#73, November 6, 2005

 

To Thine Enemy be True

 

 

How you define your enemy makes a difference; that must be a historical truth of some sort.  Let us take the current example of the War on Terror.  The enemy is…well, the enemy is supposed to be al-Qaeda and anyone who might give its members help in any way.  But who gets included in that latter category?  This may seem obvious and unnecessary to consider, because if you get intelligence that someone is helping Bin Laden and his supporters then you should, as the Welsh policeman in “The Molly Maguires” suggests, squash him like a bug (this sounds better when said with a Welsh accent!).  But this becomes increasingly problematic if it is the case that one cannot locate the enemy and one is continually chasing after his proxies and supporters.  For, might it not be the case that the people you end up getting your hands on are people that al-Qaeda really doesn’t mind giving you?

One cannot push this too far, of course, but it is curious that at no point have intelligence operatives deployed that other frequently cited historical truth: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.  For, what seems to be revealed in the recent news stories about the use of torture and some of the bad intelligence it has produced is the fact that Americans have only been able to deal with one formulation: my enemies must all be friends (this never happened in the good old days of the Cold War – no, wait, maybe it did).  But, if one has any sense of the objectives of al-Qaeda in the Middle East then one knows that it has been to cause chaos by bringing down stable regimes and turning their countries into recruiting grounds for their fanaticism.  They have clearly wanted to bring down the Saudi regime; they certainly would have welcomed the downfall of Saddam Hussein, and probably could have predicted the potential it represented for them.

 

But if one is holed up in some cave in the middle of nowhere, how does one bring down a regime with a crazy leader who has such a tight control over his country?  It’s difficult.  After all, Hussein remained in power after losing a war and facing years of sanctions; he didn’t seem to be going anywhere any time soon.  Moreover, the sheer terror that he was able to generate in people made him someone capable of keeping any organization like al-Qaeda at bay.  Now, it would have taken a mastermind of incredible, almost inhuman, proportions to decide that the way to achieve this goal was by getting the Americans to do it for you, and to have had that as the stated goal and policy of the organization.  So that may be a fruitless formulation for us to contemplate much further.

 

But look at it another way.  Here is Bin Laden, holed up, barely able to survive and not too far away from being extinguished like a bug, and the reports he’s getting seem to suggest that the people chasing him keep asking whether or not his organization is tied to Iraq.  Well, if he has any sense whatsoever he might say to himself – “Ah, the enemy of my enemy is my friend – much as I detest him – Perhaps this can be used to my advantage.”  And then he might further expostulate, “I shall tell all my operatives that if they are ever caught by the Americans, that under no circumstances should they at any point divulge anything about a connection with Iraq – no, no, wait a minute, we don’t have any connections with them, and they hate us, why would I say that to my operatives.”

 

No, of course he doesn’t say that.  He is far more likely to say, “Hey, if they want information about a connection with Iraq give it to them.  If they want to go to war with Iraq and bring down Saddam Hussein, so much the better.  That’s their funeral.” 

 

I am sorry, but this intelligence stuff just isn’t rocket science.  Know thine enemy.