the increasing U.S. bioweapons program would be a real threat to the Soviets, and they continued to lag behind the U.S. likely until the 1970s.  In early post-Cold War years, the Soviets developed weapons programs targeting crop and livestock and even developed sophisticated assassination methods with bioagents.  There was even a plan to assassinate Yugoslavia’s leader Josip Broz Tito using plague, but Stalin died before the plot was carried out.  During this period, fear of the U.S. bioweapons program motivated the Soviets to create a robust system to help spot and stop outbreaks of infectious diseases.

Still, in part because of its subscribing to incorrect biological scientific theories and a stifling bureaucracy, not much seemed to have progressed with the Soviet biowarfare program in the decades after World War II.  Soviet leaders, aware they were lagging behind the U.S., finally deferred to scientific experts (with correct, Western scientific theories backing their thinking) and decided to launch a major new biowarfare program, Biopreparat, that would take off just as the U.S. was winding its program down.  Thus, beginning in the 1970s, Biopreparat became the largest, most advanced biowarfare program in the history of the world, employing up to 60,000 people at its height; the civilian side of the program alone would end up having “10 research and development institutes, 14 production and mobilization plants, and 8 special weapons and facility design units,” and, combined with its military facilities, Biopreparat was capable of producing several thousand tons of biological agents per year.  The program developed technology to have plague, anthrax, and smallpox placed in intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBSMs)—with smallpox, maintaining a constantly refreshed egg-incubated stockpile of twenty tons—keeping some weapons loaded with agents and ready to be deployed or launched, and had the capacity to produce 1,800 tons of anthrax annually.  Overall, Biopreparat worked with about fifty different bioagents, including the highly deadly Ebola-like Marburg virus. 

Perhaps most disturbingly, the Soviet biowarfare program even engaged in genetic engineering to create new strains of existing diseases that would be stronger and resist known treatment—man-made super-strains of anthrax, plague, tularemia, smallpox, and others—as well as new agents altogether, combining some of the worst aspects of multiple diseases; by 1991, the program was researching adding genes from Venezuelan equine encephalitis, Ebola, and Marburg into smallpox.

The highly secretive Soviet Biopreparat program was unknown to U.S. intelligence until a member of the program defected to the West in 1989, two others following in 1992, the third being the second-in-command of Biopreparat, who had become terrified of what his program could unleash on the world.

After these revelations, Russia (the Soviet Union was now in the dustbin of history) admitted it had carried out a program in violation of the 1972 BWC treaty and President Boris Yeltsin pledged to end the program, but his pledge was quite controversial within Russian power circles and he faced stiff opposition.  Just a few years later, Russia was backing off some its admissions, and after Vladimir Putin ascended to the Russian presidency in 1999, he changed the official policy of Russia to one that actively and specifically denied that the Soviet Union or Russia has ever had an offensive biowarfare program. 

Russia, then, simply has not come clean on its biowarfare program.  Putin himself even publicly called for developing “genetic” weapons in 2012, and, since then, there has been a frenzy of construction activity at over two dozen old biowarfare program sites, which still remain as secretive and sealed-off as they were during Soviet times.  To this day, little is known about what became of the massive Biopreparat program or its enormous stockpiles.  Even in 2016, the Obama Administration was noting that Russia still had not come clean about what it had done with its biological stockpiles and delivery systems, and it is hard to believe that Russia is not violating the 1972 BWC treaty even today.  Furthermore, with serious security issues at Russian installations and with the immediate 1990s in Russia being something of an insanely chaotic, corrupt Wild West-like environment where it would hardly have been unthinkable that money and bioagents changed hands, we have no way of knowing which struggling scientists might have smuggled bioagents or their designs to which buyers, let alone where elements of Russia’s biological weapons stockpile are today.

In fact, some of the Soviet Union’s smallpox cache seems to have somehow gotten lost and made its way to North Korea during the tumultuous time of the USSR’s final collapse.  And a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report from 1994 stated that in the late 1980s or early 1990, the USSR or Russia had supplied North Korea with smallpox, too, which may or not be the same as the stocks of which Russia apparently lost track.  But that rogue nation would also have had its own stocks (though likely less potent) as part of its suspected longstanding biowarfare program, decades old but one about which few concrete details are known due to the secretive and sealed-off nature of the regime.  Despite this lack of information, many experts contend North Korea’s biowarfare program is a substantial and advanced one, and it seems the government of the country’s leader, Kim Jong-Un (if he is still leading, or even alive, amid his current disappearance) is trying to expand its program and bioweapons research and production capabilities.  One North Korean soldier who defected a few years ago tested positive for anthrax antibodies, suggesting (though not proving) the possibility anthrax is an active part of its arsenal.  North Korea’s military is thought to be vaccinated for both smallpox and anthrax, making both those potential bioweapons attractive to them.  And our own troops stationed in South Korea (and in general) are, overall, underequipped and unprepared for a biowarfare attack.  Experts believe the government is more likely to use bioweapons than nuclear ones and, the volatile, desperate, risky, unconventional, and sometimes unpredictable nature of the North Korean regime mean its bioweapons program may be one of the world’s programs that poses the largest threat, not least because a desperate and cash-strapped North Korean government could be willing to sell parts of this program and bioweapons expertise in general to other rogue regimes or non-state terrorist groups (it has supported terrorism across the world in the past), as it has already done with its chemical and nuclear programs and related expertise for Syria, which is also is known to have a bioweapons program.

As for other countries, a number had programs rise and fall during the Cold War, and other have clear capabilities of having or jumpstarting a program even if no evidence exists that they current do have a program.  Others still have programs today: Israel, for example, has long had a bioweapons program, but very few details are known about its current status.  China is thought to also have a program, but likely a small one and practically nothing is known about it, with experts emphasizing China’s dual-use capabilities more than actually any robust current program.  Iran is in a similar category.

It is notable that Iraq had a robust program for a number of years not too long ago under Saddam Hussein, one about which we know a lot and that really kicked into high developmental gear from the middle of the Iran-Iraq War until the Gulf War and subsequent demands and inspections from the powers who defeated Saddam’s government and severely disrupted his program at its peak.  At that peak, the program was in its early stages of being operational, but it does not seem the regime ever used its bioweapons.  The earlier DIA assessment from 1994 that concluded Russia had supplied North Korea with smallpox concluded Russia had also supplied Iraq with the virus around the same time, but Iraq likely also had its own stocks and there is evidence supporting the idea it was weaponizing smallpox, perhaps using camelpox research as a cover.  Until the mid-1990s, even under the scrutiny of international inspections, the regime was still trying to salvage its program, but after renewed and intensified international actions, Hussein’s government in 1996 may have largely abandoned serious efforts to reconstitute its biowarfare program.  The post-Saddam era has thankfully seen Iraqi governments that have abandoned all WMD pursuits.

Bioterrorism

I’ll tell you the problem with engineers and scientists.  Scientists have an elaborate line of bullshit about how they are seeking to know the truth about nature.  Which is true, but that’s not what drives them. Nobody is driven by abstractions like “seeking truth.”

Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment.  So they are focused on whether they can do something.  They never stop to ask if they should do something.  They conveniently define such considerations as pointless.  If they don’t do it, someone else will.  Discovery, they believe, is inevitable.  So they just try to do it first.  That’s the game in science. Even pure scientific discovery is an aggressive, penetrative act.  It takes big equipment, and it literally changes the world afterward.  Particle accelerators sear the land, and leave radioactive byproducts.  Astronauts leave trash on the moon.  There is always some proof that scientists were there, making their discoveries.  Discovery is always a rape of the natural world. Always.

The scientists want it that way.  They have to stick their instruments in.  They have to leave their mark. They can’t just watch.  They can’t just appreciate.  They can’t just fit into the natural order. They have to make something unnatural happen.  That is the scientist’s job, and now we have whole societies that try to be scientific.

—Dr. Ian Malcolm, in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990)

Besides states, there are, of course, the terrorists seeking to develop and use these weapons.

Besides the occasional partisans/guerillas who, as mentioned, used bioweapons against occupying German troops during World War II, there are, thankfully, only a few major examples of bioterrorism in general throughout history.  In the modern era, there is the strange case of a religious cult in America deliberately poisoning restaurant salad bars with Salmonella in Oregon in 1984, sickening hundreds of people, dozens of them seriously.  While Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo cult is famous for its sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995, it was also planning to carry out biological attacks before those plots were discovered and foiled.

Just after the September 11^th, 2001 al-Qaeda attacks in the U.S., there was the strange incident of the anthrax mail attacks that infected twenty-two people and killed five.  The case was quite murky and the best available explanation is that the attacks seems to have been an example of domestic terrorism by particular a government scientist who was an expert on, and worked with, anthrax, one who committed suicide and whose possible motives have not been definitively determined by investigators but that most likely would seem to have amounted to creating a false flag attack to raise awareness about bioterrorism and boost funding for biodefense.  Even so, the evidence is far from conclusive and some questions remains as to the identity of the terrorist(s), let alone any motives.

Al-Qaeda itself harbored serious ambitions for developing bioweapons capabilities, in particular one major plot in the years before 9/11 focusing on anthrax to carry out a large-scale attack on U.S. soil run by the organization’s second-in-command (and still current leader), the surgeon Ayman al-Zawahiri.  In the months prior to the 9/11 attacks, multiple al-Qaeda operatives were looking into crop-dusting airplanes, a tool that would make an exceptional delivery mechanism for a bioagent.  One of these operatives was Mohammad Atta, a 9/11 ringleader and a successful hijacker on 9/11, who was trying to get a loan to buy a crop duster in Florida but was rejected.  Another was Zacarias Moussaoui, caught before 9/11 and later convicted in court on 9/11 related terrorism charges, thought to maybe be designated as a hijacker (possibly of another plane that was supposed to hit the White House) but also perhaps, instead, to have been tasked with carrying out other attacks after 9/11.  An associate of Moussaoui’s who entered the U.S. with him was detained in possession of biology textbooks while Moussaoui had in his possession crop-dusting aircraft manuals.

After the 9/11 attacks, U.S. forces in Afghanistan would destroy what U.S. intelligence officials said was an under-construction facility to produce anthrax in Kandahar, and anthrax powder was found in Zawahiri’s house in the country.  Zawahiri had even recruited a Pakistani government scientist to work on advancing al-Qaeda’s bioweapons program at that Kandahar lab.  Extremist nuclear scientists in Pakistan also formed an NGO (with a former head of Pakistan’s notoriously-extremist-sympathizing ISI intelligence service and a former head of Pakistan’s Khushab nuclear reactor on its board) that was a front for supporting terrorists, including al-Qaeda and, specifically, bioterrorism plans were found in the organization’s office in Kabul shortly after 9/11.  Al-Qaeda also had a cell in Saudi Arabia that was planning biological attacks.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda affiliate, al-Qaeda in Iraq/Mesopotamia—which would later, during the Iraq War, evolve into ISIS—was even trying to develop, train with, and use bioweapons before the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

More recently, in 2014, a laptop that belonged to an ISIS operative with an academic background in science was apparently recovered from an ISIS safehouse.  Files on the computer showed the group was putting energy into looking at developing bioweapons and carrying out bioterrorist attacks, with specific documents outlining techniques for testing agents and carrying out attacks in public areas, directing that biological agents be disseminated into the air using air conditioning systems, and explaining how to weaponize plague.  There was also discussion of theological justifications for biological attacks and of the advantages of biological weapons being cheap to create and able to kill large numbers of people.  While its “caliphate” was at its height, ISIS even established a lab in Mosul for chemical and biological weapons research and development that employed a team of scientific experts dedicated to the cause.

Additionally, Kenyan police stopped a anthrax plot with big ambitions in 2016 concocted by an ISIS-linked terror group.  And in 2018, a Lebanese citizen was arrested by anti-terrorism police in Italy for plotting a terrorist attack that would have included anthrax he was seeking to obtain, taking ISIS for inspiration.  Overall, European officials worry that ISIS attacks utilizing bioagents are being planned for European targets and could be executed soon, perhaps even using drones.

Having looked at the unconventional bioweapons ambitions arrayed against us, it is now time to look at America’s sad overall history with unconventional threats to get a sense of how our performance can inform our response to current and future unconventional threats, including from pandemics and bioweapons.

II.) America’s History of Failure in Unconventional and Asymmetric Warfare

Not bad for a little furball, there’s only one left.

—Gen. Han Solo to Princess Leia Organa after a tiny Ewok lured three Imperial Scout Troopers away from guarding the Death Star II’s shield generator’s rear entrance on Endor’s moon, in George Lucas’s Star Wars: Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983)

Ironically, as Historian Max Boot noted, “today, we’re used to having American soldiers be the forces of the government. And, of course, in our revolution, we were the insurgents and the British were the role of the counterinsurgents, and, in fact, many of the strategies which the American rebels used against the British are similar in many ways to the strategies now being used against us around the world.”  There’s a reason for that current state of affairs, and it’s about our unmatched power.

America’s military might—by far the greatest on earth—is both a blessing and a curse. 

It is a blessing in that nobody can take us on militarily directly, nor can any plausible coalition of nations, especially when factoring in our massive alliance system, an “empire of trust;” this combination of hard and soft power is unlike anything in history since ancient Rome.

Yet this very power means that smart enemies do not even try to take us on in a traditional military sense; conventional, symmetric responses are, essentially, suicidal for our enemies, who, instead, opt for unconventional and asymmetric means.  In the words of Gen. H.R. McMaster, “There are basically two ways to fight the US military: asymmetrically and stupid.”  Thus, mostly all our recent conflicts have been a.) primarily unconventional in that, for the bulk of the fighting, we are operating against forces that are not regular state military units in standard-range uniforms behaving within more traditional norms of warfare and  b.) primarily asymmetric in that this unconventional organization, equipment, tactics, and strategy on the part of our adversaries are products of those adversaries accepting the power imbalance between our stronger forces and their weaker ones and are designed to address this imbalance

And when facing unconventional and asymmetric warfare in recent decades, America’s track record is actually pretty poor.  Without a doubt, biowarfare falls under the category of unconventional since it involves illegal, rare, and atypically deployed weapons and is also asymmetric because few things besides bioweapons can reduce the advantages of a more powerful enemy with such relatively low cost and easy access. 

Throughout our history, it was basically in campaigns marked by sustained brutality—including massive forced population transfers and the killing of civilians—that American colonists and later the U.S. Army defeated Native Americans over several centuries, who themselves often employed what we would call unconventional and asymmetric tactics, as well as brutal ones.

Ironically considering our later history, we used unconventional, asymmetric tactics to great success against the British in our Revolution. 

But it was in massive failure that U.S. Army troops defending both civil rights for freed slaves and legitimate biracial state governments withdrew from the Reconstructed South (the final troops leaving in 1877) as white supremacist terrorist campaigns destroyed every one of those governments in the postwar South.  The Ku Klux Klan and others carried on an insurgency lasting years of unconventional, asymmetric warfare and terrorism against U.S. forces, local troops, state governments, the rule of law itself, and those citizens who worked with and supported the new order, them whether white or black (and in this sense, their campaigns were hardly different from the terrorist insurgencies in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan).  The more just society being built in relatively modern terms was destroyed, and the ensuing Jim Crow reign of terror of the Klan, the noose, and corrupted local judicial systems in the American South and sometimes beyond would not begin to be seriously dismantled until the 1960.  Thus, with the Civil War, the U.S. won the war in four years but lost the peace for about a century after.

With the massive unconventional and asymmetric insurrection in the Philippines, which the U.S. occupied in 1898 in the Spanish-American War, it was back to brutality and murder to achieve victory.  That is not to say that, to its credit, the U.S. did not start with a softer hand there, but that proved to be ineffective at stopping the Filipino rebels, and it was only when harsher and more robust measures were taken that the insurgents were truly defeated.

While American forces in the Vietnam war won all the actual big battles against the conventional North Vietnamese Army, the unconventional Viet Cong above all else eventually broke America’s will to keep fighting in Vietnam with an unconventional, asymmetric approach.  Our collective withdrawal from South Vietnam and, eventually, Saigon was an ignominious disaster for U.S. interests in the region and those of our South Vietnamese allies.  Leaving aside any debates on a “road not taken” and military tactical successes, the U.S. was, simply, defeated.  America won the battles, yet lost the war.

In Lebanon and Somalia, American leaders rapidly drew down their involvement after a series of high-profile Hezbollah bombings in Beirut in 1983 and the notorious “Black Hawk Down” incident in Mogadishu in 1993 despite both missions having substantial international support.  Key humanitarian aims of the mission in Somalia were actually fairly well-accomplished and saved hundreds of thousands of lives before the withdrawal, and even in Lebanon with our problematic mission there, significant humanitarian achievements still occurred.

In between the unconventional, asymmetric challenges in Lebanon and Somalia, our overwhelming triumph in the conventional 1991 Gulf War actually helped lead us to be overconfident and over-reliant when it came to our conventional military abilities (and, to a lesser extent, the same could be said of the two air campaigns in the Balkans), setting us up for even greater failures in ensuing decades.  “Black Hawk Down” would be first buzzkill of our post-Gulf War high, just the first of many setbacks in the wars to come.  And in the cases of both Lebanon and Somalia, terrorists—Hezbollah and al-Qaeda—took inspiration for future terrorist attacks from our withdrawals, with both Lebanon and Somalia devolving into prolonged periods of war that killed many people and terribly destabilized their respective regions.

As for al-Qaeda, its Osama bin Laden had several basic goals behind their asymmetric, unconventional 9/11 attacks that would come years later.  They looked at the world relevant to them as being divided into two major camps: the “near enemy”—all the regimes ruling Muslim populations that were not run by Islamic principles as defined by al-Qaeda: the monarchs, dictators, and democracies from Saudi Arabia to Egypt to Indonesia—and the “far enemy”—foreign governments propping up the near enemy, especially the United States.

With 9/11, bin Laden wanted to recreate for America the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan.  As he saw it, the Soviet invasion galvanized Muslims from around the world to fight off the atheist communist infidel invader, who got bogged down over years in a conflict that sapped its treasure and strength and led to the Soviet Union’s final collapse; with the invaders ousted from Afghanistan, an Islamic regime in al-Qaeda’s mold—the Taliban—came to power. 

Osama bin Laden’s dream with 9/11, then, was to bait the U.S. into one or more wars of attrition, rally Muslims from around the world to his banner to fight the occupying invader, force an American withdrawal after it expended so much blood and treasure, seethe U.S. sour on supporting allied governments in the Middle East in the aftermath, and pull its bases out as a result or as a result of additional conflict with and attacks from al-Qaeda, flushed with recruits after already beating the Americans in one war.  In short, the endgame was to remove the presence and influence of the “far enemy”—namely America—in the Middle East and then topple the “near enemy” regimes there and elsewhere ruling over the Muslim world.   

As we know, 9/11 helped bin Laden goad the U.S. into two such wars, not just in Afghanistan but also in Iraq, and while we withdrew from Iraq after seven-and-a-half years on terms far better than the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, extremists’ policies against their own people on the parts of both the Syrian government and our allied Iraqi government empowered the unconventional and asymmetric ISIS—Zarqawi’s al Qaeda in Iraq’s rebirth and successor—to create a “caliphate” that ate up large parts of territory in both countries, forcing the U.S. reentry into Iraq and intensifying involvement in Syria.  While bin Laden expected us to invade Afghanistan, Iraq was something of a gift to him. 

The Iraq War resulted in the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, meaning Iran became our biggest enemy in the region.  But while in the beginning this was due mainly to a process of elimination, shortly after, it would also be because Iran grew considerably in power as a result of our actions, eventually playing dominant roles in Iraq and Syria and having major influence in Yemen, too, in, addition to having its longstanding leverage in Lebanon.  In short, Iran was the main victor of our Iraq War.  But especially considering how dynamics played out as war raged in Syria and up through today, Iran is hardly the only major U.S. foe to benefit from recent U.S. missteps and missed opportunities: the chief global U.S. antagonist, Russia, is also far stronger in the Middle East today at the expense of the U.S. (not to mention elsewhere around the globe). 

Ironically, as I have noted, counterinsurgency (COIN) worked well in the Iraq War after the negligent leadership of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and its gains held well until late 2013 in spite of a U.S. withdrawal that had been completed before the end of 2011.  Much of this effort was overseen by Rumsfeld’s replacement, Sec. Robert Gates, and the man in uniform he tapped to execute the mission, Gen. David Petraeus. But the earlier blunders of the U.S. had pushed to the center stage of a frightened, increasingly sectarian Iraq one Nuri Kamal al-Maliki as Iraq’s prime minister, who fed off division and increased it at the same time, playing somewhat nice while U.S. troops were still in-country but becoming increasingly unshackled as time went on and especially after the U.S. pullout.  Rather than the Obama Administration’s withdrawal, then, it was Maliki’s oppressive governing style that wiped out U.S. security gains and soon had ISIS governing a “caliphate” that included large portions of Iraqi territory right up to the gates of Baghdad by mid-2014, a situation demanding U.S. entry into the conflict to prevent a terrible situation from becoming far worse and far more genocidal, in spite of the Obama Administration’s reluctance to reinsert U.S. forces into Iraq after withdrawing them just a few years earlier.

The same Obama Administration, reluctant to appear political in an election year, responded abysmally in 2016 to Russia’s game-changing asymmetric unconventional election interference that relied on propaganda, disinformation, hacking, and social media.  In short, we lost what I dubbed the (First) Russo-American Cyberwar, and it is worth noting (and I have noted) that, from the media to the government to the public, we are making many of the same mistakes we did in the 2016 election cycle in the 2020 election cycle, to some degree even willfully.  Russia is beating us at unconventional asymmetric cyberwarfare with advanced, pioneering approaches; the Second Russo-American Cyberwar is already underway and America is already losing.

And while the Obama Administration took a relatively large degree of care to avoid alienating local populations and inflicting civilian casualties while staying true to allies in its fight against ISIS, the Trump Administration has pretty much taken an anything-but approach—killing far more civilians—even as it relaxed its assault against ISIS when the group was close to losing all its territory in Syria and Iraq, allowing for ISIS to make something of a comeback.  Even worse, in October, 2019, the Trump Administration abandoned our true allies there—the Kurds and others fighting alongside and inside the Syrian Democratic Forces (S.D.F.)–who had worked together for years against both ISIS and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s regime.  This betrayal was carried out so suddenly, and in such a way, that it dramatically undermined our ability to fight unconventional asymmetric warfare in the region, an ability that is so heavily dependent on trust and partnering with non-state actors on the ground who have longstanding, intimate relationships with the locals as members of their communities and know the landscape as only locals can.  This withdrawal was also done in a way that undermined our entire regional position, ceding much territory and influence to actors working against many of our interests: to an “ally” we could not trust (Turkey, seeking to pulverize both Kurdish forces that had fought alongside us and Kurdish autonomy as well as engage in “demographic engineering” against the Kurds) and our main rivals in the region (Russia and Iran, Assad’s top allies).  This withdrawal minimized what was already a minimal deployment (far from a costly or expensive one, especially relative to so many recent deployments) that was giving us an amazing payoff for the small amount of resources allocated.

As for the Afghanistan war, that “other” war that bin Laden’s 9/11 prodded us into, it has been a mess for nearly its entirety and still is, waxing and waning to one degree or another in its state of messiness, Afghanistan having been at war for decades before the U.S. toppled the Taliban.  Here, too, unconventional and asymmetric tactics wore down American will after American leadership’s initial projections of swift “victory” set up inevitable cynicism and disappointment, with Alec Worsnop highlighting for the Modern War Institute at West Point (MWI)  the Taliban’s particular skill at asymmetry.  Though the Obama Administration tapped Gen. Petraeus to recreate his successes in Iraq in Afghanistan with another surge, the far lower degree of national development there combined with U.S. political leadership not being committed to the resourcing required to achieve our stated aims—let alone try to sell Americans on a longer-term commitment—meant that, with that Petraeus surge or without it, that war would remain what it has been for years: an exercise in futility apart from preventing an unstable, violent status quo from becoming far worse.  Another surge under the Trump Administration also failed to significantly alter the overall negative dynamics on the ground for the better.  However President Trump describes his intent to pull out U.S. forces now, it is hard to objectively consider American disengagement after so many years as anything but a victory to the Taliban unless the Taliban suddenly becomes the opposite of what it has consistently been for the entirety of the conflicted, which is an extremist religious group that resorts to extreme methods to achieve its aims, relying almost wholly on violence and terror to “govern” and one that cannot be trusted to upholds agreements of any sort, let alone the type the Trump Administration is trying to reach with it. 

There has not anytime recently been and will not be the political will for a significantly better-resourced, medium-to-longer-term international effort in Afghanistan, the best approach to give that country its best chance to transition to overall to higher levels of stability and one that I advocated for in writing in 2009 as a graduate student. But that hardly means the failures in Afghanistan are all on the political-leadership side and that the military does not also shoulder significant blame, as the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan from 2003-2005, Gen. David Barno, wrote in 2019.  Still, senior military leaders seem to have been more careful with their use of language compared to political leaders, and it was the political leadership that either set expectations and parameters that were unrealistic or simply avoided engaging with the public on the war, hoping more to avoid having the war cause them political damage than have any seriously honest national public dialogue about Afghanistan.

What we have been engaging in there in an overall sense—open-ended long-term stalemate that prevents a worst-case scenario—can be a hard sell as the best option (not that it has been generally honestly sold as that), but that does not necessarily make it bad policy.  To quote Gen. Petraeus in a recent piece (one he penned with security-policy hand Vance Serchuk): “This strategy has been costly and unsatisfying—but also reasonably successful.”

Yet, just as was the case in Syria, President Trump seems ready to just walk away in a way that leaves America, along with our local allies, exposed and weakened.

III.) Understanding Our Failure Against Nontraditional Threats and How That Relates to the COVID-19 Pandemic

There’s an old saying in Tennessee—I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can’t get fooled again.

—President George W. Bush, September 17, 2002

Patterns and Themes of Failure

As Gen. Petraeus and Serchuk concluded in their piece on Afghanistan: “More broadly, history suggests that capitulation in the name of peace rarely succeeds in either curbing an adversary’s ambitions or moderating its behavior—at least not for long.”  Far more often than not, this has been proven repeatedly by rapid U.S disengagement in Lebanon, Somalia, and Syria, each of which preceded further disasters.

If one thinks of long-term American objectives in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia as they have stood over several decades now, the net results of our two massive wars there are massive setbacks right and left and up and down throughout those regions.  To a large extent, we did exactly what bin Laden wanted us to do: while he may have not have gotten the full collapse of the U.S. and long-lasting caliphate of which he dreamed, he still played us like a harp and saw huge portions of his goals realized from our myopia, not just in the Muslim world but also in how our two 9/11-prodded wars changed America by dividing Americans, draining national resources in a way that helped generate an economic near-collapse in 2008, and weakening our domestic democratic politics and institutions.  So perhaps, domestically, bin Laden’s plan is still a posthumous work-in-progress; we may very well make it out of these dark times with our system intact, but that is not guaranteed, and if we do not, 9/11 will surely be looked at as the catalyst for a chain of self-destructive events and trends that were accelerating well-before this current pandemic.  And the dynamics behind many of those events and trends are tied directly or indirectly with our failure to address non-traditional threats successfully. 

At the time of the peak of the “surge” COIN campaign that dramatically improved security conditions in Iraq, it might have been harder (though hardly impossible) to see possible failure and far harder to see an ISIS “caliphate” peaking some seven years later, but, conversely, at this peak of ISIS’s territorial gains, it is hard to look back at the surge and think that it ever had a chance to produce long-term success.  Perhaps the sectarianism and violence unleashed during Sec. Rumsfeld’s tenure, then, meant any positive impact from Sec. Gates and Gen. Petraeus, no matter how right-headed and brilliant they were, was doomed not to be as transformative as we wished, and probably from the start, especially since those Rumsfeldian dynamics installed Maliki in Iraq before the surge and well before the time we withdrew, helping him stay in power even when his heavier worsened.  Or, perhaps the surge era-effort was not doomed; to his credit, Gen. Petraeus saw, writing in late October 2013, that “this is a time for [American and Iraqi leaders of the surge] to work together to help Iraqi leaders take the initiative, especially in terms of reaching across the sectarian and ethnic divides that have widened in such a worrisome manner.  It is not too late for such action, but time is running short.”  He was all too right: time was running very short, as it was just matter of a few months until it would all come crashing down.   

I included the discussion and points in the previous paragraph here to illustrate the larger point that such is often how the U.S. finds itself: fighting demons of its own making, never really getting away enough from those demons to have a fresh start, succeed, and reach its ideals, however genuine those ideals may be.  If Sec. Gates and Gen. Petraeus were, in many ways, prisoners of the mistakes of the early years of the U.S. in Iraq and Sec. Rumsfeld’s legacy, then Obama and his team, as well as Iraq and Iraqis overall, were, in a similar sense, prisoners of the Bush Administration’s legacy.  In this world we live in, the U.S. is hardly unique here except perhaps sometimes in matters of degree, as other nations, whole peoples, even ourselves as individuals are often prisoners of our own past or those of our parents and ancestors.  We fall prey to the demons of the past and, in doing so, create demons of our own, ensnaring our very children, and their children, and so on, a generational, tragic spiral of trauma.  Indeed, trauma has a nasty habit of outliving its immediate effects (and exponentially so, at that).  It literally embeds itself into our very beings, down to our genes.

And our demons of failure with unconventional and asymmetric threats haunt us today and will for some time: the American government simply does not seem to get how to deal with the irregular and non-traditional.  For MWI nonresident fellow Max Brooks, there is something of a cultural deficiency in America that pushes us in this direction; in a mid-March interview discussing the problems with our current coronavirus response, Brooks remarked that “American culture has always had strengths and weaknesses, and one of our weaknesses has always been putting our head in the sand.  Not reacting to coronavirus—that’s just the latest one—but 9/11, Sputnik, Pearl Harbor … Americans are always the worst at proactive response.  That’s our weakness.”

So when confronted with such threats, the U.S. has failed and failed pretty miserably in a larger sense since the 1960s.  From the terrorism of the Taliban to the cyberwarfare of Russia, there are certain common denominators present in these asymmetric, unconventional situations to which we are not properly adjusting, ensuing that we keep losing again and again and again, allowing our own strengths and divisions to be played to cripple democracy at home (Russia’s election interference in 2016) and sometimes seeing the unraveling of our own notable own successes (the rise of ISIS in Iraq in 2014 negating the 2007 surge) or even undoing them ourselves (missions having positive impact turning into rapid withdrawals in 1984 in Lebanon, 1994 in Somalia, and 2019 in Syria).

COVID-19’s Deadly Impact Magnified by Recent U.S. Failures Facing Unconventional, Asymmetric Crises

If this seems unrelated to coronavirus, think again.

That withdrawal of most of a tiny contingent of U.S. troops in northern Syria has not only led to a reinvigorated ISIS but also a massive humanitarian crisis.  Millions of Syrians there are caught in what one article’s headline calls “the world’s worst game of Risk.”  In fact, even though Syria is now getting far less attention in the media because of coronavirus and a general ennui for Syria among other factors, the current situation in Syria is the worst humanitarian crisis of the entire decade-long war, with more people being driven from their homes than at any other time of the war.

The Idlib governorate on Turkey’s border is the last major rebel stronghold in Syria and has some three million people living in it now, but half those are Syrians internally displaced from their homes (IDPs) because of the war.  With the latest round of fighting in Idlib, some one million people have been recently displaced there, many not for the first time.  To make matters even worse, the region is experiencing an unusually harsh winter and displaced children are freezing to death in the cold. 

On top of war, a lack of supplies and aid coming in, and harsh conditions, now these desperate people must face coronavirus, a threat well-represented by the title of a recent Refugees International briefing, “A Crisis on Top of a Crisis: COVID-19 Looms over War-Ravaged Idlib,” which describes the situation there regarding coronavirus as being “like a tinderbox waiting for the match.”  The disease is spreading elsewhere in Syria and Turkey, surrounding Idlib, but conditions in northern Syria—with Syrian, Iranian, Russian, Kurdish, Turkish, S.D.F., and ISIS forces operating among other groups in a chaotic theater—mean tracking and treating the virus are themselves Herculean tasks.  Reporting on the virus can be slow, and that is if authorities are cooperating and being transparent, which in Syria and elsewhere in the region is hardly a given; in other words, we really have no idea how bad coronavirus is spreading in the area.  Furthermore, it is incredibly difficult getting aid into Idlib with all the fighting as the Syrian Civil War rages with the Assad regime’s forces’ latest offensive into Idlib, supported by Russian and Iranian forces; attacks against civilians are rampant.  The Syrian government is even blocking the transport of medical supplies to where they are needed, finding a way to weaponize the coronavirus even as aid workers and local medical staff are flat-out warning that they are not equipped or prepared to deal with coronavirus, with medical equipment and supplies being scarce in the area.

Even before this COVID-19 crisis, the local healthcare infrastructure had been decimated by the war, with some 80 hospitals taken out of commission in Idlib alone.  This has been by design, as, throughout the war, Assad regime forces with Russian backing have been deliberately targeting hospitals and other key civilian infrastructure related to food and water, as has the Russian Air Force.  Displaced civilians were already extremely vulnerable in Idlib, and now they face a pandemic with great uncertainty as to whether they will have the necessary aid to survive it alongside a host of other threats in a warzone (you can help them here).  The virus will certainly make (and already has made) their already extremely difficult lives significantly worse even if it does not infect or kill them.

These civilians in Idlib are often fleeing the Syrian’s government’s offensive to a Turkish border that has been sealed off to them—Turkey, already hosting some 3.7 million refugees, refuses to take in any more—with masses of people trapped with nowhere to go, a situation ripe for a coronavirus outbreak as they cannot practice social distancing since they live in crowded tents (if they even have shelter), nor do they have the ability to practice good hygiene since they lack proper amounts of soap and easy access to water.  Refugee camps there and elsewhere in the Middle East are teeming with people and short on necessary supplies, meaning they are potential disasters-in-the-making.

This conflict has only greatly intensified in Syria’s north lately in the absence of a stabilizing U.S. presence after the recent U.S. withdrawal discussed earlier.  It was because of that withdrawal that Turkey was able to carry out its destabilizing invasion of northern Syria, an invasion that itself displaced hundreds of thousands of people.  After its reckless invasion and engaging directly against Assad’s forces, Turkey—a NATO member state—has been furious that NATO is not supporting it as it takes casualties from attacks from Syrian forces getting support from the Russian government.  To pressure NATO states, Turkey is actively encouraging thousands of refugees it is hosting to migrate to Greece and Europe, even transporting them to the no-man’s land separating the Turkish and Greek borders—where desperate refugees caught as pawns have even clashed with Greek border guards—in a naked play to use these refugees as leverage against European NATO countries.  Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has made his intent in this regard explicit and clear and does not even try to deny he is weaponizing the refugees for political purposes.  If refugees in Turkey come down with COVID-19, this would be a far more ominous context for the dangerous game Turkey is playing with Europe.  For now, with coronavirus spreading in Turkey and Greece and refugees in camps in Greece coming down with the virus, the Turkish government late in March evacuated the makeshift camp that had popped up for the refugees it had sent to the Greek border and quarantined the refugees for two weeks. Those being released from the quarantine often end up sleeping in the streets, caught in limbo amid coronavirus, with Turkey indicating it will recklessly resend them to the closed Greek border once the pandemic subsides.

In Syria, Turkey, Greece, and all over the world, aid operations were forced to undergo massive, disruptive adjustments are being cut back drastically because of COVID-19, and with a field that was already spread thin amid a record number of people being displaced globally, the vulnerable populations the aid field was servicing cannot afford to be deprioritized.

But in particular, in northern Syria, President Trump’s Syrian withdrawal was the catalyst for the sad chain of events that has the situation there where it is now: far worse than it would have been otherwise and guaranteed to get even worse yet in the midst of a global pandemic.  The difference this all will cause in the number of dead from COVID-19 and its spillover effects will likely be in the thousands as U.S. incompetence in the face of one unconventional, asymmetric threat amplifies the harm from another unconventional, asymmetric threat.  Though the second is not man-made, the increase in the damage it will do is.

America’s Own COVID-19 Failures Mirror Its Failures in Fighting Nontraditional Threats

The issues surrounding the conflicts in Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria were complicated and difficult to understand, and many Americans preferred moving on and forgetting.  After all, most Americans could live their lives and not be affected by the nature of unconventional, asymmetric warfare in a distant land.  But the unconventional, asymmetric threats posed by coronavirus, pandemics in general, biowarfare, and bioterrorism are not something from which Americans can conveniently shrink away: they are dangerous to us here at home all over the country, not just a small portion of volunteer military personnel deployed thousands of miles away or one city or several targeted in a particular al-Qaeda/ISIS-style “normal” terrorist attack.  Thus, the approach that has created a pattern of failure for America regarding unconventional, asymmetric threats in the past is even more inappropriate, problematic, and unacceptable for our present pandemic and similar biothreats.

Whether in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, our leaders early on projected a supreme level of confidence and a belief in total victory even as they understood little about the nature of the threats they faced and what would be required to actually come out on top.  As these conflicts unfolded in their earlier phases, the political leaders initiating and running our military involvement never communicated to the public how truly difficult, open-ended, and indefinite our missions could or would be.  Because of these characterizations, proper resourcing was often a huge problem, especially given the tendencies to downplay the challenges we faced in these conflicts.  Instead, what we were told was that victory was usually just around the corner.  Furthermore, by focusing on short-term accomplishments for the sake of trying to boost public opinion, they very accomplishments themselves were made shallower and more likely to depress public opinion over time since they were more likely to come undone.  In the end, this meant that relatively short-term, technically successful increases in military deployments—ones leaders signaled ahead of time would be short-term and the goal of which was to improve security and stability enough for politics on-the-ground to move significantly in the right direction and not backslide—were always going to have a risk of history repeating itself just after or not long after the shorter-term surges; when these deployments’ effects wore off (or, even worse, the deployment itself failed to have the desired effect), it would be time for another deployment, with new deployments increasing frustration for a public that had been told we were “winning” and, over time, damaging that public’s willingness to support our military efforts as well as the Confidence of our local allies so crucial to the fight. 

Tragically, that is what happened in both of the major wars al-Qaeda sucked America into, with the same man (Gen. Petraeus) leading roughly the same surge strategy in both countries—first in Iraq, then later in Afghanistan—but the eventual hoped-for political resolutions never coming from local actors, who, having seen America’s inconsistency and mistakes up close, were more interested in sectarian and tribal agendas to bolster their positions than either allowing the U.S. to claim victory or making concessions necessary for multi-ethnic, religiously pluralistic territories to truly come together under one flag.

At the end of Invisible Armies, his seminal history on guerrilla warfare, Max Boot presents a series of major lessons from his study. One is that “most insurgencies are long-lasting; attempts to win a quick victory backfire”: 

The fact that low-intensity conflict tends to be “long, arduous and protracted,” in the words of Sir Robert Thompson, can be a source of frustration for both sides, but attempts to short-circuit the process to achieve a quick victory usually backfire.  The United States tried to do just that in the early years of the Vietnam and Iraq wars by using its conventional might to hunt down insurgents in a push for what John Paul Vann rightly decried as “fast, superficial results.”  It was only when the United States gave up hopes of quick victory, ironically, that it started to get results by implementing the tried-and-true tenets of population-centric counterinsurgency.  In Vietnam, it was already too late, but in Iraq the patient provision of security came just in time.

A particularly seductive version of the “quick win” strategy is to try to eliminate the insurgency’s leadership. …there are just…many examples where leaders were eliminated but the movement went on, sometimes stronger than ever—as both Hezbollah and Al Qaeda in Iraq did. High-level “decapitation” strategies work best when a movement is weak organizationally and focused around a cult of personality. Even then leadership targeting is most effective if integrated into a broader counterinsurgency effort designed to separate the insurgents from the population. If conducted in isolation, leadership raids are about as effective as mowing the lawn; the targeted organization can usually regenerate itself.

I have literally lost track of how many times the number-two or number-whatever leader of al-Qaeda or an affiliate or ISIS was proudly announced as killed by the U.S. (often from a drone strike), and I remember that political leaders and whichever-Administration spokespeople were usually quite eager to broadcast this as some sort of major accomplishment or an indication that things were going well even when they clearly were not.  The emphasis our government places on this tactic from a public-relations perspective when considering its ineffectiveness betrays that eagerness to present the public with quick fixes to complex problems that has so hampered our efforts in unconventional, asymmetric warfare.

Another lesson of Boot’s is that “conventional tactics don’t work against an unconventional threat”: 

Regular soldiers often assume that they will have no difficulty besting ragtag fighters who lack the firepower or discipline of a professional fighting force.  Their mindset was summed up by General George Decker, U.S. Army chief of staff from 1960 to 1962, who said, “Any good soldier can handle guerrillas.”  The Vietnam War and countless other conflicts have disproven this bromide. Big-unit, firepower-intensive operations snare few guerrillas and alienate many civilians.  To defeat insurgents, soldiers must take a different approach that focuses not on chasing insurgents but on securing the population.  This is the difference between “search and destroy” and “clear and hold.”  The latter approach is hardly pacifistic.  It too requires the application of violence and coercion but in carefully calibrated and intelligently targeted doses.  As an Israeli general told me, “Better to fight terror with an M-16 than an F-16.”

In this sense, too often we have favored the F-16, the metaphor for heavy firepower and advanced technology, including drones, missiles, and bombers, as a substitute for long-term policy, and, indeed, one of Boot’s lessons is that “technology has been less important in guerrilla war than in conventional war,” since

all guerrilla and terrorist tactics, from suicide bombing to hostage taking and roadside ambushes, are designed to negate the firepower advantage of conventional forces.  In this type of war, technology counts for less than in conventional conflict.  Even the possession of nuclear bombs, the ultimate weapon, has not prevented the Soviet Union and the United States from suffering ignominious defeat at guerrilla hands.  To the extent that technology has mattered in low-insurgency conflicts, it has often been the nonshooting kind.  As T. E. Lawrence famously said, “The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armory of the modern commander.”  A present-day rebel might substitute “the Internet” for “the printing press,” but the essential insight remains valid.

In an interview, Boot also notes our amnesia with these types of conflicts, how

this is a recurring problem, that armies do not like fighting guerrilla wars. They regard it as being beneath them, because they don’t regard guerrillas as being worthy enemies. Unfortunately, they keep getting forced into these guerrilla wars and what normally happens is they do learn how to fight after a period of trial and error, and after suffering costly defeats. But then as soon as they leave that war behind, they tend to forget what they’ve learned.

Former U.S. Army Lt. Col. Christopher Holshek—an old professor of mine in a class I took in Liberia, studying the United Nations peacekeeping mission there—perfectly summed up our failures in these conflicts in an article for Foreign Policy:

The phase-four [post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction] fates of Operations Iraqi and Enduring Freedom [the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, respectively] were due more to the sins of omission than of commission.  The U.S. government, in its haste to do in months what takes years, threw billions at hearts-and-minds boondoggles and into ministries yielding corruption, roads to nowhere, and teacher-less schools, among other counterproductive outcomes.  The vast waste has led to the current conventional wisdom that development, coded as “nation-building,” doesn’t work.  Of course it doesn’t, if you don’t do it right.

(In a way that should offer us no consolation whatsoever, it is worth noting that a large part of his article was demonstrating how ISIS was far worse at phase four than we were).

As then-President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Jessica Tuchman Mathews wrote about the Iraq surge in late 2007, “for America’s larger strategic interests, buying more time to continue the same strategy can achieve nothing. To do so is to ask American troops to fight to create breathing space for a corpse.”  In the short-term, that was not the case: the gains made in security from the surge were significant and improved and lasted over the next few years, but beyond that, it is impossible to deny that that the political breakthroughs the surge was designed to encourage did not materialize nearly enough and that all the security successes came undone between the actions of Maliki and ISIS by 2014.  And unfortunately, Matthews’s quote reverberates far beyond Iraq and can sum up so many of our strategic failures in the era after World War II.

Our leaders were simply just not honest about what we were up against or did not know themselves, and, as a result, the public never really grasped what was going on and why things went the way they did.  When the productive measures were taken, they would often too little and/or too late, with far more death and destruction happening in the long-run as a result.  As a society and a nation, we failed to properly address these threats, at great cost for ourselves and others.  Shorter-term commitments were advertised as quick fixes that were really just false fantasies, increasing and extending the pain and perhaps dooming us to repeat ourselves in wasteful, frustrating cycles that left us demoralized, diminished, and depleted.

If reading this, you are asking yourself if this sounds familiar and eerily current somehow, well, yes, it should, as our response to the unconventional coronavirus pandemic fits frighteningly and maddeningly all too well—even exactly—into these patterns and obviously so.

IV.) The World Fails on Coronavirus, Led by America

Living systems are not like mechanical systems.  Living systems are never in equilibrium.  They are inherently unstable.  They may seem stable, but they’re not.  Everything is moving and changing.  In a sense, everything is on the edge of collapse.

—John Arnold, in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990)

When asked recently “where” we went “wrong” specifically as far as the coronavirus pandemic but also generally, if there  was an “exact moment,” journalist Masha Gessen replied by saying “I think there are many moments.  But certainly, our responses, as a nation, to 9-11 and to the financial crisis of 2008, paved the ground for this, as has our persistent disregard for the climate crisis.”

We must hope that, in the long-run, we do not respond to the coronavirus in incredibly self-destructive ways that echo our responses to 9/11 and the other unconventional, asymmetric threats we failed to properly understand and handle as outlined above. Depressingly, though, the signs are already dire.

One of the most depressing things about this pandemic is that, as an American who had little faith in our leadership or system to significantly mitigate this looming disaster, I looked to countries with far more competent leadership and more centralized and robust health systems than ours to be beacons in the night of this pandemic, especially for democratic countries to beam in this true trial not just for humanity, but Western democracy, which has been teetering of late.  I saw a few slivers of light for effective coronavirus programs so far—South Korea especially above all but also Israel, Germany, plucky Ireland, and, at least through the present and perhaps still to be, Japan—but, overwhelmingly, I saw darkness where I expected light in Europe from technocratic establishments and national health systems that (mostly) did not have buffoons in charge or the gaping holes of America’s health system that this pandemic has displayed all-too glaringly.  Italy, Spain, and France are obvious disasters, along with the Netherlands and the UK (whose Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, led the way with poor choices both personally and as a leader and found himself hospitalized in an intensive care unit; and just look at this thread delving into differences between the UK and Ireland). Even Sweden seems like it could be an example of bad-practice: like the other mentioned countries, it did not take proper precautions for long after it should have.  Some of these countries are regular fountains of inspiration for Americans who expect more from their government, but these nations failed here along with us to varying degrees.  In the absence of traditional U.S. global-level leadership, then, there essentially was no global leadership. 

Much of the developing world has yet to be hard hit, but there is great potential for the tolls there to be devastating.  The terrible government response in Brazil–exemplified by the country’s president, Jair Bolsonaro—seems to be setting up a tidal wave of infections, which were recently likely twelve times higher than officially reported numbers.  In Ecuador, a country with little ability to conduct proper testing to determine the full extent of the virus, the death toll recently seemed to be fifteen times higher than what officials there had been able to determine.  If the coronavirus spreads intensely in Africa, the prospects there are also looking quite grim.  In many poorer nations around the world, social distancing is a privilege and a luxury that for a great many is impossible (not even getting into the situation of earlier-discussed refugees).  And already terrible social and economic conditions in many developing nations are only being made exponentially worse by COVID-19, meaning that hunger is now going to be a much larger problem globally, rising to affect 265 million people after factoring in coronavirus, nearly doubling the pre-pandemic figures.  Other sad realities coronavirus will exponentially inflate include, but are hardly limited to, domestic abuse, human trafficking, and suicide.  The threat to the developing world is only exacerbated by the recent inexcusable, despicable, “incredibly stupid,” and needless U.S. announcement that it will halt funding for the World Health Organization (WHO) in the midst of a global pandemic, a decision that for many in the world’s poorest nations that sorely lack vital resources amounts to a death sentence if that funding is not replaced soon from elsewhere; as if that was not enough, the Trump Administration is seeking to do long-term damage to the WHO beyond just defunding it.

Despite plenty of poor responses globally, that top national leadership in America seems to have stood out in failing miserably is not in serious dispute for anyone attempting objectivity.  This was even obvious fairly early, before most American were concerned, with top government officials warning the president repeatedly in January and February about the extraordinary nature of the coronavirus threat and bringing it to the attention of the White House’s National Security Council even earlier.  Others outside the current Administration also sounded the alarm early, including former Vice President Joe Biden—the now-clear Democratic presidential nominee-to-be set to challenge the incumbent president for the White House—who even wrote an op-ed published on January 27 warning of the seriousness of the coronavirus threat and how ill-prepared we were to confront it.  As Richard Haas, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, made painfully clear, “putting off the decision to go on the offensive against COVID-19–treating a war of necessity as a war of choice–has proved extraordinarily costly in terms of lives lost and economic destruction.”  In a pandemic in which timing has perhaps been the most important factor or at least as important as any, our leaders at the top sat passively—even stubbornly—and refused to look at the rising viral tsunami heading in our direction, let alone acknowledge it as the hundred-year plague it was.

Even the military has been seriously affected, one notable example being the Navy having to semi-abandon one of our aircraft carriers in mid-deployment, another being that recruitment has been hampered.

And while books could be and articles already have been written that demonstrate America’s failure clearly even for the most fanatically partisan supporters of the current leadership, here will be shared just this excellent, highly informative, regularly updated chart from The Financial Timesthat shows the U.S. is, literally, the worst at “flattening the curve” (the main format has been changed but there is an interactive version of the below chart here that lets you set up your own comparisons):

That phrase “flattening the curve” (or “bending the curve” as a precursor) was only understood by a handful of people a few months ago but is now well-known coronavirus-era lingo for taking collective action to limit the spread and death-toll of the virus, to lower the height of the curve (bend it) over and then keep it from increasing (flattening it) so that our medical systems can better care for those infected (with bending again all the way down after flattening as the endgame). Clearly, our American curve stands out in the above chart as both the most stridently upward-trending arc and the arc that took the longest to be pulled down relative to other nations grappling with serious coronavirus outbreaks over a similar timeframe.  Case/infection-counts are highly problematic for a variety of reasons, but the deaths statistic is far clearer as to its weight, meaning, and finality, the above chart highlighting quite well that statistic and how well countries are at slowing deaths (even if globally across the board there is a serious problem of unintentional undercounting and underattributing deaths from coronavirus, tracking deaths is still far less ambiguous than tracking overall cases/infections). 

So, relatively speaking, despite massive daily disinformation to the contrary, the U.S seems to have done the worst job of flattening the curve of coronavirus deaths out of countries with significant levels of infection that have experienced fighting coronavirus for a similar amount of time, and this would seem to be the case even for allowing for countries like China (from which this pandemic originated) and Russia, which are virtually certainly deliberately underreporting their coronavirus case numbers and deaths and also allowing for serious questions about developing countries with poor means of tracking the virus, as discussed earlier.  And while the U.S. is hardly the worst in terms of deaths per capita, the above chart shows with the available data that it is still the worst of any country with a major outbreak at slowing the level of death (and preventive measures like lockdowns seem collectively to be a much more important variable than population size or density, anyway).

And the chart just takes into account the deaths we know about; there are “almost certainly” Americans dying from coronavirus not being counted as coronavirus-related deaths because of testing issues, reporting issues, and other shortcomings, with this hardly being the situation only in the U.S. 

In the U.S. in particular, the lack of testing has emerged as one of the premier failings regarding coronavirus, making our sense of how many are truly infected by (and, to a lesser extent, dying from) the virus woefully incomplete and greatly hampering our ability to accurately model the spread of the virus.  And this, in turn, makes it very difficult for leaders to plan ahead beyond the short-term.  Especially because of our lack of testing—one of the most crucial aspects of coronavirus response—we are essentially on a ship at night in heavy fog, trying to see what obstacles lie ahead and how to avoid them but unable to see far in front because of that fog and unable to have any solid sense of when the fog will lift or if or when it will return.  Under those conditions, crashing into an iceberg and sinking is far more likely.  A military counterinsurgency analogy is also apt, as not having enough testing is like trying to neuter an insurgency without having intelligence or enough regular patrols to get a lay of the land before, say, sending a major convoy through enemy territory: with few pieces of intelligence and fewer teams gathering intelligence, the chances the enemy can launch a successful ambush on that convoy when it is sent out are far greater than if you had a much larger number of troops getting much more intelligence on the enemy territory.  Intelligence helps to lift the fog of war, then, while testing helps to lift the fog of pandemics.

Considering a detailed, highly-credibly report from last year ranked America, by relatively far, as the best-prepared nation in the world for a pandemic, the failure in U.S. leadership is even more stunningly spectacular and inexcusable; it is like losing a race in which you started ahead of everyone or if you were, say, someone who inherited millions and were already working in a lucrative field (maybe real estate in Manhattan in the 1980s) and then still managed to go bankrupt six times.

In the words of Max Brooks from another interview, this one from late March:

I think that we have been disastrously slow and disorganized from day one.  I think the notion that we were caught unaware of this pandemic is just an onion of layered lies.  That is not true at all.  We have been preparing for this since the 1918 influenza pandemic.  No excuse…The knowledge was out.  We knew.  We did not prepare.  This is on us.

…All of this panic could have been prevented if the federal government had done what it was supposed to do before the crisis became a crisis.  Because the way to stop panic is with knowledge, and if the president had been working since January to get the organs of government ready for this, we as citizens could have been calmed down knowing that the people that we trust to protect us are doing that.

A friend of mine, Ellen Adair (an actress who played a top senator’s chief of staff in Homeland in its previous season while that universe’s America was facing nontraditional, asymmetric threats similar to the types we are currently facing from Russia), pointed out a specific article from a few years back that saw all too much of this coming: writing in the summer of 2018 for The Atlantic, Ed Yong terrifyingly accurately predicts not only America’s general unpreparedness for a pandemic, but why this current administration would be particularly ill-suited for handling one (his late March, 2020, predictions for how this will end—made when the U.S. outbreak was starting to really pick up steam and yet was still a fraction as bad as it is now—should also be of interest).  While the entire piece from before COVID-19 even existed feels exceedingly current and sickeningly prescient, I felt particular chills reading these words:

Perhaps most important, the U.S. is prone to the same forgetfulness and shortsightedness that befall all nations, rich and poor—and the myopia has worsened considerably in recent years.  Public-health programs are low on money; hospitals are stretched perilously thin; crucial funding is being slashed.  And while we tend to think of science when we think of pandemic response, the worse the situation, the more the defense depends on political leadership.

…Preparing for a pandemic ultimately boils down to real people and tangible things: A busy doctor who raises an eyebrow when a patient presents with an unfamiliar fever.  A nurse who takes a travel history. A hospital wing in which patients can be isolated.  A warehouse where protective masks are stockpiled. A factory that churns out vaccines.  A line on a budget.  A vote in Congress.  “It’s like a chain—one weak link and the whole thing falls apart,” says Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.  “You need no weak links.”

Right now, we look bad, and the idea of the U.S. leading the world when it cannot lead itself anymore is indeed going to be problematic for many who used to be comfortable with U.S. leadership or, at least, tacitly accepted it.  That does not mean there will be a new world order overnight, but it sure will be harder for not just millions, but likely hundreds of millions or even billions of people to see the U.S. as a leader after our failures with this virus are literally broadcast every day for global public consumption.

Of course, there is plenty of blame to go around in America, from governors’ mansions to various media outlets, from our very own American culture to ourselves, from individual institutions to local leaders.  One standout in that last group is the Wisconsin Assembly Speaker telling people during the recent controversially-held dangerous April 7^th elections in his state to go outside and vote after he himself worked to stop both extending absentee voting and delaying the election despite the pandemic, saying this to Wisconsinites this while wearing what seems to be a hospital-quality mask, gloves, and gown set.  Dysfunction and division is not just present at the federal level and between states and the federal government, then, but within states, between governors and mayors or others all throughout the country: in South Dakota, there is even a dispute between the governor and Sioux tribal authorities.

But in dire emergencies like this, the national leaders set the tone for the nation as a whole, with many others farther down the totem pole taking their cues from national leadership, none more so than the top national leader, be it a president, prime minister, or king.  And this is the way it should be.  When we were attacked at Pearl Harbor all the way back in 1941, we did not have dozens of regional, state, city, county, and town war policies operating independently from one another: we had a coordinated national effort, and fighting deadly national and global pandemics should be no different.  In the 1940s, we were able to triumph in our finest national hour even as were caught off-guard.  That clearly has not happened with coronavirus, and our “collective” “national” response can be said to be anything but a single one with unity of purpose.

In stunning displays of hubris and lack of preparation, Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler in 1941 famously sent their armies towards Russia in June, months away from the famed Russian winter, with no winter clothing.  Now we can similarly say that, in 2020, the American President allowed our medical first-line responders to face off against coronavirus without nearly enough proper protective gear despite having weeks and months to take proper action to equip them.

We could have approached this coronavirus threat with the mentality of the Starks in Game of Thrones, whose mantra is “winter is coming”: be prepared, get ready, unite, take this threat very seriously, take nothing for granted.  Instead, (spoilers for the show/books in this sentence) our leaders were more like Queen Cersei Lannister in the final seasons: warned repeatedly and with a zombie-wight coming at her face-to-face, she still did not prioritize dealing with the Army of the Dead and, instead, took the crisis as an opportunity to advance her personal and political interests, to settle scores and amass power for herself.

Wherever blame should or should not be placed, this novel (new) coronavirus has brought the world to its knees.  Socially and economically, a huge portion of global activity has come to screeching halt or, at least, a vastly reduced intensity.  Something this sudden on a global scale is new for humanity, and we have no idea even when this pandemic will really end (other than an increasing understanding that the end will probably not be soon), if it will end, how soon other waves will come or how bad those waves will be (they may be worse).  The virus’s national and overall global spread even seems to be increasing several months into the pandemic, not decreasing.  We do not know how many people will die (today, there will be over 350,000 worldwide and over 100,000 in the U.S. for just the recorded COVID-19 deaths), except that earlier rosier predictions are now clearly way off the mark.  People are deeply fearful of a deeply uncertain future and what the world will look like after this virus leaves its initial mark.  Thus, this novel coronavirus is not only engendering a sense of fear throughout the human race, but also terror.

But the true terror is to come.

V.) A Far More Worrisome Future

The death wish of the theocratic totalitarians, for themselves and others, is too impressive to overlook.

—Christopher Hitchens, “Terrorism: Notes toward a definition,” Slate, November 18, 2002

Ultimately, humanity might not end with a bang but with a feeble cough.

—Max Brooks, “The Next Pandemic Might Not Be Natural,” Foreign Policy, April 20, 2020

Despite the examples listed earlier in our brief biowarfare and bioterrorism survey and other acts not included therein, both biological warfare and bioterrorism have been exceedingly rare in history.

One obvious reason for this is that it is hard to ensure that such weapons only infect the enemy and not also the people attempting to do the infecting and their compatriots (Japanese forces, for example, incurred thousands of casualties from their own bioweapons use in China).  In other words, bioagents are so dangerous that they have mostly been felt to be too dangerous to use, especially on a larger scale.

The idea that is supposed to give us comfort is that, in theory, it is not rational to use such weapons.  Yet the country with the largest bioweapons program in history—the Soviet Union—was regarded as insecure, famously concerned with self-preservation and constrained by rational realpolitik as a result, making it fairly predictable.  Sure, the Soviets did not use these weapons, but they still put smallpox in ICBMS and worked to create disease even worse than Mother Nature has been able to create.

Rather than us being able to trust in some solid proof of human rationality—the concept of which, as an overall rule, is highly debatable at best—then, I feel the non-use of biological weapons (similar to the situation with nuclear weapons after 1945) is less a natural product of human wisdom or design but, instead, is a product of the small-N problem, that dilemma of comparative studies and of politics in general: that there is such a small number of relevant actors with bioweapons capabilities that we cannot draw rock-solid proof from those weapons’ non-use that this is non-use some sort of “natural” outcome.  In short, we have likely just “lucked out” biological (and nuclear) weapons have not been used because only a handful of governments have had serious capabilities and the technology was advanced enough to the degree that it was hard to have anyone other than governments and specialized scientists develop them, and of these small samples, only a handful of those had the will to actually pursue these weapons, with an even far smaller number pursuing their use.

As any basic statistics primer would tell you, though, the more actors that develop such capabilities, the greater the chance that such capabilities will eventually be used, with that probability increasing being a mathematical certainty.

And therein lies one of the major current problems.  For, even before now, technology had advanced in recent years to a degree that has made it far easier for governments, organizations, and individuals to research, produce, and deploy these weapons: the internet has made the information on how to do all that more available than ever before; logistics technology have made the ability to obtain and transport necessary materials easier than ever before; and advances in medical science and technology have opened up bioengineering and made creating biolabs easier, by far, than ever before. 

So that “small-N (number)” reality an ally in perpetuating the non-use of bioweapons, that bulwark that so few people had access or ability when it came to what was needed to operationalize bioweapons, has been dramatically weakened in recent years as the breadth of actors with the ability to research, develop, and deploy bioweapons has grown exponentially in recent years with the latest remarkable advances of human civilization. 

The math, then, has changed: that probability that the small-N problem kept so low is now dramatically higher.

Even putting aside the small-N problem being a more likely explanation for general non-use of bioweapons up through the present than our own supposed rationality—even if we accept, in principle, that it is our rationality that is to be credited for the lack of biowarfare and bioterrorism and could take comfort in that—the future still looks comparatively bleak.  And the reason for that is because, relative to the rest of the modern era, we ae seeing an explosion in those swelling the ranks of apocalyptic-minded groups of religiously-motivated violent extremists.  Indeed, our era has seen a sharp increase in the number of terrorists willing to sacrifice themselves, their people, and countless innocent civilians in pursuit of their apocalyptic goals.   Such terrorists are possessed with end-times-oriented mindsets that are hell-bent on accelerating the arrival of the apocalypse, with ISIS as the flagship movement.

If we add to that equation the possibility of governments using newer science—especially genetic engineering and advanced vaccination programs—to perfect a way to immunize their own militaries and people against a weapon they could then feel safe to deploy against others and therefore confident to weaponize and develop, then the threat of bioweapons being used against America and others is only increasing by yet another factor.  If you think this sounds too much like science fiction, recall how a mass biological test on the part of the U.S. government infected the whole San Francisco metropolitan area in 1950 and how the public never learned about it until 1976.  In other words, if another government wanted to immunize its population against something pretty nasty without drawing attention to that nasty something, there are more than a few ways to immunize people without people even knowing they are being immunized (slipping in with other standard immunizations, perhaps adding into the water or food supply, manufacturing a controlled “outbreak” that would give cover for a mass immunization, etc.), especially for a government motivated enough to carry out and plan years in advance a biological first strike with a deadly bioweapon.

But there are other technological multipliers that have yet to have their potential impact be anywhere near realized that make the future look even less comforting.  Technology has just recently been advancing, and is continuing to advance, rapidly in such a way that it is only going to exponentially increase the number of actors able to carry out biological attacks, and that is even in addition to the exponential increase that has already occurred recently.  And perhaps the foremost reason for this coming exponential growth in potential biothreats and actors is a new genetic engineering technique known as CRISPR—Clustered Regularly Interspersed Short Palindromic Repeats—that makes it far easier and cheaper to create bioweapons than ever before.

To put this into perspective, some CRISPR kits were selling for under $150 even in 2017.  A United Nations panel even characterized this CRISPR threat as do-it-yourself bioweapons creation (“DIY biological labs”).  One post from a leading bioresearch and development company that has led on, and sells, CISPR tools and material ended by noting CRISPR’s “usefulness for genome locus-specific recruitment of proteins will likely only be limited by our imagination.”  And if we recall that Dream of Scipio quote from the introduction about how man is worse than beast because beasts are constrained by their lack of imagination but men are not, well, that is where this gets truly terrifying.  Indeed, the alarm has been soundly rung by many an expert on the soon-to-be-clear and present danger of this CRISPR technology’s ability to empower those with the most malevolent of imaginations.  We are, then, being presented with a brave new world of bioterrorism.

Thus, the guardrails—supposed or real—that may have offered protection from the use of bioweapons before are simply not as strong as they used to be.  Even if we accept human rationality as a bulwark, some of the biggest increases in terrorism involve suicide attackers and those embracing apocalyptic theology hoping to bring about a final world-ending confrontation, comforted by an ideology that tells them if they die as martyrs fighting for their cause they will ascend to heaven with a special spot waiting for them, with a degree of terrorists and terrorist groups concerned less with temporal self-preservation than at any other time in the modern era.  And whatever their motives, the modern world has not only already made bioweapons more accessible than ever to them, but will also dramatically expand this greater accessibility with the newest CRISPR technology that will itself spread rapidly.  Thus, we have both terrorists increasingly less worried about doing damage to themselves and a far greater number of actors that will be dabbling in bioweapons.

I had earlier discussed Max Boot’s lesson on technology at the end of his book Invisible Armies (“technology has been less important in guerrilla war than in conventional war”), but I left out the second part of his lesson’s heading, “but that may be changing,” to save it for here.  He does not mean the usefulness of technology on our end, either; he is talking about a change in favor of terrorists:

The role of weapons in this type of war [i.e. unconventional] could grow in the future if insurgents get their hands on chemical, biological, or especially nuclear weapons. A small terrorist cell the size of a platoon might then have more killing capacity than the entire army of a nonnuclear state like Brazil or Egypt.  That is a sobering thought.  It suggests that in the future low-intensity conflict could pose even greater problems for the world’s leading powers than it has in the past.  And, as we have seen, the problems of the past were substantial and varied.

And the type of weapons which are seeing the most rapid advancement in technology and ease of access are not chemical or nuclear, but biological.

In fact, as Karl Johnson, one veteran of fighting Ebola outbreaks, mentioned over a quarter-century ago:

It’s only a matter of months—years, at most—before people nail down the genes for virulence and airborne transmission in influenza, Ebola, Lassa, you name it.  And then any crackpot with a few thousand dollars’ worth of equipment and a college biology education under his belt could manufacture bugs that would make Ebola look like a walk around the park.

For Max Brooks, “Johnson’s prediction is right around the corner. With a little dark-web information and some secondhand lab equipment, anyone will soon be able to generate do-it-yourself blights in a basement lab and then release them back into the general population.”

Brooks echoes the earlier sentiments expressed herein that public policy attention given to threats posed by nuclear weapons are overemphasized relative those given to biological weapons.  As Brooks writes in Foreign Policy:

Genetic manipulation is the most dangerous threat humanity has ever faced because it allows anyone to spin straw into lethal gold. Unlike the hypothetical nuclear terrorist whom we’ve spent untold fortunes preparing for but who can’t act without acquiring precious, rare, and heavily guarded fissile material, the biohacker will be able to harvest germs from anywhere.  And unlike the nuclear terrorist, who gets only one shot at destruction, the biohacker’s bomb can copy itself over and over again.

If we look at the present and the future, then, without a doubt, terrorists and governments that have been and are pursuing the research and development of arsenals of bioweapons will only be doing so under even more favorable conditions to their goals as the future unfolds, including the near-future.  For these biowarrior wannabes, they are seeing what just something superflu/superpneumonia-ish like this coronavirus can do and are thinking of the damage and havoc they can wreak with far worse diseases.  And not only them but those who were on the fence about or reluctant to consider pursuing bioweapons programs will be seriously thinking that now.  Because the logical conclusion anyone contemplating biowarfare would draw from our current pandemic is that if coronavirus can do what it is doing now to America and the world, a deliberate, competent bioattack at a certain level could destroy the world as we know it.  We must realize that, to the degree that we are unsettled and shaken by looking at the state of our nation, our enemies are emboldened and more confident in their ability to do us harm.

Just imagine a brand new virus engineered to kill thirty percent—let alone fifty or seventy-five percent—of victims and that incapacitates most of the rest, one that spreads like wildfire, for which we have no immunity and no cure, which could cripple nations in days (not weeks), wiping out some people in key leadership positions along with millions of others, and incapacitating for days or weeks even those that survive.  Imagine the people unleashing such a disease are religious terrorists with apocalyptic death-wishes (plenty of those) or military officials from a government that has developed a secret immunity that only they and their countrymen have.  Imagine, while we are crippled, our enemy then offers the immunity it to allies or potentially new allies in the moment of crises, allowing it to destroy the nations as we know them that it deems enemies, remaking a world order with our successful enemy at the top.  Even staunch allies of ours would be tempted to fold in the face of a weapon for which the only defense comes with joining the new order. 

Think about the decades to come, in a world far more crowded where living space will literally be an issue, imagine an invasion by troops immune to the virus; with our leaders, government, and society—including the military—largely wiped out or crippled by the disease, how would an effective resistance—military or medical—to a simultaneous military and viral invasion be able to be mounted in the face of an organized enemy largely escaping the effects of such a disease?  And if the enemy offers immunity for a disease for which we have no cure and have no hope of dealing with medically in time in exchange for surrender, if the choice is between surrender and death, what happens to us and America as we know it?  The sixteenth-century Spanish conquistadors did not plan to use the smallpox virus as a biological weapon to mostly wipe out the mighty armies of the Aztecs and the Incas and bring their societies to their knees with it in the span of a blink of a historical eye, but smallpox obliged anyway, and the Spanish wiped those Empires easily from the face of the earth as a result.  The same devastating effects with the right cocktail of virus can happen today.

One case study shows how a just single person can easily cause over a dozen new coronavirus infections; imagine how few infected people would be required to mass-transmit a far worse virus like the hypothetical engineered one described a few paragraphs above. 

Now consider that out current coronavirus has already weakened and damaged democracy in some places —including in the U.S.—pushed it to the brink in others, and, at least in the case of Hungary, seems to have destroyed it.  And that does not even get to authoritarians and the authoritarian-leaning, for whom the virus has been an excellent excuse to crack down on freedoms.

The simple truth is, we are not prepared even for a naturally occurring pandemic like coronavirus, let alone a worse one than coronavirus, let alone even more so bioagents designed to as a weapon by our human enemies to kill us and crush our society.

How we appear now matters to our enemies, and not only was the U.S. caught off-guard, its overall response has exposed our weaknesses to the world (and hopefully ourselves).

VI.) The Harsh Truths Coronavirus Has Exposed

Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state.

—George Packer, “We Are Living in a Failed State/Underlying Conditions,” The Atlantic, June 2020 issue preview

I met fellow American Coco Tang years ago in Amman, Jordan, while she was on a Fulbright.  When not working as a consultant, she moonlights as a medic in some of the world’s worst hotspots.  Her postings have found her supporting as a medic both Iraqi Special Forces during the battle of Mosul against ISIS and OSCE patrols in Eastern Ukraine, working in refugee camps in Syria and Bangladesh, working in a clinic in Afghanistan, treating vulnerable women in the South Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, assessing local health in Ethiopia, and working in Sierra Leone as part of the Ebola response there.  She goes to some of the most dangerous places in the world to offer medical support, often in extreme humanitarian and medical emergencies.

And now she finds herself offering medical support in New York City during a pandemic, deployed by a medical company to the front lines in the war against COVID-19 here at home.

“When I worked in Iraq or Syria, there was an expectation of austerity. When you work in NYC, the austerity feels surreal.  Experiencing it in a place like NYC reminds me that COVID, in a lot of ways, is a great equalizer.”

That is what makes bioweapons as a weapon of war or terrorism so terrifying to powerful countries like America: it reduces the conventional operational planes in a way that is so unconventional and asymmetric that its extreme asymmetry rips the powerful far from their accustomed, advantaged positions.  

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz just recently remarked that the U.S. coronavirus response makes it look like “like a third-world country.”  Tang has experienced a similar feeling in New York: “People expect pandemics to be a third-world problem. People expect problems like PPE [personal protective equipment] shortages to be a third-world problem.”  And, yet, here she was, grappling with serious equipment shortages during a pandemic here the U.S., and not in Appalachia, but in New York City, in Manhattan.  “COVID exposes that we aren’t any better than those countries we always look down on.  That at the end of the day, America is just a homeless person wearing fancy clothes.”

Tang was not even being asked about bioweapons when she made that statement, but she still nailed one of the central issues in biowarfare and unconventional warfare and how COVID-19 relates to it.  As mentioned earlier, Max Boot wrote that “all guerrilla and terrorist tactics…are designed to negate the firepower advantage of conventional forces.”  Bioweapons just do this on a deeper, more frightening scale, and coronavirus is showing us that natural pandemics can have the same effect.  In many ways, our current pandemic is a preview of a major bioweapons attack, and it has exposed us as woefully unprepared, with our government having been shown to be unable to protect us, thought of by many to be the primary role of government.  It could have, but it did not.  Americans’ faith in institutions has already been crumbling for some time, and now that level of faith will be even lower.

Feeling the need to explain why she was writing her article in March for The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum made her case in stark terms that reflected Tang’s imagery:

I am writing this so that Americans understand that our government is producing some of the same outcomes as Chinese communism.  This means that our political system is in far, far worse shape than we have hitherto understood.

…The United States, long accustomed to thinking of itself as the best, most efficient, and most technologically advanced society in the world, is about to be proved an unclothed emperor.

George Packer also wrote for The Atlantic, echoing Tang, Applebaum, and Stiglitz in a pieced titled “We Are Living in a Failed State” with the lead “The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken.”  Packer does not hold back as he opens his article’s body:

When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly.  Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years.  We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms.  It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.

The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective.  The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.

…With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter.

Explaining how we got to this state, Packer writes that “all the programs defunded, stockpiles depleted, and plans scrapped meant that we had become a second-rate nation. Then came the virus and this strange defeat.”  Not only are we losing this war, this war is forcing us to see our national ugliness by relentlessly shining a spotlight onto it and forcing us to look nonstop.  Packer, again, puts it eloquently: “If the pandemic really is a kind of war, it’s the first to be fought on this soil in a century and a half.  Invasion and occupation expose a society’s fault lines, exaggerating what goes unnoticed or accepted in peacetime, clarifying essential truths, raising the smell of buried rot.”

In periods of pestilence, there is a tendency for those fault lines to be racial, ethnic, and religious, with those types of hatreds being only too eagerly released and minority groups being blamed for the outbreaks.

Just to name one foreign example for today, in Hindu chauvinist Narendra Modi’s India, anti-Islamic bigotry is becoming mixed up in the country’s response to coronavirus.

If we go back in time, ignorant and/or covetous Christians in fourteenth-century Europe blamed Jews for the Black Death and massacred many thousands of them across the continent, destroying whole communities and ethnically cleansing Jews from entire regions (just in Mainz alone, over 6,000 Jews perished from a plague-inspired pogrom in 1349).  If we fast-forward to today, Jews are also being blamed in very anti-Semitic fashion by a range of extremists around the world (including in America) for unleashing coronavirus as some sort of organized plot, bringing down “God’s” vengeance in the form of the virus, or of profiting off the pandemic (or a combination of these); billionaire Jewish philanthropist George Soros is even frequently accused of creating the virus.

In the U.S., Asian-Americans and Asians are also being attacked—including physically—and blamed for the virus “because” of the virus’s Chinese origin, with anti-Asian hate crimes very much on the rise, yet the federal government is not being proactive in pushing back against this hate, with problematic language coming from the White House itself only adding fuel to the fire.

There is also the persistent racism and pervasive inequality that long-plagued American society, with socioeconomic status, harsher living and working conditions, and unequal access to quality healthcare experienced disproportionately by certain groups of people contributing to their having chronic health issues that make the virus more serious and more deadly for them than for members of more advantaged communities.  Inequality also makes it far harder for some disadvantaged groups to take appropriate actions to protect themselves; in the words of Charles Blow writing for The New York Times, “Staying at home is a privilege.  Social distancing is a privilege.  The people who can’t must make terrible choices: Stay home and risk starvation or go to work and risk contagion.”  Problems of race, ethnicity, and class are only made worse by coronavirus.

In particular, the inequalities that have long been inflicted upon African-Americans have been resulting in incredibly disproportionately high deaths and serious infections from COVID-19 for African-Americans.  Just in Chicago, by the end of the first week of April, African-Americans had accounted for seventy percent of COVID-19 deaths even though they just made up thirty percent of the population.  And Chicago is hardly alone, with major disparities for black Americans in terms of coronavirus being the norm across the country.

Other groups in America are also suffering disproportionately from this pandemic.  Long-neglected Native Americans are also particularly vulnerable and experiencing extremely high rates of coronavirus problems.  Latinos are also quite disproportionately affected by COVID-19.  And lower-income people of all backgrounds have relatively borne the brunt of not only the virus itself, but also the massive economic harm inflicted by the pandemic.

As Brooks noted in that mid-March interview, “All of these terrible, terrible trends that we’ve been sowing for so long are coming back to haunt us right at this minute.”

Our unending, longstanding American divisions—politically partisan and otherwise—are only intensified by this unconventional, asymmetric pandemic, much like the unconventional, asymmetric threats from the Vietnam and Iraq Wars and Russian election interference aggravated existing American societal fault lines.  The virus, rather than showing our ability to unite, is instead exposing—even more than recent politics—our capacity for coming apart.  For Packer,

the virus should have united Americans against a common threat. With different leadership, it might have. Instead, even as it spread from blue to red areas, attitudes broke down along familiar partisan lines.  The virus also should have been a great leveler. You don’t have to be in the military or in debt to be a target—you just have to be human.  But from the start, its effects have been skewed by the inequality that we’ve tolerated for so long.

Then there is the black hole where our coordinated national response should have been.

The most extreme example of this has manifested itself in a disturbing, unprecedented, and stunning situation that just unfolded in Maryland, exemplifying a breakdown in the constitutional order and national fabric not seen since the era of desegregation.  This stunning incident hints at China’s twentieth-century warlord era, when the Qing Dynasty’s central government broke down and basically melted away in so many places to such levels that China de facto became a relatively large number of separate states run by warlords who had to step up and provide leadership in the void left by the Qing.  They also had to contend with the Chinese Nationalists and Chinese Communists as everyone fought each other, with the Japanese Imperial Army and WWII eventually merging into the conflicts; dysfunction and chaos reigned (and incidentally, remember, this situation would eventually see the most extensive use of bioweapons in the history of warfare).  To return to the American present, in the absence of timely or coherent support from the federal government, Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland and his wife, Maryland First Lady Yumi Hogan—of Korean descent—negotiated with South Korea to obtain 500,000 coronavirus tests.  The process took twenty-two days and the tests were flown over from South Korea, with the Korea Air passenger plane—which would normally have landed at Dulles International Airport in Virginia, just outside Washington, DC—being diverted to Baltimore-Washington International airport in Maryland, the first time that airline has ever flown to that the airport.  This was done purposefully to prevent the seizure of the tests by the federal government, which had earlier seized three million protective masks ordered by Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker for his state, among other seizures from governors taking matters into their own hands because of the Trump Administration’s unwillingness to directly supply the states with necessary quantities of emergency supplies.  It is remarkable that states that had asked for federal aid, had their requests denied or unfulfilled, then followed the Administration’s advice to procure their own supplies then saw federal authorities seize those very supplies.  It is also worth noting that both Govs. Hogan and Baker are Republicans along with Trump, not to say that should make a difference but to point out how even fellow Republicans are unable to work with the current Administration.  Also out fear of the tests being seized at the airport, Hogan had “a large contingent” of Maryland National Guard troops and State Police sent to secure the tests and transport them to “an undisclosed location” that is purposely being kept secret from the federal government. Those tests are still being guarded by Maryland National Guard and State Police at that location to protect them from possible federal seizure, with Hogan saying the cargo “was like Fort Knox to us” since the tests were “going to save the lives of thousands of our citizens” and noting the earlier federal seizures of supplies ordered by other states.

In effect, Maryland’s sitting governor—in the same political party as the president—ran a clandestine operation to prevent life-saving equipment Maryland taxpayers had bought and paid for from falling into the clutches of the Trump Administration after that administration had failed to provide Maryland with requested aid and those coronavirus tests are still being guarded at a secret location by security forces under the command of the governor. 

In case this is not clear, that is a total breakdown of the relationship between Maryland and the federal government, with Maryland essentially rebelling against the Trump Administration’s potential designs and actual authority.  Gov. Hogan essentially became a de facto rogue governor—much like warlords in China after the Qing dynasty disintegrated and left a power vacuum of chaos in its wake—when it came to securing and protecting coronavirus tests for Marylanders.  One can only hope this is the first and last example of anything like this happening during the pandemic, but that hope is not carried with any certainty.

To add to Maryland’s woes, the state just canceled a $12.5 million order for other important emergency equipment—1.5 million protective masks and 110 ventilators—from a brand-new firm founded by two Republican political operatives.  The company was drastically overcharging for the masks and the items were supposed to ship by mid-April, but there is no indication they have shipped, and despite repeated requests from Maryland on the order status, no information on the shipping has been provided, prompting the cancellation at a time when Maryland is seeing a surge in cases and deaths.

Yes, right now, we are seeing states, the private sector, and the Executive Branch beg for, haggle, and tussle over urgently-needed PPE and other lifesaving supplies.  In other words, too much is being left to chance, the market, the whims of suppliers, and the relative means of various states even in the middle of a pandemic, with the private sector playing a mighty role, one that involves price and bidding wars.  The result of this top-down-driven logistical nightmare is that vital medical supplies and equipment are in short supply in too many places in America fighting this pandemic.  People, both patients and healthcare workers, are getting sick and dying after being in situations where they did not have what they should have had.

Even if the vaunted Defense Production Act—a Korean War-era law greatly empowering the government to direct industry in times of emergency—had been robustly and properly executed (and it still has not), a tremendous amount of the logistics would still have come down to an ad hoc approach.  And the ad hoc approach is only adding to the confusion and chaos.  As Gen. Russel Honoré (who helped lead America’s response in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina) explained about this current crisis, the main choices for logistics are between the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA, a civilian agency under the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS) and the military.  But, as he also explained, FEMA is designed to handle one or several localized emergencies at once, not a full-fledged national one; it simply does not have the capacity to run as the point organization for this pandemic.  At the same time, the military does not have any recent experience managing national operations across most or all U.S. states at once (or operating withing domestic local, state, and federal legal systems) and much of the military’s operations would have to be also handled in an ad hoc way, with dozens of senior officers having to liaise with dozens of governors and far more local officials to coordinate efforts in addition to private-sector entities; they would rely heavily on their civilian counterparts, most of whom would have little or no training or understanding of how to respond to such a situation or work with military officials; one hopes coronavirus will swiftly bring about a filling-in of these gaps in expertise).  Writing for MWI, Mississippi National Guard Maj. Dennis Bittle notes that National Guard troops have been deployed as part of coronavirus responses in all fifty states, the District of Columbia, and multiple U.S. territories, yet the existing frameworks for Guard deployments to be robust parts of these local responses are far from ideal in this unprecedented situation.  Specifically, federalizing Guard units would be highly problematic since so many Guard personnel are much-needed local first-responders in their civilian roles.

Without proper supplies allocated, distribution networks and equipment, and the personnel to run and move under the direction of the government, as noted, individual states are having to compete in bidding wars and fights over supplies with each other, businesses, the federal government, and even foreign countries just to get desperately needed life-saving supplies.  In what Gen. Honoré called a supply chain situation that he has “never heard…before in my life [that]… look[s] like they have let the literal wolf inside the henhouse,” states are being bypassed for direct aid by the federal government for corporations to then sell to states and, overall, there is little to no oversight, no singular body distributing supplies nationally based on objective needs-based criteria (by mid-April, Montana, with few cases, was getting over $300,000 in federal aid per case, while New York, the epicenter of coronavirus in America, was just getting $12,000 per case). 

There is even at least the appearance that federal disbursement and non-disbursement is happening as a form of political favoritism, as quid pro quos.  On top of all this, the federal government’s own stockpile was nearly empty as of early April apart from federally-confiscated supplies bought and paid for (and needed) by private hospitals and state and local authorities, activity we delved into earlier with the shocking case from Maryland.  Together these factors are just further amplifying senses of desperation, helplessness, and violation of trust. 

Adding to those panicked feelings are how the White House has handled communications: as U.S. Army Reserve Maj. Wonny Kim writes also for MWI, all this is further exacerbated “by public communications that has been haphazard, to say the least,” and in visible ways for all to see that undermine America’s standing in the world and encourage our authoritarian adversaries.  Our own officials have even concluded that Russian intelligence is even “likely” using the pandemic to gain information on U.S. logistical weaknesses.

Sadly, we have seen with the federal response and in other responses that political leaders are free to ignore or contradict the advice of medical and intelligence experts, and suppress or remove truth-tellers from important positions, thus, simply having expert advisors does not cut it; to some degree, both voting populations and politicians will have to take seriously the need for familiarity with pandemic response; voters should be choosing those with a demonstrated and committed deference both to experts and to self-learning and voters must then hold those leaders accountable; if they do not, they will be rewarding non-seriousness with high office, encouraging other politicians to follow suit.  These are, after all, the basics of democracy, and if voters do not reward competence, seriousness, and expertise, a great many of them will, to some degree, reap what they so after failing in their role as citizens.  In this time of pandemic, for Masha Gessen, “it’s very important to continue to notice the ways in which our government is failing us, even if those ways have become familiar and exhausting.”  The hope is that this pandemic will teach voters to take their votes more seriously, as George Packer recognizes: “We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what it was like to be alone.”

Brooks agrees that, ultimately, we as citizens in a democracy are the ones who are responsible:

Everything that goes wrong in China with this virus is directly laid at the feet of Xi Jinping.  He has all the power, so he has all the responsibility.  Every death is on his hands.

But, by the same token, we are responsible for our own deaths in this country.  If we don’t like our leaders—well, then, look in the mirror; we put them there. We voted for them.  If we don’t like the way the CDC is handling this virus, well, who voted to defund the CDC?  Who didn’t listen to the cries of health professionals saying, “Wait a minute, they’re defunding the CDC!”?  We didn’t listen.  We were like, “Oh, my god.  Friends is on Netflix.  I have bingeing to do!  I have things!  There’s an app where I can put bunny ears on myself and send it out!”

In a dictatorship like China, you can blame the top.  In a democracy, in a republic, we have to blame [who we see in] the mirror.

But the main national election is still a while away as the pandemic rages.  Given the systemic failures, just allowing the military to take over the response is tempting—whether now or in the future—and while that carries with it its own issues, it is clear the current civilian structures do not have the capacity to handle this type of threat, except maybe if our leaders are extraordinary, and most of the time, that is not the quality of leadership we empower.

At the same time, coronavirus is exposing the military’s own shortcomings within itself, with Army Reserve Capt. James Long noting in another MWI piece that “our lack of preparation, in the form of adaptive digital networks and robust connective tissue with civilian partners,” is further adding to the damage being done by the virus.  And, while Dr. Jacob Stoil and Army Maj. Bethany Landeck noted in an additional MWI article that, in past major wars, large-scale epidemic response was an important part of U.S. military operations, that has not been the case for decades.  Thus, though the civilian apparatuses have in many ways failed in the current crisis, we cannot expect the current military to be a replacement.  This sentiment is echoed in yet another MWI piece penned by U.S. Air Force Center for Strategic Deterrence Studies Director Al Mauroni titled “The Military Is Not the Nation’s Emergency Room Doctor.” For him, the military should be ready to support civilian efforts in a pandemic, but not to take them over.

In another piece, I will release my proposal to reform the government to put us in a far better position to deal with biodefense: the creation of a Cabinet-level Department of Pandemic Preparedness and Response (DPPR).  But for now, we will simply leave this section with a recognition of how woefully inadequate the current structure of the government is to deal with these type of threats and how dependent the it is on having exceptional leadership that is able to quickly make all the right decisions on an ad hoc basis, an overall unlikely outcome.

VII.) Epilogue: Coronavirus and History, Russia and Italy, the War for Reality, and the Nexus of It All

We will never find an explanation…for the evils done by people against other people, or for the love that drove the doctors to bring smallpox to an end.  Yet after all they had done, we still held smallpox in our hands, with a grip of death that would never let it go.  All I knew was that the dream of total eradication had failed.  The virus’s last strategy for survival was to bewitch its host and become a source of power.  We could eradicate smallpox from nature, but we could not uproot the virus from the human heart.

—Richard Preston (author of The Hot Zone), The Demon in the Freezer (2002)

Eradication

It was one of the most inspiring moments of the entire Cold War.

In what has been acknowledged by many to be “the single most important triumph of public health in human history,” on December 9, 1979, the WHO certified smallpox eradicated from nature, and, to much fanfare at the May, 1980 session of the World Health Assembly (the WHO’s governing body) formally celebrated this achievement publicly with a unified declaration acknowledging the singular triumph.  The disease—terrorizing humanity for thousands of years and responsible for more deaths than any single other disease—may have wiped 300-500 million people in the twentieth century alone, but now, no more.

This triumph was the culmination of two decades of effort from the global healthcare community led by the WHO, first with an effort inspired and proposed by a top Soviet scientist in 1959 that fell far short, with many very skeptical that any disease could be “eradicated,” so support for the efforts was lukewarm and halfhearted.  Still, the effort did drastically reduce infection and mortality of the disease.  Some did not give up on the dream of total eradication , though.  A second effort picked up where the first faltered, with the Intensified Smallpox Eradication Program beginning in 1967, a year in which some two million died from the disease out of 10-15 million cases (rapid vaccination saved many infected before symptoms worsened, reducing the death rate, and these figures were down from some 50 million cases annually in the 1950s).

For the next decade, doctors and medical staff scoured the globe—braving even natural disasters and civil wars—to find all cases of smallpox and then ring-vaccinate everyone around the cases, much like cutting down trees in a forest on fire to stop the spread of the fire.  The technique worked extremely well, and the last recorded case of naturally-occurring smallpox in world history was in 1977 in Somalia.  The following year, another person died because of a mishap at a university lab that was studying smallpox.  Efforts were kept up to keep the virus from making a comeback, and they were successful: by the end of 1979, the virus was certified to be extinct from nature—the first and last disease thus far to suffer that fate—and there has not been a known case since.

In the words of Richard Preston, those carrying out the campaign

had forged themselves into an army of peace.  With a weapon in their hands, a needle with two points, they had searched the corners of the earth for the virus, opening every door and lifting every scrap of cloth.  They would not rest, they would not stand aside, and they gave all they had until variola [i.e., smallpox] was gone.  No greater deed was ever done in medicine, and no better thing ever came from the human spirit.

At the height of the Cold War, the two rivals tearing the world apart—the United States and the Soviet Union—came together to lead one of the great services for humanity that history has ever known.  Two bitter foes that were constantly threatening each other with nuclear annihilation proved that, even amid the greatest of disputes and tensions, enemies could still work together to make the word a better place, to save lives and put their common interest and those of humanity as a whole ahead of their differences.  There are few examples in history of anything like this, and nothing that matches the amount of lives saved by this common effort during a global geopolitical conflict between the two lead actors.

Eventually , smallpox would only be only officially preserved in two facilities: America’s CDC in Atlanta and Russia’s Vector Institute (the Russian State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology VECTOR that was a major facility of the Soviet biowarfare program known, as discussed, as Biopreparat) in Koltsovo, Russia, the top  government disease research facilities in America and Russia, respectively.

By the time Preston would write his 2002 book on smallpox, The Demon in the Freezer, the then-top scientist at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USARMRIID, at Fort Detrick, Maryland, where the U.S. earlier had located a big chunk of its now-defunct biowarfare program), Dr. Peter Jahrling (played by Topher Grace in last year’s NetGeo miniseries, The Hot Zone, based on Preston’s book), would frequently quip:  “If you believe smallpox is sitting in only two freezers, I have a bridge for you to buy. The genie is out of the lamp.” 

Weaponization

As mentioned earlier, since the Eradication and at the end of the Cold War, because of high-level defectors from Biopreparat, the world learned that the Soviet Union even at the height of the Eradication has a massive biowarfare program that included smallpox, and the Soviets were not the only ones pursuing bioweapons and smallpox stocks, also as discussed earlier.  Additionally, it became clear that the Soviets were working with smallpox outside the designated Vector Institute.

At the same time, with the increasing concerns about global warming in the 1990s, we get into the possibility of smallpox in the bodies of long-dead victims frozen in the now melting tundra permafrost, smallpox that could be unleashed and infect yet again from nature.

But the main concern is not the tundra smallpox.

Now we see how the Soviets got their lamp and genie.

We learned from the highest-level Biopreparat defector (Col. Kanatjan Alibekov, now “Ken Alibek”) that when there were raging epidemics of smallpox in India during the Eradication in the 1960s, the Soviets had a medical team operating there in 1967, helping to push back the spread of the disease there.  That team was accompanied by agents of the K.G.B., the Soviets’ notorious intelligence and security service.  They were on a mission to find a particularly nasty strain of smallpox, which they did in 1967, bringing the super-sub-strain—known as India-1 or India-1967—back to the Soviet Union with them.  This sub-strain was a far more virulent and stable sub-strain than other strains of variola major (already the far deadlier of two main smallpox strains, the weaker one being variola minor) and one that has a far shorter incubation period and was harder to diagnose, making it ideal for bioweapons relative to existing variola major stockpiles the Soviets had at the time.  Within a few years, India-1 was their flagship strain for smallpox bioweapons, with twenty tons of it being produced every year to keep it as fresh and deadly as possible. 

The K.G.B has used the well-intentioned Eradication program as a cover to find the raw materials for a nightmare bioweapon, and it succeeded in keeping this secret from the West for two decades, during which it carried out intense research, development, and testing with the sub-strain.

We should still be thankful for the visionaries and dedicated health professionals from the Soviet Union who helped make Eradication a reality, and for the Soviet Government’s generous donations of enormous amounts of smallpox vaccine to fuel the effort.  The sincerity of these health workers should not be questioned. 

However, as is so often in the world, even where there are good actors and motives, there can be bad ones right alongside them, and this was the case with the Soviet Eradication effort.  As Preston notes:

We will never find an explanation…for the evils done by people against other people, or for the love that drove the doctors to bring smallpox to an end.  Yet after all they had done, we still held smallpox in our hands, with a grip of death that would never let it go.  All I knew was that the dream of total eradication had failed.  The virus’s last strategy for survival was to bewitch its host and become a source of power.  We could eradicate smallpox from nature, but we could not uproot the virus from the human heart.

2020: A Year of Threat Convergences

If we jump forward to Italy now during its terrible coronavirus outbreak, we may be seeing a repeat of history.

As noted earlier, Italy was requesting U.S. assistance from our troops stationed there since World War II because we had not been proactive in offering help to our beleaguered NATO ally.  But President Vladimir Putin of Russia beat us to the punch, embarrassingly preempting significant U.S. military aid by nearly a month and one-upping us in a public relations nightmare by sending a military medical aid convoy to Italy, to much Russian fanfare and broadcast constantly with gusto by Russian media to the rest of the world.  The mission was dubbed “From Russia with Love” (sharing a title with one of the most famous James Bond films and novels) with that phrase written in Italian on a graphic of two hearts—one colored in the colors Russia’s flag, one in Italy’s—placed on the Russian military vehicles delivering the aid.  “From Russia with Love” was also, tellingly, written on the graphic in English above the Italian even though the aid was being delivered to Italy.  In the wider context of the geopolitical tug-of-war for Europe between Russia and the U.S., Russia scored another win, again beating the U.S. in a form of unconventional, asymmetric warfare.

But not all was as advertised.

The highly respected Italian daily La Stampa—one of Italy’s oldest newspapers—did some digging, and found that, according to anonymous Italian government officials, the aid Russia sent was not particularly helpful and the whole effort was more about public-relations and an effort to undermine NATO, with one official saying that “Eighty percent of Russian supplies are totally useless or of little use to Italy” and two Italian military officials echoing that sentiment. 

Unsurprisingly, the Russian Defence Ministry directly attacked and seemed to threaten La Stampa and the journalist behind the story, Jacopo Iacoboni, calling his story “fake news,” making sure to post the smear in English.  Even in this delicate situation, the Italian Defense and Foreign Affairs Ministries, while thanking Russia for its aid, condemned the Russian Defence Ministry’s attacks on the Italian free press.  The mission is now winding down, seemingly not having been very effective.

The disinformational, propagandistic aspects of the whole operation only became more evident when Italy revealed that it had received only 150 ventilators from Russia (not the 600 the Russian Ambassador to Italy claimed) and mysterious WhatsApp groups surfaced offering 200 euros to Italians to make and post videos praising the Russian “aid” effort on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (less but still some money for posts with just text).

Along with the aid, Russia sent over 120 of its top officers from one of Russia’s main Radiological, Chemical and Biological Weapons Defense (RChBD) military units.  If one buys Russia’s stated aim for this outing, it is somewhat strange that it sent biowarfare specialists to Italy, which is supposed to have some of the best personnel, equipment, and expertise in when it comes to nuclear, biological, and chemical unit capacities.  The unit is also suspiciously being led in Gen. Sergey Kikot, the number-two commander of all of Russia’s RChBD forces.

Gen. Kikot is perhaps most famous internationally for being one of Russia’s most prominent disinformationists and apologists for Assad’s regime as part of Russia’s overall Syria disinformation operations and support for Assad, with Kikot issuing strong denials that Assad used chemical weapons against his own people and that the White Helmets—the brave Syrian civilian volunteers who try to save other civilians in the immediate aftermath of Syrian regime and Russian military attacks—were staging fake footage of such attacks, absurd statements which have gone against the findings of NATO allies, experts, human rights groups, and watchdogs, including the United Nations-associated Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the chief international chemical weapons inspections authority.

It would be unthinkable in this kind of a situation for there not to be intelligence officers from Russia’s military intelligence branch, the G.R.U., embedded within Russia’s unit in Italy.  In this case, being deployed in a NATO country during a pandemic is an invaluable opportunity for intelligence collection and even for intelligence operations. 

But it is also worth noting that the G.R.U. is often the tip of Putin’s spear in both the Kremlin’s conventional and unconventional operations.  The G.R.U. has been active on the ground in Russia’s invasion, occupation, and illegal annexation of Crimea and its support for rebels in Eastern Ukraine.  It also has had its commandos—Russia’s elite Spetsnaz special forces—play important roles on the battlefield in Syria, including in Aleppo and Palmyra; it was even overseeing the Russian mercenaries who attacked a joint U.S.-S.D.F. position in Syria in February, 2018.  Furthermore, the G.R.U. has been one of Putin’s point organizations in his war on Western democracy, engaging in cyberwarfare, destabilization, and disinformation efforts against NATO countries in Europe and other U.S. allies, in addition to its infamous efforts against the U.S. during the 2016 election (what I have called the First Russo-American Cyberwar). 

But when thinking about why elite Russian biowarfare specialists and G.R.U. intelligence operatives would be in Italy, we should perhaps think less about 2016 and more about 1967, when the K.G.B. accompanied medical teams to India during the Smallpox Eradication Program.

The G.R.U. is one of the successor agencies to the K.G.B.

It is uncertain what all the precise activity the Russian biowarfare units and any G.R.U. operatives in Italy have been up to, but this scenario seems awfully familiar.  Whatever their purpose, this whole episode should serve as a reminder of the ability of the Russians to see unconventional opportunities in all situations, including public health crises, and to reinforce how unprepared we are in general to stand up to such efforts.  Years from now, we hopefully will not be caught off guard if we discover the Russians have engineered some sort of supercoronavirus, nor, on a far simpler level, allow Russia or another rival to upstage our efforts to assist our allies and friends abroad during a pandemic.

We also must hope that we are better prepared here at home in a far deeper sense than adding to and reorganizing our federal government’s organizational chart.  My soon-to-be-released proposal for a Cabinet-level Department of Pandemic Preparedness and Response would be a major leap forward in a big-picture national policy sense, but there is so much more that needs to be done throughout our society.  For it was not just our government that failed us, but different aspects of our media, our business sector, our religious institutions across faiths, celebrities and various other elites, plenty of rank-and-file Americans along with them, our very culture itself.  And it is the societal failings that are embedded deep in our society that have not only been major factors in making our response to COVID-19 so shockingly poor, but have also have contributed significantly to many of our failures in unconventional, asymmetric warfare over decades.  It is those societal failings that were so brilliantly exploited by Russia in 2016, too, but Russia has also used our weaknesses to help amplify and perpetuate our failing coronavirus response, finding plenty of existing conspiracy theories, mistrust, and hate in America to amplify and plenty of Americans willing to believe and peddle Russia’s own false narratives, whether in 2016 or today in our current coronavirus climate.

In other words, at each step of the way, millions of Americans were gleefully along for the ride, the very definitions of useful idiots, taking Russia’s disinformation and making it their misinformation.  That is happening even now, in our 2020 election.

Putin is himself former K.G.B., and part of his genius is that he and his intelligence-crowd’s longstanding K.G.B.-inspired techniques accurately assessed our domestic weaknesses, figuring out how to magnify many of them with their own operations in a variety of settings, from elections to pandemics: they look for anything and anyone that will help divide America and make us weaker, with this pandemic just being a “gift” of an opportunity for the Kremlin.

America certainly had its own strains of ignorance without any Russian meddling (to quote the great J. G. A. Pocock, “it is notorious that American culture is haunted by myths, many of which arise out of the attempt to escape history and then regenerate it”), but Russian disinformation and cyberwarfare thrives on this ignorance.  As part of Moscow’s campaign to knowingly falsely blame the U.S. for a multitude of things—from the downing of civilian airliner MH17 (shot down over Ukraine in 2014 by a Russian missile given by Russia to pro-Russian Ukrainian separatists_ to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the then-Soviet Union—Russia is now blaming the U.S. for engineering the coronavirus as a bioweapon (or sometimes 5G is to blame; yeah, the Russians are a huge part of that, too).  This follows similar efforts to blame the U.S. for spreading Ebola, HIV/AIDS, even swine flu.  The Kremlin has also been boosting America’s dangerous anti-vaxxer movement.  Overall, when it comes to health, Russia has engaged in campaigns to stoke Americans’ fears of diseases, make us more susceptible to disease, and weaken our overall trust in U.S. healthcare and medical expertise, trust that is essential for any kind of response to a public health crisis in a democracy to be effective.

The same organs of disinformation behind Russia’s “firehose of falsehood” (to quote a RAND report) for all recent disinformation campaigns are being utilized in this latest coronavirus campaign, and, like the other campaigns, it is achieving results: a recent Pew study showed that close to a third of Americans believe in the totally unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that coronavirus was man-made in some sort of lab and is not natural, with one quarter saying they are not sure either way.  To be fair, top elements of the Trump Administration are pushing an unfounded conspiracy theory that the new coronavirus was created in a Chinese lab in Wuhan, where the outbreak originated, and China has been joining Russia in promoting the idea that the U.S. is behind the virus.  While the survey does not specify where the virus originated or who was behind it, the right-wing in America has been pushing the Chinese lab theory and, as noted earlier, anti-Semitic explanations and sentiments regarding the virus.  The Chinese lab theory is now favored by the president himself, along with Sec. of State Mike Pompeo and top Trump trade and China advisor Peter Navarro.  Apart from numerous and varied other widespread disinformation campaigns and misinformation vectors, very active and present Russian disinformation still makes up an important portion of the overall disinformation being bandied about, contributing to an overall atmosphere of conspiracy, distrust, confusion, fear, and just plain bad information, casting doubt and adding more non-reality based noise to the conversation, so regardless of whether Americans—who are being widely exposed to these conspiracy theories—are convinced by Russian propaganda or not that the U.S. that “created” the virus, the Russian efforts still contribute substantially to a deteriorating informational climate.  Specifically, these efforts further feed an atmosphere suggesting specifically that coronavirus was created in a lab somewhere while generally helping to saturate that atmosphere with bad information, muddying the waters and obfuscating the truth for many Americans.   It certainly does not help that the top current U.S. political leaders and many lower-level politicians in addition to media outlets in the country are embracing similar false theories even if the culprits “making” the virus vary.  And three other factors serve as additional amplifiers poisoning the atmosphere here: that Americans are increasingly subscribing to fantastical conspiracy theories in general, that conspiracy theories are more attractive and powerful in times of crisis, and that studies confirm a large portion of Americans are simply bad at discerning fact from fiction and are easily confused.

These dynamics are as good as any at illustrating how Russian efforts and homegrown efforts and attitudes play together like a symphony orchestra performance conducted by Putin to play to his ends.  The last concert he conducted, with his Kremlin Symphony Orchestra performing original Putin works, did not go very well for us, and this new one could very well be worse.

In the midst of Russia’s coronavirus disinformation and 2020 election interference efforts targeting the U.S., as another example of both ends feeding into Russian interests, the Trump Administration allowed Russia—even as a hostile actor—to deliver coronavirus aid to us on American soil in a publicized way, a shocking yet par-for-the-course act for the current administration. 

And so Russia keeps up its public relations stunts and disinformation, hoping to deflect attention from incriminating events at home as coronavirus infections soar to make Russia alternate with Brazil as the third and second-most infected country in the world even by the official numbers, with the reality being that there are virtually certainly government efforts to suppress a far grimmer actual toll (some medical staff are reportedly being instructed not to record coronavirus deaths as caused by coronavirus).  There have even been three Russian medical professionals questioning or distraught by Russia’s coronavirus response who “fell” out of windows in just two weeks, two dying and one critically injured; such “accidents” or worse tend to befall a wide variety or whistleblowers, journalists, critics of the Putin, and others Putin wants to make disappear.

What will not disappear are the threats posed by Russian disinformation, cyberwarfare, election interference, and the Kremlin’s undisclosed biowarfare program.

Unless the U.S. has since obtained direct and continued intelligence on the exact nature of the genetically engineered strains and man-made Frankenstein viruses described by top defectors—highly unlikely—it is almost certain that the U.S. would be defenseless against such bioagents deliberately designed to overcome existing vaccines, medicine, and treatment.  Looking at how much coronavirus has crippled the U.S., if America was not able to work on specific remedies designed to counter these Russian superagents by directly studying them over time directly and rigorously testing biodefense measures—new vaccines, medicine—against these new agents, it would be impossible for us to come up with anything that could effectively protect Americans from them, let alone have the remedies mass-manufactured and ready for distribution and safe usage.  A first strike with such weapons would likely be the only strike necessary to incapacitate most of America’s defenses and to destroy America as we know it.  As discussed, apocalyptic-minded bioterrorists would be more likely to use a nightmare bioweapon.  Yet however unlikely such a strike from a state like Russia would be, being ill-prepared will only increase that likelihood.

The current international Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) treaty prohibiting offensive bioweapons and related research—to which Russia is a signatory—is a legal one, but without any verification or control mechanisms.  We must absolutely have a more forceful international bioweapons inspections system and use all peaceful means to force Russia into compliance.  Ideally, this would be through the United Nations, except Russia will clearly veto such binding frameworks and resolutions, or, even if it did not, would surely veto any Security Council efforts to specifically hold Russia to account or to submit to and/or comply with robust inspections.  It will instead fall on the U.S., Canada, the EU, Japan, and other allied and like-minded nations to collectively impose their own sanctions on Russia to force compliance or demonstrate a stiff economic price for non-compliance, much like was the case after Russia’s invasions of Ukraine’s eastern and Crimean regions.  Setting an example with Russia would set a proper tone for the unfolding century, and other rogue states would also see the costs of pursuing bioweapons and be more inclined to play by the rules if Russia is brought to heel.  And each state that is brought to heel can be part of a mandatory coalition to combat bioterrorism as part of their respective arrangements, with the BWC being rewritten to include robust counterbioterrorism provisions and severe penalties for supporting or failing to act against bioterrorism or for failing to properly secure sensitive materials involving deadly disease research.

A Collective Responsibility to Do Better

The actions suggested just above constitute dealing with unconventional, asymmetric warfare at the highest levels.

But the lowest levels are just as important.

We must also deal with our societal ills that make us so susceptible to disinformation, Russian or otherwise.  To a significant degree, preparing for unconventional, asymmetric information warfare and cyberwarfare also prepares us for pandemics, biowarfare, and bioterrorism: at the core of each is a willingness to defer to experts and to cultivate our minds to be able to properly vet what is coming from a position of factual vetting and properly understanding who and what is targeting us to take advantage of our weaknesses, biases, and predispositions.  Leaving our minds susceptible to disinformation and misinformation—whether it is about our elections and candidates or our public health system and information on a deadly disease—is like allowing our computer networks to go without security software, allowing our enemies to manipulate us and take advantage of our weaknesses to weaken our nation.  Thus, whether dealing with coronavirus, bioweapons, or Russian disinformation, taking concrete steps to tackle one will often pay off in our fight against the others.  And we have little reason to doubt that Russia will integrate coronavirus into its ambitious 2020 election interference—or, more aptly termed, Second Russo-American Cyberwar—or doubt that Russia is looking at and developing ways to turn coronavirus into a bioweapon as it did with smallpox and so many other bioagents in the past. 

Hence, biosecurity, disinformation security, and election security come together as part of the larger unconventional, asymmetric landscape.

In her conclusion to her must-read article “Disinformation, Democracy, and the Rule of Law,” former FBI counterintelligence agent and current Yale University senior lecturer on national security Asha Rangappa notes the complex, multidimensional aspects of Russia’s unconventional, asymmetric warfare against the United States:

Much of the public discussion on Russia’s disinformation operations in the U.S. has focused on their impact on the 2016 election and how they might affect elections in the future.  But the damage that Russia seeks to inflict through its disinformation campaign isn’t limited to electoral contests.  Rather, its long-term strategy has been to erode faith in the primary pillars upon which our democracy is based—including the rule of law and the institutions that support it.  So far, Russia’s efforts are yielding fruit, and technological and legislative fixes alone will be insufficient to counter them.  Defending against Russian disinformation in the long term will require a strategy to fortify America’s social fabric with an understanding of shared civic values that can serve as a prophylactic against Russia’s future attacks. 

She makes it all too clear that the government alone cannot save us from the manipulations of Russia’s disinformation and other techniques of division:

The framing of the Russian disinformation threat as a cybersecurity issue makes it tempting to look to the government, or to social media companies, to fix the problem. Regulatory and technological solutions are needed, and may well make it harder for Russia to employ the kinds of information warfare that it used in 2016.  But they will not address the fundamental vulnerability which Russia successfully exploited, which is the increasing social and political fissures in society and the resulting erosion of social trust in the U.S. over the past decades.

As a solution, Rangappa exhorts us to shore up the American weaknesses Russia exploits with a rebirth and renewal of citizenship, community, and civic life:

A model to rebuild social capital in America—and strengthen social trust—can feel unsatisfying, since it is intangible, difficult to measure, and disperses responsibility on us, as citizens.  At the same time, however, it can be empowering, as it offers a way for Americans to take ownership of a large part of the solution.  Russia’s attack on our democracy is an invitation for us to examine our relationship with fellow citizens, and how technology has affected the way we engage with them online and in real life.  By reclaiming democratic values that transcend political differences, and leveraging the most effective vehicles we have to disseminate them (including social media!), the U.S. can generate an immunity to Russia’s destabilization efforts which will endure over the long term.

In the syllabus for one of her classes that is very much an extension of her essay, Professor Rangappa provides a road map for the way forward with a robust list of materials, including:

1. Orwell’s legendary 1984 (to help bolster our defenses against not only totalitarianism and groupthink but also Orwellian disinformation and the manipulation of language so endemic in its use by troublemakers both at home and abroad)
2. The singular de Tocqueville’s ever-relevant, ever-insightful, ever-enduring Democracy in America (to understand our unique historical strengths and weaknesses and how they have factored into our democracy)
3. Amu Chua’s Political Tribes, an account of American tribalism (a force that we must understand and fight against more effectively, as it is tearing our country apart)
4. Robert Putnam’s seminal Bowling Alone (to understand how important social capital and civic engagement are in creating and maintaining a strong society)
5. The documentary Active Measures (to properly understand the methods by which Putin is attacking and harming our democracy)
6. Schoolhouse Rock(the episodes on American government and history, to show how learning about civics can be fun and also appeal to young Americans)

Professor Rangappa’s cocktail of learning is a foundation for a national societal strategy:

1. Understand how anti-democratic forces work to distort reality and language, along with rewriting history, in a war on reality we have to win
2. Know ourselves from an objective perspective (the good, the bad, and the ugly)
3. Understand how corrosive our own tribalism in America is and how we can fight it even before taking into account foreign efforts to exploit it
4. Gain a newfound appreciation for social capital and civic engagement so that we can restructure society to prioritize these vital pillars of healthy democracy
5. Know our chief foreign enemy, Vladimir Putin, and his methods, as well as how and why he has been successful in damaging America
6. Remember how important it is to start with civics and understanding our history and system overall and at a young age so that we may revive our moribund civics curricula for all American students going forward

Ultimately, such a strategy and priority-resetting will help us revive and further realize our Founding Fathers’ vision for America.

Virtue, then, along with biodefense and information warfare, is also a national security issue.

If you are rolling your eyes a bit with the serious suggestion that “we as individuals must be better and do more,” know that this consideration of virtue was of primary concern to the Founding Fathers and many great men before and after them.  They might not have used the term “national security” the way we do and I just did, but it was still a primary national security issue for our Founders nonetheless.

Few have articulated this sentiment as well and with such authority, and perhaps none better, then James Madison himself—eventual fourth president and architect and overall author of the U.S. Constitution—when he was making the case to the public in 1788, in writing and anonymously, for the adoption of that Constitution in The Federalist, in “No. 55,” to be exact:

As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.  Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.  Were the pictures which have been drawn by the political jealousy of some among us faithful likenesses of the human character, the inference would be, that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.

In other words, “We the People” must be worthy enough as a people—enough of us individually so that it is true in a collective sense—or this whole democracy thing is not going to work out so well.

Yes, in the short term, we must act boldly at the highest levels of our government and international bodies to prepare for the next pandemic and our first major bioawarfare or bioterrorist attack.  But in the long-run, we must fix our ailing society which produced such an unconscionable, unforgivable response to the novel coronavirus in the first place.  And as ambitious as my Cabinet-level Department of Pandemic Preparedness and Response proposal will be demonstrated to be, it will be that second task that will be the far more challenging one.

Cassandra: Even then I told my people all the grief to come…

Aieeeee! —
the pain, the terror! the birth-pang of the seer 
who tells the truth — 
                                     it whirls me, oh, 
the storm comes again, the crashing chords!…

Leader[/Chorus]: Poor creature, you 
and the end you see so clearly. I pity you.

—Agamemnon, 1216-1344, by Aeschylus (458 BCE), Robert Fagles translation

Correction appended: Gen. Russel Honoré’s name was previously misspelled.

In the interest of full disclosure, Brian interned for Joe Biden from September-December, 2006. He is currently in no way professionally affiliated with the Biden 2020 campaign, nor is receiving any compensation from it nor the Democratic Party nor any related super-PACs, campaigns, or other political groups involved in the 2020 nominating contests and elections.

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

This article is also available to be read as five separate articles:

• 1-A Brief, Non-Comprehensive Survey of Bioweapons, Biowarfare, and Bioterrorism History in Light of the Coronavirus Pandemic
• 2-America’s History of Failure in Unconventional and Asymmetric Warfare Is Instructive for Our War with the Coronavirus
• 3-Why the Coronavirus Pandemic and America’s Disastrous Response Will Inspire Future Use of Bioweapons
• 4-The Harsh Truths Coronavirus Has Exposed
• 5-Coronavirus and History, Russia and Italy, the War for Reality, and the Nexus of It All

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981.  He also just recently authored A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia.

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Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse January 27, 2017

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter: @bfry1981) January 27th, 2017; original interview conducted December 24th-26th, 2017; here is the English version of the interview published by ISNA on January 24th, and here is the Farsi (Persian) version

Carolyn Kaster/AP

Iranian Student News Agency (interviewer: Atefeh Moradi): The US election has passed, but we can truly see the polarized atmosphere in American society; how do you anticipate the political and social situation after 20 Jan.?

Brian Frydenborg: To be honest, it will be pretty awful. 53.9% of voters chose a candidate other than Trump, including 48.2% for Secretary Clinton, to Trump’s 46.1% (f this seems strange, just look up Electoral College on the Internet, and you will see that American elections are based on voting majorities divided into specific regions, not an absolute national majority). Yet Trump and his party will control the White House and both houses of Congress (with a large majority in the House and a small majority in the Senate), as well as the federal judiciary once Trump starts making judicial appointments and getting them confirmed, including filling that all-important vacant Supreme Court seat. For at least the next two years and likely even a longer period, this means almost 54% of Americans who voted will have no real power to check President Trump and his Republican Party from enacting an agenda they very forcefully do not support.

The one real exception to this is the filibuster, a Senate rule that, on most issues, allows the minority to prevent passage of something that cannot get at least 60 of 100 senators to support it; however, each new Congress can make its own rules, and Republicans will have the power to get rid of the filibuster if they choose to do so, which would become increasingly likely if Democrats use it block Trump’s and the Republicans’ agenda. If this happens, the Democrats lose their one way to check Trump independent of any help from Republicans, and, thus, will be powerless if Republicans stay united. Yes, in some ways, the Republican Party has not been this divided since the 1960s, but if one looks closer, this is not the case: while conservative public intellectuals and publications, many former Republicans officials (including both living former Republican presidents), and numbers of important major Republican political donors and fundraisers either privately or publicly oppose Trump, this is a tiny elite within the scope of the party as a whole; only a handful of senators and a small portion of Republican representatives in Congress consistently and publicly opposed Trump; nearly the entire Republican membership of Congress either supported Trump or dared not opposed him, and with the megaphone of the presidency on top of his Twitter-following of nearly 18 million people, Trump will be seeking to loudly intimidate any opposition, whether within his own party or not, and those within his own party will be highly vulnerable to this pressure as Trump can easily use it to rouse his followers. The political stalemate of the last six years will end as one party, led by Trump more than anyone else, will control the highest levels of the entire federal government.

What this means is that the nearly-54% will certainly see many of their hopes dashed and their fears realized, in particular women and minorities like African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans who have been subject to abuse of power by the private sector and the government at the local, state, and federal level. A Trump Administration seems poised to either stop actively protecting these groups from abuses with any vigor at the least, or to actively undermine some of the protections and gains they have enjoyed in civil rights that have been enacted in recent years. Either way, racial, ethnic, and religious tensions that have been simmering and occasionally exploding into riots and violent attacks over the past few years in America are likely to get dramatically worse under Trump and serious civil unrest is a real possibility; this will especially be the case if Trump keeps acting the way he has been, which is to say, in ways that do nothing to assure groups fearful of a Trump presidency that they will be respected and have their needs and concerns addressed seriously.

ISNA:Some analysts believe Trump campaign’s rhetoric is not the cornerstone of his policies, what would be your stance toward this?

BF: I would call this out as wishful thinking. While Trump’s stated positions have shifted so many times it’s been easy to lose count, his rhetoric and his style have stayed fairly consistent, and the overall content of his rhetoric makes it clear that many of his harsher policies are going to be pursued with vigor; any doubt about this should have been erased by his cabinet picks announced thus far. Even if he ends up enacting a milder form of some of what he has discussed, such policies will still be game-changers and move the country sharply to the right policy-wise. But as a practical matter, his supporters—and, within the Republican Party’s group of elected officials, a strong core of the Republican House members—will insist that he carries out his promises, and Trump, ever so needful of admiration and validation, won’t want to disappoint his biggest fans. So his constituents and counterparts in Congress will make it hard for him to backtrack, even if he wants to, which on most issues he probably does not. 

ISNA: In regard with Trump’s cabinet nominees, can you anticipate the upcoming Washington policies?

BF: The best sign that Trump might move into a “governing mode” and power down his “campaign mode” would have been putting moderate people who could unite the country into key positions of power, most notably selecting either Mitt Romney or David Petraeus as Secretary of State. By picking big-oil CEO Rex Tillerson (a Putin ally) as Secretary of State, but also along with virtually all of his other choices, Trump made it clear he has no intention of generally pursuing a more moderate course. Instead, he has assembled the most extreme and most right-wing cabinet and White House in American presidential history. A simple look at his choices and their records make this beyond dispute, so there should be no confusion as to what to expect from them. In several agencies—the Department of Energy, the Department of Education, the Department of Labor, and the Environmental Protection Agency—Trump even appointed people who don’t believe in the agencies core missions or are downright hostile to them. Others, like Dr. Ben Carson for the Department of Housing and Urban Development and Nikki Haley for Ambassador to the United Nations, are supremely unqualified; still others like Trump’s National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and Ambassador to Israel David Friedman are outright extremists. And those who will be running the economy hail from the billionaire class. So those who are saying “Let’s wait and see…” are deluding themselves if they mean in any way to imply that a moderate course is a possibility and that moderates and liberals should not jump to conclusions: Trump’s behavior, actions, and selections are sending a clear message that would be foolish not to acknowledge.

ISNA: The US nuclear suitcase is in Trump’s hands now, do you think there should be any doubt about it?

BF: Let’s put it this way: should we think Trump would use nuclear weapons for fun or just on a whim? No. But the man’s character and temperament are so vastly different from every single president before him, and unsuited to the responsibility of the decision to use or not use nuclear weapons, that if a crisis with a major power like China erupted, I would be worried to have Trump as a Commander in Chief. If one recalls the Cuban Missile Crisis, WWIII and nuclear war were avoided because the cooler heads of both Kennedy and Khrushchev prevailed; the only way the phrase “cooler head” and the word “Trump” can fit into the same sentence is with satire. So if a truly grave situation did emerge, yes, we should be worried that Trump would be more likely to both threaten and use nuclear weapons than any previous American president in a similar situation. As it is, Trump is already calling for America to expand its nuclear arsenal, and the last thing that is good for the world now is a new nuclear arms race.  

This, in particular, concerns Iran, and Iran is in a tough position. Should Iran resume uranium enrichment because Trump follows through on his pledge to end the nuclear agreement from the U.S. side between the great powers and Iran, this would likely cause two things to occur: 1.) an attempt by Saudi Arabia to develop a nuclear program of its own, and perhaps Turkey, maybe even others, and 2.) an Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear facilities that would likely be supported or joined by a Trump Administration, sparking a wider war in the Middle East, likely between the U.S. and Sunni-led powers on one side and Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon in one form or another on the other. Yemen and Bahrain could easily become battlegrounds, and there is reason to consider as a serious possibility Russia joining or at least supporting the Shiite side, as Russia now already has something of an alliance with Iran, Hezbollah, and the Syrian Government through Syria’s Civil War.

ISNA: Trump repeatedly said that he is not for JCPOA [the Iran nuclear deal], although EU senior officials say it is beyond Trump’s authority to make any changes to this agreement; what would be your explanation on this issue?

BF: Trump can definitely end U.S. participation in the agreement, and can get Congress reapply the sanctions that were removed as part of it (these are separate from the current sanctions regarding military and terrorism issues). Would it be fair if Trump broke the agreement with Iran? No. Would it be understandable, even justified, for Iran to resume uranium enrichment under those circumstances? Of course. Yet sometimes, what you have the right and ability to do isn’t always the right choice, and the question Iran’s leaders will have to really ask themselves is this: is it really in Iranian interests to do so? Because if it does, the possibility of an Israeli strike—however unjustified or justified, leaving that question out it—supported or even joined by the U.S. becomes highly likely, and that is a situation that will be no good for Iran and Shiites all around the Middle East, especially those who are living under oppressive Sunni governments, or for the Middle East in general, not good at all. It will result in large losses of life and perhaps catastrophic economic and physical destruction.

Sometimes, leadership is about swallowing pride and being able to absorb verbal and diplomatic abuse (in this case, coming from a Trump Administration) than it is about confrontation and conflict, even if one feels one’s cause is just. Peace is its own reward and there are a number of outcomes that can be good for Iran that do not involve uranium enrichment. For one thing, after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and watching the Arab Spring churn largely into chaos, destruction, and death, there is virtually no appetite in the U.S. for a war that would involve overthrowing Iran’s government and occupying Iran with American troops; thus, should Iran seek nuclear weapons capability as a way to prevent a U.S. invasion and the overthrow of Iran’s own government, it is trying to prevent something that in all likelihood will not be happening, yet the pursuit of such a goal would be ruinous for Iran, as plenty of military options for the Israel and the U.S. exist, with their superior air forces, that do not involve an invasion or overthrowing the Iranian government.

For another thing, if Trump cancels the agreement and Iran does not resume enrichment, the moral high ground on this issue (apart from other considerations) will be incredibly strong for Iran, and the pressure on Trump and the U.S. from the rest of the world powers will be considerable, so great that the pressure the U.S. faces could be severe and beyond verbal, and if Trump initiates major trade wars with countries like China and Mexico, sanctions against the U.S. for violating the agreement would be even greater possibility that they would otherwise, though not necessarily likely. If Iran can resist the temptation and behave more responsibly than American leadership, the support from Europe, Russia, and China would be that much greater. And, ultimately, those nations are doing far more business with Iran than the U.S. In the end, the temptation to resume enrichment would be great, and nobody likes to undergo that level of pressure, but the longer-term interests of Iran, and the lives of the Iranian people, will be much better served by not pursuing such a course. If Trump behaves poorly and Iran conducts itself with restraint, the stature of Iran in worldwide diplomatic circles will only increase, with a deeper level of respect than it currently enjoys. It Iran tried to match Trump taunt for taunt, insult for insult, threat for threat—as some of his former Republican rivals tried to do—Iran will only be seen as more like Trump than as conducting itself in a more dignified manner, and Trump’s Republican rivals show there is no out-Trumping Trump: if there is one thing the Republican primaries taught us, it is that Trump always wins when his opponents sink to his level. Finally, Iran can know that many American people will appreciate this restraint, and should politics shift and Democrats make a comeback, new people who noted Iran’s praise-worthy restraint would be empowered by such restraint to improve U.S.-Iranian relations and support Iran should it pursue policies that defuse tensions and further peace.

ISNA: And finally, do you believe amid tensions which still are in the two countries’ relationship, especially regarding US sanctions and Iran’s nuclear program, and that so far have not vanished as was predicted after JCPOA, that it would be possible that Iran and US could be better friends rather than enemies?

BF: Well, the relevant nuclear-related sanctions have been removed by the Obama Administration; other sanctions related to other matters are separate issues. But to whether Iran and the U.S. make better friends than enemies, of course we make better friends. It just becomes much harder with Trump and the Republican Party running America’s foreign policy, and especially if the sanctions that have been removed by Obama are reimposed by Trump. Clinton would have been tough, but fair, with Iran: she would have honored the JCPOA, and have used that a basis to work for breakthroughs with Iran on Syria, Iraq, Israel, and other regional issues; such work might have led to the lifting of other non-nuclear sanctions. I have always believed that Iran and the U.S. have plenty of issues with which they can find enthusiastic agreement. And I think it’s overdue for a grand ayatollah to come to Washington and for a president to go to Tehran.

And yet, the biggest obstacle to having the JCPOA become a springboard for further cooperation thus far has been Syria. I’ve personally been disappointed in Iran’s actions when it comes to Syria. As old as the concept and word “terrorism” has been around, it has been used by oppressive leaders as an excuse to crush opposition and impose iron-fisted rule. This can be the case if there is no actual terrorism or, in the case of Syria, if there is very real terrorism, even the worst in the world. Iran has good reason to fear Sunni extremist terrorism from the likes of ISIS and al-Qaeda, but one can stand against terrorism while also condemning the slaughter of Syria’s people on a massive scale by the Assad government. I understand and respect that Assad is an Alawite and that Alawites are religious cousins of Iran’s Shiites, but history will judge Iran for its support of Assad and Russia’s assault on large segments of Syria’s civilian population, not just terrorists. Even with ISIS in charge of Mosul, with the Iraqi Army having the U.S. as an ally and behaving in a relatively restrained way towards civilians, look at how much worse the civilian killings and refugee situation is for Aleppo with the Syrian forces’ assault backed by Russia (it is interesting that Iran has advisors, forces, and/or militias involved in both operations, and can easily tell the differences in the conduct and brutality of the operations for themselves even if it does not acknowledge these differences publicly). In particular, I was saddened that Iran did not forcefully condemn Assad’s relatively larger-scale use of chemical weapons against his own people back in the fall of 2013, because I know how horribly Iranians and suffered when Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons in an even more massive way against Iran during the Iran-Iraq war, with the support and cover-up of the Reagan Administration, one of America’s most shameful acts.

Thus, I was hoping that Iran could be the conscience of the Assad regime since it is clear that Assad and Putin have almost none when it comes to Syria’s people. Imagine if Iran was seen not only to be a protector of Shiites, but also of Sunnis in Syria? I still believe that Iran can act within Syria as a force to reduce the brutality and killing of the civil war, something very clearly in line with more mainstream Islamic teachings since the time of the Prophet Muhammed himself, who during war generally urged humane treatment over brutality (after all, the very first verse of the Quran refers to Allah by the title of “the Merciful,”) and to act to push against Assad’s government’s and Russia’s military’s acts of indiscriminate killing.  

If Iran were to ensure that Assad, if(?)/when(?) victorious, shows mercy and takes great care to protect civilians, Iran can play the most constructive role of any power in Syria given the present realities, eclipsing Russia, Turkey, the Gulf, and the West (including the U.S.) in helping to make a humanitarian difference and saves lives. It is beneath the dignity of Iran to be an accomplice in the abuses of Assad against his own people, and Iran can be more than just a no-questions-asked ally like Russia, which is even taking part in the mass killings with its air force and heavy weapons. While Iran’s own government has its issues with human rights, it has never done anything to its own people that rises to Assad’s level of brutality, even in the suppressions that followed the end of the 1979 Iranian Revolution; during the run-up the Revolution, the Shah, too, did not even come close to Assad’s current levels of mass murder. 

Part of the spirit of the Iranian Revolution was originally one of standing up to oppression; for Iran to be true to itself and its ideals, it must work to help alleviate the suffering of Syria’s people, not just Alawite, but Sunnis, too, Kurds, and all of Syria’s people, especially to protect civilians at the mercy of Assad’s government and Russia’s air force who have been shown no mercy or next to none. With its troops on the ground and its close ally Hezbollah heavily involved in fighting in Syria on Assad’s behalf, and with Assad’s own official forces so heavily depleted, Iran is in the best position to do something about human rights and saving lives in Syria. If it does so clearly, visibly, and verifiably under international observers, it will win hearts and minds all over the West and the Sunni world, in addition to the Shiite world. 

If it helps Assad kill genocidal or near-genocidal-numbers of Syrians and turns a blind eye to this reality, it will be behaving just like Russia is now and like Saddam Hussein behaved in Iraq, and far crueler than the Shah. I believe Iran can be better than this, and if that happens, maybe not under Trump, but eventually the American government will show substantive appreciation for such actions of protection and mercy, along with the rest of the world community. But right now, with the world horrified not just by ISIS (and rightfully so) but also by the Assad government’s actions in Syria and especially Aleppo (and rightfully so), Iran is associated with this killing in Syria and it makes it harder for the West to proceed on negotiating with Iran when it comes to other issues, negotiations that may lead to the removal of non-nuclear sanctions. In fact, Iran turning a blind eye to mass killing in Syria makes it that much harder for other regional partners to trust it in working to find common ground on and resolutions to other important Middle Eastern issues.

Any who doubt that Iran and the U.S. can find common ground should look only to the crisis with former-Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki from 2014, when the Obama Administration, Iran, Iraq’s Shiite political establishment, and Shiite religious leaders in both Iran and Iraq came together to insist the divisive Maliki step aside to give new, less divisive leadership a chance, giving eventual rise to the far more accommodating team of Dr. Haider al-Abadi (more on that in my article here). Iraqi, Iranian, and American interests are all better-off as a result, and especially the Iraqi people, thus proving American-Iranian cooperation can bring about positive change to the region. 

Ironically, the Trump Administration will be far less concerned about human rights than other recent American administrations and is seeking to come together with Russia, which makes Iran’s respect for human rights all the more important when it comes to Syria. I can say one thing: to be seen coming together with Putin and Trump in working against human rights and ganging up against Sunnis will not raise Iran’s standing globally, nor will it make things better for the people of the Middle East, whether they are Shiite, Sunni, or of other faiths; the last thing that is in Iran’s and the region’s interests is a worsening of the Sunni-Shiite conflict already playing out across the region. With the rise of Trump, Iran has a unique chance to be a champion of human rights, peace, and mercy in a region where now even fewer powers are acting towards those ends. I hope Iran’s leaders and people together see that this is a great opportunity for them, even in spite of the many challenges, some unfair, Iran may face in choosing such a course. But the right course is often not the easiest, as the lives of the Prophet Muhammad and the major Shiite Imams Ali and Hussain, so revered by Iranians, amply demonstrate.

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. 

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981), and here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content, or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse October 16, 2016 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) October 16th, 2016

Reuters/Jonathan Ernst

AMMAN — As much as the horror show of the second Clinton-Trump debate should bother us, on some levels the Pence-Kaine vice-presidential debate is more worrisome. I say this because that one has been acknowledged to be the more “normal” debate, and should remind us all of how dysfunctional our system is even without Trump and his candidacy. But, because of that, it is also one of the more instructive moments of this campaign season, even though the debate happened almost two weeks ago; in fact, its lessons’ importance do not dim with the passage of time, but only increase, and will be relevant for the foreseeable future.

See, the thing about the now-generally-spineless Republican Party elected officials is that we can see the next episode, should Trump lose, with breathtaking clarity: “WE REPUBLICANS LOST BECAUSE OF TRUMP. BLAME HIM. WE ACCEPT NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR WHAT HAPPENED BECAUSE WE ARE 100% FREE FROM ALL BLAME AND 100% OF THE BLAME IS ON TRUMP,” they will spout piously. But the largely uninspiring Pence-Kaine debate easily disproves that; it shows what is wrong with the Republican Party, it shows much of what’s wrong with our political system in general, and it even reminds us how thin the Democratic Party’s bench is.

What the VP Debate Told Us About Democrats

Now, a brief note on the issues with the Democrats before getting into the meatier awfulness of the other two topics. 

First, don’t get me wrong: I like Tim Kaine, and though I was at first disheartened by the pick of another white male, I knew Elizabeth Warren would have been a disaster in repelling centrist voters and in making it an all-female ticket (nothing wrong with that for me but America is still a backwards country), and I was really hot for Julián Castro and would also have been excited by Corey Booker, but after I watched Kaine speak once he was picked and learned more about him, I chided myself for wanting to be “excited” and realized that Clinton was right to pick Kaine, who had far more experience and who could credibly be said to be ready to be president more than most (and certainly far more than the younger and inexperienced Castro and Booker, give them time for goodness sakes! Patience!!); I realized my expectations as a liberal should not outweigh an ability to appeal to swing voters who are not as liberal as I am and to be ready to be Commander-in-Chief should disaster strike.  

In the debate, Kaine deserves some credit for acting like a kamikaze pilot aimed right at Trump: at the expense of his own favorability, he kept the focus on Trump throughout the debate even though it meant a “loss” to the man with whom he shared the stage, Mike Pence: suicide mission accomplished, Sen; Kaine. But on other levels, Kaine was lacking: he stumbled over his words more than a few times, his delivery was off, his attempts at humor fell flat. More than anything else, Kaine’s very presence was a reminder how thin the Democratic bench is, even if the Republican Bench is unquestionably weaker, especially in terms of substance. I remember thinking when Ted Kennedy died—the Last Lion of the Senate—there was no one else even close to him except perhaps for Biden, now aging and in the twilight of his political career. The Lionesses of the senate—Barbara Mikulski and Barbara Boxer—are both retiring this year, with only Dianne Feinstein left in their class, though Claire McCaskill can be said to be a good person to soon be of similar stature.  And Warren, whom I also like, is admittedly mostly talk and to the left of most Americans and is therefore not a viable national candidate for the same reasons Bernie Sanders is not. In the House, Nancy Pelosi, John Lewis, Elijah Cummings, Jim Clyburn, and other elder statesman will continue to serve well there, but that’s pretty much it for them as far as their career, and for the House. Booker and Castro are exciting, but that is a list of two people.

What the VP Debate Told Us About Republicans

Bench

As for the Republican bench, it was eviscerated by the one-two combination of Donald Trump and actual Republican voters this primary season. Newer, supposedly up-and-coming stars like Sens. Rand Paul and Marco Rubio performed abysmally. Tom Cotton (who didn’t run) may have an appealing veteran background, but he, like many other GOP newcomers, is also an irrational extremist who will narrowly appeal to white male voters and few others in terms of demographics or gender, which, in the future, will not be a winning formula even if Trump shocked us all with how many legs this formula can still stand upon in 2016 with what at least convincingly seems like a Picket’s Charge last-gasp of American white ethno-nationalism.

GOP: Party of Fantasy

Now, as to the most serious problem… Especially on the Republican side, people were pining about possibly having the guy in the VP slot switch positions with the candidate on the top of the ticket. While that would spare us the possibility of a Trump cataclysm, it would, sadly, do nothing to alleviate the myriad problems facing our political system before Trump announced his candidacy. 

In fact, the Kaine-Pence debate reminded me of the Bush-Gore, Bush-Kerry debates from years past, minus all the personality and excitement; yes, these two came off blander than we thought was possible, but the recent debate was worse in so many ways. Back then, it seemed the two parties lived in alternate realities on many issues and couldn’t agree on basic facts about the state of the world they cohabited. Today, those divisions are only more pronounced and cover even more issues than before, making the partisanship of the Bush and early Obama years seem almost quaint in comparison.

During the W. Bush years, no mainstream Democrat argued that Bush was responsible for or created al-Qaeda. Sure, there was fair criticism that Bush’s policies were counterproductive and incited and enabled more terrorism—an objectively true claim, as even Bush realized this when he replaced Rumsfeld with Gates and had Gen. Petraeus totally reorient our strategy in Iraq to be (more effectively) population/civilian-centric—but no mainstream Democrat suggested Bush wasn’t actually trying to win the war, that he was the main reason for the rise of al-Qaeda, or, even worse, that he sympathized with al-Qaeda and Muslim terrorists. Now? Even Trump, the Republican nominee for the presidency, has implied or said such things about Obama and terrorists and ISIS, has even clearly said he believes Obama “founded” ISIS even when given chances to clarify, and he is hardly alone in making such statements or holding such beliefs, which have existed since even before Obama took office as president (a Quinnipiac poll from this summer found that over half of Republicans—and nearly one-third of all Americans—agreed with Trump that Obama “may sympathize” with terrorists!). And most Republicans think that it’s mainly Obama’s fault that ISIS has risen as far as it has, which flies in the face of logic and history.

Compared to the W. Bush years, there is even more about basic reality on which the two parties cannot agree, and, as usual, it’s the Republicans who have fantastically constructed an alternative false reality. Republicans today doubt the seriousness of climate change or even its existence and also doubt the validity of evolutionary science and other scientific consensuses, as they did back then; many still believe in the demonstrably false claims of trickle-down Reaganomics; today it is clear that Republicans also and/or increasingly believe in a fantasy of the state of and effects of illegal immigration, that there is not a racial disparity in law enforcement and the criminal justice system when there clearly is, that Obamacare is a total disaster even though it is not (even with its poorly understood problems it has made tremendous improvements), that Syrian refugees as being admitted currently to the U.S. pose a grave national security threat when they do not, that having a minimum wage or raising one is bad even though there is no evidence for the former and little that evidence the latter is true (as long as the raise is not stupidly high), that racism is an equal or larger problem for white people compared to African-Americans when this is flat-out absurd, that there is no discrimination against Muslims in America when there clearly is, that America is not on a steady if slow but also historic economic recovery when it clearly is, that the South was not exactly wrong during the Civil War and that America was founded as an explicitly Christian nation (wrong and wrong), that voter fraud is a pressing issue of major concern when it is virtually non-existent, and, on top of all of this, Republicans trash the quality of the U.S. military when it is still by far the most powerful military in the world and is still being upgraded robustly.

Many of these gaps in reality were on full display in the debate between Pence and Kaine. In fact, throughout the campaigns, including the VP debate, the candidates on opposing sides have sounded like they are talking about two completely different countries when they describe America. On top of all that, Pence was in full-denial-mode when it came to Trump’s many verifiable insanities; either that, or Pence didn’t even attempt to actually defend or address some of Trump’s atrocious behavior.

VP Debate an Awful Look Into Our Political System’s Pre-Trump Deficiencies

So, in what would supposedly be something of a “dream” scenario for Republican elites (the same Republican elites that had unwittingly laid the groundwork for Trump’s hostile takeover), a debate where Pence, not Trump, would be the presidential nominee for their party—a nominee who would still be in denial of basic reality on things like climate change and racial discrimination and immigration and the state of the economy and would also deny the basic reality of much of the ugliness underpinning the Republican party—would be considered ideal.

So even taking Trump out of the equation, we find that we are lacking in key components necessary for a serious, substantive debate about our future and that one of our two parties is willing to perpetually deny reality and its own strong ties to dark forces like racism and anti-intellectualism and militarism and plutocracy. Without Trump, it is still impossible to have a fact-based, reality-situated discussion about our country’s policies and its future. Without Trump, we are still in trouble, and in very deep trouble. Without Trump, it is quite possible that Ted Cruz would be the nominee as he by far had the most delegates compared with any other Republican candidate (well over three times as many) besides Trump. Yes, defeating Trump’s historically awful candidacy is a necessary step, but if victory in that cause is achieved, the real work is only beginning and it will be oh-so-very-hard; the American political system was in dire straits even before he announced his candidacy, and nobody should forget that. Anyone who does, just watch the VP debate and that is all the reminder of this sad truth that anyone should need. 

And I would hope that without Trump lowering the bar to unprecedented depths that this problem would be something we would be discussing intensely; under Trump’s looming, groping shadow, I fear that discussion has been lost, failing to materialize as we try to put out an orange Trump fire all while missing the erosion threatening to send our house divided tumbling down a cliff over a longer period of time in a sinking collapse that would not be as sudden but would be as real a threat as Trump’s more dramatic and more immediate inferno of inanity.

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. 

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981), and here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content, or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse March 29, 2016 

By Brian E.Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) March 29th, 2016

REUTERS/Alaa Al-Marjani

AMMAN — Terrorism is one of these words behind which the intended use most often carries a hope that those hearing or reading it will instinctively shudder and recoil.  Like all such charged words—racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, genocide—the gravity attached to them has an inverse correlation with higher frequency, more careless usage; such words retain their power and effectiveness if and when they are specifically applied selectively to instances that match a relatively clear definition and/or scope of activity; overuse cheapens and diminishes their power.  That is not to say that such terms do not sometimes deserve reconsideration, reappraisal; sometimes it is necessary to update and expand our understandings of such delicate terms.  At the same time, a vocal minority that simply wants to apply the labels because they just really don’t like something or someone—calling drones strikes terrorism and the equivalent of ISIS attacks, calling almost all Donald Trump supporters racists, calling almost all Republicans sexist, calling all critics of Israeli government policy anti-Semitic, calling Israeli actions towards Palestinians genocide—must be called out for what they are: partisans trying to hijack one awful thing to make something else they don’t like be condemned at a higher level.  Thus, when dealing with these terms, it is important that the conversation around them attempts to forge a degree of clarity.  If such efforts are not undertaken or fail, it is harmful to the ability to unite and fight actions that clearly fall under the appropriate use of these terms, and terrorism is no exception.  As the late Christopher Hitchens noted in 2002, “If any of the terms in our new lexicon has undergone a process of diminishing returns, it is the word “terrorism.””

What’s in a Name?

Violence is part of humanity, even from our earliest days; it was in nature and part of primates’ existence before they even evolved into humans; therefore, the violence of humanity predates humanity.  One thing that is certain about human-on-human violence is that the parties on the receiving end will always protest, and quite often, it is normal for the aggrieved parties to cry “terrorism” when they receive such violence.  Even if the aggrieved party is justly angry and justly thinks the violence in unjustly meted out, the label terrorism may not be appropriate.  Every person has the right to defend him or herself and every government has the right to defend its people and territory and to use violence to both stop active aggression and prevent aggression where there is a clear and present danger, even to the point of striking outside its borders.  A U.S. drone that kills either 1.) a group of active militants and several bystanding civilians or 2.) kills civilians by honestly mistaking them for militants cannot be equated with a group of militants that deliberately target and kill civilians as an end target.  At the same time, if locals use guerilla tactics against U.S. military forces stationed abroad in, say, Iraq, simply giving them the same label as militants who are killing civilians in markets or houses of worship is also inaccurate.  Labeling all of these perpetrators terrorists and acts terrorism is not only inaccurate, but counterproductive to the point of making the term meaningless, subject to the whims and partisan beliefs of whomever wants to appropriate the term to denigrate, rightfully or wrongfully, anyone with whom he or she disagrees.  To go back to Hitchens, “we need a more exhaustive and exclusive and discriminating definition of it, or recognition of it.”  For him:

“It’s glib and evasive to say that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” because the “freedom fighters” are usually quite willing to kill their “own” civilians as well. But then, so are states… All parties to all wars will at some time employ terrorizing methods. But then everybody except a pacifist would be a potential supporter of terrorism. And if everything is terror, then nothing is—which would mean we had lost an important word of condemnation.” 

For most people, there is “a simpler – and perhaps more honest – definition: terrorism is violence committed by those we disapprove of,” to quote Brian Whitaker in a Guardian piece.

All Terrorists & All Violence Are Not Created Equal

Charles Tilly/Sociological Theory

Hitchens, a lifelong socialist with a soft spot for revolutionaries and rebels—from Iraqi Kurds to Leon Trotsky—would never equate the IRA or Hamas with ISIS or al-Qaeda.  For him the test is the realistically possible and rationality: do these militants ask for something that a rational person could live with and willingly accept—an independent state, an end to military occupation, an end to institutionalized discrimination—or do they seek that which a rational person could not willingly accept: mass oppression, mass murder, forced religious conversion, to go centuries back in time? In Hitchens’ mind, true “Terrorism, then, is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint;” he therefore writes: “Enfolded in any definition of “terrorism,” it seems to me, there should be a clear finding of fundamental irrationality.”  For Hitchens, “What this means in practice is the corollary impossibility of any compromise with” groups that practice terrorism in this purer sense.

The distinction Hitchens is making is that the label both of people as terrorists and actions as terrorism is more aptly reserved both for people who, and actions that, seek to impose a system of terror, rather than be applied to those who simply employ certain violent tactics for understandable, rational, and even laudable goals.  In other words, whether one is fighting for liberation and freedom as an end or for an end of imposing a murderous regime that butchers its own people and destroys freedom matters far more than the means employed in such fights (though they matter too).  For Hitchens, often those terrorist groups concerned with more noble ends are far more discriminate and measured in their means than those groups for whom brutality is the ultimate temporal end, and while in any conflict, destruction is a necessary evil of means, its scale and especially whether the destruction of lives and freedom is the end itself in a temporal sense are what matters most.

In a video discussion of WWII, Hitchens, along with Victor Davis Hanson, noted that while both the Axis and the Allies engaged in deliberate terror air bombings of civilian populations, and that such actions are hardly simply easily summed up as excusable under the circumstances, what Western Allied powers did with enemy civilian populations under their control—took care of them and spread stable, democratic government—compared to what Axis powers did to enemy civilian population under their control—systematic murder and enslavement and the propagation of totalitarian systems—is the primary distinction which by far matters the most even if does not come close to fully absolving the West for its conduct in terror bombings such as Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.  War brings out excess and the worst in humanity by its very nature, but even if both sides commit similar and comparable excesses at times, scale and what ends inspired those excesses to be committed in the first place are not things that can be forgotten and certainly expose any argument attempting to equate the Nazi and Imperial Japanese regimes with the U.S. and UK governments.

There is a limit for Hitchens to those whom we can define as rational, as “some definitions cannot be stretched beyond a certain point, and the death wish of the theocratic totalitarians, for themselves and others, is too impressive to overlook. One has to say sternly: If you wish martyrdom, we are here to help—within reason.”

Hitchens makes a passionate case for primarily using the terms terrorist and terrorism to refer not merely to tactics but end goals, and his argument is not without its strong points.  But for now and for some time policymakers and international affairs experts have loosely agreed on a broader definition (if not all its specifics) that is still both useful and far less narrow than less useful definitions.

Mainstream Views on What Is Terrorism

Joao Silva/The New York Times

Contrary to the more mainstream understanding of terrorism today, the ancient Greeks actually conceived of terrorism as a form of government (terrorcracy or tromokratos), much like democracy, monarchy, aristocracy, and so forth, in which terror was the main way the state functioned and kept law and order.  The word “terrorism” first really appears in 1795 in French (“terrorisme”) to describe Jacobin rule of France during the French Revolution, so its original use was describing government rule through terror.  It is only in the mid-to-late-nineteenth century when “terrorist” as a term is used to describe attacks on the government by the UK and Russia, respectively.  Thus, Hitchens’ approach is interesting in that his preference is for the term to be applied to non-state groups that seek to embody terror and make it an end in the way of the Jacobin regime. 

Like Hitchens, who saw a major aspect of terrorism as being an absence of reason, terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman also discusses a useful definition of terrorism that involves defining what it is not.  Where Hitchens pushes a definition that involves the absence of reason, Hoffman tries to define terrorism by going through the types of violence that it is not and showing that terrorism fills that gap.  For Hoffman, this leaves us approaching a definition that is “the deliberate creation and exploitation of fear through violence or the threat of violence in the pursuit of political change.” One Israeli definition is basically the same, but narrows the terrorists’ targets to “civilian targets.”  Similarly, even as the term remains challenging to define, consensus within many varying international legal definitions of terrorism involve “common core elements” that at least include violence against civilians as part of a campaign to intimidate or coerce populations and/or governments, an understanding that most major mainstream analyses seem to have confirmed, even if there is significant disagreement over additional acts as to how they are—or are not—terrorism where and when government and/or military targets can be included.

Counterterrorism Must Necessarily Be Complex & Nuanced

Additionally, while few would disagree that terrorism is a tactic that states are capable of utilizing directly (“state terrorism”) either on their own people or on others, terrorism, when used as a word by itself, generally refers to non-state actors, though state sponsorship is not ruled out.  That is not to say the “state terrorism” is a better phenomenon, more legitimate or respectable, than non-state terrorism, and there is an interesting philosophical debate as to how the word terrorism should be used and to what, in its purest sense, it should refer to, but that is not the focus of the policy maker; for policymakers and the elected officials we choose, “state terrorism,” as with all actions coming directly from state structures, can often be dealt with fairly conventionally on a macro-level through the interstate international relations system.  Those carrying out those acts of terrorism, except, generally, at the lowest level, are generally protected by a state or states; to deal with them, states must be dealt with.  State-sponsored terrorism requires a more hybrid response, as a state can be pressured to reduce or stop its support for such terrorism through traditional means, but to whatever the degree the terrorist group receiving sponsorship is an independent actor it will likely have to be dealt with using more traditional counterterrorism means, which is the type of response that governs non-state terrorist acts.  Compared to non-state terrorism, state-terrorism is relatively easy to manage: a single state government, even if not wholly united, is far easier to deal with than a non-state actor because the points of possible engagement and leverage are limited and generally well-understood.  Negotiating and interacting with terrorist groups that are not part of a state structure is far more challenging precisely because such groups are not constrained by the rules of the international state system; if a faction of a state government breaks off and does not honor an international agreement, that state’s government can still be held responsible, and it can even be supported to give it the ability to reign in its recalcitrant faction.  But non-state, independent terrorist groups, whose organizations are often opaque, diffuse, and decentralized, where there is no steady or reliable point of contact or central authority and where there can sometimes be little or no desire for negotiation on the side of the terrorist organization (especially over long-term conflict resolution as opposed to, say, a cease fire or prisoner exchange), require a very different set of nontraditional approaches and means for the policymaker to deal with them; this evolving, non-traditional set of tools is what is most is most often understood to fall under the term “counterterrorism,” which itself can have much overlap with the toolbox of “counterinsurgency (COIN),” as terrorism as a tactic can be used as part of war or when there is no war, falling under the watchful eyes of both civilian and military sentinels, sometimes at different times and/or under different jurisdictions, other times simultaneously.  Not every militant attack in time of war, rebellion, or insurgency is necessarily considered terrorism though some are, depending on the definition, but generally every militant attack that is not of a traditional criminal nature and that is outside of a war/rebellion/insurgency setting is considered terrorism.

Such distinctions may seem moot, but they are from it, as are the distinctions Hitchens makes between terrorists that are rational (those who can be accommodated by reasonable and just means) and those who are irrational (those for whom there is no reasonable or just accommodation possible).  Smart, effective counterterrorism approaches will make such distinctions a core driver and a core base of such policy.  Such approaches were exactly how Gens. Petraeus and Chiarelli went after the problem of violence in Iraq, and in a short period of time, they had brought groups that had been using terrorism against U.S. forces and the Iraqi government over to fighting on behalf of U.S. forces and the Iraqi government against other, more extreme terrorists like al-Qaeda in Iraq (ISIS’s precursor), and Iraq was soon on the path to dramatically decreased levels of violence, levels that were the lowest since the war began.  The recent rise of ISIS is hardly an indictment on this strategy, as, in the end, violence in Iraq only rose in 2013 in response to the terrible sectarian policies of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and spillover from the Syrian Civil War, over a year after the last U.S. forces withdrew from Iraq late in 2011.  If anything, these events show how closely related the incidence of terrorism is to oppression, politics, and policy, and how variable it is in relation to changes in all of these.

Republicans/Conservatives Often Fail to Grasp Counterterrorism Basics

But too many conservatives and Republicans don’t even seem to acknowledge such realities.  In fact, for a problem that requires a decidedly nuanced approach, their prescriptions tend to lack nuance altogether.

To be fair, a good number of leading Republicans are careful to acknowledge that Islam as a whole is not the problem, and that ISIS does not reflect Islamic values in a generally, mass-practiced sense, that the West is not in a titanic civilizational struggle with the Islamic world: Jeb Bush, Paul Ryan, Lindsey Graham, and a number of others. 

But many—far too many—do not, including Trump and Ted Cruz, two of the last three remaining candidates for the Republican nomination; Dr. Ben Carson, the last of the candidates to drop out before Marco Rubio, also fell into this trap.  And they and those who think like them are the ascending, dominant voices in the Republican Party today.  Too many Republicans and conservatives want to lump all terrorists into the irrational, terror-as-an-end categorization; the only solution is eradication and marginalization.  When Republicans talks about terrorism, they never shy away from linking it with Islam (and the vast majority of Republicans are in favor of at least temporarily banning all Muslims from entering the U.S., à la Trump); they prefer to talk about a broad, civilizational clash à la Samuel Huntington; for them, it is a war of America standing up for Western, Judeo-Christian values against a foe that represents Eastern, Islamic values that are the antithesis of everything for which the U.S. stands.  These people tend to inflate the conflict, describe it in grandiose terms, and push for extreme, counterproductive policies.  In this vein, Republicans tend to ascribe blind hatred of the West, freedom, and Christianity as the main motives of terrorists.  You almost never hear them talk about imperialism, colonialism, mass poverty, a lack of dignity and opportunity, and the oppression of U.S.-backed regimes as root causes and motivators for terrorism even though they clearly often are.  They tend to dismiss the reality that as awful as terrorists generally are, they also often have very legitimate grievances that need to be addressed; rather, for many Republicans, all terrorists are the same purely evil people with purely evil motives that must be utterly shunned and destroyed.

This mindset in part explains why they are so against diplomacy with Iran, the main sponsor of increasingly-less-terroristic Hezbollah, and so for confrontation and non-engagement.  As I have taken time to point out before, such approaches tend to bolster both the stature and number of extremists, including both extremist politicians and extremist violent groups, including terrorists.  Just recently, moderates in Iran trounced hard-line conservatives in elections mere months after the West’s nuclear deal with Iran.  Predictably, Republicans did not alter their illogical, near-universal, near-total opposition to the deal, even as the deal is clearly showing tangible, positive results on a significant scale. 

The idea of one policy for both ISIS and Hamas, and for all terrorist groups—failing to use the political carrot to moderate the behavior of more rationally-disposed terrorists like the latter in favor of pushing for an all-out confrontation is a policy that will fail to defuse conflict when there are serious chances to do so and will, instead, inflate it, causing more death and destruction in both the short and long-term and making long-term settlement or resolution of the relevant conflicts far more unlikely—is not an idea that advances the interests of the U.S. or makes it safer.  The one-size-fits-all approach that Republicans generally favor flies in the face of decades of conflict studies analyses and research, and in the face of history itself. 

Even recent history reinforces these truths: the importance of the example of the IRA/Sinn Féin in Ireland and its long, violent struggle with the British government cannot be overstated (including the example of conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s failed hard-line policies in Northern Ireland), even as it is clear groups like Hamas and Hezbollah are hardly carbon copies.  Still, both Hamas and Hezbollah, like the IRA/Sinn Féin before them, have seen a dramatic moderation of their terrorist activities since their very bloody inceptions.  Successful policy over time will be one that makes distinctions and harnesses and encourages these moderating trends, rather than pushes them in the opposite direction and paints with a broad brush, as both the recent Israeli government missteps and missed opportunities leading to the summer 2014 Gaza conflict and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s misleading attempts to equate Hamas and ISIS illustrate.  Part of the same conflict, Fatah/the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) operated very much as a terrorist organization in past; since the early 1990s, and most especially after the death of Arafat, the terror role has diminished—now arguably ceased—to the degree that now it is far more common for Fatah/the PLO to be accused of inciting terror, of being complicit with terror, or of not preventing terror rather than committing terror, even by Israel, its archfoe.  As messy as these conflicts have been and often still are, the trends with these particular groups are undeniably reassuring and moving in the direction of less violence compared to recent decades.

In short, a successful counterterrorism strategy will make important distinctions between terrorist groups of different types, rather than lump them all together, allowing for the possibility of long-term negotiation and settlement with some terrorists even as others prove unwilling to consider diplomacy; if anything, there is even the possibility of causing divides within terrorist organizations between those who want to pursue engagement and those who prefer conflict, internal division that would almost always be beneficial to the opponents of such terrorist groups.

A Discerning Definition of Terrorism Helps Us All

In the end, terrorism will be difficult to define with an extremely high degree of specificity, and that task may even be, and is likely, impossible.  However, a vague yet still useful and usable definition beyond people labeling whatever violence they don’t like as terrorism and its perpetrators as terrorists is quite possible by looking at what clearly is not terrorism and what clearly is terrorism, even if there will undoubtedly be some gray areas.  Terror is undeniably part of terrorism, but any good military will try to scare its opponents into submission, either by the ferocity of its attacks or by the overwhelming relative power of its military might.  Since we have a lexicon which describes both acceptable and unacceptable military action under international law, and since “war crimes” and “war criminal” carry stigmas comparable to the labels “terrorist” and “terrorism,” it is both unhelpful and unproductive to try to blur this distinction. 

This goes for multiple sides in this discussion: Palestinians targeting Israel military targets with violence on their own legally recognized territory are more properly thought of as rebels and insurgents than terrorists, and labeling excessive Israeli military actions against Palestinians as terrorism serves no purpose when war crime vocabulary is already clear and well-defined.  The attempts by Israelis to enlarge the definition of terrorism to cover any and all violence directed at Israeli targets, whether civilian or military, is no more accurate or helpful than Palestinians trying to label all Israeli military activity, even when justified, as either war crimes or terrorism.  Such use of such terms only encourages eye rolls and a boy-who-cried-wolf-likelihood to ignore future accusations using these terms.  We could say the same for situations with American occupation forces currently in Afghanistan and formerly in Iraq, and to the U.S. government’s credit, it has increasingly become more circumspect in applying the terms “terrorism” and “terrorist,” recognizing that some local fighters are actually more aptly called insurgents.  Middle-Eastern locals and governments who are often understandably unhappy with U.S. drone policy, likewise, should rethink their application of the term “terrorism” to U.S. drone strikes, as the main use of them is to kill specific suspected militants that have either carried out or assisted or are preparing to carry out or assist violent attacks against civilians and/or U.S. or allies troops.  Civilians are not the intended targets of drone strikes even if they are killed, and the main purpose of drone strikes is not to intimidate the general population or governments of these locations where the strikes occur.  Errant strikes that kill mostly or only civilians are, of course, to be deplored, and more care needs to be taken to avoid such mistakes, but they are in no way moral equivalents to suicide bombers killing civilians for the sake of killing civilians in mosques and markets, and, as in other cases, simply throwing the words terrorism and terrorist back at the U.S. government because the victims are understandably unhappy with the results is not a blueprint for a useful definition of such terms but is very much a blueprint for a meaningless, subjective term to be used to describe any type of violence, justified or unjustified, of which one party or another does not approve. 

Intentional killing of civilians in and of itself and the desire for such intentional killing to force a change in policy/politics through its intimidating and terrorizing effects is a terrible thing; the ability to loudly and clearly label such acts terrorism enhances the ability to fight these acts and further stigmatize those who carry them out and their supporters; unproductively broadening the scope of these terms cheapens their use and the ability to single out such acts.  If every airstrike, drone strike, and militant attack on government and military installations is labelled terrorism, their perpetrators terrorists, then pretty much all political violence, even including just war and self-defense, can be labeled terrorism and the social, legal, political, and security tools needed to reign in the most heinous types of violence that target those most defenseless of all—non-combatant civilians—are weakened, leaving those most vulnerable of all people with even fewer defenses than before. 

It is in trying to be more reserved and circumspect with labeling certain things terrorism that we can empower those who fight against such violence and better protect the civilian populations that nearly always bear the brunt of it.  That is not to diminish or excuse war crimes and improper use of force by state militaries, Western or otherwise, but such misdeeds are better labeled using more traditional means, in part because more well-established, traditional tools of state-to-state interaction, international organizations, and international law already exist to deal with such excesses.  Casually labeling war crimes terrorism and war-criminals terrorists, in addition, can in turn have the effect of also diminishing the power of and seriousness of the war-crimes and terrorists labels. 

In the end, a more careful definition and more careful approach to terrorism will save more lives and weaken terrorists further than more careless, less nuanced approaches, which may actually empower terrorists and make us less secure.  In an age of hypersensitivity that is further amplified by global social media, language carries an additional weight when dealing with such weighty subjects.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

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Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse October 12, 2015

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) October 12, 2015 and republished on MoviePilot on February 13, 2016

al-Furqan Media/Islamic State

AMMAN — There are some who would argue here in America and in other places that the greatest calamity of our time*—the metastacizing vortex of the Syrian Civil War and all its accompanying metastacizing side effects—is not “our” problem and does not really affect “us.” To them I would say, on several important levels, that they could not be more wrong.

Apart from the appalling destruction of human lives and cultural heritageon top of mass displacement contributing to make current population of globally displaced reach a scale not seen since WWII, and perhaps, even, taking all those into account, the most terrifying thing about this sad, sorry, tragedy is how absolutely quickly and nearly completely an entire (relatively) modern state and society has collapsed into pre-Taliban Afghanistan and Congolese-like (dare I say even Dark Age-like?) near-total anarchy and chaos of the most virulent and violent kind. Even in the worst days of the U.S. occupation in Iraq in 2006, when the U.S. barely managed to keep a lid on a semblance of order and Iraq teetered on the edge of chaos and civil war, the lid may have been popping and jumping, but it never flew completely off and out of sight; and after those dark days, the U.S. began to greatly turn things around. Well, with Syria, today, the lid has been blown off and it has been long-gone for some time now, and this is beyond debate. It happened so quickly that the world has been caught flat-footed and ill-prepared, content to play with Syria as chess game board and making things worse not only for Syrians but for the entire global community at worst and a few doing something to try to help but doing far too little, too late at best. In the middle, most nations do nothing.

Yet we all need to be concerned about how quickly a sophisticated, fairly modern, secular-oriented state like Syria devolved into the worst of religious extremist fanaticism and violent, murderous cruelty, of rampant anarchy and callous calculated mass-murder. Any country can produce a mass-murder or a tyrant, a Hitler if you will. And it should be remembered that before and during the Nazi era, Germany represented the peak of civilization, culture, learning, science, etc. That did not stop it from unleashing the greatest orgy of bloodletting in the history of the world for such a short period of time from carrying out and engaging in the most systematic and organized genocide in world history; only the Mongols may be comparable. No matter how great or powerful or advanced our culture may be, we must all recognize we may all, as nations, possibly produce a Hitler. Or, in this case, a Bashar al-Assad (to be fair not nearly as rotten an apple as Hitler). But it is easy to place all the blame on a leader, and harder (but more important) to confront the most troubling traits of an entire society; thus, the more important lesson here is that we may each, as a society, become Nazi Germany, or, in this case, Syria (again, not equating the two here, just making a point).

In 2015, Nazi Germany is something of a fading memory, a near-mythical tale few can say they experienced or observed contemporarily, whether up close or from afar. Syria is the greatest calamity to unfold in our current era,*and even in just the few years since the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the peak of violence there, the tremendous growth of immediate and stream-of-consciousness social media, mobile technology, broadband internet access, and interconnectedness means that the average citizen in the world, if they choose, can experience the conflict in Syria today in an up-close and personal way as no one in the world not directly in or near a conflict could have ever experienced conflict in the past. It is therefore an unprecedented teachable moment on several levels.

Syria is like a Gollum to our Frodo for all you Lord of the Rings fans. Gollum had the One Ring for 500 years and, as the prologue states, “it poisoned his mind” (an understatement). At first glance, Gollum looks utterly alien, evil, contemptible, deserving of being struck down, cast off, or forgotten. But as Gandalf explains and Frodo comes to learn, Gollum was a distorted mirror image of Frodo himself and of Hobbits general, as he was once a Hobbit named Sméagol. Especially after Frodo has been the bearer of the Ring for some time, he comes to understand the burden the Ring had been for Sméagol over the half-millennium it had taken a hold of him and turned him into Gollum; Frodo, begins to suffer as a Ring-bearer just as Gollum has, and even begins to speak and act more like Gollum as his quest goes on. In subtle ways in the books, Frodo begins to root for Gollum, hoping to redeem him back to Sméagol, because Gollum’s ability to be redeemed and overcome the evil of the One Ring is a reflection of Frodo’s own ability to do the same. In the movies, this is made more explicit with a sharp exchange between Sam and Frodo about the Ring and Gollum, in which Frodo snaps at Sam “You have no idea what it did to him, what it’s still doing to him. I want to help him Sam…Because I have to believe he can come back.” For us, we have to believe Syria and Syrians are redeemable and worth fighting for, because any nation is, frighteningly, capable of a similar descent; whether we like it or not, Syria is a distorted reflection of our own nations.

New Line

Perhaps you scoff at such a notion. “Our people, our culture, our nation, our system, our values, are better than them and theirs,” you say. “It couldn’t happen here.” Well, even in American history, there are frightening examples of similar breakdowns of society into murderous anarchy. During the Civil War, large portions of the South and Border States were engulfed in bloody, chaotic, anarchic, vengeful violence, where government authority evaporated and life was a series of bloody confrontations between deserting troops, roving guerilla bands, civilians divided over their loyalty to the Union, slaves and ex-slaves, and rebels who fought against the Confederate government; untold thousands were killed in remote parts with no witnesses to record the events; nobody and no one was safe from robbery, banditry, rape, and murder. From the Civil War through the 1960s, America experienced numerous race and labor riots, some of which were quelled with military force. The “Wild West” was somewhat anarchic for decades and was only stabilized with a heavy price in blood. In more recent living memory, riots in Los Angeles in 1992 were the largest in America in decades; much more recently, Hurricane Katrina brought one of the great American cities to its knees as New Orleans became a hotbed of death, violence, anarchy, looting, crime, and public mismanagement. And just last summer, Ferguson, Missouri, saw the worst riots in America since the aforementioned L.A. riots. Many white Americans would dismiss in a racist way the last few examples as black people just being black people; certainly white America would not behave in such a way today, they think.

Wrong. At most, our culture, system, values, etc. buy us time, certainly less than we would like to believe and certainly not enough to prevent a societal collapse under the most severely pressing circumstances.

Three television shows illustrate this vividly, each presenting a vision of America (or at least a slice of America) coming apart and being reduced to primal anarchy: Fear the Walking Dead, The Walking Dead, and HBO’s The Leftovers. (BEWARE SPOILERS, if you have seen one show but no other, just skip the relevant section; for those willing to have a bit of the story ruined but not the major parts, I have divided the spoilers into stages).

Fear the Walking Dead (SPOILERS)

Fear the Walking Dead is AMC’s new prequel of sorts for its megahit The Walking Dead. In The Walking Dead, the main character wakes up in a hospital weeks after the zombie apocalypse has begun. In contrast its mother show, Fear the Walking Dead starts us right in the middle of normal life in Los Angeles, before the outbreak and before society collapses. In just six episodes, we see a fairly normal group of people experience an utter breakdown of pretty much everything. It starts with isolated cases, and the riotous L.A. denizens are apt to see police brutality against regular citizens rather than law enforcement trying to contain a zombie outbreak: they riot en masse and draw the authorities’ attention from dealing with what they don’t yet know is a zombie outbreak. Such conditions only the enable the infection so spread even more in the ensuing chaos. Police and medical workers, on the front lines of dealing with people who are dead and then almost immediately “turn” into zombie, become particularly susceptible. Police stations, we must assume, and hospitals, we see, are turned into new front lines against the zombie infection. Many people try to leave town as disorder spreads, but the congested L.A. traffic only makes them sitting targets for zombies, as whole highways filled with abandoned cars imply in later scenes. The power stops working. 

Then the military shows up an is able to secure a small neighborhood here and there (lucky for the main characters), but most of the city of L.A. is abandoned; whole neighborhoods burn down, skyscrapers smolder, the streets and houses are empty and deserted save for small pockets, the lights are off. The military is there, ostensibly to protect the few secure zones they are able to create, but no one is there to protect the people from the abuses of a military that is almost as freaked out as the civilians. Outside of the protected pockets, there are signs that point to the military simply killing civilians left behind, possibly out of worries about infection. The sick and non-cooperative are forcefully taken away from their families and moved to detention centers. At this point, there is no law, only a new order coming at the expense of all freedom and backed by the butt of a rife. 

(BIG SPOILERS AHEAD). One of the characters in the show, we learn, was a security official and a torturer for the regime in El Salvador. He quickly feels the need to use his skills from the past, and, because it may benefit her son who has been detained, a single mother who is one of the main characters spend little more than a few seconds with her qualms and quickly accepts the use of torture with no apparent sense of guilt or shame and with no look back, unlike her boyfriend. Yet in the final episode, the boyfriend, composed until this point, comes undone and nearly beats to death the same man whose torture he was against, leaving him in a state where he may well die. The same man takes it upon himself, out of necessity, to shoot his ex-wife in the head with her full consent because she has been bitten by a zombie and knows that she will soon become one. The detained son escapes with a new friend but they decide to do nothing to help anyone else to limit their own risk; the main characters, when they decide to leave town just before the military arrives, decline to warn their neighbors of the impending disaster (not many people know what’s going on at that point); when they figure out that the military is weak and will soon abandon them completely, they decline to warn their neighbors yet again. It is likely that they have known these people for some time, but in a matter of days, those bonds come to mean nothing. Society is no more. The main characters even unleash a zombie horde on the detention camp entrance to serve as a distraction so they can rescue their own loved ones, totally willing to place all the guards and all the civilian detainees at risk.

(Exiting major spoilers) Throughout the entire show the authorities are more of less clueless, one or more steps behind and impending disaster they are ill-prepared or incapable of handling, and rather than coming together, people become more selfish and tribal, less concerned about helping others, more willing to place others at risk or leave them vulnerable, with naked self-interest dominating. The government, at least where we see it, completely abandons people and evaporates. All of downtown L.A. is a virtually empty ruin, a wasteland, by the last episode. The collapse of an entire city, one of the world’s largest, happens in a matter of days, as does the collapse of the moral fabric of society. Survival is the new central value, and sacrificing even longtime neighbors for self-preservation becomes the norm.

The Walking Dead (SPOILERS through season five)

AMC

The Walking Dead, the sixth season of which is just premiered, begins way past the initial devolution of its sister series, and takes us to some truly terrifying depths of cruelty and horror that unfortunately mirror all too much our own reality of anarchic war zones. By the time the show starts, society and government are already long gone. Most people are dead or are, literally, walking dead (zombies), and most survivors are now in small nomadic gangs whose numbers are constantly being whittled down not just by zombies, but by the aggressions and machinations of other bands of survivors. The words of the ancient Greek historian Thucydides come to mind here: “…right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” And the weak sure do suffer, killed off by either zombies or stronger groups of survivors. Killing, pillaging, even rape (though this is more implied) seem commonplace, as the most cruel and brutal seem to survive at the expense of others; the more brutal, in fact, the better. Small communities seem to survive or be established here and there, but are run by the most brutal regimes as the sadistic Governor’s Woodbury, the deceptive, cannibalistic Terminus, and the Atlanta hospital all show us. The three communities exemplify murderous tyranny, ruthless deception, and the strong taking advantage of the weak, respectively. In the case of Terminus—without a doubt the most brutal of the three—we learn that prior to becoming what they became, they themselves suffered unspeakable horrors at the hands of others. As Israeli historian Benny Morris in his landmark history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict quotes W. H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939” in the book’s preface: “I and the public know/ What all schoolchildren learn,/ That to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return.”

A dominant theme quickly emerges: the real challenge is not overcoming the zombies, but fellow human beings. 

In general, good men who try to show mercy often die because of it. Major characters die saving other people, and eventually some of these other people die too, showing a heartbreaking waste of life and that even the bravest sacrifices often turn out to be in vain. The show’s main character—and a major hero—ends up favoring execution as his preferred method for dealing with enemies as the seasons move forward, with him internalizing some very harsh lessons form earlier. Even young characters (and I mean young) exhibit sadistic and murderous tendencies, with one little girl even being put down like an animal after she kills an even younger little girl, an irredeemable product of her environment. “Good” guys sometimes kill first, ask questions later (or don’t ask), and the ability to resist having the environment completely dehumanize you is a constant theme and challenge of later seasons. Small acts of kindness and mercy are often rewarded only with death and despair. Sometimes the best mercy is killing someone to avoid a more painful death. Friends kill friends, lovers kill lovers, children kill parents, often out of kindness. Some of the drama comes as you really wonder whether some characters have lost their humanity, and if or how they can regain some shred of it.

(BIGGER SPOILERS COMING) In the fifth season, the band of survivors we’ve been following have absorbed some new people into their group over the seasons, and come across Alexandria, Virginia, a Washington, DC, suburb that was able to seal much of itself off from the horrors of the outside. Yet in being sealed off and incredibly fortunate, they are incredibly weak and ill prepared. We see how our main hero and character—truly a good man who has just been molded and shaped by his circumstances—becomes a little drunk on the power he realizes that his much stronger group can exert over them. Not without good reason, he plans to overthrow the current leaders and to take over and kill anyone who resists. It does not come to this, but in the end Alexandria’s leader and its people realize that they are weak and ill-prepared and allow the main character to take over peacefully, but not without having him quickly murder a problem member of their community with no hesitation. 

(Exiting major spoiler zone) The lesson they learn and that all the survivors seem to learn is that brutality is absolutely essential for survival; the question is, how brutal do you need to be and how brutal is too far and all-consuming? There is no easy or clear answer. What is clear is that the best of the survivors who have the most of their humanity intact have been able to survive by being able to become coldly, animalistically brutal in an instant and sometimes have to go “too far” just to survive in the jungle of the world in which they live. The softer, kinder ones in the group are usually the ones who die. And even as brutal as they become, the depravity, cruelty, and brutality of many of their opponents is so spectacular that there are clear moral distinctions even when all the people in question are incredibly brutal. Without the protections of society, no social contract to reign in our worst tendencies, brutality becomes absolutely necessary. Sometimes there is no “good” choice, only a less awful or even a totally unclear choice. The series makes this quite clear, and a popular game based on the series by Telltale Games that presents the player with truly heart-wrenching and gruesome personal choices similar to those in the show makes this even more clear.

The Leftovers (SPOILERS THROUGH SEASON 1)

HBO

HBO’s The Leftovers, the second season of which just started, was an emotional tour de force unlike anything I have seen on television before. As the show opens, we see a small upstate New York town and witness the moment when some people just disappear. Into thin air. No explanation, just fear, panic, terror. We then fast forward to three years later, to the same town, and learn via background news casts that four years ago, 2% of the world’s population just vanished. All types of people: good, bad, rich, poor, black, white, atheists, Christians, Muslims, Asians, Africans, all over the world, in every country. As the entire world tries to come to grips with this mystery, the families and friends of those who vanished—the vanished being referred to as “The Departed”—struggle to go on with their lives, to feel life, to find meaning. (SUPER SPOILER SECTION: if you haven’t seen the show, stop here) These people—called “Legacies”—are most poignantly represented by one particular character, who lost her husband and two young children to the Sudden Departure. She still lovingly buys them groceries each week, as if they were still there. She has taken a job helping provide benefits to other Legacies as a case officer/interviewer for the U.S. Department of Sudden Departure. You might think that this job brings her a sense of purpose and closure, but it entails her interviewing Legacies with a long list a very unpleasant and intrusive questions that leave her and her interviewees emotionally drained at best.  Just to feel alive, just to feel anything, she regularly hires hookers to shoot her with a gun while she dons a bulletproof vest. She is miserable, and drowning in her grief. And she is not alone. 

People want answers from above, but none come. So people creates answers on their own: numerous cults have sprung up; they are all over the news, causing violence and chaos. One cult involves a man who is something of a prophet, and fills his well-armed and well-guarded compound with his favorite delicacy: young Asian women. Another cult is setting up shop in the upstate New York town that is the center of the series; it calls itself the Guilty Remnant; its members all wear all white, refuse to talk, all constantly smoke, and they each have assignments to follow and tail specific people in the town. No one know much of anything about them, especially since they do not speak, which only makes the more frustrating to deal with.

In the shows first episode, the town is gearing up for a parade to honor the “Heroes” (the Departed). At the end of the parade, there is ceremony where a sculpture is unveiled showing a mother and a baby that is being pulled up and away from the mother. The woman who lost her husband and two kids is the keynote speaker, lamenting her loss and wishing to have them back, even if for a moment, and not even one of the better moments: she’d happily take a moment when they were all together and sick, miserable. Suddenly, the Guilty Remnant approaches from a distance, and holds up signs spelling out “STOP WASTING YOUR BREATH.” The people of the town, sad and mourning the Departed, march up to confront them. As usual, the Guilty Remnant says nothing, provoking even more anger, which spills over into violence and a riot.

Throughout the series, the Guilty Remnant continually adds new members from the town, and seek to harass people at their most vulnerable. They even buy up a Church in the center of town and convert it to one of their outposts. They break into the houses of the Legacies and steal photographs of the Departed. With these photos and through meticulous research, they find details about these people. Eventually, they secretly order incredibly lifelike dolls (an industry has popped up manufacturing scale lifelike replicas of people to cater to some of the more bizarre Legacies) in the likenesses of The Departed. After a series of building confrontations and growing hostility, they break into and place these dolls in the homes of the Legacies, dressed up as if they were still alive in the spots where they were when they disappeared. I am tearing up just now as I remember the look on the woman’s face who lost her husband and two children, a look of sheer, consuming, and raw pain, of primal anguish, silent as the sound is muted but accompanied by a soaring soundtrack. There is much more of a primal nature to come.

HBO

See, these Legacies are pretty much miserable people, drowning in depression, grief, loneliness, unanswered questions, loss. They have tried mightily to solider on. The non-Legacy, “normal” people are not doing much better. They have all had to put up with a provocative, cruel, stubborn cult in the form of the Guilty Remnant who try as hard as they possibly can to make it as hard as possible for these people to move on with their lives. The placing of the replicas of Legacies’ loved ones in their homes for them to shockingly wake up to generates a timeless and primal reaction, and it is terrifying. In a small American town not far from New York City, scenes of apocalyptic destruction erupt: the whole town, especially the Legacies, is outraged at the guilty remnant. All manner of people, even young people and even the elderly, take to the streets in an orgy of violence, bloodletting, and destruction; the town’s police force simply stands by and even the mayor just stands by, helpless, as young, old, men, women, strong, weak, all attack the guilty remnant, beating them, shooting them, destroying their compound, setting it on fire, dragging the cultists away to be tortured and murdered. Fires, gunshots, screams, blood, fill the air and background; a primal, cave-man-like hatred consumes normal people of the town; they become beasts of vengeance and nothing more. Just hours before, the town was a common, if affluent, modern American town; one act, albeit one that was a culmination of a series of acts, destroyed modern civilization and returned the town to the dark ages and prehistoric times of unthinking hatred and unrestrained brutality. This occurs in episode ten, after we have had nine episodes—nine hours—of getting acquainted with this town, its people. To see it all come crashing down, to see an entire community embrace their worst tendencies and opt for murder and mayhem in an instant, is a terrifying sight to behold, presented to us with a lyrical poetic quality that in unnerving to your very core. 

It left me shaken and rattled; it may be hard to imagine 2% of the world disappearing, but for the rest of mostly ten hours, it was very easy to accept the grief and pain and hurt and loss of these finely acted characters as real, and to accept the Guilty Remnant cult as real and their actions as real. And it was very easy to accept the primal, brutal, and violent reaction as also being real, authentic, and, perhaps most frighteningly of all, understandable. You wonder how you would have been able to stop yourself from participating in the orgy of violence and destruction, and there is no easy answer. You fall into the trap of rationalizing brutality that is not even in self-defense; you come face-to-face with the beast within. The bottom line: under the right conditions—conditions that are real and possible—this can happen anywhere.

 You wonder how you would have been able to stop yourself from participating in the orgy of violence and destruction, and there is no easy answer. You fall into the trap of rationalizing brutality that is not even in self-defense; you come face-to-face with the beast within. The bottom line: under the right conditions—conditions that are real and possible—this can happen anywhere.

And that is terrifying.

*****

All of this is important when considering Syria, and when considering ourselves. Fear the Walking Dead shows us how quickly society can collapse and how quickly we can embrace depravities like torture as a necessity. The Walking Dead shows us how terribly far gone we can go away from society, and how brutality is both a necessity and a demon with which we must wrestle, needing to embrace it in order to survive but needing to check it to retain our sense of, and belonging to, humanity. The Leftovers, too, show us how rapidly society can crumble, but shows us this in a place that looks and feels very much like our world, New York suburbia, even, and absent zombies. When the power and police are gone, we resort to tribalism and bare survival. When we resort to tribalism and bare survival, we can go to frightening depths of brutality and depravity. Some rebels in Syria are brutal mainly out of necessity, like our heroes who mostly, but not always, walk the line well. Some rebel groups in Syria are just simply brutal strongmen like the Governor or the police of the hospital, trying to carve out their own little fiefdoms where they rule as kings and bring some semblance of order to a chaotic world but an order that is to their benefit at the expense of others. Other are far more gone, groups such as ISIS, not that different from the people of Terminus (and, it is hinted, the Wolves group we will encounter in in force in this new season); their embrace of brutality as a means for survival is at the full cost of their humanity. With enough provocation, any community or people can turn into animals, predatory, heartless, unfeeling when it comes to “others.” 

This tendency is, perhaps, our greatest enemy, even as it is a strength in terms of survival. When it comes to Syria, just like Frodo, we must believe Gollum can come back, and we must try to help; the effort, the trying, is more important than the outcome, for, as Iain Pears writes in The Dream of Scipio, one of my favorite books:

“How do we justify calling ourselves civilized, after all? Is it the books we read? The delicacy of our tastes? Our place in continuing a line of belief and of common values that stretch back a thousand years and more? All this, indeed, but what does it mean? How does it show itself? Are you civilized if you read the right books, yet stand by while your neighbors are massacred, your lands laid waste, your cities brought to ruin?”

To simply abandon Syria and watch it burn is condone the destruction of society and civilization, and to invite a similar response were that to happen elsewhere or even in our own backyard. For, as Pears also writes:

“Action is the activity of the rational soul, which abhors irrationality and must combat it or be corrupted by it. When it sees the irrationality of others, it must seek to correct it, and can do this either by teaching or engaging in public affairs itself, correcting through its practice. And the purpose of action is to enable philosophy to continue, for if men are reduced to the material alone, they become no more than beasts.”

*****

Perhaps most terrifying of all, the collapse of Syria is in part engineered by collective human civilization: the internet, the weapons, the logistics, the ideologies and religions and sects and geopolitical rivalries involved, all are major contributors to this conflict, all products of millennia of civilization and development. Syria’s ruin is therefore our ruin, Syria’s victims our victims, Syria’s plight our plight. The world’s inability or unwillingness to stop the greatest calamity of our age* is also a reflection of the weaknesses of our civilization, weaknesses that must be addressed in order to prevent something even worse and on a larger scale in the future.

Towards the end of his book, Pears has one of his main characters describe the Holocaust he realizes is unfolding in the middle of WWII:

“When I was at Verdun [the WWI battle]… I saw things which were more appalling than you can imagine. I saw civilization coming apart at the seams. As it weakened, people felt free to act as they pleased, and did so, which weakened it still more. And I decided then it was the most important thing, that it had to survive and be protected. Without that tissue of beliefs and habits we are worse than beasts. Animals are constrained by their limitations and their lack of imagination. We are not.

…I thought in this simple contrast between the civilized and the barbaric, but I was wrong. It is the civilized who are the truly barbaric, and the Germans are merely the supreme expression of it. They are our greatest achievement. They are building a monument which will never be dismantled, even when they are swept away. They are teaching us a lesson which will echo for hundreds of years… The Nazis are… holding up a mirror and saying, ‘Look at what we have all achieved.’…

What they’re doing goes far beyond the war. Something unparalleled in human history. The ultimate achievement of civilization. Just think about it. How do you annihilate so many people? You need contributions from so many quarters. Scientists to prove Jews are inferior; theologians to provide the moral tone. Industrialists to build the trains and the camps. Technicians to design the guns. Administrators to solve the vast problems of identifying and moving so many people. Writers and artists to make sure nobody notices or cares. Hundreds of years spent honing skills and developing techniques have been necessary before such a thing can even be imagined, let alone put into effect. And now is the moment. Now is the time for all the skills of civilization to be put to use.

Can you imagine a greater, a more enduring achievement? This will last forever, and cannot be undone. Whatever benefits we bring to mankind in the future, we killed the Jews. No matter how great the advances of medicine, we killed them. However high our achievements may soar, however perfect we become, this is what is at our heart. We killed them all; not by accident, or in a fit of passion. We did it deliberately, and after centuries of preparation.

When all this is over, people will try to blame the Germans alone, and the Germans will try to blame the Nazis alone, and the Nazis will try to blame Hitler alone. They will make him bear the sins of the world. But it’s not true.”

*****

In the end, the world has enabled such a rapid destruction of almost an entire society in Syria, and the world allows it to continue, perpetuates it. That is hardly to suggest equally diffused global responsibility.

But if the global community cannot save Syria, will it ever be able to save itself when confronted with far greater crises in the future? It would be terrible to try to save Syria and fail, but it would be more terrible to not even try to save it and just watch it burn, consuming all inside and around in a fiery vortex of death and destruction, fed by the oxygen of nihilism and selfishness. The shows I discussed demonstrate how easily and deeply this can happen, show in great detail the dynamics of radicalization and how they can spread and corrupt all whom they touch, sparing no one, just as is happening in Syria, and show us how such shocking dynamics and sudden collapses can happen anytime, anywhere, to anyone.

There are no easy answers. All I know is that Syria is a test of our current human civilization, and whether it is the mass beheadings, the thousands of sex slaves, the religious extremism, the masses of displaced, or the petty rivalries involved, we—our world, our civilization—are failing this test.

*****

 (*To those of you who would argue that the 2003-2011 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq is the greatest calamity of our era, I would argue America’s 2003 Iraq invasion comes in second, and if you think that the situation in Iraq at the time of the Syrian Arab Spring uprising and the ensuing civil war contributed greatly to those events in destabilizing Syria you would be wrong, and it is most certainly the other way around, thatSyria destabilized Iraq, for, with the sacking of Rumsfeld and the implementation of new strategy led by Secretary Gates and General Petraeus starting in 2007, tremendous improvements in security and competence were made,so that from 2008 to 2012—the last year being a full year after a full U.S. withdrawal—the levels of violence were the lowest since the start of the conflict not including the initial invasion itself, particularly from 2010-2012.  Furthermore, throughout the entirety of the U.S. occupation, there was no major spillover from Iraq other than some refugees, whose numbers pale in comparison to both the current absolute number and especially the proportions of Syrian refugees, and the refugee populations today in Jordan and Lebanon especially are already having a much larger deleterious effect on those countries than the situation with refugees in almost nine years of U.S. operations in Iraq did with any of its neighbors. Certainly, nothing like the 2014 ISIS march into Iraq from Syria and its civil war occurred during the U.S. occupation of Iraq in regards to any of its neighbors. I have here linked to several articles I authored detailing these facts for those who wish to read more or doubt what I have written here)

See related articles by same author:

Putin’s Reckless Syria Escalation Makes Russia, Russians, Target of Global Jihad (Again)

Grading Obama’s Middle East Strategy II: Syria’s Civil War

If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to me! Please feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at@bfry1981)

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse June 19, 2015  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) June 19th, 2015

Other articles in this series:

How Not to Stop Terrorism & Gun Violence: Lessons from the Republicans

American Guns: Not Just Killing Americans (See Mexico)

Gun Violence in the U.S.: The Numbers Behind the Madness

Why Is the U.S. So Good at Gun violence?

The Irrelevant Second Amendment

Out of the many past and present world conflicts that I have studied over the last decade, I have spent as much time with the Israeli/Palestinian conflict as with anything else.  And one thing that strikes me is how myopic and tactically oriented Israeli officials, especially Israeli political leaders, have been in terms of dealing with the issue of Palestinian and Arab terrorism.  Israel wins every war, every battle.  But its lack of strategic, long-term thinking has cost many lives on both sides of the conflict and has led to ineffective long-term policy that threatens to trap Israel into a quicksand of conflict and permanently alter it in very negative ways as to the nature of Israeli democracy and society.  The recent Israeli documentary “The Gatekeepers” (truly a must see) does perhaps the single best job of illustrating this point when all six surviving heads of Shin-Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence service, conclude that a lack of strategic vision from Israel’s leading politicians has put Israel in a very dangerous place with no easy way out.  That such hard, practical men can all agree on this is what makes the film so compelling and disturbing at the same time.

Our own approach to terrorism here in the U.S. has been very different, and for different reasons we are also suffering from the ramifications of bad policy.  For all his faults, though, George W. Bush recognized after 9/11 that simply going to kill the terrorists who plotted 9/11 would not do much to limit our long-term exposure to such attacks and threats; he knew that there was something sick in the postwar, postcolonial Middle East and its cadres of monarchs and dictators that may have kept order and oil flowing but had done little for their people, economies, or societies.  And he was right about that.  That he thought the best way to help kickstart transformation in the Middle East was to invade Iraq, topple Saddam Hussein, and set up a democracy in his place, though, was questionable at best; whatever you thought of that idea, the execution of this plan not only left much to be desired but could be called criminally negligent at worst, and more or less doomed Iraq’s American-top-down-imposed-democracy-project from almost the start. 

At least, though, America saw a problem—Islamic terrorism—and attempted some sort of long-term fix (albeit one that ended in disaster in the short term and only leaves us with a giant question mark at best in the present and even medium-term future, its long-term results, then, also not looking good). This is in contrast to Israel, which (mostly) never seemed to think setting the Palestinians up with a state and a future of their own was worth exploring or planning over the course of nearly five decades of a hardly benign Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza Strip and an even more destructive policy of transferring hundreds of thousands of Jewish men, women, and children into these Arab-dominated areas in settlements that the whole world, including the UN Security Council (and including the U.S.) has condemned as illegal and a roadblock to peace.  And while in some ways the U.S., thankfully, is getting some help from Facebook, Twitter, cell phones, the internet, and Arabs themselves when they all helped to spark the Arab Spring, which has helped to bring about the ending of that sick, moribund post-colonial system of generally American-supported dictators and monarchs, accomplishing in a fraction of the time what a decade-long war in Iraq could not even for all its setbacks, Israel is still staring into an abyss, propelled by its own hubris and myopia.  Thus, America is now eyeing the Middle East with a much longer view, then, while Israel still envisions little beyond tomorrow, next month, or next year.

Though America does not suffer from the same strategic blindness and inaction that Israel does regarding terrorism, sadly, it does seem to suffer from such afflictions in almost all major domestic policy issues of the day.  The “War on Terror” thus joins the “War on Crime” and the “War on Drugs” as other wars against things which cannot be defeated.  Terror is a tactic, and you cannot defeat a tactic, nor can you defeat terror by killing all the currently existing terrorists because that does nothing to address the issues that created terrorists in the first place; crime is not simply a matter of arresting and locking up criminals (and nobody is better at that than the U.S., as we have the highest incarceration rate in the world and have for over a decade), as arresting and even executing criminals will not change the murder rates in South Side of Chicago or the Northeast quadrant of Washington, DC.; drugs (prescription or otherwise) are something that will always be with us and abused by some to their own ruin and the ruin of those who care about them, their families, and their communities, but like crime or terror, drugs are not an enemy that can be defeated.  The same childlike idealism that led George W. Bush to believe that he would become, in the words of Bill Maher, the Johnny Appleseed of democracy in the Middle East has led the American populace and many of its leading politicians to believe that crime and drugs are an enemy that can be defeated: punish criminals, punish drug users and dealers, lock them up, and the problem goes away, right?

Wrong.

Until 2012, which saw a slight increase in violent crime, the previous few years had seen a steady though slight decrease in violent crime.  The decreases returned in 2013 and in preliminary data from 2014.  However, as a Pew study shows, since the late 1980s, the U.S. prison population has almost tripled, from over half a million (almost 600,000) to over one-and-a-half million people (almost 1.6 million) in 2007; the prison population peaked at over 1.6 million in 2009 and has only decreased slightly since then; that’s over 1 of every 100 adults.  Furthermore, the pew study shows the amount states are spending is steadily increasing, with 13 states spending over $1 billion each on corrections and five states spending more or the same on corrections as they do on higher education.  California and Texas alone spend over $12 billion on prisons in 2007, all states together spending over $49 billion, a 315 percent increase since 1987.  Corrections average out to be the fifth largest state expenditure, with one out of every fifteen dollars that states spend being spent on corrections.  Furthermore, increases in this category have been higher than increases in Medicaid and in education spending.  As I have pointed out before, we already spend very little on gun control or on funding the ATF.  Much like healthcare, then, with their prisoners Americans seem content to take very few preventive measures—which are relatively very cost effective—and to wait for something bad to happen—a person getting sick, someone shooting another person—before taking action, action that then becomes much more costly and less effective at longer term prevention.  As the Pew report notes, the corrections system seems to do very little correcting.

Again, to Bush’s credit, he saw remaking the Middle East, and Afghanistan, through military force as a preventive, long term measure.  At least he attempted something long-term, whereas the Israeli leaders seem almost content to manage short-term crisis after short-term crisis through what is in many ways is the foundation of their state: the Israel Defense Forces, with very little serious effort given to a long term peace. Yitzhak Rabin tried (albeit very late in his career) and he was assassinated by a right-wing Jewish extremist.  Israel’s counterterrorism policy, then, is counterterrorism at its purest, simplest, and most ineffective: respond to each attack with overwhelming force and/or lethal precision.  That seems to be all it has in its play book, as I have noted before, and this approach is eerily similar to America’s approach to healthcare, crime, and any of a number of other issues: when something breaks (e.g., a body party), fix it; when terrorists or criminals strike, kill them and their supporters.  In this view, it is simply a matter of individual behavior, of individual health issues.

These approaches fail to see the big picture: how preventive, regular medicine and consultations as part of an affordable, subsidized national health care system can save the nation as a whole (and most people) a ton of money in the long run and save many lives.  Addressing Palestinian aspiration for a state of their own anytime during the last several decades could have seen much of the Palestinian efforts towards terrorist actions transformed instead into the business of a people with their own sovereign state and society to run.  Helping underserved communities and developing them economically and educationally would do a lot to lessen crime as young men in particular—those who are most likely to commit violent crimes—find jobs and degrees instead of guns and drugs that are easy to sell.  So sickness is treated not directly, but by focusing on preventative medicine, while crime and terrorism have more or less the same solution: the same concepts of international development that can be effective in fostering long term conditions which would create societies where terrorism would find much less fertile ground to grow can be applied to areas right here in the U.S. in order to foster development in communities where crime is rampant.  In other cases, such as those of the Palestinians, Chechens, Kurds, or Tamils, the iron fist of oppression lasting decades or even longer generally does not stop terrorism but only encourages it since, for the desperate, terrorism is often the cheap, cost effective way to fight more powerful enemies when all other options have been denied to a group.  This explains the IRA’s decision to abandon terrorism when a framework was worked out for sharing political power in Northern Ireland.

As this striking interactive feature from the University of Maryland shows, terrorism in recent years has been remarkable concentrated: roughly two thirds of the world’s terrorist incidents in the last decade have occurred in four countries: Iraq, Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan, and that ratio has more or less been consistent even as the absolute amount of attacks has more than quadrupled since the beginning of our so-called “War on Terror.”  This visual clarity makes it clear that so-called “Global War on Terror” has only led to a huge increase in terrorist attacks worldwide.  Before the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq, there were well under 1,500 terrorist incidents; by 2007 that had risen to over 4,500 incidents.  Iraq and Afghanistan alone had about 1,400 incidents, about one third of all terrorist incidents; another third were in Pakistan and India, the first country’s incidents very much tied to the war in Afghanistan, and many of the second country’s incidents also, though to a lesser degree, suffering from the Afghanistan/Pakistan terror nexus.  Basically, the U.S.’s actions had the effect of greatly increasing incidents of terrorism.  So even though Bush gets credit for trying a long term solution, the attempt was a disaster of epic proportions.  International development—the work of USAID, NGOs and the UN, among others—is a much better investment value for winning friends and helping to create conditions where extremism and violence find it harder to grow.  In fact, it is such good counterterrorism that both Generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal made political and economic development the very point of the security operations in their counterinsurgency strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan.  In fact, the military in both these theatees engaged in massive development projects to the point that the military even added these types of “stability operations” to its list of core mission functions. 

So it is that the best counterterrorism is international development, just as helping to revitalize devastated, poor, uneducated communities is the best way to bring down crime.  We do not need people as smart and capable as Generals Petraeus and McChrystal to tell us that here, we just have to think of both our crime and terrorism problems as all-encompassing problems that transcend simple solutions like “lock ‘em up” and “kill ‘em all.”  Sure, there will always be your uncommon, freak murders and freak terror attacks, like that police officer in L.A. who went on a shooting rampage or the two brothers who carried out the Boston Marathon bombings.  Some crazy cults like ISIS, al-Qaeda, and the Japanese group that released sarin gas into the Tokyo Sunway can very likely be reasonably accommodated, but the Chechen or Palestinian fighting against oppression today, like the Irishman before them, can likely be accommodated by a long term peace settlement that will not please everyone but will be good enough for most.  Sometimes, you need to kill to defeat terror; but whenever possible, you should defeat terror by defusing the often legitimate grievances of its practitioners, much like helping would-be criminals escape from poverty, drugs, and failing schools, and taking preventative measures to keep weapons that enable them to more easily and effectively commit crimes out of their hands.  The U.S. was faulted after the fall of Saddam’s regime in 2003 for not securing Iraq’s weapons depots, weapon which ended up in the hands of terrorists and insurgents; likewise, why would we want guns flowing around our more devastated urban areas like they flowed in Baghdad?

We don’t need to lock 1% of our adult population up or start massive wars to combat crime and terrorism.  Rather, we must cease our myopic approaches and need to address root causes and enablers, and (international) development and limiting access to arms for both would-be-criminals and would-be terrorists are much better starting-off points for successful policy.  We have begun to realize this in terms of counterterrorism, but we are woefully short of this mark when it comes to our home front.  In light of this most recent racially-motivated mass shooting in Charleston, SC, which can easily be considered both a hate crime and a terrorist act, this is the least we can do in face of the obvious failure of our approaches thus far.

If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to me! Please feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at@bfry1981)

If you can’t understand that Obama’s overall Middle East strategy is starting to work, you don’t know what you’re talking about

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse May 21, 2015   

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) May 21st, 2015

This piece was The Russian International Affairs Council’s (RIAC) “Post of the Month” for June/July, and was also published by Stupidparty Math v. Myththanks to Patrick Andendall and by Tuck Magazine.

The cocks who crow “failure” every time the sun rises about the Obama Administration’s overall Middle East strategy—and we will be hearing their mindless crowing at its highest decibels since the competition within the Republican Party for the Party’s presidential nomination is now officially underway—have no sense of strategy themselves and dangerously substitute tactical-here-and-nows and pointless posturing for real strategy. That’s not to say some of the Obama Administration’s Middle East policies aren’t lacking, but overall the Administration has more progress and sound approaches to point to than failures and mismanagement. Below, all of the Obama Administration’s major Middle East policies are broken down and given a letter grade. Here, then, is a look at all the major efforts of the Obama Administration in the Middle East, and as it covers a lot of territory this has been broken up into three parts, this being Part I and covering the U.S.-Muslim world reset, Iraq, and Israel/Palestine.

Other articles in this series:

Grading Obama’s Middle East Strategy (Sensibly): Part II: Syria

A tense triumvirate in September, 2009- Doug Mills/The New York Times

AMMAN — Well, here we are again. Far too many “experts,” from the far leftto (especially) those who lean right and even many non-Americans, are ready to claim that Obama is practically starting the apocalypse with his foreign policy. While hysterical, laughable claims about possible nuclear warover Ukraine and many other issues fall into this category, the Middle East situation in particular inspires a remarkable number of myopic and dim-witted exclamations not only from the Republican White House hopefuls, but also many in the commentariat and the Twitteratti. Never mind the track record of this commentary-class who are naysaying Obama’s moves (and to a degree lack thereof, but more on that later), and never mind that the generally ill-informed Twitteratti emerge practically every day with some new hysterics that that there is barely time to call them out on their hysterics of old. These Chicken Littles of all levels proclaim that the sky is falling so often, that one must marvel that there is any sky left for us to enjoy at this point if even a fraction of their panic-mongering can be taken seriously. What is particularly amusing is that many of the people who are blaming Obama for the imminent collapse of the world order and Pax Americana are the same people who blame him for U.S. economic woes, as if things were great in January 2009 and America was not in the midst of the worst economic and financial crisis since the Great Depression. Still even more amusing and amazing are that many of these people are both the people who led America into the Great Recession and into invading Iraq.

Having said this, I will am quite happy to repeat that I find the Obama Administration’s foreign policy to be far from perfect, and have made some of my own disagreements with it quite vocally and publicly on matters from Syria to Israel/Palestine, among others. So I write this neither as an apologist nor as a hater, but as someone who has studied the Middle East for much of the past fifteen years (including some studying abroad in the region and, most recently, actually living in the Middle East). Rather from a position of ideology, I simply try to look at each situation, country, organization, etc. in light of whatever current issue is at hand, and try to see who is trying to make things better, who is disrupting for less-than-altruistic reasons, and how successful these various parties are in their efforts and whether or not such efforts actually help people or hurt people in both the short and long-terms.

A few basic points, though, need to be reiterated before we launch into a discussion here:

• Obama took office in January, 2009, and had to deal with a Middle Eastthat had become an overall festering disaster from the actions of the Bush Administration but also from the terrible policies of local rulers, from Hosni Mubarak in Egypt to Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran to (the recently departed) King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and also from the actions of a number of other foreign patrons, like Russia. While some of the American disasters had been partly mitigated by some competent self-correction (see Secretary of Defense Gates, General Petraeus, and the 2007 “Surge”), it is still undeniable that Obama inherited a situation in the Middle East that was probably worse than any previous American president ever had to deal with before. And those who say the situation got worse for a while under his watch may be right, but that is a statement of fact that in no way includes presiding over with responsibility, as this would be like blaming Lincoln for the Civil War or FDR for WWII. Rather, events were in motion and grievances raw and waiting to explode long before January 2009, it just took some time until after that for it all to boil over.
• The crises of the “Arab Spring” and its offshoot situations in Libya, Yemen, and most of all Syria had little to do with anything Obama did, and those trying to place primary blame for any of these local revolutions and wars are way off the mark. Locals were just as surprised as Americans at the Arab Spring, as well.
• As far as Israel/Palestine, Obama inherited a Bibi Netanyahu who had little-to-no desire to take the steps necessary for peace and an emasculated Palestinian Authority led by an emasculated Mahmoud Abbas, with the emasculation largely by Israeli design not just over the past few years but over decades.

Now that we have reminded people that the Middle East was not Vancouver or Switzerland before Obama took office, we have to think about what Obama’s major goals have been for U.S. policy in the region, why he has these goals, and how successful he has been in moving towards or fulfilling these goals. We can then give a letter “grade” on each of these for Obama and his Administration’s efforts so far.

In no particular order, let’s go through these major goals:

1.) Resetting U.S. relations with the Muslim world

I think we all remember Obama’s lofty Cairo address at Al-Azhar University, merely months into his presidency. At that point, Muslims were still in the “he’s not George W. Bush, he’s black, and his father was raised in a Muslim family” mode. However, escalation of U.S. military efforts in Afghanistan (a.k.a. Obama’s “surge”), Obama’s (wise) overall policy of not shying away from the use of drones in principle to go after terrorists training, plotting, and operating in ungoverned spaces, the taking out of Osama bin Laden by violating Pakistani sovereignty, still failing to fulfill his promise to close the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay over six years into his presidency, and lack of progress for the Palestinians achieving statehood combined with continued(and increasing) U.S. support of Israel have all led (unfairly, but quite understandably) to a feeling among Muslims that there was little to distinguish between George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The fact is that the lofty rhetoric and high idealism of the (now somewhat infamous) Cairo speech was not matched with much of the action that Muslim publics wanted to see from a U.S. President: an end to drone strikes and military operations, the closing of Guantánamo, and real, substantive pressure on Israel and a lessening of U.S. support for Israel on behalf of Palestinians. While it was not realistic to expect any U.S. president to take away most of or all military options for dealing with terrorists in many of the weak states of the Muslim world, based on his own rhetoric Obama would have to be guilty of raising expectations on both Guantánamo and on Israel and the Palestinians far beyond what he has delivered and far below the amount of effort that should have come after such a speech.

Grade: D+ overall; more recently: C-

We don’t give Mr. Obama an F here because we are talking about the Muslim “world,” which, although mostly the people, also includes leaders and governments. This is because, despite his unpopularity on the street-level, the coalition he has put together to confront ISIS includes several Middle Eastern Muslim nations not just financing operations, as has been standard operating procedure in the past, but actually taking part in hostilities in a significant way. So one can say that recently, Obama has shown to have increased his ability to work with Muslims leader, if not endear himself to their people. In this way, then, Obama resembles George W. Bush’s father, George H. W. Bush, who was able to include a wide array of regional Muslim nations in the 1990-91 Gulf War, more George W. was able to include in his 2003 misadventure. So even if Obama remains deeply unpopular among Muslims publics in many parts of the world, he deserves credit from getting more out of Muslim leaders recently than his predecessor.

2.) Ending U.S. combat involvement in Iraq while maintaining the U.S. role of a key ally and supporter of Iraq

Here is a goal that no one should be surprised about: Illinois state senator Obama, U.S. Senator Obama, Democratic presidential primary candidate Obama, and Democratic presidential nominee Obama all made it clear his goal was to end the Iraq War, specifically to end the U.S. combat role there. The fact that he opposed it more vocally than, and before, Hillary Clinton, who had voted for the authorization to use force in Iraq, was arguably the issue which most distinguished Obama from Clinton, and which propelled him to a Democratic primary victory over her. I will state here that I was, in much of the period before he was elected President, concerned about this position of his. While it was clear to me that Iraq had been a disaster and that the decision to invade was wrong, I felt that we owed the Iraqi people a lot for invading them erroneously and destroying their society through a combination of carelessness, incompetence, stupidity, and hubris. Yet before Obama was running for president, we had been able to improve the security situation greatly through some major changes in leadership and the accompanying “Surge,” as I have noted a few times before, but there was still a lot to be done and while I was more and more doubting the ability of the U.S. to achieve its goals in Iraq, I had not yet come to the position where I was comfortable with a withdrawal of U.S. forces from a combat role. In other words, I didn’t even want to go into the store, but having broken the merchandise once we were in the store, I felt we had to fix things and couldn’t just leave (see Colin Powell’s so-called “Pottery Barn” doctrine). In some ways, Obama struck me as a bit naïve and idealistic in his articulated foreign policy, and that was one of many reasons why I was a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries. I was particularly nervous that he was going to pick a vice presidential candidate who was very light on national-level and foreign policy experience, someone like Virginia Governor Tim Kaine or others who were rumored top picks at the time. John McCain’s long experience as a moderate “maverick” Republican who was willing to stand up to his party and to do so often, allowed me to consider voting for him at this juncture, in the summer of 2008. But when Obama nominated Joe Biden as his vice president, my fears of a radical, naïve foreign policy were assuaged and I felt the pick sent a clear signal that Obama would not do anything too quickly and too drastically in Iraq that would cause a catastrophic, sudden power vacuum. Conversely, McCain’s picking of the almost cartoonishly buffoonishneophyte Sarah Palin to be his vice presidential nominee made it clear to me that the aging maverick was unfit for the presidency.

As events in Iraq continued to show no serious political progress despite our security gains, the Bush Administration and the Iraqi government, in the midst of the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign to determine Bush’s successor, completed negotiations and agreed on a withdrawal of all U.S. combat troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. And let’s just repeat that tidbit from the last sentence, for all the world and especially American conservatives to see: the administration of George W. Bush committed the U.S. to withdrawing its combat troops from Iraq by the end of 2011, which is exactly the same time frame in which Obama would eventually do just that. Years later, Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State in 2008 and a major player in the negotiations, maintained that the Administration’s intention was for that deadline to be renegotiated and/or for a “residual force for our training with the Iraqis,” but the Bush Administration—again, this is key—found itself unable to come to agreement with the exact same issue the Obama Administration found was its primary obstacle to negotiating for this same residual force: immunity of U.S. troops from prosecution by the Iraqi government, standard in any such agreement, known as status of forces agreements (SOFAs). And what is not to be missed here is that the Bush Administration, in agreeing to the 2011 withdrawal timeline mere months before it would be out of office, punted the responsibility to changing that agreement to what it actually intended it to be to the next president’s administration. So basically, regardless of any intent to change or add onto the Bush Administration’s 2008 agreement later—and betting on a future round of negotiations is always a risky bet since you cannot ever guarantee the same leaders or conditions—the Bush Administration still set the stage and the timetable for a withdrawal of all U.S. combat troops by 2008 through its own choice, through its own actions, by failing to obtain any agreement on a residual U.S. force because the Iraqi government would not agree to grant U.S. troops immunity from prosecution (which is exactly why the Obama Administration was unable to come to agreement on the very same issue!). By putting the onus on a future administration to either undo or change the agreement they had negotiated just before leaving office, those senior Bush Administration officials involved in the 2008 agreement who are criticizing Obama’s not coming to SOFA agreement on a residual force in Iraq are criticizing Obama’s team for what they themselves were unable to do. It is impossible to take any such criticism coming from them seriously, which can only be considered absurd or hypocritical at best.

Around the same time the 2008 Bush Administration agreement to withdraw from Iraq was finalized, I was starting to become comfortable with the idea of a gradual, eventual withdrawal from Iraq, and with Biden’s selection as VP, Obama’s subsequent elaboration on his ideas on Iraq, and the selection of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State once Obama had been elected, I became more confident that Obama’s team would not conduct a withdrawal hastily or irresponsibly. Still, I was torn on the issue of a withdrawal itself, but as Obama’s early years in the White House unfolded and the security situation in Iraq improved without any major political agreements being forged by Iraq’s Shiite political leadership—led by Iraq’s Prime Minister, Nouri Kemal al-Maliki—with the Sunni or Kurdish minorities, agreements that would be key in creating any lasting stability in Iraq, I became convinced that there was little more that U.S. forces could accomplish in Iraq. Having helped establish a dramatic improvement in security in 2007 with the surge compared to the previous year, and seeing each year U.S. forces remained in Iraq have a significant reduction in violence and Iraqi civilian casualties, the U.S. had succeeded in giving Iraq and its leaders the security space necessary to negotiate politically without concurrent violence dictating terms to those threatened by such violence. Even once U.S. forces had totally withdrawn in December 2011—and the withdrawal had been going on since 2010—the year 2012 saw virtually the same level of dramatically improved security as 2011 and 2010, with all three years being the safest in Iraq since before the 2003 U.S. invasion. Yet Maliki, Prime Minister since before the 2007 “Surge,” and his supporters squandered very real, very workable opportunities from during and after the surge over the course of over five years—which is more time in office than some U.S. presidents—and set the stage for rebellion in 2013 instead of reconciliation, as I have previously written. If Maliki was not going to use the massive gains in security in from 2007-2011, while American troops were still in Iraq, to make the necessary compromises in order to calm down angry Sunnis and Kurds and to put Iraq on the path away from sectarian division and civil war and towards stability and reconciliation, what was the point of having U.S. troops there anymore, shoring up a government that was unwilling to govern in the interests of all Iraqis? If anything, having U.S. forces there to support and protect his government when he was unwilling to compromise gave Maliki more cover to avoid reaching out to Sunnis and Kurds.

So by the time the Obama Administration completed the withdrawal of U.S. troops in December 2011, I had come to agree that, having spent blood and treasure to give Iraqi politicians breathing room to make politics work—the explicit stated objective of the “Surge”—while having seen no serious effort at politics on the part of Iraq’s government, having seen that our leverage and influence (being eclipsed by Iran) was clearly no longer high enough in Iraq produce meaningful results, and having seen Iraq clearly align itself with Iran over America, it made sense to get out. The “Surge” and subsequent maintaining and improving of its security gains may not have 100% fulfilled our moral and ethical responsibility for all the damage we caused and contributed to in Iraq from 2003-2006, but in 2011 especially it was clear there was no point in staying at all, especially if Maliki would not give U.S. troops immunity. So the right decision had been made, but the Bush Administration deserved some credit as well for agreeing to the initial timetable to which Obama stuck. And, as will be discussed below, he handled the ISIS in Iraq debacle in a way that very much aided Iraq’s long-term interests.

Grade: A+

Obama withdrew from Iraq and was ahead of the curve compared to many in realizing American troops could not bring about the politics necessary to stabilize Iraq, but he did so in a responsible, gradual way that no sane person could say caused a drastic power vacuum or directly caused Iraq’s more recent woes. Just like Bush (and like any U.S. president would have), he chose not to agree to allow a U.S. residual non-combat force to stay and train/support Iraqi forces when Maliki would not grant them immunity. Nothing to complain about here, and I agree that a residual force would have been better but that is 100% on Maliki not granting immunity and having already committed to his Iranian allies that he would see our troops out in 2011. We will come to ISIS (and Obama’s mild military reengagement in Iraq) and Syria as separate issues.

3.) Israeli/Palestinian Peace

Here, one may be tempted to make more of the efforts of the Obama Administration than they actually represent, but at the same time we should not minimize them.

To be sure, Obama has publicly and in speeches, beginning especially with his big Cairo speech (see above) months into his presidency, highlighted the plight of Palestinians and the need for Israeli settlements to stop expanding into what is supposed to the core of a Palestinian state. Obama tried (perhaps too hard), and failed, to get Israel to agree to a full stop, or freeze, in settlement construction early in his presidency as a way to build up badly needed faith on the Palestinian side that Israelis were serious about negotiations, instead meekly settling for a “partial” Israeli freeze from late 2009 through much of 2010 after applying no substantive pressure to Israel beyond speeches and meetings. Even while the Obama Administration was trying shore up support for the talks, Israel announced the construction of 1,600 settlement housing units to be built on illegally occupied, disputed land in East Jerusalem (which was occupied in 1967 along with the West Bank and Gaza and which Israel has held in defiance of multiple binding resolutions of the United Nations Security Council over the decades since, beginning with the unanimously-agreed-upon Resolution 242 that included a “yes” vote of the U.S.). Moreover, this announcement came as Biden was visiting Israel to lead the charge for making the peace talks happen. This is equivalent of two people negotiating over splitting a pizza, and one side eating slices the other is claiming during negotiations, and eating this pizza right in front of the sponsor of the negotiations. Even after the partial freeze was agreed to, Israel continued building in in East Jerusalem and allowed thousands of announced “exceptions” and some unannounced exceptions that were in violation of even the limited freeze to which it had agreed. In addition, Israel also allowed a much higher than usual number of settlements to be approved before it agreed to the partial freeze so that, even while new construction was not authorized for some time, the pace of building hardly changed at all, and the pace only increased greatly after the nominal freeze.

Despite such disingenuous behavior on Israel’s part, at no time did the Obama Administration publicly even raise the prospect of reducing Israeli’s billions in military aid. In fact, throughout Obama’s entire presidency, U.S. aid has increased every year Obama has been in office, with the exception of a minor reduction in 2013 due to mandatory across-the-bard budget cuts imposed by the sequestration process, the outcome of Congressional inability to agree on a budget. And yet, when the recent hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for Israeli and joint U.S.-Israeli missile defense systems, including the highly effective Iron Dome system used to great effect against Hamas and others’ rockets in the Gaza conflict in the summer of 2014, is considered part of U.S. foreign aid to Israel (it is formally part of the U.S. defense budget and not classified as foreign aid), 2013, like every other year, saw an increase in aid. In addition, the Obama Administration has made many moves to block actions against Israel in the United Nations Security Council before they even came to light, and was the only “no” vote(which also served as a veto, given the U.S. position as a permanent veto-wielding member of the Security Council) against a resolution condemning Israeli settlements at a crucial juncture in February 2011 after talks between Israeli and Palestinians had broken down. Rather than pressure Israel substantively to stop settlement expansion and begin substantive talks, with its veto the U.S. instead encouraged Israel’s course of intransigence, occupation, and settlement expansion, even as it publicly condemned such action but only with mere words. The veto was not only hypocritical, it undermined the stated policy of every U.S. president since 1967 beginning with Lyndon Johnson and needlessly undermined the Obama Administration’s own concurrent efforts. Even with well over three more years of Israeli defiance on the settlements issue, the most substantive action the Obama Administration has taken to date was to merely delay for a short period of time some arms shipments last summer at the height of Israel’s grossly disproportionate assault on Gaza.

In other words, Obama sent Benjamin Netanyahu, then (and still) the Prime Minister of Israel, a clear message: “Go back on your agreements, play words game and with technicalities, completely undermine the spirit of an agreement, provoke the Palestinians by building on land you are supposed to be negotiating over, and we will complain publicly but still happily, freely, and increasingly give you lots of money and assistance, as well as diplomatic cover. I am too timid politically to actually threaten anything substantive against you even if you disrespect my Administration and even my Vice President personally, so, though you are the junior partner in the relationship, feel free to do anything you want, to ignore what me and my team say, and to not worry about your billions in U.S. aid. In fact, get ready for that aid to increase…”

Now, this is not what the Obama Administration intended to convey. It certainly did not say this, and there has been a valiant effort first by Obama then especially by Secretary of State John Kerry to try to help Israel see that its settlement policy not only harms Palestinians but also harms Israel’s interests by keeping millions of West Bank Palestinians under Israeli control and forcing the Israeli Jewish-majority democratic state of Israel to either become an Arab-majority country that outvotes Israel’s Jewish minority or to become a non-democratic, apartheid-like state which denies equal rights to the Arabs under its control in order to preserve Jewish control of the government. Other options that would forcibly remove millions of Palestinians from the West Bank or Israel would cause Israel majorproblems with the international community and seem not highly possible in implementation or probable.

Thus, to America’s credit, it has tried being a friend to Israeli in emphatically pressuring it with public speeches and in private meetings, including some unpleasant and animated meetings between Kerry and Netanyahu during the last round of failed talks which precipitated the violent confrontation in Gaza last summer. Senior U.S. officials—including Kerry and, apparently privately, Obama—and many others—Including Tzipi Livni, one of Israel’s own chief negotiators—have made it clear, as I have pointed out, that Netanyahu and the Israeli government bear the majority of responsibility for the lack of progress in peace talks with the Palestinians. So, let’s be clear: that is not Obama’s fault, nor that of his Administration.

What Obama can be blamed for is for not using any of his real leverage with Netanyahu and Israeli hardliners: the what is now well over $3 billion in annual aid to Israel and the U.S. veto power of what would be binding United Nations Security Council resolutions against Israeli actions regarding settlements and its occupation and control of Palestinian territory. All carrot and no stick over a long period of time is not a recipe for success. By leaving this leverage untouched and essentially rewarding Israel for its stubbornness and settlement expansion, the Obama Administration, despite any words or speeches, has encouraged Israel’s (self-)destructive policies, empowered Israeli’s right-wingers, and weakened Israel’s left, a left which is more serious about peace. In a very similar way, U.S. actions have also undermined Palestinians moderates like Mahmoud Abbas and Salaam Fayyad and empowered extremists like Hamas, as I have previously pointed out.

While, again, Netanyahu and the Israeli government are the most responsible for driving the dynamics, U.S. policy has not helped, and, overall, has only made things worse. And even as senior Israeli officials outlandishly disrespected Kerry when he was in the midst of leading talks in 2014, even as Netanyahu just delivered a major speech to a joint session of the U.S. Congress—wholly unprecedented because both a foreign head of state was invited by the American domestic opposition (Republicans) without the involvement or approval of the White House or the State Department in a blatant violation of protocol (a violation publicly criticized by over 180 former Israeli security officials for damaging Israel’s relationship with the U.S.) and because this foreign head of state delivered an insulting-to-Obama, not to mention misleading speech before a formal session of Congress to rally support against the Obama Administration’s own policy on Iran (Netanyahu foolishly wants more sanctions on Iran and illogically opposes Obama’s sound framework for, and attempt at reaching, a deal with Iran on its nuclear program, while Obama wants to hold off while negotiations are taking place and close the deal outline by the framework—one must wonder how much abuse and disrespect the Obama Administration is willing to suffer at the hands of Netanyahu’s Israeli government before there are any real consequences or penalty. Because in addition to undermining the whole Israeli-Palestinian peace process by holding back so timidly and encouraging unending chutzpah on the part of Netanyahu, such non-action on Obama’s part undermines the office of the presidency and American standing in the world, as well as humiliates Obama personally, when all can see how America’s supposedly closest “ally” mistreats it when there are serious disagreements on policy and that there are no substantive consequences for such mistreatment.

Grade: D+

Obama deserves some credit for robust public diplomacy consistently condemning Israeli settlement expansion and even condemning the tactics used in Gaza last summer, and as well as the verbal efforts during many private meetings between senior Israeli and American officials including Netanyahu, Obama, and Kerry. That is why an “F” grade is not given here. But, at a crucial time during this conflict when every year without an agreement makes getting to an agreement dramatically harder, not using America’s veto power or billions of dollars in annual aid to Israel as leverage while relying just on words to pressure Israel into saving itself and treating Palestinians humanely has clearly been ineffective throughout the more than six years of Obama’s presidency. To keep doing the same thing over and over again with the same approach is to invite the same result, a result that has not helped defuse a very unstable situation and serves only to increase tension and bloodshed. Basically, Obama has literally failed to put U.S. money where his mouth is, and the interests of America, Israel, and Palestinians have all suffered as a result. In addition, humiliating treatment by Netanyahu & Co. with no serious response from Team Obama has diminished the prestige of and respect for the office of the presidency, not to mention Obama himself.

*****

Continue to Part II

That’s it for Part I, in the next two parts: first the Obama Administration’s policies on the Syrian Civil War, then (overall) Arab Spring, ISIS, reducing America’s dependency on Mideast oil, and Iran (saving the more positive for last). If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to me! Please feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at@bfry1981)

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse February 18, 2015  

By Brian E. Frydenborg, February 18th, 2015 (updated/expanded February 19th; *UPDATE 9/28/2024 to explicitly name the Dahiya/Dahya/Dahia Doctrine)

This article was republished by Ammon News.

The following is also largely excerpted and adapted from an earlier article I wrote this summer, Part II of The Israel-Hamas Gaza High-Stakes Poker Game of Death, itself part of a larger article that is available as an eBook format at Barnes & Noble,Amazon, or as an ePub file.

When I was writing earlier about the conflict this past summer in Gaza between the Israeli government and Hamas, I noted that intent is one of the three main criteria by which a party’s violence in a conflict should be judged, the other two being types of tactics used and their immediate likely effects and, most importantly, the actual effects of the violence.

Intent is something that can be multifaceted. A party to a conflict can have stated intents, which may or may not be true, and unstated intents, which sometimes can be pretty apparent, but other times can be pretty mystifying at best. Here, one must distinguish between a party deliberately and indiscriminately targeting civilians for death, and one that does not target civilians for death as an end-target unto themselves. Keep in mind that this intent is a separate criterion from looking at the actual casualties caused by the violence.

In terms of intent regarding their respective acts of violence, I looked at both Hamas’ intent and the Israeli government’s. Hamas had two main categories of violent acts in this conflict: the rocket attacks, for which “all Israelis” were declared legitimate targets and which were intended to kill civilians, and engaging the Israeli military in and around Gaza, which targeted the Israeli military and can be viewed as self-defense. Israel’s attacks, in contrast, are part of a general, longstanding policy that “is not intended to maximize civilian casualties. Yet it does intentionally target civilians: it is intended to produce maximal civilian distress, while avoiding mass civilian casualties [author Roi Maor’s emphasis],” which, though leading at times to high civilian casualties, is meant to act as a deterrent, hitting civilian areas that are used as military bases and trying to make civilians think twice about supporting or allowing militant activity in their neighborhood, or to get them to pressure their government and/or militants to abandon hostilities; conversely, the militants/government may also think twice about engaging in violence if the likely response will be massive harm inflicted upon their own civilian charges, for whom they are supposed to be fighting in the first place (*UPDATE 9/28/2014: this is the so-called Dahiya Doctrine, or Dahya or Dahia). Still, while not targeting civilians specifically for death as a policy, the IDF has displayed a callous attitude towards Palestinian civilians, and one of the IDF’s ethics code authors asserting that only the safety of its personnel should affect tactics and that no additional risks to its own personnel should be accepted by the IDF to prevent civilian casualties is something that at the very least should be debated vigorously, as such a philosophy seemingly contributed to the high levels of civilian casualties in Operation Cast Lead, taking place just before Obama took office. Furthermore, the IDF’s own investigations into abuses or questionable actions are not regarded as serious. One non-military panel found that the IDF was not even following its own procedures regarding civilians.

As it is, there is considerable and ongoing debate involving a wide variety of views regarding tactics and noncombatants since this is a grey area of international law. Here are some of Israel’s official rules regarding combat and civilians. Thomas Smith, writing in 2008, noted that U.S. tactics earlier in the Iraq War were killing higher levels of civilians and alienating Iraqis, mentioning that U.S. consultation with the IDF (as reported late in December 2003 by Dexter Filkins, Julian Borger, and Seymour Hersh) may have been a factor that actually brought about a deterioration of both tactics and the relationship between Americans and Iraqis, or, as he termed it, brought about the “Palestinianization” of Iraq. He also noted that Gen. Peter Chiarelli’s installment as a major commander beginning in January 2006 and, in January 2007, the appointment of Gen. David Petraeus as overall commander in Iraq led to a distinctly different approach that took far more care to prioritize Iraqi civilians’ needs and safety and produced some better results. It was Petraeus who had been responsible for revising, improving, and co-authoring the U.S. Army’s own counterinsurgency manual [2014 edition here] at the time, wisely writing in one heading “The More Force Used, the Less Effective It Is” and also writing that “An operation that kills five insurgents is counterproductive if the collateral damage or the creation of blood feuds leads to the recruitment of fifty more.” Currently, the U.S. Army’s own manual from 2012 on Civilian Casualty Mitigationpainstakingly and correctly notes that

Short-term thinking must be avoided because it is likely to lead to behavior that will generate widespread resentment and lead to a more insecure operational area in the future. Over time, units focused entirely on their own protection are likely to adopt a pattern of maneuvering aggressively, firing weapons indiscriminately, threatening civilians, and causing unnecessary CIVCASs [civilian casualties]

and that “Aggressive measures to protect the force in the short term can place units at greater risk in the future if resulting CIVCAS incidents alienate the population.” Not so much out of a moral principle, then, but out of consideration for the prospects of the Army’s own long-term success and safety and American national interests, it seems the U.S. military’s doctrine would allow exposing soldiers to more risk in the short term to better protect civilians because high civilian casualties over the medium and long-term can make an operating environment even more dangerous for the Army if a population grows increasingly hostile and/or becomes more inclined to support the enemy because of such civilian casualties. Essentially, it means that one must, at least to a degree, think strategically even when acting tactically. This is a wise policy, and, as it seems there is not this level of strategic consideration in Israel’s official military literature in terms of its tactics, Israel would do well to consider adopting a similar approach, not only for the sake of Palestinians and other Arabs that Israel could be fighting again in the future, but for the sake of the safety of Israeli military personnel in the long-run and for the sake of Israeli national interests. Thus, Israeli doctrine differs considerably from American doctrine, and, in fact, it is often counterproductive to Israel’s long-term interests and actually prevents it from making strategic gains or resolving conflicts, causing Israel to suffer from the“institutionalization of temporary solutions.” It is a telling flaw of Israeli thinking that the U.S. military was able to see many of its mistakes relating to civilians and adjust its tactics and strategy after only a few years of occupying Iraq and Afghanistan while Israel has been occupying Palestinians for almost fifty years and has been unable to see the need to make similar adjustments to its tactics or strategic thinking. Rather than the other way around, then, it would seem that Israel could learn a lot from America’s recent evolution of its military thinking and practice.

It is a telling flaw of Israeli thinking that the U.S. military was able to see many of its mistakes relating to civilians and adjust its tactics and strategy after only a few years of occupying Iraq and Afghanistan while Israel has been occupying Palestinians for almost fifty years and has been unable to see the need make similar adjustments to its tactics or strategic thinking.

Col. Tony Pfaff, while recognizing and embracing the utilitarian arguments, argues that there are also ethical and moral responsibilities not to transfer an excessive and high amount of risk to noncombatants and to pursue alternatives to options that would do so, since soldiers essentially exercise sovereignty over where they operate, sovereignty that makes them partly responsible for area civilians. For him, the challenge is one of balancing risk between the soldiers themselves and noncombatants, not a transfer of the maximum possible to one party or the other; with this, I would agree.

Another part of the intent behind the choice of Israel’s tactics is very political, so force is applied in a very Clausewitzian way for Israel here: the father of Israel’s military doctrine (termed Low Intensity Conflict) for most of the last few decades made it clear that this doctrine was designed “To undermine the adversary’s determination and to lead to the adversary’s abandoning his objectives, through a cumulative process of inflicting physical, economic, and psychological damage, and to lead the adversary to realize that his own armed engagement is hopeless.” Thus, force is directed at the population as a whole not in order to kill them but with the intent to make them submit to Israeli political designs over time through attrition. This strategy actually reveals an unwillingness to compromise or even attempt a political settlement, and helps to explain why Israeli political leaders like Sharon, Netanyahu, Lieberman, and others have actively tried to undermine the peace process. It is also worth noting that if this approach fails to break the enemy into submission it will only serve to increase violence and prolong the conflict.

As one paper states, “Israel’s general strategic goal has always been that of maintaining the status quo by deterring major attacks against it.” This in and of itself is essentially a strategy that lacks strategy, or a strategy that is a prescription for a merely tactical approach. A cynicism bound both by almost two millennia of Christian anti-Semitism and the Holocaust mindset is hardly a way of thinking that is likely to lead to a brighter future. That Israel’s leaders may be resigned to an inevitability of the status quo is both a failure of imagination and a danger to the future of Israel. It was David Ben-Gurion himself, the founder of Israel and its longtime leader, who said that “the most dangerous enemy to Israel’s security is the intellectual inertia of those who are responsible for security;” and it was a Palestinian journalist who said that “the legal father of the suicide bomber is the Israeli checkpoint, whilst his mother is the house demolition.”

We can see that, where America’s change of tactics in Iraq brought Iraqi Sunnis who had been formerly hostile to U.S. forces into the U.S. fold as effective allies in the fight against al-Qaeda in Iraq/Mesopotamia that contributed to a major improvement in security there, conversely, (virtually?) no Palestinian would think of voluntarily cooperating with the their decades-long-occupiers, the Israelis. Though, unfortunately, as I’ve previously noted, Iraqi’s recently ousted ex-Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki wasted and destroyed these security gains through his disastrously sectarian policies, this sad fact does not erase the very real gains of American-led COIN operations in Iraq before America formally withdrew its forces form there.

Finally, a cautionary note: as is always possible, there may be differences between official doctrine and practice.

It is sad that Israel’s philosophy is one which intends to bring about political submission of the civilian population, and to cause them “maximal civilian distress” as part of this process until that submission occurs. The U.S. found out, for all the world (including Israel) to see, during the Vietnam war that causing civilians distress and being less than discriminating is a recipe for failure, for disaster, for driving civilians into the arms of the enemy, and for increasing the risk to and casualties among your own troops. Sad, too, that, while not going anywhere near as far as it did in Vietnam, America still used tactics that were too heavy-handed early in the Iraq War that alienated many Iraqis and turned them against U.S. forces. These tactics were ineffective and counterproductive, and were inspired in part by Israel’s own tactics, which are also ineffective and counterproductive. That American leadership recognized this and changed course after only a few years in Iraq is a telling positive about America’s ability to adapt and learn from its mistakes, while Israel’s leadership doubling down on not taking into account civilians as part of a dynamic and long-term operating environment is a telling characteristic of its leadership’s failed approach, counterproductive mentality, and seeming inability to see the bigger picture, to the detriment of both Arabs involved in Israel’s military space of operations and Israelis themselves.

As Petraeus and other Americans realized, the civilian is both the ultimate means and ultimate end in counterinsurgency (COIN) operations, not simply a potential enemy to be intimidated and beaten into submission, as Israelis think.

UPDATE July 17th, 2016: Sadly, these dynamics outlined here can be seen to a degree in America’s recent police shootings in Dallas and today’s in Baton Rouge, as well as shootings of black Americans by police. Does America have a fringe black “intifada” on its hands as a result of unaddressed police brutality?

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