[lit-ideas] Islamism's triad: urban warfare, relief work, and hate media.
- From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 15 Feb 2006 13:53:10 -0500
World War IV As Fourth-Generation Warfare
By Tony Corn
[extract only]
While Islam is undoubtedly no monolith, it is not
the pure mosaic complacently portrayed by some,
either. In the past 30 years, one particular brand
— pan-Islamic Salafism — has been allowed to fill
the vacuum left by the failure of pan-Arab
Socialism and, in the process, to marginalize more
enlightened forms of Islam to the point where
Salafism now occupies a quasi-hegemonic position
in the Muslim world. The West is obviously not at
war with Islam as such and its traditional Five
Pillars; but it is most definitely at war with
Jihadism, a pure product of Salafism, which posits
that jihad is the Sixth Pillar of Islam. From the
point of view of threat assessment, the
much-discussed theological distinction between a
greater (spiritual) and lesser (physical) jihad is
utterly irrelevant, and the only thing that
matters is the praxeological distinction between
three modalities of jihad as practiced: jihad of
the sword, of the hand, and of the tongue.
Today, the most effective jihadist networks are
precisely those that — from Hamas to Hizbullah —
have combined these three modalities in the form
of urban warfare, relief work, and hate media. At
the theater level, the best military answer to
this three-pronged jihad to date remains the
concept of “three-block war” elaborated by the
Marine Corps, which posits that the Western
military must be ready to handle a situation in
which it has to confront simultaneously
conventional, high intensity war in one city
block, guerrilla-like activities in the next, and
peace-keeping operations or humanitarian aid in a
third. Yet, the West’s answer cannot be mainly
military in nature. When, as in the aftermath of
the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime, 45–65
percent of the Muslim world ends up having a
positive image of a Bin Laden, even a U.S.
military victory at the theater level can lead to
a political defeat at the global level. Since the
end of the Cold War era, the U.S. has enjoyed an
unprecedented “command of the commons,” but as the
2003 Iraq war made painfully clear, in contrast to
the 1991 Gulf War (during which CNN had a global
monopoly), the U.S. no longer enjoys the “command
of the airwaves.” Throughout the 1990s, the
emergence of global satellite televisions in
Europe (Euronews) and the Arab world (Al-Jazeera)
have combined to create a new correlation of
forces; and while the Pentagon has recently traded
the traditional concept of “battlefield” for the
more comprehensive concept of “battlespace,”
military planners and commanders alike have yet to
fully realize that ours is as much the age of the
“three-screen war” as that of the “three-block war.”6
part of a much larger article on strategy at
http://www.policyreview.org/000/corn.html
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