Nothing fancy here. I've been working on one of those projects that puts food on the table, so posting has been sparse. But the media's quandary over how to interpret the recent battle in Samarra got me wound up. The talking heads on CNN have been pondering and chin stroking all day over what brilliant strategy lies behind this "bold show of force." And in the midst of watching the terrible movie Mom and Dad Save the World I hit upon an insight into the brilliant strategy behind the apparent 46-0 encounter in Samarra. In the Mom and Dad movie the Emperor of the planet "Spengo" sends his troops out to apprehend the good guys. But the hapless troops encounter a "light grenade" planted on the ground by "Dad" with the phrase "pick me up" engraved on its surface. And of course as soon as the Emperor's toops pick up the grenade it explodes with a burst of light that pulverizes the reality-challenged soldier. Nonetheless the invitation to "pick me up" is impossible to resist for some people, so one by one 44 soldiers in a row pick up the grenade and get zapped to smithereens. And just as the 45th fedayeen is picking up the grenade the 46th soldier calls on his communicator for reinforcements...
Look, these guys knew they were outgunned by an enormous margin before they attacked. They aren't on a "learning curve," They're on a "desperation curve." The fact that there is a meda market for complex analyses seems to drive the supply, even when the analyses start to resemble the various over-interpretations about the Peter Sellers "Chancey Gardener" character in Being There. (Absent, of course, the gardener's beguiling innocence.) Extremist ideology and religion, like crime and too much TV, make yah stupid. Their "strategy," such as it is, is to somehow get history (the Ba'athists) or Allah (al Qaeda) to fight on their side, so naturally they do rather nutty stuff. Their misfortune as that THEY BELIEVE IN A FANTASY. It isn't that they aren't dangerous, but please... let's be realistic about what we're dealing with here. These folks don't think like us. They don't have a strategy as we think of it... at least, not a rational one.
Update: The Belmont Club has an excellent discussion of this "poverty of strategy." Key graf:
You can almost imagine the stupid working of his [Saddam's] mind: 'after I kill the Spaniards and the Japanese and the Koreans, I will crown it all by destroying two 4th ID columns like Groupment Mobile 100'. But no military thread ran through them; simply a media thread.
And while we're at it, the same sort of over-interpretation has dominated stories about the Saddam/Qaeda link. A panelist this morning on Meet the Press repeated the same old meme about how the CIA doubts the existence of such a link, even though that's no longer the case, according to this and this, among others. Common sense told most Americans that a link had to exist, so they assumed it. That may not have been so stupid after all.
Posted by Demosophist at November 30, 2003 11:57 PM | TrackBack