A Grand Confusion

A Grand Confusion

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

It takes a village, unless America talks national defense. When America talks national defense, it takes a “volunteer”. America’s national defense is “negotiable”.

That was the message from the far-left media this week in response to Congressman Charles Rangel’s announcement that he would like to resubmit conscription legislation to the Congress to reinstate the military draft. When word spread through Washington, DC, that Congressman Rangel was talking about creating a conscription program to support the US Armed Forces in times of war, leftists railed against the plan before it even had a chance to be debated on the floor of the House.

It is clear that the United States is ill-equipped and ill-prepared to deal with the radical form of Islamism that our country faces. Our enemies know this too.

A soldier within radical Islam begins his day attending religious gatherings so that he can seek blessings and support from his God for fundamentalist Islam’s war against the “infidels” and the “Great Satan”. The Islamic fundamentalist terrorist cell then maintains and prepares their individual weapons and improvised explosive devices for raids and ambushes against coalition and US military targets. Once the Islamic fundamentalist cell has made preparations, the terrorists meet with insurgent commanders for specific orders about where to go kill the infidels, or orders are hand-carried by thousands of willing conscripts to the cell from remote locations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Throughout the Islamic communities that support radical fundamentalism, the centers of command and control that guide terrorist operations against US personnel and property are located in the mosque archipelago. The mosque is the focal point of recruitment for Islamic soldiers, it is the focal point of command and control and communications for insurgent forces, and it is also the source of spiritual guidance and philosophical instruction for all insurgent ranks.

This military structure is really not very much different than the one that Serbians used in Bosnia-Herzegovina when they recruited young men to fill the ranks of their notorious “red berets”. Serbian military officers recruited soldiers straight out of sports clubs. It makes perfect sense that they would do so. Sports clubs were attended by young men that were in decent physical condition and once recruited could swell the ranks of Bosnian-Serb paramilitary forces very quickly. Young men that play sports at the team level were trained through sports to take orders, be competitive, work as a team, find individual discipline in some form of sports uniform that created uniformity for the group and lastly to maximize the group’s physical fitness.

Sports teams are not very much different from infantry platoons. The major difference is that sports teams gather for fun in a “game” setting, while infantry forces gather to kill the enemy on the modern battlefield. The transition from playing a “game” to killing human beings is nothing more than the issuance of weapons and ammunition. The sports teams already have the prerequisites to be effective combat soldiers. They just need to be recruited to perform a military unit function and once recruited the last requirement is effective military leadership.

The Islamic soldier then is recruited from the mosque and the Islamic soldier finds great difficulty in refusing such recruitment. In the face of his peers, his Imam, and even the cult of personality that arises from the development of the omnipotent being of his religion, the Islamic soldier cannot refuse. Infidels have “invaded” his land under the orders of the “Zionist Regime” and the “Great Satan”. It’s a “Crusades” redux. Allah would never allow such an invasion and it is the duty of every Islamic male to step up and wage war against the enemies of “Islam”. Bosnian-Serbs recruited young Serb males from sports clubs in the same way.

As this occurs, western nation-states take a different path. Western nation-states, at war with nationalism at any level and even national pride, make military recruitment unpalatable for the vast majority of young western men. Some western leaders even get on cable television and claim that serving in the military means that the individual serving is not as smart as those that do not serve, and young men that do not attend or do poorly in college shall meet their fate on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The truth is that secular Marxist forces in the west do not want young American men, or men from any western nation-state system for that matter, thinking that defending the nation-state is a worthwhile cause. Worthwhile causes are only those things defined by secular Marxism as needing a “village” to get the job done. When it comes to western national defense, only the “volunteer” need apply and there is something deficient about the volunteer anyway. The ideological forces hostile to the spreading of the idea of America around the world want to make sure that it is clearly understood as they define it that there must be something wrong with the person who does volunteer. Why volunteer when a young man can go to college instead? According to the secular left, only deficient men serve in the militaries of western nations.

Every nation-state system applies force of government somewhere more so than in other places. In America, applications of government force are ready to bend a young man’s will to support the “it takes a village” agenda, such as demanding men, under threat of dangerous sanctions, to fully support feminist causes without question. Recruiting men for military purposes and designs is dangerous for the “it takes a village” agenda because it gives those men a sense of purpose, belonging and awakens their individual rights to posterity. That is contrary to secular leftism and its agendas.

The enemies of the United States and the west have this figured out. They know that the Vietnam War created paralyzing psychological operations over the American people, specifically when it came to recruitment for the US Armed Forces. Our enemies in fundamentalist Islam suspected in this truth that they would likely face a military force in Iraq and Afghanistan that would contain certain troop levels over time that would not change. Enemies of the United States operating in Iraq and Afghanistan also knew that if they were able to avoid confronting the US military directly and gain battlefield initiative by killing ten or so US soldiers per day that they could break the psychological construct of the American people—the will of the American people to resist.

Sending the message to our enemies that the United States will not conscript military forces as any nation-state in the history of western civilization has had the lawful right to do will only embolden the terrorists. It tells the terrorists that only “some” Americans will stand up to radical Islam, that the “it takes a village” ideology is the ultimate application of government force designed only to be applied upon Americans themselves, and that fighting a war by gathering young American men together to defend the United States is not a legitimate policy. You see, wars have become those things where it is the US government against an enemy and not the American people against the same enemy that attacks the US government. That is how the secular left defines it, as they have also defined conscription.

The American dichotomy, one part sensing a grave need to defend the country from hostile enemies abroad, and the other seeking to abandon at any level national defense in favor of the continued psychological operations construct upon Americans to separate them from all non-secular leftist influences, is the key to fundamentalist Islamic war planning. Fundamentalist Islam studied the Vietnam War. Fundamentalist Islam has also studied the cultural implications of war when brought upon the American people.

Fundamentalist Islam defeated the Soviets in Afghanistan using these same tools in combination. Fundamentalist Islamic intellectuals have figured out that by creating divisions inside the United States with willing agents in the American and international media, using special interest groups that want to contain by any means necessary the application of American military power anywhere in the world, and propagating the war as an endless and fruitless endeavor, they would win a war against the United States if our country engaged them in direct combat action.

The American psychological construct that has pervasively defined who is eligible to serve and defend the United States absent conscription, and the ongoing construct from the secular leftist American and international media that this is “Bush’s war” and not America’s war, is threatening the whole of western civilization. The secular left believes that Islamic Fundamentalism is not hostile even though terrorists have already attacked and killed thousands of Americans.

There have been no attacks inside the United States after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks upon the World Trade Center and the Pentagon because fundamentalist Islam is applying a winning war strategy against the United States that does not require attacking our country again for the time being. It is more important for the Islamic terrorist leadership cells to forbid attacks upon the US homeland because that may upset the equilibrium of support that fundamentalist Islam is receiving from the secular left. The secular left has misconstrued that into thinking that the United States is now safe from future terrorist attacks and there is no reason for the United States to continue military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That is precisely what the fundamentalist terrorists want. Should the United States deviate from that, we will be attacked domestically again in a spectacular way as we were on September 11, 2001. It is more advantageous for the terrorists to refrain from attacking us, to refrain from upsetting the psychological operations balance that they have emplaced over the American people with the help of those they found in America that reside in the “village”.

In my next series of articles I will explain what fundamentalist Islam is planning to do once voices that call for America’s retreat from the world either force a collapse of American policy against terrorism and international action or whether America decides to escalate actions against transnational terrorism and the hostile nation-states that support it.

Christopher Farmer

MS, National Security

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