CENTCOM Contemplates The Permanence of Hamas & Hezbollah

« An Argument For The Existence Of God

When There’s Nothing On The Horizon, You’ve Got Nothing Left To Prove »

CENTCOM Contemplates The Permanence of Hamas & Hezbollah
By: Spencer Ackerman Wednesday June 30, 2010 5:47 pm	Tweet

From the perspective of journalism, this Mark Perry piece in Foreign Policy isn’t exactly out of bounds, but there’s chalk on its spikes. It’s about a “red team” intelligence group in U.S. Central Command wrote a deliberately provocative piece thinking through the implications of U.S. military strategy in the Middle East not having anything to do with Hamas and Hezbollah. Those sorts of intellectual provocations are what red cells are for — to challenge leaders’ assumption. At several points in the story, though, Perry treats the red cell’s perspective as the command’s perspective. “CENTCOM’s implicit criticism…” Well, no, stop right there: it’s not CENTCOM’s implicit criticism; it’s the red cell’s implicit criticism.

That said, it does appear from Perry’s report that the command has a certain lack of patience with the pieties and restrictions of the Washington debate on the Middle East. Consider:

In the wake of the Gaza flotilla incident, Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon said that those on board the Mavi Marmara, the scene of the May 31 showdown between Israeli commandos and largely Turkish activists, had ties to “agents of international terror, international Islam, Hamas, al Qaeda and others.” The same senior officer wasn’t impressed. “Putting Hizballah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda in the same sentence, as if they are all the same, is just stupid,” he said. “I don’t know any intelligence officer at CENTCOM who buys that.” Another mid-level SOCOM [Special Operations Command] officer echoed these views: “As the U.S. strategy in the war on terrorism evolves, military planners have come to realize that they are all motivated by different factors, and we need to address this if we are going to effectively prosecute a successful campaign in the Middle East.”

Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that the officers in SOCOM and CENTCOM aren’t willing to lobotomize themselves. After all, it’s an inevitable consequence of placing Gen. Petraeus, a commander who achieved secular sainthood by challenging received pieties, in command. Subordinates tend to follow their commander’s intent, and that has a tendency to be holistic.

Abe Foxman, we clearly have your next targets. Why don’t you try to hector them until they agree to insult their own intelligence?

2 Comments

2 Responses to “CENTCOM Contemplates The Permanence of Hamas & Hezbollah”

mikeyhemlok June 30th, 2010 at 7:20 pm

Yes. It’s fairly common to see the media and pundits lump all the different Jihadi, Resistance, Insurgent and Nationalist groups together, primarily based on the (frequently less than critically important)fact of their adherence to the Islamic faith. Obviously, there are those who do so out of a generalized hatred for all things Muslim. There are many, many more (I certainly fall into this category) who have a tendency to do so out of a lack of detailed understanding of who the players are, what they want and how they are trying to achieve it. It is not, however, acceptable for anyone claiming to be a regional expert or for Military, Intelligence or Diplomatic players who interact with these organizations or their opponents.

We see it most commonly when any group fighting in Afghanistan that is not Government or NATO is ‘Taliban’, even though that descriptor has a more specific meaning than “South Asian who shoots at Americans”. But it tends to color our understanding of the Palestinian issues and make us less critical of dictatorial governments in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. It would contribute to the discussion if there was a reliable go-to source for objective data about these various organizations. Do you know of an unclassified resource?

mikey