Attackerman Guestblogging

Dear all,

I'll be guestblogging this week, along with a cast of other smarter people, over at Spencer Ackerman's Attackerman blog this week. 

My first post is on whether or not the new literature of counterinsurgency is becoming too practicioner-focused, and asks more questions than it answers. I think you'll like it. 

The Great Bird of the Galaxy

Over at Attackerman, Spencer's lamenting the failure of X-Men 3 to properly take advantage of the Dark Phoenix Saga source material:

If comic books are megalomaniacal escapism, we should all want to be Jean Grey. Wolverine is better at slicing people to pieces. Jean destroys entire star systems; destabilizes intergalactic empires; compels acoyltes of mystical tyrants to clone her; makes men leave their wives for her (especially when they marry her clones); dies and comes back to life endlessly; jumps out of Jamaica Bay with her hair totally dry. All hypothetical battle plans for defeating the X-Men require gaming out how to neutralize Jean. 

Men: you should want to be Jean Grey. And as I was just saying to Dave Weigel, what a crying shame that X-Men 3 booted a chance to tell the Phoenix/Dark Phoenix saga.

I think part of the problem here is that the whole Phoenix/Dark Phoenix Saga falls apart when subjected to the sort of near-future realism that all superhero movies seem to have adopted nowadays. After all, when the synopsis of the plot (SPOILER WARNING) essentially is: "ONE DAY IN SPACE, bad things happen and the X-Men need to fly back to Earth quickly. Jean Grey out of nowhere learns how to pilot a space shuttle, and so volunteers to fly everyone else home and get zapped with cosmic rays, which contrary to previous Fantastic Four continuity realistically and quickly just straight up KILL her. 

Then she becomes a SPACE BIRD.

Said Space Bird is in fact a primeval force of nature to these aliens with perpendicular mohawks - by the way, Cyclops' dad shows up FROM THE DEAD, but this is passed over in about ten seconds - and they need the Space Bird to fix the M'Guffin Krystal. They fix it and all is well, and return to earth, where things are boring for a while. Then Jean goes to the Yale Club of New York and gets mesmerized by Jack Sparrow, Wolverine jumps out of the sewer and into the plot of Die Hard, and Jean turns evil again.

Then the Space Bird EATS A SUN. Then Jean gets better, and buys a mask and a go-go skirt. Time passes. The perpendicular mohawk aliens flip out and put Jean on trial. Luckily, Charles Xavier, space lawyer, finds a way to turn it into a trial by combat, in which the fate of the universe will be decided by an unauthorized X-Men vs. JLA crossover event. Distraught by the thought of the JLA winning, Jean Grey suicides instead of becoming the Evil Space Bird again. THE END."

(And then it gets worse.) I mean, the story swerves back and forth over the realism line like ten times a second; it's an amazing story, but it doesn't fit into a world of black leather biker jackets. It's much more high science fiction than anything else, and it would completely break the budget. Unlike Watchmen, it doesn't even pretend at realism. It is beautiful escapism, but importantly, that's not what superhero movies are about nowadays. As a response to 9/11, superhero movies changed tone dramatically. Instead of elevating us, they drag our modern mythology down to street level. This, by the way, is part of why only Batman and Spiderman movies really work at all, and why the low-science-fiction installments (The Dark Knight and Spiderman 1 and 2) are far more popular than the heavy-SF installments (Batman Begins and Spiderman 3).

Random discovery of the day

Mac OS X's built-in dictionary function knows the words "shtick" and "mensch."

Canon Fire

If you are a pomocon who wasn't in love with Spencer Ackerman already (somehow), this post will change your mind. Al Qaeda, Foucault, and you, all in one post.

"I Will Never Lie to You," said bin Laden

Spencer Ackerman, whose work I love and cite, makes in passing a frequent argument that I've always found slightly problematic:

al-Qaeda has never believed it could actually defeat the United States at so much as a ping-pong match. What it looks to do instead is lure the United States into strategically untenable situations in which the U.S. arouses widespread Muslim anger and experiences too much military pain at too high an economic price to justify a continued presence on the Arabian peninsula. We know this because, like, Osama bin Laden says it. It’s worked to some degree — a couple of years ago this country, like a less-self-aware Nicholas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, went out of its mind and invaded and occupied Iraq — but nowhere near sufficiently, as the United State will undoubtedly retain an on-shore presence in the Peninsula, and much of the Arab world won’t really care so much. Could the economic crisis be an opportunity for al-Qaeda?

Well, yes, bin Laden says it. I don't know about you, but if I were a terrorist, I'd make a business out of saying anything that psyched out my opponent as much as possible. In other words, I think bin Laden wanted to humiliate the US with a short, victorious war, and only adopted the rhetoric of long-run quagmire afterwards. Since the two are somewhat similar, and the US presence has turned out to be long-lasting, it's easy to assume he always intended the latter rather than the former. 

Now, the following is slightly risky to write about, since I could embarrass myself. So perceive the following as a request for evidence regarding bin Laden's strategy, where I'm willing very much to be proven wrong.

The quote Spencer links comes from a 2004 bin Laden tape. As far as I'm aware*, there is no pre-9/11 quotes where bin Laden says that he wanted to draw the US into a long-term, Russia-style quagmire (look, e.g., at this official, unclassified compilation of quotes by bin Laden, where the only references to quagmire come in 2002, and 2004, i.e. months after US invasions). He does refer to the US as a paper tiger, however.

He does say that he expects that the US won't last long in any post-attack invasion, just as it did not last long in Somalia, just as it didn't do anything major after the Embassy bombings. But the strategic goal there is essentially defensive - to outlast - rather than offensive - to wear down American forces and win in the field. America is metaphorically and theologically similar to Russia, but he seemed to think we wouldn't last as long in the field.

This rhetorical shift isn't without precedent; bin Laden only begins mentioning Israel-Palestine relatively late in al Qaeda's evolution for example.

Admittedly, the data are thin, but they seem to shade my way.  First, it's too damned convenient for bin Laden, and lacks any sort of easy rebuttal. Second, the timing of his statements seems to fit that; he wanted to bloody the US, but in a relatively short time frame. Third, the September 10th, 2001 assassination of Massoud, a major Northern warlord, by AQ operatives seems to be a shaping operation for defensive purposes. Killing the local enemy with whom the US might ally, who might stick around after the Americans leave, seems to fit this narrative. 

Could he have been willing to accept the possibility of a prolonged, Russia-style war? Sure. But I don't think that's what his main bet was on. 

*Please correct me if I'm wrong; I've looked through compilations of bin Laden quotes in the past for this, but the number of expansive and/or dubious quotation compilations produced in recent years makes it hard to be certain about this. If I am wrong, I'd be glad to admit it.