The Field of Fight

by Lieutenant General (Ret. ) Michael T. Flynn

  The Tehran Islamic prosecutor, however, insisted that [Fatime] Ekhtesari’s “ambiguous poems” were meant to pass “dangerous political messages that could encourage people to distance themselves from the True Faith.” “She writes something but means something else,” the prosecutor claimed. “Her trick is to avoid saying anything in a straightforward way, creating space for all manner of dangerous thinking.” (http://english.aawsat.com/2015/11/article55345600/iran-where-poetry-is-a-national-crime)

  In addition to the prison sentences, the poets’ books were banished, and the poets themselves removed from even virtual society. They cannot be named in public or print, nor can photos of them appear either online or on a real page. As famous English writer and poet Dr. Samuel Johnson so eloquently stated, “poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.” Today, people in Iran cannot tell the truth about the evil that exists inside of their Islamic Republic—and this inability to do so makes them (and us) less likely to enjoy the true pleasures that life brings.

  The Islamic State’s intention has been well described by the Italian writer Maurizio Molinari, the author of one of the best books on ISIS:

  The caliphate is characterized by three features: the reference to the origins of Islam … the great common land of the Arab peoples of the Middle East; an ideology centered on the use of absolute violence against enemies—Shiites, Christians, Jews, and all Sunnis who do not think like them; and then, the state project, the will to create a state. (www.cmc-terrasanta.com/en/video/the-caliphate-history-and-the-threat-of-terrorism-summarized-in-a-book-8583.html)

  Radical Islamists intend to create an even larger Islamic state based on the ancient precepts of Radical Islam, and they are fully prepared to use absolute violence to achieve it.

  The Islamic State and associated terrorist movements are highly inefficient in many ways; however, they are very disciplined when it comes to killing and silencing their enemies, especially within their own domains. It is no accident that Radical Islamists in America are pushing very hard and very systematically to gain legal standing for Sharia, and to forbid any and all criticism of Islam; these are all steps toward creating an Islamic state right here at home. We have to thwart these efforts and encourage criticism of those who support them. There are many American Muslims who have spoken out against the advance of Radical Islam in the United States, and they are predictably singled out by the Islamic radicals in our country and, to a degree, shunned by politically motivated people in our own government. As in all aspects of the war, this is not merely a matter of intellectual debate. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an incredibly courageous Muslim woman and a celebrated author and activist, is forced to hire bodyguards lest her radical opponents fulfill one of their countless death threats against her.

  If we cannot criticize the radical Muslims in our own country, we cannot fight them either in America or overseas. Unless we can wage an effective ideological campaign in the United States, we will not be able to defeat the jihadis on foreign battlefields, because we will not understand the true nature of our enemy. Long ago, Sun Tzu explained that is a prescription for certain defeat.

  You can see our determination to avoid charges of “Islamophobia” by looking at the rules of engagement under which we fight in places like Afghanistan. Eli Lake, a no-nonsense writer, describes it this way:

  “There are real restrictions about what they can do against the ISIS presence in Afghanistan,” Mac Thornberry, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, told me about the rules of engagement for U.S. forces.…

  Thornberry said that the rules of engagement, combined with what he called micromanagement from the White House, have led military officers to tell him they have to go through several unnecessary and burdensome hoops before firing at the enemy.

  “My understanding is it’s a very confused, elaborate set of requirements,” Thornberry said. “I think the effect of going through all of that makes it harder for our people to conduct their missions.”

  He would not get into specifics about the rules, saying, “If the public were able to know all the restrictions placed on our troops, they would be unhappy about it, and if the enemy knew this they would have more of a leg up than they do now.” (www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-01-12/rules-of-engagement-in-afghanistan-limit-u-s-effectiveness?utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&utm_content=5696a5ba04d3011752388ea9&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter)

  This is very dangerous, I know. Rules of engagement (or ROE) are, by their nature, classified, in order to keep our enemies from knowing when we might kill or simply wound them. But ROE must also be simple and easily understood. That is not the case on today’s modern battlefield, and that is too bad because it restricts our soldiers and Marines from doing what they are very well trained to do—close with and destroy our nation’s enemies.

  Remember the oft-quoted line from our own Battle of Bunker Hill (Boston, 1775), “Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes!” Meaning, “Don’t use any of your gunpowder until they’re really, really close, so you won’t miss.” Now that’s clear ROE. And I’m certain, as that whispered command made its way through the ranks, that the men standing on the line of liberty all clearly understood what they needed to do that day to destroy their enemies. Those who courageously led that day on the field of fight realized that clarity of purpose and simple language for those militiamen were required. We need that same clarity of purpose today.

  In short, we are not fighting to win in Afghanistan, or on any battlefield. We’re training and advising the locals, and when our soldiers find themselves in combat, they are constrained by rules of engagement that limit their ability to defend themselves properly.

  When it comes to Iran, it seemed we were actually delighted when the naval forces of the Revolutionary Guards captured two of our ships and detained ten U.S. sailors, forcing them to kneel and clasp their hands behind their heads, as took place in mid-January 2016. The Iranians publicly declared this to be proof of their country’s great power, while the White House and State Departments pronounced it a sign of the wisdom of their diplomatic and strategic embrace of the Islamic Republic.

  That sort of shameful behavior can only encourage our enemies to take further steps against us. If they have no fear of the U.S. Navy (the head of the Revolutionary Guards said they had targeted our aircraft carrier, the Truman, as well as a French carrier, and would have destroyed them both if we had attempted to respond to the capture of our ships and sailors), what then can restrain them?

  Moreover, the effect on our troops is devastating. Who wants to deploy when your commander in chief will celebrate your capture by our worst enemy? Who wants to volunteer to serve in a military that is routinely blown up by terrorists and rounded up by the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism?

  It’s a real crisis. We faced a similar crisis in Iraq in 2009, and the White House changed its strategy from Surge to withdrawal, but didn’t provide the necessary military resources we required to maintain decent security and sustain hard-fought victory. The intelligence community did not adapt quickly enough and for political and bureaucratic reasons is not adapting today. There has to be an entirely new strategy, and intelligence must drive this, as it has driven successful American efforts on the battlefield since 2001. Good intelligence has to start with properly and clearly defining this enemy. If we don’t have that, we are likely to fight this conflict for generations to come. We should be challenging the assumptions we have—they are obviously incorrect assumptions, because nothing we are doing seems to be a winning strategy.

  Our credibility is nonexistent right now. Our reputation as a military force and our ability to train effective fighting forces in the Middle East is in question. Our intelligence assessments are also in question. Our top intelligence officers are accused of falsifying the picture of the war in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, and they failed to spot, early on, the biggest al Qaeda training camp in Afghan history. Nor are our elected representatives any better;
it took three years before the Benghazi terrorist attack on our diplomatic compound attracted big-time public attention, and the key event was a movie, not the kind of aggressive congressional investigation warranted by the assassination of an American ambassador.

  This is not a good place to be after nearly fifteen years of this persistent, never-ending war. We have to stop half-assed participation, repeatedly deploying token forces year in and year out, and we must win!

  We must drive change in our institutions and driving this change takes intellectual bravery, not just the physical courage our soldiers display daily on the battlefield. Our leaders in Washington, from the White House to the Pentagon to our major military headquarters, have proven they aren’t up to it.

  We are fighting an enemy that wants to win, legitimately believes they are winning, and is bringing the war to our homeland. We need a winning strategy.

  When developing a strategy you have to do the following:

  1. Properly assess your environment and clearly define your enemy;

  2. Face reality—for politicians, this is never an easy thing to do;

  3. Understand the social context and fabric of the operational environment;

  4. Recognize who’s in charge of the enemy’s forces.

  We’re not doing any of those urgent tasks very well. We can’t define our enemy, not because we’re unable to do it, but because our political leaders won’t permit it. Years from now this will seem utterly astonishing.

  The 2015 attacks in Paris, France, San Bernardino, California, across the nation of Israel, and the early 2016 suicide bombings in Jakarta, Indonesia, Istanbul, Turkey, and Brussels, Belgium suggest that the old approach to containing terrorism has collapsed, along with the credibility of the leaders who advanced it. More than 30,000 people died in terror attacks in 2014, compared to fewer than 8,000 in 2011. Another example comes in 2015, when our very own director of national intelligence stated there were approximately 20,000 foreign fighters from roughly eighty countries fighting in Syria. Only a year later, the newly designated special presidential envoy to the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL (as ISIS is also known) Brett McGurk, during an early January 2016 interview, stated, “The world has never seen something like this, upwards of 35,000 new foreign fighters from 100 countries all around the world supercharged by social media and Twitter and everything. It’s something we’ve never seen before.”

  Something is seriously wrong and our U.S. strategy to defeat ISIS is clearly not working.

  We must face the reality that we are in a crisis. The people of the United States are duly scared or at least uncertain about the outcome (just look at the incredible increase in gun sales for self-protection). The attacks in our country will happen again and again until we crush this enemy. Let’s stop participating in this never-ending nonsense, call it and our enemy what they are, war and Radical Islam, and let’s win!

  Attacking the Enemy Alliance

  The two most active and powerful members of the enemy alliance are Russia and Iran, and we can judge their efficacy in the skies and on the ground in Syria and Iraq. It’s an odd partnership, to be sure, since President Vladimir Putin of Russia knows that he faces a serious threat from Radical Islamists inside his own Russian Federation borders, of which Iran is the world’s leading sponsor.

  Indeed, Putin himself oversaw the infamously brutal slaughter by Russian security forces of radicalized Islamists during a ferocious assault of a secondary school in early September 2004 in the small community of Beslan, North Ossetia. Here is where over 1,100 people, including 777 children, were being held hostage by a group of armed Islamic terrorists, mostly Ingush and Chechen. The siege by the Islamists lasted three days and finally ended with the assault of the school and the massacre of at least 385 of the hostages, including 186 children.

  It was so vicious that it prompted David Satter, a former Wall Street Journal correspondent who has written extensively about Russia, to write for the Hudson Institute: “President Putin’s determination to crush the Chechen resistance at all costs is a form of moral suicide that will destroy what is left of Russian democracy and could threaten the whole world” (www.hudson.org/research/3538-slaughter-in-beslan).

  Whatever Putin’s cooperation with the Iranians in the fighting in Syria and Iraq, and on Tehran’s nuclear program, his own people provide a remarkable number of volunteers for ISIS. Less than a year ago, Yevgeny Sysoyev, the deputy director of the Russian intelligence service (FSB), publicly revealed that between 20 and 25 percent of the 20,000 foreign fighters who have joined ISIS in Syria have come from post-Soviet states, many of them from the Russian Federation.

  Like our own “experts,” the Russians do not well understand Radical Islam, and the jihadis have exploited this ignorance to the point where one of the country’s true experts on Islam has shown that official government policies in essence pay for the growth of the radical organizations.

  In an interview published in Moskovsky Komsomolets, Aleksey Grishin, the president of the Religion and Society Analytic and Information Center, said that “unfortunately, many of the Russian officials … know so little about the religion that extremists are able to twist them around their fingers and in fact get the Russian state to finance and otherwise support what are extremist activities.

  Islamist radicals … routinely come to these officials and propose cooperation. The officials out of ignorance or in some cases out of corrupt considerations agree, the expert says, and as a result, the extremists are integrated into and supported by the state.”

  As a result, “Islamist organizations of the most doubtful kind conduct on [Russian] territory at [state] expense forums, print extremist literature, and conduct under subversive activity against the foundations of the state,” Grishin says.

  The Islamists are further assisted in their work by … the great age of the majority of rural mullahs and imams and the multiplicity of and competition among the Muslim spiritual directorates (MSDs).

  Almost three quarters of rural imams in Muslim regions of Russia are elderly, older than 70 or 75. The extremists use this. They appear in the villages, gain the trust of the elderly imams, offer to help them, read prayers, and provide regular assistance to the indigenous Muslim community.

  That allows them to disseminate their extremist materials via the mosques. And “when the imam dies, who replaces him? Of course, these people.” (www.interpretermag.com/russia-and-other-post-soviet-states-supplying-twenty-percent-of-foreigners-fighting-for-isis-fsb-says/)

  The same sort of incoherence dominates Putin’s counterterrorist operations, with a welter of agencies and ministries forever getting in each other’s way. That gives the jihadis the chance to spread death throughout the North Caucasus:

  [Rasul] Kadiyev says in an article on the site Kavkazkaya Politika that the recent events in Derbent where forces, which claimed to be part of ISIS, attacked and killed some local people “confirm that mistakes in providing security” reflect the difficulties the Russian authorities are having in coordinating their counter-terrorist actions.

  As a result, he says, the FSB, the National Anti-Terrorist Committee, the Ministry of Defense, its various special groups and regional staffs, the various regional and republic governments, and the Russian Information Monitoring Agency are often working at cross purposes rather than [as] a single team. (www.interpretermag.com/moscow-struggling-to-coordinate-counter-terrorist-effort-in-north-caucasus/)

  Therefore, when it is said that Russia would make an ideal partner for fighting Radical Islam, it behooves us to remember that the Russians haven’t been very effective at fighting jihadis on their own territory, and are in cahoots with the Iranians. In Syria, the two allies have loudly proclaimed they are waging war against ISIS, but in reality the great bulk of their efforts are aimed at the opponents of the Assad regime. They are certainly not “fighting terrorists” in the Middle East; theirs is a battle to rescue an embattled ally in Damascus.

  Although I believe America a
nd Russia could find mutual ground fighting Radical Islamists, there is no reason to believe Putin would welcome cooperation with us; quite the contrary, in fact.

  In mid-January 2016, the Kremlin announced its intention to create new military bases on their western border, and to step up the readiness of their nuclear forces. These are not the actions of a country seeking détente with the West. They are, rather, indications that Putin fully intends to do the same thing as, and in tandem with, the Iranians: pursue the war against us. The other alliance members do, too.

  The Iranians are the heart of the alliance, and they are vulnerable. Machiavelli insisted that tyranny is the least stable system, because the people can quickly turn against the tyrant. Khamenei knows that, and lives in constant fear of a “velvet revolution,” a popular uprising that will sweep him away, along with the failed Islamic system created by his predecessor. We can best attack the enemy alliance at its weakest point, the failure of the Iranian Revolution. That attack should be political, not military, and our most potent weapon is what Khamenei most fears: the suffering Iranian masses.

  It was a huge strategic mistake for the United States to invade Iraq militarily. If, as we claimed, our basic mission after 9/11 was the defeat of the terrorists and their state supporters, then our primary target should have been Tehran, not Baghdad, and the method should have been political—support of the internal Iranian opposition.

  Is it too late? Has the Iranian opposition been decisively crushed? Many think so. But then, many thought so in 2009, before the massive antiregime demonstrations erupted after the fraudulent elections. Perhaps the Iranian people have the courage to challenge the regime again. We should at least consider how to change Iran from within, remembering that such methods brought down the Soviet Empire, certainly a mission more daunting than bringing down the Islamic Republic.