Posted on 01/06/2008 8:04:55 AM PST by 3AngelaD
LTC Joseph C. Myers, Army Advisor to the Air Command and Staff College, speaks out about the firing of Stephen Coughlin:
Stephen Coughlin is to my knowledge the only Islamic Law scholar on the Joint Staff...He is a lawyer by training and a reserve Military Intelligence Officer. His first interface with Islamic Law began in Pakistan where he was investigating and prosecuting an intellectual property rights case about 10 years ago. Reviewing Pakistani property rights law, he kept seeing footnoted references to the Quran and sharia law...
I have long argued and wondered why our military from senior leaders down to tactical level are so unread and unstudied on Islam, jihad in Islam, even the topic of terrorism. I have often contrasted this unconscionable wartime state of affairs, with the due diligence the US military showed since I was a cadet at West Point 30 years ago, where we lived, ate, slept and drank Soviet warfighting doctrine...it was the threat we oriented on and we developed our own doctrine around in the early 1980's. Can anyone show me where the equivalent of the Soviet threat doctrine series for the global war on terror is published? It has not been done.
Yet today we are in the process of prosecuting war, that from doctrinal perspective, we fundamentally do not understand...we have not studied Islamic Law and few have seen or heard of even the English translation of it that has been in print for years...This failure of intellectual preparation is a leadership failure...
Coughlin has briefed senior Marine Corps leaders and staff and has presented his thesis in various military educational venues...by all accounts the veil of ignorance is lifted for all but only a few who are afraid to face what Islamic Law, doctrinal Islam, says and means with respect to jihad and how it plays out across the Islamic world...
What Coughlin did was provide the epiphany in his over 300-page Joint Military Intelligence College thesis titled, "To Our Great Detriment: Ignoring What Extremists Say About Jihad" ...In short, he argues we have in fact intellectually pre-empted our military decision making process...Strategically we have failed to do that by substituting policy for military analysis, for substituting cliché for competent decision processes.
We began on September 12, 2001 with "Islam is a religion of peace," which soothed ideological sentiments but has failed us strategically, short-stopped the objective, sytstemic evaluation of the threat doctrine.
"Islam is a religion of peace" is not and cannot be the point of departure for competent military or intelligence analysis...it is in fact a logical flaw under any research methodology...you have stated the conclusion before you have done the analysis.
If one has studied the implication of the Holy Land Foundation trial discovery documents as I have, as a former DIA senior military analyst, and understanding as Bill Gertz has written in his book about the dismal record of our counter-intelligence one has to wonder and question the extent we are in fact penetrated in government and academia by foreign agents of influence, the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamists and those who truly in essence do not share our social compact.
The termination of Stephen Coughlin on the Joint Staff is an act of intellectual cowardice. We can only hope he can be positioned in his next venue to continue to educate our military for the fight we are in -- if we don't understand the war and the enemy we are engaged against we remain vulnerable and we cannot win. No victory in the war on terror.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
“What Coughlin did was provide the epiphany in his over 300-page Joint Military Intelligence College thesis titled, “To Our Great Detriment: Ignoring What Extremists Say About Jihad” ...In short, he argues we have in fact intellectually pre-empted our military decision making process...Strategically we have failed to do that by substituting policy for military analysis, for substituting cliché for competent decision processes.”
This is indeed a very disturbing developement and I have written about it in the other post about this firing...
BUT..in PB defense, over the two years, in all of his major speeches on terrorism, he has talked about listening to ‘what the jihadist say’ and then the media dutifully makes it hard to find the actual videos and audios that the terrorists are making so that the American people are kept in the dark!!
You’re partly right. Saudi $$ buys a lot of influence and political correctness picks up the slack.
In the dark except for YouTube and other spots on the Internet, where you can watch terrorist videos and listen to what they say to your heart’s content. Anyone who is really interested can get a full headache’s worth in 15 minutes. The media has bought into the “religion of peace” BS to the point of utterly failing to perform their assigned function. The stupidity is breath-taking.
It almost seems like a case of “how much can a mind hold?” In the case of infantry troops, training has to be doctrinaire, and cover the perceived threat. In order to develop these “TTP” tactics techniques and procedures takes time and is usually attended by a bureaucracy. This makes it rather difficult, outside the slightly more flexible special ops community, for a large military to be light on its feet. Twas ever thus.
This may be a case of mooslims in the Pentagon heading off quality thinkers in the war on terror, or it just may be the typical large military bureaucracy at its worst.
Either way, our military will most likely go into our first engagement with either the oriental dragon, or the bear using tactics from the war on terror, and will have to adjust back to large scale land warfare against fixed and mobile targets.
Top sends
“The media has bought into the “religion of peace” BS to the point of utterly failing to perform their assigned function. The stupidity is breath-taking.”
It is also breath-taking cowardice on the media’s part.
My guess is that LTC Meyers has already been passed over for Colonel several times and has been farmed out to the ACSC (on an AF, not Army base) to stay of out of the line of sight of the Army. That being said, he has probably destroyed what is left of his career with this editorial—it may be true, but it is borderline unprofessional for a military officer.
Maybe now that Coughlin is no longer employeed by our insanely stupid and inept gooberment his views and knowledge will get more public exposure.
Unbelievable.
Oh, I’m sure not only some of our elected royals are on the arab payroll but some of the heads of the msm too. As our former president proved, “important” Americans can be bought, cheaply. The chinese were shocked at how little money the expresident was bought for. They now have a great missle capability.
Shortly after 911 happened we were told islam was a religion of peace. It’s a shame that phrase was used to placate the feelings of immigrants from islamic countries.
“Islam is a religion of peace” is not and cannot be the point of departure for competent military or intelligence analysis...it is in fact a logical flaw under any research methodology...you have stated the conclusion before you have done the analysis.
I am drawn to this statement like flies to dead meat.
Why is the US government trying to hide islamic agenda?
Excellent article by LtCol Myers. Coughlin’s firing should be the first public indication of what many knew was going to happen. Now that General Pace has been forced out as CJCS, Admiral Mullins is running a kinder, gentler, politically-correct Pentagon that will soon come to resemble Foggy Bottom in uniforms. Bush’s nomination of Robert Gates was the first bad sign, and his shameful refusal to fight for General Pace’s second term was an ominous signal that Washington’s permanent ruling class is back in power.
And eventually led even the good hearted -- once they lived in the border areas, and saw year after year the results of the Indian terrorism, aka Indian raids on isolated hamlets and farms -- led even the good hearted to say "the only good Indian is a dead Indian."
An example -- L. Frank Baum, who wrote the wonderfully humane and celebratory of diversity books about Oz. When he moved to the border area in the west and became a newspaper editor he wrote:
The peculiar policy of the government in employing so weak and vacillating a person as General Miles to look after the uneasy Indians, has resulted in a terrible loss of blood to our soldiers .. a disgrace to the war department. There has been plenty of time for prompt and decisive measures, the employment of which would have prevented this disaster.IMO, Baum was wrong that we had "wronged them for centuries" -- why? Because the situation as Baum saw it in his time -- that the Indians were untamed and untamable, had been the experience of every generation prior.The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies future safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands. Otherwise, we may expect future years to be as full of trouble with the redskins as those have been in the past.
President Andrew Jackson -- a man who truly loved the Indians saw the thing much clearer. That the Indians could only be tolerable in isolated single tribe compounds -- reservations -- far removed from civilization, whereat by the sheer isolation that their cultural habit of terrorism against the isolated, or of shock murdering and kidnap raids against neighboring tribes, those habits would be impossible to carry out, and then hopefully over generations be forgotten and eventually their culture could be distilled of its murderous poisons.
These wars with Islam are so damn similar to our Indian wars. And those wars lasted 250 years. American versus Indian.
And just has it happened that many good-hearted people generation after generation cried out on behalf of the Indians and decried our harshness, failing to see that such harshness was the greater love, and the social necessity to stop murder and kidnap -- just as that misguided, short-visioned yet kind-seeming myopia continued and by continuing delayed the cure and prolonged the misery of all souls -- so to it is that today we have the same situation.
The clear-eyed are ignored and derided to our hazard, and to agonies and sadnesses that will be had on account of a doe-eyed diplomatic sentiment.
You tell me. I suspect it is the path of least resistance, and that, were the government to own up to what is happening, it would have to take steps — such as rounding up and deporting several thousand Mulsims — that would seriously upset our oil-supplying allies. I can understand that, but what I don’t get is why they have to be so craven and duplicitous about it, and why there is NO BALANCE in their approach. They are selling us down the river. The first person in power who said, “Islam is a religion of peace” and based all of our actions on that faulty assumption is a fool and ultimately a traitor to the people of this country and our Constitution.
True, but Generals Petraeus (USA) and Amos (USMC) started the motions for one with their jointly produced doctrinal publication, simply entitled Counterinsurgency.
Check out the Meeker massacre.
Excellent example.
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