Al Qaeda 2.0 Conference - Part One

I attended the New America Foundation's Al Qaeda 2.0 conference on Thursday (you can see replays on C-Span).

Several comments:

• I went into the Senate Office buildings with no pass or explanation. I'm sure that it was because of the conference, but it was definately empowering to be able to wander the halls of power so freely (I got lost on my way to the conference room).
  
• The current foreign policy debate du jour - should we or should we not be promoting democracy with every breath? - was on full display. I think the most poignant examples came during an exchange between Salameh Nematt, a journalist with London's al-Hayat newspaper and Michael Scheuer, author of Imperial Hubris.
  
  Nematt, who said that he had been imprisoned in Jordan and persecuted elsewhere for his writings, was adament about the immediacy of the need for democracy. Scheuer adopted an approach that more closely resembled realism than Nematt's idealism.
  
  Now Nematt seemed like a secularist - a very serious secularist. The basis for his adamant advocation of democratization seems to stem from this value. It explains his outspokenness, imprisonment, etc. And that's a great thing. He is an example of the spirit of reform that the Middle East (and many, many other parts of the world) requires. He argues that the artificial stability created by totalitarianism - be it the monarchical kind in Saudi Arabia or the...militaristic, I guess, programming found in Egypt - is a false illusion that will be broken by fanaticism if we don't do something about it, and now. This man has seen the sufferings of his brothers and sisters, and they have affected him deeply. That alone should be cause for lending an ear - and cause for concern.
  
  Scheuer, on the other hand, was more concerned about what would happen if democracy was suddenly imposed as a directive from above from the U.S. Wouldn't that associate U.S. and democracy negatively in the citizens' minds? And how much chance would the true liberal democratics have to win the election - what with anti-American furor at an all-time high? Instead, we could end up with more Irans, and the 25 years of violence that regime has wrought.
  
  Which brings me to my next comment. More discussion of democracy later.
  
• Reuel Gerecht, formerly of the CIA and currently an editor at the Weekly Standard, used the oft-repeated retort the neo-con uses against the realist when discussing democratization:by saying that you can't just expect democracy to develop overnight in the Middle East, you are discriminating against Arabs. Essentially, the argument goes, you're saying that the Arab mind can't handle anything so complex as democracy.
  
  And then, in practically the same breath, Gerecht turned around and said that "all Arabs understand is force." Funny how many faces discrimination can assume. Hilarious.
  
• Daniel Benjamin noted that our problem in Vietnam was that we were fighting both an insurgency and a full-blown army. He says that the same situation is developing in Iraq. Besides asking who the army is, what does that do for our strategy? Seems that we're having a hard enough time fighting an insurgency, let alone a regiment.
  
  I think what he's getting at is organization. Almost every society has dissidents, and some of them turn to violence. But it's when they organize, and coalesce in great numbers, that their movement shifts into a more familiar form. Accordingly, when someone like Zarqawi arises, that becomes a focal point for the movement. It becomes like a comet: a small core followed by a trail of followers hundreds of miles long.
  
  Unless I'm mistaken, this is the opposite of what happened in Vietnam. In Southeast Asia, we were fighting an army which adopted guerrilla tactics when frontal assault failed. This fed back into the guerrilla movement, and the synergy between the two organizations reinforced each other. While the situation may configure itself similarly, I believe that the path it will have taken to arrive at this stage is already shaping up to be different than Vietnam - but I'm not sure what effect that will have.
  
• One more point for now, and then bed. More on this conference later, when I'm a bit more lucid, but I wanted to have something to say about it before all the ideas jumped out of my scalp and raced down my hair toward freedom.
  Anyway, Paul Eedle of Out There News talked about the branding strategy of terrorism. His point was incredibly interesting -
  

  
  For the whole of 2003, Zarqawi was known to the public only in leaks from American and Jordanian intelligence. Then in little more than a month, in April and May 2004, he rocketed to worldwide fame, or infamy, by a deliberate combination of extreme violence and Internet publicity.
  
  In early April, Zarqawi published a half-hour audio recording which explained exactly who he was, what he had done, and why he was fighting. It was a comprehensive branding statement, and it showed incidentally that he views the world rather differently than Osama bin Laden.
  
  ....
  
  The Internet gave Zarqawi the means to build a brand very quickly. Suddenly the mystery man had a voice, if not a face, and a clear ideology which explained his violence.
  
  But what is the point of an insurgent group building a brand, establishing a public profile in this way? The answer is to magnify the impact of its violence. The bombings of the UN and Najaf, and of the Red Cross headquarters and many Iraqi police stations in 2003, did send messages of course – but they were open to different interpretations, and Zarqawi needed to kill a lot of people to get noticed.
  
  ....
  
  By using the Internet, Zarqawi was able to control the interpretation of his message and achieve his impact with smaller operations
  Zarqawi’s brand building on the Internet happened so quickly, after a year without any media strategy, that it would be fascinating to know what triggered it. Maybe one of you here knows. I suspect one individual is all it would have taken – perhaps a jihadi arriving from Saudi Arabia, which has been the base for most of the original al Qaeda Internet effort.
  

  
  There are several notions inherent in this:
  
  First, the underpinning ideology of Islamic extremism remains fluid, not static. It can be adapted to a variety of situations, from global to regional to national. So who's to say it can't be diluted?
  Second, he underscores the power of a face in delivering the message of this ideology. He's not advocating the "cut off the head of the snake" strategy so much as he's commenting on how the international media needs a central point in order to make it interesting. Otherwise, there will be no all-encompassing dynamic ubiqutous across the networks. In that situation, it's chaos. With a face and a message behind it - no matter if anyone listens to the message - people are more apt to pay attention to the deed, and have an idea of what side they should fall on. Note that this applies to Iraqis just as much as it does to Americans.
  Third, it shows that the face can change - indeed, the natural forces of international journalism crave the change. That's what creates news - There's a new bogeyman out there! - when the public is numb to devastation and violence.
  Finally, it shows that Al Qaeda (as a network or proponents of an ideology, not a "group" filled with static members who meet after bingo) gets this. And that means they can continue to 'control the narrative' as long as the pool of semi-charismatic individuals ready to act in the name of violence remains deep.
  

OK, enough for one night. More soon.