Despite the widely recognized need to address the challenges of religious extremism, how to do so remains a puzzle for most policymakers. Respectful engagement with other cultures and countries only takes one part of the way, since that has more to do with good manners than with religious faith. America's past inability to understand and deal with religious imperatives has led to uninformed foreign policy decisions in such places as Iran, Lebanon, and, most recently, Iraq. To avoid similar mistakes in the future, we will need to expand our definition of realpolitik to include religion and other cultural factors, if we are to see the world complete and whole. We also need to make a concerted effort to understand how religion informs the world views and political aspirations of those who do not similarly separate church and state. To reduce this ambitious undertaking to manageable proportions, we will confine our examination in this volume to dealing with the challenge of extremism in the name of Islam.
Dealing With Cause
American foreign policy must develop a capacity for spiritual engagement on various levels. This will require moving beyond the rational actor model of decision making that has long dominated our practice of international relations—a model which assumes that states will behave according to the rational pursuit of their national self-interests, foremost among which is maximizing power.[ii] Absent, however, is any room to accommodate the impact of religious imperatives or other supposed irrational factors, hence the need to move beyond. Developing a new, more-encompassing framework for analysis is needed to engage effectively the challenges posed by religious extremism.
Beyond the Rational Actor
Col. John Boyd is not a widely known thinker outside the military. He didn't write books. His ideas were practical, scientific, and against the grain of Air Force doctrine. His most important legacy was his impact on the concept of maneuver warfare[iii] (as opposed to attrition warfare), and it can be found in hundreds of meticulously prepared briefings he gave during 20 years of intellectual insurgency against his own military's bureaucracy. He was also a profane, blunt-speaking truth teller.[iv] Orphaned by the U.S. Air Force for bucking the dominant mindset of "faster, higher, farther," this brilliant fighter pilot of the 1960s became an adopted son of the U.S. Marine Corps. Not well known outside the Marine Corps today, he had a simple view of war shaped by his reading of a 2,000-year-old strategist, Sun Tzu. Boyd's views were, and still are, at odds with the American love affair with technology.
His mantra for the military's technology idol worshippers: "Machines don't fight wars, terrain doesn't fight wars. Humans fight wars. You must get into the minds of humans. That's where the battles are won."[v] As Boyd dove deeper into the study of ground war, he came to understand war as something that every person experiences in some form. Conflict is embedded in human nature. To prevail, whether in war, business, or personal relations, one must understand what one's adversary believes. To empathize also means to see yourself through your adversary's eyes.
The ability to get inside the mind of the enemy fascinated Boyd. This led him to study conflicts and battles in which numerically inferior forces defeated much larger ones, summed up in his four-hour briefing, "Patterns of Conflict." He saw brute force, head-on collision warfare (a.k.a. "high diddle diddle, go up the middle") as being less and less the paradigm for the future. Speed, ambiguity, deception, getting inside the head of the adversary, and, most important, doing what is least expected will be the hallmarks of success for future commanders. And the very best will be those who, in the tradition of Sun Tzu, unravel the enemy before the battle.[vi]
This is what Marine Lt. Col. Stanton Coerr, writing in the January 2009 edition of the Marine Corps Gazette, thinks Osama bin Laden accomplished. "It's as if bin Laden had read Boyd and foreseen the American overreaction to 9/11" Boyd explains:
Pull the adversary apart by causing him to generate or project mental images that agree neither with the tempo nor transient maneuver patterns he must compete against. Enmesh the adversary in a world of uncertainty, doubt, mistrust, confusion, disorder, fear, panic and chaos.[vii]
"America reacted precisely as Bin Laden knew we would," Coerr reflects, "with a huge public, angry, unilateral, military lashing out in Muslim lands. In doing so, we allowed bin Laden to become the voice for the Muslim world...authentic in the face of First World mechanized overkill."[viii] As of this writing, America has lost close to 6,000 lives and one trillion dollars in reaction to an attack that cost the lives of 19 hijackers and well under a million dollars.[ix] While America focuses on winning battles, our opponent will be focused on winning wars by striking where we are weakest, remaining in the shadows, promoting instability, and draining our treasury. As bin Laden himself said:
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