Divisions

David Shorr has more on the simple point that one wants to discern and exploit disagreements among hostile forces, not brush past and ignore them:

In a speech last year, Zbigniew Brzezinski came up with one of the great summaries of our predicament: that instead of uniting our friends and dividing our enemies, we have been uniting our enemies and dividing our friends. One of the many problems with pumping up Jihadism as the contemporary equivalent of the East Bloc is that it defines our adversaries as monolithic. Matt's absolutely right that infighting among our adversaries could be very significant, and useful. But don't take my word for it, West Point's Combating Terrorism Center has done a serious study of disputes among terrorists over tactics and strategy. [Hat tip to Lorelei for highlighting this work last year.]

During the Cold War, almost all of the big American wins came in part from a recognition of differences. We embraced democratic socialist parties in post-war Germany and France, the better to divide them from the Communists. Nixon made a deft opening toward China. And in our better moments, we sought to embrace third world aspirations for nationhood and independence. When we did the reverse and conflated everything together we got fiascos like Vietnam or the pathetic failure of our past fifty years' worth of Cuba policy.

Comments

How can you say our Cuba policy is a disaster. Castro doesn't rule the world, DOES HE?

Posted by Kris Ferd | October 16, 2007 10:37 AM

Oh please Matt, if there is one thing that our occupation of Iraq has proved, it is just how willing the Muslims are to put aside their tiny differences in the cause of Jihadism and killing Americans.

Posted by Skyler | October 16, 2007 11:41 AM

Matt, you are clearly right on the underlying point - it is imperative that we identify and exploit divisions among our adversaries. However, I'm not sure that you are really comfortable with the ruthlessness that this requires. To be fair, I'm not sure I'm comfortable with it either. As a practical matter, exploiting the divisions among your adversaries usually means encouraging sectarian violence.

Your examples of cold war successes are a case in point. It is true that we embraced democratic socialist parties in France and Germany (also parties less socialist and much less democratic in Greece and Turkey). We also armed them and gave quiet or not so quiet encouragement while they imprisoned, exiled, or killed their resident communists. This was of course less common in France, but in Germany, the "De-Nazification" purges included a heavy dose of De-Commmunization as well, and in Turkey, Greece and Italy, the situation often resembled a low intensity civil war.
We also maintained a heavy military presence in Germany for quite some time, including basing rights that I don't think we, strictly speaking, asked permission for.

None of this really has anything to do with whether our nation's current approach to Iraq and the Middle East will prove a success. But it is clear that the military has been thinking hard about how to create and exploit tensions among the various anti-coalition forces. You even mention that West Point study in this post.

You have also, in the past, argued quite forcefully against many of the strategies for taking advantage of those tensions, including arming and funding local sheiks (warlords) in return for support against the jihadists or our constantly shifting alliances among the Shiite factions and subfactions. You object that our actions are encouraging factional violence. This is true, but it was true of many of our Cold War successes as well.

A point on which we can all agree is that American foreign policy could be handled much better (FUBAR is the description that springs to mind). I just don't see how you can cite Germany as a Cold War success in explicit opposition to our Middle East strategy, and then ignore all of the parallels that don't support your argument.

Posted by heedless | October 16, 2007 12:09 PM

Divide and rule is basically evil in a war of choice. It involves finding the weaker faction and supporting it so that a war/conflict can continue.

Posted by Bengt Larsson | October 16, 2007 5:25 PM

All occupations are wars of choice. The question is always whether the anarchy you leave behind if you pull out will be worse, from either a realpolitic or a humanitarian perspective, depending on your worldview, than the insurgency/counterinsurgency dynamic of the occupation.

Posted by heedless | October 16, 2007 9:57 PM

While Matt's point is technically correct, it is also virtually irrelevant.

It's a bandaid approach to a more overarching problem - namely, we shouldn't be doing what we're doing that is generating these enemies in the first place.

It's like installing Windows - a mistake - then installing a ton of anti-malware programs to get rid of the malware. The better approach is: don't use Windows in the first place. Get a Mac or Linux.

But just as the Windows fanboys claim that you can't do that because all the important stuff runs on Windows only, well, the statists say we have to "protect our vital interests".

Except, as Matt pointed out the other day, exactly what ARE those "vital interests"? And why why do we have to do stupid shit that generates tons of enemies to "protect" those "vital interests?"

The way it looks to me, the US has a billion Muslims pissed off at us - and a handful of statist assholes running a few countries which have oil paying our politicians big bribes to keep them in power in order to get the oil.

Why not stop supporting the assholes (notice I didn't say invade and overthrow them...), let their people deal with them (if they can) and then get the oil from the people afterward? Then the people don't hate us, we get the oil, the assholes are gone, everybody is happy.

In short, the US needs to stop being an asshole - which includes supporting Israel "right or wrong" (mostly wrong), and supporting the Arab monarchies and dictators.

Exactly how is this approach going to threaten our "vital interests"? The assholes can't do anything to us. Cut off the oil? They need the money more than we need the oil - especially if we made a concerted effort to stop needing so much oil. And they REALLY need our weapons and our foreign aid. So cut them off.

So what's the problem?

Our politicians and our corporate state, obviously. THEY are the ones who are being the biggest assholes in this whole picture. They get the campaign contributions from the oil companies and the military-industrial complex to set US policies the way they do. They work for a handful of corporate assholes who pull the strings.

But apparently that's too complicated or too scary - for our ignorant electorate to figure out and deal with.

So instead we get notions like trying to split up Hizballah and Iran...

Goddamn waste of time.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | October 16, 2007 10:15 PM