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William Lind, advisor to terrorists
The article discussed in the previous blog entry does not represent the first time that William Lind has supported Hamas. On July 6 he wrote an article at lewrockwell.com in which he advised Hamas on how it could better wage war against Israel. His logic was as follows. Hamas, in its former status as a non-state or “fourth-generation” entity, had enjoyed important advantages in its war against the state of Israel. But by getting elected to power and so becoming a state, Hamas gave up those advantages. Being a state, it is now more targetable by Israel, and also, as a state, it must defend its territory or appear as a loser, a burden that a non-state entity does not carry. These disadvantages were brought to the fore when Hamas kidnapped Corporal Shalit. But, urges Lind, all is not lost:
There is, however, another way out for Hamas. It can call and raise Washington’s and Tel Aviv’s bets. How? By voting to dissolve the Palestinian Authority. Ending the PA would dump the Palestinian territories and their inhabitants right back in Israel’s lap. Under international law, as the occupying power, Israel would be responsible for everything in the territories: security, human services, utilities and infrastructure, the economy, the whole megillah (oy!)….I’m aware that various figures in the anti-American, anti-Israel “right” have at times rooted for the terrorists. But I’ve never seen an American conservative actively counsel a terrorist group on how to be a more effective terrorist group. What is as demented as Lind’s support for Hamas is the way he got there, via his “fourth-generation” warfare idea. For years, Lind has pushed this as a warning to the U.S. Our enemies, he said, were fourth-generation entities, i.e. non-state, typically terrorist, groups, while we were still fighting wars designed to defeat second- or third-generation type enemies, meaning states with standing armies. (See note below.) While Lind repeatedly expressed annoyance at the American establishment’s obtuseness to fourth-generation realities, his main intention was a positive one: to help America evolve a military posture geared for fighting more effectively against fourth-generation entities. But now he has turned this patriotic intention on its head: instead of telling us how to beat fourth-generation entities, he is touting their superiority to conventional states such as ours and advising them how to beat us. Lind has thus joined together (1) his paleocon anger at contemporary America and her ally, Israel, (2) his fascination with the superior strategic capabilities of non-state terrorist organizations, and (3) his apparently new-found Rockwellite hatred of the state into a new synthesis, in which anti-Western terrorist groups such as Hamas become the incarnation of an emergent, superior stage of history, the Fourth Generation, with Lind as its spokesman and prophet.
Note: It should be pointed out that, whether Lind’s intention is to help the West fight terrorists, or to help terrorists fight the West, his four-generation scheme is unnecessarily complicated and obscure. This is because the respective differences among the first three generations of military strategy—18th century line-and-column, massive bombardment followed by infantry, and blitzkrieg—are of no importance in the discussion of terrorist strategy. The difference that matters is the difference between war waged by the standing army of a state, a feature that all of the first three generations have in common, and war waged by a non-state guerilla or terrorist group. Lind could greatly clarify the discussion if he would drop his esoteric-sounding “generation” terminology (with its echoes of a Marxist or Toffleresque scheme of world history) and simply speak of war-making by states versus war-making by non-states. Email entry |