Crooke: The Art of War: Different Thinking Systems
Alastair Crooke’s 4 April 2024 Al-Mayadeen column is absolutely fundamental in so many ways as its subtitle indicates:
Just as the West failed to understand Russia, and was taken by surprise, so it is that the White House firmly ignores the Biblical ‘End of Times’ dimension to the Israeli ‘way of thinking about war’.
And its point applies to much more than those two situations. It’s too important to not share widely and provides further important reasons to read the recent writings of Todd and Baud. Crooke has mentioned these issues before but they certainly need reiteration as too few are seeing the dynamics expressed. Currently, the Western Narrative appears to be shifting, but is it really? IMO, it’s not in reality; it’s all cosmetic—Keeping up Appearances. As usual, Crooke’s column is short:
Jacques Baud, a Swiss military officer with a long history of studying ‘Ways of Thinking’ about War (from Warsaw Pact to NATO -- to which he was seconded by his government), has written a new book -- The Russian Art of War: How the West Led Ukraine to Defeat. His book theme is essentially: Others understand the West, better than the West understands ‘Them’.
Baud writes that the fundamental reason for the West having the ‘blinkers on’ is “the result of an approach we have already seen in waves of terrorist attacks — the adversary is so stupidly demonized that we refrain from understanding his way of thinking. As a result, we are unable to develop strategies, articulate our forces, or even equip them for the realities of war”.
“In the West, we tend to focus on [the immediate] moment and try to see how it might evolve. We want an immediate response to the situation we see - today. The idea that “from the understanding of how the crisis arose comes the way to resolve it” is totally foreign to the West. In September 2023, an English-speaking journalist even pulled out the “duck test” for me: “if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.” In other words, all the West needs to assess a situation is an image that fits their prejudices. Reality is much more subtle than the duck model ...”.
“The reason the Russians are better than the West in Ukraine is that they see the conflict as an [organic] process; whereas we see it as a series of separate discrete actions. The Russians see events as a film. We see them as photographs. They see the forest, while we focus on the trees. That is why we place the start of the Ukraine conflict on February 24, 2022 - or the start of the Palestinian conflict on October 7, 2023. We ignore the contexts that bother us and wage conflicts we do not understand. That is why we lose our wars …”.
Baud, in his book, gives an excellent account of the military evolution derived from this western ‘thinking system’. Nonetheless, the explanation is somehow incomplete. Yes, the ‘Others’ do have an ‘organic’ and ‘process’-linked understanding of crises, yet there is more to it than that.
The French philosopher, Emmanuel Todd, in La Défaite, suggests that -- with a US in constant revolt against its own past – the West has fallen to nihilism and to “a breath-taking dogmatism across the spectrum of Western élites - a kind of ideological solipsism preventing them from seeing the world - as it actually is”.
I recall having once asked former Secretary Madeline Albright why she forbade Yasser Arafat from consulting various Islamic authorities on the radical US proposal to divide the sovereignty under Al-Aqsa Mosque horizontally, so that the topsoil sovereignty would stay with the Islamic Waqf, but the ‘beneath’ would be Israel’s sovereignty. She said firmly that it was a matter of principle at the US State Department to ignore all religious dimensions – and to remain secular.
There are other examples: Dick Cheney insisted that all that was needed in geo-politics was to understand ‘the underlying nature of people’ (as viewed from the Western perspective). Facts and history did not matter. As Baud has noted, an image that fits with prejudice is what matters.
The consequence is not confined to that of failing to see the world ‘as it actually is’, but represents an ideological teleology of refusing to see it ‘as it is’.
Baud writes at length why the West has been systematically surprised by Russia in Ukraine, and observes how this deep-seated prejudice gives Russia the advantage of surprise -- to the point “where the Western narrative led Ukraine to totally underestimate Russian capabilities, which was a major factor in its defeat”.
The key point is that Baud’s insights apply not only to the implementation of military action, as such. They are also applicable as a ‘thinking system’ to mis-construing geo-politics, too.
Just as the West failed to understand Russia, and was taken by surprise, so it is that the White House firmly ignores the Biblical ‘End of Times’ dimension to the Israeli ‘way of thinking about war’, preferring to stick with its ‘liberal-secular’ image of "Israel".
So too, the West refuses to understand the Palestinian and Resistance opposition to Zionism, and as Baud observes, “it is an approach we have already seen in waves of terrorist attacks - the adversary is so stupidly demonized that we refrain from understanding his way of thinking”.
The West thus slips back into old default colonial tactical responses to what they observe (i.e. towards the Iraq’s Hash’d A-Shaabi, or Ansarallah in Yemen), viewing them merely as ‘rebel’ or ‘mutinous’ disconnected eruptions, to be put down with a firm smack of firepower -- i.e. as discontinuous, tactical events.
There is then, no real enquiry into the reasons for these irritating neo-colonial irruptions, nor any interest in whether there is history to them.
Jacques Baud concludes: As a result of this approach, our frustrations are translated by unscrupulous media into narratives that both feed hatred and increase the sense of vulnerability. [Bolded Italics My Emphasis]
These two old regimes—the West and their Zionist spawn—must be rejected and put into a sleep so deep they never ever awaken again as they’re antithetical for Human evolution to a state where global harmony can be established that enables Humanity to face and solve the primary issues that confront its existence. There is no way to know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been. Russians are very well aware of their past and how/why they’re in conflict today—and their leaders don’t mislead them on any of that, which is why Russia’s so tight nationally today and will continue to be so for quite some time—maybe to the end of the century, well beyond Team Putin’s reign. China and much of the Global Majority are in a similar condition. The dysfunctional nations and peoples are those living on myths and magical thinking that allows for the construction of a false reality. They’re blind to the fact that they’re sawing the limb they’re sitting on from the tree holding them up because they think gravity doesn’t exist for them, that somehow they’re immune from natural forces and their reality.
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"... Russians are very well aware of their past and how/why they’re in conflict today—and their leaders don’t mislead them on any of that, which is why Russia’s so tight nationally today and will continue to be so for quite some time—maybe to the end of the century, well beyond Team Putin’s reign. China and much of the Global Majority are in a similar condition. The dysfunctional nations and peoples are those living on myths and magical thinking that allows for the construction of a false reality..."
How true that is!
The imperialists cannot understand Russia and consistently underestimate its capacities (take " a gas station with nukes" as an example) because they always believe their own propaganda. When they had installed Yeltsin in power they completely forgot how amazing were the social, cultural and economic achievements of the Soviet Union and the transformation it had produced in the ramshackle extractive Russian Empire which it replaced.
Instead the "West", despite knowing that it was propaganda of its own manufacture, believed in the myth of a terrorised population trembling at the approach of the GPU in the early hours, a factory system based on slave labour incapable of producing basic consumer goods (though it could come up with Sputniks and Space stations- a contradiction that they would attribute to the Soviet obsession with war, aggression and threats.) The Red Army-which marched hundreds of kilometres on high morale and faith in the rectitude of its cause- was seen as a cleverly calibrated slave hierarchy in which commissars played a magical role.
Evrerything that they knew/know about the Russian past is wrong-and demonstrably so. The rest of the world-much of which has fond memories of Russian assistance in national liberation struggles and Soviet treatises on equality and human dignity- has a very different view of the Russians as the imperialists are beginning to find out.
The way that they rationalise is instructive: is one of the reasons for China's strength massive popular support for the regime? Or is it that China garners support by promising its people that they will rule the world? The imperialist mind has no doubts-it must be the latter.
In the case of Russia despite the graphically presented evidence of a popular election victory, Putin's grip on power is still said to be tenuous, largely because he doesn't fall in with US plans. Which it assumes every sentient Russian (the likes of Pussy Riot and Navalny) supports.
And then there is the Empire's 'mini-me' Israel which has swallowed its own racist, supremacist propaganda to such an extent that it not only cannot understand how vulnerable it is to revolution among its slaves but it cannot believe that Europeans and Americans-as Israelis are- can sincerely sympathise with its victims. When it holds a lynching it expects everyone to enjoy the party, bring a bottle and watch from a nearby vantage point, leave with trophies like the ears of a torture victim or looted lingerie. They can't understand that they are criminals offensive in the eyes of the world- they are having a ball."Lighten up! World!" No wonder that they can only explain million strong marches of protest in terms of anti-semitism. To them racism is natural and normal- to pretend otherwise is to be seeking an excuse for hatred.
After a lifetime of exposure to the 'West's' non-stop obfuscating of all historical and contemporary factors that may undermine, contradict or expose, the 'official' narratives, I find the premise that this is a consequence of ineptitude and ignorance, willful or otherwise, to be as disingenuous as the relentless primary obfuscation.
Once a party is outed as a predictable and constant prevaricator, why should anyone believe the excuses of ignorance, blindness, ideology, naivete, civilizational character, etc.. as rational explanations or excuses for the promotion of consistently false narratives.
Reminds me of the scorpion and frog fable. Stop making excuses for the scorpion. If you want to understand the rational of the so-called 'west' look no further than the M.O. of the average criminal mind.
It is all theatre to achieve ends, facts be damned. The official mouthpieces making all sorts of noise know exactly when they are lying. By making lots of false/meaningless statements, they bury the facts (i.e., signal) in an avalanche of noise. We need to stop parsing the noise for nuggets of truth, you will never reach a rational conclusion without accepting the fact that we are all being played by the Scorpion.