unconventional thinking

insurgency works

There's a disconnection however that isn't applied here. Winning a war of attrition and effort through asymmetrical tactics and guerrilla warfare does not automatically translate toward the goals that the war is supposedly fought for. Or at least, there are still different asymmetrical tactics that need to be followed to make the post-war phase successful. Lawrence of Arabia is justly famous for driving the Ottoman empire to distraction with a band of nomadic tribesmen to compose his forces. The post-war phase however does not conclude with an independence or equality among nations, it basically just resulted in the trade from Ottoman control to British and French controls. The same problem can be applied to the current Palestianian situation, with guerrilla tactics working more "effectively" than conventional warfare had against Israeli forces. But they haven't resulted in any clear legitimacy in the post war sense, mostly because there's this unwritten rule that engaging in asymmetric warfare is a cardinal sin in international politics. Politics has its own rules that can be different, but act to reinforce those of war itself. Gladwell brings up Washington's insistence on fighting actual battles when it was clearly more effective to tire the British out with untrained and ill-equipped troops using guerrilla warfare (Indian style fighting). But what worked in the post-war phase here was in part continuing to pursue a sort of asymmetry in politics. Americans essentially persisted in guerrilla tactics by abandoning centuries of divine right law and permanent aristocracy rigidly imposed by birth rights and obtuse legal codes and experimenting with something new. And they got away with it basically because they'd won the war by being somewhat unconventional to begin with. Everyone (in as far as the British and many in the French establishment were concerned) basically assumed that what was being tried was doomed to fail anyway so why not let them do it and demonstrate it would. The same situation in Arabia, Iraq, and Syria later presented itself and the British and French allowed the Arabs to crumble and fail, "requiring" the international restoration of order through the imperial status quo (just a different set of flags). Why did that fail, and in many respects continues to, when Washington and the first Americans succeeded (albeit with some false starts)?

I'd think that would be just as interesting a question as watching how Lawrence marched a bunch of nomads around the desert and prevailed in bleeding out the Turkish armies opposing him. Perhaps the question of timing helps here. Americans and their failings took months to hear of and months more to react to by the status quo Europeans. This was far too much trouble to be concerned with measures of control in the first place I suppose. But by the early 20th century, unrest and revolt in the Trans-Jordan area could be heard of and acted upon within days. There was a substantial global and imperial means to both gather information and respond before anything really trans-formative, or perhaps dangerous, happened. The same rules did not apply some 50 years later after the collapse of these imperial forces and exhaustion from a second war. The French no longer possessed the means to outlast and crush rebellion from their Asian colonies. And this showed when the Vietnamese for example managed to change tactics and bleed out the occupying force. It's possible the same "rules" will apply very soon to American forces, and it's a world we should be ready to respond to with something other than conventional tactics. Or we should expect some trans-formative, some perhaps dangerous, things to happen.

One should also wonder if we've already passed that invisible line in the sand. Not just because we watched planes crash into buildings, or even prior to that, watched a country we had been opposing for decades crumble into something new without any idea that it was about to happen. But because our leaders decided that the means of resistance to change was to abandon some of our most fundamental rights and treat terrorists with the same level of impudence that they acted with. Terrorists are justly considered by any legal system as scum, once convicted. What we adopted over the past years was an ancient (medieval would be the best term) means of attempting to impose the "truth" upon others through violence. I don't think that's what I would suggest as unconventional thinking, partly because such means have never worked. And partly because such means are a violation of our own rules. Our sense of decency which is so offended by acts of inconsiderate violence should likewise be offended when we ourselves cross those lines. There's a way to be unconventional and still be decent. There are always ways to "cheat" the system without being a cheater, as Gladwell demonstrated. I should think it's a lot easier to look at ourselves in the mirror that way at least than to have to tell our progeny that they only have what freedoms they have, such as they'd have left, because we beat and abused a few thousand people into telling us what we wanted to hear.