#2 :
suicide bombing is XXIst century “innovation” ?? even wikipedia knows more than that :
Historical doubt surrounds the actions of legendary 14th century Swiss hero Arnold von Winkelried, which was in any case an act in the heat of battle. Some have cited Samson’s destruction of a Philistine temple (as recounted in the Book of Judges) as an ancient example of mass murder-suicide.[60]
An example is from the time of the Crusades, when the Knights Templar destroyed one of their own ships, killing 140 Christians in order to kill ten times as many Muslims.[citation needed]
In the late 17th century, Qing official Yu Yonghe recorded that injured Dutch soldiers fighting against Koxinga’s forces for control of Taiwan in 1661 would use gunpowder to blow up both themselves and their opponents rather than be taken prisoner
(…)
.”Modern suicide bombing as a political tool can be traced back to the assassination of Czar Alexander II of Russia in 1881. Alexander fell victim to a Nihilist plot. While driving on one of the central streets of Saint Petersburg, near the Winter Palace, he was mortally wounded by the explosion of hand-made grenades and died a few hours afterwards. The Tzar was killed by the Pole Ignacy Hryniewiecki, who died while intentionally exploding the bomb during the attack.”
etc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_attack

Posted by: Anonymous | Feb 27 2009 21:16 utc | 4

that john robb and pat land are both just a pair of wankers. i cannot stand to read their drivel.

Posted by: those assklowns are wankers | Feb 27 2009 21:33 utc | 6

the Romans also provided baths and lots of lots of water

Posted by: whimsy mugwump | Feb 27 2009 23:55 utc | 8

Re: suicide bombers. I didnt mean there hadn’t been any before, just that they hadn’t been used against us in an occupation role. That’s the new dimension that baffles the 4GWers — all these locals who for some reason don’t like us and aren’t intimidated by our massive fire-power and technical sophistication.
Emanuel Todd points out that the glue of empires is not just military force and the “security” it provides, but also the superior legal and cultural institutions of the center. Todd notes that America, as the modern exemplar of democratic ideals, used to have a lot of credit in the world, but has since squandered it by patently not living up to its own ideals.

Posted by: seneca | Feb 28 2009 2:05 utc | 10

Re. suicide killers — Who needs Wikipedia? For what it’s worth, a dictionary will do. From dictionary.com:
as·sas·sin (ə-sās’ĭn) Pronunciation Key
n.
1. One who murders by surprise attack, especially one who carries out a plot to kill a prominent person.
2. Assassin A member of a secret order of Muslims who terrorized and killed Christian Crusaders and others.
[French, from Medieval Latin assassīnus, from Arabic ḥaššāšīn, pl. of ḥaššāš, hashish user, from ḥašīš, hashish; see hashish.]
Word History: Active in Persia and Syria from the 8th to 14th centuries, the original Assassins were members of the Nizaris, a Muslim group who opposed the Abbasid caliphate with threats of sudden assassination by their secret agents. Other populations of the area regarded the Nizaris as unorthodox outcasts, and from this attitude came one of the names for the group, ḥaššāšīn, a word originally meaning “hashish users,” which had become a general term of abuse. Reliable sources offer no evidence of hashish use by Nizari agents, but sensationalistic stories of murderous, drug-crazed ḥaššāšīn or Assassins were widely repeated in Europe. Marco Polo tells a tale of how young Assassins were given a potion and made to yearn for paradise—their reward for dying in action—by being given a life of pleasure. As the legends spread, the word ḥaššāšīn passed through French or Italian and appeared in English as assassin in the 16th century, already with meanings like “treacherous killer.”

Posted by: oboblomov | Feb 28 2009 2:52 utc | 12

Sorry seneca, for the gratuitous dictionary quote.
I would take issue with Todd in one regard: We Americans have been expansionist killers from day one. One of my ancestors I’m sorry to say participated in the so called King Philip’s War, and similar ethnic cleansings and wars have followed that one every 10-30 years ever since. Nothing to be proud of.
I suspect that what good credit and respect the US has earned in the world derives from it’s power and the appearance that that power is being exercised more or less wisely. Guess we can forget about “wisely” now.
Peace, obob

Posted by: oboblomov | Feb 28 2009 3:43 utc | 14

where’s jeremiah?
crunch crunch crunch, b ate him for lunch.
whiskey!

Posted by: annie | Feb 28 2009 4:25 utc | 16

The trend towards the use of a term like “4GW” springs from the same font that gave us the word “terrorists”.
Honestly, i can remember — vaguely — a time when “terrorist” was simply a word that described a form of warfare that might be and has been used at any time, by any opponent, for any of a multitude of reasons.
The Reagan era is when all that started to change, and it wasn’t until the mid-nineties — some 15 years or so after Reagan’s “ascension” — that the usage finally stuck. It turned the word from “one tactic out of many possible ones”, into “someone who uses a form of war that we think is inhumane.”
Now, that’s really the sticking point, here: when the fuck has the United States * ever * practiced a “humane” form of warfare? Or even aspired to it?
The Indian wars were noted for the vast disparity of firepower between the native Americans and the U.S. military forces. The Revolutionary War was noteworthy, in European history, for being a full-bore rejection of the “Rules of War” that had been developed on the European continent — rules that were specifically put in place to protect civilian populations (or at least, the wealthy ones) from military players. The War of 1812 was used as the justification for one of the largest acts of ethnic cleansing, ever (the Trail of Tears). There’s the Civil War; the Spanish-Ameican War, and particularly the Conquest of the Philippines; skipping past the WW’s (where carpet-bombing was adapted from the “total warfare” model first adopted by the U.S. and Great Britain), we get to the atrocities perpetrated in Korea, and Vietnam. And of course, the cycle is continuing today.
The usage of the word “terrorist” in the media today is so blandly overbroad and meaningless that, effectively, it means “our enemies”, in the sense of “our enemies, who aren’t as human as we are and so must be exterminated, along with anyone who supports such demonic horrors.” The more articulate of commentators are able to refine that, but not by much: “Our enemies, who fight with no regard for Human values.”
So now we’re on to “4GW” and COIN. As was published in The Nation a while back, COIN is suspiciously close to “Colonialism from the barrel of a Gun”. I’d suggest that “4GW” is really nothing more than a re-branding of what was once called “The Cold War.”
The Cold War involved proxy wars fought in foreign lands between technological and economic powerhouses, each one backing local warrior-cliques with weaponry and materiel that the native culture in question could not, itself, sustain.
4GW is simply a re-packaging of that idea: war by proxy, but this time with cybernetic weapons systems forming a major part of the “boots on the ground.” Specialist units trained to be dropped in to foreign countries, where they will establish solid satellite and information links with the “home-base” from which they can command and control local forces, while supplementing those forces with technology and materiel that the local culture couldn’t possibly support on its own.
And who will they be fighting?
Well, if the Afghanis are going to continue fighting the U.S, then they’ll need to get their weapons from somewhere.
That “somewhere” would be China or Russia.
Extrapolation from there is simple: If China’s supplying Iran and Afghanistan with weaponry, then they’re our enemy. We should be at war with them, but they have nukes and form a major part of our economic bedrock, so we can’t simply declare war and invade. So instead, we fight a secret proxy-war — this time with satellites, robots, adaptive armor, and bio-tech — and try to drive them out of those lands we designate as “ours”.
So really, 4GW is just the Silicon Valley (or Austin, Texas) version of “21st C. Cold War”.
Sad as it is, we probably will not be parting with it any time soon. It was just this sort of moron who fucked up the post-WWII prosperity with such fetes as Vietnam, the Nicaraguan Contras, and Ann Coulter, and they have always made it quite clear that they’re content to drag us all down into whatever hole we provide them.
The only way out is for the good people to go on their own witch-hunt — which is an oxymoron, of course, so i guess we’re all doomed.

Posted by: china_hand2 | Feb 28 2009 4:52 utc | 18

I suspect that what good credit and respect the US has earned in the world derives from it’s power and the appearance that that power is being exercised more or less wisely. Guess we can forget about “wisely” now.
– oboblomov
I think america’s good credit and respect came from the fact america had been created by people from all nations on earth, kind of a strange ethnic zoo, with citizens from all nations on display. Most people are smart enough not to shit where they live. Kind of why 9/11 took everyone by surprise I think.
The only thing new in warfare is weapons systems; the outcome still depends on who controls the battlefield.

Posted by: David | Feb 28 2009 13:55 utc | 20

i was just following uncle’s wikilinks on the billmon thread. some very interesting info re coin.
from the analysis by David Price, a member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists.

The report’s residual image is of a pelagic military only beginning to become aware of the depths of their own ignorance of the complex environment they are attempting to occupy and dominate. Even at this early stage the Army had reasons to know it was in over its head.
…
Obviously, the limited scope of this 2004 Center for Army Lessons Learned report precludes addressing fundamental issues raised by the Bush administration’s reliance on false pretenses to illegally invade Iraq. Such issues are not among those included with the designated “Lessons Learned”-because at this level, the army follows rather than sets policy. But the same cannot be said for the free-agent anthropologists and other social scientists who are not part of the military and are now working as contractors on Human Terrain Teams “leveraging” culture in service of the military occupation of Iraq. These individuals willfully choose to ignore the ethical alarms being sounded by their peers as they voluntarily surrender their disciplinary skills to better “leverage” cultural “assets” for whatever ends the military dictates.
Given the problems identified in this 2004 report, it makes sense that the army would strive for a more culturally nuanced occupation; after all, it is the nature of occupying armies to seek to subjugate and occupy nations (legally, or illegally) with as little trouble as can be arranged. But anthropology’s abetment of this cause slides it askew from any central ethical principles of the field, and it reveals something of the lesser demons of the field’s nature. Granted, anthropology’s past has plenty of shameful instances of anthropologists applying their skills to leverage occupied peoples in colonial and neocolonial settings, but the common contemporary understanding that such manipulative leverages are part of a shameful past does not influence those seeking their fortune outside the ethical standards of their discipline’s mainstream.
I do like the notion of a “Center for Army Lessons Learned,” but the existence of such a center controlled by the army dooms any prospect that the learned lessons might ever be anything beyond minor tactical or technological adjustments. There is no hope of learning more important lessons about not becoming mired in imperial quagmires or unjust wars. I suppose if one were to conjure a Center for Anthropological Lessons Learned, its central findings might include admonitions to not betray or “leverage” the people one studies and lives amongst.
Although those who directing the war appear to have discovered ways to use anthropology to more efficiently achieve their goals, they don’t care that anthropology becomes what it is used for. As a member of my anthropological moiety, Kurt Vonnegut, once noted, “Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don’t you wish you could have something named after you?”

Posted by: annie | Feb 28 2009 18:06 utc | 22

“COIN” is a misnomer when applied to foreign military forces. The US military was the insurgent force in both Iraq and Afghanistan. That is, a force which overthrew the existing legitimate governments. The Iraqis and Afghans who fought the subsequent US military occupying forces were the true counter-insurgents.
from the DOD Dictionary: insurgency — An organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through use of subversion and armed conflict.
Now one might say that this is only semantics, but in that case one would not understand that fighting foreign insurgents is a universal human condition.
Let’s suppose that the Chinese Army invaded the US in the last decade, overthrew the hated George W. Bush and established a brutal military occupation. Wouldn’t there be an armed resistance to the Chinese occupiers? Of course there would. Bush would be nothing compared to the Chinese. Some people would simply hide under their beds, but many would take up arms against the foreigners. Would these patriots be called insurgents, and the Chinese counter-insurgents? Of course not. That’s silly, just like this whole COIN/Petraeus stuff is silly on the face of it — because the definitions are wrong and they don’t reflect the human condition.

Posted by: Don Bacon | Mar 1 2009 20:25 utc | 24

Concord Hymn (one stanza):
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
A new method of warfare? As b pointed out, even those actions of the embattled farmers over two hudred years ago were surely not a new phenomenon. There were many shots heard before that, often against foreign military occupations designed to promote and protect empires, and there will be many more.
And some will call the empire’s reaction “COIN” — goody for them. I say throw that particular coin in the fountain of ignorance.

Posted by: Don Bacon | Mar 1 2009 21:10 utc | 26

How did John Robb get into the discussion? Seems to me Bill Lind is the central figure defining theoretical 4th generation warfare, generally as an evolution away from wars between nation states, and then wars designed to hollow out nation states. I think theoretically that there is some substance to to this, in that post WWII large nation states have been unable to engage directly (because of MAD) and so have instead moved into either proxy or wars of occupation. Historically, there is good reason to see this as a genuine “evolution” away from one paradigm and into another. Not that there is necessarily anything new, but rather that there has been a shift in the possibilities. The whole COIN industry (of which Robb is an actor) is an attempt to flesh out the details as a matter of adapting to the new paradigm, as a shift in emphasis and possibilities.

Posted by: anna missed | Mar 1 2009 22:59 utc | 28