Middle East vs. U.S. and Western Powers

It's hard to know where to begin the discussion.  The US has tried so many times to contain radical Islam, it begs the question how to control these movements.  Approaching 14 years since 9/11, clearly, next to nothing has been learned.  Or shall we say that much has been learned, precious little is of pragmatic use as we observe accomplishments and setbacks.

I have just re-read Malcolm Gladwell's book, David and Goliath.  It's theme is that too much of a good thing, or a powerful thing, or an apparently useful method or strategy, eventually leads to big limitations on the outcomes that were so exciting about the big whatever thing it was.  He refers to the inverted U curve, the flatlined graph of improvements, and sometimes production of the exact opposite outcomes first enjoyed when the game was new.  It's a kind of law of diminishing returns, Econ 101.

Does the military pay any attention to Gladwell and others like him?  They should, for what have we got to lose except our ineptness?

Today the New York Times gives up this review of ISIS:

Offering Services, ISIS Digs In Deeper in Seized Territories

By BEN HUBBARD

The jihadists' governing efforts, from inspecting food to offering perks to newlyweds, have brought a stability unavailable from national governments.

Among Hubbard's points is that 10 months after the power of airstrikes has pummeled the jihadists,

"the jihadist group continues to dig in, stitching itself deeper into the fabric of the communities it controls."

Iraq's Sunni Muslims distrust the Shiite government in Baghdad and it's militias.  (Recall that they don't like the US either.)  Despite living under an ISIS despotism, people in these conquered and controlled areas tend to experience a certain continuity, predictability and security.  The article closes with an unmistakeable parallel to Gladwell's book theme.          

            “Now there is more security and freedom, no arrests, no harassment, no concrete barriers and no checkpoints where we used to spend hours to get into the city,” said Mohamed al-Dulaimi of the jihadist-controlled city of Falluja, Iraq.

              “What will happen if the militias enter Falluja?” he asked. “We will take our guns and fight them, not because we are ISIS, but because the militias will kill us all.”

Among several examples, Gladwell interprets some military history events to illustrate that overwhelming force becomes irrelevant in communities where people have nothing more to lose. Things cannot get bad enough to change behaviors where conditions are chronically abysmal anyway.  In the face of insurmountable odds, people shed fear and gain courage.  The West seems not to have learned this point, which I'm sure has been made by many other writers.  What do the Pentagon people study?

The easiest example from Gladwell is the German blitz of London in WW II.  Fear was replaced by a stoic acceptance and defiance.  There was a huge loss of life and property, but the British people endured the siege and emerged victorious in the end.  Their society held together.  Excess power slides relatively harmlessly down the back side of the inverted U, the powerful become relatively impotent, the weak find strengths that were not so evident.

If the Pentagon is ahead of the curve on this, we'd like to know about it.  The public ought to be able to take some ownership and pride in an intelligent strategy regarding efforts to control radical religious and political movements.  To date, the American public finds only the same tired and effectual tools in use.

Can any new thinking be applied?

The right to bear arms; a conundrum of the American Experience

The following is an op-ed which expresses the blog post title.

The Opinion Pages | OP-ED COLUMNIST

Guns in Your Face  NY Times

JUNE 12, 2015

Gail Collins

Life in America requires a lot of advance preparation. For instance, when you’re getting ready for a plane trip you imagine what you’ll do if a problem arises — flight delay, long lines at security. But I bet you haven’t considered the best way to react if the man in front of you on the airport escalator has a gun dangling from his shoulder.

That very thing happened recently in Atlanta, when a Georgia resident named Jim Cooley came strutting through the airport lobby with a loaded assault rifle.

Cooley — who was taping the whole encounter and posted it on YouTube — corrected the police officer who stopped him. (“It’s not an automatic! It’s a semi-automatic!”) Then he declined to respond when she asked if he had a permit. (“Am I being detained? … If you’re detaining me then I’m going to have to file a lawsuit.”) And, in the end, he walked away in triumph.

We’ve moved from the right to bear arms to the right to flaunt arms.

While the airport setting gives the incident a particular flair, this kind of thing has been happening quite a bit. In Michigan, the City of Grand Rapids has been in a legal battle with a man who took umbrage when police stopped him while he was walking down a residential street on a Sunday morning wearing camouflage, with a pistol strapped to his leg and singing “Hakuna Matata” from “The Lion King.”

Very few states have flat-out rules against openly carrying guns in public. It’s just something that never came up. “It’s not a practical thing to do,” said Laura Cutilletta of the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. But it turns out that anyone with the legal right to carry a concealed weapon — which, in some states, doesn’t even require a permit — generally also has the legal right to walk into a McDonald’s with a gun sticking out of his waistband.

The open display of weaponry freaks out average citizens, especially the ones with children. It outrages police. At one point, even the National Rifle Association said the open carry demonstrations were “downright weird.” But the organization quickly backtracked, apologized, blamed the post on an errant staffer, and averred that “our job is not to criticize the lawful behavior of fellow gun owners.”

You’d think that lawmakers would move quickly to make it illegal, but with a few exceptions, there’s more enabling going on than anything else. After a Kalamazoo man walked into the public library’s summer reading party for children with a 9-millimeter gun strapped to his waist, worried officials asked the State Legislature to add libraries to a very small list of gun-free zones. The Legislature did nothing.

“Look, I got a gun!” yelled a man who walked into a park where kids were playing baseball in — yes! — Georgia. “There’s nothing you can do about it.” The police, who were summoned, determined he was absolutely right.

The Georgia State Legislature passed a law a few years back that made it legal for citizens to take their guns into the airport. At the time, then-Gov. Sonny Perdue was expressing concern about giving his wife the option of toting a pistol when she was “walking from one of those parking lots to pick up a grandchild or something like that.” He did not mention middle-age guys toting semiautomatic assault rifles past the check-in counter. But here we are.

In Texas, where open carry had been banned since the post-Civil War era, protesters staged demonstrations all around the state, toting their guns to family restaurants and storming the State Capitol, where they confronted one unsympathetic lawmaker in his office. In response, the Legislature enabled House members to install panic buttons in their offices, and then legalized open carry for Texans with gun permits.

Some commentators have attributed the whole open-carry phenomenon to white American men trying to work out their insecurities. We’ve got to stop blaming white men for everything. Really, they’ve contributed a lot to the country. Still, you can’t help but notice that there’s a certain demographic consistency to the people who are making a scene over their right to display arms.

It wasn’t always that way. California passed its first ban on open carry in the 1960s in response to the Black Panther Party. “The Legislature was debating an open-carry law when 30 Black Panthers showed up at the Statehouse with their guns,” said Adam Winkler, a professor of law at U.C.L.A. and the author of “Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America.”

“The same day Gov. Ronald Reagan made a speech, saying there’s no reason why a law-abiding person should be carrying a gun on the street.”

Maybe the way to turn this debate around would bring new recruits into the gun rights movement. “If open-carry advocates today were Marxist-leaning black radicals,” said Winkler, “we might have a very different situation.”