Monday, February 9, 2009
Meet Michael Phillips (pseudonym). Michael Phillips is a US Army officer who works in the Washington, D.C. area at the national level.
You may remember the case of Maj. Stephen Coughlin, the Pentagon analyst who was fired for being too outspoken with regard to the Jihad threat to national security (Coughlin's controversial thesis can be downloaded here). Well Phillips has his own Casandra stories to tell, though most will have to remain untold except in broad outlines for now.
Phillips is well familiar with the pushback that a bureaucracy can administer to ideas that threaten its precious and safe assumptions. The attached essay, UNDERSTANDING THE CHALLENGE OF JIHAD IDEOLOGY: POLICY IMPLICATIONS FOR THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY [PDF], was written by Phillips as a Master's thesis. I wish I could tell you at this point some of the stories that he has told me of pushback that he has received from both the military and academic communities for what many blog readers will find to be a very straightforward and factual narrative of the threats we face.
One academic who was present at Phillips' thesis defense called it the most contentious thesis defense he'd ever seen. When the shouting was over (yes, shouting), Phillips passed, but only because the panel couldn't argue with the facts presented, even if they didn't like the conclusions.
Here is the executive summary:
It has been almost seven years since the attacks of 9/11/2001 and more than twenty-five years since Hezbollah's bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut. Yet the United States Government and its various law enforcement and intelligence communities still do not have a clear understanding of the threat from militant Islam or jihad, its ideological basis and its doctrine.
The policy the United States has adopted to counter this threat is still based on an incomplete understanding of the threat doctrine, the ideology that drives it, and the religious basis that jihadists use to validate their tactics. This lack of knowledge must be rectified in order to establish realistic policies to counter, defer, contain, and defeat the threat from radical jihadists.
This ignorance and neglect has led to the unimpeded growth within the United States of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), the original modern jihad organization, and its many off-shoots, fronts, and imitators, whose stated purpose is what the Brotherhood itself has called a "civilization-jihad" whose intention is to destroy Western civilization from within. Despite this threat, many intelligence analysts and policy-makers insist that we must "engage" the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies in order to influence their behavior in a positive direction.
An improved policy must be focused on education first and foremost. There must be an organized, concerted effort to educate the government and intelligence communities on the true nature of the threat posed by jihad organizations. A clearly understood and fully elaborated global threat model must be developed, through what might be compared to the Manhattan project: in this case, an all-out, concerted effort to develop, not a weapon, but a clear strategic comprehension of the threat and to develop a clear definition of the enemy.
From this clarity, policies can be developed to confront the activities of the MB in the United States. The Brotherhood must be exposed as a hostile strategic threat. It must be engaged in this realm only.
Much of our leadership -- political, academic, military -- is asleep at the switch. It is more and more up to us, the regular folks, to educate ourselves and force our leaders to take this threat seriously. Read Michael Phillips' essay, pass it on to others, post it on web sites, link this post. The people in the establishment who do get it, who are trying to speak out on our behalf, need our support, and we support them by educating ourselves and our neighbors.
Here is the link to the essay again. Here is the supporting documentation [PDF], the 1991 Muslim Brotherhood strategy document that contains these now infamous words:
The process of settlement is a "Civilization-Jihadist Process" with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and "sabotaging" its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers...
You'd think that alone would have leadership kicking and screaming to do something. You'd think...
Solomon,
I have Mr. "Phillips" to thank in part for my own thesis. As you know, I wrote a 300 page monster outlining what I think is the latest form of warfare: Cognitive Warfare. I was able to leverage many of the same sources as Phillips in order to give a few concrete examples of how jihadists have succeeded in this deceptive way of war. The online archives from the Holy Land Foundation trial were particularly helpful. Please feel free to reference my own thesis if you think it relevant. The latter chapters, like Phillips' thesis, are directed to policymakers and analysts, and they include some discussion of the MB's activities in the U.S.
Stu