Use "Hiroshima" Tactics for "Total War" on Islam

[Panzersharkcat]

So says a now-canceled class at the Joint Forces Staff College. Link.

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 up the 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.

Holy shit.

[Simon_Jester]

I wonder how the paranoia level here stacks up against some of what was said about the Russians during the Cold War?

Or, for that matter, what bin Laden says about the US, or what the Russians said about the US during the Cold War, or, well... basically anything that motivates this idea of clashes of civilizations in which a handful of people hyperventilate and start screaming about how the whole thing is utterly evil.

[Surlethe]

It's a bigger problem, I think, when those handful are in charge of the most powerful armed services of a member of one of those civilizations.

[madd0ct0r]

i remember coming across a document online that advocated using mecca as the balancing chip for a MAD approach to islamic terrorsim.

basically, if shit happens here, we nuke mecca.

fucking cold war dinosaurs...

[Korto]

I wont ask the rhetorical "Is this guy insane?" because that's kind of obvious. But it takes a quite "special" person to think that glassing Mecca is a good way to fight Islam. Mecca is a spiritual heartland, where "spiritual" translates as "We don't really need it, but by Allah will we be pissed off when it's gone"

You know, I suppose you could claim the tactic of stinging someone and provoking an over-the-top rage and massive over-reaction, except I'm not sure what they could do that would count as an over-reaction after a large population centre and their most sacred site had been bombed.

i remember coming across a document online that advocated using mecca as the balancing chip for a MAD approach to islamic terrorsim.

basically, if shit happens here, we nuke mecca.

fucking cold war dinosaurs...

Bloody hell, on the subject of provoking a massive over-reaction. Did saner heads realise that Mecca would be a sacrifice bin Laden likely would have been happy to make in return for such a awe-inspiring own-goal?

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.”

Those cunning Islamists! Conquering us by wanting our freedoms!

[Ralin]

I wont ask the rhetorical "Is this guy insane?" because that's kind of obvious. But it takes a quite "special" person to think that glassing Mecca is a good way to fight Islam. Mecca is a spiritual heartland, where "spiritual" translates as "We don't really need it, but by Allah will we be pissed off when it's gone"

You know, I suppose you could claim the tactic of stinging someone and provoking an over-the-top rage and massive over-reaction, except I'm not sure what they could do that would count as an over-reaction after a large population centre and their most sacred site had been bombed.

If he's talking about the article I think he is then it made a little more sense then that. The idea was that we loudly and repeatedly make it known that we will nuke Mecca if Al-Qaeda nukes one of our cities, thereby discouraging them from doing so in the first place. So it was about preventing major attacks, not advocating that we go out and do it to fight them.

Let me make it clear that I'm not saying this would be a good idea, just explaining the argument.

EDIT: Typos

[madd0ct0r]

yeah - as i said it was a MAD form of deterrent.

and as korto says, some might be willing to sacrifice mecca to take down the west.

[Korto]

That's pretty much what I assumed, but my point is it wouldn't discourage them. Mecca would be a sacrifice the top leadership would be happy to make for the "Greater Struggle", as bombing Mecca will do alnost infinitely more damage to the US then to Al-Qaeda. Sacrificing a queen hurts, but you'll do it if the payout is worth it, and this queen is worth far more to you dead than alive.

[Simon_Jester]

It's a bigger problem, I think, when those handful are in charge of the most powerful armed services of a member of one of those civilizations.

Yes.

Again, I think there were probably equally paranoid and crazy anti-communists in the US government during the Cold War. I strongly suspect there were equivalent paranoid crazies in the Kremlin, too- but neither side was actually willing to make the collective decision to wage wars.

Here, that's more of a problem because the US can fight wars with fewer consequences than it could against the Soviets.

[Junghalli]

I don't meant for this to be a cheap shot, but you know, this reminds me of that "would you do the stuff the Nazis did" tangent in that "democrats: you could lose" thread, and when I see stuff like this I think maybe I can understand what the guys who drew up plans for stuff like the Holocaust and Generalplan Ost might have been thinking and feeling.

Look, our enemies are huge threats to us just by their very nature, we'll only be safe when we've completely destroyed them or rendered them totally impotent, and anything we do to them is justified because the threat they represent is just that huge and horrible.

[Simon_Jester]

Actually, I think it's fair.

Although it puts an upper bound on the... evilness level of the US military if these guys are getting smacked down and not allowed to set all the policy decisions. Having a few colonels, or even generals, who think nuking Mecca is a good idea is merely troublesome. Having the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense think so makes the problem a whole new dimension in murderous intent.

[Broomstick]

It's proof you get extremists on both sides. As Simon Jester noted, though, there has been a smack-down, there's an on-going investigation, and an end was put to the "class" that was promoting this stuff. In other words, the mechanisms for controlling nutty fanaticism apparently kicked in and it's being dealt with. I view that as a positive, that the system is working.

Sure, you had plenty of "NUKE RUSSIA!!!SHIFT111!!!" nutballs during the Cold War, too. They weren't put in charge of the bombs. If you have any means of weeding out the nutters at all you're going to turn up fanatics from time to time.

Doesn't mean I'm happy or complacent about the whole thing - I find proof of these nutters existing disturbing and upsetting - but I'd rather they be rooted out and found that not.

[Lord Relvenous]

i remember coming across a document online that advocated using mecca as the balancing chip for a MAD approach to islamic terrorsim.

basically, if shit happens here, we nuke mecca.

fucking cold war dinosaurs...

A bargaining chip we could never use. A terror attack happens on U.S. soil, we nuke Mecca in retaliation... and then what? Whoops! Unlike an enemy government, you can't wipe out Islamic terrorists by nuking a city. And after you do, hey look, 1.4 billion pissed off people! Better threaten more holy sites. If the first time didn't work, maybe the second or third one will.

I mean, jesus. Did they even think past the "nuke Mecca. MURICA FUCKYAH!" stage? An 11th grader could see that Mecca would do shit all as a deterrent. Hell, even try to use it as one, and you just gave AQ a shit ton of "the Americans want to destroy all of us and our religion" ammunition.

Wait, I got it. This Dooley guy watched Avatar, and instead of seeing a Dances with Wolves, he saw goddamn TURRISTS! attacking the natural superiority of MURICA! and luring pure-blooded MURICAN soldiers to their dangerous ways! Quarrich had the right idea, he just didn't execute it right! He didn't commit hard enough. He shoulda nuked those goddamned TURRISTS! from space!

And yeah, it got caught, but it took almost two years. "Dooley, who has worked at the Joint Forces Staff College since August 2010"
This kind of bigotry and crazy intolerance was tolerated for a year and half without getting stomped out. It's not like anyone could have mistaken this guy's views for something more sane. At the very least, the school's commandant should have vetted the guest lecturers.

[Broomstick]

I agree - taking a year and a half to two years to shut down this sort of bullshit is too long. Nonetheless, I am still glad it was done late rather than not at all.

[Aaron MkII]

Inertia, there's a lot of it in the military. Chances are that the College CO never knew of it either, though whatever passes as their standards cell should have raised an eyebrow.

[Akhlut]

I wonder how the paranoia level here stacks up against some of what was said about the Russians during the Cold War?

I'd say it goes far, far, far beyond that. Paranoia about the Soviets and the US engaging in nuclear warfare and utterly destroying the modern world and everything we hold dear was not implausible in the least. After all, each side was point thousands of nuclear weapons at each other and there were multiple times each side was a hair away from pulling the trigger. Cooler heads prevailed, obviously, because the people in charge of the nukes on each side said to themselves "no, the other side is composed of rational people who do not want to kill us" and therefore didn't launch the bombs (unlike, I'm sure, if these guys in the article were in charge 40 years ago).

Muslims, as a people, though? Not only no, but hell no. The worst that the most vile, terroristic of them (which represent a minor percentage overall) can do is less harmful than what the US does to itself every year (people killed by drunk drivers in the US in 2010: just over 10,000).

Or, for that matter, what bin Laden says about the US, or what the Russians said about the US during the Cold War, or, well... basically anything that motivates this idea of clashes of civilizations in which a handful of people hyperventilate and start screaming about how the whole thing is utterly evil.

Irony defined: people bitching about how dangerous, murderous, and evil an ideology is and advocating the preemptive mass-murder of 1.5 billion people to stop it.

[Pelranius]

Are military higher education professors also protected by tenure or not (that is, the ones on active duty)?

[Alkaloid]

Yeah, there is a considerable difference between thinking the Soviet Union posed a serious existential threat to the US, which can be done without assuming that every single Soviet Citizen personally wanted to murder all Americans everywhere, and assuming that every single Muslim on the planet, regardless of anything else, is an extremist and cannot possibly be a moderate simply by dint of being a Muslim and will attempt to destroy America given the opportunity. The first actually makes sense, the second is reason to have somebody sectioned.

[Aaron MkII]

Are military higher education professors also protected by tenure or not (that is, the ones on active duty)?

It's probably just a posting. They'll still be subject to the UCMJ.

[Simon_Jester]

And yeah, it got caught, but it took almost two years. "Dooley, who has worked at the Joint Forces Staff College since August 2010"
This kind of bigotry and crazy intolerance was tolerated for a year and half without getting stomped out. It's not like anyone could have mistaken this guy's views for something more sane. At the very least, the school's commandant should have vetted the guest lecturers.

Er, I may just be missing this in the article, but- when exactly did the disciplinary actions and crackdowns on Dooley's nonsense start? Did they only just start a few days ago? Or did they start several months ago, and only now is all this being reported on as a whistle-blower sort of thing?

Yeah, there is a considerable difference between thinking the Soviet Union posed a serious existential threat to the US, which can be done without assuming that every single Soviet Citizen personally wanted to murder all Americans everywhere, and assuming that every single Muslim on the planet, regardless of anything else, is an extremist and cannot possibly be a moderate simply by dint of being a Muslim and will attempt to destroy America given the opportunity. The first actually makes sense, the second is reason to have somebody sectioned.

[/quote]You don't understand. There were Americans who really believed that communism meant the Soviets had an ideological commitment to destroy America at the first available opportunity, for the sake of spreading "WORLD COMMUNISM." That was the paranoia.

Simply noting the Russian nuclear arsenal, which post-1965 or so had the potential to really hammer us? That's not paranoia.

Basically, if you read a lot of formative American papers on Cold War doctrine, starting with Kennan's long telegram, you see veins of this. Attitudes that can be... paraphrased or perhaps parodied as "No, the commies are NOT regular people, they're an evil indoctrinated zombie horde who'd sacrifice 90% of their population just to get 100% of ours!"

Acknowledging a physical threat is not the same as this kind of intense fear. The former just leads people to defend themselves. The latter leads to genocides and preemptive first strikes.

[Winston Blake]

Another example, which may help with understanding this mentality, is the attitude toward the Japanese in WWII. Japan's propaganda about the Japanese people being unafraid of death and glad to die for the Emperor, etc, was incredible. Al-Qaeda-style boasting is rather similar, with 'the Emperor' replaced with 'Allah'. In hindsight, taking such boasting seriously seems absurd. Yet at the time you had people geuinely believing that all Japanese-Americans were spies, and that Japan could not be defeated without total extermination.

When this war is over, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell. - Admiral Bill Halsey (December 7, 1941)

... as it turns out, 'moderate Japanese people' could exist after all, and years of being exposed to a 'clash of civilisations' mentality was what radicalised them.

[Simon_Jester]

The flip side of this is that the fanatics were also real- if Japan had been governed by basically sensible people, they would have been very seriously trying to get out of the war by late 1943; by 1944 and the fall of the Phillippines at the latest. The Japanese attitude toward surrender was such that it wasn't entirely unreasonable to wonder whether they'd be willing to give up at all.

(I've heard it speculated that this contributed to the decision not to target the Japanese government leadership with a nuclear attack on Tokyo- that if there was any hope of a Japanese surrender, there had to be a government left alive to surrender, which would actually be obeyed by the great bulk of the army including its fanatics)

[Lord Relvenous]

And yeah, it got caught, but it took almost two years. "Dooley, who has worked at the Joint Forces Staff College since August 2010"
This kind of bigotry and crazy intolerance was tolerated for a year and half without getting stomped out. It's not like anyone could have mistaken this guy's views for something more sane. At the very least, the school's commandant should have vetted the guest lecturers.

Er, I may just be missing this in the article, but- when exactly did the disciplinary actions and crackdowns on Dooley's nonsense start? Did they only just start a few days ago? Or did they start several months ago, and only now is all this being reported on as a whistle-blower sort of thing?

At the very least, it hasn't been that long.

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.

Recently is the key word. At the very most, I'd say recently could be stretched to two months. That's just a gut estimate. However, the fact that the investigation is still ongoing and that Dooley still has his position points toward this being a somewhat recent development.

At the very minimum, Dooley was allowed to espouse his views for 11 months: August 2010 to July 2011.

Hell, even the brass agrees that it went too long before being discovered.

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.

I'm not saying that this is a huge deal, because he was reported and he is being investigated. However, I do find it disappointing that his ass wasn't on the curb much earlier.

[Sea Skimmer]

Yeah, there is a considerable difference between thinking the Soviet Union posed a serious existential threat to the US, which can be done without assuming that every single Soviet Citizen personally wanted to murder all Americans everywhere, and assuming that every single Muslim on the planet, regardless of anything else, is an extremist and cannot possibly be a moderate simply by dint of being a Muslim and will attempt to destroy America given the opportunity. The first actually makes sense, the second is reason to have somebody sectioned.

A difference does exist in that thinking, yes, on paper. On the other hand the US military was building bioweapons, until Nixon ordered all such work destroyed, specifically intended to wipe out every single remote Russian village as B-52s contaminated vast swaths of landscape. This was intended to deal with the fact that most godless Soviet communists didn't live in easily nuked cities, but just simply had to be killed.

Japan though, they actually went far out of the way to met the US with fanaticism at numerous points in the warm, even long before suicide tactics were openly mandated and indeed, by the end they'd stopped even relying on purely volunteers for kamikaze units and simply ordered squadrons to convert. Combind that with a high rate of slaughtering Chinese in China, which makes any kind of 'let the Japanese wait until THEY want to surrender' argument completely nonsensical and the atomic bomb was just an option that had to be taken.