The War in Iraq may well have turned the corner, Afghanistan might yet go either way, but here at home it seems that we may have lost a critically important battle in the war of ideas:
Stephen Coughlin, the Pentagon specialist on Islamic law and Islamist extremism, has been fired from his position on the military’s Joint Staff. The action followed a report in this space last week revealing opposition to his work for the military by pro-Muslim officials within the office of Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England.
Mr. Coughlin was notified this week that his contract with the Joint Staff will end in March, effectively halting the career of one of the U.S. government’s most important figures in analyzing the nature of extremism and ultimately preparing to wage ideological war against it.
He had run afoul of a key aide to Mr. England, Hasham Islam, who confronted Mr. Coughlin during a meeting several weeks ago when Mr. Islam sought to have Mr. Coughlin soften his views on Islamist extremism.
There’s probably more to this than what has been said in the Washington Times. There’d better be.
A thing is what it does, and if we lose the power to name the foe then we’ve lost the capability to frame the fight.
Mr. Islam is apparently a retired SWO CDR and there’s a lot of chat supporting this development going on over at a certain SWO message board.
Sorry, I am not up to speed on the SWO boards, but would like to follow the discussion. Can you give me a vector?
Flatlander;
You many years old bad judgment of becoming a “brown Shoe” is now a significant limitation on you logging into Sailor Bob….
Sorry, we’ll have to autocat the data your way.
Thank you, Curt,
Saw nothing over at your place. I was afeared it was in the closed community of http://www.swonet.com. Just to be sure, I even checked http://www.swonet.net, and laughed my assitcles off.
V/r
-SJBill
I’ll do a summary tomorrow AM…one of the posters has worked with Mr. Islam…interesting reading…something about “so you want us to round them all up?” and responses…
Thanks, old shipmate.
Would be terribly embarrassing to be seen on “swonet”, after all. :>)
Umm, in order to know what one is talking about, it seems to me that one should call things by their right names.
I believe that Eric Blair (aka George Orwell) wrote some interesting words about that.
Wow, some scary warning notices at swonet.com!
If it’s dotcom, how does it get to act like dotgov?
Maybe the same way porn sites get to act like dotedu and dotorg.
The distinctions don’t seem to make any sense, these days, and that just chaps my Ass-Pie (and also Cracker) ass!
Some follow up from the “Black Shoe” side of life:
Begin AUTOCAT xmission:
Hesham Islam, the guy who raised the ruckus about the “Christian Bigot” is a retired SWO CDR. Seems his last work was in N5, and he “followed” his current boss to the SECNAV office.
OCS grad (’87), while there volunteered to do the color guard work, as a tribute to his country.
The other part of the discussion evolved into “why are we trying to reach out to them?” and “what do you propose: camps?” sort of discussion, not about the players in the current drama.
No new stuff since yesterday. Nothing too exciting, but at least there’s context on one of the player’s backgrounds.
End xmission.
(Standing by for commentary on SWO lineage/mentality/behavior/proclivities as I know this is a no slack zone – but who gets ya there, baby?)
Bonus for t-shirt collectors:
Cafepress stuff, thought up by SWO group think:”
Best of breed: Signal Flag shirts, including “INT PAPA” and “WTF”
Help line the pockets of the SWO community by buying their stuff…
Now, now, XF, this old Air ASW guy has a fond spot in my heart for all ASW SWOs, and especially the Knox-class, in particular Vreeland, Turner, Truett…
P.S. You guys don’t have any “flaming datum” T-shirts do you?
Phib launched a salvo on Sec England, today.
http://cdrsalamander.blogspot.com/2008/01/gordon-england-dhimmi.html
Phib also forwards you to: http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2008/01/05/eaton-agonistes-redux/. Bostom presents a historical link to Tunisian consul, William Eaton.
Truly a worthy read.
-SJBill
(also ex-CVS/VS AWRer)
Regret the long post, but I don’t have the original link. LTC Myers (Ret) has been cited favorably here before, so here is his take on the Coughlin firing (from http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/019465.php#comments):
MAJ (USAR) Stephen Coughlin is to my knowledge the only Islamic Law scholar on the Joint Staff…
He is a lawyer by training and a reserve Military Intelligence Officer. His first interface with Islamic Law began in Pakistan where he was investigating and prosecuting an intellectual property rights case about 10 years ago. Reviewing Pakistani property rights law, he kept seeing footnoted references to the Quran and sharia law…
I have long argued and wondered why our military from senior leaders down to tactical level are so unread and unstudied on Islam, jihad in Islam, even the topic of terrorism. I have often contrasted this unconscionable wartime state of affairs, with the due diligence the US military showed since I was a cadet at West Point 30 years ago, where we lived, ate, slept and drank Soviet warfighting doctrine…it was the threat we oriented on and we developed our own doctrine around — “AirLand Battle” in the early 1980′s.
Can anyone show me where the equivalent of the Soviet threat doctrine series for the global war on terror is published?
It has not been done.
Yet today we are in the process of prosecuting war, that from doctrinal perspective, we fundamentally do not understand. Over two years I have had 90 of the Army’s top majors come through ACSC, across all branches including MI and special operations forces, and only one had read a book with the title Understanding Terror Networks, that by Marc Sageman…
Just before Christmas I presented a lecture on Understanding Terrorist and Insurgent Support Systems to an interagency audience at the Joint Special Operations University, that included Joint Staff and Joint Command officers, DIA and other IC reps, DHS and law enforcement… there, two people had read Sageman’s work…two out of the special ops community. The third individual was Sageman himself.
More importantly we have not studied Islamic Law and few have seen or heard of even the English translation of it that has been in print for years, none had at JSOU or had read a work titled Understanding Jihad, War and Peace in the Law of Islam or even The Quranic Concept of War…I can go on but let me be frank.
This failure of intellectual preparation is a leadership failure, and it is as the 9-11 Commission warned, a failure of vision.
We have spent much intellectual capitol revamping and analyzing our own doctrine as it relates to counterinsurgency…it’s time we do our homework on the threat.
Coughlin has briefed senior Marine Corps leaders and staff and has presented his thesis in various military educational venues…by all accounts the veil of ignorance is lifted for all but only a few who are afraid to face what Islamic Law, doctrinal Islam, says and means with respect to jihad and how it plays out across the Islamic world from al Qaida, to the Saudi government, to Pakistan to the Muslim Brotherhood…
What Coughlin did was provide the epiphany in his over 300-page Joint Military Intelligence College thesis titled, “To Our Great Detriment: Ignoring What Extremists Say About Jihad” that is meticulously documented and powerfully argued.
In short, he argues we have in fact intellectually pre-empted our military decision making process and intelligence preparation of the battlefield process, the critical step 3-”evaluate the threat.” Strategically we have failed to do that by substituting policy for military analysis, for substituting cliché for competent decision processes.
We began on September 12, 2001 with “Islam is a religion of peace,” which soothed ideological sentiments of many but has failed us strategically, short-stopped the objective, sytstemic evaluation of the threat doctrine.
“Islam is a religion of peace” is fine for public policy statements, but is not and cannot be the point of departure for competent military or intelligence analysis…it is in fact a logical flaw under any professional research methodology…you have stated the conclusion before you have done the analysis.
If one has studied the implication of the Holy Land Foundation trial discovery documents as I have, as a former DIA senior military analyst, and understanding as even Bill Gertz has written in his book Enemies about the dismal record of our counter-intelligence one has to wonder and question the extent we are in fact penetrated in government and academia by foreign agents of influence, the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamists and those who truly in essence do not share our social compact.
The termination of Stephen Coughlin on the Joint Staff is an act of intellectual cowardice.
We can only hope he can be positioned in his next venue to continue to educate our military for the fight we are in — if we don’t understand the war and the enemy we are engaged against we remain vulnerable and we cannot win.
No victory in the war on terror.
BTW, in the intel community we recently went through another flail, driven by a general who should know better, on how to avoid using the term “foreign fighter.” Jihadist wasn’t acceptable, nor was mujahideen. Salafist is often posited, but is entirely inaccurate as a descriptor. Takfiri is closer, but only describes the threat the foreign fighter poses to Muslim regimes, not to our own Western regimes.
Myers is absolutely right, that there is a willful ignorance about the teachings and nature of our enemy, and his goals. From the President on down.
Umm, Zane, maybe somebody could come up with a euphonious one-or two syllable word for “crazy evil bad people who want to cut our heads off”?
I have no suggestions which would not offend some groups whose opinions are respected by those in power.
Wait, I have it! It’s a three-syllable word, though.
ASSASSINS. That’s it, we’re in a war against assassins!