Political Warfare Course

Final class, December 1

We'll meet in the front classroom in the library basement on December 1, due to the preparations for the dinner event in our regular classroom. See you Thursday.

- JMW

MAJ Nidal Hasan's powerpoint: He described his threat doctrine to the Army long before Fort Hood

Per our discussion in class, here is a PDF of a photocopy of MAJ Nidal Hasan's powerpoint presentation to his fellow soldiers, outlining his threat doctrine, long before he shot up Fort Hood.  Download MAJ Hasan Slides

Because he didn't describe it as a "threat doctrine" but merely as an expression of religious belief, the Army took no action against him. The US military still does not recognize Islamism within its ranks as a threat doctrine.

The photo at right is from a surveillance camera at a store that Hasan visited just before the shooting. Note that he is wearing traditional garb, in white, as he makes his rounds before his murder spree. Most Muslim men dressed this way do not go on killing sprees, but for a US Army officer to dress in such a manner while on post is highly irregular and should have been a red flag as an ideological statement.

In his powerpoint, Hasan defines "Islamist" in a way that both adherent and critic can largely agree with, that is, one who "advocates . . . Islamic political rule/Sharia law (i.e. No separation of Church and State)".

As such, an Islamist by definition cannot legally serve in the US Armed Forces, because he cannot fulfill his pledge to uphold and defend the US Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. By definition, Islamism is incompatible with, and hostile to, the US Constitution.

This example is an easy means of identifying a threat doctrine.

The Hasan powerpoint is not required for the final exam, but is provided here because several of you had expressed interest.

Class 12, November 17

Islam, Islamism and Cultural Warfare

Is there a difference between Islam, the religion, and Islamism, the range of political ideologies based on the religion? Should the US make a distinction for its own operational purposes? What about for strategic purposes? What are the differences between Islamism in general and radical Islamism (or Islamist extremism)? What are the strategic goals of adherents to each?

Does official US policy to "counter violent extremism" address the matter of countering extremism that is not presently violent?

In this class we are interested in radical Islamism as a form of political warfare. We will look at various radical Islamist movements, including the Muslim Brotherhood, Saudi-backed Salafism/Wahhabism, al Qaeda, Iraqi insurgents and Islamist movements inside the United States, and the Shi’i regime in Iran, as well as discuss strategies to combat them both abroad and at home.

Required Readings 

• Taylor, Chapter 25, “The Gulf War of 1991,” pp. 285-297; Chapter 26, “Information-Age Conflict in the Post-Cold War Era,” pp. 298-314; Chapter 27, “The World After 11 September 2001,” pp. 315-319; “Epilogue,” pp. 320-324.
• Andrew McCarthy, "Islam or Islamist?" National Review, October 29, 2011.
• Ikhwanweb.com. This is the official English-language website of the Muslim Brotherhood. Familiarize yourself with the site.
  
•  Daniel Kimmage and Kathleen Ridolfo, Iraqi Insurgent Media: The War of Images and Ideas (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 2007). Read entire study and view accompanying slide presentation. Download a pdf of the report here: http://realaudio.rferl.org/online/OLPDFfiles/insurgent.pdf.
•  J. Michael Waller, Fighting the War of Ideas Like a Real War (Institute of World Politics Press, 2007). Read entire monograph. Order a hard copy online, or download a free pdf here: Download fighting_the_war_of_ideas_like_a_real_war.pdf 
• Douglas Farah, "US Muslim Brotherhood Groups Called 'Threat Organization' in DoD Memo," Counterterrorism Blog, September 10, 2007. (Farah, a former Washington Post reporter, takes issue with my above monograph and implies that your professor is an agent of the Muslim Brotherhood.)
• Joseph E. Schmitz, former DoD Inspector General, letter to Senator Dianne Feinstein on Muslim Brotherhood operatives in the US military chaplain program, November 8, 2010. Download Schmitz Feinstein 2010
  
• Suleyman Nyang, "On the Status, Method and Fallout of the Global Spread of Wahhabism," Islamic Supreme Council of America. (Note: The Islamic Supreme Council of America, a Sufi Muslim organization led by Sheikh Mohammed Hisham Kabbani, actively warned against the spread of Saudi-backed Wahhabist radicalism in the United States and around the world.) [The Islamic Supreme Council of America has removed the Syleyman Nyang interview from its site. The interview can now be found here: http://malaysian-times.blogspot.com/2008/03/on-status-method-and-fallout-of-global.html.]
• J. Michael Waller, "Larry, Curly and Musab," Los Angeles Times, May 21, 2006. (This short piece concerns using ridicule as a weapon against Islamist extremists. (The original title, as it appeared in the LA Times paper and online editions, was "Larry, Curly and Osama." Someone at the LA Times went back and changed the headline after the fact to "Musab." Interesting. . .)

Recommended Readings

• Alex Alexiev, "Islamic Finance or Financing Islam?" Center for Security Policy Occasional Paper No. 29, October 2007.
• Alex Alexiev, "Tablighi Jamaat: Jihad's Stealthy Legions," Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2005.
•  Frank Gaffney vs Suhail Khan, "Is Sharia Consistent with the US Constitution?" Debate, Harbour League, Baltimore, September 2008 (text and audio).
• J. Michael Waller, "Statement," or "Terrorist Recruitment and Infiltration in the United States: Prisons and Military as an Operational Base," Hearing of the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security of the Senate Judiciary Committee, October 14, 2003. This testimony was the first to identify the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) as a Muslim Brotherhood front organization.
  
• _____, "Muslim Pop Artists Lead Youthful Resistance to Islamic Extremism," Serviam, January-February 2008.
• See the "Extremism" page of the Islamic Supreme Council of America website.
  
• The LibForAll Foundation, based in the US and Indonesia, is tied to the world's largest Muslim organization and political and cultural pluralism.
• J. Michael Waller, "'Wahhabi Lobby' takes the offensive," Insight, July 12, 2002.
• See my the Islamist page of my blog, PoliticalWarfare.org, for a string of odds and ends.
• Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, trans. Anthony F. Roberts (Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2002).
• Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (Oxford, 1969, 1993).
• 'Team B,' Shariah: The Threat / Team B II Report (Center for Security Policy, 2010). Order from Amazon for a hard copy, or download a PDF here: Download Shariah - The Threat to America (Team B Report) 09132010

Class 11, November 10

How to Defeat a Superpower: The Asymmetrical Political Warfare of North Vietnam and El Salvador’s FMLN Insurgency

With Soviet support, the North Vietnamese government devised an inexpensive but brilliant political warfare campaign to force the United States to defeat itself and abandon its South Vietnamese ally, enabling Hanoi to win the war in 1975 without a single military victory against the US. Five years later, El Salvador’s FMLN guerrillas, with Soviet, Cuban and Vietnamese support, tried to replicate a similar strategy.

 

In this class we will study the Vietnam experience, with a focus on the 1968 Tet Offensive in which the enemy turned its tactical military defeat into a strategic victory by means of political warfare.

 

 

(The image above is the iconic photo of the South Vietnam National Police chief executing a Vietcong prisoner during the Tet Offensive. The summary execution, carried out in front of NBC and Associated Press cameramen, played into the communist propaganda campaign and helped turn American opinion against the war.)

Required Readings

• Taylor, Chapter 24, "Propaganda, Cold War and the Advent of the Television Age," Munitions of the Mind, pp. 249-282.
• SGM Herbert A. Friedman (Ret), "National Liberation Front (NLF) Anti-American Leaflets of the Vietnam War," Psywarrior.com. This is a good basic military primer on Vietnamese communist political warfare inside Vietnam.
• Marc D. Bernstein, "Ed Lansdale's Black Warfare in 1950s Vietnam," HistoryNet.com. This article tells how the US tried to wage political warfare against the communists in North Vietnam early in the conflict, during the Eisenhower Administration. Colonel Edward Lansdale was a brilliant warfighter whose approach to conflict remains unappreciated. You might have heard Professor Tierney speak last week of Lansdale's work against the Huks in the Philippines.
• Maj. Monte R. Bullard, "Political Warfare in Vietnam," Military Review, October 1969. (On South Vietnamese political warfare against the communists)  Download Bullard PW Vietnam 
• Douglas Pike, Viet Cong: The Organization and Techniques of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1966), Chapter 7, “Communication and Ideas,” pp. 119-135. Download pike_vietcong.pdf

Recommended readings

• Cecil B. Currey, Edward Lansdale: The Unquiet American (Potomac, 1998)
• Edward Geary Lansdale, In the Midst of Wars: An American's Mission to Southeast Asia (Fordham University Press, 1991)

Class 10, November 3

US Psychological Strategy: The Truman and Eisenhower offensives

Following World War II, the United States developed a national psychological strategy to wage ideological warfare against the Soviet Union. This class emphasizes American psychological strategy under Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, but covers strategy through Reagan and looks toward the future.

We will also discuss the general concept of psychological strategy and how it might pertain to current conflicts.

 

Required Readings 

• The introductory essay on the Psychological Strategy Board files at the Harry S Truman Library;

• Harry S Truman, Directive Establishing the Psychological Strategy Board, 20 June 1951.

•  J. Michael Waller, ed., The Public Diplomacy Reader (Institute of World Politics Press, 2007). Download a pdf of the entire book here Download public_diplomacy_reader.pdf and read the following sections. See the book's table of contents for the corresponding page numbers. (Note: Be careful when printing this file - it's more than 500 pages long.) The pdf contains the text of the entire book. Those wishing to order a hard copy of the book may do so at   Amazon.com.
• • "Functions of the PSB [Psychological Strategy Board]," Department of State Memorandum of Conversation, 26 March 1952.
  • Dwight D. Eisenhower, Excerpt of letter to Rev. Edward L. R. Ebson, 31 July 1958.
  • John F. Kennedy, Excerpt from "Speech to the University of California," 23 March 1962.
  • Excerpt, "Ideological Operations and Foreign Policy," Report No. 2 on Winning the Cold War: The US Ideological Offensive, Subcommittee on International Organizations and Movements of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, US House of Representatives, 27 April 1964.
  • Col. Stephen Tanous USAF, excerpt from "Building a Psychological Strategy for the US: Leveraging the Informational Element of National Power," US Army War College paper, April 2003. 
  • Ronald Reagan, "Management of Public Diplomacy Relative to National Security," National Security Decision Directive No. 77, 14 January 1983.  

Recommended Readings

• William E. Daugherty and Morris Janowitz, A Psychological Warfare Casebook (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1958). Every practitioner or expert in the field must have this book.
• Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (University of Kansas, 2006).
• Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communication Research & Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960 (Oxford University Press, 1994).
• Benjamin Williams, ed., Psychological Aspects of Global Conflict, Vol. XVII of The Economics of National Security (Industrial College of the Armed Forces, 1955).

Class 9, October 27

Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals

This week we will turn our attention to Chicago community organizer Saul Alinsky and his work, Rules for Radicals. As the paper syllabus says, students should come to class prepared to discuss Alinsky’s book in detail.

We'll look at the sociology behind Alinsky's community organizing formula, how he got his ideas from his work as a criminologist in the 1930s, and how he implemented his ideas into action.

We will also discuss Alinsky's legacy after his death in 1972 and how his community organizer trainees transformed politics.

One of the take-aways from this class will be to apply Alinsky's principles to present-day politico-military conflicts, particularly to insurgency and counterinsurgency.

Required Reading

• Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals (Random House, 1971, Vintage, 1989). Read entire book.
• "Interview with Saul Alinsky," Playboy, 1972 [month not available]. At Progress.org. Read the full text of the 12-part interview here, or at least the following parts below:
• • Part 1, "Introduction."
  • Part 2, "Let's Talk."
  • Part 3, "Raw Beginnings."
  • Part 4, "College and Criminals."
• David Horowitz, ed., "Saul Alinsky," DiscovertheNetworks.org. This is a very important article that describes Alinsky, his development, his philosophy and his times, from the perspective of a critic. Horowitz is a former Marxist-Leninist and Alinsky follower who over the past two decades has devoted his life to describing the elements, individuals, structures and methods of the revolutionary left.

Recommended

• Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals (1946, 1969).
• "Democratic Promise: Saul Alinsky and His Legacy," a sympathetic website narrative and video narrated by Alec Baldwin.
• Noam Cohen, "Know Thine Enemy," New York Times, August 22, 2009. A piece about how American conservatives are reading up on Alinsky and adopting his tactics against the present administration.

Qutb developed his philosophy from a prison cell

While we're on the subject of the necessity of prison time (or some other form of exile or retreat) for the politically active operative to have the down-time needed to develop his philosophy and other motivational writings, we turn to Syyed Qutb (pictured) the lead theoretician of the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan) and an inspirational source for al Qaeda and other violent movements.

This representative example suffices from Islam 101:

After his return to Egypt he resigned his job in the Education directorate and devoted himself to the idea of bringing a total change in the political system. Ikhwan gained ideological vitality when Sayyid Qutb in his jail cell wrote a book in which he revised Hassan al-Banna Shahid’s dream of establishing an Islamic state in Egypt after the nation was thoroughly Islamized. Sayyid Qutb recommended that a revlutionary vanguard should first establish an Islamic state and then, from above impose Islamization on Egyptian society that had deviated to Arab nationalistic ideologies.

His subsequent 11 years behind prison walls gave him an opportunity to confirm what Maududi’s writing made him aware, and that is what convinced the secular Nasserites to condemn him to death on false accusations.

Alinsky's thoughts about political warriors in jail

Remember when we were talking about the value of jail time for a political warrior to organize his thoughts and develop his philosophy? Here's what Saul Alinsky has to day about it:

". . . a periodic removal from circulation by being jailed is an essential element in the development of the revolutionary. The one problem that the revolutionary cannot cope with by himself is that he must now and then have an opportunity to reflect and synthesize his thoughts.

"To gain that privacy in which he can try to make sense out of what he is doing, why he is doing it, where he is going, what has been wrong with what he has done, what he should have done and above all to see the relationships of all the episodes and acts as they tie in to a general pattern, the most convenient and accessible solution is jail.

"It is here that he begins to develop a philosophy. It is here that he begins to shape long-term goals, intermediate goals, and a self-analysis of tactics as tied to his own personality. It is here that he is emancipated from the slavery of action wherein he was compelled to think from act to act. Now he can look at the totality of his actions and the reactions of the enemy from a fairly detached position.

"Every revolutionary leader of consequence has had to undergo these withdrawals from the arena of action. Without such opportunities, he goes from one tactic and one action to another, but most of them are almost terminal tactics in themselves; he never has a chance to think through an overall synthesis, and he burns himself out. He becomes, in fact, nothing more than a temporary irritant.

"The prophets of the Old Testament and the New found their opportunity for synthesis by volunterily removing themselves to the wilderness. It was after they emerged that they began propagandizing their philosophies. . . .

"I welcomed interruptions and used them as rationalizing excuses to escape the ordeal of thinking and writing.

"Jail provides just the opposite circumstances. You have no phones and, except for an hour or so a day, no visitors. Your jailers are rough, unsociable, and generally so dull that you wouldn't want to talk to them anyway. You find yourself in a physical drabness and confinement, which you desperately try to escape. Since there is no physical escape you are driven to erase your surroundings imaginatively: you escape into thinking and writing. It was through periodic imprisonment that the basis for my first publication and the first orderly philosophical arrangement of my ideas and goals occurred." (Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, Vintage Books edition, 1989, pp. 156-158.)

This gets back to our question in class: What are we incubating as we give writing implements to the enemy combatants at Guantanamo?

How prison can help the political warrior

We mustn't always believe everything we read, and when bad guys with big ideas are released from prison, we should presume that they'll be causing trouble again soon.

Especially if the nice, civilized prison officials are good enough to give them writing implements and paper.

Here's an article from the December 21, 1924 issue of the New York Times.

No, it's not a parody. I'm not trying to trick you. There is no punch line. It's the real deal.

Hitler was convicted of high treason and sentenced to five years in prison for his role in staging the "Beer Hall Putsch" in Bavaria in late 1923. A political pressure campaign got him freed after he served only nine months.

The History Channel recounts how Hitler spent his time. Notice the hard-core political warfare at work: "Sent to Landsberg jail, he spent his time dictating his autobiography, Mein Kampf, and working on his oratorical skills. After nine months in prison, political pressure from supporters of the Nazi Party forced his release. During the next few years, Hitler and the other leading Nazis reorganized their party as a fanatical mass movement that was able to gain a majority in the German parliament - the Reichstag - by legal means in 1932. In the same year, President Paul von Hindenburg defeated a presidential bid by Hitler, but in January 1933 he appointed Hitler chancellor, hoping that the powerful Nazi leader could be brought to heel as a member of the president's cabinet.

"However, Hindenburg underestimated Hitler's political audacity, and one of the new chancellor's first acts was to use the burning of the Reichstag building as a pretext for calling general elections. The police under Nazi Hermann Goering suppressed much of the party's opposition before the election, and the Nazis won a bare majority. Shortly after, Hitler took on absolute power through the Enabling Acts. In 1934, Hindenburg died and the last remnants of Germany's democratic government were dismantled, leaving Hitler the sole master of a nation intent on war and genocide."

Food for thought: Can you find any modern-day parallels?

If you have an electronic subscription to the New York Times, you can find the article yourself at this link: http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F70A17F73F5B12738DDDA80A94DA415B848EF1D3&scp=1&sq=Hitler+tamed+by+prison+article&st=p.

Class 8, October 20

Totalitarian Political Warfare: Communism, Naziism, Fascism and Gramsci

In this class we'll take a look at the main forms of totalitarian socialism - Communism, Naziism and Fascism - but will concentrate on the theory of the brilliant Italian Communist Party leader Antonio Gramsci.

I emphasize Gramsci (pictured) for three purposes: 

(1) He doesn't get the credit he deserves for the advancement of totalitarian political culture in the Western world;
(2) He was brilliant and the knowledge of his theories and techniques is important for the study of political warfare; and
(3) The US and its allies can exploit Gramsci's theories and techniques and adapt them to wage the war of ideas abroad. 

Gramsci became famous in his prison writings (1929-1935) by differing with the Bolshevik road to power. Prison allowed him to develop his ideas from the operationally political to the strategic and theoretical. Gramsci embraced the idea of a dictatorship, but, while in prison developed a theory of long-term penetration of political and cultural institutions, including public education, in a strategy of cultural subversion.

Gramsci is important because he took Marxist theory and Leninist strategy and tactics, and combined them with his careful study of the writings of Machiavelli. He can therefore be known as a Marxist-Machiavellian.

Gramsci was imprisoned under the fascists and is now known as a "political prisoner under Mussolini" or "political prisoner of the fascists" rather than as an agent of Stalin as chief of Italy's communist party.

Required readings:

• Taylor, Munitions of the Mind, Chapter 22, “The Bolshevik Revolution and the War of Ideologies,” pp. 198-207;
• Smith, On Political War, Chapter 5, “World War I,” pp. 101-118; Chapter 6, “Marxism-Leninism,” pp. 119-140; Chapter 7, “The Nazis,” pp. 141-159; and Chapter 8, “Britain and America in World War II,” pp. 159-184.
• Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, various editions; or online Project Gutenberg e-edition, Chapter XI, "Propaganda and Organization."
• David Forgacs, ed, The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935 (New York: New York University Press, 2000), Chapters VII-XIV.
• Antonio Gramsci, "Newspapers and the Workers," 1916. This is a simple call to boycott the "bourgeois press" but shows a general approach to the media until the party could infiltrate media organizations or build its own. The item is short and uncomplicated, part of the "bring the system down" phase of revolution. Notably it predates the Bolshevik Revolution.
• Gramsci, "Neither Fascism nor Liberalism: Sovietism!" 1924. A short piece in which Gramsci underscores his long-term goals, but without the thoughtful theoretical and strategic approach that he would develop in prison.
• Barry Burke, "Antonio Gramsci, Schooling and Education," The Encyclopedia of Informal Education (1999, 2005). Pay close attention to this sympathetic analysis of Gramsci's approach to using the educational system as a means of totalitarian formation.
• Antonio Maira, "Hugo Chavez Presents Gramsci to Hundreds of Thousands of People. A Beautiful Revolution." InSurGente.org. Translated by Iris Buehler and James Hollander on AxisofLogic.com, June 28, 2007. This essay is a very interesting look from the Left at how Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez is carrying out his revolution, and how Chavez invokes Gramsci. (Click here for the original article in Spanish.)

Optional Gramsci reading:

• Gramsci, Theory.org.uk
• International Gramsci Society
• Gramsci's Works Online (by Marxists.org - a funny one, because the very capitalistic copyright owners of the English translations of Gramsci's key works have invoked their property rights to force Marxists.org to remove the translations from the Internet.)
• Gramsci Links Archive

Strongly recommended additional reading (not required, but you won't want to miss them)

• Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Project Gutenberg e-book) Vol. 2, Chapter IX, "Fundamental Ideas Regarding the Nature and Organization of the Storm Troops"; and Chapter X, "The Mask of Federalism." Like Gramsci, Hitler was too busy doing his political work to find the quiet time for introspection to write a definitive political warfare theory and strategy, and found that being thrown in prison was actually an excellent opportunity to sit back, think and write.  This is something the US must think about when it holds enemies captive, and when it gives them access to literature, writing implements and communication devices while in custody. As Hitler notes in the first paragraphs of his preface, being imprisoned at the Fortress of Landsberg am Lech was almost a favor to the Nazi movement as it gave Hitler the time he needed to write. As a whole, Mein Kampf is a superb example of a coherent political warfare strategy. Students who have not read Mein Kampf should do so, although nothing about the book is likely be on this course's final exam. The full text of Mein Kampf in this Project Gutenberg e-book can be accessed here.

• Viktor Reimann, Goebbels: The Man Who Created Hitler (Doubleday, 1976). This entire book is instructive about the thinking and actions of the propagandist who gave coherence, excitement and enforcement to the National Socialist movement and who turned the Nazi party from an extreme political group into a cultural phenomenon. If you can read only one chapter, I recommend Chapter 3, "Propaganda Devours Culture."