For many military critics of COIN, the future of war is not to be found in the steamy jungles of Vietnam but rather on the rocky hillsides of southern Lebanon, where Israel was fought to a standstill by the guerrilla army of Hizballah in the summer of 2006. Israel possesses one of the world’s most powerful and technologically sophisticated militaries, yet Hizballah was not only able to withstand overwhelming firepower and to fire rockets deep into Israel, but also to inflict significant damage on its opponent. Unlike the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, who employed mostly hit-and-run tactics, Hizballah fighters often held their ground and even maneuvered against Israeli forces in lengthy battles. They intercepted Israeli battlefield communications, shot down an advanced helicopter and even struck an Israeli naval ship with a cruise missile.
Two weapons today threaten freedom in our world. One — the 100-megaton hydrogen bomb — requires vast resources of technology, effort and money. It is an ultimate weapon of civilized and scientific man. The other — a nail and a piece of wood buried in a rice paddy — is deceptively simple, the weapon of a peasant.
—Lt. Col. T. N. Greene, The Guerrilla and How to Fight Him (1962)
Counterinsurgency is another word for brotherly love.
—attributed to Edward Lansdale
At the fourth Culture Summit of the US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) in April 2010, Maj. Gen. David Hogg, head of the Adviser Forces in Afghanistan, proposed that the US military think of “culture as a weapon system.” [1] The military, Hogg asserted, needs to learn the culture of the lands where it is deployed and use that knowledge to fight its enemies along with more conventional armaments. This conceptual and perhaps literal “weaponization of culture” continues a trend that began with the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
The easiest way to understand the dramatic changes in Iraqi politics from 2009 to 2010 is to look at shifts in the discourse of politicians belonging to the Da‘wa Party of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
During his second term, his approval rating heading stubbornly south, President George W. Bush was fond of comparing himself to Harry Truman. The dour Missourian, too, was “misunderestimated” — lightly regarded when thrust onto the world stage and then raked over the coals for strike breaking and a stalemated war in Korea. Like Truman, Bush mused, he would be reviled in his own time only to be accorded great respect in popular history.
Baer, Marc David. Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in the Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Baer, Marc David. The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries and Secular Turks (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).
Bayat, Asef. Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).
Mohamed el-Sayed Said, a long-time contributing editor of this publication, died at the age of 59 on October 10, 2009. He was buried in his native Port Said. The intellectual elite of Egypt attended his funeral.
Yaron Peleg, Israeli Culture Between the Two Intifadas: A Brief Romance (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2008).
Robert Lacey, Inside the Kingdom: Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia (Viking, 2009).
In the early 1990s, the security forces of Egypt were embroiled in a low-grade civil war with the Gama‘a Islamiyya (Islamic Group), an uncompromising outfit committed to the violent overthrow of the government. The Gama‘a, like the even more radical Egyptian Islamic Jihad and al-Takfir wa al-Hijra, grew out of study circles reading the works of Ibn Taymiyya and Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual godfathers of jihadi groups across the Muslim world, including al-Qaeda. Qutb taught that jahili (pagan) governments and social elites had usurped the entire realm of Islam.
In the waning years of the twentieth century, it was common to hear predictions that water would be the oil of the twenty-first. A report prepared for the center-right Washington think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, forecast that water, not oil, would be the dominant source of conflict in the Middle East by the year 2000. This prognosis rested in part upon the estimate of US intelligence agencies that by that time “there will be at least ten places in the world where war could break out over dwindling shared water, the majority in the Middle East.” [1]
Yemen is one of the oldest irrigation civilizations in the world. For millennia, farmers have practiced sustainable agriculture using available water and land. Through a myriad of mountain terraces, elaborate water harvesting techniques and community-managed flood and spring irrigation systems, the country has been able to support a relatively large population. Until recently, that is. Yemen is now facing a water crisis unprecedented in its history.
The abundance of oil in Saudi Arabia is staggering. With more than 250 billion barrels, the kingdom possesses one-fifth of the world’s oil reserves, affording it considerable influence
“Look at that!” said Muhammad ‘Asfour, an environmentalist and avid nature photographer, pointing to a picture of a boat and wooden staircase perched well above the Jordanian shore of the Dead Sea. “Do you see how far they are from the waterline?”
The Middle East is running out of water.
Nearly 50 years after independence, the North African states of Algeria and Morocco face challenges to their national unity and territorial integrity. In Algeria, a
