Newsletter January 2008 #71

Table of Contents:

Alexander Mackenzie's Bookshelf

A Reporter among Soldiers

Good reporters are unfortunately not that common, but what defines them is the ability to see accurately, intellectual integrity, a lucid prose, and a good instinct for developing sources. One of the things that can catapult a reporter beyond being merely good is a strong sense of empathy. Christie Blatchford, a long time newspaper reporter now writing for the Globe and Mail, has that sense and employed it while covering the Canadian Army in Afghanistan in 2006.

The result is Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death Inside the New Canadian Army (Doubleday, Toronto, 2007). Each of her stories encapsulates a day in the campaigning of that year and concentrates on the men (and women – she also writes about Captain Nicola Goddard, our first female combat arms officer to die in battle) who were at the centre of a particular episode; describes the soldiers who died, and the lives they left behind them in Afghanistan and at home. Those who have spent 25 years reading her stories in four different newspapers might note that Ms. Blatchford has always had a fondness for writing about ordinary people with physical courage, honor, compassion and integrity. She found all she could handle among our soldiers and shares their stories with the rest of us.

The details of her book give a very clear view of how our Army was conducting itself in some extensive combat in 2006, of just what our soldiers are like, and how they have taken to warfare against the Jihad movement. These are compelling portraits of some of the finest people our country has, and Blatchford has probably surpassed herself.

A Soldier turned Reporter

Combat in small wars is never a minor matter to those who personally experience it, and a soldier doesn't need to be caught up in a giant mincing machine like Stalingrad or Verdun to know every nuance of fear, misery and suffering that battle has to offer. Given that – so far, anyway – the global Jihadist conflict has not taken on the appearance of a total war, most of our societies operate under the illusion that the distant battles we hear so little of cannot be significant.

David Bellavia argues otherwise, and he would know. In November 2004, after letting al Qaeda insurgents occupy the Iraqi city of Fallujah for seven months, the US military muscled its way back into the city. David Bellavia was a squad commander in the US Army's 2nd Infantry Regiment and recounts his experience of this particular battle in House to House (Simon and Schuster, New York, 2007). The retaking of Fallujah wasn't trivial to those who were there.

This is a gripping narrative from the point of view of a front-line soldier (which is always valuable to historians). Bellavia gives a fair notion of what it is like to fight Jihadis, and how they think in battle. As always, soldiers and warriors fight quite differently and soldiers usually win, but battle is seldom easy for those who wage it. The warriors of the Jihad are reckless, imaginative and aggressive -- they are also incompetent, badly disciplined and uncoordinated.

The retaking of Fallujah wasn't easy; one fight that Bellavia describes in explicit detail must still give him nightmares. Moreover, there have been other battles like it, and there will be more. Yet if one compares what sort of defences the Jihadis could prepare in seven months, compared to what the Imperial Japanese or the Wehrmacht routinely did, they don't quite seem so fearsome… but all the same, they are today's problem and not one that is over 60 years behind us. And soldiers today still need the same guts that their grandsires had.

The Forgotten Battle of Mecca

Although the Jihad confronting the world today had been brewing for decades, 1979 marks the year it really began. Most people can recall the Iranian Revolution in January, when Marxists and Mullahs overthrew the Shah and then turned on each other – to the great detriment of the Leftists. The escalating civil war in Afghanistan also led to the Soviet invasion in December of that year, and most of us can recall how the resulting resistance to one evil was the midwife to another. There was also a third episode that marked the birth of the global Jihad, and it has been almost forgotten.

Yaroslav Trofimov's The Siege of Mecca (Doubleday, New York, 2007) describes what happened. In November of 1979, the annual Hajj was underway when a large gang of Wahhabi gunmen launched a long-planned revolt against Saudi rule by seizing the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Attempts by Saudi authorities to retake the central Mosque of Islam failed, until French ‘advisors' and a quantity of poison gas was used to flush out barricaded rebels. After 14 days of fighting, much of the Grand Mosque was in ruins and while Saudi figures on the death toll are vague, at least 1,000 people died.

Trofimov's straightforward reportage about the siege also mentions much of the fallout of this affray. Predictably, with the cognitive dissonance that substitutes for reason on the Arab street, the US was blamed for the siege, and US embassies were attacked by mobs, not least in Tehran, where the notorious hostage taking of 1979-80 began. The Saudis, stunned by the revolt, also accelerated their attempts to buy Wahhabi cooperation by increasing their share of the Kingdom's oil wealth and directing their attentions externally. Al Qaeda and the international Dawa missionary movement to the Muslim immigrant communities in the West are two of the results.

Whatever are they thinking?

There is a school of optimistic thought which holds that all human conflict could be solved if we only understood each other. Mind you, police hate answering calls concerning violent domestic disputes and few wars are as vicious as civil wars. However, one thing is clear about the ongoing record of encounters between the Western and Arab worlds… we really don't understand each other.

David Pryce-Jones is an exception, having lived among Arabs as a child, soldiering among them with the British Army, and having been a foreign correspondent in the Middle East for many decades. He tries to share what he understands of the Arab mind-set in The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs (HarperCollins, 1989, 2002). Essentially, he argues that the Arabs of the Middle East reverted in the early 20th Century back to their tribal and kin-folk social structures; with their only over-arching loyalty being to Islam.

This reliance on tribe and family is a significant causal factor in the numerous internal wars, repressive governments, and economic stagnation (once one discounts oil) that have plagued the Middle East for the last 85 years. As they define themselves by their tribal, religious and cultural traditions; there is resentment – based on both fear and jealousy – of the alternative forms of societal behaviour from the West. This is an interesting book; well furnished with anecdotes, a very detailed knowledge of Middle Eastern culture and history, and much practical experience.

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca