Fascinating read from a few weeks ago about Lt. Col. Matthew Dooley’s American “jihad” against Islam, which sold this terrifyingly insane Hiroshma strategy to US troops.
Make sure to check out this article if you happened to miss it in Wired.
From Wired’s Danger Room:
U.S. Military Taught Officers: Use ‘Hiroshima’ Tactics for ‘Total War’ on Islam
By Noah Shachtman and Spencer Ackerman | May 10, 2012 |
The U.S. military taught its future leaders that a “total war” against the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims would be necessary to protect America from Islamic terrorists, according to documents obtained by Danger Room. Among the options considered for that conflict: using the lessons of “Hiroshima” to wipe out whole cities at once, targeting the “civilian population wherever necessary.”
The course, first reported by Danger Room last month and held at the Defense Department’s Joint Forces Staff College, has since been canceled by the Pentagon brass. It’s only now, however, that the details of the class have come to light. Danger Room received hundreds of pages of course material and reference documents from a source familiar with the contents of the class.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff recently ordered the entire U.S. military to scour its training material to make sure it doesn’t contain similarly hateful material, a process that is still ongoing. But the officer who delivered the lectures, Army Lt. Col. Matthew A. Dooley, still maintains his position at the Norfolk, Virginia college, pending an investigation. The commanders, lieutenant colonels, captains and colonels who sat in Dooley’s classroom, listening to the inflammatory material week after week, have now moved into higher-level assignments throughout the U.S. military.
For the better part of the last decade, a small cabal of self-anointed counterterrorism experts has been working its way through the U.S. military, intelligence and law enforcement communities, trying to convince whoever it could that America’s real terrorist enemy wasn’t al-Qaida — but the Islamic faith itself. In his course, Dooley brought in these anti-Muslim demagogues as guest lecturers. And he took their argument to its final, ugly conclusion.
“We have now come to understand that there is no such thing as ‘moderate Islam,’” Dooley noted in a July 2011 presentation (.pdf), which concluded with a suggested manifesto to America’s enemies. “It is therefore time for the United States to make our true intentions clear. This barbaric ideology will no longer be tolerated. Islam must change or we will facilitate its self-destruction.”
Dooley could not be reached for comment. Joint Forces Staff College spokesman Steven Williams declined to discuss Dooley’s presentation or his status at the school. But when asked if Dooley was responsible for the course material, he responded, “I don’t know if I would classify him [Dooley] as responsible. That would be the commandant” of the school, Maj. Gen. Joseph Ward.
That makes the two-star general culpable for rather shocking material. In the same presentation, Dooley lays out a possible four-phase war plan to carry out a forced transformation of the Islam religion. Phase three includes possible outcomes like “Islam reduced to a cult status” and “Saudi Arabia threatened with starvation.” (It’s an especially ironic suggestion, in light of today’s news that Saudi intelligence broke upthe most recent al-Qaida bombing plot.)
International laws protecting civilians in wartime are “no longer relevant,” Dooley continues. And that opens the possibility of applying “the historical precedents of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki” to Islam’s holiest cities, and bringing about “Mecca and Medina['s] destruction.”
Dooley’s ideological allies have repeatedly stated that “mainstream” Muslims are dangerous, because they’re “violent” by nature. Yet only a few of al-Qaida’s most twisted fanatics were ever caught musing about wiping out entire cities.
“Some of these actions offered for consideration here will not be seen as ‘political correct’ in the eyes of many,” Dooley adds. “Ultimately, we can do very little in the West to decide this matter, short of waging total war.”
Dooley, who has worked at the Joint Forces Staff College since August 2010, began his eight-week class with a straightforward, two-part history of Islam. It was delivered by David Fatua, a former West Point history professor. “Unfortunately, if we left it at that, you wouldn’t have the proper balance of points of view, nor would you have an accurate view of how Islam defines itself,” Dooley told his students. Over the next few weeks, he invited in a trio of guest lecturers famous for their incendiary views of Islam.
Shireen Burki declared during the 2008 election that “Obama is bin Laden’s dream candidate.” In her Joint Forces Staff College lecture, she told students that “Islam is an Imperialist/Conquering Religion.” (.pdf)
Stephen Coughlin claimed in his 2007 master’s thesis that then-president George W. Bush’s declaration of friendship with the vast majority of the world’s Muslims had “a chilling effect on those tasked to define the enemy’s doctrine.” (.pdf) Coughlin was subsequently let go from his consulting position to the military’s Joint Staff, but he continued to lecture at the Naval War College and at the FBI’s Washington Field Office. In his talk to Dooley’s class (.pdf), Coughlin suggested that al-Qaida helped drive the overthrow of Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak and Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi. It was part of a scheme by Islamists to conquer the world, he added. And Coughlin mocked those who didn’t see this plot as clearly as he did, accusing them of “complexification.”
Coughlin titled his talk: “Imposing Islamic Law – or – These Aren’t the Droids Your Looking For!”
Former FBI employee John Guandolo told the conspiratorial World Net Daily website last year that Obama was only the latest president to fall under the influence of Islamic extremists. “The level of penetration in the last three administrations is deep,” Guandolo alleged. In his reference material for the Joint Forces Staff College class, Guandolo not only spoke of today’s Muslims as enemies of the West. He even justified the Crusades, writing that they “were initiated after hundreds of years of Muslim incursion into Western lands.”
Guandolo’s paper, titled “Usual Responses from the Enemy When Presented With the Truth” (.pdf), was one of hundreds of presentations, documents, videos and web links electronically distributed to the Joint Forces Staff College students. Included in that trove: a paper alleging that “it is a permanent command in Islam for Muslims to hate and despise Jews and Christians” (.pdf). So was a video lecture from Serge Trifkovic, a former professor who appeared as a defense witness in several trials of Bosnian Serb leaders convicted of war crimes, including the genocide of Muslims. A web link, titled “Watch Before This Is Pulled,” supposedly shows President Obama — the commander-in-chief of the senior officers attending the course — admitting that he’s a Muslim.
Dooley added the caveats that his views are “not the Official Policy of the United States Government” and are intended “to generate dynamic discussion and thought.” But he taught his fellow military officers that Obama’s alleged admission could well make the commander in chief some sort of traitor. “By conservative estimates,” 10 percent of the world’s Muslims, “a staggering 140 million people … hate everything you stand for and will never coexist with you, unless you submit” to Islam. He added, “Your oath as a professional soldier forces you to pick a side here.” It is unclear if Dooley’s “total war” on Muslims also applied to his “Muslim” commander in chief.
After the Pentagon brass learned of Dooley’s presentation, the country’s top military officer, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey, issued an order to every military chief and senior commander to get rid of any similar anti-Islam instructional material. Dempsey issued the order because the White House had already instructed the entire security apparatus of the federal government — military and civilian — to revamp its counterterrorism training after learning of FBI material that demonized Islam.
By then, Dooley had already presented his apocalyptic vision for a global religious war. Flynn has ordered a senior officer, Army Maj. Gen. Frederick Rudesheim, to investigate how precisely Dooley managed to get away with that extended presentation in an official Defense Department-sanctioned course. The results of that review are due May 24.
Ironically, Dooley and his guest lecturers paint a dire picture of the forward march of Islamic extremism right as its foremost practitioner feared its implosion. Documents recently declassified by the U.S. government revealed Osama bin Laden fretting about al-Qaida’s brutal methods and damaged brand alienating the vast majority of Muslims from choosing to wage holy war. Little could he have known that U.S. military officers were thinking of ways to ignite one.
I am a US Army Foreign Area Officer (FAO) currently attending Intermediate Level Education (ILE) at Fort Lee, VA. ILE is a professional military education (PME) course whose curriculum for field grade officers – mostly Majors – is, in scope and format not unlike that at the (JFSC) for more senior officers. Like the JFSC, one of ILE’s chief merits, both for the officer students and for the organizations they serve, is that it provides an academic forum separate from our usual lives and duties, with all the freedoms which that entails. It is a place in which professionals can encounter some of the larger issues that they will likely confront in their future careers. Students are taught, encouraged and indeed required to engage in critical thinking, debate and a free exchange of ideas with smart, motivated, energetic peers of diverse backgrounds and experiences; with a dedicated cadre of instructors and facilitators; and with an array of guest speakers whose presentations are rarely taken directly from the revered texts of our profession or the current doctrine of our organizations.
It is largely because of this experience – because this incident happened while I was here at ILE and not in any other place or position – that my response to it now goes beyond what it might otherwise have been. As a FAO, and as a specialist in the Middle East and North Africa in particular I am immediately affronted by the deplorable messages and gross abuses of scholarship that the materials of the JFSC elective appear to demonstrate. But this issue poses an even more interesting question for me as an ILE student than it does as a FAO. It moves me to ask not just what I would have done if this material came up in my own classroom, or what I should do to engage it and its fellow travelers in professional forums. It compels me to ask the question of what I would have done as the commandant of the school if an instructor had approached me with that particular curriculum. Would I have allowed it?
After a good deal of reflection, prompted in no small part by discussions with my peers and mentors here at ILE, I am inclined to propose that I might have approved this course were the decision mine to make. I would have done so for two reasons, and with two related caveats. First, to an educator and a leader in an educational institution, the principals of academic freedom and academic integrity pose compelling and not necessarily competing claims. One of the reasons I would be inclined to permit even this seemingly meritless material into a classroom would be in defense of the first, academic freedom. This is no small consideration in our society, where even the highest court in the land has given freedom of expression a great deal of latitude. In National Socialist Party v. Skokie, and the recent Snyder v. Phelps, among others, the court has drawn wide buffers around even the most unredeemed hate speech. The court does not argue, nor do many academics, that educators and administrators are compelled to present views regardless of content or merit, but this expansive tradition of First Amendment liberty goes a long way in coloring decisions and shapes how we construct discussions that touch on such liberties. No serious academic would wish in any way to chill open discussion of an important topic. I would uphold academic freedom as one of the reasons informing a decision to permit the erstwhile JFSC elective, but it is not the only reason and is not sufficient in itself. More importantly, I suggest that it is precisely because we permit even ill-informed and terrible views their place in our public discourse that they should have their moment on center stage in our classrooms.
Gen. Martin Dempsey’s response to this incident, and his public comments were right on the mark: this brand of hate-peddling has no place in educating our officers or our Soldiers when presented as it apparently was, but I would argue that it does have a place in the classroom. The strategy of the US in confronting the real and serious threat of violent extremism – Islamicist fanaticism included – and our broader national policies all rightly reject out of hand both the thesis of this course and the brand of demagoguery that it and many of its fellow-travellers dress up in ersatz scholarship. But looking at many of the comments that appear beneath the stories about this incident, this stuff is out there. Parochial ideologies of fear, promulgated by those whose apparent cachet far outstrips the merits of their arguments, inform a good number of replies on this issue, even if a good portion of the posters couldn’t put a proper footnote on their received ideas. More tellingly, the thoughtful, reasoned responses are found here and there, but they are too few and too quickly dismissive. Where is the national discussion on why this kind of stuff is so scary and dangerous? Who will prompt it? I say that part of the answer to that question is and should be we officers and leaders. Matthew Dooley’s syllabus, cribbed straight from the Stratgegic Engagement Group’s playbook, maps with negligible points of nonconformity to the programatic elements of the projects of Spengler and Hans Schweitzer. And they have an audience. The second reason I would permit – even encourage – the presentation of this material in a professional classroom is closely tied to the caveats I would place upon it. First the material would have to be properly framed as a case study in countering propaganda and shaping strategic communication, with clear and careful disclaimers as to its content, authorship and purposes. I would further require students at the end of the presentation to deconstruct the arguments, identify their provenance, and refute the claims and thesis presented. Alternatively, students wishing to defend the presentation in any part would be free to do so, with accepted standards of academic rigor applied in evaluating their defense. In short, I would present this case as a debunking exercise for leaders and strategic communicators.
I am much less fearful than the general public or even some of the media who have expressed concern for how many students were presented this material and what damage it has done. I am well aware of the caliber of students currently attending our PME programs, and I would like to think that if LTC Dooley had shown his slide deck in my classroom it would have been met with acute criticism. But should we give this brand of rhetoric further audience in our senior staff colleges and Professional Military Education fora? I say, absolutely – because it is important to encounter in itself, and as a representative case in how much of our public discourse is currently framed. As an ideology, this stuff needs to be debunked, and a professional academic forum is as good a place as any currently available to do that. More importantly, in a time when our public debate is marred by vapid rancorousness and sophism, such materials as presented in this erstwhile JFSC curriculum, properly presented as a case study for dissection, would better arm and encourage our strategic communicators to encounter and defeat this type of nonsense on the public and world stages.