The termination of Stephen Coughlin on the Joint Staff is an act of intellectual cowardice

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.

Interesting views. Thanks for the time to post.

Does this mean we should have the children play ‘cowboys and Indians’....errr.. Cowboys and Muslims - nowadays? Hardy to say, but we need to do something to retain what is left of “American culture”.

We fought the Japs (yup, Japs, as in 1940) and to make lasting peace, had to basically destroy the Japans culture as it existed from 1920 or so to wars end. For Germany, we utterly destroyed the country and reformed the Govt at gunpoint.

As for the Muzzies, hard to say - the ones we are fightling really are not a State, and in many cases, not even really a Nation - more of a Tribe. That is going to make things difficult to say theleast.

Recent events in Africa show how quickly tribes trump civilization..

The Arabs have ever been tribal, never having a "state". Other cultures under the crescent of Islam have had states that unified tribes -- Iran going back millennia. Iraq. Turkey. The Indonesian variants I am not that familiar with.

The groups in sub-saharan Africa, and in the Horn of Africa are tribal, although in the Horn there is some ancient state heritage. The heritage of those in Bosnia is state-like, and in Albania more tribal/familial.

Look to Turkey for how some made Islam work beyond the tribal -- under the Ottomans, kidnapped outsiders were drafted as children to be Janissaries -- the Imperial Guard and state police. This precluded tribal grudges and vendettas. The Turkish ruler in the early 20th century, Attaturk, enforced a form of secularism in dress and social habits, attempting to restrain, defang, Islam to the Mosque. No more Janissaries. An experiment. Maybe it has worked. My guess is Attaturk was right -- for the Turks.

General MacArthur made sure Japan learned its lesson, and defeated the Emperor, undid the Emperor worship. Without that timely spiritual repair all the firebombings of Tokyo , or nuking of cities would not have kept the warlike Imperial spirit from reawakening in Japan. Such Timeliness may be most important -- just has it is timely for the blacksmith to strike the metal when read-hot, and useless just seconds later.

Germany was beat on the ground, ground down, their war machine was annihilated, the citizens left begging with gold coins for a loaf of bread, and then nursed by us back to some life. But we had no MacArthur for Germany, they are perhaps unlike Japan, mortally wounded, just lingering long. Birth rates. Their spirit is dead, imo.

How do we defeat the Arab Muslims -- the tribalists of Islam? Only when we realize they are mortally dangerous even when appearing peaceful and friendly if they have any resources beyond barest sustenance. And even then their poisonous flame is not extinguished, but ready to flare up or to start poisonous fires anywhere in the world.

Like in the example of General Sherman and thr destruction of great buffalo herds perhaps we have to take their resources away -- that is the oil. Like President Jackson, perhaps we have to remove them from direct contact with civilization, impounded in isolated reservations, where their scholars and imans can continue their vile studies of extremist Islam, but to little effect on us.

Maybe even Dubai is a way. Give the bastard his easy riches and vices as long has he lives in it, with in, dominated by it. But we can't allow a Saudi Arabia or a mullah-run Iran, of both easy riches and sharia. They are the wells of living poison.

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