In an earlier column I referenced Thomas Friedman’s interview with President Obama, published in the August 9 New York Times. The interview is worth revisiting, because it yields important clues to the origins of our failures and distress.
Before I criticize the president, let me make two points. First, in the interview President Obama demonstrates a far more realistic view of the world than that of his childish predecessor, George W. Bush. Second, the errors in President Obama’s world view are shared by virtually the whole Washington Establishment. The most prominent and damaging disconnect from reality, hubris, is worse among Republicans, where howlers for endless war everywhere such as Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham are still taken seriously by some.
That said, the magnitude of the Establishment’s hubris shines through President Obama’s statements. Nowhere is it more clear than in his statements about Libya, where our intervention against Qaddafi destroyed the Libyan state and created another petri dish for Fourth Generation forces–exactly as I predicted at the time. Friedman quotes Obama saying,
I’ll give you an example of a lesson I had to learn that still has ramifications|to this day. And that is our participation in the coalition that overthrew Qaddafi in Libya. I absolutely believe that was the right thing to do (emphasis added) …when everybody is feeling good and holding up posters saying, “Thank you, America.” At that moment there has to be a much more aggressive effort to rebuild societies that didn’t have any civic traditions.
Friedman summarizes what was presumably more discussion of Libya by writing,
Intervening in Libya to prevent a massacre was the right thing to do, Obama argued, but doing it without sufficient follow-up on the ground to manage Libya’s transition to more democratic politics is probably his biggest foreign policy regret.
What on earth leads the Establishment to think America can go into a country with a radically different and largely dysfunctional culture, about which it knows virtually nothing, and “manage its transition to more democratic politics,” much less “rebuild societies that didn’t have any civic traditions?” Who do the Establishment think they are? Merlin? The Archangel Michael? The degree of hubris is astonishing. The United States, or any foreign power, has no more ability to do those things than we do of commanding the tide to recede.
More, what President Obama proclaims is a “lesson he had to learn” shows that the Establishment cannot learn. The obvious lesson from Libya is that if you overthrow a tyranny, what you get in most of the world is anarchy. But he does not draw that lesson, concluding instead that we must somehow do more to turn these flea-bitten fly-blown third-world hellholes into Switzerland. Here we see the rigid limits the Establishment has set to learning from experience. The lesson cannot be that its ideology of “democratic capitalism” is at odds with reality, despite its repeated failures. Anyone who dares draw that lesson immediately ceases to be a member of the Establishment. Instead, the ideology must be preached all the more stridently, and dissenters banished ever-farther from the seat of power.
The sin of hubris runs through much of the remainder of the interview. Speaking of the Sunnis in the Middle East, President Obama says, “Unless we can give them a formula that speaks to the aspirations of that population . . .” Who are we to think we can give the locals “formulas” to solve problems that go back more than a millenium? Of the Iraqis, he says, “We can help them and partner with them every step of the way . . .” After a decade of showing we don’t know down from up in Iraqi society, how are we supposed to “help them and partner with them” instead of just making everything worse, as we have already done in spades? Again and again, we see the same point proven: the Establishment cannot learn.
Two other sources of our distress shine through the president’s remarks, both, like hubris, common throughout the Establishment. Discussing ISIS, he told Friedman,
the question for us has to be not simply how we counteract them militarily but how we are going to speak to a Sunni majority in that area … that, right now, is detached from the global economy.
Besides the fact that the Pentagon hasn’t a clue how to deal with ISIS militarily, because all it knows how to do is drop bombs, the assumption shining through here is that the Sunni-Shiite civil war could be settled if only its participants were involved in the “global economy.” The Establishment cannot grasp that religion, race, and nationalism are far more powerful motivators than is economics. Globalism, with its hollowing out of the state, is in fact paving the way for more primal war, fought for age-old reasons by entities that are not states.
And in his discussion of the dangers of political maximalism, concerning which he is both prudent and correct: the president said, “And the more diverse the country is, the less it can afford to take maximalist positions.” That is true. The more diverse the country, the more difficult and dangerous its politics, the more likely it is to splinter in civil war. Yet President Obama, like all the Establishment, is a fervent believer in more “diversity” — which in the coded language of cultural Marxism means diversity of everything except thought. The President wants more immigration, more emphasis on cultural divisions already present within this country, more rubbing raw every difference of race, sex, and class. Why cannot he, and the rest of the Establishment, perceive that “diversity” is likely to be the undoing of America, that we need, if the country is to survive, what it used to have, one common people and culture?
The answer: again, is the willful blindness demanded by ideology. Of all the poisons unleashed by the French Revolution, ideology remains the most deadly. 
The rise of ISIS and similar Fourth Generation entities poses a conundrum. On the one hand, it is in our interest to uphold the state system, which puts us at odds with non-state forces. On the other hand, direct intervention with U.S. military forces has repeatedly failed. It has often worked to the advantage of the Fourth Generation forces that are our greatest threat, as we saw in Iraq, where there would be no ISIS today if we had not overthrown Saddam.
What we need is a way to act effectively against ISIS and similar entities. We must accept at the outset that America’s favorite military tool, air strikes, will work only in a few situations, and then mostly just at the tactical level. It is important we not be misled by the local success we have attained against ISIS by supporting the Kurdish Peshmerga with air strikes. They only worked because we had an effective force on the ground to support, the terrain was open, and ISIS was sloppy about camouflage, deception and embedding its forces in civilian populations. Similar air strikes are not likely to prove effective in support of the Iraqi army because that army is not competent and ISIS will quickly learn how to protect itself from air attack.
We must also accept the rule that the more obvious the American role is, the less likely we are to succeed at the strategic level. The problem, which I have discussed in previous columns, is that we become Goliath while clever 4GW opponents know how to play David. This is van Creve1d’s “power of weakness,” and it is often decisive in 4GW. Anything we do must have a light footprint. So what might work? The key is to realize that ISIS and many other 4GW entities are loose coalitions of elements that are often in tension with each other. If you press them from outside, you push them together, which makes the entity stronger. What can defeat ISIS and other such non-state opponents is pulling them apart from within by leveraging their internal divisions.
How might this be done? The starting point is intelligence and analysis that enables us to identify the elements of the coalition and the tensions among them. Our intelligence agencies alone are not likely to be able to do this. We will need to turn to other sources of expertise, including academics who specialize in the region, local allies who may personally know some of those on the other side and the intelligence services of international allies, who may know more about a particular place than we do. The Russian intelligence services could be especially useful here; regrettably, our short-sighted policy of hostility toward Russia makes their cooperation unlikely.
Once we have developed an image of the mosaic we face, we must reach inside it with a mixture of promises and threats–mostly promises, many of them involving money–and seek to exacerbate its existing feuds. Entities such as ISIS that, publicly at least, are led by religious fanatics will be especially vulnerable to leveraging of internal differences because many elements of their coalition will loathe the fanatics and the tyranny they impose.
How might we reach inside our opponent? At one time, the CIA was rather good at that. But I fear it is no longer. Over time, it has re-focused on photo intelligence and direct action so much–another Second Generation attempt to reduce war to identifying and putting firepower on targets–that it may not be able to do much else. Our special operations forces are not likely to be better, again because of a recent over-focus on direct action. Both local and international allies may be our best bet. With ISIS, others in the Arab world are likely to have contact with the Baathist elements in ISIS’s coalition, which I think have been decisive in its military success. If the Baathists could be split from the Islamic puritans, ISIS would crumble. That would mean, of course, that the Baath would have to be assured a post-ISIS future, either in a united Iraq (unlikely) or in an independent entity, the equivalent of Kurdistan, for Iraq’s Sunnis.
All of ISIS is not in Iraq; much is in Syria. There the answer to ISIS is much simpler: support the Assad government. It has been doing quite well with Iranian and Russian support, but we could no doubt help. The obstacle, as is so often the case, is the imbecility of the Washington foreign policy establishment. Bleating endlessly about “democracy”–which has worked so well in the Middle East–they will claim they cannot support a “dictator and war criminal“ such as Assad. They are ISIS’s best friend and most effective ally.
The conundrum of having to choose between doing nothing or doing what does not work when faced with 4GW opponents is solvable. It requires capabilities we used to have and allowed to atrophy, but they can be revived, and in the meantime allies can help. Regrettably, nothing can inject the necessary dose of realism into our foreign policy establishment, without which we will continue to avoid what might work while pursuing what is impossible. So long as that establishment endures, 4GW will strengthen and spread.
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