Arms and influence

Revolutionary strategies: Maoism

THEORY
Far from being shadowy figures, insurgents are some of the best-understood characters in history's dramas. The spectacular successes (the American colonists, Ho Chi Minh, etc.) and the spectacular failures (Che Guevara, James Connolly, etc.) invite examination and re-examination because of the importance of the events in which they played major roles. Revolutionaries are also very eager to talk about themselves and their movement. The goals and strategies of revolutionary warfare need to be communicated, clarified, and adjusted—particularly since their goals are ambitious, and therefore need to be made believable.

Revolutionary warfare didn't start with Mao, but most contemporary discussions of him do. The Greek revolutionaries, ELAS, may have frightened Americans into fighting a Cold War, but they lost their bid for power. The Chinese Communist Party, in contrast, defeated its enemy, ignited fears about a possible global triumph of communism, radically altered the balance of power in Asia, and placed American, South Korean, and other UN troops in their first direct shooting war with a major communist power. The Chinese Communists quickly positioned themselves as the patron of other revolutionary movements, to the surprise and chagrin of both the USSR and the USA alike.

It's not surprising, therefore, that Mao's theory of revolution became a blueprint for other insurgents. Since 1949, nearly every guerrilla movement has overtly embraced, modified, or rejected Maoist doctrine. Almost none of them have completely ignored it. In the end, the peculiar circumstances of a war might have mattered more to guerrilla strategy than the classic Maoist texts like On Guerrilla War. However, it's the rare revolutionary who hasn't acknowledged Mao, if only to explain the reasons for rejecting Maoism.

The Maoist strategy for revolution has three distinct phases that, of course, mirror the history of the Chinese Civil War. This strategy has the supreme virtue of making the incredible appear credible: the revolutionaries start as a weak, vulnerable, and desperate group. By the end of the conflict, they have become an unstoppable political and military force.

In the first phase, the revolutionaries are building what Lenin called "the organizational weapon," the political, military, logistics, intelligence, and command infrastructure. Maoist revolutionaries aren't impatient to leap into the fray, as the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks did in the political confusion and despair following the fall of the tsar. Instead, Phase I is a quiet prelude for the real battle to come.

The revolutionaries, according to Mao, should be organizing where the regime is weakest. In China, as in many countries where the Maoist strategy has been attempted, the best place was the rural hinterlands. Not only did the government have a weaker (if any) presence in these areas, but the local population felt less affiliation with the distant centers of power. The Soviets looked on the peasants as the least revolutionary segment of a society—as capable of understanding revolutionary ideas as "a sack of potatoes," as Marx and Engels said in one memorable phrase. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) didn't just reject the urban proletariat as their revolutionary allies because there weren't that many of them in China at the time. (Even more significantly, the Kuomintang drove the CCP out of the cities during the bloody clashes of 1927.) The CCP developed its own theory of the peasantry's revolutionary potential: what grievances it felt, how it could be recruited and trained, and how it could be spurred into action. Meanwhile, during this early phase, the proto-guerrillas hid among the rural population—revolutionary fish swimming in the vast sea of the countryside, to use Mao's famous metaphor.

The real action occurs in Phase II. Based on their own experience, the Chinese Communists eventually recommended a strategy of avoiding direct confrontation with government forces. Instead, the revolutionaries need to strike where the enemy is weak: remote police or army outposts; towns and villages beyond the government's reach to occupy; rail and telephone lines; anything else that was politically or militarily significant, but incapable of being defended adequately. In short, the revolutionaries need to maintain the initiative at all times by turning weakness into strength. While the government army might be bigger than the guerrilla movement, it can't defend everywhere. By remaining invisible, or in sanctuaries safe from the enemy, the guerrillas can strike at the time and place of their choosing. The CCP learned some hard lessons on this point, having spectacularly failed to defeat the KMT in more conventional military clashes.

The point of Phase II, however, is not military. Military action is one prong of the attack on the regime; so, too, are efforts to organize an effective counter-government in liberated areas, maintain a flood of propaganda, subvert the government through infiltration, and take all other measures that erode the regime's political foundations. Defeating the enemy army isn't the point; destroying the confidence of the population in the government, and the confidence of the government in itself, is the ultimate objective. Military and political action, therefore, is simply a tool to win allies in the population, or convince an even larger audience that history is on the side of the revolutionaries.

Phase III, therefore, is merely the denouement. The revolutionaries carry out a final assault against the mortally wounded regime. The army may be too weak to resist, or it may even turn on government leaders. However this final act plays out, the ending should be the same: the hollowed-out regime crumbles under the final revolutionary onslaught.

As you might infer from this description, being a successful Maoist revolutionary requires a lot skill than just firing a rifle. Maoists have to be capable organizers, patient military commanders, and astute political operatives. They need impeccable timing to know when to initiate Phase II and Phase III. Most of all, they have to maintain a laser-like focus on politics—the political conditions now, and the steps toward creating the regime's political collapse in the future. In this sense, Mao was the consummate Clausewitzian strategist.

PRACTICE
Today, in Iraq and Afghanistan, we face enemies using a version of the Maoist strategy. In one case, they've been successful, at least in keeping the movement alive. In the other, the only movement you might label as Maoist has failed.

The Army of the Mahdi, led by Muqtada al-Sadr, tried to create a mass movement. Its methods were very different from those of the strictly terrorist groups like Al Qaeda in Iraq, which doesn't care about mass mobilization. Although not avowedly Maoist, his general thrust was the same. However, his methods appeared more like Castro's foco strategy, which reversed Mao's Phases I and II. Rather than wait until the revolutionary infrastructure was solidly in place, the Army of the Mahdi leaped immediately into action, hoping to impress or intimidate the population. After clashes with American forces in Najaf and other cities, al-Sadr's movement stalled. The Sadrists proved to have more ardor than skill in political and military affairs, and many Iraqis to see them as both arrogant and dangerous. Having failed to mobilize a mass movement behind him, al-Sadr agreed to de-mobilize his fighters and join the "normal" political process.

The situation in Afghanistan, unfortunately, is much different. The remnants of the Taliban have survived and, by some measures, prospered. Although under regular attack by Afghan and NATO forces, the Taliban has increased the frequency and lethality of its attacks in the last 1-2 years. The Taliban already won a Maoist-style war against the mujahideen. In fact, the Taliban movement itself was a reaction to the corruption and brutality of the mujahideenonce they defeated the communist regime and seized power. (The ethnic tensions between the Pashtun-dominated Taliban and the predominantly Tajik and Uzbek mujahideenplayed an important role as well.) The Taliban knows how to hide in Afghanistan's hinterlands and fight an indirect war against a more powerful adversary.

The current regime in Kabul is nothing like the mujahideenregime (even though many former mujahideennow have important roles in the Afghan government), but the story outside of Kabul is quite different. "Warlordism" is still the curse of Afghanistan, which the Taliban readily exploits. The normal petty corruption of life under the warlords is magnified by the opium trade. The lack of leverage that the Kabul government has over the warlords is visible to all. While people were willing to vote, in the hope of a better situation, the government most Afghans elected is still a geographically and politically distant entity. Even though the Taliban doesn't quote Maoist tracts, they do have a key virtue for the Maoist style of warfare they're pursuing: patience.

Casual Friday: guerrilla games

IN THE NEWS
Since it's Friday, I'll get off the Serious Express for a moment.

As I've mentioned before, I've been an avid wargamer since I was a teenager. If you don't know what wargames are, they're board games designed to, in some fashion, simulate military history. For example, my latest acquisition, Empire of the Sun, depicts the Pacific Theater of WWII.

Some wargames do justice to their topic, while still making the game playable. The designers who can strike this balance deserve much praise. It's easy to cut corners, damaging the value of the simulation. It's just as easy to create a game so bogged down in detail that no one could ever play it.

Most wargames cover conventional conflicts. The American Civil War and World War II, not surprisingly, are popular topics. Some wargames cover the entire war; others cover particular battles, or representative clashes at the level of the individual soldier or squad.

There are very few wargames that cover revolutionary warfare, or even the unconventional aspects of otherwise conventional wars (for example, anti-fascist partisans in WWII). This neglect of unconventional or "little wars" is odd, since there have been far more of them in the last century or two than major conventional wars between states. It's not hard to understand: more people are interested in the American Civil War than the Shining Path rebellion in Peru.

But, say, if there were a good game about the Shining Path, people like me would sit up and take notice. I've found one, an amateur-press wargame published several years ago. The rules are a bit hard to follow, so I'm thinking about asking the designer for permission to rewrite and post them on one of the major boardgame aficianado web sites. The basic game, as I've found, is a great laboratory for anyone interested in learning about guerrilla warfare.  Want to see the difference between Leninist and Maoist strategies in action? Curious how revolutionary strategies evolve over time?  Wondered why many governments have a tough time beating insurgents? Shining Path does a very good job of illustrating these and other points, in a wargame that's low on the complexity scale.

Books about military affairs, including revolutionary warfare, are essential. Sometimes, you need the experience of sitting on one side of the battlefield or the other to deepen your understanding. Happily, with wargames, no real bullets are fired at you in the process.

Revolutionary chaos, radical order

THEORY
It’s worth returning for a moment to Edmund Burke, who said that the road from the Tennis Court oath to the guillotine was the inevitable unfolding of the French Revolution. Not every revolution ends in terror, but what’s worth examining in light of a recent posting, Revolution’s minimum entry requirements, is the balance of forces is muddied by other groups opposed to the regime who are not necessarily allied to the revolutionaries. These groups often win the initial political victory against the regime, such as the replacement of the tsarist monarchy in 1917 with the short-lived Kerensky government. These Russian moderates, like their counterparts in France, Iran, and many other countries in the midst of upheaval, are the main characters for only a brief chapter in the history of a revolution.

Frequently-repeated political forces cut short the rule of the moderates. The new government immediately inherits all the problems that inspired people to overthrow the old regime. Re-organizing and staffing the civil and military parts of the government is extremely difficult, particularly if many of the loyalists can’t or won’t serve the new regime. The moderates also fall prey to their own moderation. Their main rivals, the radicals, are often better organized, more experienced at clandestine political action, more convinced of the necessity of their victory by whatever means necessary, and more capable of articulating a clear ideology—their roadmap to the future—at a time of enormous confusion and anxiety. Kerensky’s cabinet won the right to be the first replacement for the tsar, but the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were already waiting in the wings to depose them.

Sometimes, analyses of revolution, like Crane Brinton’s or Lyford Edwards’, depend too much on “the Great Revolutions” in France and Russia. However, in more recent times, we’ve seen the same dynamic at work: once the old government falls, and a coalition of moderates takes its place, this cataclysmic event turns out to be only the prelude to the triumph of the radicals. It’s easy to forget, for example, that it wasn’t just the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamist supporters who deposed the Shah of Iran in 1979, but a broad coalition of many groups. Similarly, you often hear people mistakenly talk about the Taliban defeating the Soviets and taking power, when in fact it was the Tajik- and Uzbek-dominated mujahideen coalition that routed the Soviets and defeated the Najibullah regime. The Taliban movement was, in fact, a reaction to the corruption and brutality of the mujahideen. Again in 1979, when President Somoza fled Nicaragua after his National Guard refused to continue to defend him, the Sandinistas were only one of many groups who erected an interim government in Managua.

The way insurgents organize themselves creates an even more complicated political picture. There may not be one insurgent group, but several, sometimes united under a single banner, sometimes not. The FMLN in El Salvador’s recent civil war was actually an aggregation of five guerrilla groups, under some degree of joint command, but also often operating with equal independence. Guerrilla and terrorist groups usually have political front organizations, like the FDR counterpart to the FMLN, or the Sinn Fein complement to the IRA. The fronts often try to become a larger umbrella organization beyond the original insurgency, allying with or leading other groups opposed to the regime. These apparent divisions among insurgent groups, or between the insurgents and their political fronts, are sometimes real, and sometimes illusory. They always cloud estimates of how strong the insurgents really are, politically and militarily, and how much of a threat they represent in combination with other opposition groups.

In other words, insurgents don’t need to draw a straight line to victory from their first attacks to a triumphant march on the capitol. They often take advances and reversals of fortune in stride, waiting for the time when either they can win the kind of victory they plan, or take advantage of another political movement’s success at deposing the old regime.

PRACTICE
Not surprisingly, I have Lebanon on my mind while I’m writing this piece. The large, noisy, and effective opposition, which succeeded in deposing a pro-Syrian cabinet, has gained enough force to possibly force a partial or total Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon. Meanwhile, everyone familiar with Lebanese politics is aware of the proverbial “dog that did not bark in the night,” Hezbollah. Hezbollah started as a collection of terrorist cells responsible for some of the most infamous bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations during Lebanon’s Civil War, including the 1983 simultaneous suicide attacks on the US Marine barracks and French paratrooper base.  Now, Hezbollah has many faces, much like Palestinian group Hamas in the occupied territories. Hezbollah has charitable organizations, a satellite TV station, a publication arm, and 12 elected representatives in the Lebanese parliament. Anyone who imposes the picture of the ragged, desperate terrorist on the current leadership of Hezbollah is sorely mistaken.

Hezbollah has supported the Syrian occupation, but so far has been very quiet about a possible Syrian withdrawal. A question I’ve yet to see pressed with any energy, in Western media circles at least, is who killed Rafik Hariri. The finger could point to Hezbollah as easily as the Syrians themselves.

Whoever was responsible for blowing up the car in which Hariri was traveling, Hezbollah is, of course, a classic “radicals in the wings” group. Nearly every other despotism, benevolent or savage, that the Bush Administration might like to topple has its version of “the radicals in the wings.” That’s not an argument for giving up on reform or revolution. It is, however, a stern warning for anyone who wants to proceed heedlessly, hurriedly, and ultimately, recklessly—which is a fair description of the Bush Administration’s handling of Afghanistan and Iraq. We may applaud the moderates who take power today, and bemoan the radicals who overthrow them tomorrow.

Revolution’s minimum entry requirements

THEORY
An important question for many reasons is, How big does a revolutionary group need to be to start a civil war? The “critical mass” question is important for every phase in the “etiology” of revolution, from its ignition to its final victory or defeat. For this article, I’ll just focus on one dimension, the force ratio between the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary armies.

Clearly, one disgruntled person is not enough to start a revolution. However, the actual size of many revolutionary organizations, once they started to make serious progress, was actually quite small. Take, for example, the guerrillas operating in the Sierra Maestra mountains at the beginning of the Cuban civil war. With only a small force, Castro could have waited before beginning serious military operations against the Batista regime, if he had followed the standard Maoist template for revolution. (First, according to Mao, you build a political and organizational base in the rural population. Then you start guerrilla operations.) Castro believed instead that some initial raids against police and military installations would inspire people to join the revolutionaries, switching the first and second stages of the Maoist strategy completely around. And, obviously, he was right—though, as always, one has to be careful about generalizing too quickly, applying “lessons learned” from one revolutionary conflict, in a particular country at a particular time, to another such conflict elsewhere and elsewhen.

Terrorists, too, operate in very small groups. In fact, a great deal of revolutionary propaganda and strategy documents, from terrorist groups as varied as the IRA and al Qaeda, justify terrorism on the grounds that “the masses” just aren’t ready yet. The dedicated cadre of revolutionaries can only create a revolutionary mindset, they argue, by triggering a series of events starting with terrorist attacks. Different terrorists have varying predictions of what will follow—for European Marxist groups, a repressive police crackdown that tears away the mask of decency from the capitalist state; for Islamists, a sudden mass awareness that the imperial colossus is not invulnerable—but the story starts always with the small, enlightened, dedicated, and disciplined revolutionary cell doing whatever they think is necessary to start the revolution.

Terrorists and guerrillas can be wrong. None of the groups like the Red Brigades or the IRA ignited the mass revolution they had expected. Al Qaeda lost its base in Kabul, since the United States and its allies proved not as fearful of fighting a war in Afghanistan as expected.  But the general principle is true: it doesn’t take a mass movement to start a revolution.

Sustaining it, however, is another question entirely. Guerrillas and terrorists, fighting “the war of the flea,” need at all costs to maintain the initiative. Many of their needs, therefore, depend on having sufficient numbers of fighters, agents, and supporters. Information about what the government is doing, a steady supply of recruits to replace losses, couriers willing to take clandestine messages between commanders—these and other functional pieces of any revolution’s anatomy require, at bottom, enough people to keep the revolutionary going.

At a purely military level, the revolutionaries need enough relative strength compared to the government’s military and paramilitary forces to sustain guerrilla operations, including patrols of “liberated zones” and raids on government facilities. While guerrillas don’t need to match the government, soldier for soldier, they need enough fighters to sustain these kinds of operations.

Looking at this force ratio from the other side, students and practitioners of counterinsurgency often cite a “magic ratio” between government and guerrilla forces—usually 8:1, but often as high as 10:1. According to this counterinsurgency canon, if the government’s military strength hasn’t reached the 8:1 threshold, it can’t re-take the initiative at the operational and theater planes of strategy from the guerrillas.

It’s best to understand the magic ratio as an average, not an absolute number required for all governments fighting guerrillas. For example:

• In 1985, approximately 120,000 Soviet and 30,000 Afghan soldiers fought 150,000 mujahideen. Even if you were to add the 100,000 Afghan Communist paramilitary troops (of very questionable value) to the scales, the balance was far from the 8:1 ratio. Not surprisingly, therefore, the Soviets gave up and retreated, but it’s easy to forget how tenaciously the Najibullah government held on for a couple of year after the Soviet withdrawal.
• In 1950, at the crescendo of the Huk Rebellion, the Philippine army had only a 3:1 or 4:1 advantage over the Hukbalahap insurgents. However, the Huks dramatically lost ground to the Filipino government over the next few years.
• In the mid-1980s, the government of El Salvador enjoyed as high as 10:1 advantage over its FMLN adversary, but it still did not make military or political headway against the guerrillas until the end of the decade.

Obviously, there are too many peculiarities of each conflict at play for any absolute ratio, like the 8:1 figure, to make sense. In the Philippines, for example, Defense Minister (and later President) Ramon Magsaysay substantially restructured the armed forces at the regimental and battalion levels, making it easier for them to defeat a guerrilla army than other militaries fighting other insurgencies. The triple-canopy jungles of South Vietnam helped the National Liberation Front ambush and fade away, but not every country has that much concealing terrain to mask guerrilla movements. Daniel Ortega and other Sandinista leaders had a much better ability to organize and recruit than the contra armies they later fought. Fidel Castro had a much better nose for revolutionary potential (or, perhaps, just much better luck) than the Tupemaro leaders in Uruguay.

However many variables you want to throw into the equation, the principle of the force ratio still stands. The number of capable fighters on each side determines the ability of the guerrillas to maintain the initiative. Training, operational and tactical doctrine, equipment, leadership, and other characteristics of the government and guerrilla armed forces add further weight to one side or the other of the scale. The fact of the balance, and its effect on the course of the war, is undeniable.

It’s worth noting here that terrorists have no equivalent balance of force considerations. A very small group of terrorists can continue to bomb, kidnap, and assassinate, even if the government increases the size and quality of its security forces by a full order of magnitude. The horrific nature of terrorism usually keeps the number of recruits willing to abandon their scruples, and increasingly in an age of suicide attacks, their lives, to a minimum. However, to continue as a terrorist organization or network, the cause doesn’t need that many fighters or supporters.

For people who guffaw at the idea that terrorism requires more law enforcement than military action, it’s worth taking stock of that last observation. Terrorist groups that spring from within a society don’t need foreign bases, substantial military support from foreign governments, or operational support from a foreign army. Guerrillas might be able to turn these boons to their advantage, but domestic terrorists can’t, and don’t need to. Even foreign-based terrorists, such as al Qaeda, need a lot less from foreign safe havens and patrons than many people assume. Atta’s group could have learned how to pilot an airliner in many countries to be sure, but they could gather information on Logan Airport only from within the United States. Even if the Bush Administration had invaded Afghanistan the day after it took office, the operational stages of the 9/11 attacks within the United States were already underway.

Finally, when do you know when you’ve defeated the revolutionaries? Often, the answer is, You can’t, and don’t assume that victory means complete elimination of the enemy. Aside from the Communist Huk Rebels, the main enemy of the 1940s and 1950s, the Philippine government has been fighting Moro separatists practically since the day the Philippines gained its independence. At no point has the Moro movement ever completely disappeared, though it would be disingenuous to say that the Filipino government has never defeated them. The Moros have often been confined enough to be, at worst, a nuisance. Final victory may not be possible with the forces available, or the leaders of the next phase of the insurgency may melt into the population until the time is again ripe for armed resistance. Belief in total victory may not only be completely misguided, but also highly dangerous. Massacre, mass displacement, and genocide are the tools of people who believe that such total extermination of all resistance is both possible and necessary.

PRACTICE
Having said a lot already on the theory side, I’ll say only a few words on the practice side. Clearly, this question of numbers is important, for both the international struggle with al Qaeda and the regional conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Here are a few salient points:

• Forceful action abroad can have only marginal effects on al Qaeda. In the pursuit of a long-term goal, whittling down al Qaeda, it’s important to deny it as many safe havens as possible, kill or imprison its leaders and fighters, and shut off easy sources of funding and training. However, the size of the al Qaeda network abroad is less important than the activities of al Qaeda operatives within the United States, or in places where dramatic attacks against large numbers of American civilians are possible.
• Yet again, it’s important to call attention to how little progress the United States has made in Afghanistan. The central government is far from reaching a sufficient balance of forces against the Taliban, warlords opposed to the central government, narcotics traffickers, and brigands. In fact, over the last few years, these groups have become even more intertwined than they were before the 2001 invasion.
• We can make too much of individual terrorist attacks in Iraq. The number of terrorist attacks against Iraqi and foreign targets will not drop to zero any time soon—if ever.
• At the same time, the balance of forces in Iraq isn’t where it needs to be. The number of Iraqi soldiers, policemen, local militia members, and border guards trained is a misleading statistic—and the numbers are far short of the original goals in any case. Hastily trained troops—if you can say they are trained at all to fight the different insurgent groups—won’t swing the balance significantly against the insurgents. Since not all the insurgent groups are the same, the balance of forces matters differently in practically each case. If there had been a larger contingent of well-trained, well-equipped Iraqi troops in Fallujah, the world might have seen the first instances of Iraqi government troops defeating guerrillas like al-Sadr’s Army of the Mahdi. However, winning house-to-house battles with that type of insurgent is no guide to how well the Iraqi security forces can deal with Ansar al-Sunnah and “al Qaeda in Iraq,” which are more interested in high-profile kidnappings, televised executions, and suicide attacks than running gun battles with American and Iraqi soldiers.

Many discussions about current events circle back to the same questions: How soon will the Iraqi government be able to defend itself?  What signs should we seek that we are reaching that threshold? Clearly, we’re not there yet, and a raw statistic about the number of troops in uniform is almost no guide at all.

The evolution of revolution

THEORY

In the 20th century, the question of causes dominated discussions about revolution among historians and political scientists. What caused the Russian Revolution? Whose theory of revolutionary ignition made more sense? Are there discernable warning signs that a revolution like the one that occurred in Iran is about to happen in Iraq?

Causation may have been the 20th century's concern, but before then, etiology—the predictable course that revolutions take, once they begin, was the more common topic. Many ancient philosophers, such as Socrates, believed in a cycle of revolutions, including monarchic, aristocratic, oligarchic, and democratic phases. Edmund Burke objected to the French Revolution because, he argued, once revolutionaries threw aside prior laws and traditions, nothing restrained the most violent, unscrupulous leaders from rising to the highest reaches of power. Marx and Engels focused more on explaining where the revolutions that drove societies from one "mode of production" to another (for example, from feudalism to capitalism) than they did describing "the revolutionary moment."

All of these thinkers, however much they disagreed on other issues, had a common and somewhat pessimistic view of how much individuals could steer the course of a revolution once it began. In Book V of The Politics, Aristotle describes how states with different "constitutions" (in his terminology, the type of regime, such as an oligarchy) have defects that, if unchecked, inspire particular kinds of revolutionary forces. Oligarchs, for example, can't help but oppress the larger population, which can create the mass outrage that explodes into popular revolution. Members of the same oligarchic faction develop rivalries and resentments that can lead to coups and civil wars. Some oligarchs are smart enough manage these risks, tempering these rivalries and avoiding excessively oppressive measures. Smart oligarchs may stay in power longer than others, but that's not the same as saying they can achieve total mastery of their destinies. Heraclea, Cnidos, Erythrae—Aristotle names several oligarchies that failed, despite the best efforts of the oligarchs.

There's an old, old question peeking around the edges of this discussion of revolutionary etiology: What decides the outcome of major events, the leaders involved or impersonal historical forces beyond their control? This question arises in many different contexts, from Tolstoy's War and Peace to John Ellis' Brute Force, an argument for the "inevitability" of Allied victory in World War II. You don't have to find a final answer to this question to see that revolutions take natural courses, passing through similar, predictable phases. Whether human beings can slow down or stop this revolutionary progression is a separate issue than whether events tend along a familiar trajectory.

Although 20th century thinkers spent more time on causation than etiology, a few students of revolution did take a stab at describing what these predictable phases might be. You might not have heard their names before—perhaps, in part, because the course of evolution is such a sketchily-addressed topic. The two I'll mention here, Crane Brinton and Lyford Edwards, have very similar theories of revolutionary etiology, so it's fair to discuss their two books on the subject together.

Both Crane Brinton's Anatomy of Revolution and Lyford Edwards' The Natural History of Revolution use the "great revolution" of modern times—the French and Russian revolutions most prominently, but also the English Civil War and the American War of Independence—as case studies. To paraphrase and summarize Brinton and Edwards a bit, here's what they see as the normal course of revolutions:

• A period of unrest and uncertainty preceding the revolutionary outbreak.
• A catalytic event that starts the revolutionary motor.
• The collapse of the old order, followed by a period in which moderate factions hold the reins of power.
• The failure of the moderates, followed by the radicals' seizure of power.
• A reign of terror, which the radicals justify in their minds by the slow pace of
• revolutionary transformation.
• The exhaustion of the terror campaign.
• A period of "cooling down," during which the radicals may or may not lose power.
• The return to normal politics, signaling the end of the revolution.

Both Brinton and Edwards argue that the politics of the revolutionaries is irrelevant to the course of the revolution. You can trace the same road through these predictable phases of revolution, whether you're talking about the Nazi seizure of power, the Iranian revolution, or the history of the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua,

PRACTICE

If you think revolutions follow a predictable path, you're left with an obvious question: is Iraq fated to follow the same course? Are the number of troops the United States and its allies deploy, the amount of aid sent to the Iraqi government, and the recent elections all irrelevant to what will happen there, regardless of our efforts?

I don't find the argument about historical inevitability convincing. Revolutions often fail, as did the Sandinistas' revolutionary regime. Leaders can unleash long, bloody reigns of terror, such as the terror famines and the great purges under Stalin, or they can be relatively short and less violent, such as the Iranian mullah's consolidation of power. Certainly the repressive measures that the Revolutionary Guards and other instruments of that consolidation were brutal and destructive, but they never reached Stalinesque proportions. History with a capital "H" may propel societies through these revolutionary phases, but how quickly, and what happens during them, is something that human beings can affect.

Iraq may be passing though exactly the phases that Brinton and Edwards describe. If we're trying to support a moderate regime, it may be at enormous risk, for all the reasons moderates have failed in other revolutions. The radicals are usually better organized and motivated than the moderates. As long as the moderates are in power, they bear the blame for whatever failures or mistakes the new government commits. Many people frustrated with these setbacks join the radical faction, with either enthusiasm or resignation.

In short, the short-lived seizure of power in Fallujah by the Army of the Mahdi, one of many radical factions in Iraq today, may have been a harbinger of things to come in the rest of Iraq. So, too, was the disgust of many living in Fallujah with their "liberation" by the radicals, and the repression that quickly followed.

Unfortunately, the residents of Fallujah were furious with the American "liberation" as well. How we fight this war in Iraq does matter—we and the Iraqis are not merely leaves blowing in a revolutionary gale. We can see where events may lead, and respond accordingly. Sometimes, we may be able to cut short one of the phases of revolutionary cataclysm; at other times, we may have to merely ride them out.

The Iraqi elections run along a revolutionary knife's edge. If, as the Bush Administration argues, elections will build an intimate connection between the voter and the government, that bond may just as easily make matters worse as better. If Iraq is passing through the stage of moderate rule, the elections may become the symbol of what the "new Iraq" is supposed to be. In other words, the elections may frame what the current "regime of moderates" is supposed to be: broadly representative of all Iraqis, regardless of religious outlook, ethnic background, clan affiliation, political ideology, or any other identifying characteristics. If the elected government doesn't seem representative, or fails to deliver equal justice, reconstruction, and security to all groups in Iraq, the moderates in power may find themselves facing more outrage and frustration than if the elections had never occurred. The elections, therefore, may undermine the moderates at this critical phase in the transformation of Iraq, not help them. Few can blame a provisional government for not being completely representative of a fractured, fractious country. Everyone can blame a new set of leaders in Baghdad and their American patrons if elections fail to produce a more representative, responsive regime than the interim government.

POSTSCRIPT: The term etiology was my doctoral advisor's favored way of phrasing this issue. I also have Harry Eckstein to thank for showing me how important—and, unfortunately, neglected—revolutionary etiology has been.

Causes of revolutionary violence

THEORY
People who study revolutions share many traits with people who study the weather. Both groups worry about cataclysms: when they might hit, how long and intense the duration of the storm, and how best to plan for the aftermath. The one difference, of course, is that no one can effectively steer the weather, while often human beings can (or at least try to) deflect revolutions on a different or reverse course.

In its infancy, the study of cataclysms, whether they’re revolutions or hurricanes, focuses on causes. What forces combine to create the cataclysm? If you know what causes a revolution, you’re well on your way to predicting when it might happen—just as meteorologists issue storm warnings, sometimes under clear skies, when atmospheric bumps and troughs begin to collide.

There is no comprehensive theory of what causes revolutions on which all social scientists and historians agree. Instead, theories generally break down into two camps:

• Revolutionary furor. Outrage, in this perspective, fuels revolution. Resentment against the pampered French aristocracy, the grievances of the American colonies against the British government, the disgust with communism across Eastern Europe—pick any revolution, and it’s easy to look at it through this lens. Some of the most articulate proponents of the “revolutionary furor” thesis include political scientists like Ted Robert Gurr, Theda Skocpol, and James Davies, historians of particular revolutions like Alexis de Tocqueville and Stephen Cohen, and, of course, Marx and Engels with their theory of class conflict and revolutionary consciousness. However, the “revolutionary furor” perspective crosses ideological lines, so someone arguing about middle class resentment against Salvador Allende’s policies before the military coup that ousted him is as likely to stress popular discontent as a neo-Marxist interpretation of the Iranian revolution. Social historians often appear in this camp, since their focus on everyday life is going to put popular discontent in the foreground of their research.


• Revolutionary opportunity. Revolution, in this perspective, is the apocalyptic resolution of an ongoing conflict among competing elites. Factions eager to seize power from their enemies ride the wave of popular discontent, but it’s merely one of many tools in the revolutionary leader’s arsenal. “The organizational weapon,” terror, intrigues, agitprop—there may be a mass audience, but it’s a small group of revolutionaries, the “counter-elite,” that creates these implements and directs their use. Again, you can find a mix of political scientists (for example, Charles Tilly) and historians (such as Richard Pipes and Edmund Burke) of many ideological stripes who argue this position. Often, people who write “grand histories” of important leaders and events will fall into this camp, again because of where they focus their attention.

The two perspectives disagree on many points. For example, once people start making loud challenges to the status quo—angry Iranian students, marches of the sans culottes through Paris, demonstrators against Ceausescu—is it a good idea for the regime to try to buy them off by meeting some of their demands? The revolutionary furor theorist might say yes; the revolutionary opportunity theorist would say no. Reforms may dampen outrage, but they also embolden the counter-elites by demonstrating the regime’s lack of confidence in itself. People who cleave to one view or another might even define revolutions differently. If you think that the Russian Revolution was really the collapse of tsarism in the face of its failures, you’d mark Nicolas II’s abdication as the start of the Revolution. On the other hand, if you think that the Bolshevik seizure of power and its implementation through the next decade or so is what really defines the Russian Revolution, then you’d mark its beginning with the Bolshevik and Menshevik coup against the Kerensky provisional government.

Actually, I don’t think these two views are necessarily contradictory. You might say that outrage is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for revolution. Only a particular mixture of the two elements, mass outrage and opportunity, makes a revolution happen. There might be other variables in the equation worth noting, but I’d argue that these are the two dominant ones. Counter-elites will continue to plot, but without the volcanic eruption of mass outrage, they’ll never have the power to topple the government and ensure some legitimacy for whatever follows. Without revolutionary leadership, small eruptions may happen, but they’ll remain as unsuccessful as, for example, peasant revolts in the Middle Ages. Rebellious peasants often had a programme of fundamental political, economic, and religious change in mind; what they lacked were powerful, effective allies in the higher reaches of society. When it looked as though rebels might find just such an ally, as the Cathars did with Count Raymond VI of Tolouse, The Powers That Be “got medieval” with them.

I wish I could give you a formula that would predict whether or not a revolution will happen. I’m not sure that scholarship is at a point where anyone can even state the percentage chance of revolution occurring, as meteorologists talk about the chances of rain or hail. We are able, however, as practitioners of warfare, to see ways to win as revolutionaries or counterrevolutionaries. Many strategies might be obvious to the point of being truisms. However, some conclusions might not be, such as the risks of making discontent worse by giving in to some demands for reform. The larger question, however, is how to strike the right balance between outrage and opportunity. If the United States is fighting a war against al Qaeda, for example, should it try somehow to address the “root causes” of terrorism, the reasons why young men and women are willing to volunteer to become suicide bombers? Or should we focus on the leadership of al Qaeda, assuming that once we kill the brains of al Qaeda, the rest of the body will follow?

The answer, of course, is that we need to do both. Future posts on counterterrorism strategy will try to answer exactly what we need to do to address outrage and opportunism, which both sustain terrorist attacks against us.

PRACTICE
I think the big question on many people’s minds this week is, “What the hell is going on in Najaf?” The Army of the Mahdi and its leader, Muqtada al-Sadr, continue to vex the United States, and the situation seems to be getting worse. After each agreement with al-Sadr, the Army of the Mahdi slows its attacks, regroups, and then renews its assaults. What will it take to stop them?

Again, we have to be clear about both our own objectives, as well as careful to understand the other side’s goals. Do we want just to restore peace and quiet, or do we want somehow to put al-Sadr in his place? If so, what is that place, and why are we putting him there? And what do al-Sadr and the Sadrists want?

I won’t answer the first questions about our own goals in Najaf today—in large part, because I think the US government is extremely unclear itself about what it wants. I’ll also be arguing something that may sound counterintuitive in my next post on this topic—perhaps we should just let the fighting rage, instead of reflexively trying to squelch it—and I can’t delve into that discussion without losing track of the main issue in this post. What started the Sadrist attacks, and by extension, what keeps them going, is the question du jour.

You might assume that all the revolutionary talk about the Mahdi, making the shari’a the basis of government, and evicting the Americans is just talk. In reality, you might conclude, al-Sadr is behaving like any other sheikh, demanding his rightful place at the conference table and in the halls of government. He is, in effect, the leader of a discontented counter-elite. The Sadrist leaders see the weakness of the Americans and the provisional government and have decided to exploit it. The attacks are definitely not about seizing ground, but instead are designed to make a political point: we’re here, we’re armed, and there’s nothing you can do about it but make a deal. The Sturm und Drang of street fighting is just political theater, in which, unfortunately, the US military is playing the role of a particularly feckless antagonist.

Or, in contrast, you might argue that the Sadrist movement is just that—a movement, not a disguise for an existing clan, or some neo-clan trying to elbow its way to the table. The Army of the Mahdi has successfully recruited many people so disgusted with the occupation that they’re willing to take up arms. It’s a real army, not an alliance of extended families, and it has real grievances: lack of security against criminals and guerrillas; lack of water; lack of electricity; lack of jobs; lack of respect from the occupiers; lack of a lot of other things. Occupying the shrine of Imam Ali isn’t merely a cunning tactical ploy; it is, in this view, a very sincere political statement. The Sadrists want a hot, Koranic wind to blow across the landscape of the new Iraq, sweeping it clean of the corruption, crime, and malaise of post-invasion Iraq.

Once again, both views might be true, since they are looking at different parts of the Army of the Mahdi. In the most cynical view of Muqtada al-Sadr, he may be just as much a cynical manipulator of popular discontent as, say, the Roman republican politicians who exploited the grievances of the lower classes. And, at the same time, his followers may be so angry that they’re willing to continue sacrificing their lives in clashes with American forces. In fact, not only might al-Sadr and his lieutenants might be cleverly timing and directing these violent eruptions of discontent, but at the same time, al-Sadr might genuinely be a prisoner of them. He may not be able to agree on many negotiation points, simply because his own followers might feel betrayed if he did. While Publius Clodius Pulcher or Gaius Julius Caesar might not blink an eye at selling out the plebes, al-Sadr is not as experienced a politician as they were.

Clearly, though, “getting al-Sadr” or “getting the Sadrists” won’t be sufficient to reach whatever our goals are in Najaf today. Removing al-Sadr from the apex of the Army of the Mahdi won’t cause the movement to collapse. And killing Sadrist foot soldiers won’t remove Muqtada al-Sadr from the political landscape of Iraq. Success depends on being able to chew gum and walk at the same time: deal with al-Sadr (or just cut a deal with him), while at the same time, addressing whatever fuels the outrage of the Sadrists.

Revolutionaries and war aims

THEORY
In my last post about the theory and practice of terrorism, I took great pains to separate terrorism and guerrilla warfare as operational and tactical approaches from the goals of the groups waging these types of conflicts. Not everyone who uses kidnapping, sabotage, suicide bombings, or assassination is necessarily a revolutionary. In fact, what we sometimes call death squads or militias, allied with a particular regime or ruling faction, are often using the same methods as the regime's enemies. The civil war in the Sudan, in which the Janjaweed militias are operating on behalf of the government in Khartoum, is the most vivid example from today's news.

However, the preponderance of groups pursuing terrorist or guerrilla strategies are, in fact, revolutionaries of some stripe. Asymmetric warfare is a necessity for these groups, but governments have other ways to defend themselves. The national army, for example, should already provide sufficient firepower to wage a counterinsurgency or counterterrorism campaign. These same armed forces are usually uncomfortable with private groups, beyond their control. In Northern Ireland, the frictions between the British army and the Protestant paramilitary groups is emblematic of these frequently troubled relationships.

Not every revolutionary group wants to change the world, however. War aims range across the political map, from the modest (simply twisting the arm of a government to make reforms) to the apocalyptic (overthrowing the regime and radically transforming all of society).

GOAL	EXAMPLES	COMMON TERMS
Eject an invading power.	French maquis in World War II, Afghani mujahideen during the Soviet occupation.	Partisans, resistance fighters.
Change a government's policies.		Rebels, iconoclasts, resisters, renegades, dissidents, reformers.
Replace a government's leaders.	Different factions in Sierra Leone's civil wars, dynastic struggles in China prior to the Chinese Revolution.	Rebels, factions, insurrectionaries.
Replace a government, then use its power to transform society.	Afghani Taliban, Peruvian Shining Path, Nicaraguan Sandinistas.	Revolutionaries, radicals.
Break away from the central government to form a new nation.	Biafran separatists in Nigeria, Confederate States of American in the US Civil War, Québécoise separatists in Canada, Basque ETA terrorists in Spain.	Separatists, secessionists.

Some of the very same groups will move from one row in this table to another, depending on the enemy. During World War II, the main enemy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was the Japanese occupational force. After Japan lost the war, the CCP turned its guns on the Kuomintang. In the first war, the CCP fought as partisans, and in the second , as revolutionaries. These same groups might have a blend of goals, and therefore more than one enemy, at the same time. The internecine fighting among anti-Nazi partisans in Eastern Europe, between the CCP and the Kuomingtang during the Japanese occupation, and between Cambodian factions during the North Vietnamese incursion shows how groups making common cause against one enemy may still bitter differences over other goals.

When you first look at a conflict like the Angolan civil war or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they look like William James' "blooming, buzzing confusion" of details. Different groups with different alphabet soup acronyms; a long, sad history of societal breakdown, punctuated by battles, massacres, assassinations, and the inevitable tragedies of civilians caught in the middle; a web of connections among different government and military organizations and outside political factions; and, increasingly in the last few decades, multiple foreign powers and transnational organizations (the UN, NATO, OAS, Shell Oil, the Carter Center, etc.) involved in the conflict.

However, it's not too hard to eliminate the confusion if you build a simple table or scorecard, with a row for each combatant, civilian or military branch of the regime, or other important player. Who are they? What are their goals? What strategies are they pursuing at each level (theater, operational, etc.)? How are they faring? What were the important events in the history of the group?

Combatants in internal wars can lose track of their own war aims, a problem endemic to war in general. (Thanks to Princessboo for reminding me of this important point.) Sometimes, a group may be unwilling to give up arms, even long after their original terms of victory have been achieved. Sometimes, demobilization simply looks dangerous, as it did to the contras in Nicaragua, or the IRA in Northern Ireland. It's a great leap of trust in the trustworthiness of former adversaries that not every group is willing to take. At other times, as is arguably true of these and many other revolutionaries, these groups are unwilling to give up the fight for fear of losing the clout, prestige, and resources that they enjoyed while in arms. Simple mental inertia or crass self-interest are as much in play in revolutionary organizations as any other type.

PRACTICE
The practical conclusion one can take away from this discussion is fairly obvious: since there are multiple groups comprising "the insurgency" in Iraq, you can't fight them all the same way. What might satisfy bandits comes down to simple cash. What might satisfy clan leaders looking for opportunities to gain an edge against their rivals depends completely on regional or local politics. What might satisfy a real partisan group is the withdrawal of US forces. And what might satisfy a radical Islamist group is nothing short of a revolutionary transformation of Iraqi society.

The same principle applies in Afghanistan. President Karzai's campaign to end warlordism is directed against mujahideen factions like Hekmatyar's. Warlordism in Afghanistan has a familiar face that a 19th century British officer stationed there would immediately recognize. The warlord factions want autonomy, wealth, and prestige, none of which they feel a powerful central government can give all of them simultaneously. Whenever someone in Afghanistan has tried to centralize power, either in the hands of an occupational power or a native Afghan regime, it has been accomplished to the benefit of one faction, and by extension, to the detriment of others. This makes the job of making Afghanistan a less threatening place to the West, either as a terrorist stronghold or an opium exporter, extremely difficult, but not impossible. Other societies have moved from a fragmented collection of local elites to a central national authority--including every European nation that emerged from feudalism with a real state.

The gradual transformation of Afghanistan away from warlordism is not the same as the war with the Taliban, however. The Taliban emerged as a reaction to the corruption and despotism of the mujahideen once they had won power. They are not, however, a warlord faction like the others, so they won't be appeased or defeated in the same way. Although the Taliban are predominantly Pashtun, they are a group outside the normal ethnically-rooted factionalism of warlord politics. They have at least one point of similarity with the medieval military orders, such as the Templars or the Hospitallers: they are a group with transcendental goals, with no allegiance to any temporal authorities. The Taliban bow to no clan leader like Hekmatyar; their crude, flinty version of Islam is their ultimate sovereign.

In both countries, therefore, the mix of objectives among insurgent groups certainly adds complexity, but it also represents an important opportunity. If the United States, Great Britain, and other international players in Iraq and Afghanistan deploy people with the right combination of cultural understanding and political guile, it should be possible to help the weak new regimes in these two countries play insurgent groups off one another. Alliances of convenience form and dissolve all the time, as evidenced by Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Husaini Sistani's on-again, off-again defense of Muqtada al-Sadr. Sistani has no love for Sadr and his Army of the Mahdi, but at times, he's either compelled or enticed to defend the Sadrists against the United States. Since we fight wars to create particular political outcomes, the use of force in Iraq has to be designed to fragment insurgent groups and other important figures like Sistani, not unite them in a common front. For the time being, we have other forms of leverage to use as well, and we should have the outcome we want--the isolation and elimination of the worst groups, like the bandits with faux revolutionary titles, and the absorption of other groups into the civil order of the new Iraq. Otherwise, when Americans go into battle in Najaf, Fallujah, Basra, or Sadr City, they might as well be firing their weapons into the air.

Revolution and violence

THEORY
The journey towards a better understanding of counterterrorism first needed to pass through the general principles of strategy. What Clausewitz learned from his experience in the Napoleonic Wars may not appear to fit the struggle against al Qaeda, but that's what makes a good theory: even if circumstances change, the core principles still provide a guide to action. I hope the theory/practice format of this blog has proved the universal efficacy of the principles, levels, and dynamics of strategy.

Now that we're ready to dig into the specifics of terrorism and its cousin, guerrilla warfare, we fact the usual, unavoidable, question: what do these words mean? For the last few years, we've heard the words terrorists, terrorism, and terror countless times, but it's obvious from the amount of noise and confusion in these discussions that the basic terminology isn't clear to speakers and audiences alike.

The roiling, frothing mass of emotion and politics surrounding these words doesn't make it any easier to see their real meaning. Terrorists attacks are horrifying, whether they kill a single individual or 3,000 people. Of course, these attacks are designed to generate horror, in the hopes of terrifying the enemy into submission. The natural evolution of terrorism is to find ever more inventive ways to generate the maximum amount of horror--and in the process, making it increasingly harder to have a level-headed discussion of the topic. If your friends or loved ones have died in a suicide bombing in a bus, or have been held hostage on an airliner, it's difficult to have a calm, open-minded discussion about how to combat terrorism.

Difficult, yes, but necessary. It's time for Americans to put aside their shock and horror evoked by 9/11 and start making rational judgements about what works when you're fighting al Qaeda, and what doesn't. In fact, "getting over" 9/11 is long overdue--and vital in a presidential election year.

We all know the way in which partisans of political causes use words like terrorism and fascism to arouse the passions of their audiences. We've all heard the phrase, "One person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter"--but the problem goes deeper than what this maxim implies. If the list of groups on the State Department's yearly report on global terrorism constitute the enemy, then that mosaic of accused terrorist shapes our own understanding of what terrorists look like and what they do. It isn't merely our own worldviews that put this group (say, the Basque group ETA) in the terrorist frame while leaving others (for example, the FARC in Colombia) out of the picture. The public debate over terrorism overtly and covertly shifts the way in which we think about terrorism. The face of terrorism today may be Osama bin Laden's, but only ten years ago, it was Timothy McVeigh's.

As I argued in an earlier post, terror, terrorism, and terrorists are very different things. Therefore, the war on each of them will be different not only in scope, but in kind. A battle to eliminate a small group of radical Islamists is far different from changing global attitudes about any use of violence and fear for political effect.

Terrorists also are not identifiable by their politics. Everyone from the Christian Identity movement and the Ku Klux Klan to the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Weathermen fit the definition of terrorist--and these are just the American groups. Some terrorists are the mortal enemies of a regime, such as the IRA, the Red Brigades, or the Al Aksa Martyr's Brigade. Others are the eager allies of the government or some ruling faction, such as the infamous Arena death squads in El Salvador's recent civil war.

There is also no clear dividing line between terrorists and other kinds of combatants. As I've mentioned earlier, the same group might look like a terrorist one year, and guerrillas the next. Before the National Liberation Front (NLF) in South Vietnam became famous for being consummate jungle warriors, they started their campaign against the South Vietnamese regime with a wave of assassinations. Some groups employ terrorist and guerrilla methods at the same time, and even shift some of their efforts into conventional military operations.

If you took all these observations about terrorism together, you reach at least one important conclusion: terrorism is a combination of particular theater, operational and theater strategies. And that's all it is.

It's worth chewing on that last point for a while. Terrorism is not a particular political cause. In fact, it's not even always revolutionary. Asking, "What creates terrorists?" is therefore a lot like asking, "What made Norman Schwarzkopf adopt a maneuver strategy during DESERT STORM?" Terrorists aren't the product of a bad seed, nor are they necessarily wed to this approach for all time. Terrorism, therefore, exists because people making strategic decisions conclude that it will work--much like Allied military planners in World War II decided to emphasize maneuver over attrition, or vice-versa, at different points in the assault on Fortress Europa.

Without this perspective, it's impossible to make sense of what al Qaeda wants, and why it's willing to go to horrific extremes to get it. I recommend you read their translated handbooks, speeches, manifestos, interviews, and other statements. Terrorists like bin Laden and al-Zawahiri are not ciphers. On the contrary, they want to be understood. They're usually eager to bend your ear, telling you perhaps even more than you ever cared to hear. As Konrad Kellen, a RAND specialist in counterinsurgency who interviewed members of the Baader-Meinhoff group once told me, "That's the thing about terrorists--they just won't shut up."

Al Qaeda's grand strategy, in a nutshell, is (1) eject corrupting Western influences from Muslim nations and (2) ensure that all Muslims are subject to their version of shari'a law. What this means at the theater level, al Qaeda leaders will tell you, is cementing an Islamist revolution in a pivotal Middle Eastern country. From this base of operations (one of the reasons why they chose the name al Qaeda, which means the base in Arabic) they can then move to future phases in their campaign to mobilize and transform the Muslim world. Everything else--their hatred of the United States and Israel, the interest in finding a "friendly" country like Afghanistan or the Sudan, their fascination with the World Trade Center as the nerve center of neo-imperialism--flows from this grand and theater strategy.

Terrorists and guerrillas are both looking for a way to win a war on the cheap, since their enemies--more often than not, governments--are far more numerous and better armed than they are. The different styles of "asymmetric warfare" (a nice term that embraces both terrorism and guerrilla warfare) are, therefore, what these groups believe to be a necessary choice. At the grand and theater levels of strategy, these groups have not given up; at the operational and tactical levels, they need something that works. Centuries of successful examples, from the original Assassin cult to the PLO, provide encouragement.

Terrorism, as an operational strategy, is designed to take a particular course of action: give the Palestinians a state; get the British out of Northern Ireland; give the Basques autonomy or independence. In the terrorist's worldview, however, the reaction they want isn't necessarily something as direct as, "Here's your homeland. Please stop bombing us now." In many cases, they hope to trigger a chain of events that will lead to the desired outcome. Interestingly, to get the historical dominos falling, many terrorists hope that the enemy will overreact to a terrorist event. The Baader-Meinhoff group, for example, had an elaborate theory of how their actions would inspire a harsh political crackdown. The West German public, seeing how "the state" was not their protector, but a bloodthirsty monster, would achieve that revolutionary epiphany that generations of Marxists hoped to inspire. This idea of creating revolution out of overreaction is something common to terrorists of all political stripes, including American white supremacist groups and Japan's Aum Shinrikyo "doomsday cult."

As many people have noted, terrorism is theater. It has to be dramatic, attention-grabbing, horrific in the way nothing else can be, or else it can't compel governments to take courses of action they would normally find unacceptable. Kidnappings, assassinations, sabotage, bombings, poisoning the water supply, releasing poison gas on a subway--these are all ways to script the terrorist moment. Just as hack horror directors put hapless summer camp attendees in constant risk of being chainsawed by masked maniacs, terrorists attack innocent bystanders, not soldiers or political leaders, to ensure the maximum terror and disgust in the largest possible audience. (They take great pains to explain why the murder of innocents is morally acceptable, which is one reason why terrorist tracts go on and on. If you talk long enough, you'll hit on a few halfway arguable points, like the number of civilians killed whenever the United States bombs Iraq or Libya. You'll also talk yourself into all sorts of nonsense about how people standing in line at the airport are actually the supporters of an evil regime, thereby deserving to be cut down by automatic weapons fire.)

Guerrilla warfare has a different emphasis. Guerrillas hope to erode the political base of an enemy regime until it collapses. If the government can't provide basic security, as demonstrated by repeated guerrilla attacks on army posts, power generators, elected officials, and other targets of opportunity, why wouldn't anyone conclude that its days are numbered? Guerrillas and terrorists might use some of the tactics--sabotage, kidnappings, assassinations, etc.--but the intended outcomes are significantly different. However, if one approach doesn't work, groups will switch to the other, particularly if many of the tactics don't change. If terrorism is generating a backlash that's hurting the cause, maybe it's time to try guerrilla warfare instead.

To sum up:

Terrorism is an operational and tactical approach used by many non-governmental groups trying to defeat a more powerful opponent at the theater level. Terrorist operations--bombings, kidnappings, and the like--are designed to generate enough horror to compel the enemy to take a particular course of action.

PRACTICE
Since this post is pretty long already, I'll keep the specific example fairly brief. In the last week, Muqtada al-Sadr's Army of the Madhi has been busy. After believing it had reached a truce with the Sadrists, American commanders are now fighting them across Iraq--in Najaf, Basra, Nasariyah, and Sadr City. What happened?

Muqtada al-Sadr may not be humanitarian of the year, but to be fair, he's no terrorist. Like many anti-American insurgents, he fits the guerrilla profile more than the terrorist one. Still, as someone fighting an asymmetric war, al-Sadr's decision to intensify the fight with the Americans illustrates an important point: our adversaries will take the strategic path of least resistance, or just the only one that isn't blocked for the moment. The Sadrists didn't see the truce as a first step towards the political prominence they felt they deserved. Given how thinly American forces are stretched, and how the American siege of Fallujah backfired politically, gambling on another uprising undoubtedly seemed like a good choice.

Back in our discussion of the initiative, we talked about how important it was to get the enemy to fight on your terms, not theirs. However, that means you have to set up a military or political situation that steers them in the direction you want. Muqtada al-Sadr only saw one course of action, and it wasn't the one US commanders wanted his group to take. Even if you think al-Sadr is a "thug," as some Administration officials have described him, why encourage him to think that acting like a thug is the only choice other than surrendering? Asymmetric warfare, the war of the flea, whatever you want to call it, is just a set of operational and tactical choices. Since we can't kill every Sadrist fighter, banish his faction from the country, and ensure that the Army of the Mahdi never regenerates, what choice is there but to find a way to knock the Sadrists into a different strategic orbit?

[I plan to say a lot more about revolutionary political violence and the Iraqi insurgency in a later post.]