Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change

Fighting Identity

Praeger Security International Advisory Board Board Cochairs Loch K. Johnson, Regents Professor of Public and International Affairs, School of Public and International Affairs, University of Georgia (USA) Paul Wilkinson, Professor of International Relations and Chairman of the Advisory Board, Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, University of St. Andrews (UK)

Members Anthony H. Cordesman, Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy, Center for Strategic and International Studies (USA) Thérèse Delpech, Director of Strategic Affairs, Atomic Energy Commission, and Senior Research Fellow, CERI (Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques), Paris (France) Sir Michael Howard, former Chichele Professor of the History of War and Regis Professor of Modern History, Oxford University, and Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History, Yale University (UK) Lieutenant General (Ret.) Claudia J. Kennedy, former Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Department of the Army (USA) Paul M. Kennedy, J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History and Director, International Security Studies, Yale University (USA) Robert J. O’Neill, former Chichele Professor of the History of War, All Souls College, Oxford University (Australia) Shibley Telhami, Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development, Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland (USA) Fareed Zakaria, Editor, Newsweek International (USA)

Fighting Identity Sacred War and World Change

Michael Vlahos

The Changing Face of War James Jay Carafano, Series Editor

PRAEGER SECURITY INTERNATIONAL Westport, Connecticut • London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Vlahos, Michael, 1951Fighting identity : sacred war and world change / Michael Vlahos. p. cm. — (Changing face of war, ISSN 1937–5271) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–313–34845–7 (alk. paper) 1. Strategic culture—United States. 2. War—Religious aspects. 3. National characteristics, American. 4. War—Moral and ethical aspects—United States. 5. United States— Military policy. 6. United States—Military relations—Middle East. 7. United States—Foreign public opinion, Muslim. I. Title. U21.2.V58 2009 201'.7273—dc22 2008033678 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2009 by Michael Vlahos All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2008033678 ISBN: 978–0–313–34845–7 ISSN: 1937–5271 First published in 2009 Praeger Security International, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To lost friends: Roger Angus Brooks and Jon Oliver Koslow How poor the world feels in your absence!

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction How I Came to Write This

1

Chapter 1

Idea

6

Chapter 2

Identity

27

Chapter 3

War

50

Chapter 4

Method

75

Chapter 5

Fieldwork

86

Chapter 6

Them

113

Chapter 7

Us

146

Chapter 8

Fit

172

Conclusion

Where I Came Out

201

Notes

211

Bibliography

231

Index

239

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Acknowledgments

This meditation represents something of an experiment. I realized that I could only truly approach America’s conflict with nonstate actors—so passionately sprung on 9/11—by reframing war itself as perhaps society’s central ritual of identity and the sacred. This in turn meant rethinking our own national narrative and positioning it right alongside the sacred histories of our enemies. Going big like this can quickly turn experiment into risk. Hence my gratitude grows greater when thinking of those who supported me, and who even encouraged me to take that risk. First and foremost, my gratitude goes to Ron Luman, who told me straight out that I should write a book, and then made it possible; and to Duncan Brown, who offered the logistic support for me to conclude this campaign. To John Benedict, who spent many long hours reviewing my manuscript, only then to rescue me from more than a few excesses; and to Rose Schmitt, who generously unearthed so many surface imperfections with her practiced eye. To Lois Archibald and Christina Pikas, who without hesitation delivered, again and again, the fruits of modern scholarship through their web of interlibrary loan and access online: they made all research possible. To Rear Admiral Phil Wisecup, USN, who in the midst of command duties let me test out scores of wayward notions on him, before I ever cemented them into this mosaic. To my editors Adam Kane, who held me up and saw me through, and Nicole Azze, who brought me smoothly to the finish. But also to my stalwart editing team—Lisa Connery (project manager), Sunil Nepali (sponsoring editor), and Eric Tucker (copyeditor)—they marshaled empathy and grace to keep me Chicago-style honest while also understanding my vocal rhythms and cadences. Thank you!

x

Acknowledgments

To the editors of Military Review, who took their own risks as Army officers, boldly placing my early idea as a marquee article. To Grand Cru and Restaurante La Union for always offering a constructive editorial milieu when it was needed! To the inspiration of a man I have never met but who changed my life, Peter Brown: he turned the world I knew on its head, only to set it right again! Finally, and most important, to my beloved wife Kelley, without whom none of this would appear to you now.

Introduction

How I Came to Write This

The bull will rise up in fear from what is coming to him, and will leave his land and settle in the city Idols. The master of the East will settle down, sickened, and the bull will rise up between the two rivers . . . The western king is roused to anger, and the nations will stretch out their necks. When tidings of the West are on the point of scattering the dust upon the East, then the bull will send armies against the western king, with him leading them, and they will meet him face to face and be revealed. From the Apocalypse of Weeks1

Apocalyptic was the most popular literary genre of late antiquity, perhaps because shaken and uncertain times are also times of immense collective expectation. People yearn for revelation, and in Greek, A ´ ποκα´ λυψις is just that, literally “the lifting of the veil.” That crystalline morning, September 11, 2001, unfolded as from antique apocalypse. Self-styled Ghazi—“Holy Warriors”—passionately steeped in ancient Muslim apocalyptic created the event. We responded with our own brand of American apocalyptic: from sacred national narrative both messianic and millenarian. For me it was a personal “lifting of the veil.” The world I had known ended as I watched the second plane hit the second tower and, from my back deck, heard the Pentagon boom. This essay is the revelation that began on that day. Making it clear has taken seven years of interpretation. What does revelation tell me? First, that war is a celebration of the sacred. It is the liturgy of identity. What makes this recognition so elusive is that we narrowly consign the sacred to “church” in thought and conversation. We miss the bigger conversation. It is not that war is religion: rather, war and religion both represent ritual and transcendental vessels for identity. They serve true meaning in life, which is our

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Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change

realization of self, through the transcendence deep belonging brings. Belonging takes many forms. Sociologists point to “primary” or kin-identity—family, extended family, and clan. But in advanced societies there is also something like a sacred identity. It has many and often interchangeable anchors. Some are called tribe and nation and some thicken the cable of belonging with the vision of a universally gathered humanity. This is not blood-kin-identity but rather “big” identity, its collective senses infused with the sacred. Hence American identity is a form of religious nationalism. It is the sacred identity of a people, a society that promises transcendence for its members and, at the end of history, for all humanity. Metaphorically it is a river beyond time, past to present to future, flowing and receiving its brother and sister citizens.2 This is the identity that so willingly sacrifices in war. War establishes a story cycle that can be ritualized and thus repeated. It is the serial celebrating of a larger national sacred narrative. Thus war contains the same elements as church liturgy. What I saw in fraternal fighter groups—the Ghazi we went after in Afghanistan—was their reenactment of Islam’s sacred story cycle. Their fighting brand was marginal to most Muslims, yet there it was: jacking into and lighting up a vision vicariously celebrated now by hundreds of millions. The United States’ invasion of Iraq only reified this sacred story cycle of resistance and deliverance. Reified and legitimated. Now fighters included not simply wild-eyed Ghazi and uncouth Takfiri but also leaders of Muslim communities in a civic insurgency. It was this new struggle of communities that made the fight truly legitimate. So wider patterns of mythic struggle emerged. I saw Muslim identities rising through community resistance—from the Somali Courts Union to Chechen “Tigers” to Baluch guerilleros to a renewing Taliban to Hizbu’llah in South Lebanon to the Sadrist Jaish al Mahdi. This was not “terrorism” but rather a series of prospective passages, and what once might have been observed as local discontents were now being carried away into a new grand framing of Islam’s sacred cycle of resistance and deliverance. These are not simply emerging societies: they are emerging identities seeking to realize themselves through resistance and war. War is the maker of identity through sacred narrative fulfilled. Narrative is not an explainer alone—it is also a maker. But this call to piety and transcendence has a practical by-product: fighting effectiveness. The fighters—Civil Militia and Wilderness Ghazi alike3—were taking on and immobilizing Western forces. Watching nonstate actors fighting us made me wonder whether this ability to marshal piety and energy into military effectiveness was new. What about the lore of original Islam in late antiquity and Islam’s great revival at the end of the Middle Ages? I took my time machine back to those times. But my transporter—there is only this rudimentary model—even at its best reveals only as “through a glass darkly.” We can see tiny shards of light: really only human afterglow. They come

Introduction: How I Came to Write This

3

as fragments of script on papyrus or vellum or as artifacts lovingly exhumed from clay. But they speak to lost human things with aching intensity and richness. What do we get when we gather this faint human starlight? What is history’s received night sky? Ours is not the first globalization. Greco-Roman late antiquity and the High Middle Ages preceded us. Their oikoumenoi (“known worlds”) were as globally integrated—and mixed—as our own. Globalization times are their own times: they have a distinct human character and coherence. They span centuries, so we can call them epochs rather than simply eras. But no matter how alien their artifacts, customs, mores, and technology appear to us, their rhythms are resonantly and universally human. Globalization times are also transformation times. Old rhythms of life are upended and identities stripped, tossed up, and remixed. New human patterns emerge and new formulations are negotiated: among societies and states, and within identity. The world going into “global” is not the world coming out. Globalization is history’s meat grinder—of cultural creative destruction. But creative leveling also births creative response. This is where the mysterious negotiation between continuity and change occurs, where the shockingly “new” embraces the “old” at heart. Transformation is necessarily syncretistic.4 We like the thought that our globalization—beginning around 1800—has been a transformation time. Yet the thought is appealing to us only as long as it preserves our own sacred narrative. But earlier globalizations tell us that transformations share inescapable aspects we might not like: First, new identities rise from the wreckage. They do so as nonstate actors, which reigning establishments cannot suppress. Also, unaccountably, these pathetic entities often challenge even established system leaders and cannot be put down. Second, pacing nonstate resistance is the viral rise of new ideas. These “ideas” are also contra-establishment, and established authorities cannot effectively suppress them. Often old elites eventually migrate to their cause. New ideas mean new consciousness. Third, the biggest established states, the system leader(s), struggle vainly against the erosion of their authority. Even the most energetic or draconian responses often only seem to promote the very challenges they fear. Moreover they come to believe that preserving authority means making what is new and unlicensed: existential threat. Thus in looking at them, I came back at last to us. In its 9/11 War the United States embarked on a flamboyant enterprise: the “transformation” of the Muslim world.5 But it was not a mobilized national enterprise like World War II. Rather it was a singular, if prodigious, state-only enterprise. Moreover its chosen field of decision was Iraq, the classical heart of Islam. We staged the grandest opera to remake the world, but also centrally to set up our own transcendence in history. We achieved our apocalyptic goal, but not as we had planned. Our ensuing and intimate relationship with the Muslim world was liberating—at least in forcefully

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Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change

opening up that world to new things. But they turned out not to be our things, nor old things, but things still taking form. We also unwittingly threw into question our cherished sacred narrative—the very object of the war itself. We altered, perhaps irrevocably, the contours of American world authority; but we certainly undercut one of its essential symbols: that of “eternal victory.”6 We are a diminished idea today. These unfolding dynamics are the natural if not inevitable workings of world relationships in a mature, late-stage globalization epoch. Raging new identities, a system leader losing authority, a palpable shifting of fears and expectations as the larger world system slowly transforms—all this speaks to ancient patterns of human change. Yet how can we see this when our “seeing” equipment is tweaked and customized for another narrative, the one that was expected and announced and then did not happen? This essay is my alternative glass. So be forewarned: this is a lens with a very different prism—and rather than just an alternative thesis, it also asserts an alternative way of thinking. This essay is a necessary exercise in holistic thinking—confronting the interconnectedness of numberless human fragments. Necessary because this essay is principally about war and fighting—and there is no knowledge guild more sealed-off from human interconnectedness than military and security studies. Modernity has made war something apart from rather than of. However central to our lives, it is still alien and outside of our thoughts. War is not just the property of a knowledge guild but also of a practitioner guild, and it is jealously guarded. This essay is about how deeply war is intertwined in what it means to be human—in belonging and in collective identity, in the shared rituals of society, in the ongoing negotiation that represents relationships between societies everywhere. War is existentially embedded in the cultural frameworks and consciousness of humanity. Continuing to sequester our war enterprises in privileged subcultural lockboxes robs us of a piece of our own humanity. But also in our willingness to be deprived of their content, in our ignorance of them, we become blind to what we do and even who we are. To unlock the deep connections between war, identity, and the sacred—and to suggest how these are shaping our world—I must try to tie together scattered discussions that are rarely—if ever—enjoined. Here is my plan. The first chapter sketches my idea. How do war, identity, and the sacred link up and intertwine? How does new identity emerge so strong in globalization times? How do we unwittingly work to help realize the very rising identities we fight? The second is about identity. What is that collective identity we can call “sacred”? What are the precise attachment points between identity and the sacred? How did ritualized belonging evolve? Where is sacred identity—“big identity”— moving today?

Introduction: How I Came to Write This

5

The third is about war. How does war frame the sacred? How does warnarrative become a liturgy of identity? How does battle’s ritual reconsecration become a collective transcendence? How are war-narratives over time woven into mythic story-cycle, so familiar to almost all advanced societies—especially our own? The fourth, “Method,” is for those who want to critically review my suppositions, my sources, and my synthesis. Its existential question: How can we detach ourselves from the bonds of our own belief system: the iron rod of phenomenology and the iron rod of history? How do we go beyond measurement and homily? Here I offer an alternative framework. The fifth is about using history—free of homily and focused on culture—as practical fieldwork for comparing changing cultures. How do we compare very different societies in very different historical milieu? How can we be sure we are prudently comparing what can be appropriately paired, rather than simply seeking out (again) “history’s lessons”? The sixth is about them, the nonstate actors that “heap us” and “task us.” What amniotic sea offers up humanity’s rising identities? What new réalités do they portend? How do we separate the prospect of authentic societies as full-time future humanity from our fears of the waning of the nation-state? And what is the elemental power in their narrative? The seventh is about us—how our band of tribal military identities has transformed, putting national narrative in question. Is American identity entering another metamorphosis? Does the Tribal Confederacy of Defense represent a new American identity? Where and how might an alternative nation realize itself? America has had bifurcated identities before, but what happens now to our national narrative? The eighth chapter, “Fit,” is about how America and its “enemy” dovetail in perfect relationship. How did “Gods of War” practice become the helpmate of enemy realization? How is its changeling, counterinsurgency, making this fit more seamlessly inescapable: as we become more comfortable living it? Are we becoming ever more existentially tied to our enemy? I will tell you at the end where I come out.

1

Chapter

Idea

How do war, identity, and the sacred link up and intertwine? How does new identity emerge so strong in globalization times? How do we unwittingly work to help realize the very rising identities we fight?

VISIGOTHS AT THE FRIGIDUS The Romans called this river the Frigidus, in a place we now call Bosnia. The time: autumn, A.D. 394. Two emperors are at war, with the world in the balance—where the armies of the West must meet the armies of the East. The West has the better general, but the East has fighters with more heart: Alaric’s Gothic tribal militia. These are armies in true imperial tradition, in a yet undiminished Roman world. But to our eyes the scene would look all wrong. We might gasp, “But these look like medieval armies, in their barbaric pants and spangelhelms and big round shields, and with the Western armies’ stronghold a wagon laager!” But the Visigoths feel right at home. They are perhaps no more than what we would call a militia, but they fight like trained shock troops. Again and again on the first day they storm the laager, taking enormous losses. They become the decisive force behind Theodosius’s miraculous defeat of the Western armies—reuniting the empire.1 But in the aftermath of victory, the Goths do not get the reward they feel they deserve. Soon they take on the imperial state itself, raiding and threatening, pushed and beaten but always pushing back for the next thirty years—like an insurgency in the heart of the Western Empire. Rome contains them only when the great emperor’s sister Galla Placidia is wed to the Gothic leader, and Visigoths are finally, as they always wanted, made Roman in Aquitaine. As Roman foederatii they become loyal and even steadfast allies for the life of the western Roman State. They were truly the empire’s very own nonstate actors. “The Goths themselves

Idea

7

were created by the pressures of life on the Roman frontier, and the whole of their social and military history . . . developed in the shadow of Rome.”2

ALMOGHAVER SCAVENGERS Fast-forward nine centuries. A ruthlessly extravagant man, Roger de Flor, seals the deal with Andronicus II, Basileus of a much shrunken Romaioi. Roger’s soldier-company—7,000 Catalans, women and children too—set out against the Turks. Nothing can stop this skirmishing, ferocious light infantry. The Byzantines are losing Asia Minor, and the Catalans are their last hope. Romaioi cannot stop the Turks, but the Almoghavers are simply unstoppable. They fight in underhanded ways. They creep up, they rush, and they ambush: they are fearless and they rampage through a Turk-infested Roman Asia like a fourteenth-century blitzkrieg. But they do it for themselves, like a rogue army among fearful Romaioi. Are they fighting Turks or looting Byzantines? Nor is there enough gold in the Byzantine treasury to keep feeding them. The bad-boy Catalans throw it back at an emptypocket state, and then it gets worse. A giant brawl near Constantinople—in which hundreds of Catalan fighters are killed—starts an empire-wide, seven-year rampage that almost brings down Constantinople itself.3 Amazingly this threat to the Byzantine world is from just a couple thousand fighters. But larger Roman armies cannot defeat them. The Almoghavers are in no position to even take a city, but they are a massively disruptive force. Eventually astute Byzantine generalship shepherds them south to Frankish lands, where, besting proud but stupid French knights, they can carve out a principality of their own: the Duchy of Athens. We know these people. They may be separated from us by centuries. But we still know them or people just like them: we know so many who look and act chillingly like them. Our government calls them many things—terrorists or killers or radical extremists—perhaps even suggesting something almost less than human. But our government also has another name for them. It is a name both more useful and more revealing of what they really mean to us. The name is “nonstate actor.” In contrast to the “evil” sound bites of a hundred presidential speeches, this moniker sounds almost clinical. But however our government describes them, we still know them. We know them from watching them on TV. We have seen what these nonstate actors have done—from Colombia to Somalia to Iraq to Afghanistan Think of the Goths and the Almoghavers as two snapshots in history. These frames show us two nonstate actors seizing the greatest states of their day by the throat and taking what they want. How can a people, or even just a group of people, defeat established states? How can they possibly bring even great empires to a standstill? And what about today?

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Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change

GROZNY KESSELSCHLACT Kesselschlact means “cauldron battle, practiced on a grand scale in the NaziSoviet apocalypse.” After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Muslim societies of the Caucasus become restive. The Chechens actually rebel. The new Russians come down hard. They mass huge forces to take Grozny, the Chechen capital. Then, on New Year’s Eve 1994, they drive into the city. Not yet, not so fast. In fact, the Chechens let them drive in. They let them get to the center of the city. This is not a big city, just a couple hundred thousand people on the Soviet edge of nowhere. But at the center is a concrete-numbing, five-year plan built-up area—a perfect place for a cauldron battle—and there, the former Soviets—now just young draftees—give them the opportunity. A swirling network of fighters with just small arms and RPGs destroy the high-temple Soviet armored punch. Their T-62s and APCs are taken out in a 60-hour fight, and those sent to rescue them are also savaged. A thousand Russian draftees die that night. A video set to the DDT’s “Dead City Christmas” rolls the 60-hour horror in 8 mm.4 The last chorus: I can’t look for the answer where each question means a bullet, where every step is a millimeter. Time: five cigarettes. The dead city, its empty eyes, Is with me. And I was firing blanks, I was alive yesterday.5 In revenge, the Russians lay down everything they have on Chechnya. It does no good. The Chechens retake their capital and defeat the Russians once again. Only since then has the iron rod of Russia been able to force this Muslim society prostrate. How? There are only a couple million Chechens. But in return for the stain inflicted on Russian honor, over 12 percent of Chechen society has been assassinated since. But still they resist.

SHI’A FORT VAUX Fort Vaux in its agony held out against Germans, against all odds, at Verdun in 1916. When the Israeli army invades Shi’a Lebanon, they declare the town of Bint Jbail the capital of the resistance. Almost as soon as they enter, Gal Hirsch, commander of the Galilee division, declares, “We have achieved full control over Bint Jbail.” But this is not to be. The Shi’a fighters are ready in their deep network of tunnels, prepared long before the war. The Israeli infantry enters, and suddenly grenades are coming from everywhere: “Almost all of the first platoon was hit, all 15.

Idea

9

It was a real surprise.”6 It is also Israel’s heaviest one-day loss in the war. But it does not end there. Israel in return throws everything it has into the fray. But the fighters have over the years carved out a tunnel network worthy of the great French fortress builders of the late nineteenth century, like Henri Brialmont, or the best of the Maginot Line—along with all the mystery and terror that tunnel fortresses inspire.7 Hizbu’llah “fought in the wreckage of their battle-scarred city for 28 days without yielding an inch of ground.”8 Israel’s government and high command had proclaimed that their transcendent airpower alone would bring the Shi’a to heel. But then, as they are forced to move in with infantry, they help mold the symbolic experience of Nasrallagrad, in which Hizbu’llah fighters fight the Israeli Spartans to a Thermopylae standstill.9 And here, the Israelis blinked.

TEA WITH THE 1920 REVOLUTION BRIGADES Strong tea is the polite way to negotiate with Iraqi Arabs. No one can or should forget the arms-flung-wide confidence that attended the United States’ invasion of Iraq. Reality may have turned chest-thumping into breast-beating, but in the early days, from mid-2003 to the end of 2004, the American domestic audience was massaged for easy victory. Iraqis were tenacious fighters—but not to U.S. leaders. Sure, angry Sunni rejected the new reality we offered. But we could handle them. Surely the greatest military of all time could trounce mere “dead-enders.” Meanwhile their dead end residue created what became for awhile the most seductive Islamic call of all—Jihadi music video—and it was hugely compelling. Hence the larger call of struggle and transcendence was in no way diminished by our presence but rather was encouraged by it. Thus our five-year, 24/7 of nonstop fighting has been almost wholly unwitting. We took on a nonstate enemy that we can simply not subdue. Moreover their confidence trumped ours. They created a killing machine that we—with all our celestial high-tech—could not parry. They killed and killed, and then quite suddenly we decided we wanted to talk to them. But puzzlements were everywhere: like the faction we supported, forging a very public symbiosis between Shi’a Iraq and Shi’a Iran; or like our rejecting the one Shi’a leader who had an authentic mass following among the poor—the one Shi’a leader who was truly an Iraqi nationalist rather than simply a Shi’a Arab. But puzzlements to us of course were simply the natural fruits of our strategy. Finally we realized that a divide-and-rule approach means really playing factions off against each other, actively and consistently—co-opting and then proscribing, promising and then punishing and then rewarding. After four years of losing control, we finally stumbled into imperial client politics at the local level. Sadly for us it is no more than that—yet we brought that outcome on ourselves. Instead of a client king, there are only endlessly squabbling

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Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change

boss men and sheiks. Four years of military ineffectiveness has made us the informal ruler of a gaggle of killer-fractious political constituencies. This loss of military authority means that expedient co-optation rules. We rule, but we rule by juggling and by payout. This is the nonstate military achievement. The Chechens in 1994 defeated the most feared military machine of the late twentieth century. We used to call it the Red Army.10 Now it was brought low in a formal battle. If tribesman and holy warriors had slowly sapped the military machine of the world’s greatest empire for years in Afghanistan, now it had been bested mano a mano. Hizbu’llah had held off the fury of the most electric military tradition of the past 50 years: the Israeli army. The Sparta of our modernity had come up short and literally given up the fight against just a handful of tunnel-fighters. Iraq’s Sunni insurgent bands had finally brought us, the world’s superpower, to tea. We, the great empire, having failed to break them, now came to them like a supplicant, offering arms and money. American officers sat down with the killers of their own troops and started bidding.11 Is this so different than what the Visigoths achieved against Rome, or the Catalan Company against Constantinople? Both challenged empires with little more than what they had on their backs or could carry in their carts, and with women and children in tow. Both got what they wanted, which was (1) a place of their own; (2) the legitimacy that comes with anointing your name that only an empire could grant; and (3) the security that comes with a general recognition of their new identity. Yet the Visigoths and Catalans had to fight for years on end to get there. Neither was all that powerful: they had neither the numbers nor the resources to do anything more than hurt their unhappy imperial hosts. That means they had to hurt selectively; they had to use the powerful symbolism that comes with damaging an empire, because fighting was their only way of negotiating. Why did they fight? They fought because they knew how to fight but also because fighting worked. They had the good fortune to live in a time when a group of people—call them a fraternity or a community or even a society—could actually take on the biggest of states. Today we, like Romans and Byzantines, are the great state, the system leader. What does this mean? Simply: system-leaders are both military enforcers and civilizational beacons in their time. It is our misfortune and opportunity to live in a time when mere groups of people can take us on.

THE FALL OF MODERNITY? These stories represent a kind of military counterpoint across time—where war is a window onto human change. The rise and success of nonstate actors raise deep questions about what is really going on in our world: Why are nonstate actors and their way of war so effective? What does war today tell us about the human heart of world change? How in fighting them do we strengthen their course and their cause?

Idea

11

What follows is my answer. The visible theme is war, because war is the transaction we see. War is the heart of the negotiation, and war is the path to relationship and resolution. But the deep theme is human change. The wars of nonstate actors—the wars of identity—show us a migrating humanity. Nonstate actors and their conflicts show us the contours of new and transfigured identities. It is almost as if through their struggles we can glimpse the geography of the human future. Is this really real? We are so locked into our expectation of a culminating narrative of humankind—of progress—that perhaps we cannot see the countercurrents of alternative humanity. What we see as wars to wipe out or convert the final vestiges of the ignorant, primitive, and evil, from another vantage point, might be new and authentic human developments that we simply cannot accommodate. Right now there are billions of people outside our world of progress. They are globalization’s “left behind.” But they have not simply been cast off; they are also potentially consigned—that is, left for living dead in an uncaring, unseeing world. We and our anointed 3 billion are moving ahead nicely, thank you; those others must just get with the program or be left behind. Being left behind is their doing and thus their responsibility. But they are not accepting this status inside our framework of meaning. Instead they are looking for meaning on their own—and finding it. They are self-organizing: they are creating new fraternities and societies and even new nations. What we have consigned is seeking its own star—however deviant or alien it may seem to us. So the “big change” today is the migration of the other humanity in search of identity. It is their counterpoint and perhaps the inner consequence of globalization. Nonetheless fighter groups and armed communities represent only a fraction of this worldwide search for new and renewed identity. It is the search—the other side of globalization—that matters. But it may be the fighters that in the end make the difference.

NEW WAR AND WORLD CHANGE The big movement in humanity is not about wealth and poverty; it is about identity. Since the first wave of modern globalization began in the 1800s, forcing the world together has also meant tearing down the many little “worlds” of traditional life. Old identities that had offered a river of meaning for centuries were overturned. New identities did not rise instantly to take their place. Instead there began a time of searching and sorting out, a time too of competition between new siren songs, and a time when Western overlay was forced onto society, bringing superficial order but no lasting meaning. But there have been other “globalizations.” The Greco-Roman world of antiquity brought together all of the peoples of the Mediterranean and beyond for the first time. But this world came apart in the seventh century, at antiquity’s end. In the High Middle Ages a series of crusades from the Latin West and Mongol banners from the Steppe East flowed over the worlds of Byzantium and Islam. The creative destruction ironically integrated the economy and culture of the very

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Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change

places split apart when the first globalization evaporated at the end of GrecoRoman antiquity. Hence there were two premodern globalization epochs—and each spanned three or four hundred years. Both achieved incredible human integration for mere agricultural civilizations. But in these eras nonstate peoples and groups could also challenge the greatest states.

Roman Globalization Think of what globalization meant back then. For Romans it was a triumph, and they called the new world after themselves: Romanitas. For a couple centuries it was like a world community of free security, unfettered trade, and shared values—Roman values. But that was on the surface. Below the surface were people moving restlessly. Inside and on the edges of empire were the migrants: the Syrian potter in Italian Ostia, a stranger in a strange land; the Phrygian country boy in Ephesus trying to throw off the rube for city life; the Berber centurion who has seen much and come far with rough Latin and hard service in the Legion; the Frankish petty chief selling cattle in Roman Trier and bringing back his precious silver-worked cingulum, prized honorific belt.12 Identities were migrating: “It is precisely the men who were being uprooted and cast adrift from their old life who provided the background of the anxious thoughts of the religious leaders of the late second century.”13 These took the form of Christian study groups—conventicles, didaskaleia—and competing cults, like the worship of Mithras, that would sweep the army. The army was becoming also the place for “new men,” the venue for uncouth barbaroi to move into the swirling centers of power. On the edges of empire were emerging semiRomanized peoples who wanted to become Roman and enter Romanitas. Even more worrisome to the state, people were deserting the empire and its tax oppression and choosing to become marginal peoples—Bagaudae or brigands— rather than endure Romanitas. Their dropping out was a stand. They preferred to live free rather than suffer the oppressive vise of imperial oversight. But what did this mean? A Christian nation rose within the heart of empire; barbarian peoples pooled at its edges; the new big men were all from the world of the barbaricum; and the dropouts everywhere were shriveling the tax revenue of an increasingly militarized state. Now the state that spoke for Romanitas was being torn every which way, in part because of new identities it could not understand. By A.D. 300 there was no way the empire could avoid the new consciousness. Rome no longer owned globalization; instead it had to accommodate to it to survive—to keep alive the mythology of a single vision and its one world. Having presided over a centuries-long creative destruction that they saw fit to ignore—except where it fit imperial majesty—the Romans now needed to find creative new ways to reaffirm the legitimacy of the Roman state. It was in this

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transformed world—and the increasing brittleness of Roman authority—that fighting peoples and groups made their way. Soon they would begin to carve out their own spaces—in local places, but also, with the Church, a social network of many nodes, which came to be known as monasteries. The “world” empire was fissuring from the inside.

High Medieval Globalization Globalization in the High Middle Ages in contrast began in conflict. It was a high-octane, centuries-long clash of cultures. But in its initial surge this bloody cultural exchange was led by great princes and by great states. The biggest Latin powers of the day—England, France, the German Empire, and Sicily—simply muscled their way into the Byzantine and Arab worlds, while a Mongol superpower overthrew the Caliphate itself. Then the imperial ventures of grand crusade began to dissolve. The grand states that dreamed such imperial pretension were in recess. Yet the Crusades had torn apart the other half of Christendom. Constantinople had fallen, and the Byzantine commonwealth was forever fractured, with a big chunk ruled now by petty warlords—French barons as Latin à la mode. Baghdad had also fallen to brutal Mongol warlords. Byzantine and Islamic civilizations were both at the mercy of dynamic outlanders who seemed primitive but who brought new energy and unleashed new ideas—and who also forced these worlds to struggle with the renewal of their essential identities. Defiant new governance was rising. Out of big-state decomposition rose independent city-states and stubborn little principalities, defying unwieldy kingship and imperial systems. But this was also a time of exuberant economic growth and innovation. Some of the new republics, like Venice, Genoa, Pisa, and Amalfi— were also pioneering new global networks of commerce and banking: tiny but vital nodes of power that could defy an atrophying feudal order. The result was massive open space and motivation for new identities to emerge. Within a century, they did. Look at the world of the fourteenth century and you will see new civilization emerging out of the wreckage of twelfth-century globalization. The Crusades opened up space for a new world. By the thirteenth century there was, for the first time since Greco-Roman antiquity, an economically and culturally integrated world system. The difference this time was that it was much bigger. Janet Abu Lughod convincingly shows how this second globalization tied together a series of smaller regional worlds, networking Latin Christendom with the Byzantine Commonwealth, the Turkic, Arab, and Iranian Ummah-communities, India, and even China.14 So we have two earlier but also very real globalizations to look at. What do they tell us? They tell us a three-part story. Globalization integrates, but the process of bringing together also tears down traditional identities. In the free space created, new demand for identity emerges. Finally, whatever larger organizing framework

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Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change

or spirit went into globalization, it was not the framework and spirit coming out. Our two stories tell us this. Rome completed the globalization of the Mediterranean world. But this unleashed creative migrations across a range of social contexts. Eventually, these sorted themselves into what became three separate worlds: the Latin West, the Byzantine Orthodox East, and Islam. Both the Latin West and Islam were the creation of nonstate actors. The fall of Jerusalem (1099) to crusaders began the next mixing of the world. The fall of Constantinople (1204) and the fall of Baghdad to Mongols (1258) completed the second. But renewed globalization also oversaw the breakup of the Byzantine world and the end of the Abbasid Caliphate—leading to a fracturing of identities in both the Orthodox and Muslim commonwealths. Out of this fracturing a new civilization eventually emerged that united them both for half a millennium—the Ottoman, whose Ghazi tribe had originally been a classic nonstate actor. These earlier globalizations led to a creative mixing and migration of identities that eventually led to the emergence of new worlds. Hence both epochs were in a sense bridge times between worlds. But of course they were also unique times of their own, lasting for hundreds of years: late antiquity from 200 to 700 and early modernity from 1100 to 1500. Our modern epoch of globalization has already been unfolding for two centuries—many talk about a third stage in our globalization, acknowledging its long standing. But like earlier epochs that integrated humanity—if only for the bridge time they represent—they share this: In human terms globalization’s most compelling and powerful nature—perhaps its very dynamic—is the migration of identity. Moreover such migration comes in the form of nonstate groups and movements. This dynamic is as compelling today as it was in late antiquity and early modernity. What is the migration of identity today?

SIX IDENTITY MIGRATIONS We are profoundly put off by the idea of identity migration. This is because we are also a profoundly conservative world system committed to preserving and sustaining the framework of life as it is and defending the status quo. But at the same time we champion a process of creative destruction we call globalization, which serves to break down established identities in the developing world. Moreover, the West’s cadenced destruction has been going on for 200 years (of course it accomplished the remixing of cultural identity in Mesoamerica 500 years ago!). Perhaps today we forget how we trampled traditional societies in Africa, East Asia, and the Muslim world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Out of that upending emerged a brittle crust of neo-Western governance, which in no way offered the necessary framework of meaning we had unthinkingly broken down or stripped away.

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Over the past 30 years it has become clear that the brittle crust of Western colonialism has failed to effectively offer new identity. Hence we are now in a second wave of worlds in search of identity. The result is identity migration. People are seeking new meaning and new belonging. They are framing journeys that they hope will lead to a realization, even a transcendence, in which they can renew or restore the fullness of remembered old life, now lost. We do not recognize this dynamic, but nonetheless we create the space for the nonstate to flourish. We may not think we are encouraging the very dynamic we fear, and much of our political debate is about how to close up these new human spaces. But we do more everyday to make them bigger and very little to shrink them. Most critically, once a space is opened, identity migration can happen fast. Six identity migrations are rushing into the new human spaces we helped create.

Networks of Conversion/Networks of Subversion The Metaphor Our cherished Christian vision of human progress is the martyred struggle of believers to bring others into the orbit of love. But was not that stainless story of true conversion really about subversion—through which a quietist Christian community transformed its world by gently taking over Roman tyranny from within? Even anointed ancient legend reminds us of quietist power.

Their Big Stories The Muslim Brotherhood and the Pentecostals. The Pentecostals carry on in true Christian form as martyrs and missionaries. But the Muslim Brotherhood? We are told all Islamists are sheepskin Jihadis. But here we see a classical Christian-like movement of quietist conversion. The Brotherhood is insinuating itself, working its way into places across the Arab world. It may have risen in Egypt, but now it is pulling in people across the Gulf princelings. It is also pulling in elites from those corrupt princeling societies. This is exactly how early Christians subverted the Roman state. Moreover, networks of conversion remind us of early Christian communities. Just as they relentlessly built community among the Roman rootless, spreading with such success that they soon worked their way into the ruling elite, so too does the Muslim Brotherhood, reaching now across the Arab elites of the Gulf emirates.

Autonomous Urban Subcultures The Metaphor A crushing late Roman state created its own worst nightmare: the Bagaudae, the dropout communities taking over the Roman countryside wholesale. What does an empire do when 20 percent of its empire falls away—fertile land deserted—a wound of its own making? But who were these Bagaudae?

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Our left behind are today’s Bagaudae. Humankind’s contemporary migrations are the demand function of new identity. The human trek of our time—like late antiquity—is a rejection of modernity. People flock to hope, itself inextricable from physical migration. Everywhere today this represents movement to the new human landscape: to the infinite supercities, our globalization’s “planet of slums.” Although some among the throngs of rootless and left behind and dispossessed seek precious new Muslim Brotherhood or Pentecostal conventicles, others leap for more satisfying, richer devil’s bargains.

Their Stories We might recognize in what we call gangs the stirrings of new society. Our Ray Ban law enforcement lens sees gangs as simple and threatening criminality, but their social organization and emerging ethos is that of a new subculture, permeating community as an identity alternative. Hence the rise of the Maras— MS-13—as a barrio power both in Central America and in the United States; this emergence of a truly transnational gang suggests evolution. The world citizens of our own “barrios, favelas, gecekondas, chawls, ghettos, and mega-slums” are the unrecognized Bagaudae whose collective message will eventually force itself on us: ordinary people in extremis.15 If their Roman brethren could not pay the crushing taxes of a militarized state, our billions simply cannot survive in the paradigm we offer relentlessly. Their energy will speak to us one way or the other, and because they come to the cities—in our midst— there is no Roman way to savage them in the countryside. They are with us in the city—both our city and their city.

Emerging Nations The Metaphor Our cartoon pseudo-histories of völkerwanderung—the candy “graphic novels” of the mind that undergirded our twentieth-century wars, of some imagined war of “races” that emerged after Rome, still fighting for that imperial eagle—have their counterpart in the new peoples of the world searching for a place of their own. But we can see this identity migration right before us in modern terms. It is no mystery; it is rather, for people pushed to the edge of survival, a path to realization. It is in this sense not so different from the Goths, Slavs, or Arabs of late antiquity or the Vlachs, Albanians, or so many others in early modernity. Peoples at the margins of civilization not only want to join but also, if they are persecuted, want to carve out their own national world.

Another Two Stories The rise of Muqtada al-Sadr is the awakening of the despised and the downtrodden. The poor Shi’as of Iraq have been injured by Sunni archons but also by elite Shi’a compradors. Muqtada speaks to a community—a third of Iraqis—whose

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identity need is greatest. Like Lebanon’s Hizbu’llah, the Sadrists remind us of the Goths and Berbers building new nations—and they must fight us to do it, because we have staked ourselves against them, as pumping 200 Hellfire missiles a month into Sadr City’s packed humanity attests. These are the equivalent barbaricum Goths, Slavs, and Arabs—in the Muslim Ummah—the community of all Islam. They represent alternative nations that simply seek legitimacy. Yet in their struggle they come to see the old order—and the American puppet master—as the barrier to that realization. So they then enter into a new space where they must continue, in the absence of legitimization, their uncompromising struggle.

Fighter Fraternities The Metaphor We represent Muslim Ghazi—the holy warrior tradition—as unique to Islam and as an insidious source for the terror networks of today. Its counterpart is missing in other civilizations—or is it? But was even William Walker’s “filibuster” gang that was grabbing and ruling Nicaragua in the 1850s so different? Throughout Europe in the High Middle Ages there were monastic fighting orders on both sides—the Christian Templar and the Muslim Assassin—that fought and sought exactly the same things as today’s Muslim holy warriors.

Their Stories The New Al Qaeda and Taliban in the Federated Tribal Areas, Waziristan, and Afghan Border Regions. These fighters are essentially swept up in the sacred romance of Islam. They desperately want to join the Prophet, the desideratum— the thing most wanted, especially by today’s generation of Muslim men. It is important to see the emergence of a realm of fighter fraternities not necessarily as some terrible threat to the West but rather as expressions not only of enduring and vibrant visions of Muslim identity, but also of alienation and anger. In this sense Al Qaeda is reminiscent of the Assassins, and the Taliban the Ghazi bands of thirteenth-century Western Asia Minor. But there are fraternities in the West too, such as the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), whose prison revolt in Brazil took over 78 prisons and wrecked city life in Sao Paulo, killing scores of policemen. This is a ruling prison network— like an untouchable chigger parasite-deep within the state itself—that owns the tin-roof neighborhoods of Rio and Sao Paulo.

Militarized Bucellarii The Metaphor Established elites under unbearable pressure always embrace the very thing they hate and fear. What did the Romans do? They became like the barbaricum they fought against. The Roman Empire became the very thing that was not them. The

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rulership and power of a Mediterranean world literally migrated to be close to the enemy. There, hundreds of miles from the civilized civitates, the New Rome emerged. In late antiquity this was the empire of forever war, an empire whose entire identity was absorbed by the enemy they daily slew. Essential to this enterprise was creating a subculture of barbarian retainers who would extend their authority. And who were these flinty-eyed enforcers? Those who sat closest to the warlord got the best bread at table, so in Latin they called these favored retainers bucellarii. Building bucellarii was in fact the dominating late-Roman cultural enterprise, so much so that, by the end, there was no separating or even distinguishing Roman warlords from those who served them.

Our Stories There are three. (1) Some societies are still new to self-ruling modernity, where an artificial nation-state imposed by European colonialism becomes an arena of older and deeper identity jockeying. Hence in Kenya there are nonstate militias that are also blessed by the state—or at least by the factions that make up the state. (2) In Colombia identities divide down different lines. The militias of order speak for the latifundial elites whose provenance goes back to the king of Spain and his letters to conquistadores. (3) In Pakistan, however, a guardian military subnation finances its own bucellarii, who are unleashed—like the Taliban—to do the bidding of the state-within-the-state.16 The army as midwife to Pakistan’s identity migration toward Islamism has its eerie echoes in the fervent political Mithraism of the late Roman army under Julian and Arbogast and then as champion of a Christian order after Theodosius. It was the forever venue of “new men”—it is an establishment subculture through which the lowly outsider may come to rule. In corrupt places such as Pakistan—or late Rome—this amounts to an anointed safety valve, sucking in the best and co-opting them into the system in return for saving it. But they only partly comply. Often the new men move with the currents of change, and in turn seek to co-opt it. This is what Constantine did. This is what Pakistan’s Zia did, and what his army subculture continues to do. But the danger, as Rome discovered, is that the establishment becomes like its own hired gun-margins.

Intercessor Security Subculture The Metaphor Is there identity migration among us? This is the unseen story of America’s Tribal Confederacy of Defense: the rise of an authentic American Intercessor Nation.

The Story Through six decades of world management, the United States created a galaxy of defense subcultures. These grew into a tribal confederacy of war and security: a nation-within-a-nation. Moreover the 1980s marked a bigger migration, not simply of identity in terms of subculture but also of national identity at the deeply symbolic level.

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In our own professional security subcultures we can see a bit of late antiquity’s migration of wealth, expertise, and leadership to elite monastic networks and household regiments, as national identity gravitated toward institutions of security and enforcement. In the Special Forces, CIA, and Marines, we can see the lance head glimmers of ancient military orders. Of all these images, it is the last that reveals our chosen relationship with nonstate actors. It suggests that a piece of the picture of migrating identity is here, in the West. It is almost as though our response to the challenge of nonstate identities is creating tribal identities of our own—professional, even monastic fighter societies, whether inside the government or not—that intercede for us. They protect us from the threat of alien fighter fraternities, narco-principalities, networked gangs, and insurgent new nations—the looming global other. It is in this chosen relationship that we can see most clearly why we can do so little to suppress or mitigate the consequences of migrating world identities. We are threatened by the way new identity is expressed—through nonstate actors— but we have fastened on a curiously symbiotic response. It is curious only in part because it seeks to counter the threat nonstate actors pose with insufficient strength. But curiosity grows on realizing how our efforts actually help nonstate peoples find realization. We join with them in their world to become their aggressive helpmates. Possibly across the decades, we become like them.

WHY ARE WE INEFFECTIVE? WHY ARE THEY STRONG? We work to make them strong. We should not forget that our globalization has created the need that has called them forth and created the spaces in which new identities can take root. Furthermore our engagement with them in their world makes identity worth fighting for. Hence we are part of why they are strong.

Technology’s Ebbing Fetish Ex Machina But we have changed too. We are not as strong as our former selves, the roistering builders of globalization—or at least, we are not strong in the same ways. This was surely true of late Rome and the world of the High Middle Ages. Then established power and the confidence that went with it were weaker. Superficially the Roman state of A.D. 300 or even 400 was bigger and better than ever. Its military was huge—three times bigger than the army of the Golden Age (the 100s: the century of the “five good emperors”). But sustaining a total force of 600,000 on an agricultural base with a declining population meant a crushing tax burden, which pushed even more citizens to drop out. Moreover, size did not translate into quality. Most of late Rome’s soldiers were static salary men, a sort of lifestyle frontier gendarmerie. The real hardedged, professionally honed force was small. Increasingly Roman order was dependent on a tiny and expensive elite of mobile shock forces—the high-tech

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expeditionary forces. The empire had a single perfect and magnificent but small army with which to tamp down an unruly world.17 The state militaries of early modernity (the High Middle Ages) were also hard-hit by technology’s new demands. The Armies that they knew, old social networks of feudal obligation, were suddenly obsolete. The serf-empowered Chevalier with his scythe-armed levies were in an instant no match for highly trained and well-paid soldier companies, armed and accoutered in the super-tech of the day, from trebuchet to arbalest to high-castled cog.18 The nation-states of the West today share some of these challenges. As in early modernity, big draft armies are inefficient and insufficiently trainable for the war machine our new technology demands. As in late antiquity, a truly high-tech army is so expensive that its actual “boots on the ground” are few. There is only one army. As recent experience shows, almost the entire combat force of the greatest military power on earth can be swallowed up in a single medium-sized country. The army is immensely powerful, but it is fragile in this sense too: if it is stretched too thin and worn out, there is no backup force to face a sudden emergency elsewhere. Worse yet, as Rome discovered, if this force is actually lost, the empire is at the mercy of all threats until it can raise and train another army—and that takes years. It did for Rome, and it would for us today. Like citizens of late Rome, we are equally determined to sustain our narrative of American universalism, as well as our brand of eternal victory, which, like Rome’s, is the belief that supremacy in war will guarantee our divine promise forever. Like Rome, we too have our American way of war.19 Yet also like late Rome, we find ourselves ineffective against barbarians we call nonstate actors. The nonstate fighters heap us; they task us. Yet we can achieve nothing against them. Something is happening here, and we need to take it on board. But doing so means throwing off our narcissism and certainty of entitlement. It is a heavy burden to shrug off. But shrug it off we must. The American way of war enshrines triumph through military “transformations.” They are divine tokens of our superiority. Even better, “like us” challenges from others are met with all-out U.S. outperformance. Germany’s blitzkrieg innovation led to “Patton beats Rommel.” Ditto Japanese carrier aviation. Ditto Soviet atomic rockets. Ditto too their vaunted military-technical revolution. How we outdid them! But our paradigm of military “revolution” is steadfastly both technology-driven and self-focused. The American way of war is all about “like us” or “kin-enemies” also doing like us. We always win out in the end and win big. But today’s transformation has nothing to do with us, except perhaps in how the new innovators take on our technologies and target our vulnerabilities. The innovators here are emerging societies and alternative communities, not “kinenemies” but alien, “stranger-enemies.” They drive this transformation of war. Greek theater in antiquity, like the American way of war, also exalted technology—stage technology—as its métier.20 It was here that the phrase deus ex machina was born. “The god in the machine” is our assurance of how in war we may connect

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to the divine, that through technology the divine will always channel victory and its message of ultimate American triumph. But everywhere our deus is failing us. For all the billions thrown at “IEDdefeat,” at “total situational awareness,” and at “tagging and tracking,” none of these ex machinas worked during the period of struggle when they were needed. At last in Iraq we discovered a better way and began to connect to and co-opt our enemy. But this came as a necessary expediency; it was the survival instinct of good commanders and alert new teams. Yet our ethos of war remains religiously machina.21

The Civilized Sensibility If we are careful about how we use our military power, then how is this a weakness? The commander in chief is hardly going to do what Julian did, “leading Rome’s army to its doom in Iraq.” The weakness is unstated and implicit, and it is this: the army can be risked only so far. The crises to which it responds can be only so big. The politics of the Iraq War shows how this army must achieve its goals within a certain time. “A democracy,” Marshall told his biographer Forrest Pogue after the war, “cannot fight a Seven Years War.”22 Or it will be brought back home. Hence it is a limited force. It is limited in one other way too. Its full power cannot be used. This speaks to innate limits in Western consciousness, absent in Roman consciousness, that prevent us from destroying whole peoples. So how did the Romans deal with their nonstate actors? What was their track record? Romans always tried to be straightforward and behaved within the accepted standards of Greco-Roman civilization. They would try to negotiate with rogue groups, but if these groups became an intractable problem, a Roman army would march off to wipe them out. The cruel notches on this track record spanned at least five centuries. In 102 B.C. big Germanic communities entered Italy—the Ambrones and the Teutones—and was essentially wiped off the face of the earth by the legions of the Consuls Marius and Catulus. In A.D. 405 a comparable host of “odds and ends of peoples”23 under Radagaisus entered Italy and was similarly exterminated by the Magister Militum, Aetius. This was a half-millennium no-prisoners approach. Presumably thousands would be slaughtered in the melee. Remaining fighters would be taken prisoner and ritualistically crucified—often by the thousands. Women and children would be sold for profit. The community that survived such events would have them literally seared into their collective memory. So Aetius dealt with the Burgundians in A.D. 436, bringing savage Hunnic cohorts into southern France to flay the offending nation. From that horror, and the slaughter of two-thirds of their people, comes our modern Nibelungenlied.24 Yet as long as there were Romans, Burgundians remained steadfast Roman allies. There are plenty of voices today—just look

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around the Internet—who would celebrate this as a model win by the good guys against the terrorists.25 Likewise the Romans barely contained fractious Jewish communities. In 79, Judean insurgents triggered a strategic crisis of empire, which was concluded only by the punitive sack of Jerusalem itself. Yet even here Roman scorched-earth policy only teased out, three generations later, an even more fiery Jewish revolt, whose outcome was the destruction of the Jewish nation.26 So by Roman standards we are weaker, which is not to say that we are decadent or afraid to fight or lacking in military potential. It is just that we employ military power with very real limits on it. We give nonstate groups a better-thaneven shot at their goals. But do we have a choice? In the end, war is all about us and how we realize our sacred narrative. We cannot fight wars that betray or bring down the holy thing we fight for, which is our own identity.

Sacred Narrative, Sacred Blinders On the surface, the American national ethos is all about material things and a linear story. That story for most still keeps to its plotline: human progress as globalization, slowly birthing a world beholden to American values and vision. Furthermore this has been a story underwritten by America’s “revolution” in war, where war’s face was reminted as the agent of altruistic human change. The American way of war is much more than a military vision. It is also the core agency for fulfilling America’s sacred story. Our overarching national narrative, as we shall see, is a series of existential, transcendent experiences repeated not recursively but progressively, where each new restatement moves our missionary identity a step further. American narrative is progressively ascendant, moving surely toward ultimate and foreordained fulfillment. Hence the U.S. military transformation of the 1990s had a critical impact on our contemporary interpretation of the sacred narrative. The transformed force was declared to be unprecedented in history. For the first time a single society had secured absolute military dominance over all others. We Americans had at last become the gods of war. The corollary, of course, was that any U.S. military intervention would be unstoppable. Going further—in this tumid moment of “shock and awe”—we believed that in our Olympian state we could do almost anything.27 Romans in late antiquity also had their own story. Romanitas was forever— and the legions played a central role—because of “the deep belief in the most potent of Roman myths: the myth of the Roman empire’s ‘eternal victory.’”28 Most of us never imagine globalization as a sacred story. Rather we see it as a majestic force of history bringing the world together, and as the world comes together, it also comes to share common values. Because we are all part of one big marketplace and tied to each other through the global network, it is ordained that we will become more like each other—with America as the model, of course.

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Yes, it is rhetoric, but Romans respected how rhetoric spoke to deeper meaning. So too for Americans. Our rhetoric also speaks to the deeper meaning of our national gospel—the passionate core of our sacred story. How can we know this? We believe in it so strongly that we either trivialize or demonize developments that do not fit the story. We are threatened by alternative initiatives. People going in different directions become enemies. But the greatest weakness in our story of globalization is that we cannot see the full significance of the back story. Hence our ineffectiveness in a changing humanity is not just about the limits we place on ourselves. Our ineffectiveness is hardwired into our very belief system. Our cultural printed circuits switch us off from how our enemies speak for the identity demand of a larger, desperate humanity. We deny the dynamic trajectory of the world’s other humanity. We pay lip service, we give modest money, and, above all, we fight them, but we cannot bring ourselves to acknowledge, in the fullness and creativity of their misery, the new world they are making. So it is with relief that we rush to label them enemies when they resist. We can accept them as passive objects of pity, but we cannot abide them as rebels or insurgents. The wretched of the earth become a dark and dangerous other when they fight for themselves. We have no space within our global-management paradigm for the righteous resistance of authentic freedom fighters unless they have already been anointed as “good guys.” This severely limits our flexibility and fences off opportunities not only to support popular movements but also to build global belief in our own narrative. Our negatively prefigured relationship with the global other thus becomes a disconnect that paradoxically drives change. For all our altruistic rhetoric, we have become the resisters of change, and as such we work to promote change by our punishing opposition to it. New war—the ancient resistance of communities that strikes us today as somehow de novo—speaks to such unacknowledged changes in this bridge time between worlds. War reveals and helps usher in revolutions in human affairs. If we need evidence, we can see it right in front of us, in three testaments that we have witnessed: 1. The United States has failed to achieve its stated goals in any Muslim society in which it has intervened. In fact, in every instance, America has been thwarted in actual combat. 2. American military ineffectiveness has led not to a deep reconsideration of the problem but rather to a search for a new formula, a new recipe for success. Today that recipe is counterinsurgency, which only pulls us in more the more it appears to succeed, shaping a colonial approach to other peoples. 3. Successful resistance nurtures codependent relationships in which America becomes a full participant in the realization of a new identity. We create and then buy into a chaos space in which change not only can happen but also must happen. Thus we drive change toward more violent cultural syncretism and anoint sacral-violent rituals of realization through war.

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All this suggests that war—far from being simply a phenomenon of resistance, a doomed last rebellion against the forces of modernity—may represent instead an expression of alternative human paths that have real possibility. This suggests that war itself is the migration, that it creates a collective passage for a people. It is the bridge of bridge times. Moreover, we become enablers and legitimators through our combat engagement. War gives new stories of collective passage their promise and power. That we cannot see this ironically speaks to how our own stories of collective passage have atrophied into establishment convention. We exalt our own—as long as they are approved—and yet seek to deny others the same essential promise and power of identity realized. Ours are sacred (if floral-pastel), whereas theirs are deviant (if blood-red). These sacred blinders are the main source of our military ineffectiveness.

NAPOLEON’S NOSE Napoleon had a favorite maxim: “In war, the moral is to the physical like three is to one.” Everyone knows and loves this Western military hadith. It is repeated everywhere in canonical army writing. But do we actually take in on board? Clausewitz did; he called such geist “genius,” and his revered god of war— Napoleon—the maker of history.29 We say we revere it, and then we work our damndest to ignore it. We never seriously reflect on it, or debate it, or otherwise make it a part of our ongoing conversation. Why? Because—however reified—its truth goes against the narrative of American exceptionalism. Bonaparte’s message cautions us as we enter the nonstate world. The unflinching message: a committed people can defeat those who fight for less. Yet our narrative cannot conceive that in some circumstance, in some faraway place, we fight for less. Neither can it imagine a people who fight for more. How could some other tribe ever equal us? But this is exactly the world we face today. Napoleon’s nose senses above all that in any reckoning of military effectiveness, things not material are always things more essential. They are often decisive. Surely such spiritual strengths can be overcome by raw material force. We have seen this happen in the later stages of modernity again and again. Remember the “British square” at Omdurman, in Hilaire Belloc’s immortal words: Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim gun and they have not. But in contexts where mind-numbing force cannot be brought to bear, how then does the spiritual motivation of man rise to overcome material adversity? I posit this vague spirituality—the moral as to the physical—as the actual power of identity: the elusively central issue of human energy and commitment to the battlefield. I believe that energy and commitment is all about identity. I

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believe, based on every experience we have had in the Muslim world after 1992, that such energy and commitment is, in reality, faith. It is the essence of what we awkwardly call religion. But in truth identity is the very substance of what truly moves humanity. Is it possible to quantify the power of identity? Whether we choose to examine Visigoths or Hizbu’llah, the power of identity in this shifting bridge time has a discoverable basis. We can isolate six contemporary expressions of identity power on the battlefield. The first is the commitment to the stakes—where the stakes are all or nothing. A people collectively focus on existential choice; they simply must transcend on their terms, or they lose identity and are thus brought down to nothing. We can see this if we wish, in all its most exquisite misery, among the Palestinian people. If such were not the stakes, then surely even they would have submitted long ago—if only for the material relief that prostration to power so often receives. Yet they have not. The second is the need for sacrifice. How it takes on a beauty and transcendence of its own and becomes sacred assurance in its infinite loss. This existential commitment can overturn existential misery and an otherwise hopeless situation (see Gaza). It is a form of collective power marshaled and laid down. The presentation of sacrifice is a purely spiritual weapon against material powers. But it is also practical, because it works. Such sacrifice can strip the heart out of an enemy not equally committed to sacrifice. Third, collective resistance is tactical effectiveness. People together, especially in urban landscapes, can effortlessly create neural-collective, organic C3I networks that trump an enemy dependent on purely technological agencies to see and hear what is going on. They can do with their collective “person” what no high-tech net can do for us. But here is a dirty little secret: they can do it because we gave them The Network. That Verizon guy—“Can you hear me now?”—has his helpful legion behind the enemy too. Fourth is the battle-power narrative. Stories of sacred battle must strengthen “us” and weaken “them.” Hence all of America’s battle creation-myths are always on record—especially our stories of World War II, replayed 24/7 on the History and Military channels. In this spirit today, when the enemy “other” engages us and fights and dies, their stories of sacrifice likewise become a part of their emerging creation-myth; whereas in contrast, our sacrifice in war today feels like terrible, irreplaceable loss—the unstated “for nothing.” The sacrifice of those we fight is yet another building block in their passage of identity and its imminent transcendence—not so unlike ours in World War II. Here is the power of battlenarrative. The fifth is favorable battle terrain: that is home. America likes to fight in clean, well-lighted places. There is no happy tradition of Americans fighting heroically in cities. Nazis and Soviets did that in Stalingrad. We do not do Stalingrad. Yet that is what we are faced with now. Every move we make into the new humanity is a foray into despised people-space, and there, they dominate us as we kill them and their families. Why? Because you can kill people in their home and they never forget it. They know and embrace how it was home.30

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Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change

Then there is the commitment to transcendence. Aspiring nonstate societies know who they are and what they need. This is means-to-ends clarity: in which struggle and sacrifice are deeply tied to the collective river of identity. But there is a seventh element, and it is by far the most mysterious. The real key to “other” realization is in the war relationship itself: seducing us into a codependent relationship where we assist their realization and legitimization. It is a magical artifact crying for us to pick it up. We are what they want. We are what they so desperately need. The commitment, the sacrifice, and the promise of transcendence: all of this is focused on engaging us. Why else take on the greatest nation-state? The Visigoths surely asked the same question and reached for the same answer: the relationship itself. Nonstate actors need the superpower; they desire the superpower. Only the grand state—the world state—can confer legitimacy, the sacred nonstate prize. Quickly, the themes of this essay going in: • Conflict is a celebration of identity. War is no simple material struggle; it is religiously existential. For those who understand war’s true power, there is only one question: How to harness the power of war to realize deeper needs? • War that engages the system state instantly elevates a people’s whole self—yet at the same time this engagement means implicitly forging a long-standing codependency with the system power. Realization lies in the terms of relationship. • Completed mythic passage is the newly canonized sacred narrative. America’s problem comes with the discovery that it is merely the midwife rather than the godfather. We fight so as to get nothing from those we legitimize in battle.

But there is still more going on. In the mirror we seem to ape our imperial progenitors. Romans and Byzantines fretted and recoiled at embracing barbaricum, the nonstate actors of their day. But after Rome embraced them, Roman identity—and classical civilization itself—moved in a difficult direction. Roman, and later Byzantine, success came in a surprising way. The late Roman state and army literally migrated north to engage them. The succeeding Long War created a symbiosis between the Roman state/army and emerging barbarian identities. A new Roman “self ” began to take shape, where what it was to be Roman was all about fighting nonstate actors—barbaroi. In this sense, new war is as old as the High Middle Ages or even late antiquity— and even older. It is not so much that this “new war with ancient roots” mingles the primitive and postmodern. It is not so much that it is predominantly ritualized—meaning that war is about the sacred, and so speaks to our spiritual yearnings more than our material yen. It is that nonstate passion and power also happens to elicit—like a half-forgotten dream—the buried desires of long-established big societies, driving them to rediscover their own lost passions and beliefs. Hence when the nonstate engages a system-leader the fighting experience ends up changing the system-leader as much as the nonstate actors it seeks to put down. So let us begin by asking, what is identity?

2

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Identity

What is that collective identity we can call “sacred”? What are the precise attachment points between identity and the sacred? How did ritualized belonging evolve? Where is sacred identity—“big identity”—moving today?

I took a week off writing this book in Fredericksburg, Virginia. I had no idea I had arrived there on the eve of the battle, 145 years ago. When I found out, I set out to walk to the battleground after sunset, to remember. So I was walking, looking for the heights. Stumbling at first, I had a little freak-out: Did they just pave over history with Route 1 honky-tonk? But I kept walking. Slowly and strangely, out of the easy tract houses rose a slope of grassy ground. I turned left, and there was the sunken road—the eve of battle. There was a zinc plaque, all but unreadable in the looming dark. It was today, tonight, and tomorrow. The battle was now. But what did battle actually feel like today? It was nothing much, but it was also everything: a long stone wall without mortar like the kind we used to lay a couple centuries back. Then there was the road: a road empty even in anniversary, empty in the gathering twilight. When I walked it, 145 years ago, the clamor would have been loud and insistent. The Federals had pushed their divisions over the river and fought street by street, all day long. This Victorian Fallujah took 9,000 Union shells. It was America’s first real street fighting, its first urban combat, and it was not pretty. Lee remarked that the Vandals could not have looted a town better. But now the Army of the Potomac was fully invested in Fredericksburg. Above the town, where I was walking, the Army of Northern Virginia was gathered and waiting. The battle would unfold the next morning, afternoon, and evening. Sixteen desperate and failed Union assaults, all for nothing. Thousands of wounded men,

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Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change

clinging to the slope of that hill, would writhe through the night in the Christmas cold, crying out . . . Why start a book on nonstate actors and war today with an anecdote about our long-ago civil war? Because it reminds us about the way we were. The Battle of Fredericksburg reminds us that we once collectively felt the passion of jihad, Federal and Confederate, and how our passion came close to immolating the American Idea. All who watched this terror unfold swore that those Union men charging up the hill bore an expression of “seriousness and dread.”1 This was the face of those about to die. American men on both sides pledged to sacrifice themselves for freedom and democracy, America’s two sacred words. In their name the sacrifice was so great that today—if it were to happen to us again—such a war would mean 7 million dead. We cannot deal with that. Americans like those who died in Fredericksburg did. But Fredericksburg also tells us who we are now. Walking back down the long dark slope, I wondered why I had seen no one on the sunken road on the very eve of battle. I walked into a local watering hole and spoke about where I had been. Blank stares. One guy said, “I’m a Northerner. I don’t care about the Old South.” I replied, “Most of those who died here were Northern boys.” Everywhere I went, it was the same: “Oh, last Saturday there was a reenactment,” as if it was gay local color in a Renaissance fair. Only one old man raised his eyebrows, and of course he knew everything. But the sacrifice goes on. Have you been to The Cornfield at Sharpsburg? Go there on a hot summer morning and try to listen through the pulsing cicadas for the mind-blowing noise of gathering battle. Smell beyond the sweet grass the nose-filling sting of black powder. See through a small and harmless park space the chaos and clamor of killing. In this wedge of destiny, tens of thousands of men jammed into a field of death: thousands gone to Minié ball in minutes. One veteran remembered: “The cornfield was so full of bodies that a man could have walked through it without stepping on the ground.” How powerful was it? Consider Cold Harbor. That morning in midSeptember 1864, a frustrated U.S. Grant flung the Army of the Potomac against Lee’s dug-in butternut and gray. The Federals knew what they faced: veterans asked their buddies to pin scraps of paper with scrawled names to their backs, so that their bodies might be identified. Seven thousand fell in just twenty minutes. Who were these men—so many of them still boys—who willed themselves into this mortal storm? Yet their terror was not exceptional. It was our Civil War norm. So many battles . . . Shiloh, Gettysburg, Chickamauga . . . so much sacrifice. Yet it is through the sacrifice that we truly see identity’s power. Our Civil War sacrifice tells us how American identity once drove battle and how battle fulfilled identity. We snap up sentimental prints of idealized battle, like a Mort Kunstler or Don Troiani brand of American Socialist Realism. But airbrushed historical memory also whites out the red passion of our own “mystic chords of memory.”

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We were, for four terrible years in our sacred passions, American Ghazi, in this sense: through us coursed such pious identity power that we came—a campaign, a battle, a charge?—close to killing our own nation. Surely we did not look or act like Muslim Ghazi, and our sacrifice meant something different, both to those hundreds of thousands who died and those many millions who mourned them. But two new histories—Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, and Mark Schantz’s Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death2— begin to show us, through the grief and its rituals, the power. Samuel Watson reveals this battle motivation of the sacred among Southern soldiers: At Fredericksburg some “felt that they were almost in heaven, and could hardly suppress their exultant religious shouts amid the loudest roar and din of the conflict . . . and the palpable peril of their own lives.” Upon receiving a severe wound at Gaines Mill, one man was virtually blinded by faith: “I was not only unafraid to die, but death seemed to me a welcome messenger. Immediately there came over my soul such a burst of the glories of heaven, such a foretaste of its joys, as I have never before experienced. The New Jerusalem seemed to rise before me . . . I was wholly unconscious of any tie that bound me to earth.”3 Was their sacrifice so different from Taliban who ambush that armored American patrol, phat with Predator-C4ISR? Are they not armed as well with the sure foreknowledge of their death? The woman who straps on a belt of C4 beneath her burka just takes the sacrifice one small step beyond. Always it is the sacrifice that shows the meaning: not the fact of its simple certainty. As Faust wrote of the impact of revivalism in the Confederate Army, But surely the Confederacy’s soldier-converts were even more concerned with the actualities of war. For them, perhaps, the ever-present threat of death gave battle a transcendent, rather than primarily worldly, significance.4 We forget the sacral power of the Confederate nation, but the Richmond Examiner caught the spirit of the hour” after first Manassas: This blow will shake the Northern Union in every bone, the echo will reverberate round the globe. It secures the independence of the Southern Confederacy. The churches of this city should be open to-day and its inhabitants should render god their thanks for a special providence on their behalf. As Emory Thomas wrote of that day: “God was Southern, and the Confederacy would live.”5

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Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change

The American identities that fought the Civil War—indeed that fought World War II—are no longer with us. Today we fight our wars with a professional force. Most of this magnificent legionnaire-military are American citizens, yet in practice they serve their leader: the commander in chief. The notion that our armies and our collective citizenry are one and the same is a quaint, even antique conceit. But the civic consequence is that a tiny slice of our society fights in the name of a vast majority whose only duty is to “go shopping.”6 Yet the nonstate actors we face—the terrorists, insurgents, and radicals—in contrast fight and die like those men in blue and gray at Fredericksburg. It is a necessary truth too to see that their “seriousness and dread” also translates, however terrible their casualties, into real military effectiveness. In our world identity counts for just as much as it did in long ago Civil War. Identity power—as Clausewitz reminds us about geist, or spirit—is the true source of military power. If identity is what moves people, then war is identity’s supreme instrument. People continue to make their identity through war. Hence the shared experience and sacrifice of war is both a story and a celebration; and if war makes identity, then its ritual remembrance afterward is nothing less than a people’s mass. War is the liturgy of identity. It is hard, even uncomfortable for us to think of something as terrible as war as also being something wonderful or dare to think that it represents a spiritual zone in human consciousness akin to religion. It asks even more of us to imagine a kinship of faith and a shared investment in faith’s realization through war—with our avowed enemies. Yet this is exactly what war means to human identity, meaning all of us: across all cultures, all places, and all times. War may not be a nation’s formalized religion; yet when successful war meets the same needs and offers the same solace as religion, it is the same thing. War is a celebration of human belonging. We make possible the enactment and remembrance of war as a supreme mythic passage. This is why wars have always been fireworks lighting the story of the nation. If not the essence of sacred identity, war is at least identity’s most passionate rarefaction. Willingness to sacrifice is a window into military effectiveness. Of itself sacrifice is never enough: history’s cold graves are crammed with vain loss. But sacrifice cries to immortal spirit: that can take a nice, orderly regiment—perfectly accoutered and drilled—and infuse it with invincible ferocity. Look at our Global Other today—from alternative communities to fighter fraternities to blood and tattoo-cemented gang clans—and add in even the pious, quietist acolytes of subversion who seek not to fight but rather to convert. What do you see? You see burning identity. America in its civil war and the Global Other today—they are both fiery, radical, self-sacrificing, and, above all, beyond control. The question is, Can they meld identity power to the operational functions of military effectiveness, as a “force multiplier”?

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Moreover, is Western identity power weaker now? If such fighting focus is subsiding, what does our martial decompression portend? Do our less warlike selves lead us to a killer “fit” where nonstate fighters become stronger than our national militaries? My hypothesis is that harnessed human spirit is the essence of military effectiveness. This spirit represents identity, which itself can be understood as the core power of culture. Military effectiveness is at root always about culture. We see this clearly in the traditional elements of military effectiveness: the quality of recruits, how well they are organized and trained, and the technology-edge of their equipment. We rejoice, for example, in how good-old American know-how and can-do—in other words, the very best of us—translate into incomparable military training and technology. But the ever-elusive spirit of identity power also plays a central role—and here, others can be just as strong, or even stronger. But our models of military effectiveness downgrade identity. Instead they mirror the parochial needs of military society. Because our own military societies inhabit an ethos of “professionalism” that we sign off on, we also buy into the notion of military effectiveness as coterminous with the master activity of the cool professional. We have come to celebrate the “best armies” as paragons who give us their own stainless ethic in place of the shapeless spirit of loose and unreliable society. Hence we imagine Roman legionnaires and British regiments of the line just doing their job—and doing it better than any vision-befuddled tribesman or starry-eyed Yankee Minuteman—for “regulars” alone have become our true ideal of the soldier. But think back for a moment. Roman legionnaires and British grenadiers were at their very greatest when they represented—even as “professionals”—the hopes, fears, and prayers of the people they defended. When Romanitas and Kipling’s empire were at their cresting, the armies that fought for them surged too with the very same identity pride. Not just professional identity. History’s greatest professional armies— including our own—also embody deep cultural convictions, even if they are unacknowledged, that make for identity power. I have a friend, a well-known military historian, who insists that Trajan’s legions in Dacia were the greatest Roman army ever. I, arguing from the ornery unconventional, declare Julian’s corps at Strassbourg the top ancient host. This argument is all in fun. But what is serious is its implicit acknowledgment that even among long-standing professional regiments there were special legions and special leaders and that sometimes, when everything came together, they had world-shaking power. But where did that power come from? Was it just tough Roman training or inspired command? Rome’s best armies were infused with the pride and the passion of identity when it was at a flood: the tide of Romanitas. Whether Marius or Caesar or Trajan or Julian, such leaders and their armies mirrored a bigger zeitgeist radiating collective confidence, energy, and belief.7 Marius and Caesar led a republic unbounded—if three generations apart. Trajan held the moment of a Roman world perfected. Julian two centuries later tapped into the energies of an empire restored, of renovatio unleashed. Yet

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Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change

significantly all of these celebrated military snapshots show Roman identity power unleashed.8 Can we show this? Can we prove this? If identity power is a mysterious and elusive idea, it is nonetheless amazingly real. It is right in front of us, yet we cannot see it. It is up to us to understand.

WHAT IS IDENTITY? Culture is our iron frame of reality—it is the human everything. But what does culture really tell us? Our individual consciousness begins with family—what sociologists call the “primary group”—but we continue on to various successors throughout our lives. We often see this more intimate identity through the lens of the lifestyle groups we join. Thus we can tell the difference between a Main Street citizen of Columbus and an anointed resident of Malibu or between an RV-AARP pensioner and a Harley-Yuppie retiree.9 Subculture is sub for a reason—it is a culture within a culture, but even if it is “less,” it might not be subordinate in its claim on big identity. As the great sociologist Rodney Stark reminds us, Sometimes the differences between the general culture are not very great, as is true today between the general American culture and the subculture of German-Americans. Sometimes the differences are great, as between the general Canadian culture and that of the Mennonite communities of Saskatchewan. Often, people are born and raised in a subculture. But often too, they join subcultures such as those sustained by convents.10 Many subcultures with close-knit fraternal and community ties still claim a larger identity first. Yet there are also more marginal subcultures that coexist with the larger culture and yet keep their primary identity within the group. The Mormons of nineteenth-century Utah were just such a subculture. Yet, as the Romney candidacy shows, they have mainstreamed their identity into American consciousness.11 Not only have Mormons felt like Americans first—for decades— but they have also ceased to be “the other” in mainstream American life and thought. Arguably this is less true for other celebrated subcultures such as Amish or Hasidic communities.12 Culture may be the human everything, but it is identity that moves us. This essay is about identity that moves us to sacrifice in war—the kind of identity that moves history. Yet when it comes to identity we are constantly juggling the claims of our primary group with those of national culture and subculture. What is this big identity, sacred identity?

Sacred Identity Sacred identity, or sacred civic identity, is culture’s juju. It can live in the tribe, in once-upon-a-time Romanitas, or in Christendom or the Ummah. But

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modernity’s big identity has been most successfully realized through the nation—and its state. Its sway may be less than complete, but the nation has been the dominant equation of modern culture: French = la France, American = the United States, on and on, through a couple hundred iterations. Remember, culture is reality’s playbook. Everything we think and do is coded into culture’s inescapable rules for life. Yet these confining rules are also counterbalanced by the comfort culture gives us. Culture’s collective belonging offers a living answer, which we can hold through life, to the big questions: Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? (D’où Venons Nous? Que Sommes Nous? Où Allons Nous?) These questions, so achingly signed into Gauguin’s greatest canvas, are at the source-center of identity.13 Identity is purest meaning, as identity makes meaning all about belonging. We are together, and being together through time makes this life not just something to be endured but a joy to be celebrated. How else to explain why so many “primitive” peoples call themselves—like Venezuelan Amazonia’s Yanomamö— the human beings? We are special, so special; and all successful societies find a way to make that precious value inhere in our being together, so that “we (just us) are the world.” In short, our identity is the sacred. What we hold most dear, what we cherish even to the sacrifice of our own life, is this belonging. Hence Old Romans knew well when they called this existential feeling, in their Latin tongue, religio (to bind together). Think of identity as a kind of sacred river. In its full and eternal flow from past to future, identity is the foundation of all formalized institutions that we call religion. Hence in this argument religion is a ritual practice of celebrating identity, but it is hardly the only one. This may seem too messy and too broad. But think about how we Americans talk about religion. We all equate religion to sectarian church: the most narrow and restrictive venue possible on what we value in life. If we can just step back and see how religion is only one way to celebrate the sacred, just one way to realize identity, then we might also see how wonderfully messy and broad our human search for the sacred really is.

Changing Consciousness and Identity This is identity, and we as individuals seek to join its eternal river. And we do so as significant persons. We are great and empowered as we join, and we sometimes sacrifice ourselves for the river. Our “individuated consciousness”14 is essential to the power of the passage—we make it possible. Just think how the sacred works in identity as it is tied to our consciousness. How does the sacred migrate when our consciousness changes? If identity infuses consciousness, then understanding the precise contours of a culture’s changing consciousness is our best window into identity migration and historical change.

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Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change

Consciousness sounds too deep to talk about, but historically it is not so hard to see and describe. We can actually track migrating identity through changing consciousness. Perhaps our best window into changing consciousness—and its consequences for society—is in late antiquity, in Egypt—in the haunting portraits from the Fayyum. These were wax-encaustic portraits of people. In sarcophagi that survive only there, they send us messages about how the sacred part of identity can change and where that change can take a society and even a world. Simply new consciousness that emerged with Christianity reshaped the relationship of individual people to the divine. Think of this as quiet empowerment. Now even the lowliest people could imagine themselves in their moment in time as something significant and powerful. Alternative Christian communities thus became alternative centers of power in society—at the very time that the core equipoise of Roman city politics was beginning to come apart.15 This is crucial. Not simply did new consciousness give power to alternative community-identity, but shifts in the political balance of society itself pushed these communities to positions of new leadership.16 Societies’ balance of identity began to shift. This predicated a migration of identity through something as intangible as “individuated consciousness.” Roman society in the East was slowly transformed.17 Think back: Christianity began as little networked groups. Then these fraternal networks became vibrant communities, and then these subcultures eventually took over the larger society itself—and it was a very changed larger culture. So looking at identity means sorting through the conversation that anthropologists and sociologists have when it comes to culture and subculture, because we need to find out how and why apparently marginal groups can become the heart of human change.

Complex Identity Where does sacred civic identity live? The answer starts off looking easy, such as sacred identity in “primitive” societies of clan and tribe. But then it quickly starts getting difficult. Complex societies permit (and should encourage) multiple parallel identities. But such cultures still reserve overarching belonging and its sacred meaning for the collective. But just how does sacred identity get big? How do sprawling culture areas and complex national societies maintain allegiance and a shared sense of the sacred among scores or even hundreds of millions? How do the competing claims of powerful subcultures get adjudicated and then subordinated to a big sacred identity? Hence multiethnic and multireligious societies have big identity problems. The bigger and more complex they are—even if to us perhaps more “civilized”— the more these cultures are vulnerable to the tug and pull of identities between culture and subculture. This can be a creative and enriching tension. Yet so often

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it also creates contradictions within and competition over who owns sacred identity—big identity. But before going on, there is this simple and fundamental question: how can people who have never met and never will meet sign onto a sacred identity that may claim their ultimate life commitment and sacrifice? We do such things for family, and we may do them for clan or even tribe, but how can we all together keep on reaching for something bigger? Benedict Anderson addresses this paradox in his exegesis on nationalism, Imagined Communities.18 From his vantage modern nationalism emerged out of traditional “cultural systems”—the “religious community” and the “dynastic realm.” The post-eighteenth-century nation-state thus represents not only continuity with old sources of identity but also a distinct break from them, as “old cultural conceptions lost their axiomatic grip on men’s minds.”19 He recognizes the sacral aspect of nationalism, but he is unwilling to position it in the same place as religion: “Nor am I suggesting that somehow nationalism supersedes religion.” Yet he fully recognizes the power of an “imagined” (as in “self-created”) community: The nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.20 I would argue that all advanced societies offer in some central form this sacrificial collective comradeship and that the imagined/created sense of such belonging as a belief system is almost infinitely extensible. Hence imagined communities are not only as compelling as any kin group; they are by definition liberated from limits in belonging. The imagined community can aspire to the universal. Moreover, when Anderson posits the puzzle, where “members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion,”21 he gives us just the lowest voltage of identity power: how shared symbols and ritual to substitute for and even transcend kinship. For how is an imagined community to be made real? What rituals seal the communion? Hence the liturgy of war becomes a core tool in the evolution of (imagined) human community, and it works both ways. War mobilizes identity; identity mobilizes military effectiveness.

A SHORT HISTORY OF IDENTITY How has “belonging” evolved? Our own “American exceptionalism” makes us resistant to empathy for others’ identities and their struggles. Reviewing how identity has evolved can give us a better sense of connectedness. Also, in nearly every construction or variant of identity today, we can see our human past.

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Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change

So today, as then, there are fraternal networks aspiring to subvert what they see as a tradition of sacred identity gone wrong. There are real subcultures moving steadily if stealthily through old ethos, making converts and spreading a New Word. There are tiny principalities of Big Men who are bringing the wretched and left behind a sense of security and belonging. There are new nations rising, however primitive their cloaks and tunics. It is all happening in real time, and we have no framework to make sense of it. But the framework is there. It is in where we have been. Where we have been tells us where we are going, and its benchmarks are the notches of battle. For these several “civilized” human millennia, the emergence, realization, and celebration of identity have been achieved through war, increasingly sophisticated and evermore remarkably beautiful and compelling in the power of its literary treatment. Identity’s evolution shows how the needs of identity have elevated the rituals of war to keep pace with increasingly complex and unwieldy social structures. But this evolution also shows how, as identity has evolved, its war practice has become more uncompromising and destructive. This is partly because more sophisticated technologies and messages drive us there. Yet this does not mean that identity itself is necessarily stronger. For many nation-states today, war technologies and their messages may be more uncompromising and destructive, and yet identity may be weaker. To understand identity power and military effectiveness today we need to know how we got here. We also need to know how nation-state identity got weaker and nonstate identity got stronger. Human notions of identity have evolved through four very rough and imprecise phases of consciousness.

Identity Happens—Kinship Group Rises to Tribe Identity began with family, or rather the family bands that defined the first humans. As these bands grew more robust, they became culturally extensible: they built themselves into clans and then into tribes. But in that straitened world of pain and early death, how did we create belonging and find meaning? We know just a very little, yet it is achingly evocative. The physical evidence shows us how our Neanderthal ancestors—100,000 years ago—lovingly buried their dead in special places covered by stones and worked with red and ochre pigments and with many flowers. They were stitching the delicate human tracery of connection.22 But as we built out human society into real tribes and taught ourselves this thing called civilization, we kept close the secrets of our Neanderthal kin. Serious Romans on the Cursus Honorem always had little busts of their ancestors in a revered place in the house.23 Even as Rome launched itself unthinkingly into universal empire, the most sacred spot in their city remained the Temple of Vesta, goddess of the hearth—the hearth of the cave. What was war in this world of the rising tribe? That question had been answered for Romans long before, because of course before them it had been

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answered authoritatively by Greeks. The answer was Homer. Homer was our very first literary canon of religious identity, realized through the liturgy of war. Think of Homer, refracted through Thucydides, as the bridge between civilization and the primitive, where war was both the celebration of unimaginably ancient identity and the new consciousness of the Poleis: the city-states. John Lendon reminds us how what we think of as “modern” city-states were (still) strikingly driven by the sacred verse and heroes of the Iliad, and so how Homer remained their canon of identity. As early as can be traced, Homer was the foundation of Greek education—indeed, epic may have constituted nearly all of Greek intellectual education down into the fifth century BC. Homer was “the teacher of Greece,” memorized and recited and in later times read and reread with a concentration that no modern system of education devotes to a single set of texts . . . it was the sign of a man of standing to be able to recite the Iliad and the Odyssey by heart, and that fact is evidence that these two epics had achieved a canonical position.24 Hence in our most rarefied and civilized vision of antiquity—which would be Pericles’ Athens—Demosthenes and Aristophanes and Socrates still went hand in hand with Homer. Or rather, when it came to politics and battle, subordinate to him. Homer would remain at the core of Greco-Roman ethos all the way to Antiquity’s end.

Identity Gets Civil-Religious—Tribe Rises to Civilization Yet it was in this muscling new world of civilization that more modern war came into its own. Before, in the dark bark, the literary loam of Homer, war was something practiced by tribes without history. But for the new literate city-states, war became history. War now had a pedigree: it was a bona fide enterprise of civilization. But war was still, for Greeks and Romans long, long after, the existential— read manhood—test of identity. Yet if in Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, modern thinking of politics and strategy morph instantly into an Iliad manual, this is the mark of a time of transformation. City-states that still feel like tribes, still jacked into ancient identity, are also now writing sophisticated histories on papyrus scrolls. They are no longer tribes but Poleis, in a world where the city-state is the new benchmark of something called “civilization,” while those without enlightened politics now become the ancient primitive: the Barbaroi. The new worlds opened up by the Greek city-state are expanding the ancient Mediterranean identity and, more important, networking it into an oikoumene: the known world. This world is moving ever away from Homer’s warrior to something richer and more complex, a world of many identities and subcultures, but with this big difference: there is now a new idea, a Western vision of the universal.

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The big change comes with Alexander. Suddenly all the Greek city-states are the unexpected model for humanity: Greeks rule the world. A new concept of identity is born. For two centuries Greeks struggle with this idea, and then Romans come along and show how it can and will be done.

Identity Gets Universal—Empire Rises to Commonwealth The Romans—if they did nothing else—saw us through to universal identity. The world they made was really the West’s first globalization. Latins did the job of finishing and organizing what Greeks had achieved but could not consolidate. Moreover the heart of this world remained an abiding Greek network. But what Rome did was to extend and reify identity by forging compelling ties between local identity and Roman world loyalty. What Rome did was to bind Mediterranean humanity together by having everyone civically acknowledge a common identity. But their political construction of the universal was brittle thin. It did little to bind local belonging to the Roman whole. All that the imperial managers asked was that people burn a bit of incense to the god Augustus. The god Augustus was thus no more than a civic hitchhiker off the established body of the local = everywhere sacred. The new faith called Christianity—already a new and subversively insurgent imperial identity—refused this tolerant offer, and when the Christians took power after Constantine, they also refused the tolerant path for identity’s relationship with authority. The old live-and-let-live imperial system was succeeded by an uncompromising vision of identity. Christianity demanded not simply a bit of incense—it wanted submission. When Christianity won, the new universal now seemed inseparable from the new faith. Christianity made its monotheism coterminous not only with universal identity but also with universal political authority. But there was an obstacle: making a new universal consciousness fit a universal political order. As Rome split in two and then, with the rise of Islam, split again, an emerging new world took the form of three competing universal visions and three competing universal identities, all sharing the same provenance and brand of monotheism: the Latin West, the Byzantine commonwealth, and the Ummah of the caliphs. What is important is the continuity of identity with governance and with faith. For example, in the tenth century no one in the Latin West called themselves French or German or even Aquitanian or Swabian: they were all citizens of “Romania,” and this Western Roman order has its papal imperator, just as citizens of the East called themselves “Romaioi” and looked to their Basileus Autocrator. This persistent meta-identity is intensely illustrated by the collective outpouring of the High Middle Ages we call the Crusades. Here (in passionately authentic if later idealized expression) was sacred narrative, sacrifice, and transcendence not for prince or monarch but for God and Christendom. The First Crusade in fact unfolded as a perfect mythopoetic passage.

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Rome and Constantinople were the twin stars of 1200 as they had been in 400. The Ummah’s caliphate had long ago, like the old Western Empire, also collapsed, but Muslims still looked to the spiritual authority of a caliph in Baghdad, six hundred years after Muhammad. When the Byzantine imperium imploded in 1204, the last lineal descendant of Roman antiquity finally fell. All three empires were now looser identity blankets. Latin, Byzantine, and Muslim identities were being tossed and mixed together. The former universal was resurfacing as a grand competition. The world of the High Middle Ages tried to keep the Roman vision of antiquity alive as Latins, Byzantines, and Muslims fought to revive old commonwealths. But restless new brands of primary identity were revolting and asserting their own new primary identities. So postimperial commonwealths, in this savage new mixing, began to come apart.

Identity Gets National—A People Rise to Meet Their State Commonwealth became a kind of bridge for changing identity. It preserved the identity claim of former imperial political authority in the form of a much looser affiliation through church, where church still kept a firm if symbolic hand in the process of political legitimization. However, its very looseness encouraged the evolution of more intimate local identities. In the Byzantine commonwealth, and to some extent in the Ummah, these local identities could also create their own church authority—the autocephalous patriarchies, Shi’a and Sunni centers of authority—and so embellish even more the idea of new primary identity. In the Latin West this came later, with the Reformation. But what was the essence of these new primary identities? It was bigger than just the former, preimperial sense of granular, kin-tied Latin natio or tribus. The new identity touchstone still called itself natio, but the new nation-state carried forward the legacy of late antiquity, in three very new ways.

Romanitas in One Nation The rise of the nation-state in the former Latin West symbolically melded the political authority of Roman lineage with a state-owned national church, tied together in a collective national narrative. This narrative was made sacred through an anointed, mythic passage of national becoming, tied to an official, if literary, appropriation of Roman imperial authority from late antiquity. Thus the new nation-state always claimed, at some level—even if it did not seek to represent a universal idea—to be the successor of Rome.

Christendom in One Nation Modern nationalism thus represented an essentially new religious compact (Meiji and early Showa state Shinto is in this way an homage to our Enlightenment!). In both Europe and the United States the primary—and so implicitly

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Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change

religious—identity was to the nation. In this schema of cultural evolution nationalism replaced Christendom as the essential identity—that is, religion— of Western civilization. Seeing this, however, means enlarging our reading of identity. Religion plays a thorny role in identity. In the West we declare religion narrowly as church—because this is what modernity (after the Reformation) has insistently taught us. But a single catholic institution and its unitary consciousness ruled the world before modernity. We called our world Christendom then— it was the proud badge of our primary identity. That identity was broken up. An emerging modernity of nation-states appropriated their various local ecclesias and tied them to affirmations of a new primary identity. The state with its own church was invested with authority over a nation’s—where natio equals tribe—identity. We live still in that era of religious nationalism. Identity as religion means necessarily offering existential answers to the big questions of shared and collective meaning. Like the old church, the new state needed ultimately to constitute itself as uber-existential authority. This does not mean that the religious nation-state intervenes directly—or at least visibly—in narrow theological squabbles or sectarian disputes. Rather the state defines and regulates the context and boundaries within which church may acceptably operate. Ideally the boundaries of state intervention are at some substantial distance from the individual, but often state ownership of its official church leads to very near claims on the sacred: ask any Soviet-era Orthodox or Chinese Catholic priest!

Nation Is the True Faith We can see all of this in the rise of La Belle France, the first of Europe’s truly sacred nation-states. Louis XIV created a centralized nation-state out of the wreckage of the Reformation, Counterreformation, and Thirty Years’ War. His success led to a Bourbon vision that actually paralleled Gallic imperial politics in the fifth century. He nearly realized a simulacrum of the old Western empire, before a rival coalition defeated him. Louis XIV’s monumental building, Versailles in particular, hearkened passionately to ancient Rome. The professional armies of his state prefigured Napoleon’s legions reborn. French became the world’s koina, as in Greco-Roman times: the language of all civilized persons. Yet this was sacred identity only for the few, focused on the person of the manmonarch. Louis XIV failed on two counts. He failed to re-create a truly universalistic identity—through Roman renovatio—and he failed to embrace the French people in his personal concept of sacred belonging. Yet not long after, when another Louis was righteously and vicariously guillotined, the cry of “Liberte! Egalite! Fraternite!” suddenly stoked French claim on the lost Greco-Roman universal, building on but also fully realizing the Sun King’s foundation.

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For a fast moment Napoleon seemed poised for a transcendental renovatio of Western Empire, with him as godlike Basileus. He even gave his army eagle standards, and his Napoleonic Code a new Lex Justinianus—while surely also harnessing Roman republican virtues of collective oath and sacrifice to the nation.25 If “France was now the ‘torch-bearer’ of civilization,”26 as Stuart Woolf describes, the French Revolution consolidated this appropriation of the role of vector of civilization because of the universality of its political message of “liberty” and “equality.” And in the subsequent Napoleonic years the reforms imposed by France on the territories it conquered confirmed the claim to the identification of civilization and French nation. Now, more than ever, the French nation not only incorporated the universal values of civilization but was, in the most literal sense, the carrier of these values to less fortunate peoples.27 Yet after Napoleon’s fall French identity was partly reclaimed by its intensely inward and tribal vision, romantically rooted in the rise of the Frankish successor state. This contrapuntal leitmotif of modern French identity was emotionally vested in Childeric, Clovis, Charles Martel, and Charlemagne. Just contrast the electricity of French revolutionary universalism in David’s Oath of the Horatii to the emotional treacle of salon art like The Death of Chilperic. Thus La France remains an inward-outward vision. France’s identity-tension was shared by other great powers in modernity, like Germany, Russia, and Great Britain. All three sought large ethnos-spaces for the future: Volksreich, Pan-Slavism, and Joseph Chamberlain’s “White Dominions.” Only the Soviet “fast moment” envisioned the universal, before subsiding into an empire of the Red Tsar. Thus European religious nationalism in modernity represents an existentially conflicted construction of primary identity. Each national vision wished to celebrate and revere its uniqueness and yet could not resist its own claim, however small and insincere, on the siren-universal. Modern Greece could be the saddest example of the universal enslaved to the iron-particular. Greeks are not to blame: British played the Greek revolt narcissistically—through Byron!—as a feel-good Phoenix-rising of the Age of Pericles Pappas. But Greeks who bought into modernity’s surge of parochial religious nationalism still wanted deeply to reclaim their Byzantine selves. But nationalism would not permit them to embrace non-Greeks, even former full citizens of the Byzantine Commonwealth. They doggedly set about to re-create Byzantium as a geo-physical shell, grand but empty: a wholly Greek enterprise, a Megale Idea. Tragically such ended as only it could, “on the quay at Smyrna”— neither megale nor much of an idea.

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THE LAST RENOVATIO The Ottoman Ghazi actually had a better idea. The man who took Constantinople in 1453 was at least half-Greek and, in some ways, all Byzantine. Mehmet’s vision, fully realized by Suleiyman, was after all the vision of Romanitas, this time under the banner of a tolerant and accommodating Islam. But how strange was that? If the original Roman order of the Mundus had so successfully accommodated Christianity—remaining Roman—why not again? Might not a Turkish Romaioi do just as well? They did. They saw themselves as official Roman successors reuniting the world of antiquity: Suleiyman proclaimed himself the new Justinian, the hope of a modern Renovatio. This early modern Universalistic surge did not last. Yet the world of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was still open to Roman successor concepts: What changed under Mehmed II was that for the first time the highest offices in government, including that of the Grand Vezirate, now became open to former members of the Greek, Bulgarian, and Serbian aristocracies . . . What I would term the “Byzantine aristocrats turned Verirs” were drawn from the highest strata of the preconquest nobility . . . the Ottomans opted for “continuity” to an extent which seemingly lacks a direct parallel in either the contemporary 15th century world, or in modern society.28 The triumphant creation of a new Roman empire in “America”—what we today call “Latin America”—was the Western counterpart, after all, of what the Ottomans achieved for eastern Romanitas. But the Rome of the New World was splintered in the early nineteenth century by the zeitgeist of religious nationalism at the same time that it fractured the Roman-Islamic oikoumene of the Ottomans. Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian, and Egyptian independence paced the grand insurgencies of Bolivar and San Martin. Ironically the Ottomans’ fantasy Byzantium—based on the cultural appeal of the Romaioi for a wild and obscure Turkic Ghazi band—worked like a “reset, restore all default settings” to both the Byzantine Commonwealth and the Sunni Caliphate. But within a century it reached natural limits in terms of the calling of universal identity. It suddenly could go no further. Natural limits were built into the Ottoman state concept itself. The empire also worked within as a commonwealth of sectarian nations called millets. Half of the empire’s peoples were Christian, so the state was never able to tie itself to a sacred and universalistic Muslim identity. The Ottoman solution was really the pre-Christian Roman solution of antiquity, updated and revised. The Ottomans created a new civilization that enfolded, though it did not meld, the lost parts of Greco-Roman antiquity. Their rulers, like Mehmet II and Suleiyman, idealized themselves as the successor of Basileus Autocrator, and the civil society they created, a renewal of ancient truths. Mehmet kept a copy of Prokopios, in Greek, by his bedside. In this sense the Ottoman imperium was as Roman as it was Turkic in its early centuries. Imperial administration was officially Muslim but open to all, and the compact it made with its millets looked back in some ways to Augustan governance.

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Heath Lowry proposes that early Ottoman cultural syncretism was in part spectacularly successful because it was flexible about identity: It was typified by an accommodationist stance vis-à-vis the majority of Christian population, one in which religion was only marginally a barrier to either military or administrative advancement . . . this syncretic 15th century Ottoman reality, rather than the abundance of an over-growing influx of Turks, to which we must look for an explanation of Ottoman success in embracing the multitude of peoples divided by culture, language, religion, and history . . . among the numerous reasons advanced to account for the long-drawn-out Ottoman decline, we might consider adding the final establishment of a more classical Islamic bureaucracy to what had previously been a more elastic Ottoman polity.29 Abandoning a forward-looking for a backward-looking vision helps explain the real decline of the Ottoman-seeking-Byzantine-seeking-Roman universal identity. A century later, it could no longer stand up to the raw, rising identities of Europe’s new religious nationalism.30

The Fate of Modernity’s Religious Nationalism So the Ottoman (Romaion) Empire also declined and fell, and our literary lens tells us that it fell to the triumphant forces unleashed by Europe’s sacred nationalism. What succeeded the Ottomans, and indeed, the whole of the world outside of Europe, was a massive patchwork of mirror nation-states. Through its era of colonial empire, Europe managed to reshape humanity toward a congress of nation-states in its own image. There is no escaping the proselytizing zeal of religious nationalism after Napoleon. It swept Europe in 1848, as it swept the Spanish-Roman Empire of the Americas. It did not sweep the Ummah, Africa, or East Asia. In those places it came as an overseer, as the sternest of missionaries: promising salvation without freedom. Of course the overseers also unwittingly brought and gave authority to Europe’s traditions of revolution. The sacred narrative of identity realization that began with the French Revolution became the cry of Uhuru and of every liberation movement down to our own day. In short order the saved-enslaved revolted in proper European fashion, at least on the surface. The result was that Europe achieved a perfect European outcome, in spite of its colonialism, because the “native” successor states were at first polite clones of its own religious nationalism. It is tempting here to let in images of the Roman successor kingdoms. Yet was it such a perfect Roman outcome? Aprés Rome, Germans and Arabs alike adopted Roman law, ruling concepts, and working administration almost wholesale and kept them for a century and more before developing state paths of their own.31

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Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change

Today so many of colonialism’s nation-state creations are coming apart so much faster than the old imperial commonwealth identities of late antiquity and the High Middle Ages. We too are privileged to see the actual consequences of the cultural mixing we call globalization. Moreover after a spiritually eviscerating Thirty Years’ War (1914–1945), Europe—along with Japan, Russia, and China—entered a long slide in terms of identity’s claim on the sacred and the celebration of identity through the liturgy of war. This brings us to our own present. But before we go on, we need to talk about ourselves.

The United States: Exceptional Religious Nationalism Why is the United States the last great bastion of modern religious nationalism?

Romanitas in One Nation The big difference between America and Rome is that while Rome flung Romanitas onto the oikoumene—the human landscape Greeks called the known world—America has pulled the oikoumene into us: “We are the world.” But the state is never so distant that a sect might deny the overarching theological truth of the American religion. The Roman state was no different. Rome’s proscenium theological truth—Romanitas and its paideia—was symbolically attested through the Greco-Roman Pantheon, suitably increased periodically by busts of deified emperors. But appropriating ancient piety for the purpose of legitimating contemporary political authority—as in ancient Rome—is precisely what we do today. America has come closest in Western modernity to reestablishing the Roman model of rule and religion. That imperial state made primary civic identity contingent on Romanitas. The aspiring Roman needed to embrace both civil religion (which included formally sacred obligations) and its way of life, which the elite called paideia.32 Like latter-day America, this was not a “church” embrace, but a broad civil and cultural joining. The vast others ruled by Rome could keep their local primary identities as Jews, Celts, or Berbers, but even local elites, as the curiales—or city fathers—of every Greek Eastern city eagerly attested, became true Romans, or Romaioi.

Christendom in One Nation American religious nationalism developed a creative variant on European practice. Instead of establishing a state religion, our new polity declined to establish an American church. But neither did it permit the establishment of Ottomanlike millets or American subnations governed by church (with the possible compromise exception of its concordat with the Church of Latter Day Saints). The United States has insisted firmly that there can be only one overarching sacredcivic identity: the American “civil” religion. America, ever the political entrepreneur, made church an independent franchise. We went much further than European states. We liberated church to be the

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protected province of the individual, but of the individual only, because the state still licensed the franchise (as any Scientologist will tell!). Thus our nation-state made a stern compact that demanded we hold ourselves to be Americans first, and only then Episcopalians, Lutherans, Catholics, Jews, et cetera. In America, national identity always came first. This was made abundantly clear in every World War II movie, where, for example, the iconic B-17 crew always proudly boasted a Catholic (Irish and Italian) and a Jew, though always with the WASP guys in the cockpit. Yet they were all Americans first. True religion in the United States has always been a wholly owned, if unrecognized, national franchise, with one exception. Confederate identity stands out within American religious nationalism as explicit Christian evangelism: The connection between religion and Confederate nationalism is as familiar to scholars as it was to contemporaries. In Emory Thomas’s words, saving grace “was both personal and corporate. Applied to armies and the state, the personal and the collective features of the Confederate faith were all but indistinguishable.” 33 The Confederate example should be a warning that even American ethos has the capacity to formally fuse faith and national identity. Americans persist in seeing religion as nothing more than sect or church, because our ethos scripturally declares itself superior to European example and, indeed, exceptional. But we should see it also as a uniquely successful development of the post-Reformation European norm. The Reformation gave Western civilization a vehicle for the state to subsume church, finally eliminating the threat of Rome’s Catholic universalism to every prince. But these successor national “micro-Christendoms”34 were not just selfserving but also self-limiting. Sure they gave new identities a national fusion of church and state and thus a successor confidence in new national identity. But state ownership of an official church could both weaken the full feeling of collective identity—especially among sectarian minorities—and erode civic trust in the state, if it abused its authority over church. America, in contrast, blissfully unaware of its own encompassing faith, has no bar to wholehearted embrace of true faith.

“Nation” Is the True Faith Hence the claim of the state in original virtuous republic was the collective claim of us all. We—not the state—demanded service and sacrifice of ourselves as the necessary precondition of civic virtue. Moreover this was not theory but constitutional practice, hence the Second Amendment and the Militia Act of 1792.35 The officer-veterans of the Continental Army formed the Society of the Cincinnatus in homage to the sacred Roman republican political model they so revered. Thus U.S. tradition never had more than a frontier-patrol army and an adequate defensive navy. War was the virtuous civic preserve of the whole nation.

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With Doniphan’s March we see America’s militia ethos in full. Alexander Doniphan was a famous trial lawyer in Missouri, and in 1846 he raised a volunteer regiment and they marched, fighting their way like Xenophon’s hoplites,36 to Mexico and back. Bernard DeVoto memorialized them big: They remembered the campfires most of all . . . A campfire burns in the submerged memory of Americans all the way west from Plymouth Beach, and the First Missouri had sat round three hundred and fifty campfires on their way. The fires illuminate the composite memory of the March of the One Thousand—thirty five hundred miles of prairie, desert, and mountain, the faces of your squad ruddy in that light and some of those faces you would not see again, stories by firelight more memorable than any stories you would ever hear in Missouri, the ease of stretching out by the flames after the day’s ride, buffalo hump to eat or maybe just charred cakes of cornmeal, and sleeping under the peaks before dawn came up and the heat mirage began to shine.37 This was the original, the real American way of war—as a nation struggling together, fighting together, sacrificing together. Charles Royster said this about how Americans saw themselves during their revolution: “To fail as defenders of ideals was to fail as Americans; to succeed was to give the victors, their country, and its liberty the prospect of immortality.”38 DISENTANGLING AMERICA IDENTITY Americans have so many issues with identity. If they are superficial lexical issues, they still obscure insight even on the surface. First, we consciously deny the sacred civic nature of national identity, what Robert Bellah called the American civil religion. This denial has its charms, like the belief that religious conversion to our universalism is no more than signing up to what everyone wants, the all-natural American Dream. But where is the jolt of recognition showing how all of our multiple identities in parallel, our infinite subcultures within society, are subordinate to the civic-sacred? But the message is everywhere, even in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta: a veritable showcase for modernity’s orchestration of identity within the civic sacred. A citizen of Victorian England might be a naval engineer, a Mason, a Methodist, a family man, a Liberal, a member of a gentlemen’s club and also pledged to a professional society. Yet each “persona” was woven into this refrain: He is an Englishman! Boatswain He is an Englishman! For he himself has said it, And it’s greatly to his credit, That he is an Englishman!

Identity

All That he is an Englishman! Boatswain For he might have been a Roosian, A French, or Turk, or Proosian, Or perhaps Itali-an! All Or perhaps Itali-an! Boatswain But in spite of all temptations To belong to other nations, He remains an Englishman! He remains an Englishman! All For in spite of all temptations To belong to other nations, He remains an Englishman! He remains an Englishman! Victorians knew this so well that as Kipling sacralized it, Gilbert made fun of it. Americans simply miss it: by redefining identity. Hence identity in our culture is for and about individuals, as in “she is having an identity crisis,” or the mediafavorite “identity politics.” Identity is all about me. Hence our second issue with identity is insisting that it is a lifestyle choice. Americans live in the unthinking embrace both of religious nationalism and of its commitment to the civic sacred, which believes itself to be the universal future of all humanity. Yet we still declare identity to be a smarmy personal statement, a merely individual realization. Check out a modest 1961 film starring Tony Curtis: The Great Imposter.39 It is a romp through the cherished trope of American individualism. The hero, Ferdinand Waldo Demara, casually inhabits the personae of a civil engineer, a sheriff ’s deputy, an assistant prison warden, a doctor of applied psychology, a hospital orderly, a lawyer, a child-care expert, a Benedictine monk, a Trappist monk, an editor, a cancer researcher, and a ship’s doctor on a Canadian destroyer. The message: you are who you want to be, as all of us are. The great metaphor of American identity is the relentless celebration of persona as identity, all the while showing these to be but masks—imposters—for our real selves swimming in the river of American ethos. Lifestyle choice and even subcultural identification is our backhanded, American ratification of sacred civic identity. You can be whatever you want to be as long as you are an American. Hence our infinite resistance to multiethnic or multisectarian mélanges: the “Salad Bowl” and “Patchwork Quilt” were really evocations of where we were rather than where we are going. The relentless current moves us ever toward the big identity— like with Mormons, who were once stoned and persecuted and who are now iconic Romney Americans. Even American subcultures that have kept their sacred identity uncompromised or been kept from joining the rest of us—only those permanently in

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Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change

exile physically and separately within us—are still apart from us. But they remain outside only for awhile, because America will always bring to bear the irresistible motto of the Borg—our sci-fi namesakes—“Resistance is futile.”40 But the very ferocity of American religious nationalism makes our consciousunconscious the more remarkable. Historically it has proven itself more powerful and more durable than any other brand of Euro-inspired religious nationalism— what the Greeks called Patriota. To be an American today still means, with the last hot determination among all Western society, to be “of the nation.” We know our sacred deeply and collectively. We can see it in this war’s precious, silencing mantra: “Support our troops!” That this is still a holy vow not to be transgressed shows the strong persistence of American identity’s religious core. So now our third issue: not seeing the “religious” in American nationalism. Bellah has an idea why this might be so: Why something so obvious should have escaped serious analytical attention is itself an interesting problem. Part of the reason is probably the controversial nature of the subject. From the earliest years of the nineteenth century, conservative religious and political groups have argued that Christianity is, in fact, the national religion. Some of them from time to time and as recently as the 1950s proposed constitutional amendments that would explicitly recognize the sovereignty of Christ. In defending the doctrine of separation of church and state, opponents of such groups have denied that the national polity has, intrinsically, anything to do with religion at all.41 How “holy” is the national holy? The film Amistad has its climactic homily in the temple’s inner sanctum itself: the Supreme Court chamber. John Quincy Adams, the legendary former American president, addresses the Court before its deliberations on the fate of 49 West Africans. The actor Anthony Hopkins walks reflectively—seeming almost lost in meditation—past the marble busts of the Founders: James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington . . . John Adams. We’ve long resisted asking you for guidance. Perhaps we have feared in doing so we might acknowledge that our individuality which we so, so revere is not entirely our own. Perhaps we’ve feared an appeal to you might be taken for weakness. But, we’ve come to understand, finally, that this is not so. We understand now, we’ve been made to understand, and to embrace the understanding . . . that who we are is who we were. We desperately need your strength and wisdom to triumph over our fears, our prejudices, ourselves. Give us the courage to do what is right. Just as Romans would have, invoking their sacred ever-present ancestors, we have not moved a single inch from antiquity’s sacred. Yet this was written, in canonical reverence, not in 1839 when the case was heard but in 1997, when it was invoked in movie temples.42

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What is important to know from this short history of identity? What does identity’s past tell us about identity power today? • Identity has always been evolving and continues to evolve. • The national has been the most powerful vehicle pushing identity in our epoch of modernity (nineteenth and twentieth centuries). The tribal force has been weaker, and the universal, the weakest of all. • But all identities still live among us—the tribal and the universal both survived the nation-state shock of modernity. • In late modernity—our “between time”—the American construction of identity, blending both the national and the universal, has dominated. Its two twentiethcentury rivals, the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, were destroyed. • But late modernity, in relentless pursuit of globalization, has also unleashed countervailing and resurgent tribal and universal identities. These now have been infused with a power equal to that of America: the greatest of national ram’s horn calls.

3

Chapter

War

War-Cry, the daughter of War prelude to spears, to whom men are sacrificed in holy death for the city. (Pindar, fr. 78 Maehler)1 How does war frame the sacred? How does war-narrative become a liturgy of identity? Why does battle’s ritual reconsecration become a collective transcendence? How are war-narratives over time woven into mythic story cycle, so familiar to almost all advanced societies—especially our own?

War is an elusive phenomenon, like any human activity. Like so much of what we think and do, when we talk about war we have traditional, even orthodox forms for that conversation: War is instrumental. This is war as force of nature, or war perhaps to be vicariously savored through the lens, say, of the Military Channel, where bombs drop and things go boom on the screen 24/7. War simply “does things.” Bad things happen in war—terrible things are visited on people and places. But that is, after all, what war is: terrible but compelling spectacle. Such reflection usually puts moral and political dimensions to one side, where war is a grand entertainment. Please, let me enjoy this! War is political. War through this lens pretends to be “Clausewitzian,” which is to say, serious and considered. War is an act of policy, a coolly rational means to an end, an objective, regrettably, that can be achieved only through violence and force. For some this act is inherently amoral. Yet for others its moral content is tied to the moral basis of society’s politics. Hence terrible acts are morally mitigated by democratic politics, on the conviction that democracies are inherently more humane and altruistic, because they represent all the people, and that the whole

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is less likely than a powerful individual to go to war capriciously. Thus war conducted by “good” politics is at least better war. War is (a necessary) evil. Our cultural lenses overlap. Even those who detach themselves from any moral concern, seeing war as simply instrumental, and those who see war as an extension of, and thus a judgment on, politics understand that war is a cultural enterprise that cannot be disentangled from questions of good and evil. Hence war can be “just” only if it is morally necessary; because war itself is murderous violence, a society can justify its initiation only if “good” is directly threatened by “evil.”

Our lenses on war are the cultural optics of our “inside conversation.” They are the constructs for how we think and talk about war. We can talk about war as entertainment, war as politics, and war as a test of morality. Yet war is preeminently something more than all of this. War is part of our ethos. War is a cultural ritual. Moreover it is a central or core ritual. War is a sacred retelling and celebration of identity. This is the heart of the essay. If we want to see also the true heart of conflict in our world, if we want to truly understand nonstate actors, if we want to know the inner dynamic of human change and where humanity is going, then we need to see war for what it is. If war is a ritual, and its rites are those of religion, then war is our celebration of us, and is all about us. War is humanity’s dark liturgy. We know what liturgy is. In the Catholic Mass it is the story of Christ’s Passion: of his sacrifice and divine transcendence. But to call war a liturgy is a freshwater metaphor. To get to the salted Ur-metaphor, we need to go even farther back than our own understanding of religion. We need to go back to our earliest memory of history. We emerged out of prehistory with Homer. We think of Homer as the magisterial poet, but he was so much more. He was more like an apostle, like a first singer of what would be Christian testament. Homer sang the liturgy of a new civilization. Here we unearth the bridge between our prehistoric lives and the world of our civilization. This lost bridge is called the Iliad and the Odyssey. But what exactly was this liturgy? Lendon describes it as the blueprint for a full ethos: both Greek and, later, Roman. The Iliad (and to a lesser extent, the Odyssey) was the collective cultural template of the Hellenes: But without doubt the cult of Homer perpetuated in Greeks the competitive ethics embodied in the poems . . . this congruence of Homeric and later Greek ethics ensured that the heroes were not only old, but also admirable, and so the past of the Greeks was not inert, but to be imitated by the men of the present. The heroes of epic always sat invisible upon the shoulders of the Greeks, whispering their counsel.2

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As guiding form, the Iliad was scriptural. As sacred canon, “epic was the underlying melody of Greek civilization, for the most part so deep within the symphony of civilization that the Greeks themselves were unconscious of it.” Yet, on a conscious level . . . when a Greek faced a puzzle of ethics or writing or even a practical way of doing something, it was to epic he first applied for a solution: the poets (and “Homer is their leader”) “know all the crafts.” Epic was the “encyclopedia” of the Greeks, and the way-of-epic were the good ways.3 This is the Iliad—our epic canon—as blueprint of ethos. But by extension Homer also frames the heroic passage as liturgy, wherein Greeks attain both individual and collective transcendence through battle’s heroic competition: Heroes compete in public performance in war and battle, performance which is constantly evaluated by their peers. A hero’s high birth and high deeds in the past create a favorable expectation in the eyes of observers, but the hero must uphold his reputation by the continual display of merit in action.4 We see this restated again and again in Greco-Roman antiquity—what Lendon calls each “pervasive instance of this pervasive pattern of epic recollection.” We see a repetition of the sacred story: commitment, competition, sacrifice, and transcendence of heroes. For both Greeks and Romans, war was the endless repeated celebration of their ethos, but also, intimately, their own personal apotheosis—emperor as much as simple citizen. In antiquity the battle rites of identity are as sacred as any Mass—and always, so very much like a Mass. As Greeks emerged into history, both their battles and their wars—and the way they were precisely remembered—became epic consecrations of identity. Hence Marathon was a Mass, Thermopylae was a Mass, and, for the Romans, Aquae Sextiae, Actium, and so many more. For Greeks and Romans, the Iliad was canon as much as liturgy, and thus in an overarching sense its epic form was the meta-framing, while the “story” of each war and its culminating battle became the liturgical vessel. Its literary-historical representation—in papyrus scrolls—was the actual vehicle of transmission, sharing, and remembering. Hence Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War or Caesar’s Gallic War should be seen through the Iliad platen press as new editions of the liturgy. Unfortunately we see them through our modern eyes as literature and history, forgetting their sacred content. Even with Caesar we can go no further than “political” analysis. Yet Roman identity as much as Greek continued through antiquity to be built around the polis. So Caesar was not simply arguing his own leadership bona fides, but rather by personally creating new epic Roman narrative—built around him, as the Iliad was built around Achilles—he

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was deliberately placing himself at the center of his people’s sacred self. He was proving, anointing, and apotheosizing himself. We of course look back at Greco-Roman antiquity as a “global” civilization but also as our progenitor, so naturally we want to see our ancestors as fully modern. Because only if they are “like us” can they also ratify us through the forms and framework of meaning that we inhabit. But their ethos was not modern. It was rooted in the idea of the hero and the narrative form of the epic, whose unfolding and fulfillment could be summed up by two words: arête and paideia. Together these defined a man’s worthy life through proper education, civic virtue, and virtuous striving or competition. But the truest test of this Cursus Honorem was in war and battle. This is a pattern shared by many “early societies” (as employed in this essay instead of the older traditional usage, “primitive societies”). So across early societies the sacred narrative form of war is shared: among the Grand Valley Dani of highland New Guinea or of the Cheyennes horsemen of the Great Plains or the Aztecs (Meshica) of central Mexico. We begin to share and even celebrate such primitive essence too, in post-classical antiquity, through a sacred epic poem: Beowulf.5 But what is not modern may still be characteristically human. Hence at last we might begin to see that we need not make ancient Greeks and Romans like ourselves. Instead we might see how much we are still like them. Do we dare see this in ourselves? The point here is not that Western antiquity was more “primitive” than “civilized” but rather that what we still insist on thinking of as “before the modern” is still with us—and in us. Just as Greeks and Romans were both primitive and civilized, so too are Muslims and so too are we. Identity still drives. It is still the source of the sacred, and war is still its liturgy of celebration and realization. We must ask ourselves, If the story war tells is a sacred story of people, living and sacrificing and transcending, does this story still attain? War and battle is no longer central to our day-to-day ethos, just as the measure of a man is no longer reckoned and recalled by his performance in battle. Or is it? Just as “civilization” and the sacred coexisted and melded in antiquity, so too today. If we are to understand modernity as the epoch of the nation-state, then war is especially enshrined as a ritual of identity. Modern war simply has a more sophisticated and elaborate liturgy. Its highest sacred expression indeed may be in the United States. The briefest iconographic glance at American history shows how war has been an electric celebration. Every reflex in our ethos understands this. Look at our civil war, 144 years gone. Yet “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” is still the core canon of the American battle liturgy, here with modern-English subtitles: Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord: He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

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Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword: His truth is marching on. [This war is not us but a gift from God. In this we are his agents. We embrace the Lord’s word and the Lord’s work. He works through us.] I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel: “As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal; Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with His heel, Since God is marching on.” [Evil must be defeated. This is the holiest of human tasks. This is our ultimate role in life, and we are all, man and woman, together in this.] He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat; He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat: Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet! Our God is marching on. [God’s call is our passage of becoming, and we fight to become worthy of him. In our shared sacrifice we will be lifted by his hand and as his holiest warriors we will transcend.] In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me: As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, While God is marching on. [Our beautiful sons in their sacrifice not only relive our Lord’s sacrifice, but become as one with him, in their death ensuring the divine possibility of an earthly redemption.]

A woman wrote this. She created America’s eternal war-hymn. Julia Ward Howe not only framed our liturgy, she kept it straight with God—and with Christian liturgy as well. Doing so she stripped away any thought that identity is the special province of Church. She zaps us instead in neon-electric verse with all we need to know about American religious nationalism. She thrusts us naked and true into America’s righteous vision of war. Here our identity is a forever vision of endless renewal, a divine path guiding us eventually and inevitably to our eschaton: the final apocalyptic fulfillment of God’s promise. Looking at Greco-Roman antiquity’s preliterate, prehistorical liturgy built on epic and myth, and looking at the American Civil War’s explicit blend of Christian universalism with American exceptionalism, we see war’s ritual precisely shaped— identity’s story cut to fit its ethos. But are there common framings of the ritual story, at least in the literate and historical West? Is there even a shared template?

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We should remember that three Western civilizations emerged at antiquity’s end: Latin, Orthodox, and Muslim. Comparing their repertoire of battle, we can see how appropriate “war liturgy” is in framing their construction of sacred stories. Islam’s canonical story after all is its original battle narrative. The Christian liturgy has been a big template for passages of identity and their subsequent celebration. In the High Middle Ages officially anointed “crusades” were narrative happenings that sought through collective sacrifice, Christlike passages. In the First Crusade, when men’s spirits were at their lowest at Antioch, victory was miraculously assured—at least for the energy it generated among men—by the discovery at the point of siege itself, of the lance head that pierced Jesus’s side. Usually however the liturgical framing of war ritual is more metaphorical. This is especially true of religious nationalism in modernity. Explicit religious metaphors were predominantly “pagan” in the late eighteenth century, hearkening to Greek or Roman republican models—hence the electrifying “Oath of the Horatii” or our own marble George Washington in full Roman toga. Alternatively, the narrative passage of war liturgy might also seem to have wholly appropriated Christian liturgy. At a deeper level however, it is tempting to see war liturgy as a more universal storyline. Joseph Campbell’s evocative Hero with a Thousand Faces suggested that the hero’s journey is an almost universal trope of culture.6 In looking at war as liturgy the guiding motif of heroic odyssey—not for a man, but for a people—seems overwhelming. However, liturgy’s more narrow metaphor remains useful when looking at the Western—and especially the American—way of war. The Christian framing is the directly antecedent cultural tradition of religious nationalism. Moreover in American war stories there is also a direct connection between Biblical meta-narrative and the passion of Christ, as Julia Ward Howe testifies. Even in the Western tradition however the framing of war as “liturgy” has summoned a range of passions and participation. Hence Crusading and Jihad as sacred narratives had their strongest “pull” when culture communities strongly abstracted overarching and universal collective identity—the Ummah in the seventh through ninth centuries, and Western Christendom in the eleventh through fourteenth centuries. War liturgy as a “people’s passage”—of a gens-identity—can be glimpsed in the struggles of the Hussites or the Swiss, whereas the Cathars show how cohering regional identity took form as alternative religious community. Going further the Reconquista used the claim of Crusading universal to eventually fashion a unified national identity—called Spain—from disparate Iberian tribes. French “national” identity “crystallized” in the struggle against warlordEngland—with Jeanne d’Arc as the sacrificial leader—while contrapuntally an emerging English national identity in Elizabethan times looked back to the invasion of France to find a needed battle story for the national sacred. In Henry V Shakespeare fashioned from a warlord’s extended raid the Ur-emblem of English transcendence—when Tudor kings were grappling with the creation of a fully

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national consciousness out of ancient familial pyramids of aristocratic loyalty and obligation.7 We can posit shared patterns—whether universalistic, community intimate, or proto-to-mature religious nationalism—in the narrative cycle of war ritual as liturgy. The Catholic Rite has a metaphor for this, the shared Ciborium: the chalicelike vessel in which the Blessed Sacrament is carried—and brought to all who belong. It is a peoples’ precious vessel for their story, lovingly preserved in their tabernacle of identity—and hence from time to time presented before all assembled and collectively reconsecrated. It goes like this. One, the people are persecuted, brought down—seeking succor from tyrants—or otherwise humiliated and degraded, or they are unjustly and capriciously threatened with violent coercion. There are many variations on this, going back to the persecution of the Goths when Romans grudgingly let them cross the Danube to safety in 372. Then there were the Poles, oppressed by Teutonic Knights, or Russians oppressed by the Mongol Khan. Then there were Bulgars under the yoke of a Roman Basileus. What of the Hungarian Transylvanians, reduced to submission by the Ottoman Sultan? Modernity began with Greeks restive under the same Turcocratia. Modern nations can also be oppressed and degraded, like Poland after its humiliating partitions or the French after 1871. German and Italian petty states after 1800 felt increasingly used and abused by the great powers and yearned for a unified identity of their own. Two, the enemy assumes his full, evil form. This form is always posited as the Other—the alien, the outsider, the stranger. Here the “force of nature” raider is less threatening than the alien identity that would have you submit and divest your own—that would have you become the enemy, only as lesser dependent. The trope of forced cultural conversion is so often what in literary retrospect becomes the dominant feature of the war liturgy. War is the only means of saving identity, and thus the war is existential as well as sacred, no matter how intense or polite the actual fighting. Hence the “Spanish Armada” would have made England both Latin kneelers and Latin speakers. Hence the Ottomans would convert all Europe at the edge of a scimitar, just like the Arab’s eighth-century “invasion” of France. All-or-nothing dramatis personae electrify the ritual. But worst is the “kin enemy,” because he would betray the sacred bond, usually for pathetic cash payment. Worse than betrayal is the desire to join the enemy identity even as a second-class retainer: suggesting that the identity you defend is somehow represents something lesser and unworthy. For Scotland it was the Lowland Clans sellout—“We were bought and sold for English gold”—but this trope, especially of leadership classes that collaborate with the enemy to betray their own, is everywhere. Three, the Awakening and the Oath. Awakening is dramatically framed almost as Chorus in an ancient play. It connects present war to the canon of identity past. Later literary embellishing adds stories and images of visitations by the shadows of ancestors, spirits of the nation, and heavenly signs—all signaling a recovery or rediscovery of ancient virtue, and a call to arms as in days past.

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“The awakening” is a trope of retrospective mythmaking, but the Oath is prospective. The most celebrated of these, initiating war narrative, are at the “birth of the modern”—the American Declaration of Independence, David’s Oath of the Horatii, and the Tennis Court Oath.8 Four, resistance builds, the declaration is made, the people rise, the leader comes. Each represents the grand entrance, or the awaited surreptitious appearance, like a revelation. Hence the coming of the chieftain, the Mahdi, the deliverer. At the turn of the eighteenth century Sweden had a boy-king. But Charles XII took his tiny Lutheran army and flung it against the Russians at Narva. In a blinding snowstorm his men stormed Peter’s entrenched camp, outnumbered four to one, and routed them. Let’s take another tack: an ancien régime scion going up against the god Napoleon. But he is no patsy. Archduke Charles grabs the standard of Austria at Wagram and leads the charge that almost undoes the French Empire. What of the nonestablishment, the insurgents? How many of us have seen Braveheart—but what do we see? We see the power of a common man fighting for liberty, while calling for his lord to do the right thing. Wallace, charging Robert the Bruce, is also an ancestor charging us. Great commanders and (sometimes) even kings have put themselves in the line of fire and died. Charles tried at Wagram, clutching the Hapsburg standard. But what might easily have been the sad fate of Archduke Charles instead became the very myth that probably sustained a weak dynasty for another hundred years. Wallace surely sacrificed himself. But out of the body of lore a simple truth comes out. Those who sacrifice for people become our godlike heroes. Those lucky enough. Five, the transcendent sacrifice of the pure, the pious, the young. Only through the power of their sacrifice can the nation transcend. In the sacrifice men are portrayed as Jesus, and their mien is as holy as that of the Son of God. Sometimes, and very symbolically, women lead the sacrificial charge. Perhaps as the preeminent Roman successor state, the French have had women at the fore since Jeanne d’Arc. Delacroix’s great canvas of revolution has her successor, the lovely metaphorical Marianne leading le peuple at the Parisian barricades. But sometimes such fated charge is undertaken only for its sacrificial symbolism. Hence the Black Watch—the 42th—flung themselves at the French abatis-abbatoir at Carillon simply to show the English how it was done—that after Culloden and the Bonnie Prince, that they were still the better men. In others, like the Bridge at Rivoli, the charge was the key in painters’ propaganda-eye—the seal of revolutionary spirit forging a new age where revolution and battle are one. Six, the decisive sacrifice of transcendence. This is the event in which sacrifice demonstrates, or redeems, or saves, and triumphs, against all odds. Hence the Somme demonstrated the virtue of Britons and their commitment to a better, liberal world. A tough sell. Well, yes, but that is what they did. Antietam, or Sharpsburg, in contrast was something of a redemptive battle on two levels. It redeemed the Union cause, as a hard-won if ambiguous victory after so many defeats. But it also led to the Emancipation Proclamation and thus transformed mere civil war into a war of revolution and redemption. Battle thus prefigured the nation’s redemption. Valmy was about magnificent survival, of the revolution, of

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the idea—Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité—against the backward press of fated anciens régimes. So to the Marne, which simply saves La Patrie. But then there are the central passion-triumphs, like Austerlitz. No matter here the lost war. Austerlitz was perhaps the grandest triumph of early modernity: the ideal at least of La Revolution not simply flattening the combined old guard of has-been tyranny. Here the deed outshone historical result. Seven, the enemy is laid low, vanquished, or even destroyed, forever. In apocalyptic war there is a culminating, final battle between good and evil. In the First Crusade, for example, this was the siege and fall of Jerusalem; in the Reconquista, it was Las Navas de Tolosa; in the Nazi-Soviet cauldron, the Red Banner over the Reichstag. In sacred national narrative the animus of the enemy is laid prostrate. Often this is asserted by defeating and then capturing the enemy’s chieftain. Hence Vercingetorix at Alesia, Louis Napoleon at Sedan, and Wellington’s “personal” defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. Agincourt as Shakespearian narrative morbidly but explicitly catalogs the list of slain French aristocracy—captives of an English death. Likewise Swiss vanquishing Charles Le Temeraire on the field. In the struggle of gens-communities, transcendence often comes by forcing the oppressor simply to abandon the field. Eight, the reunification—and renewal. And at the end of that mythic path, the hero is reunited, as Odysseus to Penelope, Jesus to the Father. So how do we fulfill war’s final joy? In two (possibly three!) ways: according to ancient tradition: In ritual celebration, the Roman triumph edges into Hollywood “Big Parade”—with cameras rolling: the Hero symbolically reunified with father/nation, mother-goddess/wife. Think Gary Cooper, aka Sergeant York, American Everyman Achilles. His return to America might as well be in dactylic hexameter as 35mm. Practically and politically, however, such ritual cements the continuity of new authority: hence the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) and the “Rightly Guided” Caliphs. War’s narrative becomes the acclaimed paradigm of new politics. But a “Peaceable Kingdom,” meaning the millenarian—the upward movement toward the divine, as in “The War to End All Wars” and all other apocalypses is still and yet, unattained. This is a scattershot tour d’horizon of the war liturgy in Western civilization. I have held off from referencing the United States and the world of Islam. Their sacred narrative cycles should be compared directly. So what does this common, shared ritual cycle tell us? • • • •

It really is a liturgy, and the template works. It has kept remarkable continuity from antiquity to modernity. It works deeply, even unconsciously—we cannot even see it. It has become more complex and sublime as civilization has evolved.

Before at last holding American and Islamic narrative side by side, perhaps we might take a break and reflect on Western battle art—or how a meditation on the “holy” might bring the lineaments of war, identity, and the sacred into sharp relief.

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AN EXCURSUS ON SACRED BATTLE ART— THE ICONS OF WAR Addressing the class of the Army War College, a 300 corps of field-grade officers—on this essay—I drew their attention to the heroic art that hung on every corridor space between each office door. I joked that contemporary artists like Mort Kunstler and Don Troiani were our own “socialist realists.” Yet such sacred-political artists play a key role in identity. How do the pictorial arts support the relationship of war and identity? We know how gripping images can be. We also know—from Byzantine icons—that the image itself can become so gripping and invested with mysterious power that its very frame and pigments take on sacred power: “The icon took the believer to the threshold of the visionary experience . . . icon and vision validated each other . . . religious art which cannot be prised loose from the other means by which society strove to obtain intimacy with the divine.”9 If we look at a single pictorial genre—painting—we can see how war is put to sacral use and also how its shifting sacred content is a barometer of war’s place in identity. Artists need patrons. Traditional society shows how the hard edge of artistic patronage works. In our not-too-former times—the rollicking eighteenth century before American Independence—we can see military art as portraiture of a corrupt world. If the supplicant artist coldly seeks out the patronage of high and mighty, so naturally they paint to show how war was all about them. A battle? Sure! Here it is, the entire experience delivered as a portrait of the patron! The king, general, admiral, or lord of war commissioned the artist to make war a celebration of the grand person himself. So before our own epoch of religious nationalism, the era we call “modernity,” war was a celebration of social status in a society dominated by a tiny competitive elite. Thus in Great Britain in the eighteenth century—which is to say England, with its comprador Scottish buy-in—a fraternity of gentlemen-militarists sought fame and status in their own narcissistic homage to republican Roman Cursus Honorum. But vast country estates were not enough: they needed “Roman” immortality on canvas. Thus the battle art of our English ancestors was primarily—as everywhere—about celebrating the Great Man and His Battle. Take just one very lateeighteenth-century canvas by Mather Brown: “Lord Howe on the Deck of the Queen Charlotte, 1 June 1794.” Here is a grand seascape, of a celebrated British victory. But we see nothing of the battle itself, or of its sailors—who fought it— but rather The Man, center stage, with his fawning junior elite guys gathered around him, suitably dying and otherwise looking upwardly supplicant. But the canvas is all, all about him. It was the first time that portraiture was tied to the grit of an ongoing naval battle.10 This was the art of battle’s social trajectory—until Napoleon. It was all about the great men, and the panoramas of their greatness. Go to the Escorial and gaze upon the wonder of Carlos Quinto victories over the hapless French, or of the massive murals sanctifying the end of Islamic rule in Iberia, or the vanquishing of rebellious Dutch, et cetera, one glory after another.

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But then battle art changed. Napoleon made it the canvas of the French nation, and we begin to see the exaltation of the common man, “us” and society, as we are all brothers-in-arms, forever tied to our families and so at last to the very living idea of La France. Propaganda perhaps of the basest sort: but also an opening door to modernity. Look ahead just a couple generations. The Lordly canvas of Admiral Howe—forever all about him—was even in Britain slowly being replaced by touching, wrenchingly sentimentalized portraits of common soldiers and their families: the living sustenance of Victoria’s middle-class, unified Great Britain. So out of the revolution of the pre-Raphaelite school and the dual crises of the 1850s—the Crimean War and Indian Mutiny—came countervailing and exuberant visions of patriotic British men and women up to the challenge. Henry Nelson O’Neil’s “Eastward Ho!” shows soldiers and families parting as they depart by packet for India. Edward Hopley’s “An Incident during the Indian Mutiny” features stoic wives reloading revolvers for their soldiermen, mosque domes and minarets in the background. Not a Lord or General in sight. It is no longer about the lordly “them” but about the people “us”—men and women together.11 Just as it was everywhere—so everywhere it was about them. Retrospective and prospective European battle art was in its nineteenth-century nationalist zenith, all about Le Peuple: and that meant soldiers and their sacrifice. It was also increasingly about the daily life of soldiers. Here tropes support former Anciens Regimes evolving at the turn of the century into parliamentary democracies. So amidst the heroes of the past panoramas—either toasting l’Empereur or liberation from the Corsican tyrant—the heroes of contemporary snapshots, like the latest firefight in Hue or Ouagadougou or up the Zambezi, are the new metaphors of a harmonious, unified, and above all, ardently patriotic society. We see recruits at their medical exam, desperate to pass, or in the field on maneuvers, or parading before—and hence legitimating—the national order. This was the cresting of Europe’s religious nationalism, when the transcendence promised by war was still simply expectation: yet unrealized and also never to be questioned. It was also the high point of battle art as the passionate standard of Western modernity, with us, the people as standard-bearer. Battle art and soldier art carried all the tropes of sacrifice and transcendence forward in sentimentalized form, while its true focus of celebration was the nation, for which its soldiers were its symbolic crown jewels. Then came 1914. Art was torn away to the trajectory of a zeitgeist ever defiled by two crucifying wars. Officially anointed backward art still proclaimed to deafened, ruptured-hearts that glory nonetheless resided in the ghoulish sum of trench-sacrifice. But pulsing now in counterpart was a wholly new and wayward energy to speak the truth. But two nations still found power and glory in twentieth-century war. They were the United States and the Soviet Union in World War II. What are we to make of their art? For one thing they are their own best mirrors: the best of Russian and American artists went to war, and drew and painted for the war effort. Soviet and American World War II art was serious art. True it is “of the people” and hence hardly cutting edge, but it is still serious and solid. It is for example

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unblinking in its delineation of horror, and it is also focused on the overwhelming reality-need: forwarding collective identity into the future.12 It is real art, and it is not politically constrained. This may sound strange given our estrangement and cold war with the Soviet Union. We spent 50 years trying to underscore how different we two were. But what comes across to me is how much we were brothers-in-arms. Soviet World War II art is not some reflexive exercise in “socialist realism” but rather more like say, Thomas Hart Benton’s Navy art. Or Edward Hopper or Grant Wood or Andrew Wyeth or Norman Rockwell or Rockwell Kent. They are too akin to be different. The story they tell is of a real and existential war of identity. American and Soviet art from World War II is a stalking horse for a shared passion play, and the sacrifice the two victors reified—in very different ways—was all about the apotheosis of their identities. If Soviet dead were 28 million, and American a fiftieth of that, we nonetheless shared the transcendence of victory—and the knowledge of what we had been through. Art had to tell that story unflinchingly. Afterwards as we settled into our long cold war, our memory changed. Postwar war art shows this, both American and Soviet. The Soviets needed the memory of war more than we did: it was, in the wake of Stalin’s wreckage, the only claim to the legitimacy of the Soviet state. So it is in the cloying sentimentalizing of The Great Patriotic War that socialist realism became the abased iconography of identity. It no longer represented true memory but rather a lovingly prettified tie for later generations to embrace as ideal and model. Hence what I called “Socialist Realism” to my War College “300” audience is in the end neither really socialist or realist. It is carefully and deliberately sentimental—and it is universal. What earnest Victorians wanted to see of the Crimea or the Indian Mutiny looks a lot like what peacetime Americans and Soviets wanted to see in the 1950s and 1960s. So the apparently sprawling canvas of partisans in a snow-forest clearing, gathered round the fire, laughing and hearkening to the sly knowing storyteller, their dark Shpagins carelessly slung, in the glow of vodka and tobacco, represents the precise recalibration of collective memory that we associate with “socialist realism.” But it is our recalibration as well. The generations that looked back also refracted memory into sentimentality and romance. Here there is an entire industry of Civil War art. There is some Revolutionary War attention, and bit of World War I, and fair attention to World War II—mostly aviation art.13 But contemporary war art predominantly remembers 1861–1865. And how it remembers. Artists like Mort Kuntsler and Don Troiani and their guild turn out grand canvases by the hundreds, even thousands. But this is the religious market speaking, the people—and the painters know what the people want. Tireless researchers, they miss not a personal artifact or unit insignia or bit of uniform or weapon in the battle moment they recapture. But there is something unreal in the attractiveness of these scenes. The faces look right, the contortions of wounding and death are not denied, but it is all like a storybook visual: the deaths are “good deaths,” the living are passionate and heroic, and the leaders are men of iron. What is missing is the terrible stench of blood and black powder. It is what boys reading of battle envisage in their mind’s eye, that now

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we see—and in seeing it, restitch into the sacred narrative so that it remains the tapestry we need it to be. Whatever the actual “was” is remaindered to the memoirs and reminiscences of old books. But in a million homes, in the Army War College, it hangs as sacred iconography. This is an important passage of war, almost as important as the actual original passage itself. The sacrifice and transcendence of those who were part of it must be repackaged as liturgy for those who come after. Yet this is no tawdry or venal enterprise, nor is it self-deceiving. Rather it is necessary, because liturgy speaks to us through its symbolism, not through the authentic preservation of reality. Some of reality we want. Yes: like the precious, we-choose-to-cry-now weaving of a Ken Burns documentary. We must see enough, and hear enough to connect and care, but this must be sieved through the correct filters that ennoble and uplift, that treasure and tend to the sacrifice and transcendence. We demand remembrancefilters that make it beautiful. This reified metamorphosis can be especially poignant in the art that follows lost wars. Look at Detaille or Messoniers and you can see the French nation achingly trying to deal with defeat, and the shame of submission to Germany. In such straightened circumstance, where transcendence is denied, the purity of the sacrifice becomes more central, more precious in the liturgy. So after 1871 French battle art no longer takes in the panoramas of victory, but rather settles stubbornly on the abiding truth of sacrifice. It is almost to say that— sure, we were defeated this time, on the battlefield—but we transcended in the purity of our stainless sacrifice for France. Hence we are not truly defeated but only awaiting the opportunity for our incomparable patriota, properly organized and led this time, to sweep us to victory. Look at the canvases. In an année terrible one shining moment seemed to redeem the virtue of La France. This was the sacrifice of Gravilot Saint-Privat: a death-skirmish in which Prussian hordes drew the noose ever-tighter around the armies of France. But here a few thousand poilous fought to the death against overwhelming odds. Moreover what really counted was how they died: Le Cimeteière de Saint-Privat, reaffirmait la grandeur du dacrifice des combatants de 1870 et, ette fois-ci, dans un cadre don’t la valeur symbolique renforçait l’effet: le tombes bouleversées, les lueurs du crépuscule qui se confondent avec celles des incendies et les derniers survivants adosses au mur, don l’immobilité contraste avec a la furie de l’assaut.14 The code-images are in-your-face: a narrative of encrypted visual fragments that all Frenchmen and women would instantly decipher: cemetery (ancient ancestors), in the city (among the people), barbarians defiling home (the German other), the quiet dignity of martyrdom (the soldiers’ Christlike bearing). Pathos so deliberately unleashed is intent not simply in recapturing French esprit after 1871 but rather also girding and prefiguring the nation’s necessary and awful future. Intimate and touching scenes of sacrifice for La Patrie so were also touchstones of terrible transcendence. But they also verged into treacle-like sentimentality. There is an army en bivouac for the night, while in its collective dreams—urging them from the heavens—eternally march the spirit-hosts of Napoleon’s Grand Armee. Or at a frontier

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crossing, helmeted dragoons are shielded by the spirit of Jeanne d’Arc in full gothic battle harness—this from the salon of 1914, on the eve. Also from that showing, Les Vedettes, shows a single dragoon facing contemptuous Uhlans mounted above two Alsatian girls clinging together in fear. Around his horse’s hooves rotted corpses of the 1870 fallen claw their way toward him. One bleachedskull Zouave tries to raise a regimental standard. A trumpeter holds aloft his horn. Another grisly but still-uniformed corpse raises his arm, pointing toward Alsace Lorraine.15 The national iconography of French army art before 1914 is a call to piety and to future—the-nearer-the-better, the-greater-the-better—sacrifice. Sacrificial need in turn became codified in Army doctrine, the Furia Francese, élan vital. Actual doctrine stipulated that identity power was not only real: it was the essence of victory—transcendence—itself. There is in the art of that fin de siècle, no more graphic witness to and testament of war and the sacred. France would have the opportunity millions prayed for. France would get its second chance. In the sweltering August heat of 1914, in La bataille des Frontières and so many more to follow, millions would die as they had dreamed. So what we see in three pictorial battle genres of three religious nationalisms is this. For the Russian-Soviets battle and soldier art was the essential glue of their postwar identity. But they also must internalize a terrible lie: their biggest killer before and after war was their own leader, Stalin. Only the binding transcendence of “The Great Patriotic War” could possibly bring them together. So they work it, because that is all the authentic identity they have. Hence their art was existential. During the war it is often wonderful art—bucking Soviet orthodoxies—and its pathos is heart wrenching. It is truly sacral, and may well have helped to keep the Soviet empire together for the next 45 years. For the French after 1871, battle and soldier art was about a mission. The sacred narrative had been soiled and degraded, and the nation must be redeemed. The art was all about building on that emotion, stoking the passions of expectation, working the canon from all angles. The terrible tragedy is that it succeeded. For Americans today, the message is mixed, if not murky. Why the “nostalgia” for civil war art. Why is the “people art” mostly Civil War, and why is World War II art mostly about things: and why is it mostly about airplanes? Perhaps we should ask ourselves who is buying our authentic Socialist Realism. Most American homes do not have a treasured, signed Kunstler or Troiani hanging in the living room. But of those many that do, who are they? The Civil War is mythic to those who treasure it in our nation today. It is the ultimate American war precisely because of the transcendence of its sacrifice. Thus it is the ultimate benchmark too for what it is to be truly American. Those who treasure its modern recreation also treasure the ideal of an America that perhaps only Daniel Webster could capture, on that day in the Senate, when he thundered: “You have a Sparta, embellish it!” After many years of being fascinated by this contemporary equivalent of Soviet socialist realism, and reflecting on its popularity and persistence, I must conclude that it represents the contemporary core of American religious nationalism. As such the art must resemble the sacred art of Byzantium. It is not intended to capture the

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reality of those terrible times through the eyes of those who lived through them. We have that record, and it in no way resembles this de novo celebration. Rather, like Byzantine icons or frescoes, this is a school of remembrance—not of what happened, but rather the distilled iconography, several generations removed, of American identity itself. What better way to memorialize us than through our civil war, because no other Passion of American identity can approach the purity and fullness of sacrifice. If we were to enter a Catholic school or an Orthodox church we would find sacred images in panoply, yet each of them in their current, crystalline form represents an entire consciousness smoothed and polished over centuries like stones in a riverbed. For example, the art in a modern Greek Orthodox church is lineally tied through every brushstroke to the world of late antiquity. Hence the loving research of Troiani or Kunstler or Gallon or Strain or Stivers is likewise a ritual celebration— not of our civil war, but rather of the whole of national identity blessed and anointed through the core passion of sacred narrative: still the American Civil War.16 So American battle art not only tells us unerringly about the nature of our religious nationalism, it also leads us to the legion—the last legion—of true believers today.

AMERICAN AND MUSLIM UNIVERSALIST WAR-LITURGY To look at Western civilization as a chain of continuity is to see “as through a glass of crystal clarity” how both the United States and the Islamist revival are lineal descendants of the universalistic movements of late antiquity. They are, unknown to themselves and unrecognizable: brothers-in-arms. What they share is a universalistic sacred narrative cycle framed as war liturgy. We consciously separate and drive apart in our mind, Muslim and American “ways of war.”17 But their shared framing goes deeper. Here is a still-living relationship between universalistic identity—expressed through movement, society, and polity—and the cultural framing of its authority through sacred ritual. Hence war is not simply essential to the celebration of Muslim and American identity—it is essential to contextualizing the passage of identity through historical time. In this sense the narrative-cycle of a war punctuates the larger story of belonging through time: it establishes and then reestablishes, and then reestablishes again. It is worth placing the American and Muslim sacred war-cycles in direct comparison.

The People Are Persecuted, Brought Down, Degraded Both share the idea that people must take up arms against oppression, although Muslims may see this more as injustice and impiety, while Americans’ focus has been more on liberty—with impiety as a secondary element (Tories in

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the Revolution, impious Secessionists in the Civil War). Ironically both American and Muslim liturgies are inherently “democratic,” declaring insurgency to be selflegitimating: the virtuous acts of righteous individuals. Yet sacred narrative in American religious nationalism has evolved into a collective state expression. Thus both the American nation and its religious vision— i.e., “democracy”—are threatened. This threat assumed twentieth-century form as competing, Manichaean national religions: Nazism and Soviet Communism. Hence the rhetorical drive after 9/11 to frame a comparable enemy package— Iraq/Iran plus “radical Islam.” This highly iconic “looming threat” is also enshrined in Islam’s war-liturgy. This began to assume long-standing tradition in the “long war” with Byzantium, but mostly as a frontier struggle in which the Caliphate was dominant. The grand threat trope did not crystallize until the twin assaults of Latin Crusaders and Steppe Mongols.

The Enemy Assumes His Full, Evil Form Both liturgies’ stories are shaped around the relationship between external threat and an enemy within. For Americans the notion of the collaborator as identity-betrayer—the Tory—was thus easily updated as the Bolshevik of the 1920s or the “Comsymp” of the 1950s. A subtler form of this relationship is even more ascendant today in the shape of the “appeaser.” Superficially less a collaborator than just weak and fearful—yet in his willingness to submit to evil, the appeaser’s impiety is equal to the collaborator’s betrayal. Muslim lore also juxtaposes outsider evil—the Dajjal—with corruption and betrayal within—the Sufyani.18 What is common in both American and Muslim sacred narrative is the symbolism in this relationship: outsider evil seducing and corrupting faith is a key trope in all religious stories. In American and Muslim war-liturgy it is the deep penetration of evil that leads to the awakening. Hence Americans ignored the spread of Fascism until it was almost too late; likewise also we “slept” through the 1990s, until finally attacked. Muslims have been seduced for two centuries by honeyed-tongued tyrants who promised renewal but instead crushed their own people and betrayed Islam.

The Awakening and the Oath There is a tension between attacking and being attacked. Righteous insurgent awakening needs to attack evil first—hence the Boston Tea Party, Lexington and Concord, The Green Mountain Boys, and Fort Sumter. Hence the Mahdi’s siege of Khartoum in 1884, Al Qaeda attacks of the 1990s to 9/11. But being attacked by evil is also a righteous event—hence the Union response to Fort Sumter, the sinking of American Flag Vessels in 1917, Pearl Harbor, and 9/11 for us. Hence for Muslims the Victorian-era invasions and occupations of their world, and today’s U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

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Injustice, impiety, and threat come together in a torch-event. But there must be more than event to galvanize identity. To simply await some final injustice after all is yet another form of dependency on the tyrant: yet another expression that his authority continues. Some countering act and symbol—like and yet opposite— is needed to establish the new and yet equal authority of people and their insurgency: The Oath. As Jean Starobinski tells: But the oath must be contrasted . . . with the traditional ceremony of the sacred, or anointing of the kings of France. Through an intervention from on high, in the name of a transcendent God, the coronation ceremony invested the monarch with the supernatural insignia of his power. The revolutionary oath created sovereignty, whereas the monarch received it from heaven. Starobinski goes on to remind that “the year 1789 saw the taking of many oaths,”19 including George Washington’s oath of allegiance to the Constitution, and the Tennis Court Oath, which triggered revolution in France. But of course the great American oath had been sealed 13 years before, when in our great Declaration’s “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” The oath is the ritual act of existential commitment, the watershed of identity, where there is no going back. Oaths are central in Muslim sacred narrative: they pepper the Sunnah and ahadith: Then ‘Abdur-Rahman said (to ‘Uthman), “I gave the oath of allegiance to you on condition that you will follow Allah’s Laws and the traditions of Allah’s Apostle and the traditions of the two Caliphs after him.” So ‘Abdur-Rahman gave the oath of allegiance to him, and so did the people including the Muhajirin (emigrants) and the Ansar and the chiefs of the army staff and all the Muslims.20 Oath-centered identity in America and in Islam ultimately means sacred narrative built on collective, popular authority, as distinguished from monarchical attestations of loyalty by retainers and inferiors. Hence the oath here is also constitutional: it makes caliphal legitimacy dependent on the people determination that they are “rightly-guided.”

Resistance Builds, the Declaration Is Made, the People Rise, the Leader Comes Lucky American war-liturgy often finds its leader—from Washington to Lee to Lincoln to FDR—but not always. Wilson failed to achieve full reconsecration, while the Bush liturgy failed even in mid-ceremony. But clearly mythic qualities

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inhere in those who succeed, almost as if they become sacred kings (as in traditional West African and Nilotic cultures). Certainly later hagiography of their warleadership affirms an almost official ascent to sacred status. Our most sacred three are Washington, Lincoln, and FDR (now that his temple is finally anointed). These three also mark the three great celebrations of liturgy. What Americans must wrestle with today is how this celebration came to be suspended. Islam’s always-waiting title of Mahdi—Deliverer—through which a leader becomes a brother of Muhammad himself—remains unfilled today. Islam has not found its Mahdi in modernity. Muhammad Ali came closest in the nineteenth century, but Britain stomped him. The Sudanese Mahdi: just a local figure with the right mole. Postcolonial deliverers each failed in turn, from Nasser to Sadat to Zia to Khomeini. The cannier among them hewed to national revivalism, but in the end they all failed. Ghazi pretenders, of whom Osama bin Laden is the greatest, have also all failed in turn. Liturgy was not supposed to be like this.

The Sacrifice of the Pure, the Pious, the Young Battle marks the sacrifice, so battle itself is, as Lincoln declared, “hallowed ground.” Thus American leaders may have their official temples, but the places of battle are our true memorials of national identity. They even maintain a kind of priesthood in the form of those we call “reenactors,” who lovingly reconsecrate the sacrifice in special religious festivals on anniversary days. But the essence of American nationalism is to be found in its war cemeteries and Memorial Day, because the sacrifice of the pure, the pious, the young—and its remembrance— is the Eucharistic moment of transcendence for American identity. For Muslims this is formally hardwired into the sacred canon of Islam itself: in the Sunnah, the Sira, and the Hadith. Those who give their lives righteously in the defense of Islam are martyrs, just as pure as those white American crosses— my name included—in a sacred field in the Ardennes.21 But Muslims tie their memorials to poetry rather than to battlefields. Ancient battles fill the canon of their memory. It is noteworthy that this tradition has been carried forward on the Internet. For flagellant Shi’a too the sacrifice of Husayn Ibn Ali is still renewed each year by collective blood flagellation—not memorializing but actually reconnecting.

The Decisive Sacrifice of Transcendence For Shi’a Muslims Husayn Ibn Ali is an example of what Clausewitz would call “the culminating moment of a battle”—it is the breakthrough instant where all is changed. For Christians this is the moment of Jesus’s death and the assurance of all that must follow, enabling a new relationship between man and God. For a people this is the moment when identity breaks through—its future, their belonging—where the river of a people is made sure, where past is joined to future.

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Hence Husayn’s sacrifice is an opening for us to see the deep bonding between religion and war, between identity and its transcendence. In some ways the moment of his sacrifice is truly Christlike, with the same spiking of pain and anguish and injustice and betrayal—and surely, the great icons of him that Shi’a hold high as they make their pilgrimage to Najaf look so much like our Jesus. But his decisive sacrifice is also the creation-moment of Shi’a identity—that crystallizes in battle. He is thus both Christ-like and yet also the holiest of Ghazi, fighting righteously for God, just as would Muhammad. Americans also reify the sacrifice of their war leaders. In the American Revolution this took the form of Washington sharing the privation of his army at Valley Forge, which has been memorialized à la penitentes, not unlike the flagellants of Husayn. How in our mind’s eye we still hold the image of men without coats, their frostbitten feet wrapped only in rags, still holding the line for liberty. So in civil war and both world wars, leaders also still sacrificed, dying or mortally stricken at war’s end—like the grandfather of John McCain—or himself. Intense senses of martyrdom associated with the celebration of war-liturgy pervade both Muslim and American religious identity.

The Reunification This is the moment when Army and People are rejoined and the nation is again made whole. In modernity this has been a resonant denouement not seen since antiquity, when the armies of virtuous republics—their whole people’s men—returned in triumph. The new “nation-in-arms” meant for us that 12 million Americans in World War II were uniformed and under arms, near 10 percent of us, and all but one of our 90 divisions were overseas at war’s end. Hence reunification was national and tidal and marked what be for most—who had never been overseas—the great odyssey of their lives. So there was a mythic quality, not seen before or since, to their return. But there was also a missionary dimension both in American ethos and in Islam: promising the final unification of humanity. This reflects an apocalyptic dimension in Muslim and American thought. Ours, and theirs, is the expectation that war’s fulfillment is also the realization of God’s Word: because war itself is the revelation (´Aποκα´λυψις). American apocalypse, however, is publicly conceived as a secular-sacred millennial state, whereas the fulfillment of Muslim mission is more explicitly the prelude to God’s return.

The Renovatio and the Redemption Muslim and American war-liturgies are truly contending but nonetheless related ritual forms. What they share remarkably is not simply their provenance in late antiquity, but their mirrored conviction. They are both equally messianic and also firmly apocalyptic, seeking revelation and the fulfillment of God’s Word. Also remarkably after 9/11 they eagerly engaged each other, almost as if drawing strength from one another. War’s divine nature was certainly agreed on by

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both: it was surely a war of civilizations—of truth—and hence a conflict for humanity: the struggle to decide the future. This is the mirrored rhetoric at least of two universalistic visions. Yet seven years later they have, to say the least, lost their strength. The oomph(!) is out. On the surface this seems like war-weariness among Americans. Only a Republican minority still inclines to the trumpet-call of a “war of civilizations.” Muslim response is similar, turning against Al Qaeda, looking for new models and practical outcomes. Have universal visions simply failed and drawn back: to lick their wounds and rationalize lesser achievements? Or is something bigger going on? Has the cometlike, early-twenty-first-century resurgence of universalistic war simply flared out? The question is worth asking. Flare-outs have happened before—and these speak to the fragility of big identity as a universal vision. Even fired-up universalistic enterprises can wear out. What is the larger significance of such fatigue?

THE ISLAMIST UNIVERSALIST COMES UP SHORT The Muslim world has been staring at the West’s “modernity offer” for nearly two centuries. It has taken hold and it has effectively, if often selectively, coexisted with Islam. A number of Muslim societies, from Malaysia to Morocco, have prospered within the framework of Western globalization. Al Qaeda (Wilderness Ghazi) push a vision that is both rigidly black-and-white and at the same time seems to offer nothing but “blood, sweat, and tears.” Not a winner even among many Islamists. Moreover the vision is built on a romantic, if epic, myth: the Renovatio,22 the return to “rightly-guided” glory and greatness—the Caliphate. But there is a small problem. No unifying cultural basis exists within Islam for a Renovatio, not even a working prototype. Nothing like it has existed for many centuries—if it ever even really existed. There is not even a Muslim model in modernity. The Ottomans come closest, and yet their empire was only one of three. Along with Mughals and Safavids, these were the last great Muslim superpowers—in 1700. Al Qaeda behavior has been very, very bad. Every wondrous gift to come their way has been squandered. The United States handed them the biggest opportunity of their lives in Iraq. Yet they proceeded to alienate every local ally—because they are asocial romantics living out epic fantasies. Ottomans and Mughals in contrast were a very different sort of Ghazi, shrewd and tolerant and looking for what worked. They grew quickly into the civic order whose tax revenues and recruits they needed—they were not from “civilization” yet they urgently wanted to possess it, not kill it. There are alternative movements offering Muslim renewal. Foremost among them is the Muslim Brotherhood, which has in Egypt become a movement of conversion and subversion—conquest by the book rather than the sword. The Brothers and others like Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan or Hezbollah in Lebanon offer education, social welfare, legal adjudication, and a community of faith.

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Some, like Hizzbu’llah or al-Sadr’s movement in Iraq, also provide physical security. There is thus a range of competing renewal movements committed to local community as well as renewal of the Ummah. As in late antiquity, there is much competition in a world seeking identity and belonging. Ghazi aren’t giving. Does the failure—or perpetual limitation—of Al Qaeda reflect a larger subsidence of the Islamist Universalist? Surely in the later 1990s, Western observers eager to see such a shift applauded heartily before the fact.23 But should we interpret both the failure of this generation’s Ghazi—and the response of the Ummah—as a failure of Islamic, as opposed to Islamist, universalism? What is apparent after seven years of Western war with the Muslim world is that Islam has begun to assimilate many fraternal fighter groups (not Al Qaeda) while focusing its more serious energies on a real Muslim Renovatio. The powerful and positive role of the fighter fraternities has been to remind Muslims that righteous resistance—however extreme—is perhaps necessary to an awakening. Hence Al Qaeda was a sort of divine messenger and interlocutor. Now that resistance has spread, and Muslims everywhere feel more involved and more committed and above all, more expectantly hopeful, Al Qaeda’s failure to create an apocalyptic-messianic solution for Islam becomes irrelevant. They achieved something different and in a way more significant than their romantic dreams. Their rash and intemperate acts were even so, a revelation: not the revelation they themselves had sought, but rather an unexpected revelation of potential Ummah empowerment and renewal. Traditional Muslim universalism— as in the centuries’ long literary dream of a Caliphate reborn—is dead. But the vision of a renewed Ummah—new Muslim Commonwealth—still lives. Thus the Al Qaeda strike and the Empire Strikes Back begin to represent a clearing of space—the colonial successors, discarded—and cements a framework for awaited renewal, built by New Islamists and civic fighters at the local level. This is a surprising outcome—for Al Qaeda and America—and yet we do not yet permit ourselves to see it. (But it is there.)

THE AMERICAN UNIVERSALIST COMES UP SHORT Fifty years of Cold War had made the American sacred very stale, and it showed. Hence Americans delighted in its abrupt passing. Now at last we could cash in on the promise of 1945. Twilight struggle was out and the American millennium had begun! Hence 9/11, a short decade later, was yet another bipolar tailspin, as familiar as it was terrible. So Americans were quite prepared for payback after 9/11, and even a thick slice of messianic rhetoric. But when the easy, flowers-in-the-gun-barrels faded and then failed in Iraq, the American nation was simply not ready for another “long war,” especially with an apocalypse around every corner. World War II was fading. Its sacred claim like its living generation was fading away. Films chanted old verse—from Saving Private Ryan to Flags of Our Fathers to Band of Brothers—but its former meaning had passed from memory into myth.

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Sentimentality should have warned that another new war could not just lean on the old to keep identity’s embers stoked. Sectarian politics alienated half the nation. This was achieved in part by tying American mission to a political agenda, yet doing so reduced the authority of the sacred itself. But the rhetoric of World War II was also ardently appropriated for a political cause and for a lesser if not unworthy venue. The result degraded America’s central sacred experience, risking national identity itself. We let our “intercessor-nation”—the sum of our professional military societies, defense, and intelligence agencies in U.S. government—fight and bleed while we shopped. The shopping trope actually became quite celebrated as a symbolic sidelining of the American people, while actual ownership of the war was vested in a tiny fraternity of partisan elites. The unfolding of the 9/11 War represented a watershed in the cultural evolution of American universalism, deeply undercutting the power of its own claim. This seven-year war reveals the fragility of universalistic visions. In one sense when unleashed they can be amazingly powerful. When all the people—any people, even tribes in ancient times—participate in a universalistic warliturgy, they can seem almost unstoppable. The puzzle is that a single people pursuing the universalistic inherently represent the antithesis of what they pretend to seek. Hence universalistic war-liturgies have difficulty staying collectively inclusive— even to include their own. This was true on twin existential levels in the 9/11 War. The war was hardly inclusive for American citizens—shoppers (99 percent) versus fighters (1 percent). Moreover for all the extravagant seizure of World War II reliquaries, the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) gained no enduring world community support. In World War II the United States of America led a “United Nations.” The opposite attained on the elective invasion of Iraq in 2003 and was so attested by official phrase: “a coalition of the willing.” This recalled client contingents that marched with every Napoleon or older or newer emperor, and there were many such participants, tagging along not as allied equals but simply as the willing. The risk of the universalist is no simple proposition in history. Hence at the “rosy-fingered dawn” of modernity, Napoleon’s armies made a chevauchée across the whole old world that ultimately failed totally. But from Egypt to Russia to Spain this passage was so neon-electric in its energy and so mythic in its sweep that today there is still a pious Roman triumphal arch in Paris with the names of every battle on that wild ride. The last French universal gambit failed, but not for nothing. For all 60 battles he fought, Napoleon’s opponents sought in aftermath to be—more like the French. Even in defeat Napoleon was the transformer: the protean maker of modernity.24 Moreover the French were literally able to build national monuments in imperial marble to the enduring hypnotic of the French universal—to French transcendence in battle. War liturgy at its most elemental! The French found a way out of their siren song of the universal—in glorious defeat. Is this our exit too? Will ours also require a 20-year war (1792–1801, 1803–1814/5)?

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But we have crossed a watershed of American consciousness. In World War II we took an oath to redeem humanity: today the oath is just about protecting and defending—us. Not universal humanity, not even “freedom and democracy.” The stories for American leadership and Wilderness Ghazi look like parallel paths after 9/11. Our leadership pushed an old-holy narrative to Americans, while Wilderness Ghazi pushed precious-ancient narrative to Muslims. Both failed to fully ignite, in spite of showers of sparks and insistent years of pyrotechnics. Initially American society and the Ummah were eager for the universal, renewed. A whopping majority of Americans supported the invasion of Iraq, and a floodtide across Muslim lands supported resistance to American invasion. This was a hot mirror of emotional investment in symmetrical narrative fulfillment. Both sides raced with passionate expectation. American invasion was richly orchestrated as cathartic and vicarious national experience, with “embeds” as its video-leitmotif. But then—so soon!—“knights” of the Iraqi (Sunni) resistance had their own extended run of IED and sniper music video—with the crescendo of Al-Askari’s Golden Dome come down, and victory tantalizingly at hand. “Crusaders” seemed weary and close to caving. But then for civic Sunni resistance the struggle turned to hell on earth, unleashing Shi’a fury and the daily, ritualized electric drill to the skull—a macabre, cranial ethnic cleansing of Baghdad. But for the wild-eyed Al Qaeda Ghazi of Iraq, declaring independent emirates, it was a brave new world. Yet so soon, Ghazi failure—the social failure to build relationships and trust among people—mirrored our own. For our part, American failures in Iraq could possibly be salvaged. What was lost was the promise—the Theseus-thread of sacred narrative. Iraq was sold as a game-changer—it had to be, because it was symbolic and not intrinsic to the central problem of the war. It was tangential but it was ripe and for the taking and the administration promised us that it could be made central. When promised “transformation” became a descent into hell, Americans judged it to be a strategic failure. So in 2008 there is also a cool mirrored result: Americans want to decouple from Great War liturgy. They want to handle security threats as a discreet and normative routine. Proof is in the turnabout of the leadership itself, explicitly exchanging the whole lexicon of “transformation” and “spreading democratic values” for counterinsurgency and compliant—for a fee!—local behavior. Meanwhile Muslims everywhere still yearn for deliverance and the overturning of injustice, but very much less now through Jihad. Local resistance is still emotionally supported—whether against Israel or America or Russia or India— but the holy warrior mission seems to be poised for another period of recess. Its stock is down: only one out of six Muslims likes what Al Qaeda thinks and does, one in five likes that it stands for Muslim causes, and one in three really likes that it confronts the United States. The only good news for them in 2008 is that only one in five Muslims has zero sympathy for Al Qaeda. Two years ago hatred was running in three. So hope surely still smolders in the Ghazi breast.

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But it should stay calm. Civil insurgency is taking hold, and keeping its new claim on Muslim imagination. Of the “world leaders” Arabs “admired most,” hands-down and away it was Hassan Nasrullah, leader of Hizbu’llah. Moreover, by two-to-one, Arabs believe that if America just leaves Iraq, that civil groups there will be able to work things out on their own.25 So right now, in the spring of 2008, twin universalistic visions that have dominated the last seven years have failed. Both Americans and Muslims have rejected the lure of messianic vision.26 This may represent a rhythmic lull, a quiet time of weariness and fatigue. But it may also portend a long-wave decline in the force of the war-universal. Here are the last universalistic progeny of late antiquity, still seeking to deliver and unite humanity through military liturgy—but on an ebbing tide. Humanity’s universalistic visions promising transcendence through empire also promised global deliverance. But if these are in recess what idea will meet powerful rising demand for identity, and for collective belonging and transcendence? Not surprisingly, the answer may be in smaller, more intimate local movements, and also in quietist universalistic calling. The local answer is unencumbered by the distant promises of universal rhetoric, and keys into existing trust networks in existing communities. Moreover the universal that is succeeding today among Latinos and Africans and Muslims is building right into local community, precisely because it promises to balance the transcendent with the intimate. Today’s triumphant universalists are locally-committed proselytes, and they bring “good news” not through war-liturgy but rather through a seamless, ancient melding of great and small. Yet war and conflict remain essential. Blended identity frameworks also test the proposition of sacred civic identity. But they too have their limitations. Migrations away from the nation-state continue to take reified form in armed resistance. These too are part of new belonging.

A GRAND CAUTION Perhaps having read this far, my alternative conversation has simply become too fabulous—or dreamlike, or preposterous. But remember, I am trying to cut to the heart of our thinking; and for that act to succeed it must cause wounds. Here are two cautions. First, war is not religion. War addresses the same things as religion. Simply we all seek ways to make our longing for belonging sacred, so that this central truth— through myriad and marvelous social norms—has inarguable meaning, and there is no meaning without transcendence. Transcendence can be described and defined in infinite ways, but it is always the same: to join us eternally to the river of identity—of us. Hence the puzzle is to find the essential place of identity for people: what I call big identity. I posit this as the very thing worth fighting for—meaning worth sacrificing your life for—where such sacrifice is immortally engraved as sacred act. Using

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this certainty as a guide, even in modernity’s thicket of identities, each of us can discern the core, the essence, the big thing we want to be a part of. It is not surprising that civilization found a way to make of big identity truly grand collectives—even to the hundreds of millions like China or India or the United States. Yet it should also not be surprising in a tossed-up world transfigured by globalization that others would also cast about for new identity in whatever authentic places it might live. Second, if we choose to look at the last seven years differently, through the lens of a sacred war of identity, then we might more precisely and accurately see why this war failed . . . for Muslims and Americans alike: for all those who had sought to make it a war in ancient epic tradition. Once we deconstruct and unpack these traditions and discover why they are no longer so powerful, then we can more easily arrive at the place humanity actually occupies today.

4

Chapter

Method

How can we detach ourselves from the bonds of our own belief system: the iron rod of phenomenology and the iron rod of history? How do we go beyond measurement and homily? Here I offer an alternative framework.

So far I have argued that identity is the essence of shared human meaning and that war has often been its electric ritual of celebration and realization. But what does this tell us about world change? I have also proposed that we live in the mature phase of the West’s third globalization epoch. Could we be living in yet another transformation time? How would we know? Hence the need for a chapter on method: How am I approaching knowledge to make my argument? What knowledge disciplines do I rely on for guidance, both for the knowledge I select and for the way I use it to build my case? What method, practice, and principles make up the framework of my idea? In other words, what is my epistemology and methodology? Naturally I do not write in isolation. American thinking about world change is messy and vast. Yet America’s sociology of knowledge for thinking about world change is rather more precisely divided between two dominant knowledge subcultures. One reifies phenomenological measurement and the other exalts homiletic canon. This essay will not tackle the phenomenological algorithmic meta-model of human change, in part because it has only a minor and elite claim on American imagination and in part because it can be addressed only on its own terms— winning here would be like Copernicus overturning the ownership guild of the Ptolemaic universe, not in 1543 (the publication date of De revolutionibus orbium coelestium) but in 1243! The other, the literary and religious uses of history as homily, is at the core of my thesis. This is a fight I take head-on in Chapter 5, “Fieldwork.”

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My method? Think of it as an alternative way of thinking. It represents an exploratory framework. Hence, absent the backing of a recognized knowledge guild (or even a school of thought!), it is no paradigm. At best it is an offering. But it is a framework and it has a method: I call on two nonscriptural knowledge disciplines and employ them together, also nonscripturally. Alone, each of them can get us closer to humanity and thus closer to the reality of human change. Working together, they give off showers of sparks. The oldest is also called history. The youngest is called anthropology. This essay is a synthesis of anthropology and history. Anthropology offers a holistic guide for thinking about human culture: our thought and action. History is the observed record of human thought and action. But both disciplines lead separate lives; they do not talk to each other. Moreover they suffer—like all knowledge guilds—from a conviction that each knows the best path to enlightenment. How do I try to meld such two? The synthesis comes through treating history as “fieldwork” on human culture. History here becomes a window onto patterns of culture, through which “eras” ancient and modern, legendary and contemporary reveal shared patterns of continuity and change. The goal is to reveal patterns that we do not see and, just as critically, to explain why we do not see them. But my goal is complicated by our culture’s literary and religious use of history—history as homily. I must demonstrate that history can be treated comparatively and with full reference to our situation today, and avoid the homiletic imperative. This is the burden of Chapter 5, “Fieldwork.” Let me begin by summarizing my meta-themes, to show how an encompassing concept of war, identity, and the sacred can illuminate the potential changes in a mature globalization epoch: both for nonstate actors and for system leaders. The first theme explores the identity power of nonstate actors. Why are they so militarily effective today? To answer that question, it is necessary to unpack the role of nonmaterial factors in war and, indeed, the essential nature of war itself and its place in human life and culture.

“IDENTITY” AS OUR CORE FRAME OF MEANING I began this study believing that a cultural approach to the subject of nonstate actors and war would yield new insights. But it has surprisingly opened up a new vantage on how we understand war in society and how war is inextricably bound up with identity and human change. How did this happen? It quickly became clear that the strength of resistant nonstate actors is not due to material factors alone. Moreover none of the traditional factors—cohesion, training, morale, resilience, and leadership—seem to get to the heart of their strength. Going further, religion narrowly defined was also an unsatisfactory explanation. Their deep sense of fraternity, commitment, and willingness to sacrifice are not simply the by-products of a theology. There is something still deeper going on.

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Robert Pape sees cool rational calculation. Marc Sageman looks to the psychological bonding of individuals in small support groups. The fast and easy talk right after the Cold War’s end was all about blood and tribe.1 But I feel these compelling takes, all telling snapshots, all miss the connecting context. Compare the strength and performance of soldiers and fighters—and the people they fight for—with their ethos. What the power of collective belonging reveals is a dynamic human force. Religion is simply one rather elevated expression (or channel) for this state of collective consciousness and commitment. Hence formal religious language and symbolism may be a central medium of sharing, but it is hardly its only language. In modernity the lexicon of nationalism and other twentieth-century isms have all the power and the glory of theology— and then some. The power is in what religious language and its symbols address: identity. In this study identity is used to denote our primary, sacred state of belonging. Identity here is in no way comparable to the popular use of identity as lifestyle. Identity as something sacred implies not simply a bond of connection and belonging but also a promise of transcendence—thus the “religious” character of identity. Fully developed, the rituals of identity promise individual transcendence realized through collective belonging.2 War can thus be seen as a ritual with the symbolic richness, life intensity, and emotional release to serve effectively as a kind of liturgy of identity. Like all liturgy—and perhaps more so because it is not recognized as such—war takes on a character more complex and mysterious than we are able to see. Ethnographies of warrior societies identify this sacral nature of war as ritual, but this key insight has not been broadly developed for society in modernity.3 The practice of military history essentially ignores it. Moreover this basic recognition is not frontally part of our consciousness. Hence a cultural approach has brought me to war as a ritual of identity. I was seeking the true strength of resistant nonstate actors. But going further and applying historical fieldwork—comparing the evolution and diffusion of nonstate actors today with those of late antiquity and the High Middle Ages—suggested yet more change trajectories. Perhaps resistant nonstate actors are not simply a part of the landscape waiting to be clipped and mowed, but rather a dynamic force of their own—a new human garden. Finally, the limitations and vulnerabilities of large and established state systems in such a roiling context strongly suggests more cautious behavior and more restrained objectives for the United States.

GLOBALIZATION AND IDENTITY The second theme explores the connection between the identity power of nonstate actors and world dynamics, which we package and label as globalization. Americans see globalization as inevitable human development, whose course is to be mediated through U.S. leadership. Any alternative path thus suggests a world sliding into chaos and barbarism: a failed future.4

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But the identity power and worldwide emergence of resistant nonstate actors suggests more dynamic changes in the established system of nation-states and hence limits to America’s ability to manage globalization. This raises an alternative possibility: that globalization is also a process of cultural creative destruction, which by clearing away the old leaves much space for new things. These take the form of emerging groups and movements—nonstate identities. But these may also represent a broader system change. Yet our literary canon of globalization cannot take this perspective in. Our ethos is “thing-oriented”—even when it comes to describing its impact on people. Perhaps this is encoded in our cultural DNA. We analyze societies according to demographics or economic indices, whereas their intimate culture is observed only through the lenses of civic institutions, crime, or social cohesion. Yet what people believe and what drives them to action cannot be accessed through traditional analysis—through models, algorithms, and simulations.5 So “emerging societies” are difficult for us to see on their own terms. To us they represent an alien phenomenon. Moreover, because they do not fit the civic expectations of globalization—indeed, the entire ruling framework into which the developing world is expected to fit—they tend to be seen as deviant. The more resistant they are, the more they tend to be described as a threat. Hence there is a double barrier—both to exploring nonstate groups on their own terms and to exploring the possibility that they are an expression of alternative world system change. So I propose to go around the fence. I found—as William McNeil recognized 50 years ago—two earlier globalization epochs, each ended in system big change and cultural transformations.6 Earlier “world eras”—notably “globalization” in late antiquity and the High Middle Ages—show us patterns both of nonstate emergence and corrosive stresses on established states. Nonstate actors then also had unusual influence and impact, and in both of these earlier epochs the state systems of major culture areas were transformed.7 Why the centrality of nonstate actors? How did transformations happen? Patterns of continuity and change in these epochs give us insights into similar dynamic forces in our time. Moreover they show us how nonmaterial shifts—and especially migrations in identity—are central to change in history.

“NARRATIVE” AS KEY TO CULTURAL ANALYSIS “Narrative” is the leitmotif of my cultural argument. Narrative here does not refer to a story, but rather to core meaning—identity—organized and sacredly packaged into a formal liturgy. Narrative takes on a literary form as a story, but it is also a series of touchstone moments of emotional recognition: full of lessons and messages, warnings and rewards, comfort and solace—and ultimately at its culmination, the promise of shared transcendence. We can see how sacred narrative works in the American identity. Our three great wars—of revolution, civil war, and world war—are a single liturgy twice

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renewed and reinterpreted. Revolution was our national realization, our coming into being. Civil war was our national redemption. World war was to be our redemption of humanity, which nearly complete, was then 50 years postponed: to be finally finished (or so it seemed) only after a long Cold War.8 Hence 9/11 at its deepest was a shock and also a calling: Now was the time, so many said, to bring American mission to its divinely ordained culmination. Our leader declared it to be, in repeatedly sacred terms, humanity’s final democratic “transformation.”9 Looked at this way American identity is indeed a religious nationalism, and war is indeed a spiritual enterprise. Banners trumpeted as globalization, U.S. leadership, promoting democracy, and global engagement form an authentic catechism which, when repeated, reaffirms different elements of American mission, which requires the fulfillment of its sacred narrative. The world of Islam’s sacred narrative and its very particular anointed lexicon for the Muslim mission is a far older mythos, yet its core tropes, like Jihad and the Rightly Guided, still promise to fulfill the vision of a renewed Ummah and its caliphate. A world at last redeemed by the unity of Man and Islam still resonates deeply.10 We know that such narratives are sacred because they are existential—in other words the narrative defines reality, and the material world must fit itself to the narrative. This is not to say that such narratives are wrong. Quite to the contrary they are truly “right” because they are the very packaging of meaning. Sacred narrative becomes a treasure we hold high in our celebration of belonging. Its existential centrality for us means there can be no American dissociation from the ultimate goal of a democratic world of nation-states living in harmonious prosperity. Likewise there can be no Muslim dissociation from the ultimate goal of a righteous humanity living altogether in the tent of Allah. I argue that this recognition is essential. Understanding the deep role of identity in our lives and the lives of other cultures makes for clearer and better decisions about our world relationships. By acknowledging the central and holy place of national identity (in modernity), we will be much better placed to see actual world dynamics. We see less well today because our observation of world dynamics is filtered through the lens of American religious nationalism. We must creatively square what our eyes see with the demanding portrait of our sacred narrative. That is why we make of resistant Muslim nonstate actors an existential threat. This urge is in part driven by the extraordinary symbolism of 9/11, which charged us to fight a fourth American Great War of transcendence. But even without such a binding geas,11 our sweeping sense of world mission would still attain. It is an imperative embedded in American national consciousness. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this—that is, pursuing American universalism—unless world conditions militate against its aggressive pursuit.

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THE CULTURAL APPROACH IN A RELIGIOUS MILIEU12 My approach—a living cultural framework with history as fieldwork—suggests world conditions that constrain the exercise of U.S. power, and that are not receptive to the fulfillment of American sacred narrative. This is in no way to suggest that the United States is in decline or that I am pessimistic or a defeatist. In fact, these reflexive accusations in themselves are ample demonstration of the inner truth of American religious nationalism. Those who critically examine sacred narrative are of course always heretics: not metaphorically but actually. Heresy is the necessary counterpoint of official orthodoxy—and hence heresy is expected. All great religions spawn ecologies of sects, and in America there are right-wing and left-wing and Greening and Nativist and Libertarian and Socialist sects aplenty. But only the two parties represent “true church”—hence those who can claim true orthodoxy only may interpret scripture and issue fatwas.13 Thus pursuing a cultural framework with history as fieldwork also reveals how what we call history is really homiletic literature. Academic history is marginal to the theological debates of our politics, whereas popular history in contrast is enshrined for the righteous power of its moral tales. This is true of the left, lit by warning parables such as Jared Diamond’s Collapse or Al Gore’s film parable An Inconvenient Truth. But it has been even more electrically evident recently from the right. Hence Victor Davis Hansen’s lesson for our times—of “good” democratic Athens vs. “evil” totalitarian Sparta—or Max Boot’s retelling of “The White Man’s Burden” as the moral path of America’s “small wars”—were ringing philippics of the GWOT.14 Ancient Rome was held up like talismanic saint’s bones blessing the “American Empire.”15 The epithets of Munich and Appeasement were laid down like a fire and brimstone sermon.16 The disconnect between real and homiletic history is an American strategic vulnerability. It suggests that American thought—which is to say its political thought—is as much at the mercy of the tendentious homiletic urge as it was in 1812 or 1898.17 Hence I seek to use history and narrative very differently. The work of more emotionally detached scholars today who do not give over their work to religious homily gives us evidence of cultural patterns in earlier societies as good as, and in many ways comparable to, contemporary fieldwork in anthropology. Thus issues of migrating identity, emerging society, and cultural syncretism can be examined and compared to similar patterns visible today: human snapshot to human snapshot, frame to frame. A cultural approach must seek to escape the pull of religious nationalism in analysis. It should attempt to cut away from the enfolding web of value judgment—of “right” and “wrong”—and of moralistic tale as historical homily. This of course leaves me open to accusations of moral relativism: What about American leadership? Fighting evil? Building a better world? Ensuring our future? “Moral relativism” is less an epithet than it is a cultural signal. It tells us all that modernity’s religious nationalism fears any narrative constructs that posits a

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definable “end of the line” outside of tendentious homily: in other words outside of stern warnings that America must follow the true path . . . or else. Conceiving of human history as cultural creation that moves outside of coherent ordination is threatening. Heresy might be defined as alternative interpretations within a theological paradigm. Conceptualization standing outside of it, even in American political discourse, is thus simply apostasy. Fortunately apostasy in this society leads at worst to mild sanction. Surely being dismissed or ignored or being coaxed to change the answer is much to be preferred to the strappado or the stake. But a complex culture that punishes— however mildly—the messenger bearing contrary signs of change is also a culture that is vulnerable, perhaps deeply vulnerable, to the denial of what it fears.

WHY ANTHROPOLOGY? A couple generations ago anthropology rather grandly styled itself as the study of man. But suitably updated this banner still fits, for this is a discipline that is at its heart, holistic. It looks at all of society and what makes us think and do as we do. I feel anthropology gives my three themes their broadest possible inquiry. It is also a thinking structure big enough to compare and synthesize different human enterprises, from war and literature to religion and politics. Anthropology encourages us to integrate human thought and action, rather than to subdivide and compartmentalize it. But there is another reason to start with anthropology—fieldwork. Anthropologists cull their insights from the intimate observation of a society—and only then do they begin to identify patterns of thought and action that all humans share. The big picture emerges from the record of many thousands of in situ studies. This means that there is a sweep of rigorously observed evidence that must be the foundation for synthesis. Looking for human patterns cannot depart from the evidence. Other “critical” disciplines, from political science to semiotics to gender studies, in contrast, are theory-driven. Their theories and their thinking are both more attuned, and yet also more susceptible to the sway of our zeitgeist and its surface narratives. Thus to speak of “identity” for example is to instantly enter into a contemporary intellectual milieu—that is an emotional battleground. Here the academic debate must address the wrangling of haute couture ideology: postmodernism, structuralism, Marxism, etc. Between these fortified perimeters of thought is only endless social combat over status and its evanescent idea-ownership among a gaggle of intellectual subcultures. Anthropology is certainly not free of these currents and undertows. Thus with the “origins of war” there was in the 1960s and long after a passionate mêlée. Was war the inevitable by-product of man’s biological nature? Were we the descendent of a “killer ape” that killed in the competition for survival? Or was war instead a ritual creation of culture, a more positive expression of a species that had evolved through altruism: meaning, through cooperation and collective

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support?18 That particular debate has been resolved, else I would not be writing this essay. But there are many, many others. Anthropology has not escaped our need to wrangle over the prize of anointed truth in human knowledge. But look at war under the anthropologist’s lens. Look at Hoebel’s ethnography of the Cheyennes, Chagnon’s of the Yanomamo, Berdan’s of the Aztecs, Heider’s on the Dani, Robarchek’s on the Semai.19 Suddenly the grand, quintessentially modern enterprise we know as war—and its impenetrable weave of politics, art, and industry—is stripped clean away. We fall back from quintessence—that “fifth element” from the heavens—to just, essence—the earth.20 We see war in the intimate human: and here we uncover perhaps its meaning. Here lies the power of fieldwork. It takes us back to our earlier selves. Anthropology offers an intimate window—into what we were that becomes a mirror of what we are. Ethnographers used to talk about studying “primitive society” but it is more useful perhaps to think in terms of studying our earlier selves. But “earlier” does not always mean earlier in time. Rather these are societies we can observe, before the take-off of modern trajectories, before the material complexities of raw size and higher technology. Earlier in development does not mean that society was simpler, and in no way was it ever less human. What we see in our earlier selves are abiding communities of the human— and high among these is war. Here I discovered war’s symbolic and practical role as ritual deeply tied to identity. Not identity casually understood, as individual lifestyle choice, but a core commitment.21 Ethnography shows us identity as essential belonging— and thus, essential human meaning—and war is ritually tied to the sustaining of meaning. Earlier societies show this, and their ethnographies potentially point the way to how war sustains human meaning today: in both nation-state and nonstate society. Think about an imaginary building—a grand edifice we could call “knowing the human.” Approaching this building, Anthropology shows us to a portal. It gives us the key—in the form of a conceptual framework—and then pushes open the gate for us—with its body of fieldwork. Yet we still find ourselves only just in the lobby. Anthropology’s framework and method encourages us to compare societies and discover broader human patterns. But the nature of the discipline limits how we understand our contemporary situation. Ethnographies of “earlier societies” can only tell us so much. The deep truths they offer about war and identity may be existential but also impressionistic. Those societies we once called “primitive” can only tell us so much about war and identity today. Today societies we fight— that some yearn to call primitive—still live in our world. We meet them here. Modernity is in them as much as it is in us—“medieval” visuals notwithstanding. This is globalization’s common thread: we are all modern now. Furthermore anthropology traditionally focuses on single societies. Comparative study then means comparing a bunch of societies. Anthropology is thus less successful tackling broad change over time through large cultural

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systems: groups of related and mixed societies. But then again there is no knowledge discipline today that is good at tracking and synthesizing human big change. Here is where I turn to history. By history I do not mean the classical discipline that has produced such wonderful epic narratives as Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. This grand work is modernity’s fundamentalist homily—it is laid down as an iron rod moral lesson, but sold as a crackling good story. Most popular history—the bestseller kind—is still homily. But in the scholarly world, history has become more like anthropology, or rather, more like the paleo-equivalent of ethnographic fieldwork. Such “paleo-fieldwork” has always been with us in a sense—as archaeology. But more recently in this field, have we been able to go beyond artifacts and classification and begin to reconstruct the life of distant and disappeared societies. For example, Mesoamerican societies before Columbus have their own ethnographies. This is due in part to proto-ethnographers like Bernardino de Sahagun, the sixteenth-century Franciscan priest who translated the Florentine codex of the Mexica so that even here, half a millennia gone, there is a Western bridge: a pre-anthropology.22 But even where there is no written optic of contemporary observation, we nonetheless now have a tremendous capacity to reconstruct life and behavior from physical remains. Moreover history as a written optic—in conjunction with related “paleocentric” disciplines like archaeology, sigillography, and epigraphy—now opens new doors to people that were. The fieldwork metaphor is evermore appropriate, so that at least among our monkish, tower-bound scholars, historical understanding of the “long-ago” begins to look more like true ethnography.

WHY HISTORY? The big argument for history as fieldwork is that it offers a sweep of evidence that for the first time lets us do pattern-seeking and cultural comparison in the arena of human change—as societies become more complex and “closer” to our own. It offers us insight into our just-former selves—and our American selves today. Yet how does historical evidence become fieldwork? The deep if unwitting trend in historical writing today is that it seems more and more anthropological. This goes beyond the influence of rising paleo-centric disciplines (e.g., archaeology, sigillography, epigraphy) to also include history’s advancing scope of inquiry. It is no longer enough simply to sort out, weigh, and catalog the sources—and then establish a narrative. Today even the most familiar source material can be reinterpreted with far greater sophistication. By synthesizing a more massive yet also more transparent body of evidence, physical and written, once-invisible or vanished human worlds again come into relief, sometime with an almost granular intensity. This is why we can look at the West’s two earlier “globalization” epochs, in their mature phase, and compare these human transformations with change

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today. This is how we can then compare our combat with nonstate actors today to warfare in earlier globalization times and find shared cultural patterns. We can compare human context (complex global cultural systems mixing) and human conflict (expressing migrations of identity) to counterpoints in late antiquity and the High Middle Ages. Historical fieldwork makes this possible. Historical fieldwork most closely resembles anthropology at the more granular level of society. In terms of war and identity, we can look at earlier nonstate actors and compare their war ethos to the evolved, established states of late antiquity and the High Middle Ages. This comparison shows us conflict dynamics that we would find familiar today. Exploring this framing of history is the next chapter of this essay. But historical fieldwork also has its dark counterpoint, which is sacred history. Hence thinking and writing in our society must serve our deepest needs. Imagining our American past or its predestined future must satisfy the earnest hopes of identity. Hence even criticism—especially criticism—must fit all this like a good sermon or pastoral missive. This is why “the future” has been delivered to so many earlier societies through sacred prophecy. Messages of things to come are required to reify the narrative—whether affirming or scolding—and so truths can only be truths if uttered by anointed authority. This expectation of revelation might be likened to an ancient visiting the Cumaean Sybil. There, like Graves’ Claudius Drusus, the supplicant would stumble through the cypress and high grass to the cave, on that sacred bluff overlooking an azure middle sea. As night enfolds, he would approach the cave to grand cicada-chorus and, from fading summer heat and smell of leaf, pass suddenly into the damp scent of deep rock. There are torches ahead! He goes on into the pungent haze of incense, and insistent sacred chanting fills his ears. There enthroned, at the very end of the passage, is the Sybil herself, invested in frozen golden mask. Now you are the supplicant. Awaiting truth. We treat history like Sibylline prophesies of our future, rather than openended evidence of how ideas and societies change—there for all of us to examine and interpret ourselves. Looking through this window-that-is-mirror is still a personal journey into the mystery of knowledge, but it need not be the preserve only of establishment mystics and sages. Could we even see the onset signs of yet another human transformation? This essay proceeds from that very hypothesis: that what we see as the struggles of resistant and insurgent nonstate actors are those onset signs. Moreover we can look back to such signs in the maturity of earlier “globalizations.” But looking back they do not seem deviant or marginal. Indeed, they are the hallowed beginnings of our modern selves. The difficulty we face in contemporary thought is not simply with our tools, our assessment templates and instruments of analysis. The difficulty is that now we are the Romans. We are not like Romans culturally, but we inhabit their station and have taken on their anxieties about human change.

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Around the year 229, as Peter Brown tells us, the celebrated historian Dio Cassius offered to his elite world of Romanitas a complete history of his civilization. It was a grand and sweeping chronicle, culminating in the sure and certain majesty of his own eternal present. Nowhere in his history was there any mention of the followers of Christ.23 Yet they were everywhere sanctioned and proscribed, persecuted and beaten down. Certainly such an irksome issue deserved minor mention. His omission seems all the more telling, because just three generations later Christians would represent the driving political force of his world, on the very cusp of capturing the Roman state itself—to become our future. Writing here, I would not argue—nor certainly advocate—that in a few short decades hence some miserable movement we despise today will ascend to the future. I would only warn that our attitude risks an ultimate remembrance by remote posterity, not so unlike ours of Dio.

5

Chapter

Fieldwork

How do we compare very different societies in very different historical milieu? How can we be sure we are prudently comparing what can be appropriately paired, rather than simply seeking out (again) “history’s lessons”?

HISTORY AS HOMILY VS. HISTORY AS FIELDWORK My historian friend and I were having another argument. This is an impressive man who has done well by the Defense establishment. No fool, he has cannily taken on the persona of an irascible Victorian gentleman, who knows everything and brooks nothing. He is perfectly suited to the gymnasium-zeitgeist of American military intellectualism and perfectly configured to put a been-and-done battle veteran in his place if need be. I was speaking at one of those bejeweled Defense nonprofits. I started with the same stories that began this book. Of late antiquity, I declared as provocation: Rome did not fall but rather transformed over a couple centuries. What we see as the onset of the “dark ages” was really a long subsidence. It was not about a barbarian coup, but more like the air slowly coming out of the Mediterranean World’s magnificent whitewalls. But then my friend squinted my way with that “what we are about to receive” smile and barked in his best faux Hemingway, “You know of course that the barbarians did in the Roman Empire.” His eyebrows arched challengingly. So began another spirited debate. “Wick, you are behind the scholarly curve,” I countered. Rome did not “fall” to invaders but rather decompressed: first in the fifth-century West and then, finally, in the early seventh-century East. This was magisterial civilizational decompression in which Barbaricum played as colorful extras. I reminded him

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forcefully that I had all the big guns on my side, like breakthroughs in archaeology, sigillography, and epigraphy. We like to use history to make better arguments. I began this book with a couple snapshots out of time—lost time, forgotten eras. This is still in a grand tradition of using history to make our case. But we should know what history is. It is the base clay of our own stories. We shamelessly use history to push our arguments and our agendas. History is not only forever in the eye of the beholder—it is the beholder. It is always there for us. It is always submissive. It is always what we want it to be, because it is us. So why even try to “use” history? More pointedly, how can I argue that this essay is not just more passionate grist about how we are so like the Roman Empire? Because history still tells us real truths. History is our window on us. Historical memory’s very declaration holds up a mirror. How we use history tells us about ourselves. History is deep explanation. It is bedtime reading, telling our sub-conscious who we are. No shame here. Whatever we think history is, it is. Yet its essential validity is religious. So if Rome never “fell,” we still believe it did. Like my historian friend, we cling piously to the lessons we were taught in the homily of “decline and fall.” Rome’s melodramatic story is the leitmotif of our own. It remains the greatest Western sermon, whose delivery began in 1776 with the sonorous narrative of one Edward Gibbon. Each new reader of Gibbon necessarily relives his recognition: when sitting in Piranesi-etched ruins of the Forum Romanum—sun-drenched on that eighteenth-century afternoon—he saw it all. And so we see it too, in our mind’s eye endlessly repeating that majestic and melancholy moment of insight. Because of this infinitely recursive faith-based experience, there will always be sober, somber volumes that help us keep his “truth” alive. So if we look again at the wrangle with my friend, we see “homiletic politics” at work. On the surface he seems to be arguing the case for discontinuous change. Barbarians enter the empire, the empire falls, and darkness descends. Similarly, my counterargument seems to be a plea for change as doggedly evolutionary. Many change factors were at work in late antiquity, and over centuries a transformation happened. But continuity kept pace with change. This may look like historians simply defending their personal theses: What changed humanity? Was it revolution or evolution? But look more closely. The barbarians-overturn-civilization narrative is a stern warning: do not let this happen. Fight change that threatens your very identity. Destroy it at any cost before it destroys you. It is either you or the barbarians, and if you show weakness: just look what happened to Rome! In contrast the transformation argument contends that big change had to happen, it happened slowly, and it kept the old as much as it brought in the new. This very thought is anathema to history-as-homily because it says that big change/transformation may not be so very terrible after all. This undercuts the whole purpose of the homily and its religious lesson.

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So although my friend is citing the very latest in orthodox scholarship, he is nonetheless fighting for the faith-based “truth” in homily. Hence the struggle against history as homily becomes in itself a political act, and the “new school”—however much scholarly integrity and dispassion it brings to the debate—is sucked into a homiletic contest. My desire here is to escape that trap, or at least circle around it. My notion of history as fieldwork is thus to take snapshots or living slices of groups and societies and try to avoid the static electricity that political-sacred rubbing always seems to generate. So the grand new marshaling of evidence by the new school of late antiquity is there to be sifted and enjoyed.

Addressing Assumptions First We “think history” as time periods, based not on their own human character but rather as life carved in stone. Periodizing is the essential province of homiletic history: ages, eras, and epics are above all like chapters, organizing and advancing the story. Yet how can we avoid banding time? We segment time into broad human spaces with distinct characters, but those times must be apprehended on their terms, the terms of those who lived it. Often they had a sense of an age like a belle époque or fin de siècle. But we have other ideas. They are gone and yet they have a good story—at least, a story that is good for us, a story that we like. This is the place of narrative contests. How do I escape them? More important, how do I believably attest to this goal? Let me try and show you: Our third globalization epoch—Advancing a hypothesis that we live in the Western oikoumene’s third globalization is not controversial. I am only comparing distinct periods marked by system-high levels of human mixing and interchange. I am focusing on the mature-to-final phases of globalizations, with the understanding that even though these times are called “epochs” for good reason—having lasted for several centuries—they also come to an end for good reason. A transformation time—So to suggest that our two previous globalization epochs made for big change is also simply to agree with contemporary interpretation. Historians see late antiquity and the High Middle Ages as ushers of transformation. More urgent for me is how the mature phase led to such profound shifts in human direction by epoch’s end. If big change is tied to the very dynamics of globalization, this also means that change keeps going when a globalization epoch peaks—and what happens then? A distinct epoch—Long human spans are easy to call “epochs” in time, but they are harder to see as their own times. Traditional historical narrative is partly to blame here, with its insistence on endings and beginnings. Hence change times become narrative orphans, just bridges between stable, “real” times. So there may be a natural tendency to compress such times into classic “fall of the Roman empire” melodramas that are like a three-generation rip between civilization and “the dark ages.” But now we know better: that the transformation time spans four or five centuries—with character all its own.

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Hence history as fieldwork means a comparative look at societies and culture among those of three globalization epochs, with an emphasis on war and identity, globalization and identity, and system leader as midwife; it also means comparing the central established states and their relationship with nonstate actors, as well as the subsequent changes both experienced. But this is a huge trove of human memory, and beyond what I can usefully treat in an essay. I can suggest, and even draw out, some patterns connecting the three main themes. War and identity connects to globalization and to the role of system leaders in ways we have not fully appreciated, and yes, in ways that speak to our world today.

Suggested Fieldwork on War and Identity Contemporary historical studies like John Lendon’s Soldiers and Ghosts,1 and Mark Bartusis, The Late Byzantine Army: Arms and Society,2 unearth like archaeologists of ethos the very “artifacts” of how lost people conceived of themselves, how they approached the problems of their world, and then how they put their energy into trying to solve them. Lendon shows us the elite world of late Roman antiquity desperately trying to square its ideals of living a life of greatness—meeting the expectations of sacred ancestors—with the practical reality of dealing with barbarian outsiders, the new participants in Romanitas. Rome and Constantinople, dealing with resistant nonstate actors, limited their own range of policy choices, because they were invested in certain identity expectations. Bartusis takes us forward to Byzantine’s desperately resisting a roiling world mix: trying to preserve identity without, through their very struggle, helping ensure their final submergence as well. What Lendon and Bartusis set up is the question of how established and long-standing state systems broadly conceive and frame their struggle against new identities. We have letters and chronicles aplenty about how the mature system-state reacted to emerging societies, but we have far less to go on when it comes to the new nonstate groups of late antiquity and the High Middle Ages. It is far more difficult to find windows of equal clarity that show how these new identities—“the new participants”3—framed their own hoped-for new place in a “globalized” world.4 Yet nonstate actors rose to become successor states or even successor civilizations. How did they do it? This elusive, and even counterintuitive transformation is highlighted, again at the granular level of society and ethos, in several recent studies: Walter Goffart’s Barbarian Tides, Herwig Wolfram’s The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples, Chase Robinson’s Empire and Elites after the Muslim Conquest, Cemal Kafadar’s The Construction of the Ottoman State, and Heath Lowry’s The Nature of the Early Ottoman State.5 The intimate interaction between old society and new participants reveals how syncretism in identity happens. New identity, even as it fights the old, comes

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also as an acolyte and even a supplicant. So seventh-century Visigothic Spain aped Byzantine court ceremonial gesture for gesture and word for word; Toledan kings wore the same regalia as a Basileus of the Romaioi. But old authority also quietly repays the favor: struggling in ways it cannot consciously acknowledge, to pass on its ethos and vision to the enemy. So the same Basileus might offer a barbarian Bulgur Khan his daughter’s hand, or at least that of a charming niece, and with it all the Roman offices and exported manners that would attend such a blessed union. In times of change such things happen face-to-face and day-to-day, across generations. But we can move this fieldwork lens to the meta-level too. Let us propose that we can usefully compare our world today to now-ancient relationships between nonstate and nation-state, through the passionate negotiation of war and identity. But let us also go just a bit further. We can see ourselves changing at the oikoumene, or world level. Are there not some dimensions of our life, in the maturity of “late modernity,” that we can see in the culminating phases of late antiquity and the High Middle Ages? Chapter 2 speaks to how groups of people in globalization seek out new identities. In globalization epochs too, universalistic movements—both old and new—collide and compete, and ultimately meld with, local and particularistic identities. Moreover this process shows us its electric tracery through war. War is a cultural package: a passage of identity, a realization of new identity, and after a celebration of established identity. War is the maker of sacred narrative, and after its passage is complete it is enshrined, memorialized, anointed and offered up, again and again, in society after society throughout late antiquity and the High Middle Ages. The new and rising “universals” develop the most complex and highly ritualized narratives, like the Muslim story cycle outlined in Chapter 3. Other, smaller communities have simpler claims, and the narrative is focused on establishing its claims to political legitimacy in a larger world. Tension and symbiosis between universal identity and the intimate identity of a people, or caste, is the interwoven dynamic of these epochs, played out through war. Let’s start with emerging peoples’—as Romans would say—gens-identity.

War and “Ethnogenesis” In 643 the Langobard (Lombard) King Rothari published his Edictus Rothari. Written by Romans—“the Langobard kings had undoubtedly the best chancery officials and jurists of the time”—Rothari proclaimed himself Flavius rex, linking himself to an old ruling dynasty, making him properly Roman. Not simply Roman, but as legitimate a ruler of Romans as the great Ostrogoth king Theoderic: the first to make himself a “Flavian.” Moreover he also “counted himself ‘seventeenth king of the Lombard people.’”6 Now remember, Romulus, the founder of Rome, was the seventeenth

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descendant of Aeneas, the only Royal to escape from Troy—in Virgilian canon. Hence Lombard identity required double or even triple legitimization: not just in terms of symbolic Roman kinship (Flavius rex), but also in terms of Germanic predecessors that had been legitimated by imperial authority (Theoderic, from Constantinople), and finally, by adopting the originating Roman enunciation of authority (the Edictus Rothari and the descent channel from Aeneas). In our homiletic historical traditions of the “fall” of Rome, who would have thought “barbarian” rulers to be so needy and solicitous—that they wanted so badly to be Roman? Perhaps better yet this story shows how essential Rome was to the creation of the Western empire’s successor states: its new, “Romanly” imagined communities. But who were these “peoples”? Roger de Flor’s Mughavers knew their provenance, and his company was already part of the informal Mediterranean expansion of Aragon. Joanot Martorell’s Tirant Lo Blanc, the greatest Catalan chivalric novels, follows a hero’s journey that in many ways parallels the life of de Flor. Think of it as literary legitimization of a Catalan swashbuckler to ascend from nonstate to state, or at least his fat new fief—the Duchy of Athens—he had wrested from Walter Brienne’s French knights. Yet their glory passed like late summer sun. New identity did not evolve, and this band of Catalans hung on for three or four generations until they blended into the Byzantine landscape of Boetia. But the “Germanic peoples,” the Barbaricum of late antiquity were surely more complicated narrative-seekers—like Rothari. They were about the building the heart of all “imagined communities”—authority-narrative—that worked as the interdependent nexus of political legitimacy and sacred identity. Again, our homiletic historical traditions—thanks in part to the imagined community that was late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Germany— tell us that “wandering” barbarian nations overthrew the Western Empire. As Walter Goffart asserts: The barbarians in the age of Rome’s fall were not Germans even though they have long been called so. None of them in late antiquity, either as individuals of as groups, ever appealed to this name as though it were theirs. They did not imagine that the words coming out of their mouths were variants of a common Germanic tongue or that the customs they practiced proceeded from a common Germanic civilization.7 The Goths that the emperor in Constantinople sent to Italy in 489 were no living, breathing tribe, much less (as historians used to paint them) volkerwanderung whose collective myths of self extended back to some primeval origin in Sweden or North of the Volga. Theoderic’s army was a mixed host, a gaggle of recruits from all over Rome’s Balkan provinces.8 It was a model of diversity—and

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it was what Rome actually was at that time, just as Theoderic, who grew up in Constantinople, was a Roman patrician of “Gothic” descent. Theoderic, thirty years into his rule over Italy, needed through official, anointed narrative to create a Gothic identity. He turned to Cassiodorus, one of the last great Romans, to write that history, the Origo Gothica. Cassiodorus himself, in the third person, described his accomplishment: “He turned the descent [or ‘past’] into Roman-style history.”9 One very late letter of the Gothic court praises the particius Tuluin as “convenit gentem Romuleam Martios viros habere colegas.”10 Goths have the martial spirit of Romulus! The same was true for Rothari a century and a half later. The truth that is now dawning on us is that various peoples who had lived, sometimes for centuries, along the Roman periphery, wanted to be part of Romanitas. Once they came in—in typically modest numbers—they quickly rooted in its larger cultural landscape. This was true for Goths and Burgundians, and even for the supposedly “worst” barbarians, like the Suevi, Siling, Alans, and Asding Vandals who crossed the frozen Rhine in 407. Rome and its “best” Gothic allies destroyed the two biggest of these groups by 420. The other two, when they reemerged into history, had become Roman players—“The Sueves and Vandals, having survived the test of initial endurance, were reborn as lasting components of the late Roman world.”11 The more famous Vandals who took and ruled North Africa we now know were wholly indistinguishable from the Roman elites they displaced—“from archaeological evidence [alone] we would have no idea that the Vandals had invaded North Africa.”12 Yet the empire in Constantinople denied them identity, and they were eventually destroyed: a tiny elite defeated in a single battle. Ethnogenesis is the rarefied tag of the historical school of wandering Germanic nations. What we now see instead is the anointment of late Roman nonstate identity—as junior Romans. The new peoples sought their identity within the universal identity promised by Romanitas. Rather than overturning the Roman world, they eagerly became part of it, and the local or particular identity they sought was against the empire only in the context of a negotiation for the very legitimization from Constantinople they desired. The struggle of nonstate actors was thus not “against” but paradoxically, “for.” War was a means of entry, a frame for negotiation and for proving themselves worthy. “Barbarian” struggles with Rome are thus about identity building—a protracted mediation for an anointed space within both Roman constitutional framework and its sacred identity. This passage of identity has resonance today—not necessarily in the literary mold of Romans (us) and Barbarians (them)—but rather in unfolding conflict narratives that represent a negotiation over legitimacy, inclusion, and anointment—both within Latin America and the Muslim world. This intermediation of identity and its constitutional framework—between established order and new communities—was the human dynamic of late antiquity.

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But it also became part of its breaking apart. The universal of Romanitas was about to splinter. Three new, smaller “universals” would take its place.

The New Universals The Romanized Arabs eventually had a different idea, although this may not have been their original plan. When Arabs took over Roman Egypt and Syria around 640, they were entering provinces where Constantinopolitan control had not effectively been reasserted after the Great War between Rome and Iran. The ease and speed of their occupation was eventually succeeded by the assertion of a truly universalistic successor vision to Romanitas. The vision that became Islam—the first Muslim histories date from the turn of the ninth century—evolved into a meta-narrative whose central focus was the struggle with Constantinople. In other words the elaborate Muslim sacred cycle still built its legitimacy around the struggle with the universal it sought to replace. The new Islamic system was in this sense also looking through the narrative framing of war for legitimization from Rome. Furthermore in its approach both to identity and to administration it was truly Roman-like. Its laws were founded on Roman models, and its entire institutional makeup followed Roman practice. Its actual administrators remained Greek for another hundred years! Moreover, the Greco-Coptic landowner-archontes elite of Egypt stayed in place for another two centuries,13 and we have similar evidence from the formerly Roman Northern Mesopotamia, and of the persistence of the shaharija: the Christian landed gentry and administering elite of Mosul’s hinterland.14 It is significant that the demand for new identity is so bound up in the need for legitimization from existing structures of identity. This makes natural cultural sense, because continuity is to be prized, even by barbarians. After all, they need the tax revenue too, and so they have every incentive to keep the system going. But more than that, they need to establish their identity. Rome had created an imperial “system” that did not allow for large-scale immigration and assimilation. It permitted small-unit embrace, mostly through military recruitment. But Rome made a decision to draw the line and build a fence. Rome was happy to build client relationships with those across the frontier, and even give them a feeling of being almost Roman. But the Romans never could decouple their vision of the universal—Romanitas—from submission. This effectively meant that the only way that other could become “Roman” was to fight the empire and through victory barter for recognition. But for the so-called Germanic peoples this meant that they also had to construct artificial narratives of identity that could be used in establishing their place within Romanitas. They could only join the universal by first fighting and then creating a narrative of themselves within the Roman world. That is why their narratives so explicitly strove to make them distant Roman blood relations, while at the same time differentiating themselves through their superiority in war and battle.15

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Islam’s successor Romanitas eventually became more like late Rome when dealing with rough-and-ready outside peoples who wanted in. During the globalization of the High Middle Ages, several influxes of steppe people washed over the Ummah: from Turks to Kurds to Circassians to Mongols to Mughals. Each of these invading peoples were in turn assimilated, and either stormed in to become rulers or rose from slave armies to create dynasties. But like Goths or Franks they entwined themselves into the Garden of Allah: they entered into local Muslim identity and ethos—and yet retained their essential character as a virtuous warrior “conquest society.”16 The Ottomans were different—though initially looking the same. They entered the Byzantine Commonwealth: the last Roman world. They came initially as highland peoples, and they entered a fractured Byzantine world that allowed them to act as its freewheeling successor. They rose to the challenge and created a new civilization, half-Christian and half-Muslim. In this sense, once they defeated the Egyptian Mamluks, they also bridged the old division of late antiquity. The Ottomans (partly) rejoined Rome and Islam: at least Byzantine Romaioi and Arab commonwealths. But as was the case with Barbaricum in late antiquity, war was not only the vehicle of legitimacy but also the framer of identity—whether of gens or natio like Theoderic’s Goths or Rothari’s Lombards or of a ruling caste subculture, like Mamluks, Mughals, Safavids, or Ottomans. The manufactured, yet sacred narrative of origins-to-greatness-to-legitimacy always remained a battle narrative. For most migrating identities too, the legitimacy was received not from local societies but rather from the reigning authority of a universalistic identity. In late antiquity this was the Roman state, while in the High Middle Ages this authority had migrated to institutions of church and mosque.17 Thus identity had a counterpoised dualism, in which universal identity conferred legitimacy on local and particularistic identities. This in turn lent the sacred narrative a dual-utility too, as bearer of gensidentity and political legitimacy within universal identity. This is why, for example, why the Ayyubid Sultan Nur al-Din made explicit pilgrimage to Baghdad for a Caliph’s blessing, before he retook Jerusalem from the Crusader king.18 Tension and symbiosis between local and universal also characterized the Latin West. The Crusading era highlighted these tensions and symbiosis. The Church was still a necessary conferrer of political legitimacy, but its authority was ebbing, and self-referent identity was rising, beginning with the imperial city-states of Genoa and Venice. This marked the slow shift of universal identity’s association with an imperial seat of authority: Caliph, Pope, and Basileus each for several centuries representing the successor seat of such authority from the Roman state of late antiquity. The Ottoman state, so closely modeled on the Roman-Byzantine, came close to replicating imperial Roman authority. But the Latin West would create a new evolutionary branch of identity, modernity’s nation-state.

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But as long as universal authorities remained, migrating identities at the gens or subcultural level needed to “get permission.” Hence their elaborately constructed sacred narratives needed to “address” either Pope or Caliph or Basileus, at least until the Ottoman state’s triumph (East) and the Reformation (West). Then the new Ottoman sultan gave himself permission, while in western Europe, the new princes—Catholic and Protestant alike—were freed from Rome. Louis XIV had his own “kept” Roman Catholic authority, just as the Protestant princes owned their wayward churches. The age of the nation-state was near.

How Old “Universals” Co-opted Barbaricum But how did later Roman and tenacious Byzantines cling to universalistic claims—and hold on to authority—with such century-spanning persistence? That authority held for a millennium: from the first big breakdown in the 230s to the catastrophe of 1204. It had its ups and downs, and they did plenty wrong: they were bad assimilators, insisting always on their own terms, and those terms were so inevitably terms of submission. They nurtured the identities they feared by the ways they chose to fight them. But however sclerotic in adaptation, they did eventually adjust. Their adjustments even saved the Constantinopolitan polity in the seventh and eighth centuries, when its weak Ravenna-sister had collapsed 300 years before from the strain. The clues are in how the “new participants” built their new narratives of identity. These anointed stories, from Theoderic to Muttawakil, were written for the Roman “other order” as much as they were for themselves. The official passages their chroniclers described were ultimately shaped for the conferral of Roman legitimacy. However resistant and antagonistic their relationship with Rome/Constantinople, their identities were built on the conferral or transfer of legitimacy. Rome/Constantinople, even as enemy, still bequeathed identity. In an ideal Roman situation, generous generals would embrace prostrate chieftains and lift them up as prospective Roman citizens. Think of this as the classic Roman laying on of hands. Again, in highest ideal, this is how it went down: If you go, say on a gorgeous sunlit day like so many in Southern France, to the Gallo-Roman Museum in Lyon, you would enter a brutalist cave cut in the cultivated hillside. On entering the hot sun would flee, and in concrete chill you would immediately begin to descend, like into a Paleolithic cave, like you were really going back in time. On that winding ramp into the deep-remembered human past you would reach a little bend in the road. There, right in front of you, big and bold and all in bronze, would be a plaque. Not some minor embellishment this, like a little civic thank-you on public library brick, but rather something grand: a testimonial for the ages. Like a thank-you launched into eternity.

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Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change What does it say? It addresses the emperor Claudius Nero Drusus Caesar, and it is indeed a thank-you note: not groveling but dignified, as one Roman community to another. In this case that would be Lyon—the city fathers’ Lugduni—speaking to the imperial state’s supreme person, and thanking him for his beneficent grant of Roman citizenship.

This was a big deal for Lugdunum. They had been La Tene barbarians not so long ago19—their grandfathers might remember when their painted warriors, their long hair greased with rancid butter, had driven chariots into Roman cohorts seeking triumphal heads. Now their hair was to a man cropped short, the old mustachios by pumice clean-shaven, and they were letting their man know that they were, after all the killing of Caesar’s wars, grateful to have been made Roman. This was Rome’s ultimate and enduring power—to pull this off throughout the oikoumene—even and especially among the Greeks. But of course they could not rule their superiors, and so after a couple centuries the Greek civitates of the oikoumene were all not merely self-governing but now fully vested in the Roman Senate.20 Then but another century or so after that, the Romans actually moved their big city to Greek lands. It became the New Rome—known as Constantinople— and within a couple generations the Greeks were once again on top.21 Make that a mark of Roman success in assimilation. But what of Barbaricum? Latin or Greek Romaioi, the later empire persistently bungled possibilities with the new participants. Essentially the later empire defined them all as “terrorists”— unpeople—and gave them no hope save through submission. But late Rome had lost the Augustan touch. They could no longer force Barbaricum to submit, although occasionally they could destroy them.22 But those who broke in successfully—within a generation had become part of Romanitas— because they had already become a part of it as the disenfranchised within the Roman order—or for that matter Roman warlord elites themselves! Moreover they discovered that they could be effective political players in a Roman world that had been coming apart for a couple hundred years. Just as generals since the third century had been proclaiming regional autonomy, while others, feeling stronger, sought to become emperor themselves, the new participants engaged in the tussle between generals and their legions that had become late Roman politics. As the oikoumene naturally began to come apart, its core migrated and strengthened in the Greek East. Constantinople became the empire, but it now had to deal with successor states that came to it for legitimization. Hence when long-standing (going back generations) Roman allies, the Franks, took over Gaul in 507, and their chief wanted to be finally Roman, the emperor sent an embassy to Clovis at his coronation. Their scroll from Anastasius proclaimed him Consul and Caesar. The emperor had made him—and the Franks would remain absolutely loyal Roman allies for another 150 years.

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In contrast the defeated Romans allies in 507, the Visigoths, set up a kingdom in Spain. Their political allegiance had always been to the Western emperor in Ravenna, so they had no reason to suck up to Constantinople. But still, if we look at Visigothic seventh-century court ceremonial, it is all a Byzantine knockoff. They desperately want to be junior Byzantines. So it went on, even in the “darkest” centuries of the Romaioi. Eventually, beleaguered as they were, they decided to start slowly anointing their existential enemies. It took centuries, but they made the Bulgars good Orthodox Romans, in a way, just as they did the Serbs and the Russians and still later the Rumanians. Rumanians—yes, people who call themselves “Roman.” A triumph. More so, even the Latin West, which eventually conquered Constantinople and set up a slew of little duchies and baronies across the world of the Romaioi, Latins who despised the Constantinopolitan universal, desperately sought the regalia of its authority. In conquest. After the great city fell in 1204 there was a grand surge in the trade of relics, because Constantinople had them all. It was almost as though the sacred blood of Roman-Christian identity was flowing at last into the Latin West.23 Plus, for about 50 years, the old Roman empire, now as Eastern and Western Christendom, had been reunited. Islam did many similar things as it sucked in the steppe peoples. If Islam was more successful it was surely because it had a far more seductive offer of entry, and a far lower bar. In this sense Islam as the last take perhaps on classical antiquity had the offer that served its civilization best: “You, Turks, Mongols, whatever, accept Allah and we will embrace you!” Surely Muslim conditionality was nothing like the barrier erected by Rome and even Byzantium in dealing with new and resistant identities that wanted in. Hence it was so much more successful—but success comes at a price. Muslim medieval polity prized the stainless model of martial tribal purity—what had once been their own, original Bedouin conquest society. Hence they naturally welcomed new rude but virtuous barbarian rulers: Circassian, Seljuk, Mamluk, Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal.24

Bringing “Fieldwork” on War and Identity Forward to Today So what does my historical-anthropological lens show? Let’s say that we can compare “globalization” epochs in terms of cultural change. What then does late antiquity and the High Middle Ages have to tell us? Could today’s nonstate actors be historically channeling the energy of ancient Goths or medieval Mulghavers? Let’s see. Hizbu’llah in Lebanon, like the Visigoths of Alaric, did not even exist by name before 1982. They were just the people on the land, mostly Shi’a, mostly poor and illiterate. Today they are a nation within a nation, and they got there through fighting. Although a titular part of Lebanon, Nasrullah plays in its politics not so unlike, say, Euric playing in fissiparous late imperial politics in the Roman West.

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Or the wandering Vandals of Gaiseric or the de Flor’s Catalan Company, looking for a city state to seize: a snug berth with a harbor, and good tax money. Al Qaeda in Afghanistan or (briefly) in al Anbar, or even the Taliban? Not exactly a perfect fit, but suggestive of migratory fighter networks that try and establish themselves on top of fearful societies desperate for security, and hence willing to acquiesce to new alien rulers, like Vandals in Carthage, like Catalans in Athens. Or the Somali Courts Union, like the bishops of fifth-century Gaul, rallying the civitates and creating a small oasis of law and security where everything seemed to be breaking down. In these stories of Sidonius Apollinaris and Martin of Tours we begin to see the emergence of new civic order in the early medieval West.25 Was the same process underway in embryo in Mogadishu? Now we will never know. Or the Muslim Brothers in Egypt, creating alternative communities of brethren like a parallel Egyptian nation. Does this remind us, just a little, of third-century Christian communities in the late Roman world? Or the gangs running wild in Latin America and throughout the United States, with autonomous favela principalities in every Brazilian city, or whole states in Mexico and Brazil run by drug duces—what are we to make of the nonstate within the West? Rome’s Western empire in late antiquity was rent by a comparable phenomenon: the Bagaudae. Roman administrators called these people “bandits”—not so unlike the gang description midway between terrorist and criminal—but they were a corrosive part of the late Roman world, eating out whole provinces. Expedition after expedition mounted against them came to nothing, century after century. Or finally, do lofty and untouchable multi-national corporations have some of the texture of Genoa and Venice in their heyday? These global trading subcultures are not simply business enterprises. In the Niger Delta, for example, they have their own professional armies and intelligence services protecting precious offshore oil rigs. But continuing on, is the vast business of private security so different from the Monastic fighting orders of the High Middle Ages, like the Templars and Assassins and Hospitallers—now Blackwater and Triple Canopy and Dyncorp. Some of these comparisons might seem out of place or unfair. But I am not trying to say that Blackwater is the Knights Templar reincarnated: only that it shares some of the same fertile ground for the development of a subculture, warrior-identity framed around fee-for-service enterprise. Surely too the biggest MNCs can be compared to medieval Italian city-states in terms of revenue: ExxonMobil’s total revenue in 2007 was $404 billion, with a net income of $70 billion.26 This compares very favorably with the revenue of a good-sized nation-state—Spain has roughly a $100 billion annual revenue and budget. Exxon is a solid revenue-comparable with say, rich and hefty states like Venice or Naples or Milan.27 Venice, raking in 1 million ducats in 1492, had about one-fifth the available state revenue of the Ottoman Empire.28 But such “points of light” comparisons only go so far. How do these emerging identities, as societies, relate to the world order’s established universals?

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Today there are two: the American “world order” and the “world commonwealth” of Islam. In addition we might add these less-than-universaist “empires”—Latin America, the European Union, India, and China, each of which is rightly a true “world” of its own, as commonwealth, loose polity, or nation. But only the America’s global system and the commonwealth of the Ummah have both universalistic provenance and a combat edge defending and extending. The others are culturally inward turning, with regional outreach: Latin America into the United States, the EU into Francophone Africa (and some of the British Commonwealth), India across the sweep of old empire, and China along Ching periphery. But America and Islam have global plans for humanity, and their spread of material and spiritual investment is equally far-flung. Both American and Islam represent competing universalistic frameworks of authority—hence each system has the deep capacity to endow legitimacy. Moreover their orbits heavily overlap, with the United States clearly more invested in the world of Islam, than Islam in America. So emerging nonstate actors within the Ummah must contend with the United States as well as the Muslim commonwealth. It is unsurprising that most have chosen to be legitimated within the Ummah. Like Nasrullah’s Hizbu’llah some have become symbolic champions of the Ummah itself. But although the Muslim commonwealth is sweeping in its terms of identity, it has no coherent political instrumentality. Its seats of actionable authority are clearly in Arabia and Iran. Egypt, once the seat of real revenue and power in the Arab world,29 and the true source of Sunni thought, is now no more than an Arabian (Saudi family) dependency. Iran has once again extended its reach to Safavid proportions, folding in Shi’a Iraq and Afghanistan.30 Pakistan subsides, and all others are outliers, so the inner representation and adjudication of identity occurs within the context of bifurcated Muslim imperial authority—Saudi and Iranian—brittle as it is, for as long as these state upholders hold onto power. How this works is elusive for the Western observer. But it differs little from late antiquity. Sunni resistance is supported by Arabia—informally, from persons with authority in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states—while Shi’a others seek succor from Iran. Pakistan is different, a relationship between state military and nonstate fighters that is all too reminiscent of the late Roman West. The United States faces a different prospect. Like the empire at the end of the fourth century, we can still claim an undiminished global realm. Its Cold War alliances are still intact. Its global financial institutions (IMF, World Bank) hold fast and still swear fealty to American authority. Moreover like late Rome, America’s military is unsurpassed. But U.S. authority—if not its raw power—is fraying. The NATO claim, perhaps strengthened in the post-Yugoslav Balkans, has been weakened in Afghanistan. The United States still grips international monetary institutions, but its strong seat in world finance is fast slipping. And nonstate actors stubbornly show up the limits of American military power.

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All this—America’s alliance relations, it financial levers, its military effectiveness—can be improved, if not turned around. The grand puzzle for Americans is exactly how to perpetuate its network of state-regime client relationships across the Ummah—or the world. Here American authority is “thin,” because it is invested in the ruling regimes of rather brittle, if not wholly imagined, nation-states. In Iraq the United States sought to reestablish itself within the Arab world as the working universal: in the sense of granting legitimacy to new identities that it chose to raise up and anoint. But this has worked—thinly and partially—only with Kurdish identity. Iraqi Shi’a now look to Iran for legitimacy, and Sunni to Arabian tribal brothers. They accept American dollars, but the path ahead is to recognized identity within the Muslim commonwealth framework, not the American democratic universal framework. System leader states—by definition polities that represent universalistic visions—are at their strongest when they treat with emerging identities as the only universal in the area. This explains why the late Roman state(s) ultimately successfully integrated new identities, and also, why Islam assimilated new participants like Turks, Azeris, and Mongols. In both cases Greco-Roman and Muslim civilization was unchanged, even with different-looking rulers. But in a “global environment” of several competing universalistic visions, even powerful states will quickly discover the limits of their own. Constantinople in the eleventh and twelfth centuries tried to push its framework out in a broader competition with two other universalistic paradigms: the Latin West and Islam. But its efforts to establish a kind of identity overlordship in Italy and Anatolia met only limited success. America’s gambit in Iraq was never intended to be a purely military action. It was in the words of those who imagined and directed it, to be a “transforming” experience both for Iraq and for the Middle East. We were attempting to extend American identity. We were going to create new Muslim identity that would live within our universal vision—but we neglected to take the competition into account. Ours was thus a “thin” rather than a “rich” approach, because it operated as if we were the only universal framework within which new Muslim identity might emerge. Thus we focused on institutional and material building programs: that is, stabilization and reconstruction, “building capacity,” aid, and assistance. We neglected to recognize, let alone fully assess, how emerging gens-identity seeks, as part of its passage to realization, legitimacy within a universal embrace—and a restored Muslim commonwealth is for them a more compelling model.

Suggested Fieldwork on Globalization and Identity Michael McCormick and Chris Wickham and Janet Abu-Lughod have presented magisterial studies that encompass the sweep of human transformation at the end of antiquity. They capture globalization epochs as they decompress and become something new.31 But what do they show?

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They show worlds in transition, or more properly, worlds transforming. But theirs are also world portraits spinning off new identities, creating new communities. It can be a world apparently coming apart, or it can be a world muscling its way into horizons. If late antiquity was an oikoumene coming apart, the waning of globalization at the end of the Middle Ages led to expanding new horizons pioneered by both western Europe and Islam. William McNeil made this point with a compelling graphic, “Moslem vs. European Expansion, 1000–1700 A.D,” showing Europe encircling Africa and Asia, while Islam spreads from its Fertile Crescent center by land and littoral, to the very same margins, where they meet at last again in the run-up to Western colonialism.32 Historians not tied to the traditional literary construction of narrative give us sweeping pictures of societies and ideas as they change from old identities to something new. But however big the change we also see such human transformation taking several generations, or even centuries to play out. No matter how different their dynamic coloration, globalization times share something else in common: continuity. This is a second existential theme all anthropologists stress. Even the biggest change is balanced by continuity. Big change also means big continuity. Here Peter Brown highlights the essence of transformation. He created something of a movement to reinterpret late antiquity and its aftermath. His great message overturned Gibbon’s homily of Decline and Fall with a hopeful panorama of transformation. What made it hopeful is his insight—transformation symbolizes and synthesizes new and old together. This new fusion it succeeds because it finds and celebrates a point of equipoise between change and continuity.33 We can see these same three issues emerge in the late phase of globalization in the High Middle Ages: (1) it was a true globalization; (2) it offered continuity as much as change; and (3) transformation as transformation can succeed. Late antiquity tells the story of a mature culture area—or oikoumene—as it begins to come apart. In the twelfth century and after formerly separate culture areas were violently thrown together. The result was an epoch of growth. But eventually, as in late antiquity, however violent and wrenching the conflict and change, new things nonetheless grow and evolve. The heart of new identities in the later High Middle Ages was the rise of a new ecumenical civilization. How this happened—how the Byzantine and Sunni Commonwealths were transformed—needs more treatment. Michael Angold wonderfully uncovers the Byzantine World’s migration from empire to commonwealth, which eventually opened the way for an Ottoman-led Renovatio.34 But not enough work has been done to bring Byzantine-Ottoman and Mamluk-Ottoman continuities into sharp relief. Some of this has been done at the granular level, such as Continuity and Change in Late Byzantine and Early Ottoman Society, which Heath Lowry followed up with his recent Fifteenth Century Ottoman Realities.35 What we do see in both late antiquity and the High Middle Ages are globalization epochs fissuring into more self-contained culture areas. Late antiquity ended in collapse for two of its three new culture areas, but the Middle Ages ended

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with growth and energies renewed. Sixth and seventh century decompression was due in part to the shocks of climate change and pandemic. But emerging identities were also at the heart of change—as they were in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. What things really stand out in globalization? What makes them such distinct human epochs? Three factors above all: new networks, new consciousness, and exogenous—meaning out of the blue too—shocks. We know all about networks in our globalization times. We adore our Internet and cell phone ubiquity and intimacy. We hunt tenaciously for cut-rate fares in the airline network. We even talk knowingly about “social networks”: the chic cultural dimension of our “world network.” Good. We know what we are talking about, and in late antiquity and the High Middle Ages, we would have been talking the same way. Cogs, galleys: A week from Rome to Alexandria! Letters, mail: The latest epistle from Paul! They had their Internet and social networks too. Just as eminent Victorians had the hot new steamship, locomotive, and telegraph. So in London, August 26, 1883: Krakatoa just blew, three hours ago! We in networked times love our connections!36

Shifting Consciousness Core shifts in identity happen through changing consciousness. But how can this affect new identity in emerging societies? Culture is about how people think and behave. But moment-to-moment it is only a series of snapshots, because this thinking is always changing. Cultural consciousness shifts when the warm and familiar contexts of reality become so distorted and challenged that people begin to look at life and their world very differently. How are we are tied together, self to whole? How is the meaning of me connected to the meaning of us? When such questions are foremost in our thoughts, consciousness is on the move. This sudden tearing of the fabric of reality is a feature of globalization— and it has both terrible and wonderful consequences. Moreover by its very nature it can transform, or set in motion, a transformation of identity. Shifts in consciousness can set up identity migrations to come, even three or four generations later. We need an example—a shift in consciousness that happened—with changes we can track and consequences we can see for identity and society. Our best window here is in late antiquity. In Egypt, in the Fayyum, in the wax-encaustic portraits of people, and in sarcophagi that survive only there, these are messages to us—about where the sacred in identity lives and how this identity changes. The Golden Age of Greco-Roman antiquity ended with the death of the philosopher emperor Marcus Aurelius. After 180 the Roman world entered a time called late antiquity, which everyone thinks was a bad time, a time of decline, the time before the Dark Ages, the time that led to darkness. What new thinking now tells us is something very different.

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Late antiquity was bookended by the rise of Christianity (200s) and the rise of Islam (600s). Late antiquity was not just a transition, a bridge time, but a special and unique epoch of its own. And the beginning—the rise of Christianity— is a time of transformation. Between Marcus Aurelius and Constantine lies nothing less than a transformation of human consciousness. I would like to quickly review the big change, because it speaks to us today. The Greco-Roman Golden Age was golden for the free, the landed, and the educated few—the very, very few. Neo-Platonism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, and so on, gave them a rich menu for individuated consciousness. But what of the rest: the other 98 percent? For them the world was bounded, as it had always been, by three iron realities. One, the supernatural was everywhere, but humanity was separate and apart from it—hence the special place of oracles in peoples’ lives. Only through the oracular could people approach the gods. Two, humanity was intimately bound in the loam of the earth, of nature, of the mundus. We were embraced and imprisoned in the remorseless rhythms of the cicada call. And three, even the world that had escaped that rhythm, the world of the city, the place where the lucky 10 percent lived, the place ruled by its archons’ individuated consciousness, was still a tightly ordered society. The curiales, or city fathers, sustained a civic ethos where life, status, and expectation were locked in eternal equipoise. All of this fell apart in the third century. What took its place was completely different: and to get there, each of these three elements had to work together in a strange harmony. To understand what happened it is important to throw away our own grand pile of cultural baggage about religion, stacked up for us these many centuries. If we look at Christianity in functional human rather than theological terms, what we see is this: The supernatural came into humanity. It is not as though Man became God, but rather that God became part of Man. As Sabine McCormack writes, “We are dealing with religious consciousness capable of seeing existence in terms of pairs which could transcend the boundaries set between the divine and human species.”37 Or as Peter Brown puts it, “it lodged contact with the divine directly in the structure of the personality itself.” In this new framework, “the frontier between the human and the divine lies wide open.”38 This was nothing less than an overturning of the nature of consciousness, opening the way for ordinary people to discover senses and empower truths formerly denied them. Every person could become not just a person, but also something much, much more. Conversely the inescapable bonds to the earth too had now been broken. We were rudely separated but also free, even commanded to follow our own course to the divine. How do we know this happened? I give you Exhibit A: the wax-encaustic portraits of the Fayyum. Gaze upon the Golden Age (second century) ornamental sarcophagi of Asia Minor. As Wiegartz puts it: “We learn nothing of the individuality of the dead person. The carvings speak to us only of the

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distinguished, refined lifestyle and classical culture of those who had themselves buried.” Now look at the Fayyum (third century) portraits: men, women, and children. On one level you see the person, beautiful and unique. On another you see yourself—in the pathos of your future. On another still you sense their collective envisioning beyond: their shared calling to the divine. This is above all a very special advance in individual human consciousness. Finally too, this strangely symbiotic dynamic of change: the equipoise of urban society itself broke down. Yet this only further promoted individuated consciousness for ordinary people. The Roman Empire of Marcus Aurelius was no cliché of transcendent imperial power. Quite the contrary, the Golden Age regime was almost nothing more than a fragile network-racket co-opting local elites. The Roman state did not rule: local elites did. Peter Brown calls this “soft government”: “The emperors of the second century had ruled with ‘a magnificent economy of effort,’ through the tacit collusion with the upper classes of the cities.” This system fell apart in the third century, and by its end, the elites had all become K Street clients of the emperor. In the new system of “hard government”—“the collaborators came to identify their status and power with the position they enjoyed in the imperial government.” What did this mean in practice? First it meant a slow collapse of civicmindedness—and then eventually of the entire community equipoise built around an ancient trust-relationship between city elites and people. Second it meant that alternative communities were motivated to quickly coalesce and chart their own course. Not surprisingly those that stepped up were Christian communities that, as Peter Brown puts it, offered a community which, in symbolic form, clearly accepted the breakdown of the equipoise on which the traditional pagan community had rested. Its initiation was conceived of as producing men shorn of the complexities of their earthly identity. Its ethos produced a more atomistic view of the person, who was less bound than previously to the ties of kingship, of neighborhood, and of region.39 Constantine eagerly courted the Christian community: not simply because it was big, well placed, and nicely infiltrated into elite circles; or even because it was the strongest constituent player in the empire. He was worried because it offered ordinary people an alternative model of authority tied to the magnificent promise of individuated consciousness that the Roman state could never even think of trying to match: By the end of the third century, Roman society did not have to reckon with one high-pitched hierarchy alone. Over against the secular

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hierarchy of an increasingly ‘pyramidal’ society there stood, in clear outline, a spiritual hierarchy of ‘friends of God,’ the source and legitimacy of their power in this world held to rest on an unambiguously heavenly origin.40 What am I saying here about late Rome? Just this: a surprising expression of individual consciousness somehow intertwined and worked with deep changes in the imperial sociopolitical system to create a new human context. What was the new picture after four generations? Community was different, civic ties and politics were different, and above all, the possibilities of the individual person were not just different, but transformed. It is strange that a flowering of individuated consciousness should accompany the rise of centralized despotic politics. It also goes against the grain to think that the loss of civic-minded community could lead to the emergence of less traditionally civic but yet more spiritually connected and personally fulfilling alternative communities. But this is exactly what happened. The physical shocks that hit the Mediterranean in the sixth century, pandemics and climate change, wore away at each link in the tracery of a networked civilization—so that by the mid-seventh century it was all almost entirely gone. With it went city life. Why was city life so important? Simply it was what made the transformation of third-century consciousness possible. The mosaic of Mediterranean cities was the necessary foundation for the take-off of individuated consciousness. The infinite pathos of those encaustic wax portraits from the Fayyum would never have been realized without a density of human possibility. Why was Egypt the epicenter of our transformation? Because only in Egypt did urbanization reach such levels in antiquity. Archaeologists now reckon that almost a third of all Egyptians lived in Greco-Coptic cities. Even in Italy or Greece it was only 10 percent at most. This is an amazing achievement for the preindustrial world.41 Egypt was not simply significant in early antiquity. It was a center of the Hellenistic world and the Byzantine-Roman world—and then the Arab world and its Mamluk and Ottoman successors. In the seventeenth century a quarter to a third of all Ottoman state revenue—then the trans-European superpower—came from Egypt.42 The cities survived the end of antiquity in Egypt—but not so in Latin Europe and Byzantium. They withered in the seventh century down to citadels, administrative centers, or Episcopal seats. The point here is that their withering also accompanied the rollback of individuated consciousness. The exuberant horizons of the third century and after were cruelly leashed, either into a severe Catholic feudal vise in the West or into a Soviet-like imperial state society in the Byzantine East. Only in the twelfth century would the momentum be reversed.

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So a majestic and unstoppable advance in human consciousness now seems like a fragile thing. Perhaps we also live in a world not so unlike antiquity, where as an old order’s balanced verities wither, and where implacable state systems loom, people everywhere reach out for a more personal transcendence. What does a big change in consciousness in late antiquity tell us about today? First, the Greco-Roman East—the most sophisticated and economically developed part of the Empire—was becoming more spiritually focused individually, but inclining collectively toward a universalistic embrace. Second, as this was happening, the long-standing traditional equipoise of society—built around the rhythms of the city, the civitas—began to unravel and change in form. Third, this transformation was receptive to new universalistic polities, like Islam, but was also dependent on the survival of a robust network of cities. Hence the new Islamic polity (where the cities were) could leverage this consciousness to advantage, while the Byzantine East and Latin West were left with a more primitive order rooted in localized governance. New consciousness today is taking three recognizable forms. The first is a new universalism—or universalism renewed—in the Muslim world. The sacred cycle rejoined, the mythic struggle reengaged, has led to a new Muslim consciousness. But we should be clear what this represents. It is not an expectation of a Caliphate reborn. Garth Fowden and Aziz Al-Azmeh effectively put that fear-trope away.43 Even in its ancient inception, Islam was moving quickly toward a grand commonwealth. The vision of a Caliphate as “super-state” is a fantasy shared ironically by Al Qaeda and Americans. What has happened is that the metaphorical engagement between Al Qaeda and America has framed a new identity space wherein Muslims may both universally and intimately redefine their belonging. In contrast the grand American universalistic vision of 1945 has begun to break down. What we see here is a split between an inward-turning Euroconsciousness and a “long hard slog” American consciousness. What the 9/11 War has managed to tease out are diverging identity choices between Europeans and Americans. Increasingly Americans have bought into the darkest construction of their destiny, necessitating all manner of future sacrifice and suffering. Above all we cannot permit the world to change in ways that threaten the American vision. Europeans in contrast seek an alternative outcome: to create a protected, interior world safe from the chaos of world change. The dynamics of the split itself have been revealed in Afghanistan, where the rusted framework of old universalism—NATO—is quietly corroding in the tension between two diverging visions. Although NATO was officially promenaded in ritual plenary as healthy and undiminished, the lineaments of alliance politics in themselves speak to changing consciousness, because the divergence between Europe and American operates at the level of the existential collective. World consciousness is changing—and worth tracking and feeling.

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EXOGENOUS SHOCK AND DEUS EX MATERIAL CAUSALITY A leitmotif of this essay is the American ontology of the material. We seek reality not only in what we can see and touch, but more critically, in what we can quantify and analyze. Hence our favorite paradigm of change is “thing-driven” change—especially the FX/CGI movie subset of “crash-driven” change. Examples of popular crash-driven preachers are Jared Diamond (past) and Al Gore (future). This essay believes that big change is not simply people-change but also identitychange. So what about the alternative, disaster-flick genre of historical causation? This excursion has a couple suggestions about how we might thoughtfully integrate crashdrivers into the web of change. Globalization in late antiquity and the High Middle Ages offer plenty of shock advertisement, even “poster-boy” anecdotes of disruptive climate change and grand pandemic. Or perhaps they offered pandemic its invitation—like we do today, except then with high-castled cog instead of Airbus or 747. But what do they tell us? We know more about the Black Death of 1347 than we do about the Justinianic plagues that began in 541. We cannot be sure even what bacillus really hit the world of late antiquity.44 We know that an integrated world is a networked world, and networking is not just about flows of goods, finance, and information. We also know that human society both late antiquity and the High Middle Ages withstood and eventually recovered from its networks of pandemic. What we are less certain of is the actual impact itself—apart from observed horror and its reification into myth. For example, we know that pandemics did not bring the Mediterranean world of antiquity crashing down, nor did they destroy the burgeoning world of the High Middle Ages. What we do know about are the high-impact zones of the Black Death. In the fourteenth century three places were hit the hardest: new global enterprise, fragile system rulership, and ancient establishments.45 Bruges’ Hi-Tech Zone, including Ghent and Ypres were like a fourteenthcentury Silicon Valley. The Black Death ruined them: “cadavers were piled in the streets of Ypres, and the number of orphans shot up astronomically.” A century later their populations had still not recovered from this 50 percent loss.46 Mongol Khanate Mothership was the pandemic network that connected what had been encapsulated culture areas, or “disease pools.” Globalization’s Mongol network agents then linked China, India, the Muslim Middle East, and Mediterranean Europe: “Not only did the Mongols have little resistance to the disease, but their mounts offered a safe harbor for the rapid transport of infected fleas . . .” Thus Great Khanate undid itself. Old Romaioi barely holding on—down but not out—was at last laid flat by the same flea, offered by Mongol besiegers of Kaffa in the Black Sea and brought back by Genoese traders, three days sail from Constantinople. The city never recovered. Decades after Mehmet’s conquest a century later in 1453, his pashas were still importing Greek Tsakones from the Peloponnesus to replenish the city. But the empire’s population did not recover for a century and more. Ottoman revenue in the Chalkidike shows that the people-tax densities of the early fourteenth century were not reclaimed until the sixteenth.47

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The story might even be simple. Big humanity—meaning functioning culture areas, like Europe, The Levant, India, China—survive the shock. But particular communities may be too hard hit to recover. The fourteenth-century experience suggests that these were either the most vulnerable—for different reasons. Constantinople was vulnerable because it was the sea-route nexus of the world. The Mongol Mothership was vulnerable because it was the imperial center of Eurasia: the place where all roads end. Bruges was vulnerable because it was the magnet of new industrial technology: the place of money, the place to be. It is also worth exploring how exogenous shocks can assist dynamics already under way. For example, the globalized oikoumene of late antiquity was well into a system decompression in the sixth century, when the rolling waves of pandemic hit. Finally, rather than necessarily accelerating a coming apart, outside shock can also encourage consolidation in culture. Even if internalized and inward-looking, such a pulling-together can still serve as a strengthening.

So what does “fieldwork history” tell us about “global” system change? It suggests that our own globalization epoch has crested. It also has begun to reveal the promise of human transformations, difficult as this is for us to see. But it also offers our world some comfort too. As Peter Brown reminds, big change is big change, but cultures have always, somehow been able to find ways to shape the change so we can live with it. Americans worry which way the arrow is pointing. Late antiquity’s arrow was pointing down. The Greco-Roman-Persian world was brittle, and climate change combined with plague simply pushed it to null. In contrast the arrow on the human energy gauge was pointing almost straight up in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Humanity was moving ahead—and continued the upward climb, Black Death notwithstanding.48 But in the end it was a world split up—yet again—material growth or decline notwithstanding. What are we to make of this? If the end of antiquity tore the oikoumene into three civilizational identities, the end of the Middle Ages saw a similar fissure in global consciousness: between a renewed western Europe and a re-created Roman (or Ottoman-Romaioi) world that encompassed both the second Byzantine commonwealth49 and the Sunni Caliphate. I suggest that exogenous “shocks”—like climate change and pandemics—threaten our global oikoumene less than splintering identities. Or perhaps this should raise a related possibility that “shocks” can work in concert with cultural shifts. Hence the Black Death may not have sent the world into fateful tailspin, but it was the available prybar of rapid Ottoman expansion. So if there is no lesson and certainly no prediction here, there is still patternrecognition. What that tells us is that “between-times” are also profoundly open times. Hence we need to focus on the possibilities of a fermenting cultural mix rather than its deviance from us—and on changing cultures’ potential for change

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rather than just a threat to what we have. If we can see these epochs as betweentimes or bridges of human transformation, we must be willing to ask, bridges to what? Seeing our world’s nonstate actors as threat and nightmare is to approach them only through our national-religious anxiety over the future of our own sacred narrative. Ravishing emotional-historical tropes of decline and fall, modernity vs. barbarism, and a clash of civilizations blind us to the full scope and potential of human change right in front of us.

Suggested Fieldwork on System Leader as Midwife I have defined the system leader as a universalistic identity framework tied to a state. This vantage is helpful because the United States clearly owns this identity framework today. Comparing the United States with the “nation-states” of late antiquity and the High Middle Ages is thus a contrapuntal exercise. Late antiquity and the High Middle Ages are rich in themes of the system leader dealing with new identities and transformation times. The great system leader of late antiquity of course was the Roman state or, for a critical time, two states: in Ravenna and Constantinople. Late antiquity shows a fairly unified “global” order coming apart. The High Middle Ages begins with three distinct but related culture areas violently melding in a centuries’ long conflict. Their interaction tears apart the largest and most integrated state system, the Roman-Byzantine state. Finally a new system state emerges, the Ottoman, pulling together both Byzantine and Arab Muslim commonwealths. There was also the Ayyubid-to-Mamluk dynasty in Egypt and Syria, as well as rising and subsiding pastiche power centers in France and Germany and in Mongol realms, but none of these, save for a moment, could lay strong claim on a universal vision. But the system leader at the decisive times in both globalization epochs was Constantinople and the empire of the Romaioi. From 450 to 750, at the end of antiquity, or from 1050 to 1200, in the High Middle Ages, the center remained Constantinople. Constantinople (the Roman Empire from late antiquity to the High Middle Ages) was, if not actually always endowed with the material power of system leader, always at an indefinable source level its enduring source of authority. Hence it was “system leader” in the sense that it still owned the sacred keys of identity. This was clear in the fifth to the eighth centuries, and even if there was a lapse in Carolingian times, by the tenth century this symbolic authority had been reestablished.50 Yet if this is a time of transformation, what do Roman and Byzantine responses to transformation help us see in ourselves? First, there are signal insights informing assessment and adaptation. Rome and later Byzantium assessed their situations through the lens of sacred narrative, just as we do today. They pursued strategies guided, like ours today, by built-up institutional norms

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and anointed constructs—including touchstone tropes and declarative language girding official action. Hence what Romans or Byzantines did was often based on achieving something akin to what great ancestors had done before. They had no other model for thinking about their situation. Second, the consequences of deep conservatism are reflected in the state’s need to reaffirm identity through official ceremonial. Michael McCormick’s Eternal Victory shows how the elaborate ritual of the triumph became the actual objective of Roman (and Byzantine) strategy, where war was the vehicle for the ultimate, celebratory reaffirmation of imperial majesty—and hence collective “Roman” identity. Foreign policy came to be framed according to its symbolic potential. Paul Magdalino’s biography of Manuel Komnenos highlights the everpresent temptation to push strategic opportunity in the pursuit of sacred identity-prize.51 In addition, other studies and articles—like John Drinkwater’s “The Germanic Threat on the Rhine Frontier: A Romano-Gallic Artefact”52—raise the possibility that change itself was embraced only after it had been made to fit within traditional narrative constructs. This created a sort of strategic “solution” in which a treasured mythic core of ethos and identity, rather than accommodating to change, could instead be renewed through a permanent struggle against the new “threat.” Thus change could be made to fit ancestral expectations in sacred narrative, while offering new vehicles for the present to transcend and join the river of identity. Finally, external pressures for change reshape the system leader or central state, both politically and culturally. Integral to this change is how the “threat” creates a new component of national identity in the form of a military elite whose own subcultural identity is tied to its struggle with the enemy other. Both late Rome and late Byzantium became militarized elite societies, thus subtly altering the evolutionary course of their own cultures. The United States is surely neither late Rome nor late Byzantium—or the Ottomans! But it is the dominant state and system leader. If not as grand as Rome or as vulnerable as Byzantium, America is still the world center, the source of order, and the enforcer of order’s vision. Like them it is the source of political legitimacy as well. So when we look at old patterns we see this: • It typically fell back on institutional norms and anointed policy constructs, which were also backward-looking in that they sought to renew the glory of the past: they were thus tied to older benchmarks and expectations in sacred narrative. • The conservatism of the state—sustaining its position—led to strategies that could be capped with appropriate official ceremonial. The engagement “over there” was ultimately about a celebratory reaffirmation “here at home.” • Change was embraced by being made to fit traditional narrative contexts. Hence the often-preferred strategic “solution” was to shape change in terms of a “threat” around which the nation could rally and find unity in another mythic struggle. • Building an approach to change based on a grand threat, however, led to its own forms of political and cultural transformation. The resulting emergence of a military elite society would reshape the universalistic vision itself.

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Building state strategies on the guiding framework of sacred narrative is well outlined for the later Roman state(s) by Lendon. He shows how Roman “grand strategy”—in contrast to the homiletic Luttwak who make Romans obedient American “Cold Warriors”53—was rooted in an emotional-spiritual conceptualization of identity: The Romans still managed, until Adrianople, to field a professional army, soldier by solider not demonstrably inferior in any respect to the Roman army of the earlier empire, and in some respects superior. In straitened times, whether by decision or default, numbers on the battlefield and usable reserves had been sacrificed to quality. There were men who knew how to lead an army like this, men like Valens’s general Sebastianus, men like those who had pleaded with Julian not to march east into the realm of the Persians. The army of the fourth century needed to be treasured, to be commanded with care and circumspection, not risked unnecessarily. It needed to be wielded with calculated finesse, like a rapier: its tragedy was to be commanded by men like Julian and Valens, men who used it like a mace, as Roman commanders always had. Remembering that American forces are also “commanded” by their head of state, we might reflect on these lines: Late antique commanders were lashed on by history . . . What commanders knew (and were told by those around them) is that leading their armies boldly at the enemy was expected and admired behavior . . . There was, in short, a dangerous mismatch between the capabilities of the Roman army of the fourth century and the culture of its commanders, visibly or invisibly guided by the tradition in which they fought.54 A highly conservative state culture focusing more and more on ceremonial process is revealingly explored by Michael McCormick. His thesis is that Rome’s political authority—and just as critically, its universalist legitimacy—was built on “triumphal rulership,” or as the Romans called it, “eternal victory.” Hence war was not simply a celebration or even a renewal of Roman identity, but rather a more practical political issue. War and battle were needed to reaffirm the state’s right to rule and the very office of the emperor. His continued authority depended on victory in battle, and thus actual battle became the basis for the thing itself: the “the triumph.” These were elaborately staged imperial victory celebrations held in the capital. Inasmuch as the elite culture of even a “global system” was still contained in a single mega-poleis, these ritual celebrations had similar “audience penetration” to analogous events on television today. Their significance should not be minimized, simply because we do not acknowledge the impact of comparable rituals in our

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time. Moreover it is a window into how seriously great state systems take their rituals, and how often today events are designed to make possible the ritual. The last two aspects of system leader response—the creation of a “threat” trope that fits with sacred narrative, and the way in which the threat subsequently works to transform both elite and identity—are also well covered both for late antiquity and the High Middle Ages. For the late Roman West, there is a consensus among scholars. The evolution of a military elite society that became coterminous with the state led to a state essentially decoupled from the other key elements of elite society: senate, church, and city elders (curiales, decurions). The emperor as leader of a military elite not only depended more on triumphal rulership but also was poorly positioned to claim the universalist mantle. It might be tempting to suggest that globalization times, and the weltering pressures of change they present established states—and especially system leaders— encourage a militarization of elites. Certainly this was the transformation of the Muslim world in the High Middle Ages. By the later fifteenth century the Ummah was clearly moving in the direction of ruling military castes. The three great empires of early Muslim modernity—the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals—were each built on Ghazi warrior horseman elites. This is a Muslim tradition that has continued in both modern Turkey and Pakistan, and in different and less successful form in Egypt and Iraq. Certainly in both Turkey and Pakistan the army has become the guardian of the nation, and an institution that, especially in Pakistan, represents a nation-within-a-nation. Like the late Roman West, such military castes add to a splintering of identity in national society. But these nonetheless remain inward-focused military castes. In contrast the United States—so often compared to Rome as today’s equivalent system leader—has a very outward-facing defense establishment. In fact this establishment is also something of a nation-within-a-nation. It is a sort of tribal confederacy of many subcultures, all bound together by a common mission-identity: the defense of the American universal vision. If we compare America’s response to World War II—and its continuities up through the present day—as that of a system leader (a universalistic vision that is also a coherent polity), a few caveats are in order. First we are not—repeat—not the Roman Empire. Yet how America responds to cultural change in the mature phase of our globalization may resonate with others. It is important that we do not overplay this; that we explore system-leader responses within their own cultural context rather than simply as self-evident “parallels” or “prophesy.” If American behavior paces other times and places, our awareness of shared patterns can help us assess change within the United States: how its system leader response, extended over decades, might affect the American universalist vision itself. This is the burden of Chapter 8, “Us.”

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What amniotic sea offers up humanity’s rising identities? What new réalités do they portend? How do we separate the prospect of authentic societies as full-time future humanity from our fears of the waning of the nation-state? And what is that elemental power in their narrative?

THE WORLD OF THE OTHER He is literally a man on a mission. His is a mission to the most wretched of the wretched: the prisons of the planet of slums.1 His name is Jeff O’Malley, and he has given his life to building Christian prison-fellowships in places you do not want to go. Belize, 2007: Here are a people who are largely unknown and untouched by local and global society. Yet they are people with hopes and dreams. They have names. Maybe I over-dramatize a bit, but I am struck how most people don’t see these folks as “like us.” And yet there are Americans who understand this. In the face of great odds, they are working to change this. Lending a helping hand, whether food, legal assistance or employment training—like the group I volunteer for, Samaritan Ministry. The poor in Belize City are so much in another world that they essentially run their “hood” themselves. Gang leaders in their early 20s, with eyes that look decades older, call the shots on the streets. Living with rampant crack cocaine and horrible infrastructure, hopelessness abounds—at least hopelessness when it comes to living like the rest of people. One neighborhood, Back-of-Cemetery, houses hundreds of people yet there is no electricity, running water, sewage . . . Yet there are good people who venture in there. Rotarians, government reps who want to help. They are developing a plan to bring some aid. Interestingly, smack

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Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change in the middle of Back-of-Cemetery, there is a Pentecostal church . . . serving on the front lines . . . The entire world of prison fellowship is helping create a new consciousness. Not the organization but the movement. These are people who don’t accept things as they are and even in the midst of massive injustice, pain and deprivation, they are bringing hope and help.2 Zimbabwe 2002: I remember just a long straightaway from the airport: no lights, every few feet a band of young men, mile after mile, driver petrified that the van would break down, clearly you saw a society where there was almost nothing to rally towards, nothing to aspire to, no way to get out, physically or spiritually. All infrastructure rusting, collapsing, everyone it seems, hitchhiking, cues of hundred trying to get buses, four to five hour commute to get home. Land confiscated by the regime is dotted with shacks. No one is working. Total inactivity. No vision of where we are going, sense that we will just take what we can . . . Yet there is always hope with the individual who feels called. The prison is always the worst, and yet out of such hell comes a cry of humanity. Yet the prison becomes a symbol of sparks of identity out of less than nothing. People everywhere are answering that call. Prison becomes a symbol of sparks of identity out of less than nothing. My response to the counterpoint that exists between those who come out motivated criminal organizers and those who come out as motivated missionaries. They share a response: to do, to make, to find. To be.

O’Malley speaks to issues embedded in globalization yet still stubbornly unseen. We reflexively think of terrorism or insurgency when we hear the term nonstate. But the nonstate is everywhere among the global other, among humanity’s left behind. What does nonstate really mean? Nonstate actors are groups, communities, and movements whose identity is migrating away from or wholly removed from the state. They do not have to be outside of the state to still be nonstate. They may exist within titular state power structures, even live under the shadow of state authority and its enforcers. But identity is seriously decoupled. These are subcultures that live for themselves, that celebrate themselves, that see nation-state society as something apart. Sacred identity is no longer tied to the state: it has drifted downward to the local, the intimate, the real. This is important because we cannot understand shifting and migrating world identities if we look too narrowly at what is nonstate. To be not a part of the nation-state world is at heart a belonging decision. But deciding to be part of something “not” has existential implications, because it represents a migration from the sacred iconography of the nation-state. It means you are committed to finding a new sacred identity.

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If we look at the nonstate world through this prism, it refracts into a far broader spectrum of humanity. Let us take a quick chevauchée through it. Two-thirds of humanity is moving away from us and also from our vision of one world. They are the global other, and they inhabit a terrifying world. For example, in Planet of Slums Mike Davis keys chillingly off the darkest science fiction, like Soylent Green or The Terminator. While Tom Friedman rhapsodizes new Silicon Valleys like Bangalore, Davis spotlights the thousand slums that surround it: Half of Bangalore’s population lacks piped water, much less cappuccino, and there are more ragpickers and street children (90,000) than software geeks (about 60,000). In an archipelago of 10 slums, researchers found only 19 latrines for 102,000 residents.3 Now fling this across the planet and a future of 3 billion slum dwellers. The real story—the actual world dynamic—is that universal integration is no longer the human prospect. It is rather a black split between “us” and a “surplus humanity.” Globalization has become the privilege of those lucky few billions in the formal labor market. But what about those left behind? What about the other half on their way to becoming the other two-thirds? What happened to our redemptive narrative in a world where modernity ends forever at 40 percent of humanity?

How the Other Became Evil Our story for them has become murky and confused. Are we the redeemer, and they the helpless victim awaiting our intercession? Or are they now—after 9/11—simply a dark side beyond succor? Or worse yet, is the dark and wretched the breeding ground of terrorism and resistance to the nation-state—and thus, civilization—itself? Yet America the redeemer has drifted to NGOs, like O’Malley’s prison fellowship, community charity drives, or individual donation. For a fearfully nativist majority, a new narrative has already reconciled us to the reality of a permanent and unreconstructed humanity. Even during the “soft globalization” 1990s, the story was being rewritten. Robert Kaplan’s The Coming Anarchy helped steer us there. Repelled and horrified by his descriptions of Abidjan and Conakry, the deep message readers took away was this: keep them all as far away as possible to survive. There is to be no human redemption, just human consignment.4 Kaplan put the global other in the starkest possible terms: We are entering a bifurcated world. Part of the globe is inhabited by Hegel’s and Fukuyama’s Last Man, healthy, well fed, and pampered by technology. The other, larger, part is inhabited by Hobbes’s First Man, condemned to a life that is “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

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We were prepped during those years for the answer this war narrative now gives us: redefine humanity. The world of the “left behind” is the seedbed of the dark side, from drug lords and terrorists to medieval religious fanatics. Ralph Peters, popular thumper of the war narrative, prefigured the evolution of American feelings about the global other. In 2000 5 he described a “dark transformation” among the global other, where the grail of individuals and masses alike will be the quest for an excuse for their failures. They will find it in a return to crude, intoxicating systems of belief and valuation—wronged gods and stolen patrimonies. The result will be intermittent euphorias of hatred, stunning violence, and ultimate failure that then begins the cycle again. Much of humanity is returning to the days of witches, anti-Christ, and self-willed apocalypse. If Kaplan and Peters helped emotionally decouple us from a world we once sought to redeem, 9/11 birthed a chorus of voices, Kaplan and Peters included, who now explicitly tie the global other to the “breeding ground of terrorism” trope or its even more popular call for “draining the swamp.” The morphing of the nonstate in American sacred narrative flows from a deeply-stained misperception of them. The transformation from wretched to be redeemed to dark side to breeding ground has enabled a subtle shift in the sacred narrative itself, as it was enunciated for the 9/11 War. First, the nonstate itself represents “rejection” of civilization. As Peters asserted in 1994, We have entered the second and final phase of the rejection of the West by noncompetitive cultures . . . They struggled to become those whom they reviled, and failed. Now, inarticulately enraged by the evidence of that failure, these broken states are attempting to do no less than to detach themselves from our history. The “apocalypse” is occurring in the rejectionist states themselves, where demagogic leaders, mass movements, and criminal gangs impoverish their lands and peoples . . . The new barbarians who have no interest in government or society beyond what they can seize from it.6 The notion that the West’s postcolonial successor order had failed really means that they had failed us. So as Peters does here, nonstate responses are lumped together with colonial-residue tyrants as surest evidence of failure. Rather than seeing “nonstate” communities and movements as authentic cultural responses to a failure we helped make, we see the new nonstate and failed successor regimes as simply barbarous. Moreover, because they reject us, they reject civilization and hence choose to be our enemy. Painting the nonstate world as malign and inimical means that any resistance to us or movement against us emerges out of a whole world. Breeding ground and

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swamp whisper to us that it is not just the terrorists or insurgents who are the “bad guys,” but the whole of their world, or as the tribal confederacy likes to say, “the sea in which they swim.” This redolent image is attributed to Mao, but it is now authentic argot of American COIN. Yet the irony is that we have turned Mao on his head. Instead of wooing “the sea,” we use Mao’s insight so as to say, “See? What do we expect? Of course bad guys and terrorists abound—is this not the sea in which they swim?” In doing so we unconsciously signal that the problem is not the terrorists but rather Islam’s Muslim world. 7 What this transformation of the global other meant for sacred narrative at the beginning of the 9/11 War was that redemption became a trope of full conversion. The invasion of Iraq declared as its goal the erection of a democratic secular state in stainless American mold. The most recent polling of Muslim attitudes shows how rapidly our intent was apprehended. Muslims everywhere knew instantly that it was not just the terrorists, but also their own very way of life that we despised and would overturn. This unambiguous signal was a “hinge of fate” unappreciated at the time. Without a shred of uncertainty we told the Muslim world that we were coming to convert them. This represented a departure from World War II or even the Civil War— where at least reconstruction was visited on related or kin political systems. The 9/11 War revised sacred narrative to make it seem as though America has successfully converted alien societies to democratic faith before—especially Japan—and rhetorically couched this as a civilizing mission. 8 Thus the 9/11 War has decisively changed how nonstate actors everywhere (not just Muslims) see us and also how we see nonstate actors. Even though we backed off big time from forced conversion in Iraq and Afghanistan, the experience itself has left a lingering legacy in the American Mind. The nonstate now inhabits, perhaps permanently for Americans, the same place in our collective imagination as Barbaricum for Romanitas.

Why the Other Matters But we must still try to see the real world of the nonstate. So let us return to Jeff O’Malley. His missions among the left-behind are missions to the smallest molecules of the nonstate: little communities of committed, pious, passionate believers contending with the wreckage of their world. Again, when he talks of the ironical counterpoint “between those who come out motivated criminal organizers and those who come out as missionaries,” he is making an essential link in their creative response: They share a response: to do, to make, to find. To be. Nonstate humanity emerges from the left-behind. It is precisely out of environments shattered by globalization—making them residue—from which rise up many

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Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change who still will struggle to build new identity. It is important here to declare that the new identities among nonstate humanity cannot reflexively be expected to be about being like the West: that has become, through so many billion eyes, a cruel lie.

Identity is about what can be done: building both community and the passionate belonging whose collective energy can be harnessed for realization and transcendence. But these passionate identity enterprises take extreme forms and demand extreme piety. One is religious, one is criminal—and many are both criminal and religious. In extremis, all passions are extreme. Again, O’Malley: I saw a documentary recently showing how the mainline denominations in Africa are losing people by the droves to Pentecostal churches. The focus was that many were attracted for practical reasons. The thinking is that, here, I can get a better job, increase business contacts and find that special someone I’ve been seeking for so long. This is connected to a tendency toward materialism in some cases. The other part of the “dark side” I mentioned is emotional appeals. People are revved up constantly and too many associate such feelings with their spiritual wellness. (So if they feel down, they must not be in favor with God . . . ) What’s the attraction? The Pentecostal tradition practices spiritual warfare. They are not overly cerebral and analytical, but dive in to fight evil practices and seek to spread God’s love. They provide an outlet for those who wish to express boisterously and without compromise, the depth and power of God’s love. If the vast “other” from which nonstate identity draws is from humanity’s left behind, then it should come as no surprise that the passionate piety of new communities is inherently resistant. It is rooted in struggle. The ways ahead still open to them are almost always anathema to what the state allows. The world of the state has abdicated, or allowed, or often encouraged the kudzu-spaces of the left-behind. It has surely overseen the migrations to vast new slum-cities—and done nothing to regulate them and make them livable. It has turned a blind eye to the savage practices of its own senatorial class toward sharecroppers and tenant-serf labor in the vast wilderness-backwoods where no camera-eye survives.9 This is the worst of it. We might think such wretchedness as completely beaten down. Maslow told us that people at the ground floor of his “hierarchy of needs”10— without security or life’s necessities—can do no more than petition survival. But that is not so. Abandoned by the state and civil society, people still seek identity and its active hope of realization and transcendence. Their answer is right in front of us. We see everywhere, since the beginning of humanity, how strong and passionate belonging is—as necessary to life as bread and protection.

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But this world—whether we call it a “planet of slums” or a “new Middle Ages”11—is not simply an infinite and unimaginable shantytown. Its human tides reach past the shoreline of “real” places not staring at the edge of night. These are places right next to seas of corrugated living compost, but that nonetheless still represent working communities with their share of doctors and lawyers and writers and artists. The fractures here are the cracks of human coexistence, wherein daily realities intermingle at the fault lines of change. Truth is that the identity migrations of our world are taking place in societies where the working and the wretched live side by side. Doctors, lawyers, and managers are engaged with the human dross on their doorstep—they see them as people and as community too. As we will see for Egypt’s new Islamists, professionals can also migrate and at different levels turn their integrity away from an uncaring ruling elite, and toward those in need. Hence the nonstate actors so feared by the West are not the specters and parasites of “ungoverned spaces” but also increasingly those accelerators of cultural dissonance: where interchange and dialogue between modernity’s apostate managers and after-modernity’s left behind begins to reach in and change established society. Nonstate communities and movements may be sustained by hopeless hope, but they are also informed by nearby, restless expertise. This can become a kernel of syncretism in society. Coexistence within a shared “national” society informs the evolution of nonstate resistance. Resistance becomes a dual path to identity. Many nonstate movements and communities have already established local authority—for example, the great Kibera (or “jungle”) slum of Nairobi12—but they lack recognition. Recognition must be established inside (identity’s narrative) and outside (the acknowledgment of identity’s legitimacy). Resistance is a proven path to attaining both. Moreover we insistently intervene to prolong the wretchedness. Africa is perhaps the shining model of how the West arrived, visited its creative destruction, and then left behind weak successor kingdoms that could not function because they were often no more than cultural simulacra. Africa’s post-colonial regimes represented other-directed identity—existing essentially for us. But what Africa needs is inner-directed identity: authentic identity. But what would such identity look like? In many ways contemporary Africa suggests the constellation of successor kingdoms of the Roman West. For a couple centuries these regimes in late antiquity aped the court in Constantinople and its mores and laws—and it took centuries to become themselves. This sense of inner-identity—made at home—is the essential lie to the West’s rhetoric-rap about “modernity.” What the West achieved through three centuries of colonialism and still-unfolding globalization is nothing more than our unacceptable offer: other-directed identity. What we see in contrast, even among the most wretched, is the emergence of inner-directed identity. Ideally this is what we should want for them.

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Yet the world’s inner-directed identity is stubbornly emerging in nonstate form—as local communities and transnational movements—and for us this is a threat. But more threatening still is our interposition in their act of creation. People are doing what all people have done since the beginning: make culture. And culture is about realizing and celebrating identity. Trying to stop such creation in favor of our models is nothing less than fighting identity—fighting ourselves. Chapter 2, “Identity,” suggested six identity migrations of defense and resistance—and one is ours. All in their way are about belonging: forged through combat with those who threaten. Each is about building sacred narrative.

THE PATHS OF THE OTHER Quietist Resistance: Network of Conversion, Network of Subversion? The great homiletic narrative of late antiquity was the conversion and subversion of the Roman Empire by Christianity—enshrined in modernity by novels, and then movies, like Quo Vadis or The Robe or Ben-Hur. But homily it turns out is a pretty good model. There are nonstate missions in Nigeria, for example, that are reminiscent of the work of Columbanus. As Eliza Griswold relates, both Christian and Muslim community enterprises truly resemble emerging societies: Living Faith is mega-church with 300 branches across Nigeria, and 300,000 worshipping at the Canaanland headquarters alone,” and Nasrul-Lahi-il-Fathi with 1.2 million members, with 100,000 worshipping at the Lagos Secretariat Mosque.13 Yet as Muslim and Christian communities war with each other, their resistance is not about the state, either liberation from it, or its subversion. What is happening in Nigeria is perhaps the groundwork for decoupling local identities within a subsiding patronage scheme called the nation-state. But not quite yet. Pentecostals are now 15 percent of Latin America and 21 percent of Brazil— and how closely does this story track with the work of the early Church: Hugo Leonardo da Silva is like deals with it by staying away, he says, “unless it is to spread the word of God. That is where the two worlds converge for “Fishermen of the Night.” “Who are you?” barked a gang member, seeing dos Santos’s group approaching them in the middle of the night, right at the spot where they used to carry out their briskest drug sales. Dos Santos stood in the front, and was pushed to the ground with the butt of a rifle. “We come with the word of God,” dos Santos said, suddenly surrounded by 40 men from the Red Command, one of the fiercest factions operating in Rio de Janeiro. The Pentecostals prayed, trancelike, as they called out for God to reach the gang. Dos Santos says he doesn’t remember

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what he was saying, or what was happening around him. He kept repeating, “You are not alone, you are with Jesus.” Someone suggested they were spies for the police or a rival drug gang. Dos Santos says he can stay calm in such situations because he carries the shield of God, but certainly his personal experience in a gang helps him.14 Egypt is different. Sixty years of resistance by the Muslim Brotherhood (al-ikhwan al-muslimun) speaks to a deep struggle over Egyptian identity itself. Ray Baker sees this struggle as originating in the historical conflicts among Egyptians about how best to deal with the colonial onslaught that, more than any other factor, shaped the context for Egypt’s emergence as a modern state. Two powerful and competing currents arose . . . the first found inspiration for resistance in Islam, while the second turned to Westernized nationalism. The two trends competed for the soul of Egypt, without decisive resolution.15 The Free Officers coup of 1952 seemed to decide the issue in favor of Western Socialism. But the six-day kesselschlact of 1967 reawakened the “Islamist alternative.” What is this alternative in the struggle over Egyptian identity? Leading Islamist historian Tareq al Bishry called Egypt’s “Western” failure a fatal disconnect between state power and national purpose [linked] to the unconstrained and arbitrary character of state power. The Egyptian state had refused the inherited Islamic framework for legitimating state power, turning instead to Western secular models . . . without subjecting state power to limitations established by a public consensus on democratic principles.16 Egypt’s Islamists are no interior community chafing to be free. They do not chart a separatist identity: their “subversion” is not as some accuse, to create a “parallel Islamic society.” Nor are they truly revolutionary. They do not seek to overthrow the state but rather, reform both state and society—when society is ready. “It would be unjust if the Brotherhood were to come to power before a majority of the society is prepared to support them.”17 Islamist leaders who talk like this are not budding Marats. With our notion of “historical fieldwork” in mind, it seems as though the Brotherhood resembles more and more the Christian movement of late antiquity— where both represent long-term cultural process approaches to new identity. The trope of Jahiliyya and deliverance is the embedded core of Islamic sacred narrative. That is preserved in the Al-Ikhwan variant, but what is surprising is how its pursuit of community building looks more like the other great idea of late antiquity: • There is the evolution toward the quietist, the nonrevolutionary. • There is the persecution, swinging back and forth.

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Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change • • • • •

There are the martyrs. There is the dramatically successful community building. There is the embrace of the real elites, the working elites. There is the slow self-inflicted delegitimization of the state regime. And all the while the “universalist” authority of the movement grows.

Like early Christians the Brotherhood was repressed—several times, with great severity. But like the situation of Christian communities in late antiquity, this was a pendulum-swing between toleration and repression. Paradoxically this back-and-forth actually works to the advantage of the proscribed group, because old authority can extend legitimacy but has much greater difficulty suddenly withdrawing it. The path to legitimacy also is framed by persecution, and equally important, a ruling regime swinging back and forth between toleration and repression. Persecution is a powerful story opportunity for martyrs to showcase and contrast their integrity and courage against the cruelty and cowardice of the regime—and its fear. State fear is carved in public stelae for all to see, in its constant wavering between embrace and proscription. Moreover the martyrs will be read—and the Brotherhood had powerful writers whose sacrifice only amplifies the energy of their words. One of the turning points in the progress of Christianity was when the Roman elite began to sign up. It is hard not to see in the death of Hassan al-Banna and Sayed Qtub something like the martyrdom of Apollonius, Roman senator. Al-Ikhwan also shows similar success in the face of persecution. The Brotherhood has been successful politically. In 1987 they took 35 seats in the national assembly, during a period of toleration; then again, when the pendulum smiled in 2005, they took over 80 seats: 20 percent of the assembly. Many experts feel that fair elections today would net them 40 to 60 percent. Perhaps more important is their mobilization of society in pursuit of the Islamist renewal vision. So much of Islamist strength today is built on the piety of Egypt’s professional class, appealing to their innate realization through personal integrity. “The Islamists succeeded in enlarging the associational role in civil society . . . the Doctor’s Association went furthest, expanding its social service efforts on behalf . . . of less privileged elements of the population in the interest of social justice.”18 The Brotherhood and Islamist groups promoting Wassatteyya, “a distinctive Islamic vision of reform explicitly repudiating violence,”19 have created the lineaments of a renewed Egyptian society, by effectively building alternative, working agencies of education, health, and social welfare that are doing what the state either will not or cannot. This might seem like a parallel Islamic society, but people embrace it as Egyptian identity renewed, the reformed successor nation. Just how big an embrace is shown in the number of mosques. In 1986 there was one mosque for every 6,031 Egyptians; 20 years later, with twice the population, it is one for every 745.20

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Plus the Brotherhood has universalistic appeal for the Ummah. Part of this is in Egypt’s central claim on Muslim intellectual imagination, and part is in the demonstration. The model works, and it works across Egyptian society as both a renewal and a reassertion of Egyptian identity’s place within the Ummah. For all the impatient and the angry and the disaffected who left al-Ikhwan for speedy careers in the great Jihad, the true, quieter Brothers have found the stronger and surer path to legitimate Muslim Renovatio. The fulfillment of the narrative is in the transference of legitimacy itself. Paradoxically this may come not from a waning and irrelevant clerical establishment or state-kept Ulamma but rather from indirect, indelible terms offered by “Rome and Constantinople”—the United States itself.

Feudal Gangs and Statelet Turf: Autonomous Urban Subcultures In the late Roman West the free farmer became legally bound to the land and slowly crushed by imperial taxes. People who run out of life-options have a last option: flight. The Roman state called such people Bagaudae—“terrorists.” Throughout late antiquity the phenomenon of abandoned lands (agri deserti) became common as peasants, free or not, simply fled the pressures of landlords and tax collectors . . . this may have included as much as 20% of all the arable land of the Empire.21 This was breathtaking internal migration, greater by far than any “barbarian” peoples who entered the empire from outside. It has its mirror today. Agribusiness is happy to see impoverished tenants move off the land, so the issue today is not about losing the tax revenue of farmed acreage. It is about the people. If in late Rome 20 percent simply fled to ungoverned rural spaces, today they flee to ungoverned urban spaces, and in comparable share: Today, it is estimated, that one third of Rio’s urban population live in more than 500 favelas. The number of people living in favelas is growing at an annual rate of some 7.5 per cent, whereas the overall population of Rio de Janeiro is only increasing by 2.5 per cent per year.22 Now take today’s Bagaudae global: UN projections indicate that virtually all of the population growth in the world over the next 25 years will be in the cities of the developing countries; and that the vast majority of this new urban growth will be poor people living in squatter settlements and slums. These “subnormal agglomerations” (as the census terms them) currently account for 30%-60% of the urban population in Asia, Africa and Latin America.23

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But like Rome’s Bagaudae they represent not simply “alternative” communities, but ungoverned communities—a threat to the state: Politically, slum life with its informal political and economic structure is a semifeudal realm of kickbacks, bribes, tribal loyalties, and ethnic exclusion. Urban space is never free. A place on the pavement, the rental of a rickshaw, a day’s labor on a construction site, or a domestic’s reference to a new employer: all of these require patronage or membership in some closed network, often an ethnic militia or a street gang.24 So their very existence, which for convenience the state has encouraged, which in its civic insensitivity it condones and even benefits from, nonetheless grows as an existential threat to nation-state legitimacy. Pressure mounts for the state to find symbolic vehicles for their public submission, which at the same time do not require risky full-scale intervention. The surest such route is to make them illicit by renaming them as “lawless” zones, so that the entire community is implicitly criminal: Lawless zones can be found in the barrios, favelas, gecekondas, chawls, ghettos and mega-slums of global cities; in rural enclaves or frontiers; or in the desakotas (urban villages) where sprawl has blurred the distinction between urban and rural, center and periphery. They are regions ranging from a few small blocks to large uncontested areas and failed states where state institutions such as the police and traditional government services hold minimal or no traction.25 This is the tremulous voice of law enforcement as it helps established politics shape a fearful future in an effort to shore up eroding legitimacy. Yet these threatening places are to their own simply identity’s new locus. Hence it is still another political constituency, however far removed from their authority. Yet their resistance has profound implications to the essential nature of state authority itself. It is the consequences of these implications that they truly fear: Many of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, for example, are now so dangerous that politicians enter only with the local gang leader’s permission. The gangs deliver votes in exchange for patronage. Beyond that, the politicians and the state remain largely invisible and irrelevant. The gangs do not wish to secede from Brazil, but they can compel its government to negotiate the terms of its sovereignty.26 What consequences? Simply this: if mega-slum communities govern themselves in the absence of state support, they must seek permission from that same uncaring state. Yet this demand inevitably slips into gray negotiation—with outcomes that subtly alter the very proscenium of state authority. Nation-state governance that can

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exert no more than a thin protectorate or client-state authority over autonomous communities would over time be forced also to adjust the very constitutional nature of their relationship from “ungoverned” to “self-governing.” Hence to “win” the negotiation and preserve if nothing more the symbolic authority of the nation-state, state-establishments must cling to the power that remains in declarations like: “Failed states and ‘lawless zones’ fuel a bazaar of violence where warlords and martial entrepreneurs fuel the convergence of crime and war.”27 Yet all the signs point to the state’s slow loss of leverage in this negotiation over existential auctoritas—and perhaps for this reason alone: The local gang maintains its own system of law and order. It “taxes” local businesses in return for protecting them, punishing those who refuse to pay with attacks on property and people. It provides a rudimentary welfare safety net by helping locals with school fees, lunch money, and employment—a function the Jamaican government used to perform . . . As one kind of authority has withdrawn, another has advanced.28 In late antiquity the Bagaudae’s all too similar resistance came up short. After all it was only backwoods-loser peasantry. Imperial officials went after them with bloody-minded ruthlessness—suppressing them in slaughter. But the Bagaudae of our contemporary lexicon—gang, criminal network, illicit society—have the technology of the network on their side. They have a more productive revenuestream than the state—drugs. They also often have the allegiance of the citizens of their “barrios, favelas, gecekondas, chawls, ghettos and mega-slums.” They also have that straight-razor throat-hold that comes from inhabiting the same arterial space where authority also lives. Resistant village and slum communities in our world are—by our definition— criminal. Certainly most are run by gangs and illicit networks, and their currency of authority is narcotics. If illicit from the Latin means not-licitus, “not lawful,” then this is easily true. Going further in Latin, licitus is from the past participle of licere, “to be permitted” (which may be negotiable). Not lawful, not permitted. This is how we see resistant governance in the vast world of edge-shanty and mega-slum: dark and evil. Just like the Romans. But for the rootless pushing roots identity cannot be denied. Leaving old belonging behind they yet carry the scaffolding of identity—eager to place it alongside the walls of new basilicas of belonging—even if it is corrugated steel only, even if it means embracing a jefe de favela who can offer working security and governance. Then there is the countervailing authority of faith. Pentecostals, like their fierce proselatory brethren in late antiquity, also have natural political authority: Gang members leave Pentecostals alone because, although they don’t necessarily practice any religious doctrine, they still overwhelmingly believe in God, say researchers. Catholicism has traditionally reflected

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Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change the political elite here, who are seen as having done little to combat crime. Pentecostals are seen by the community as operating in a separate, uncorrupted sphere.29

The unknown prospect is in the chasm of the state, where both gangs and pastors fight and strive. Febrile scenes inhabit the current of evolution: from fear and predation to civic investiture. This evolution in fact tracks the organization of new authority in the early Middle Ages, after Rome, or in the High Middle Ages, after Byzantium. Society will evolve in the absence of the state. Gangs and missionaries alike represent just such a potential. They are already evolving into patterns as in the early Middle Ages, of rulers and church, and like these patterns, they evolve locally. But they can also transcend to another path, that of the fighter fraternity. This was a path blazoned once by warrior-monks, Muslim and Christian both. It is a reified predatory-ascetic narrative and it moves toward a very different goal.

Warrior Martyrs and Penitentes: Fighter Fraternities Globalization in the High Middle Ages produced three brands of nonstate actors who made their living by fighting. There were soldier-companies-forhire—comparable to our corporate armies so celebrated by Blackwater and Triple Canopy. The vignette that began this essay flagged the most legendary of these: the Catalan Grand Company of Roger de Flor. Like today these were the new bizenterprises of a global economy. There were also monastic warrior fraternities that mixed business with piety. They fought for a contending global vision—the Latin oikoumene, or Christendom— but they were also about building social networks of wealth and property, properly fortified of course. Richest and most famous in the Mediterranean bourse were the Knights Hospitaller and Knights Templar. Islam had its Assassins, but rather than reified they were persecuted: an ascetic Ismaili fighter sect in a sea of Sunni, while the military orders were anointed defenders of their “globalization” narrative, the Crusades. Finally there were the informal and unanointed: the Ghazi. These “holy warriors” were already ancient tradition in Islam’s High Middle Ages. They symbolized the original fraternal bands that had created the Ummah in late antiquity. Over the centuries they were loosely institutionalized along the forever-war frontiers of Islam—keeping myth alive while harnessing wilderness energies of restless holy warriors that might be destabilizing if any closer to Muslim political centers.30 The most successful were the fourteenth-century Ottoman Ghazi, who creatively harnessed the engine of a new civilization. We see all three today. Soldier companies are playing as significant a role in Western security as they did in late medieval Europe. The closest to a truly monastic warrior fraternity might be the distributed fighter-networks we call gangs.

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Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, or the Brazilian prison gang Primeiro Comando da Capital, or PCC, bear all the hallmarks of penitentes’ piety, especially in the extravagant ritual and heraldic scarification of their “coat of arms” tattoos. The PCC showed in May 2006 how it could effectively shut down the second city of Brazil. An entire urban society essentially put in panic mode. Their grip on their own is unmatched, but it is the fierce resistance of the contra. Thus their sacred identity is passionately particularistic, while Templars and Hospitallers were rich and successful identity parasites, where their order and the entire monetized cause of what we might call the “globalization” or “civilizational” metanarrative could not be disentangled. The PCC ethos resembles more thirteenthcentury Assassins. Hence today it is Al Qaeda that hearkens back to mythic Ghazi traditions and to the model of the Christian military orders—to one surely, and perhaps, to the other. In one sense like the Ottoman Ghazi in their first generation they are socially fluid. The Ottomans embraced Greek and Catalan Christians: they were an omnivorous social network.31 Al Qaeda in this spirit embraced all the many stripes of Salafist code, and even downplayed Shi’a apostasy.32 In another sense, they resemble the militant fervency of the early military orders, infused with zeal and an almost monastic commitment. They share the medieval penitentes’ celebration of hardship and physical sacrifice—admittedly in very different ways. Al Qaeda has emerged as late modernity’s most compelling fighter fraternity: with a literary branding on a par with Templars. But they are neither Templar nor Ottoman Ghazi. We must go beyond metaphor to place their significance in this globalization. Look at Al Qaeda through these four lenses. One, like ancient Ghazi they bear an indivisible universalistic vision. Chapter 3 discussed why this vision, born by aspiring Ghazi, comes up short. The bottom line: It treats the sacred narrative too literally; but worse, it seeks to replace a multiplicity of identity needs in the Ummah today with a storybook template, rather than addressing what people are actually looking for. Two, the road for Muslims today is a sacred liturgy that must be interpreted and refashioned for every single Muslim context. Furthermore the role of Islam must fit each expectation as it is crafted into a local or national story. Hence what Egypt needs is totally different from what Pashtun or Punjabi Pakistan needs. Three, Al Qaeda’s social fluidity and “franchise” approach to local enterprise means that these needs might possibly be accommodated through a fighting Islamic revival. Adaptability is built into the model. Medieval warrior-monks evolved powerful corporate subcultures, but they lived or died by that model. Four, likewise, the Ottoman example shows a path to power through almost “prehensile” cultural adaptability. Rough Ghazi Turks somehow assimilated the spirit and institutions of Greco-Roman antiquity. They became Muslim Byzantines—but better performers. Al Qaeda is not on that road, although it has tried. It partly succeeded with Taliban in Afghanistan, but it wholly failed in Iraq.

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The overarching issue for Al Qaeda is establishing a framework of legitimacy in the face of a Muslim zeitgeist that has already been forever altered in its twocentury-long encounter with Western modernity. Moreover Al Qaeda fastened on a vision of Muslim Renovatio that was no longer real to most Muslims. Islamism—revolution and reform in Islam—was a powerful force in the 1980s and early 1990s, but Al Qaeda adopted an apocalyptic narrative framework for change (from late antiquity) that had limited appeal for an Ummah living in modernity. David Cook suggests the essence of this contemporary rift between antiquity and modernity: One should also note the attack on “formal” Islam implicit in the tradition: The apocalyptist is saying that the present order is not sufficient, and that “formal” Islam has failed to bring the messianic golden age. . . . This is the very essence of the Muslim restoration myth: at the End, the things that have been degraded and destroyed during the interim period will be rebuilt and restored. The call for just government was, and is today, the hallmark of every revolutionary apocalyptic and messianic Muslim group and needs to be recognized as such.33 For the Ummah to embrace mythic restoration the mythic had to be made real, and apocalypse from late antiquity was the vehicle for reasserting the liturgy. But how could that possibly be done? Clearly it is not through the establishment of an Al Qaeda “model society.” A mere taste of that was trumpeted in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan in the late 1990s, but it was self-defeating. Resonantly, the vicious grab of Al Qaeda in Iraq was if anything, worse. In Anbar Al Qaeda came very close to total auto-delegitimization. These were not Ottoman Ghazi or even Mamluks, Mughals, or Safavid horsemen. They lacked the true virtues of Muslim rulers in the making. They flunked the “Ibn Khaldun test.” Patricia Crone suggests that the political evolution of Islam was “fixated on the tribe”—the romance of their own Bedouin origins as conquering warriors sweeping out of the desert. Arabs like Ibn Khaldun thus saw barbarian Turkish tribes as the successor model to themselves: Turkish tribes . . . imported from the land of heathendom . . . embrace Islam with the determination of true believers, all the while retaining their nomadic virtues undefiled by lustful pleasure, untouched by the excess of luxury, unmarred by the habits of civilization.34 Al Qaeda clearly believed themselves the descendants of al Ansar, but it is clear to the Ummah that they are just modernity’s reenactors. Just one in six Arabs approve of their behavior and beliefs. They are not seen as leaders; rather, half of all Arabs sympathize with Al Qaeda only because it supports the Muslim causes and “confronts the United States.”35

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Here was the way to an Al Qaeda alternative: legitimization by the evil one, the Great Satan, the Dajjal. America. Al Qaeda’s path was forever bound to America by the grand historical act that was 9/11. Saad al-Faqih put it this way in a 2005 interview: Zawahiri impressed upon Bin Laden the importance of understanding the American mentality. The American mentality is a cowboy mentality—if you confront them with their identity theoretically and practically they will react in an extreme manner. In other words, America with all its resources and establishments will shrink into a cowboy when irritated successfully. They will then elevate you and this will satisfy the Muslim longing for a leader who can successfully challenge the West . . . This challenge to American identity itself was a result of a huge transformation.36 To get Ummah buy-in to an apocalyptic narrative from antiquity required American anointment. It is fascinating to speculate that while Templars were legitimated within the constitutional framework of medieval Christendom, Al Qaeda has informally been legitimated by American authority, which, however “evil” in their eyes, still occupies the supreme position of late Rome to a resistant, barbarian outsider. If that outsider force—American Dajjal—remains, and remains in force forever, then Al Qaeda is situated in an unusual position. If American intervention effectively nurtures establishment regimes and proscribes revolution, then the prospect of revolution may seem to die out in Islam. In this world Al Qaeda will struggle desperately to make its case. But in contrast if the chaos-space of American intervention keeps pushing new things, then Al Qaeda has a mission—but maybe not as they had planned. If new Muslim worlds emerge—in Egypt or Arabia or Pakistan—these communities will not be Al Qaeda–driven. The great testimonial power of Al Qaeda unfolded in mere minutes: with three planes hitting their targets. Then it was over. Revolutionary groups—even if they jealously inhabit the core zones of myth— must in the end die or survive by becoming part of new things that will (eventually) no longer be fighter things. In a world of successful Islamic revival Al Qaeda will need to find a niche—even as it is celebrated as the Renovatio’s heroic launch. But what constitutional role can Ghazi play? A symbolic-archon enterprise, placed strategically to discomfit the West? We know what Muslim states did with the Ghazi-impulse in the ninth and tenth centuries. They sent their Al Qaedas off ritualistically to fight Byzantines. To languish for centuries. But the High Middle Ages has an alternative for today: the military orders. We should not view it through a nostalgic historical optic: our contemporary romancing of “Holy Grail” Knights Templar. Try actual reality, the reality of the Corso at Rhodes. Yes, ensconced in their granite perch on Rhodes, the Knights Hospitaller secured a couple centuries of legally sanctioned maritime pickings. Rich pickings. As in pirates. Or terrorists.

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Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change The old principle that the military orders could retain lands won from the infidel was recognized in 1307 in a papal confirmation of the Hopital’s [sic] rights to Rhodes which it had conquered from the enemies of Christendom, that is from “schismatic Greeks.”37

A religious military order was authorized by the Pope to terrorize Byzantine Romaioi for God (and for profit). Knights Hospitaller—which we romanticize still as defenders of Rhodes and Malta against the dark Turk—were in fact pillagers of any phat coastal target of opportunity, like monasteries on Mt. Athos, plus any and all available shipping. Yet this remained throughout the globalization of the High Middle Ages: legitimate, anointed enterprise. Listening to fourteenth-century polyphony as it might have been sung at Mass by the 21 priories of the Order leads me— almost without thought—to the plainchant of Salafist music-videos: “In keeping with Salafi practice, male choirs perform songs without instrumental accompaniment.”38 Perhaps this is mere frisson—a little shiver from across the centuries. The United States has vowed to destroy Al Qaeda, while their strategists still talk of seizing another country: Saif al-Adel, a senior al-Qa’ida leader, articulated a multiphase strategy that would culminate in victory in about 2020. Al-Adel contends that when al-Qa’ida or like-minded groups control a government, they can use this power as a steppingstone to establish the global caliphate. Once the Muslim world is stronger and more united, the West can be attacked in a more conventional manner.39 But imagine a different outcome to the Renovatio. We need to reposition how nonstate subcultures might evolve in a broader context rather than the very narrow fulfillment of our own expectations of their final destruction.

“A People Numerous and Armed”: Emerging Nations40 Perhaps the most persistent trope in the fall of Rome homily is the volkerwanderung—the “wandering peoples”—as if these gens/nations had full identity and were merely in search of a home. Hence the Victorian cascade of pseudo-histories of Germanic “races” dismantling a decayed Western Empire. We preserve this trope today, almost as if it were a fetish, because it ensures, as it did for Romans, a better enemy. In the same manner as nineteenth-century romantics seeking to anchor the substrate of their own pulsing religious nationalism, so we create an enemy with the same iconographic tincture. Only now it is not “of us” but “against us.” We have simply stood modernity’s central homily on its head. Now we are the Romans, and the new peoples represent the anti-“us.”

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But like real Goths and Vandals, Franks and Lombards, these are identities still in the migration and the making. Moreover their passage to identity becomes intertwined in long-standing relationship with the enemy. Rome’s Germanic peoples were not wandering identities that finally arrived at the doorstep of civilization—rather they were identities that shaped themselves through a long and productive cultural interaction with the Empire. Hence their narratives of becoming can be redacted as passages searching for sacred literary form. It is quite clear that the Roman successors sought retrospective celebration in distinctly Roman form, and even hired Romans to write it out for them.41 They assembled the experience of passage in narrative that made their identity special within Roman identity. We see this take in different form today among self-actualizing peoples and communities. Kurds and Tamil represent two variations on classic ethnic struggles against hated alien overlords. Tamil fight for realization in the land that is them. This is straightforward narrative, infinitely protracted. Kurds in contrast are tasked by a narrative fractured between four overlord nation-states: Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq. Only in Northern Iraq have the Kurds realized a passage of “national” or gens-identity. Yet this is no completed story but merely a subnarrative—a model and beacon—to other Kurds, especially those resisting in Turkey. Hence the Kurdish struggle against Saddam Hussein is just the first chapter, or perhaps, the first story-cycle in a larger history yet unfulfilled. The Sunni and Shi’a communities of Iraq present a more complex evolution of identity: a multithreaded migration. Initially the Shi’a community could look to an authority that stood above the rest: SCIRI and its Badr Brigades. Leadership authority derived from its expatriate provenance—working the struggle for years from Iranian exile. But another Shi’a community movement arose in resistance to American occupation. While SCIRI became the favored agent of U.S. state building, the poor Shi’a of Baghdad gravitated to a young man with the revered name of al-Sadr. This son of a martyr mobilized the Shi’a wretched of the “Sadr City” megaslum and fought the American occupiers, even teaming for a time with Sunni insurgent groups. The framing of this struggle has become the most electric narrative of becoming in post-Saddam Iraq. Again, the story has myths’ ancient familiarity: • • • • •

The old-line SCIRI establishment becomes America’s compradors, corrupted. The son of the great martyred family, so young, takes up the peoples’ standard. The Crusaders boast to the world that they will take him. Twice his companions take on the Americans, defending the holy places. In Najaf they fight from gravesite to gravesite, mausoleum to mausoleum, in the “world cemetery,” in holy combat with Crusaders among ancestral remains. • The young leader is wounded in battle but holds the Mosque at Najaf. • Then, when Sunni blow the Golden Mosque, the Mehdi Army takes the offensive to takfiris and literally cleanses Baghdad.

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This is the sort of mythic prepackaging that has grown the Sadrist movement to 17 percent of all Iraqi Shi’a, with a kingmaker block of seats in Parliament. Now they contend with SCIRI for control of the South and the oil, less with fighters now and more with unresolved electoral politics. In a sense this is a local struggle within community identity and also, for titular national leadership. The Shi’a are the rump state of Iraq, and the precise character of its identity is still in play, the narrative still unfolding. For the Sunni, the fall of Saddam was their fall too. They had represented a centuries-long coherence of elite rule going back deep into Ottoman times. They had the army, and thus they had the coronet. The U.S. invasion stripped them of their entitlement, their privileges, and their very place in after-Saddam Iraq. Now with Shi’a rising, and favored among the new rulers, the Sunni became the persecuted (de-Baathification), the marginal (boycotting elections), the wretched (without jobs and status), and very quickly, with gathering insurgency, the “evil.” But as their wrecked community identity lay in shards, it fought back as a resistance of shards. There was a gaggle of fighter groups, looking at first to old threads of authority that led back to Saddam, which only slowly led to new leadership. But this too was a jumbled enterprise: from tribes and Ulamma and former Baathists, and foreign fighters from Arabia. This meant jumbled narratives. Were they fighting for nation or tribe or Ummah (jihad) or simply to win back what they had lost—or all of these? The American occupation and its favored comprador Shi’a gave the resistance its coherence. But no single narrative emerged. The fighter groups had some inspiring propaganda, but even this highlighted that absence of a story line. There were electrifying music videos set to the rhythmic succession of American armor blowing up, and soldiers suddenly dropping. Glossy group magazines with names like The Knights celebrated their intimate victories over the Crusader, and so many martyred comrades. Perhaps the flamboyant presence of foreign Ghazi, wild-eyed Al Qaeda, infused this “one day at a time” narrative with shock troop extremism, as if success lay not in sober strategy or a nation-building narrative, but rather in simply creating a level of violence that would break American and Shi’a will to fight. But they succeeded only in creating a dynamic they could not handle. Gutting the Golden Mosque unleashed a battle for Baghdad, a yearlong campaign that the Sunni lost but that al-Sadr won. This was no passage but instead a narrative of futile sacrifice and defeat. Hence the so-called “Anbar Awakening” is truly recognition that their narrative pastiche of insurgency needed replacement. The result has taken initial form as collaboration with the American occupation in order to recover and rebuild. The strategic goal is to create a functioning Sunni capability to protect the community against the Shi’a. This strategic decision begs the question of Sunni identity, which means both its conceptualized nature, and the path toward its realization. In a practical sense

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the initiation of this national or gens-narrative awaits the endgame of occupation, and also the outcome of the Shi’a internecine struggle. If the Sunni of Iraq highlight the consequences of a poor and messy narrative open to outsider appropriation, à la al Qaeda, then the Shi’a of Lebanon—Hizbu’llah—have a torch to show what a unified, compelling story can accomplish. From inhabitants of Southern Lebanon, hayseed Shi’a farmers scorned by Beirut’s dominant sects, Shi’a consciousness since 1982 has flared into burning identity. How did narrative advance a people’s passionate trajectory? • • • •

There was the Israeli invasion and occupation: humiliation, injustice. A movement arose, Hizbu’llah, that took up the righteous fight. The struggle never wavered; many were martyred. After a generation of struggle came the victory and the Zionist retreat—the first defeat of Israeli arms. • Then Islam went on the offensive, and Israel attacked again. • The fabled Zionist army was defeated in open battle and withdrew—for the first time in 60 years.

Hizbu’llah’s narrative success begins with its fusion of universalistic and particularistic. As Amal Saad-Chorayeb notes: The Lebanese Hizbu’llah are viewed as an extension of the Hizbu’llah mujahidin (those engaged in Jihad) in the Islamic world who are characterized as “all the oppressed Muslims” . . . as an intrinsic part of Islamic resistance in the world . . . According to one Hizbu’llah official, every Muslim is automatically a member of Hizbu’llah’ . . . In this specific context “umma” encompasses both Shi’ite and Sunni Muslims.42 Even though Saad-Chorayeb goes on to caution that Hizbu’llah’s pan-Islamic identity is an “intellectual construct,” it is nonetheless integral to the framework of Lebanese Shi’a identity, and permits the narrative to at once be both intimate and universalist. Hizbu’llah has managed to maximize the power of identitythrough-narrative by giving its essential character (resistance) self-reinforcing significance: Lebanese Shi’a are fighting for all suffering and oppressed Muslims,43 while the Ummah places their hopes in Hizbu’llah’s struggle, elevating them to a revered mujahidin leadership. Going further, Hizbu’llah has shaped Shi’a identity around resistance: Hizbu’llah sacrificed its political independence and integrity, and perhaps even its political size, for the sake of preserving its resistance to the Israeli occupation. There is much truth in Nasru’llah’s claim that, rather than subordinate its resistance to its political activity, Hizbu’llah’s political activity serves its resistance . . . it is the resistance that necessitated the creation of the political and social institutions that now constitute Hizbu’llah, and not the other way around.44

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Hence sacred narrative first not only frames identity—it is identity. The strategic utility is to create a society determined not simply to realize identity— arguably achieved through the two victories against Israel—but to focus collective energy, if need be over generations, until final transcendence is achieved. Finally, Hizbu’llah narrative is ritually anointed and sacrally integrated into the river of Islamic mythic canon. The sacrifice of Iman Husayn at Karbala is central to their resistance and its dedication to the cause of all Islam. His martyrdom, and “the primary message conveyed by the Karbala drama was that the submission to oppression and the ‘life of humiliation’ such a submission entailed, was tantamount to death . . . ‘an honorable death is considered preferable to a ‘humiliating life,’ which leads to the ineluctable conclusion that the true meaning of life lies in resistance and martyrdom.”45 Hence, binding themselves to the sacred river of Islam is not only a form of legitimization within the Ummah but also an internalization of the indissoluble tie between Jihad and martyrdom, as the holiest of acts. Jihad and sacrifice become not only the means to ultimate transcendence, but a form of repeated personal transcendence in the here and now: in the continuing act of resistance. Thus the sacred narrative is self-reinforcing: the perfect instrument for a people engaged in “the long war.”

Militia Bucelarii: Elites’ Nonstates and States-within-States How do established states become patrons of the very nonstate fighters who threaten them? Two contexts encourage such fateful embrace. One is security. An established state that cannot contain its own weaknesses will naturally reach out to those that threaten it because they represent authenticity: something that the old has lost. This strategy’s consequences can be explained away with the argument that these nonstate groups along (or within) its periphery or frontier zone are the threat—that can still be co-opted. In other words even existential fear can be sublimated into opportunity. Make them integral to the security effort—make them “us” for a minimal entrance fee. This is a strategy that makes sense. But the downside of course is that what was Roman also became by extension, minimal. This is a negotiation that in any other globalization times took centuries, so that late Romans eventually looked no different from those they negotiated with. Hence it was quite easy for the late Roman West to bring in Franks and Visigoths and Ostrogoths and even Huns. Late Byzantium, a bit more reluctantly, did this for Albanians, Vlachs, Turks, Mongols, and Cumans. Cumans worked out well. Turks did not. Very often this necessarily means hiring those you have been fighting, for years or even generations. The problem, however, comes later, when nonstate fighting groups become so integrated into state security that these actors become entrusted with the main instruments of the state itself.

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Going further—as we can see in both the late Western and Eastern Empires—the very subcultures of the army itself (especially in terms of leadership and command) become altered and even transformed as nonstate culture permeates the traditional army ethos. In late Rome the army was the kingmaker. But it was also, more importantly, the path through which outsiders could become Roman. Moreover, after the third century, these lowly outsiders were in fact best placed to lead the Roman state and even shape its course for the future. Moreover in critical frontier zones there emerged a distinct and powerful milieu. Hence what Constantine did for his world is perhaps akin in spirit to what Zia al-Huq did for Pakistan. Traditionally the sedentary-civilized Punjab had to deal with nonstate tribal groups—themselves a celebrated but ambiguous legacy of centuries’ standing, and even a mythic, if distant literary piece of essential Pakistani notions of nationhood. Hence identity means, figuratively, that Babur stakes the Mughal horseman’s claim on Muslim legitimacy within Indian civilization, beginning with the Punjab. But Pakistan had sublimated and reified this conflicting tradition by making its grand state institution—the army—the changeling for Babur. The Army, in the words of Ayesha Siddiqa, became the “Parent-Guardian” of Pakistan’s national identity.46 This is how Zia put the Army front-and-center in the search for a distinct identity after the 1971 debacle. His Deoband-Islamist calling created a fraternal mission among the larger, trans-Pakistan sweep of Pashtun Afghanistan. This tie was cemented by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Then the great, U.S.-financed Jihad framed and reified a much grander Pakistani mission. Afghanistan became the “strategic depth” of the nation, and so ceased to be a mere knock-off catchment-frontier zone from the old Indian Empire. Instead the world of Pashtun resistance was harnessed—through the Taliban— to the greater vision of Pakistan. What the ISI created and nurtured was just a part of a larger expansion of Pakistani identity realized through nonstate resistance. For example, fighters became the frontline agents and memorial sacrifice in the struggle with India over Kashmir. Army identity was moving into new social and ethnic venues. The unassailable guardian of the nation was now being infected and seduced by its own clients. Their subcultures of resistance and Jihad were changing the core institution of the Pakistani state. Tribal fighters in FATA and NWFP, and even less-savory armed nodes, became integral to the Army, and thus in an unexamined yet subversive fashion, integral to an altered identity. Driven by fragile identity, Pakistan is another “frontline” exhibit of nonstate mothering by a weak established state. Yet it is the American world-state, blissfully free of any such vulnerability, that is the grand nurturer of nonstate fighters. The United States is the world’s patron of nonstate resistance—and it mothers globally.

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An inescapable example is the “dirty” war in El Salvador. Somehow the United States, coming out, was able to say that it killed an insurgency and made a democracy—death squads notwithstanding. But the fruits of migration so subtly purchased this triumph. Fleeing Salvadoreans took their adolescent boys out of the country: 25 percent of all fighter-age men-boys. The insurgency may well have starved from a lack of recruits. But back in the good old USA these young men formed gangs: with evocative banners like Mara Salvatrucha: MS-13. From 1994 to 2005, 50,000 gangbangers were reseeded to El Salvador: “gang migration through deportation.” Such unknowing nurturing is today our American trademark. Our backhanded creation of MS-13 is our personal blowback gift to El Salvador. Prisons as the incubation of subculture—again, unintended nurturing. Prison as “safe haven” and even command center for conducting operations. Yet there is another context in which states patronize nonstate resistance: when essential components of the polity—and the political elite—molecularly move away from the national and toward nonstate authority. In other words, when there arises an apprehension of the decomposition of the nation-state. We can see this. It may not look like runaway decomposition, but it is rather suggestive of something that in the end takes you there: decompression. In late antiquity local elites began, quietly and then urgently to recruit, co-op, and otherwise patronize nonstate fighter bands—to help them establish working political authority. Roman warlords were the halfway house to future successor kingdoms.47 But this was an unusual context in which the geographic half of a “world empire” was slowly devolving into local ruling identities. Today there is no evidence that the American-Western oikoumene is on the verge of a similar political decompression. Evidence instead comes from the changing offspring polities of Western colonization. In Colombia, landed elites sponsor local militias in a complex existentialnational struggle in which traditional latifundial archontes seek to maintain their lock on national identity, the state, and the power and glory that goes with it. In Kenya, in contrast, elites that bought precisely into British-crafted successor national identity—where tribal ties could be translated into party politics— are now moving away from this received colonial construct. They are adopting more ancient retainer-models, gangs and militia—Mungiki, Kelengin, Sabaot, Chinkororo (representing Kikuyu), anti-Kikuyu, Soy-Ndorobo, Kisii—to back up the familiar cudgels of deep identity. Then add in the upended, identitydisenfranchised, like the Baghdad Boys, Taliban, Kosevo, Jeshi la Mzee aka Kamjesh, and the Mulungunipa Forest Group—the enforcer “boys” of Kibera and all the other endless identity-mélange-slums of lost Kikuyu, Luo, Maasai, Kisii, and Luhya.48 This represents a transformation. If original identities had been successfully dispersed in a sort of political-identity colloidal suspension, what this tells us is

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that the colonial medium no longer works, that identity coagulation is reasserting itself. Finally let us return to the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC). In a sense they are the ultimate creation of the nation-state: especially the modern nationstate’s need to control and rule. Yet they took an entire structure of nation-state rule—the massive Brazilian prison system—and made it their own. In other words the institutions of the state most essential to order and control become the institutions of disorder and chaos. The PCC rebellion is thus electric theater. It does not intend to bring down the Brazilian state but rather to reveal its lesser place in a galaxy of many powercenters, of which the Primeiro Comando da Capital was one—a big one, a new Brazil—and that Brasilianos had now officially entered new terrain. New identity terrain. New human terrain.

COMPARING THE OTHER Sitting across from him I could not escape memories of similar audiences I once had with former secretary of defense Harold Brown, who had migrated from the defeated Carter administration to a soft berth at SAIS. We were putative, statutory “colleagues.” This man was younger but cut from the same cultural cloth. He had been head of DARPA and was now a fixture of the Defense Science Board, or DSB. Like Brown he was a titular Democrat, a scientist, and a genius. So the conversation took a familiar turn. It was not a conversation. I was allowed to present my brief, briefly, and then he proceeded to explain the way it really was: You see, Mike, there have always been nonstate actors. This is not new but rather the way of the world. They are always there, and they can cause problems, but they are part of the human landscape. We need to know about these groups, and we need to manage them, and that is why we have the DO (Directorate of Operations, CIA). Back in the day [the great Cold War day] we trained and deployed a cadre of professionals we sent out to get to know the world at the margins and report on what was going on. If we can only get this back we will have what we need. That is how to stay on top of nonstate actors, and this is why we need a reinvigorated DO. Well, there you are. Genius can be relied on for clarity. My thought going out the door was: Maybe I should sign up for a correspondence course in refrigerator repair! Inhabiting the soul of a notional Democrat, his attitude was beatifically less savage than that of Ralph Peters, yet when it came to the nonstate world he had the emotional toughness and steely intent of a Victorian district officer riding herd on Her Majesty’s domains, save just one thing: the district officer’s kit would likely have packed several full canteens of cultural empathy.

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The Honorable DARPA was in fact giving me the old vision of the nonstate: that of a steady-state universe that we Victorian Americans could manage nicely, thank you, given just enough dedicated district officers.49 But this world was blown clean away by the 9/11 big bang. Now, nonstate actors are considered the primitive in humanity gone bad. They are not marginal but rather declared a threat to our civilization, for which aggressive measures are required now to contain them. Of course they will be uplifted—after we break them. Such landscapes of the mind have no use for a genteel district officer ethos. Perhaps this is fitting. America’s vanished former imperial management ethos was after but an artifact of Cold War—melded to a boy’s love of things Kipling and Elgar. But they loved the world they ruled. We are intent on neither love nor rule. We are all about the threat and the fight. The British Empire was about creating something, and we—in spite of boilerplate about “stabilization and reconstruction” and “building capacity and nation-building”—put 99 percent into “servicing” the enemy. Not surprisingly the world of the nonstate knows this, and their strategy seeks our energy thrust. Hence if we were to compare the migrating and emerging identities of the Global Other, we should do so with an eye to how they use us to leverage their rise and realization. Resistant nonstate groups depend on two primary identity vehicles: narrative building and legitimacy acquisition.

Narrative–Building Resistance may be a given, but it needs a great enemy to reify a transcendent narrative. Resistance against the great opens the possibility for identity realization. Hence Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood has created and drawn strength from a coherent narrative of resistance—perhaps comparable to Christians in late antiquity. Hence too, Hezbollah, the Sadrist movement, the Tamil Tigers, Chechen Tigers, and all of them: they live off of and for their narrative. If such resistance represents the people, they will win, because there is no other choice but loss of identity itself. This is why Moros still fight the corrupt infidel hand from Manila on teeming islands like Jolo, and why only a Tsunami could quench the identity-fire of Aceh, fighting the Dutch and successor Indonesia for nearly two centuries. Even Dutch insurgents fought Spain for 80 years. We need to consider a new timeline— with a new curve. Arguably after a generation or two, a fighting identity is drawing its very strength from resistance. Al Qaeda in this context represents perhaps a more brittle narrative prospect—always flirting with failure. Why? Because narrative romantics are rigid, narcissistic, and punishing. Al Qaeda looks nothing like the fabulous Ottoman Ghazi of myth. They are contemporary prisoners of their narrative, unable and unwilling to stretch it to fit the needs of people and their societies. But what is the neon-narrative of gang-fiefdom—or close cousins like the urban duchy and its backcountry brother, the narco-principality? Can gangs even be dignified by the notion of narrative?

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But narrative is for everyone. Mara Salvatrucha and developed comparables like 18th Street, Gangster Disciples, Pagad, and Hard Livings50 are electric offers of identity. Yet the gang is closer to the primary group than to a sacred nation-state or gens-identity. Its identity-offer is family as fraternity: warrior-monks with tattoos. Brotherhood societies that enshrine this will move toward the Templar model. Others like Brazilian favelas are pulled toward community-leadership. Beneath the graying shadow of the state they offer the color of belonging. If there is no transcendent narrative, there is yet a better alternative than what the state will give— and the state has not the power either to tame or uproot their community. People left behind look to their local jefe de favela for protection but also for a binding framework. Gang and drug bucellarii subcultures are not altruistic but they are effective: they provide where the state will not, or cannot. They preside over their new flock, their new realm—and this in itself is narrative of a kind, inchoate and awaiting a chronicler. Is this outcome different from the early Middle Ages? Moreover the entrenchment and growth of such communities parallels the proliferation of less “civilized” and yet similarly effective working governance in the post-Roman West. Finally, what of the proliferation of nonstate retainerships among beleaguered third world elites? Is this nation-state devolution in action? In Kenya such solutions are in the heat of the political moment perhaps a hedge, a search for electoral advantage, a lever and rod of patronage. We can make excuses. But perhaps they represent a profound alternative: that of reasserting political authority and governance in a state context that is slowly breaking down and dissolving. The loyal bucellarii of so-called national parties are in this case not so unlike late Roman warlords who gathered their loyal retainers close, and paid them well (hence, from the Latin, they got the better bread!). Here explicit nonstate initiatives light the way for the post-state, the successor polity. But then what about still-functioning polities like Pakistan? Here is a significant variation: that of the guardian state institution—the Army—using nonstate militias to leverage its hold on both politics and national identity. The risk is that nonstate irregulars and armed retainers cease to be pliant surrogates and begin to go their own way, and start driving the politics of meaning in society. Pakistan’s army, even as an overlord nation-within-a-nation, is still a bureaucratic dinosaur, and its worldview and social interests are intimately woven into the complex fabric of Pakistani elites. Nurturing resistant nonstate identities is a bit like feeding wild new ideas in the hope that they will become like you and take direction from you—like the Taliban.

Legitimacy–Acquisition Every sacred identity trajectory—from universalist mission to street gang to warrior-frat to proto-nation—craves recognition. The Augustan laying-on-ofhands is the desideratum—the thing most wanted. Yet recognition is not realization until the ritual of anointment. Romans called this legitimacy. But how does a nonstate community or movement get legit? That begs the question, who will legitimate? This leads to the first paradox of the nonstate

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narrative: its path to realization is through its relationship with the power it resists. But how to resist best? Rarely will the new ever successfully overthrow the old. Perhaps like wily Christians they might subvert it—like a certain Brotherhood?—but the surest if most painful path is through battle. Battle is the best way to be so persistently troublesome that The Power anoints you just to get it over. “The Power” today of course is us—and we are definitely there to be leveraged. But the global picture is rather more complex. Perversely it is a prize to be able to fight the United States, until they throw a title or entitlement your way. This worked for Sunni insurgent groups fighting American forces—after four bitter years. Now the Sunni cause and identity have at least a bankroll-legitimization and a promise—for as long as it lasts. But most of the world’s resistant nonstate must fight lesser and lessfruitful enemies. How do Tamils conceive their endless struggle to survive Sinhalese who would crush them as Untermenschen? Listen to a young girl who has signed up: But asked when she hoped to achieve her dream of being a suicide bomber, she grinned, squirmed and buried her face in her arms. “She’s already written her application,” said her commander, Lt. Col. Dewarsara Banu, smiling at her charge’s shyness. “But there’s still no reply.” “Why hasn’t there been a reply?” whined Samandi, looking up with the one eye, her left, that survived a shot to the head and fiddling with the capsule of cyanide powder around her neck. “I want this. I want to be a Black Tiger. I want to blast myself for freedom.” Samandi’s chances of a normal life were shaky from the day she was born in Tamil Tiger territory in northern Sri Lanka. But Samandi said it was the death of 125 friends and neighbors in the government’s carpet-bombing of her village that forced her to put aside thoughts of anything much but death. “I saw all that, all that blood and all those bodies and I thought, ‘tomorrow, I will die like this too. So I will join the LTTE. And die for a reason.’” 51 Yet their successful fight to stay alive is branded as terrorist by the United States. This is a real “long war” for identity. So many others must treat with local overlords, where American intercession is always on the side of the established: no matter how jackbooted. Then there are places where America is even irrelevant, like Tibet or Chechnya. Chechens have paid so dearly for the humiliation they visited on Russia. Tibetans know the Han would be no less kind. So here is how legitimacy acquisition is playing out: • The Universalists—the Pentecostalists and the Brotherhood and the rest—are beyond our reach, but not our anxiety, and this is their strength. • The gangs are also in tight with their states and in accelerated evolution mode. • The fighter-fraternities in contrast face a moment of decision.

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• The proto-nations are all full-steam ahead, no matter how miserable their current state. These are identity enterprises that cannot be killed, unless they are all killed. • The blessed nonstate armed retainers are doing their job, staking out alternatives for their elites, alternatives in which to live cozily within the decaying state.

We have a choice here: we can take this all in and try our hand at building relationships with all of them—and in many cases we are doing this right now— or we can keep our rhetorical rudder hard over and keep charting an official course to fight them all. We are not late Romans, but we seem to have inherited the palette of late Roman choices. There is simply too much going on, and its human scope and sweep is simply too big for us to push the “default button” for a nonexistent DO. Yet appreciate our strength approaching the nonstate. It is a judgment on us that we decide to feel so weak. After seven years we seem oblivious to our stillamazing appeal. We feel our power, but not as authority. We have no idea how much space we have in the authority-legitimacy domain. We operate day-to-day as if we really have to reach hortatory goals—like “democracy” or “stability”— that are really just spin for domestic politics. Reality is right in front of us: and it is the power of Rome. Not the power to kill, but the power to relate . . . and reward. Two stories. The first is from Michael McCormick: To the modern observer, the situation of the Roman empire in the late sixth century appears grim. Barbarian advances, plague, and civil strife engulfed the ancient edifice. When a severe uprising rocked Egypt . . . a Roman general named Theodore was dispatched to quell the revolt. Before attacking, he had two recently freed prisoners try to persuade the insurgents to lay down their arms: “Observe all you people who have joined with the rebels: do not war against the general, for the Roman empire is neither enfeebled nor vanquished!” The reported effect was remarkable: a number of dissidents abandoned the revolt and came over to the imperial forces.52 Then in perfect counterpoint is the key moment from MGM’s film of 1939: The Wizard of Oz. Having magically vanquished the Wicked Witch of the West, the regime-change party returns to humbly petition the Wizard. He is then unmasked, utterly powerless and discredited, but remarkably his authority still inheres. The Scarecrow demands: “You promised us real things—a real brain!” To this, the Wizard responds in the following manner: Back where I come from we have universities, seats of great learning where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they

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Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change think deep thoughts—and with no more brains than you have—But! They have one thing you haven’t got! A diploma!

America in late modernity offers that diploma. We might find features we recognize both in late antiquity and our own grand opera of identity. Our curtain is torn away, as the Wizard’s was. Our diplomas—not our military squeeze—are our main authority now. Can we use authority—rather than mere power—so effectively?

The “Medieval” Metaphor Juxtaposing the “Fall of Rome” with a new “Dark Ages” is the anxietymetaphor of our time—it is America’s homily. Hence we all fear the decline and fall of the nation-state, and we all vicariously cringe at the prospect of a global Nightmare on Elm Street event sounding the onset of darkness. John Rapley builds upon this metaphor in “The New Middle Ages.” He describes, resonantly, “a growing worldwide phenomenon: the rise of private ‘statelets’ that coexist in a delicate, often symbiotic relationship with a larger state.” Rapley paints today’s human movements as bonded to historical lessons from the pulpit. “Rome’s fall did not smash Europe into shards,” he admits, and he is careful to note at least some of the continuities that followed the subsidence of the Western State. But civilization still transformed fairly quickly from state unity to political fragmentation, of “highly localized economies, social structures founded on plural identities, and a political system composed of multiple and overlapping authorities, each drawing on an autonomous resource base.” Rapley clearly sees this as our future. We are at the beginning of another ending—modernity like antiquity—with America as Rome. When I decided to use history as “fieldwork” it was exactly to avoid the inescapable tropes that trap Rapley. Late antiquity was its own time. True it was a globalization time, but it also spanned about 400 years. It offers us evidence of a comparable epoch of world interaction and change. Looked at this way what Rapley observes is not a sign of homiletic decline and fall but rather what explodes out of the mature phase of a long globalization time. Large states structures abounded in late antiquity, both in Constantinople and the Muslim Caliphate-ad-Commonwealth. Even in the post-Roman West, the successor state themselves remained Roman in character. Again, the Visigothic court aped every Constantinopolitan air in the seventh century—a tribute to syncretism and continuity. The richest fragmentation—and syncretism—happened at the edges of the Roman world, in the “catchment zones” where a less-rooted Romanitas mingled in their quest to be Roman. This happened everywhere, from Northern Gaul and the Rhine valley into Germania and to the Danube—and also in North Africa and the Arab world. Even when things broke down in the “shatterbelts” of continuing

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conflict—as in Lombard-Byzantine Italy or the whole of the Balkans after 600— the syncretism continued. Romans were making Romans in spite of themselves. New participants tried to be Roman. Archaeology shows how well they did in after-Roman times. In the lower Rhine valley at the end of the fifth century, for example, “local leaders and military commanders could no longer legitimate their power with reference to ‘Roman’ authority, although they remained based in Roman fortifications linked by Roman roads. Here was the final militarization and localization of political power.”53 But apparently even here city centers and the minting of coins continued. Within a century, “grave goods became more standardized and less lavish, suggesting an increased security in matters of status . . . burials increasingly advertised the continuity of power over time . . . By the 7th century the dominance of the church was central to the political and social strategy of the aristocracy.”54 In places where there was stable state transition—in the most developed societies of the Empire—a sophisticated new polity emerged. Rough-cut Arab conquerors immediately sought out continuity in the Greek administration of Syria and Egypt. Chris Wickham persuasively shows how both Syria and Egypt stayed as sophisticated and productive and “civilized” as ever.55 Its syncretism was an Arab-Romaioi civilization. No dark age here. We of the West—the core bastions of the West—seem to be in no danger of going the way of antiquity. Our world is big and strong. But we might still think on late antiquity, or at least look for similar dark fruits of globalization.

BUT WHAT IF? (A LITTLE THOUGHT EXPERIMENT) What if we are in fact racing toward a new Middle Ages? First, what would this mean? It would mean that our globalization epoch is moving on from its current mature phase. It would thus represent an epoch in transition: But toward what, and with what evidence? Late antiquity tells us to look for five markers. Decompression. This was the inescapable marker of late antiquity. The air was coming out of civilization’s tires. Not because of barbarians. Not because of a barbarized, militarized state. Not because people were abandoning the land. Not because population was declining. Not because of plague. Not any of these things alone. But things worked in unconscious concert. No leaks here. But three big shocks wait in the wings: global pandemic, climate change, and energy crunch. We might imagine that the best-prepared societies—the EU, Aus-Can-US, and Japan might weather these hits. But what of fragile giants like India and China? What of the teetering mega-city societies of Latin America and Africa? Who succors the non-oil-anointed Muslim world? Loss of state authority. If people stop believing in the state then they also stop believing in the state’s appropriation of sacred identity. It is not so much that the state can no longer regulate and enforce, but rather that the state becomes an objectified tyranny—and so betrays its trust as guardian of

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national identity. Whatever “the nation” was is taken—ardently possessed—by the state. But what state now possesses is no longer nation. Here was the true death of Rome. Societies whose identity is migrating away from the state will fully abandon it if shocks hit and the state fails and betrays them. Hence true crisis is the nexus of physical harm and loss of belief. Shocks that put hundreds of millions in extremis will move the survivors to new faith and new belonging. Very likely too we will be too afraid to reach out to them, and they will turn forever away from us. Separating worlds. Decompression and loss of belief work together in mysterious ways. In late antiquity new universalisms actually ended up encouraging a coming apart of the very universalism they proclaimed. Hence Islam decisively split the world of Greco-Roman antiquity in two, just as Justinian’s attempt to reclaim the Roman West split Latin from Greek. Imagine then a gathering series of system-shocks to our globalization. How do the biggest and strongest respond? They look to themselves to ride out the storm. The others, those once left behind, are now the abandoned. This is the recipe for neo-late antiquity, or as Peter Brown puts it, “after empire, a world without a center.”56 “Relative aristocratic weakness.”57 Even as we fear a new middle ages we should remember that escape from globalization brought a long human relief: the recession of old rulers and iron rod retainers. People in the so-called dark ages were less oppressed by rule from above than ever in late antiquity or the later High Middle Ages. They were not free, but they were less enslaved. Having abandoned “the rest”58 in the calamitous sea of fear and desperation— however long it lasts—we can be sure that the fall of that delicate but vicious tracery of overseers we funded and doted on for so many decades will be a liberation that will puzzle rather than satisfy us. The world of the nonstate we fear today will then become part of the human future—in a big way. New consciousness. In late antiquity the new meta-identities bonded “us” to “all”—like spirit—beyond the claim of landlord or decurion or imperial tax official. We were suddenly no longer in thrall at all. In fact the establishment now had to genuflect deeply to the new consciousness, the new universal—if it wanted tax revenue. But like Constantine’s proskynesis to Christianity they will also make it their own, to use and abuse. Yet they will still be eternally bound to it. New identity is new consciousness, but consciousness alters the landscape of human reality beyond identity too. A world of intertwining human shocks will use this physical theater to lead people to new awareness. Some of this awareness will concern identity, but there will be more than that even, just as we can see in Egypt in late antiquity. The fall of modernity will surely usher in such new thinking. This what-if exercise is modeled on the emerging patterns of the early Middle Ages. If we substitute the High Middle Ages we get a much less depressing story. The networked world of the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries may have finished in the prolix culture area separation of Europe, Islam, and China. But the new epoch found refreshing other horizons in the trans-Atlantic enterprise

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to the New World, and the Ummah’s surge into Africa and Southeast Asia. We found ourselves happily occupied prefiguring the next great globalization epoch, the one that would again seize the world after 1800: the one we still call modernity. So everything is in play, as it always is with us humans. The surge of nonstate identity, the comet-energy of new consciousness, and the viciously delicate defensiveness of established belief: we should at least note these, and be forewarned.

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Is American identity entering another metamorphosis? Does the Tribal Confederacy of Defense represent a new American identity? Where and how might an alternative nation realize itself? What happens now to our national narrative?

PART 1: “300” In the firmament of “American professional military education” one class stands high above all. It is the Ur-class, the Naval War College course titled “Strategy & Policy.” I was privileged to teach it for the academic year 2007. Most of my students were men, Navy men, and nearly all were active and reserve officers. But think: this was the spring of Leonidas reborn—through Frank Miller’s chiaroscuro cinema-eye. His was, briefly, a hot film, and my students lobbied me for a 300 class. Other friends, many my own-boomer retired military, kept asking, “Mike, have you seen it yet?” followed by ringing declarations like “You must!” One Khe Sahn Vet Marine colonel was existentially fulfilled because he had seen it twice with his midshipman son. Needless to say we soon had our multiplex class. What we saw was not entertainment. 300 is a religious film. No, it is a religious experience. It has worked its viral way also, over the past year, to produce this essay. Writing here about war as celebration and renewal—as liturgy—and invoking the ghosts of Greek hoplites is no idle fantasy. 300 is the liturgy for American officers today. As the screen faded to black my students—all-American Navy field grade—emerged close to tears. They had that gleam in their eyes, that anticipating, readiness-is-all look. It was instantly clear that an early-twenty-first-century graphic novel—translated to the big screen—could be as loyal to Homeric canon and to arête as any ancient Greek or Roman historian, philosopher, or poet.

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But that liturgy, so electrically enunciated and so passionately enjoined, is not in question. Its power and glory is incredibly real for our soldiering societies in today’s America. The question is what this tells us about changing American identity. The existential root of original American identity was civic virtue. Every citizen was a defender of the nation. The collective citizenry—armed—was the state. We were a nation-in-arms. Two centuries later that original idea was still alive, barely, in a beleaguered civic institution called the draft, and then, suddenly, it was gone. Since 1974 the United States has been a society defended by a corps of professional soldiers, sailors, and airmen. True, the metaphor of the citizen-soldier was preserved in the forms of the National Guard and Reserve. But now even this faint spring of ancestral civic virtue has dried up. Long campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have made the Guard and Reserve integral to the regular army as active duty supplemental forces. After seven years at war, the significance of the watershed passed in 1974 is visible at last. It is a transformation—not of military technology or practice but of identity. This is what my 300 moment showed. The identity of those who defend us is diverging from the larger American civic identity. Yet in our dim awareness it is just a little bumper sticker that reads “2 Americas.” There is 90 percent America: the balance of society and its civic responsibility is, for most, simply electoral: “I voted.” Then there is the other 10 percent, the defenders of the Republic. Call this the Tribal Confederacy of Defense. It is in some ways like a nation-within-a-nation, because its people are 100 percent connected to our national security: building, managing, analyzing. A very few are in harm’s way, and from among these, there is a small, exalted band that fight for us and sacrifice for us. These are the 300. This essay is not just about nonstate identity and war: it is also about how America deals with nonstate actors. It is the 300 on the front line of this long war with nonstate fighter fraternities and resistant communities. It is not a war between nations, representing states and their societies. It is a war between the American 300 and the world of nonstate resistance. Talk about change: this bond between two warring bands of subcultures has already stacked up and moved out. For the United States this war of groups shines a light deep into changes in American identity—a transformation that has been unfolding for three generations. But the war is finally crystallizing change, etching a new relationship between national society and its state. These changes come in four dimensions: one, establishment and evolution of a constellation of national security institutions; two, separation of defense institutions from the “nationin-arms” idea; three, coalescence of Defense tribes into a federative political constituency; and four, centrality of military subcultures to state identity and its new narrative.

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Changing System Leader Military Identity Is this fair, or even appropriate? Our standard meme of military and society is a glued thought-laminate called “civil-military relations.” But the United States in no way supports a well-regulated civil-military meme. The issue is not how American military societies relate constitutionally and practically to civilian politics. Superficially we are the model of democratic decorum and civilian control, yet such a discussion is almost irrelevant. The real relationship between military and society can be understood only through a discussion of American identity and its sacred narrative—and how this has been changing. Hence the only path to sight is through other grand imperial prisms, however occluded by both antiquity and assumed “antiqueness.” But remember, if we are “modern,” so once were they. The United States, right now, is best understood as the challenged system leader, working both its power and its practice at the bleeding edge of what it takes to keep a world going. Hence the only useful view to America’s situation today is a tour of systemleader legacy in our Western culture area. The central question is straightforward, even easy to see: how does the globalization system leader deal with the big change challenge? This essay has zeroed in on the concept of the system leader as a universalistic identity frame tied to a state. But it is never simple. Remember, the challenged state is a supremely successful state: it is It, The One, The Big Deal. Yet this is in the end its core weakness. In strategic narcissism is strategic vulnerability. So what about the legacy? The Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires are a (stubbornly counterintuitive) two-thousand-year continuity of system-leader self-identification. It was a tradition founded on a shared universalistic vision. Its lineal sense of political self-legitimacy was almost unbroken with only two short lapses, from 235 to 270 and from 1204 to 1261.1 Moreover it was the only real meta-national or universalistic vision in the Western world with legs. The life of aspiring new Western empires—from Charlemagne to Carlos Quinto to Napoleon to Hitler—was always like the passing of summer to autumn: falling leaves and too-few days.2 The Roman-Byzantine-Ottoman universalistic vision was, above all, forever alive in the mind.3 It was a framework of identity for both society and state with real historical tenure. In this sense it was surely a succession of three “imagined communities”4—but no less successful and long-standing for it. What is worth discussing is how a universalistic identity created a relentless need among system leaders to reify successive visions of themselves. What does this mean? Simply, the system leader fights for its status and position, and the prize is big. Out of necessity it embraces internal identity shifts to continue and survive. Romans thus embraced a long transformation of military and state. So did the Byzantines and the Ottomans. These were moreover transformations of military identity. Military identity literally shape-shifted in order to

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preserve a universalistic (system-leader) identity—even if, as in the very late Western Empire, the Byzantine “dark ages,” or the last Ottoman century, it was mere fictive leadership. Societies whose identity, authority, and very legitimacy are built around a universalistic belief system are, by definition, big-change societies. The military societies of universalistic identity are tied to the trajectory of their societies. Hence military metamorphosis paces societies’ big change. These shifts may include new technology or new practice, but in their essence they are transformations of military identity. Rome’s military transformation was from Roman citizen-soldier, dropping his plough to defend the republic—to professional legionnaires. These all too soon became a foreign army led increasingly by foreign Romanized officers, disconnected from the identity of Mediterranean society. Byzantium only became Byzantium when it dropped its continuity with Rome, and settled its army among the people. Such militia was the only kind of army a financially strapped rump empire beset by enemies could afford. But then came the great Byzantine revival, and once again the “Roman” state moved toward a professional force, again with heavy foreign presence. Ottomans began as Ghazi who settled into fat conquest fiefs as timariots always on call for the sultan—very much like Byzantine pronoia. Then began the rise of the great Janissary Corps: the heart of Ottoman administration as well as its invincible shock troops. But when two centuries on they became too dominant, when the state’s universalistic vision broke, they too were purged and broken. These transformations give us a cultural context for today’s very real American military transformation. We need this, because there is no contemporary context for comparative reflection. Moreover we tend to approach military power as an algorithm whose variable inputs are military technology, money, and the smarts to put the two to work. We are convinced that this is military transformation. But brains, hot hardware, and a fistful of dollars tell us very little about the relationship of military society to national identity. Yet above all it is identity that defines what is military. If nation-state identity has dominated modernity, today America is beset not by national but by much more basic gens-identities and by fighter fraternities at war in the name of ancient universalism. Moreover the United States’ military—arguably the most successful nation-state war model in modernity—has been culturally transforming into a tribal confederation of subcultures, and along with this migration a different kind of state is emerging. Hence Paul Kennedy’s exploration of America in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers is unwittingly backward looking: an almost nostalgic treatise. Imagining the United States as yet another “great power” within modernity’s two-century lineup of combative nation-state militaries is to miss the metamorphosis. In a sense he is still catering to Victorian sacred narrative.5

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The truth is that America’s transformation of military-state identity is much closer in form and spirit to the transformations of the Roman-ByzantineOttoman state—an institutional evolution perhaps inherent in universalistic states. What led to their own transformations of identity, and what insights do they give us? After success, system leaders inhabit a worldview of iron conservatism. After all they are defending not “the nation” but rather its universalist vision. Inevitably this means preserving authority over many other identities—not all of who wish to submit to The Vision. In change-times, new identities rise both from within and without. These alternative communities or movements are almost instantly resistant communities, because their very declaration of identity challenges the “universal” authority of the system leader. Hence the system leader finds itself in an unenviable position. It must defend everywhere, or it risks a “run” on its authority, an unraveling. But how to defend everywhere with limited resources? Moreover, system leaders represent a reified narrative of success. But this is also a double-edged sword. In one sense success represents the fulfillment of a compact between society and its state. The state enterprise has created a prosperous and secure social order. Moreover, for early Romans, Byzantines, and Ottomans alike this achievement was to a very great extent the product of popular participation in the very successful wars that led to wars’ association with prosperity and security. The legions of the Roman republic were composed of its citizens. Byzantine thematic armies were a bit like frontier militia settled among local villages. The main armored cavalry forces of early Ottoman armies were built on local landed elites and their retainers.6 But success brings satisfaction. War and its threats become distant. Society is ever less connected to “defending the realm.” When threats reemerge it is suddenly also difficult to go back to citizen or people’s defense. This is especially true when new wars are far away. Think of it: the society of the system leader has benefited for generations, perhaps centuries, from being the world—or at least their world’s—center. Life is good, and people seek “the good life.” What was a system leader to do? The answer is simple and unavoidable, and it works (for a while at least). It is a two-part answer. First, grow and harden the administrative and regulatory bureaucracy to maximize revenue. Second, with this tax bounty, reify and militarize the state. This in no way implies militarizing the society; indeed, the society’s movement away from martial ardor is the core motivation for the state to assume the security burden. The state cannot pull that promise back without risking its authority (it is after all in people’s minds the system leader!). But at the same time it must do everything within its power to sustain the flow of global rewards and favors that its people expect, and on which its authority depends.

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Hence the state effectively grows and separates to become its own subculture: or rather, a constellation of state subcultures, military and bureaucratic. Christopher Kelley describes the transformation of the Roman state: The Roman Empire in the first two centuries A.D. was marked by a relatively low level of centralized authority and a high degree of local autonomy. From the end of the third century, this long-standing pattern of power was significantly disrupted by the gradual establishment of a centrally organized and greatly expanded imperial bureaucracy. The movement from “soft” to “hard” government is one of the defining characteristics of late antiquity.7 The hardened state was the creature of the new grand threat. The looming threat of Barbaricum necessitated the Roman equivalent of a “national security state” and to finance the armies of that state, a much bigger tax-bureaucracy was required. Think of this solution as an elegant symbiosis of soft civil bureaucrat and iron solider. For the next eight centuries a court bureaucratic subculture and a state-army subculture essentially sustained what was left of the Greco-Roman world. But this necessary “hardening” of the state also paves the way for new subcultures. Historically the “bureaucracy” of a system leader, freed from defining association with traditional landed elites and their aristocracies, in effect represents a new and distinct subculture of rule. True, it is not freed from the endless claim of elite constituents, but its own protected special identity within the larger culture gives it an apparent liberating freedom of action. The same is surely true for military subcultures that share rulership in system-leader hierarchies. Their significance moreover is not simply in their ability to protect and defend. They also represent something new in the culture: an intercessor society that will interpose itself between external danger and internal security. This is not what we see in politically central military subcultures, like those of second or third-tier nation-states—Pakistan or Egypt and many Latin societies— where military elites are intertwined with ruling elites. Military tribes can rise to become “guardians of the nation” as part of a nexus of elite constituencies. Thus these civil-military political relationships reflect fundamental and long-standing ruling social relationships. They are an embedded part of national life.8 In contrast system leaders must defend necessarily expansive and diffuse polities with limited means. To be effective the state-military needs to be a relatively self-contained society, a subculture wholly shaped by its mission of system defense and “stability.” Every society is different. Every system leader is different. Their military responses to challenge were thus also different. Are their various transformations

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of military identity at all comparable? Here is a very generic historical template. One, state revenue goes more and more to the military. Where once there was a government surplus to do other things, now it is all about building the force. Two, military subcultures evolve as a separate, highly privileged set of national institutions, integral to the state and increasingly powerful within the state. Three, distinct military identity creates a distinctive political constituency, with its own interests and agendas. These interests are often enmeshed in system-leader politics and strategic needs along threat zones. And four, military subcultures become central to state identity, and effectively take over the sacred narrative. In system leaders they come to represent the universal idea.

Changing American Military Identities Can we reveal the changing character of American military identity by looking at earlier system leaders? Why compare us to system leaders from long-past agricultural economies, discordant to us in time and space, institutions and technology? Because in comparison—in cultural comparison—we do not see time and space; we do not see the material trappings and tools. Instead we are looking at how a very particular framework of identity shapes military society and how it evolves. What is important, because we can compare its cultural impact, is identity. The West has not produced many system leaders that get beyond the “aspiring” stage. Our tenured lineage is Roman-Byzantine-Ottoman, where we can trace how universalistic identity shaped the development and eventual transformation of state and military subcultures. But first it must be said: we are not Rome or Byzantium, and we are even further removed from the Ottoman oikoumene. We do not particularly resemble these aspiring world empires. Nor do we resemble at all the European colonial empires of modernity. No emperor rules us, and we still proudly call ourselves a republic. But we are a system leader, and more important we are a system leader in our own mind. American identity is a world identity. We represent a universalistic vision. We are committed to “spreading democracy” and “global engagement.” We have military alliances with several score other states, and elements of our military are guests in over 100 nations. We have a globe-girdling network of over 700 military installations outside of the United States. Like Roman-Byzantine-Ottoman states we have built a military to deal with the armed forces of nation-states. But also like them we are everyday engaged with nonstate actors who challenge our authority. We face a range of potential and very real threats to our system: our world system. Also like them, the life and work of our military societies is detached from the life of American society. This decoupling has been soft and quiet, and completed only recently. Yet this detachment is arguably the big change in American identity. How closely does it track the historical template of changing military identity in former system leaders?

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State revenue goes more and more to the military. Where once there was a government surplus to do other things, now it is all about building the force. Premodern system leaders made war on the backs of their peasantry. Agricultural economies could produce only so much nonsubsistence revenue. To do so, crushing tax collection practices were required that were ultimately selfdefeating. Late Roman taxmen actually drove society off of cultivation and into brigandage. American modernity could not stand in starker contrast. Roman military society and the military economy of the first century, including dependents, was perhaps 1 percent of population. For the United States today it is close to 10 percent. Aggregating a menagerie of subcultures—even for shared military-state identity—is anthropological art, and imprecise at best. First imagine the fighters: 2.2 million active, reserve and Guard uniformed personnel. Add to this some 700,000 General Service civilian DOD personnel. Now include the 2.2 million employed by Defense industry (2 percent of the American workforce). But there is more: State and AID and their modest constellation of contractors, and the much bigger Intelligence Community and its supporting contract firms. Do not forget Homeland Security (250,000 total) and its contractor base. Now let these numbers roll in your mind into living society: they all have families! Among the domestic archipelago of military bases, moreover, there are whole towns devoted to caring for the 300. Finally, there is a $100 billion private military enterprise, and only they know how many people they employ! But put it all together—and the identity-sweep of the intercessor nation must be close on 25 to 30 million Americans. Moreover this tribal confederacy is but a small burden on the nation. It is in fact a much smaller part of the society than during the decades of Cold War. But even so this is another powerful contrast the Roman-Byzantine-Ottoman state systems. Even when the bureaucracy and army of the Roman state tripled in size at the end of the third century, the subcultures it represented were altogether much smaller than America’s tribal confederacy today. What this means, not potentially but surely, is that the American tribal confederacy can keep its historical trajectory for decades: a century and maybe more. Military subcultures evolve as a separate, highly privileged set of national institutions, integral to the state and increasingly powerful within the state. Superficially the evolution of American military subcultures seems to pace the general shift of Roman-Byzantine-Ottoman military identity from popular participation with the state to separate subcultures of the state. From late eighteenth to nearly midtwentieth century, America’s modest professional naval and military castes tended to the waterspouts of peacetime and then ascended as leadership cadres for the storms of Great War. But since Vietnam the American military has become a truly professional military designed to handle the entire defense of the nation. Here is the cultural resonance with Roman-Byzantine-Ottoman antecedence. Their armies were the focal activity of the state enterprise itself, absorbing most imperial revenue and

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dominating in terms of sheer numbers. They also came to dominate the administration of empire, as we see with Roman proconsuls, Byzantine strategoi, and Ottoman janissary pashas. What this essay calls the Tribal Confederacy of Defense also dominates the enterprise of the American state. Including the Intelligence Community and collateral support elements like State and AID, the tribal confederacy takes a huge slice of the budget. Subtracting transfer payments, national security represents 75 percent of what’s left. Going further, the Department of Defense has come to dominate all other aspects of the state’s relationships with the world. The most critical military and intelligence activities are increasingly managed by Defense. It is America’s primary agent in the world—the world of states and the world of nonstates. It is our intercessor. Distinct military identity creates a distinctive political constituency, with its own interests and agendas. These interests are often enmeshed in system-leader politics and strategic needs along threat zones. The Roman Army was not a distinct political constituency as long as it was officered by its own political elites. But the evolution of the Roman army as a separate political constituency paced a corollary rise of big imperial bureaucracy at the end of the third century. Late Rome was an age of distinct and dominant military-bureaucratic subcultures—a parallel aristocracy of arms, a parallel political cabinet. American military subcultures arguably have gone further. Three generations have invested a constellation of national security subcultures with standing and lineage. Pride of place goes to the armed services: but there are scores of other agencies, bureaus, departments, and services. Gathered around each one are supporting contractors that infuse the character of the government communities with veteran retirees. The American tribal confederacy is “political” on two levels: interest and practice. The first is visible in defense of its own interests. Each tribe defends its people and its place in the vast Defense firmament. But each tribe of the confederacy has tied identity to a specific practice or repertoire in defense of the nation. Hence the sense of “ownership” of practice: ownership of practice frames each tribe’s evolving narrative. So in this sense each tribe has its own narrative, its own stories of passage to identity, and its celebration and renewal. This procession mirrors the larger narrative of national society. Yet each Defense subculture also ties identity to a way of life—“the mission”—that is integral to the world of its practice. Hence narrative is reenacted as daily practice rather than as intermittent, if grand, national liturgy. Thus the “political” aspect of Defense tribal societies is to ensure—and if possible expand—the practice that underpins their ethos and way of life. Military subcultures become central to state identity and effectively take over the sacred narrative. In system leaders they come to represent the universal idea. Why

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does this happen? Why does the state become all about the military? Why does the military become its own federation of subcultures? Why does military ethos stake out a political mission to sustain its way of life? What the tribal confederacy does is shaped by what the nation is becoming. The chronicle of Roman-Byzantine-Ottoman states became increasingly tied to military achievement—because sustaining a universal vision increasingly meant upholding it by force. The grand vision for all three empires was always in the process of becoming a more military vision. The shift came when the original vision stopped being an easy expansion and started being “prevent defense.” Often this shift takes generations to recognize. We celebrate how in this “war” we are “going on offense.” But everything we do is defensive, as in “to stop, to contain, to prevent.” Roman-Byzantine-Ottoman prevent-defense times, however, occupied most of their histories. They got pretty good at it. They focused on preserving what they had and put that preservation in the hands of their armies. Today our military celebrates its role as being on the front line of the American sacred narrative. But its actual work is all about holding on, keeping down, and taking out. Practice trumps narrative. Simply, our Tribal Confederacy is about preserving American status as system leader. Yet they also have become guardians of the narrative’s remnants in the absence of a working nation-in-arms. This is quiet transformation, because no one wants to discard the rhetorical shell of sacred narrative, much less acknowledge how it has been appropriated.

What Our Transformation Means America’s long transformation of national military identity has three implications.

A Completed World There are vocal constituencies that rail against “American militarism” or point to the impending danger of our becoming a “Garrison State.”9 Yet the truth is that America’s defense confederacy is not only highly affordable: it is nearly infinitely welcome. The confederacy has been fully invested, embraced, and celebrated within the fabric of American life. It has become an authentic part of Americana. We have not just embraced our defense federation: we have welcomed its newly proven role as intercessor nation. Americans have gladly ratified a fundamental migration of national identity: where our relationship with the world and the existential basis of our security is in the hands of an exalted corps of Americans. If this is a warning for our national ethos, notwithstanding, it is a practical solution to today’s security threats and needs. 10 percent of America should represent a more than adequate defense confederacy. But does it?

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What we have made into a national norm also represents a culturally mature confederacy of subcultures. The surprising paradox of this grand alliance of subcultures is that fighter bands—à la the 300—are perhaps its tiniest part. The American intercessor nation represents real societies that act like societies and thus represent focused political constituencies just like tribes or even states. The confederation itself is a marvel of political union. But what binds that union is a complex edifice of compacts—agreements negotiated over six decades. The very evolution of U.S. military tribal identities after 1945 in fact took place in a stable and prosperous environment. Shaky and ruthlessly competitive at first,10 the end of Vietnam ushered in an era of stability, leading quickly to informal “articles of confederation.” Hence the cultural secret of the POM system: it is the tribal confederacy’s Constitution. The tribal confederation has evolved like a polity, where the act of union is a compact where everyone is taken care of. Hence in its maturity there is only room for concession or expansion—or change—at the margins. We see this most visibly in the working compact between the main military societies. But it was Goldwater-Nichols that created a higher framework of collective identity. Today’s tribal confederacy as living polity is a recent phenomenon. It is the work of a generation, and it is essentially complete. In its final maturity the industrial defense contractors were also brought into the federation, transitioning after Cold War from competition to collegial inclusion, called “teaming.” The “pie division compact,” first negotiated for the armed services, was extended to the weapons builders and even the think tanks. Fully united, the Confederacy now speaks with one voice: as a nation. Moreover by making this confederacy essentially autonomous, there is no oversight avenue within the American political system—even if it is urgently needed. The chief executive has the power, but consider: the president and the state (the executive branch) have joined their identity to the dominant defense confederacy. Presidential authority has over American historical time become coterminous with military leadership, especially “in time of war.” In the 9/11 War the American president has taken to exchanging civilian mufti for military threads: a standard-issue flight suit for his landing on the USS Lincoln, a bomber jacket for his many speeches to his troops, with chest embroidery declaring on camera, “George Bush: Commander in Chief.” There is no incentive to enter into an internecine struggle with the confederacy. There is instead every motivation to argue for building up the intercessor nation, of which the president is supreme commander.

A Zone of Your Own Our intercessor nation—or Defense Tribal Confederacy—serves to defend a universalistic concept. It is America’s agent for managing both a world system and a mission in history.

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The confederacy grew up in the Cold War, where the tribal confederacy was everywhere needed—and presumably, for eternity. Thus America’s Defense Tribal Confederacy also grew up in a world where it “owned” certain garrison realms: frontier zones where its fustian presence kept the peace. Hence soldiers in their helmeted millions cycled through Germany and Korea, like thousands of jet bombers and rockets in a global constellation of bases, or carrier battle groups on perpetual prowl along the rim of Eurasia. The 9/11 War exchanged a world of garrison realms and routine patrol for something very different. Now as changeling for the civilized confrontation of “superpowers” there is a dark, wilderness realm for the Tribal Confederacy—to be tamed through force. Moreover it is everywhere nonstate: from the AmazonianAndean to the mega-slums of Lagos, the arid scrublands of the Trans-Sahel to the squalid river cities of Iraq, the cracked peaks of the Hindu Kush to the high desert of Yemen to jungle islands like Jolo and Zamboanga. These are not just different places—the mental space is entirely different from Cold War geography. It also draws upon the mythic imagination of the American West. Soldiers seize the metaphor, and writers notice. Robert Kaplan glowingly records vignettes like these: A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis—a marine with an unfailingly delightful disposition—told me one evening, eyeing the mess hall: “Isn’t this place great! I love being here. It’s the new version of the Wild West, minus the booze, the whores, and the fun, of course. But we do have Indians in Iraq—good Indians and—his voice lowering in mock seriousness—very, very bad Indians.11 And his own take on the tribal confederacy is straight-ahead: There was now a professional military that, true to other imperial forces throughout history, enjoyed the soldiering life for its own sake. For many of those professional troops the twenty-first century looked strikingly similar to the middle and latter half of the nineteenth, when volunteer cavalry and dragoons subdued a panoply of mobile guerilla forces, comprised of different American Indian tribes.12 It is an appealing thought precisely because it avoids the stain of Gunga Din and Beau Geste. It is all-American and “How the West was Won”—the wholesome alternative to Euro-colonialism. But is it? The new conflict space also represents an alternative American reality zone. It is the place where the intercessor nation lives and dies—for us. It is their place. It is also the place where the tribal confederacy touches and mixes with the Other. It is the relationship zone of the nonstate and us. It is shaped and molded in fact by this inescapably intimate relationship—a relationship that

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over the years will forever change the tribal confederacy and its role in American life. Here the late Roman experience is revealing. In their “forever war” against Barbaricum the Romans of the third century and after built up a vastly larger military and a “hardened” state, committed to the defense of a vast frontier zone. Our snap assumption is that the Roman state was simply trying to defend itself. Yet however much this looks on the map like a frontier zone, from a cultural vantage something else was going on. This was not a frontier: it was “free space” in which an emerging army-state identity could be nurtured and realized. This was where Roman ruling society came to live, and this is where the tax revenue of the state was dumped. This was their place. This was home. Also, as their base, it was the identity-citadel from which the state periodically reasserted its ruling stamp on the inner Mediterranean—the world of classical Romanitas. The real empire, the new empire, had migrated to the zone of war, to the place of the army, and the high place of the state. Patrick Amory calls it late Rome’s “military milieu.”13 Kaplan’s affection for our “Wild, Wild West”14 is an ardor for a literary trope that lasted no more than a single frontier generation—hardly long enough to entrench a military milieu. The Roman precedent in contrast lasted 250 years in the West and 400 in the East. What do such enduring identity zones—like this new American military milieu—portend? First, identity gets tied to the zone and to the people of the zone. Second, the zone becomes the reason for being. Third, the zone begins to sharply differentiate the American society of the “milieu” from the rest of society “back home.” In effect the tribal confederacy and the leader create a new world in which a special American identity can be exercised and realized.15 This is superficially war-driven but in reality it is neither a form of militarism nor colonialism but rather an authentic identity migration, not so unlike what happened in late Rome. It locks in the necessary rite de passage of 300 membership—as it already has. Engagement in the zone of war, generation after generation, becomes the defining mythic narrative of the intercessor nation, as well as its constitutional framing in American political life. This is what a real forever war does. Just ask the Romans.

A High Place Just what does this transformation of military identity really mean? I write this watching the HBO series John Adams. Original American identity and original American military identity, together, are inescapable. In 1774 Sam Adams comes in a carriage to collect his cousin. They are part of the Massachusetts delegation to the first Continental Congress in Philadelphia. The carriage is escorted by men on horses. They are wearing civilian clothes but they are also wearing an expression of “seriousness and dread,” and they are heavily armed, with muskets upright and at the ready as they ride, right by the British regulars stationed in Boston. Some of them are holding flags with the icons

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of trees or coiled snakes, with slogans like “An Appeal to Heaven,” and “Don’t Tread on Me.” With AK-47 or RPG-7 or RPK—a black bandana and Mehdi Army headband— this would not be 1774. John Adams’s escort was insurgent militia. Here was where our American militia ethos was born. After viewing the aftermath of Concord, Adams rushes to his wife: If you had seen them Abigail: an army of plain country boys, with no experience of professional soldiering with their faces shining like the sun through a church window. Oh, I must support them: the guns and the leadership and faith in what they do. The original American Way of War was insurgency, the war of the armed citizen, the militiaman: the Republic. This vision was buried in civil war. In a sense the Confederacy was the last American militia insurgency. But the original vision of the armed citizen as the state remained intact from Gettysburg to Hue City. The state now claimed military service, beginning in civil war and extending through two world wars and a generation of cold war. Then under pressure after the Tet Offensive, state fiat began to unravel as the final, embarrassing draft lottery. The end came quickly, and suddenly the long transformation was visible, although it would take another generation still before the new military identity gelled. The long transformation of military identity has been painted here as a four step process, cleanly linear and sequential. Reality looks much messier: a transformation of fits and starts, of parallel developments and even evolutionary dead ends. But we see it essentially completed, unfolded for us in the battles for Fallujah. In House to House, SSG David Bellavia declares on page 1 Welcome to the infantry. This is our day, our job. It sucks, and we hate it, but we endure it for two reasons. First, there is a nobility and purpose in our lives. We are America’s warrior class. We protect, we avenge. Second, every moment in the infantry is a test. If we measure up to the worst days, such as this one, it proves we stand a breed apart from all other men.16 300 indeed. It is a justly proud transformation, emotionally supported by nearly all Americans. “Support our troops” is no idle cheer; rather, it is something of a civic oath. Yet it is sworn by one society in praise of another. It is the larger American nation honoring the American Tribal Confederacy of Defense: its intercessor, protecting and defending the nonwarriors, “the people,” lowercase. This cultural arrangement was masked between 1974 and 2001, because during that time the sacred narrative had been invoked only once, very briefly,

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for a ritual celebration called Desert Storm. Today we are seven years into war framed (from the very trauma of its start) by the rhetoric of the sacred narrative. Yet the most important trope of that narrative has been absent. If we really want to we can see an emerging and separate American nation— a spiritual elite—matched by a corresponding divestiture of civic virtue by the larger society. This represents both a twin-migration and a split in American identity—also something of a migration. Yet can we take the measure of this identity migration? The distance between the two can be intense. From Kaplan: One of the Renegades . . . came up to me and began to talk: “I’m twentythree. My generation sucks. They’re all soft. They don’t care about their identity as Americans. We live in some bad-ass country, and they’re not even proud of it. My family flies the flag, but other families don’t. Nobody knows what it means to be American anymore, to be tough. I like being home and yet I don’t. People at home are not proud of us being in Iraq, because they’ve lost the meaning of sacrifice.”17 Why would they think this? Notice his contempt is not for Napa-chardonnay antiwar liberals but rather for the entirety of “civilian” society. It is not the partisan “out-of-Iraq” that bugs him, but the softness and unknowing—like a once virtuous people who have lost their way: a now-lesser nation. Moreover his is a reasoned argument. Even in their careful genuflection to the “high place” of our tribal confederacy, lowercase nonfighter americans offhandedly reveal their moral disengagement. PBS went so far as to offer a 10-part series about life on a Navy CVN. But the view of Salon.com—tony-yuppie Internet rag—certainly captures the chardonnay-eye. The title says it all: “City of Lost Children.” USS Nimitz is archly likened to a maximum-security prison where lost girls and boys (not sailors!) struggle to escape the destiny of rube-loser hometowns. Only in the very last “graf ” does the writer acknowledge her astonishment that these same men and women are so committed to what they do and feel ennobled and transformed by their service. This is at the last a puzzle to her, which she shrugs off.18 No American civilian “disrespects” the tribal confederacy; most slavishly praise its commitment and sacrifice. The predominant sensation rather is one of emotional distance. Two Americas increasingly see each other as the Other— without the shock (yet) of such recognition. The lowercase american people pay idealized lip service, while the tribal confederacy looks to its 300. Thus these are culturally diverging identity paths, etched primordially for the 300 in Pleistocene-to-Iliad moments of ancestor-sacrifice bonding. Then nearrecognition glimmers as sharp spiritual dissonance and separation from the lowercase:

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On the way back to the Blue household, another lieutenant and I discussed what a shame it was that Blue had been killed. Our conversation then shifted to how only a small proportion of the American public truly carries the burden of this war. The other lieutenant commented that while soldiers are risking their lives in Iraq, the majority of Americans are at the mall, oblivious to the sacrifices the military personnel and their families are making on a daily basis. In no time, the atmosphere in the car got very bitter.19 So are we then to be surprised by the 300 Ram’s Horn? Bellavia’s judgment on “Shopping Americans” has onscreen echoes in RenderMan myth. In the film, Leonidas is leading the 300 toward the Hot Gates of Thermopylae, when a contingent of many hundreds of Arcadian hoplites asks to join them. King Leonidas: “You there, what is your profession?” Greek: “I am a potter, sir.” King Leonidas: “And you Arcadian, what is your profession?” Greek: “Sculptor, sir.” King Leonidas: “Sculptor . . . And you?” Greek: “Blacksmith.” King Leonidas: “Spartans?! What is your profession?!” Spartans: “Ha ooh! Ha ooh! Ha ooh!” King Leonidas: “You see, old friend? I brought more soldiers than you did.” So the big truth of big change is right in front of us. The tribal confederacy and the state together have appropriated—at least in the last seven years—our sacred canon and its narrative. American identity has migrated to a new place, along with its sustaining vision of the universal. Moreover the people, lowercase, have all but abandoned it. What are the consequences of our identity shift? The American nation has always been keyed to sacred narrative. As new owners appropriate the national narrative, what becomes of our national identity? Is the American narrative simply now to serve as a rhetorical device to secure taxpayer acquiescence?

PART 2: WHO’S DOING THE FINAL SEQUEL? At this point we know some things. Let us review what we know, and then let’s try to answer the big question about the future of American identity, war, and the sacred. We know American strategy is shaped as much by the needs of national narrative as by practical needs. Examining the role of sacred narrative in strategy and policy helps explain some important constraints and vulnerabilities in the American way of war. We know storytelling is as important to war as fighting.

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For war and politics, narrative is much more than just a story. Not just a fancy literary word, narrative is actually the foundation of all strategy, the foundation on which all else—policy, rhetoric, and action—is built. Narratives need to be identified and critically examined on their own terms, for they can illuminate not only the inner nature of a culture’s most passionate activities—like politics and war—but also the very nature of ethos itself. The story it enshrines becomes a nation’s identity. Religious nationalism has been the world’s driving force since 1789. If it went into deep recess in Europe and Japan after 1945, it is still powerful in many places, like Russia and China, and it is still dominant in the United States.20 Because we still live in an era of religious nationalism—identity makes narrative into a kind of sacred ark. A nation’s evolving storyline fills this vessel with mythic tales of success and translates them into a collective assurance of transcendence. It is this national vision of transcendence—so often fulfilled through war—that makes its narrative sacred. The more successful the nation, the bigger is its identity, and the grander its vision. Then narrative even begins to extend its promise beyond the people: to humanity itself. National narrative can aspire to a universal vision. Along the way, as the once-humble story is invested with a promise both grand and holy, it becomes ever more difficult to revise the sacred narrative, to adjust to a changing world. What it represents, the line connecting past to future, becomes an iron dream. So at some point in the unfolding of its historical canon, the weight of ancestral expectation becomes as heavy a baggage on strategic choices as the challenge of new enemies. A nation’s choices narrow so that defending the narrative becomes the essential mission. To see what can actually happen when a subset of the nation—its state and tribal confederacy of national defense—comes to inhabit the sacred narrative, look at how American narrative operates: in terms of (1) existential form, (2) the relationship between war and narrative, (3) the role of the universalistic, and (4) how narrative is institutionalized.

Narrative’s Form The narrative of American identity is progressive. If it is not a straight line, then at least it graphs well. We begin as determined little beachhead communities of liberty. Once independent we become a beacon to liberty, a model to European civilization, and then to the world. As we grow we feel confident enough to offer sanctuary to freedom fighters, and to peoples fleeing persecution and oppression. But we are a nation burdened by a great sin: the stain of slavery. We must purify and redeem ourselves, and doing so, we emerge stronger, and finish taming a continent. We then go from a “wilderness empire” to the world’s greatest economy and a magnet of hope to people everywhere—millions of new Americans. We begin to represent world-redeeming potential at rest, ready to be unleashed.

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We rescue a European civilization at the moment of its collapse. We seek to remake the world, but we are not quite ready. We draw back, then evil reemerges, and again at the last moment, we rescue the world. This time we vow to purify and redeem humanity, so evil can never again threaten, so all the world can join an American path to light. This realization, so close at hand, is again denied. Yet the issue is only deferred, because America for 50 years defends the Free World and waits for the ramparts of tyranny and ignorance to fall of their own unsustainable untruth and iniquity. Fall they do, and in 1990—or so we think—our millennium begins. History ends. What we see in full is a narrative of steps. Each step represents a profound upward movement, even if it is small or delayed. This trope of “the step” is framed as a transcendental action, taking the literary form of a repeated yet distinctly variant story. This repeated story cycle is formed by America’s Great Wars. Hence the American sacred narrative is both linear and progressive—that graph of ascending steps—but also cyclical and repeated, where each war represents a variation on anointed form.

War and Narrative War does not simply move the story along. In American sacred narrative, war celebrates a mystery of sacrifice and transcendence. War is the story within the story, where battle is not only the central event of the nation’s mythic passage but also, afterward, the ritual reconsecration of identity.21 Hence the sacred cycle of the American Great War is like a liturgy—in ritual form and delivery of meaning, it is a Mass. Like a Mass, we collectively share the sacrifice and transcendence, so that the meaning of our identity is renewed. But war also represents an opportunity to recreate the story so that it is both new again and passionately part of a society. America’s Great Wars are rituals renewed when the generation that sacrificed in the last one is passing away—so that it is a renewal of memory among the living as well. Thus the three American Great Wars—Revolutionary War, Civil War, and World War II—were each astonishingly separated by four generations, reclaiming just in time the immediacy of sacrifice and transcendence central to national identity. But they were also contemporary experiences. In this way the war story— while preserving the repeated liturgical framework—would also serve as a vehicle of contemporary reinterpretation of the larger sacred narrative. Was it divine planning, or perhaps a deep-collective literary awareness, that made our first three Great Wars such perfect advancers of the story? Hence Revolutionary War was the realization of the idea: liberty, the American sacred word. The Civil War was the redemption of ourselves, so that we might become worthy. World War II, thus, was enshrined as the awaited completion: the moment almost at hand.

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Here even World War I worked to advance the plot. It was a necessary failure. Americans were not yet ready to shoulder a world mission for humanity, but they needed to know the urgency of this mission, and they needed a foretaste of what they had to do. “Over there” was the precursor, the preparer, and our failure: the moral lesson we would take to heart. America’s Great Wars follow a mythic cycle. The cycle is familiar to all of us, and subconsciously a part of us: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

The threat to existence: we are unjustly, barbarously attacked The evil face of the enemy is revealed—what we refused to see The awakening and the Oath The leader comes—he rises to the test The transcendent sacrifice of the pure, the pious, the young The decisive sacrifice of transcendence The enemy is laid low, vanquished or even destroyed: forever The reunification—and the deliverance/redemption

Central to this repeated story cycle of threat-sacrifice-triumph-redemption is the trope of the apocalyptic. We casually think of the “apocalypse” as amazing death and destruction, but it really speaks to its true meaning, which in Greek is A ´ ποκα´ λυψις—“the lifting of the veil”—or revelation. In American sacred narrative this is the central moment of passion: the Emancipation Declaration, the Fourteen Points, the “Declaration by United Nations.”22

Narrative and the Universal Three wars, three steps—from liberation to self-redemption to redeeming humanity. What a story! From the colonial to the universal in just eight generations! American universalism was part of the narrative’s original coding. Militarily weak and vulnerable our new nation may have been, but its sound like divine trumpets carried through the world. Our Founders could not have conceived of a universal nation, but they proudly proclaimed a universal idea. Hence Jefferson thought that even faraway new American communities would be new republics— Eaglets—and that a continent-wide empire could never keep its republican virtues.23 Civil war showed that it could, that “American Empire” could be vast, unified, and still virtuous. The confidence that flowed from this made American industry a quarter of the world economy by 1914.24 Moreover great waves of immigrants made our society a mirror of humanity, with ties to all. Even before our universalist mission kicked in, in 1917 and 1941, America had come to feel like the universal nation. This inner transformation made the rescue of civilization in 1917–1918 imaginable—just as our absence afterward made American world mission indispensable (as the homilies of the canon would make clear). But even in 1945 we sought to lead as first among equals: the United States would dominate the new United Nations—its own creation—not by physical force but by the moral force

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of its example. The UN was the League of Nations, perfected. The vision of San Francisco was still a bright line traceable back to the Founders. America was the universal idea and ideal: we had evolved from model to sanctuary to underwriter to guide.

Institutionalizing the Narrative Cold War changed all that. It also revised and ultimately reinterpreted the narrative, and for the first time, outside of the liturgical cycle. The ritual of apocalyptic war, culminating in the announcement of God’s message—then to be followed naturally by reestablishment and reconstruction25—shifted and took new form (transubstantiation). War became Cold War and apocalypse became anti-apocalypse, meaning that this time God’s message would truly herald the end, Judgment Day, so it was to be “deterred.” The ritual itself was also transformed from liturgy—celebration and transcendence—to investiture. The Cold War did not advance the narrative: it froze it. What it froze in place was a religiously Manichaean form, but it was not a narrative form. It was an authority-investing form. It established the institutions and regulatory regimes of American universalism. It was a metamorphosis in this sense: the American narrative was transformed from an idea-driven progressive story to an institution-driven quest for world equipoise. So compelling was this shift that for two generations Americans’ belief-imperative was to build better institutions and defend the world as it was. The original sacred narrative had progressed for eight generations as God’s unfolding plan for humanity—and it was a change plan. America was the divine change-agent. Now for the next two generations it was an anti-change plan. Its leaders were judged not as deliverers but as managers: not Lincoln, Wilson, or FDR, but Truman, Nixon, and Ike.26 America’s institution building centered not around “war” but rather “national security”—so that the core investiture of American universalist authority was through “global” military authority. A grand weave of military and “securityrelated” institutions—a tribal confederacy of “defense”—rooted and spread its branches, so that the balance of the State—especially in people-terms—came to be focused on discharging its sacred responsibilities to the world through security institutions and security missions.

Narrative Jumpstarted Reagan effectively banished the frozen changeling of American sacred narrative from the Oval Office. He dismissed the anti-liturgy by declaring that change had resumed, and after the change, came the expectation of change. The American belief-imperative began to shift back to the narrative, and in doing so stripped the Soviets of their legitimacy as forever-and-equal Demiurge. What had been banished from the Oval Office was now ready to be banished from the American Mind.

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The so-called Cold War was at last all about our grant of legitimacy to them. Without legitimacy, like some Germanic successor king unexpectedly shorn of his offices of Consul and Caesar by the Basileus in Constantinople,27 the CPSU simply began to decompress, leaking authority until, on one sad day when confronted by a single defiant man, it was all gone. Did Reagan ever know that this was what he was doing? He did know—even though the sacred narrative had been suspended for generations—that this had not been time lost. Something had happened during all those years: the world investiture of American power and authority. When the progress of American sacred narrative resumed in 1990, the universal idea found that it was also the universal institution—the world empire. But this presented a paradox and hence a hesitation. In 1945 the United States was still a religious nationalism whose identity was shaped around universal idea/ideal. In 1990 the United States had institutionalized its universalism, and furthermore was now expected to defend and even enforce it—not in anti-apocalyptic ritual against the Soviet Demiurge but rather for the whole world. The sacred narrative had resumed with ever-greater expectations of its final triumphant conclusion, but also now with the smarts and tools to do so. This was heady stuff: but to a social establishment grown to middle age on defending against big change—as opposed to believing themselves anointed change agents—it was also the stuff of high anxiety.

Narrative “Is a Harsh Mistress” It is worth pausing here to assess the strategic bind that sacred narrative—at “the end of history”—placed upon those called upon to fulfill it. The massive Defense Tribal Confederacy seemed up to the task. Moreover during the Reagan years the leader brought them gently into action through familiar war rehearsals that helped prepare this mighty federation for resumption of the narrative.28 Decisively too, the opportunity came suddenly in 1991 to have a full-scale dress rehearsal called Desert Storm. Moreover the ethos and interior narrative of military subcultures was also preparing itself. What is billed and labeled doctrine in these societies is not. Rather, doctrine represents an official reworking of the subculture’s own canon of identity, not as homily—that is reserved for military history—but as prefiguration of its role in sacrifice and transcendence to come. Hence the entire enterprise of “Military Transformation”—ostensibly to achieve a vast “force multiplier” in military effectiveness—was also a collective incantation of belief and expectation that the U.S. military would be transformed into Gods of War. Some might argue that “transformation doctrine” amounted instead to a military ideology. But the specific “effect” sought from the entire exercise was to transform not simply operational practice and outcomes but soldier identity itself. And it worked. Lexical snapshots of this “Transformation zeitgeist” showed a readiness to engage, and eagerness to demonstrate. “Situational awareness,” “effects based operations,” “net centric warfare”—each showed a presumption of the divine.

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An anthropologist with literary roots might argue that the entire “Transformation” ritual was the Tribal Confederacy’s war-dance—readying its band of subcultures for the next grand struggle. To be worthy when sacred narrative was again reengaged and claim a mythic win.

The Last Great War Story? The United States had spent the 1990s reengaging the sacred narrative, with its elites wrangling over what the new framework should be. September 11 gave us the answer. Within days we were wrapped in the talismanic mantle of a fourth great war. The president met collective bated breath with the promise of a final passion of national transcendence and world redemption. The sacred cycle of America’s war was thus renewed. But as every American Great War has renegotiated the actual unfolding of the mythic cycle, so too did the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). In one sense it needed to fulfill tradition, and especially hallowed traditions that had become public expectation. Yet it also had to deal with the American zeitgeist: meaning precisely, the parameters of the sacred narrative in this time. On that score there were several questions. • How much sacrifice could Americans bear, to achieve transcendence? • How much “apocalypse now” was needed to realize the story? • Such a limited Great War would likely not achieve its goals quickly. How could a “long war” be sold? Could the familiar model of cold war work here as well?

The answers to these questions determined the nature and presentation of America’s fourth great war. The story cycle of threat-sacrifice-triumph-redemption was adopted, with these modifications: • • • •

The enemy was fudged: was it criminal killers or a degraded civilization? The sacrifice was minimized and decoupled from transcendence. The transcendence was designed to be vicarious, not visceral. The “reunification” was deferred.

The core storyline of course, from civil war and world war, was still there. But there was no clarity in this war as to how that might be done. Moreover Americans no longer linked religious nationalism to civic sacrifice. Thus the war had to posit a collective transcendence that was compelling but which at the same time did not hurt. Hence it had to be couched in the vicarious terms that contemporary America had embraced: the video vantage, in full Dolby, pulsing with sensory thrills but devoid of personal angst. So the actual task facing American leadership was almost impossible— without a miracle. They had promised a fourth American great war of transcendence, leading this time to some millenarian measure of outcome, perhaps even the completion of America’s divine mission to humanity.

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But a complete, showcase story was needed to encapsulate the mythic story cycle of threat-sacrifice-triumph-redemption. The situation was messy, the enemy elusive, the nature of “victory” indistinct and distant. A single clarifying event was needed—a story within a story—that would give symbolic coherence to the entire grand enterprise. So getting there again required that American applications of military force be the engine of transformation. So the essential problem facing the leadership was: How to make Muslim transformation happen with limited means? The answer lay in a mix of Military Transformation Doctrine and presumed world authority. In other words the key by-products of the 1990s—a new Godsof-War military and the acknowledgement of U.S. “hyperpower”—existentially informed the GWOT. Those who conjured its strategy did so from a beliefimperative that the United States could now—with physically limited means— achieve spiritually unlimited ends.

How the Fourth Great War Unfolded The secret recipe was a mix of Great War and Cold War. Afghanistan would show our majesty and invincibility. Then we would proceed to the classical heart of Islam—Baghdad—and raise-up an oppressed people. Once freedom and democracy reigned in Iraq (as they surely would, we were told, because Iraq was the most secular Arab society and thus the most receptive to this shock treatment), it would set off a sympathetic cascade of democratic revolution throughout the Muslim world. We could furthermore be sure of this because Muslims had been repressed by their old regimes and were desperate to embrace modernity. This was the Great War half of the plan. The Cold War part would proceed in parallel, and the newly liberated Muslim world would surely accept our continuing effort to go after evil, even if that meant communities—or even “rogue states”— that gave evil sanctuary. In the broader context of actively “transforming”29 Islam, we would feel free to go after “the bad guys,” however long that might take. So how did it work out? At first it all seemed to go according to plan. We carefully staked-out two stages for the grand drama: first Afghanistan, then Iraq. Getting to Kabul was easy, and it seemed to showcase the very Gods of War vision that Military Transformation had assured. Then came Iraq. Think of the invasion of Iraq as a conflation of successful recent events—Desert Storm and Enduring Freedom—contrasted mythically with D-Day and the liberation of Paris. The fourth great war would differ from the third (World War II) in two ways: transformed Gods of War would destroy any enemy almost instantly and sustain amazingly few casualties; and the authority of American War transformed would work on targeted societies like overwhelming theater: “Shock and Awe.”30 With victory won Iraq would be uplifted like Germany and Japan after World War II. This was the explicit preinvasion promise, and it met no significant challenge. We believed.31

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The very experience of such new war was presented in effect as Apocalypse Lite. It was Great War in all of its splendor: transcendence without pain. It seemed to be working too—in the spring of 2003.

The Conundrum Then it all went wrong in five ways. Liberation fizzled—the long-oppressed we rescued, the Shi’a, only grudgingly accepted our new rulership. Those to be redeemed—obdurate Sunni— fought back and stood up a popular insurgency. The great evil to be destroyed—Al Qaeda—appeared in Iraq for the first time, as guests at first of the Sunni insurgency. Furthermore, there was no miraculous reconstruction: to the contrary, essential services were contracted to the point of collapse, and did not recover, and over four years, 20 percent of non-Kurd Iraqis were displaced or became refugees. There was no democratic transformation in Iraq, and hence no grand surge of democratic yearning across the inner Muslim world. GWOT strategy was an ambitious melding of Great War and Cold War in which the dramaturgy of Apocalypse Lite would authorize a more protracted campaign against “radical extremism.” Apocalypse Lite was required to establish America’s moral claim—as in World War II—so that an extended campaign would then be embraced throughout the Muslim world, just as Europe had embraced Cold War alliance with the United States. This did not happen. Moreover there was no Plan B. But as Iraqi resistance grew and was renewed in Afghanistan, a Plan B in fact did emerge. It played on the early trope of “a long, hard slog”32 to reshape the original mythic cycle variation presented for the GWOT. Simply, the new GWOT—the 9/11 War—discarded Apocalypse Lite as well as the Cold War follow-up which might resemble SWAT-like law enforcement. Instead we had entered “World War IV,” or as it came to be known officially, “The Long War.” This was no frozen standoff like the Cold War, nor should Americans expect a high-sacrifice, high-transcendence apocalypse. Instead this would be a hundred years’ war against Islamofascism. We might in its pursuit continue to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan for decades as well.33 We should certainly expect to fight—to be “a nation at war”—until victory was won. If American Great Wars enshrine reinterpretation, this was one of the biggest. The original GWOT risked a breathtaking literary fusion—melding American war liturgy (apocalyptic war followed by peaceful reconstruction) with the routinized nonwar ritual of Cold War. But now they effectively discarded both. They offered a new war cycle for the national sacred narrative. Americans, they strongly suggested, should no longer expect a rapid millennial outcome. Nor should they expect protracted conflict to be decorous, and like the Cold War follow certain rules. This would be a drawn-out dirty struggle

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against an implacable foe that, unlike the Nazis, would not be defeated on the field. But an American majority rejects the “Long War”—enshrined in Iraq—as the new sacred narrative.34

Where Sacred Narrative Stands But what exactly is this majority of Americans rejecting? They continue to support ongoing operations in Afghanistan, as well as operations against “terrorist” networks like Al Qaeda. This is less partisan politics than a window into American identity today. It paces national response to Korea and Vietnam. Those conflicts were at first tied to the sacred narrative, even if they were not called wars. They were nonetheless presented as the inevitable and necessary corollary to a “twilight struggle” against Communist Evil: the Demiurge (what we know today as The Long War). But Americans did not accept such revision. They bought into Cold War as apocalypse deferred—or even as a frozen, anti-apocalypse—but they ultimately rejected the premise of “protracted conflict”35 as “forever war.” They could not accept the prospect that the American idea could become the purveyor of endless war as another changeling sacred narrative. Why was this? Part of the answer may lie in the hallowed forms of war that were ritualized over two centuries as Great War. Other wars, if small, self-contained, and executed at the margins of American life, were acceptable. Yet they were still not decoupled from the sacred narrative—they merely reenacted and celebrated the meta-narrative microcosmically. The Indian Wars, for anyone who has seen a John Ford–John Wayne Western, can see for themselves how the sacred national story was merely displaced into intimate testament. Hence even “small wars” became potential religious-constitutional crises if they abridged the sacred narrative. At the upper limit of “small” the War of 1812, the Mexican War, Korea, and Vietnam, all recklessly appropriated the liturgy. Disaster and near-disaster ensued. Only Jackson and Britain’s last-minute military gift saved 1812 for positive memorial. Manifest Destiny in Mexico threatened even to destroy national identity by transmogrifying American mission into the extension of slavery. Vietnam threatened the same for our mission of world-redemption. This is why hidden and “dirty” encounters can be surprisingly threatening. For the Indian Wars the entire experience was reworked into a century of historical cleansing and spin. It is ironic that our rethinking of what happened in the post–Civil War trans-Mississippi West followed the shock of Vietnam. In this sense a failure of sacred narrative can lead to a falling down of earlier icons too. Then there is the twilight zone of the un-canonized. Putting down the Philippine insurrection and the Moros through large-scale torture and defilement of insurgent remains was simply too unclean to reclaim for memorial—apart from a single Hollywood movie, The Real Glory (1939)—and without a twinge the film includes the glory of American soldiers sewing Muslim insurgents into pigskins

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before immolating them. It is a surprising sign of the overconfidence right after 9/11 that some thought to rehabilitate this “savage war of peace” or even make it a model for the GWOT’s expected contribution to sacred narrative.36 What does it mean then when today’s identity-divide intrudes on the formerly stately passage of American narrative? The revealing and troublesome secret lies—as we shall see in the next chapter—in a sacred narrative appropriated for system-leader maintenance operations. Perhaps this tectonic shift—this metamorphosis—might have been masked by resounding success. But in fact it has been gilt-framed in failure. Yet its path ahead is bureaucratically and politically unstoppable. Does this not in itself suggest a looming contradiction: a watershed or breaking point in American identity and American life? There has until now been no room in original American ethos for the moral merging of “small wars” with sacred canon. More ominously there is also absolutely no precedent in American experience for creating an intercessor nation—state and military together—to serve as identity’s changeling by adopting American sacred narrative as its own. Such accommodation requires that the very tissue of our story itself be changed. To do so—or attempt to do so—risks ruining the national ethos itself. The tension in sustaining American traditions alongside a new sacred paradigm cannot continue without serious conflict. Is the state aware of this? Do the leader’s many adjurations “to go shopping” suggest a quiet encouragement of American civic disestablishment? Such consciousness is unlikely. The pending metamorphosis is arguably wholly unconscious. We should remember that the American Republic has shapeshifted and metamorphosed several times in two short centuries. The skein of vision—our identity—as sacred narrative was however always successfully carried forward to new contexts and a changed national spirit. So we should not be too anxious if change continues. But this does not mean that we should be oblivious to change and its implications. The appropriation of sacred narrative by the state and its tribal confederacy bids fair to mark a signal break in our very special national identity. Moreover if the state and its tribal confederacy truly come to represent our sacred story, then they will be the ones defining “holy” mission. It is even possible that the narrative will be reinterpreted—just as it was in other Great Wars—but this time more narrowly, according to the needs of system-management. Thus a “renewed” national story may have little reference to a lowercase citizenry, encouraged to remain wholly self-directed.

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Fit

How did “Gods of War” practice become the helpmate of enemy realization? Is our response—counterinsurgency—making this fit more seamlessly inescapable, even as we become more tactically effective and comfortable living it? Are we becoming ever more existentially tied to our enemy?

Imagine a music video like on MTV or VH-1. Only the electric graphic splash is in Arabic: grainer, alien, and impossibly more urgent than anything our corporate media permits. But in its own meter we feel pounding rhythms and a backbeat borrowed from us—where Arabic hip-hop mixes with ancient, chanted message, all delivered in spliced video frame: American soldiers hit and dropping, again and again; Humvees and Bradleys driving and then upturned in fire, some flung whole and ghastly into the air. On and on it goes—one after the other, perverse rhythmic mélange punctuating each kill, building into a litany of American helplessness and defeat.1 Then try on this syncretism: “the Top 20.” Yes, that would be the top 20 hits, the top 20 kills of Americans by sniper or IED. All filmed. All music video. All over the Internet. All the time. Enemy media is alternative ritual for battle’s sacred celebration. Victorious practice is the necessary narrative of military identity. Yet, locked in combat with nonstate actors, the Defense Tribal Confederacy was unable to defeat its enemies or secure basic objectives. The core of this ineffectiveness is in our relationship with the enemy.

PART 1: THE GODS OF WAR (2001–2007) The United States failed in its 9/11 War because Americans fail to understand the whole of war. War is a celebration of identity, and the war narrative is its liturgy. Hence to succeed, war’s narrative must be fulfilled; this is the mission of

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strategy and its practice.2 But essential to its fulfillment is our relationship with enemy narrative. This was what Americans failed to understand. America’s leaders out of their own prophecy3 saw apocalyptic war: a fullblown Great War in which humanity would be redeemed through altruistic military action. This strategy was to be played out in practice, and a national consensus put its full faith in the divine rule sets of a transformed American way of war relentlessly bearing the enemy to righteous destruction. Hence American leaders could talk about this war as though it was the final sequel to World War II. They sensed the war as a sacred exercise in identity to be realized through narrative. American success in its Great Wars was a given—our mythic stories told us so. We believed the narrative awaited only the pure of heart. Once we truly pledged apocalyptic commitment, we must prevail. Hence too our military could talk about war as triumphant material practice— as divine “boom” operations—building on World War II ancestral success. This war might not look like classical combat but in the 1990s the military had transformed itself to take on even more unconventional and irregular enemies. The Tribal Confederacy was our next great generation and the nation’s instrument of destiny, and the word destiny was proudly celebrated as in this 2005 paean, War and Destiny. Listen to destiny’s language: From the very beginning the Bush doctrine, with its attendant revolutions in foreign and military affairs, represented a radical strategy wedded to a bold and ambitious premise: that American power, unconstrained by traditional bonds and honed to a domineering edge by military transformation, could not just check or contain, but decisively defeat the great threats confronting Western civilization at the turn of the twenty-first century— nihilistic Islamic terrorism, the spread of doomsday weapons and technology, growing global instability, and the proliferation of failed or rogue states that nourish all those modern scourges.4 This was the moment of strategic expectation—without doubt, without regret, and fully vested in its own righteousness—and it would complete the American Mission. But also necessarily, righteous practice would fulfill it. Quite simply we embraced Gods of War going into Iraq—neocons and Dems and regular Americans alike. Yet both strategy and practice were rooted in unexamined assumptions. The fateful assumption was the belief that war would be whatever we needed it to be. In our minds there could be no other way. Great war had always led to national epiphany. In its presence we would always rise and transcend. We simply had to work hard and persevere. For our leaders this was truly an article of faith. But so it was for almost all Americans. There was just one small thing we missed. For any narrative to play through and be fulfilled, it must also fit the narrative of the enemy. Two war narratives must mesh.

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Martin van Creveld presented this concept of “the fit” in Technology and War (1989) as a relationship with the enemy. This relationship explained how the introduction of new technology in war actually created memorable and even astonishing battle outcomes: It was not the technical sophistication of the Swiss pike that defeated the Burgundian knights, but rather the way it meshed with the weapons used by the knights at Laupen, Sempach, and Granson. It was not the intrinsic superiority of the longbow that won the battle of Crecy, but rather the way in which it interacted with the equipment employed by the French on that day and at that place. Using technology to acquire greater range, greater firepower, greater mobility, greater protection, greater whatever, is very important and may be critical. Ultimately, however, it is less critical and less important than achieving a close “fit” between one’s own technology and that which is fielded by the enemy.5 Creveld says he is talking about “technology,” but he is really talking about how war is made and how two opposing ways of war do not so much “meet” on the battlefield as they interrelate. Hence outcome is not so much about biggerbetter-more as it is about the deep essence of the fit. Hence his concept can be applied much more broadly to encompass the entire human enterprise of war. Moreover we can talk about the “fit” of narratives in war and then how this relationship plays out in supporting arenas of strategy and practice. Van Creveld’s narrow technology insight actually leads to the broadest, existential interaction in war itself—the “us” and “them” mesh of ethos, of contending visions of the sacred. It is the dynamic at the heart of war. Hence in revolution, civil war, and world war, American narrative fit with enemy narrative in ways that subtly worked in favor of our victory. British, Confederates, Germans, and Japanese subconsciously worked with us. They shaped the emotional context of conflict so as to elicit maximum American commitment and willingness to sacrifice. They bought off on our battle stage and theater of war. They fought like us but behaved in ways that weakened them and gave us a decisive edge each time, in storybook fashion: Pearl Harbor and Midway, Pickett’s Charge and Pacific Samurai suicide charges, “Across the Pacific” and “On to Berlin” mixed with Civil War banners like “Marching through Georgia” and “On to Richmond.” They all also knew how to surrender so as to bequeath us the transcendence of victory, as reified by Cornwallis at Yorktown, Lee at Appomattox, and the cinemascope of Tokyo Bay: the American Grand Fleet, the teak decks and 16-inch guns of a battlewagon. These were America’s characteristic rhythms of victory—each a passage in the mythic manner of Xenophon’s “March Upcountry.”6 But the flip side to tri-

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umphal sacred narrative is how unquestioned belief in an ever-victorious American Way of War hardens over time into shell. A historical accumulation of success led to three problems, each powerfully asserted in the 9/11 War. The first is the belief that the narrative is self-navigating, on sacred-historical autopilot. Its talismanic powers will protect us; its universal wisdom will show us the way. Second, underestimation of, if not contempt for, new enemies, who exist to permit us fulfillment. They only need provide a suitably “evil other” to move the story. And third, in thrall to sacred narrative, but unable to examine its hold on us, we cannot wrench ourselves from it. We cannot see how our fit with the enemy serves them. The failure of American strategy and practice in the 9/11 War had many contributors. One was the pernicious influence of war liturgy on strategy and practice—pernicious because it was subconscious and unexamined. But liturgy’s deep claim also prevented us from seeing what was actually happening in the Muslim world. Then our faith in Gods of War power drove us to stay the course rather than critically reexamine the self-defeating dynamic we had helped to made. Transformation’s Olympian doctrine staged the Iraqi War as pure national adrenaline rush. Embeds were the vicarious eyes of the nation, and the battle tempo, low casualties, and ordnance harmonics lent it a crossover genre quality: half reality TV, half first-person shooter. The special effects were great, and there were just enough actual engagements to sustain the high. This was what we wanted a reconsecrated sacred narrative to look like—and it lasted exactly 30 days. How did Gods of War practice go wrong? We had a very bad fit with the enemy that worked against us in four ways: • • • •

We were militarily ineffective. They had strength we did not see. Technology was a surprising equalizer. “Myth worked against us—and for them.

Nation-State Ineffectiveness Self-Ratifying Rule Sets Handcuffed U.S. Military Power Going into Iraq and for four years thereafter, we fought tenaciously to our American way of war; no matter how bad things got, no matter how awful the video feed, we kept telling ourselves that this was the path to victory. In war we focus on the enemy and how to defeat him—or so we say. We pay little attention to how our needs and expectations shape war, and almost none to how our relationship with the enemy shapes war’s outcome. Here is how we thought—imagine this subtext for the Gods of War mindset: Our needs and expectations in war take the form of “rule-sets” that not only define how we do military operations but also how we understand our enterprise as a success. We assume them to be rule-sets because we believe we make the rules when it comes to war. The very height of our pride came at the turn of the new

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millennium. We were so sure we owned the very the laws of war that we declared, like Ovid’s Olympians, that we could “transform” war at will.7 Our “transformation” vision can be summed up in these maxims—reality assumptions: (1) Situational awareness (network-centric operations) tells us everything. (2) Anything we see we can kill—with “precision”—we get the kill right. (3) Rapid dominance (rapid decisive operations) collapses opposition. (4) Kill enough of the enemy, and their leaders, and resistance will fold.8 But we forgot one thing. What we do in war will always mesh with what the enemy does. But our military culture is simply incapable of this. We deployed a culturally ignorant battle element into their environment. Moreover more than half of this battle element was not about battle at all but about a support-umbilical. It is umbilical because it seeks to sustain an American-sanctuary where fighting troops inevitably seek relief not only from the battle but also from the alienness of the evil stranger society. Engaging the enemy thus becomes a daily foray-dynamic that our own logistical structures work daily to reinforce. Out there: the Red Zone. Back here, Burger King. But our hallowed rule sets were overturned. The enemy made us fight to their rule-sets—to our loss. The way we do things in war now worked against us. This is because how we do things “fit” enemy practice in ways that make nonstate resistance more productive. Our battle “fit” with the enemy actually advanced their goals. But we could not admit this because we were committed to the belief that what we do was the only possible recipe for “victory.” We were working against ourselves. Thus our “fit” with the enemy filled us with uncertainty and hesitation. We not only could not control the outcome of military intervention, we could not describe practically how to achieve “victory” or even military effectiveness. For example we were told—years after promises of imminent military victory in Iraq—that “success” was not really military but rather political. But this sacrifice was set against a fantasy narrative—the changeling for a suddenly inconvenient story. We were daily promised a series of turning points— from Uday and Qusay as painted corpses to massed purple fingers to Saddam exhumed to Zarkawai’s fateful meeting with a couple Mk.82s9—where victory was always just around the corner. Moreover actual reality was officially denied: there was no civil war, no ethnic cleansing, no million widows, no patchwork militia-politics. At the end of 2006 military operations resembled not so much a failure as an official lie.

Western Consciousness Leashed Our Engagements Chapter 5, “Fieldwork,” spent some time on the significance and implications of a transformation of human consciousness in late antiquity, especially in Egypt, its richest and most developed society. Such inner transformations can powerfully affect how a society makes war.

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We know that modernity has overseen somewhat similar transformations in Western consciousness. The religious nationalism of European civilization—both Latin and Orthodox—has withered into nostalgia whose most notable expressions of passions play out during the World Cup. National military forces are small and defensive, and only tiny slices of society serve. Sacrifice, rather than anointed, is anathema. Moreover, this is no zeitgeist spirit-eddy in the wind. That so-called spirit of the age is really just a soufflé of attitudes and prevailing notions, often encompassed by a generation setting its time stamp on history. Zeitgeist looks like, say, Berlin in Cabaret. But modernity is bigger than that: an epochal sweep. Hence a shift in consciousness can be the token of a new human time. The United States looks superficially different. Its popular literary expressions— in film and video game—are molecularly violent and murderously machismo to an extreme only possible in a civilization both enlightened and unfazed by silicon simulation of flesh-and-blood—in graphic havoc. American civilization cherishes its martial roots—we love the orb and scepter of our guns. Yet this affection is also vicarious and nostalgic. We are no longer a fighting society. Hence the emergence after three generations of an intercessor nation: the Tribal Confederacy of Defense. Even among them, only the very few ever fight. The reality of a forever-altered American ethos shows why and how Bowie, Travis, and Crockett could be replaced in the “warrior” heart by the 300. It is not simply that fighting identity has declined in the West. It is rather that like third- and fourth-century Egypt the consciousness of civilization has moved elsewhere. The Iliad is now “for the few, the proud,” “we band of brothers” . . . and this classical appropriation is appropriate. But Muslim consciousness has also changed. There is today a transformed identity no longer inclining to Al Qaeda’s adolescent nostalgia, but rather unexpectedly, out of the armed struggle in battles from Somalia and Chechnya and Afghanistan to Iraq and Palestine. This is meaning to Muslims who are finding something of a shared “Ummah consciousness” through new media, from Al Jazeera to the world network. This is not to say that Muslims are now infused with ancient calls for renewing their universalistic vision: ready to sacrifice themselves for God and the larger commonwealth of Islam. But there is now a passionate overlay of identity. Muslims today feel a sense of electric connection absent even a generation ago. So resistance is righteous again, and the calling is the new righteous way, whether with AK-47 or Qur’an, with a commitment to social service, or through other means.

We No Longer Controlled Even Our Own Narrative The abiding essence of the American Way of War—and its narrative culmination in eternal victory—is reflexively and indissolubly tied to submission. So pure is our “fight for the right” and so evil the stain we fight, that only their ritual prostration can bring peace and their hope of ultimate redemption.

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We can see how this trope built from very modest origins—in Burgoyne’s and Cornwallis’ polite surrenders—to the merciless spectral landscape of Richmond and Petersburg, and the butternut-scarecrow remnants that surrendered with Lee at Appomattox. In our lore, the Kaiser “armistice” was no submission at all, and necessitated the eventual leveling of all urban life in Germany (and Japan). We brought this “rule-set” to Afghanistan and Iraq. The “bunker buster” collapsing of Taliban and Al Qaeda tunnel networks was satisfying, and may have nurtured its sequel, the boastful advertisement of “shock and awe” as our divine, enlightened, and sure expectation of enemy submission. Without enemy submission we had no alternative military narrative. We denied ourselves the option of achieving political objectives by giving the enemy what he wants—even if that was clearly the best way to go—because our rhetoric had made this unthinkable. We are about victory—because this is how we memorialize our soldiers’ sacrifice and thus organize our collective mythic experience. In our rituals of American religious nationalism, seeking a relationship with the enemy can easily be made to seem like a desecration of hallowed sacrifice.10 We deprived ourselves of options. When we lost narrative control in Iraq in 2004 we showed our reflexive desperation to recover the path to enemy submission. It also led to the editorial choice that determined the war’s distinctive approach to the enemy: “Wanted: Dead or Alive,” the card deck, the “the head of the snake” trope—Uday and Qusay, Saddam’s “rathole,” Muqtada al-Sadr, and Zarqawi—tied to the mad, desperate bounty-hunter trope—“Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia”11—which informed the entire approach to the Iraqi “enemy.” Atmosphere had some of the texture of the TV show COPS—and more than a bit of the Peckinpah-picaresque. Abu Ghraib—and the entire iconography of Iraq—were as much shaped by us as done to us, and thus heavily invested with American popular culture and its zeitgeist. The narrative was lost. Thus however we spin our nonstate wars we feel we have lost, because in terms of our expectations and mythos, we have. Perceived battle and campaign failure in turn creates even higher levels of anxiety and loss of confidence. This is pure strategic opportunity for all-or-nothing nonstate fighters.

They Could Work Our Narrative Against Us They gave us the overwhelming puzzle of suicide bombing, which completely short-circuited our framework of understanding. Then the improvised explosive device—the infamous IED—created terrible and yet almost meaningless casualties, not from combat but rather from the ceaseless-sortie approach (we need to be operating!) that substituted for an operational plan. Finally, the SWAT/COPS approach of rounding up Iraqi men, almost at random—shaming them, degrading them—ended up degrading us. This was true especially as it stripped our cause of its righteousness. For Americans not lockstep on-message—for whom Limbaugh’s frat pranks were no exculpatory simile12—Abu Ghraib was enough to

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end their support for the entire war narrative. The enemy had effectively split the nation. This was the power of their message about us. It was not so much that Abu Ghraib was decisive in itself, but rather that it broke the claim of the sacred narrative over Iraq: with Americans.

Nonstate Strength Narrative Fits Identity The wars of our nonstate “between times” are above all wars of identity. Because we put our faith in controlling rule-sets where technology is the talisman of victory, we cannot see how identity power instead is the decisive factor in war today. It is not simply that Western—or U.S.—military units are forced to fight the enemy’s war, in the enemy’s battle environment. Far more significantly we fight as world managers against mythic heroes sacrificing themselves for “the river” of their particular humanity. Entering into their fit means also entering into a world where we cannot escape the role they create for us in their grand drama—their drama of identity. The role we play as the Other in their passion play—evil, weak, even inhuman—is central to a cultural ritual that is almost primitive in its emotional intensity and passionate symbolism. We come (on the surface at least) bearing “policy” and “administration” into a world—as described in classic ethnographies—of primitive warfare. But it is primitive only in the sense that its connection to the sacred ties today’s fighters to the earliest human societies. In terms of how such warfare affects us however—it is highly sophisticated. To an extent undreamed of in classical war, where we “fit” an enemy mirror of ourselves, in the stranger-milieu we are at their mercy. Furthermore our weapons’ sophistication is less a factor today than it has been in two centuries—due in part to a surprising leveling of technology. In the warrior face-to-face, their meaning trumps our meaning. Their passion and piety overrules our dispassion and reason. Above all they make us their enablers. In the new “fit” we become agents of their story. Moreover, our world authority legitimates and anoints them among those they seek to convert. We become their secret weapon.13 Why can we not see this? Here the enemy creates another paradox: by challenging our own identity they pull us into an emotional codependency. We may have gone in thinking clinical experience, clinical outcome. But their riposte is a manhood challenge. Their very resistance inflames our nation’s spiritual need to prove its battle-worthiness and warrior ethos. We cannot resist their challenge. They hook us into their “fit” . . . and we are finished.14 We are finished because our angry lash-out makes us even better helpmates. Practically this means that we sustain what motivates them—the evil other, the American dark enemy. Yet we also ratify their necessary story: that they are the frontline struggle against the evil invaders of Islam.

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High Identity Power and Willingness to Sacrifice Sacrifice and identity power are deeply linked, and in the Shi’a consciousness, sacrifice is a direct communion with sacred ancestors: with Ali and Husayn. Moreover Shi’a religious celebration culminates in ritual flagellation, a symbolic form of sacrifice. The elements of sacrifice that can create positive fighting commitment are four: stoicism, martyrdom, “the other,” and divine intervention—meaning, in suffering, the promise of a magical guardian. Stoicism What is stunning about the poor Shi’a of Iraq rallying around Muqtada al-Sadr is their collective identity of sacrifice. This is all the world has to give them. Let us die if we must. But we will remain true. “A missile hit the house,” Naathoul said. “It’s a family of six, and last year they lost one in a car accident. Now two are gone and then him. The situation speaks for itself.” He waved toward Raheem’s bed. “They said there was a very small chance he would live,” Naathoul said. “But by the grace of God he is getting better.” Nearby, 16-year-old Karrar Ali Hussein’s chest also heaved, because a bullet pierced his side and remained inside him. He was playing soccer, his father said, when a U.S. sniper shot him. Downstairs, Ammar Ensayer looked at his father in worry. He was shot in a marketplace; he, too, says it was an American military sniper. “We are an oppressed people, but what shall we do?” he said. “We can do nothing.” Nearby, Jabar Abdul Ridha was stoic in his small, shabby home in a narrow alley of Sadr City. His wife, Kareema Hafout, and daughter Nisrene Jabar were killed in a U.S. airstrike last week. He came home last Wednesday and found them dead. It was 5:30 p.m. The glass in the two top rooms of the home was shattered, and the glass frame around the portrait of the revered grandson of the prophet Hussein was cracked. His wife had been hanging laundry as his daughter and niece, Zahra, washed for prayer. The airstrike killed his daughter instantly; her head was separated from her body. His wife struggled to get inside but bled to death before he came home. Zahra was healing in a hospital. Downstairs, wails came from the kitchen. His teenage daughter hasn’t stopped crying, the image of her sister and mother burned into her mind. But he doesn’t cry. “What shall I do?” he said. “I have two young sons. I was sitting with them, and I went out for two minutes. Two minutes, and I would have been with them.”15 Hence Americans continue unthinkingly to act like Saddam’s successor with this most abused and injured Shi’a constituency.

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This intimacy of loss and resistance through and across families is strikingly like grief and emotional response in our civil war. Plus it is existentially reinforced by the constant loss of women and children to U.S. fires. This makes their sacrifice more like those in World War II Europe who endured the aerial bombardment of cities. But today, we occupy those cities. Martyrdom Look at the vast community of poor Shi’a in Iraq: they have been martyrs many times over. Their revered ancestors were unjustly killed. Their own visionary leaders—not only slaughtered but defiled by evil.16 Now America takes old evil’s place. My moment of recognition came up at West Point on a cool and bright spring day, when a young Marine Captain confided his crystal instant in Iraq. There, in 2004—in Najaf, the world-cemetery—he sat, commanding a Star Trek M-1, all eight-inch armor and 120 mm tube. So a Sadrist militia fighter steps up shouldering a pathetic RPG-7. He walks right up to the tank. Right there he defines the war and his victorious identity in transcendent death. An American officer in impregnable tank is hence forever moved by the power of identity. And the sacrifice continues. Suffering increases commitment. See Germans in World War II. Moreover, the example of martyrdom all around you, and the emotional passion of losing loved ones only further steels motivation. The Other The passion of it all obscures our essential opportunity: building relationships with the enemy. This is surely a daunting challenge. Nonstate community is perfectly suited to fight as a people, where all take up the stress of the effort in some way. This convergence of willingness and availability permits the nonstate community to shape its battle environment organically. We could change that picture. We could engage them in ways that begin to deconstruct their “all against the stranger” existential reality. But look instead at what we did. “Muqtada himself was wounded in three places by shrapnel from a bomb.” The Americans did not want to destroy the shrine, but they still wanted to kill or capture Muqtada. Dr. Mowaffaw al-Rubai’e, an independent Shi’a Islamist, attempted to mediate. But as he tells it now, “the Americans’ willingness to negotiate was actually a cover for an attempt to lure Muqtada to a place where he could be killed or captured. I believe that particular incident made Muqtada lose any confidence or trust in the [U.S.-led] coalition and made him really wild.”17 Dajjal. Trickster. Devil. Us. Divine Intervention Go back again to Najaf. The American cordon was tightening, losses horribly mounting. Then the water was cut off. A young militiaman remembers: “When there were periods of calm we would talk about what would happen at the end of

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the battle, and some of us were hesitant and fearful. . . . We began to feel that we were weak and the Americans so strong.” But then, as Patrick Cockburn recounts, “In the face of vastly superior U.S. military equipment, the pious and naïve young men fighting in Najaf believed they were receiving divine aid:” “My brother returned from Najaf and told us there was a huge bird which cried out in a loud voice,” said a teenager in Baghdad. “It appeared when the American began bombing Mehdi Army positions.” The bird would brush falling bombs with its wings so they would not explode. “It’s a sign from God—he has soldiers of all kinds.” . . . Other militiamen said they had seen mysterious shadows flitting around American tanks, which they believed were angels intervening to disable the guns or tracks of the tanks. . . . Sayf Adnan, a twenty-five-year-old fighting near the Imam Ali shrine with a group of Mehdi Army militiamen when it was heavily bombed. “It went on for half an hour,” he said. “Bombs struck every metre, but eighty percent of them did not blow up. Not one of us was hurt. “We knew we were under the protection of Imam Ali . . . and nothing would happen to us.”18 Meanwhile our energy from 2003–2007 was all in the sortie, followed by the flight back to sanctuary. Theirs in contrast is in the battle inhabitation. Their sanctuary is the very (sacred) ground they fight on.

High Learning Curve for Western Vulnerabilities This is not your grandfather’s tribal warrior. Nonstate interaction with the West has the very same standing that Germanic peoples had with Rome—when they broke down the frontiers. Two centuries of fighting and trading and sucking up to and getting stiffed by Rome had made these “barbarians” very much partRoman and also Roman-smart. Today’s nonstate fighters know us better than we wish to know them. We in fact generally despise them—like old Romans or Byzantines—but even though they may hate us they do not despise us. Theirs is a position of cultural ambiguity that seeks both realization and acknowledgement from us. Just as “barbarians” wanted to be a breakthrough self while at the same time, wholly Roman and worthy of being Roman, so our enemies sort and sift through a complex problem that inherently makes them receptive and adaptive—even as we see only the primitive. Above all they come to know how and where we are vulnerable. They know what it takes to beat us, while we still have no idea who they are in the river of their world. They know what happened in Afghanistan and Mogadishu and now Iraq in intimate terms. They know what happened to Israel as it strove vainly and leadenly to “manage” its Shi’a buffer zone or for that matter, the Palestinian territories.

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The result is a prehensile mindset for shaping the fit—in stark contrast to their tribal grandfathers—and in stark contrast to us. Their grandfathers were fixated on taking the latest Western “boom” weapons and effectively fitting them into their deep identity-style of war. But now, as we shall see, the nonstate fighter is focused instead on the fit. This means, simply, how to defeat the more powerful adversary? The answer: work the fit so that he defeats himself. Thus every battle move, every killer foray, is about working the fit. We are the ones who fight like their grandfathers. We are the ones who do things because they fit not the enemy but our own sacred identity-needs in war.

They Let Us Shape the Battlefield for Them We occupied and the feeling was, Show us, but do it quickly: Some swore they would continue attacking Americans. Sheikh Abdel Hakim Sabu of the Suheid bin Sinan Mosque gave the Americans six months to prove themselves, and if nothing changes, he said, they would declare a jihad.19 In existential terms they let us set up the context—they let us configure the battlefield before they set out to exploit it. When we showed our hand, early on and without a care, they used our battlefield lifestyle and routine we created to do two things: recruit for the fight and work the pattern. Driving Recruitment: When “Gods of War” had to start going house-to-house, a prospect not in the manual, our soldiers entered an alternative emotional space. It was like a COPS episode: reflexive, break-down-the-door-rush-in-handheldvideo. A Navy Reserve lieutenant, intel, confided that when he was supporting SOCOM in Iraq, that the major sniper harvest-demographic was a stream of 10-year-old boys hired to carry insurgent grenade bags. This glory was a prefiguration of things to come. Offering Opportunity: Our mode, tempo, and routine became meta-patterns that etched a template-lesson-plan for the enemy. We lived inside the swagger: pedalto-the-metal, all-the-way, all-night sorties. The cool response to service our combat-lifestyle: the improvised explosive device (IED). Clearing Competitors: LA Sheriff ’s Department Lieutenant John Sullivan talks about the “liberation”—for criminals at least—of neighborhoods visibly flooded with police. He remembers his first years with a badge in the wild-ass Manhattan of the early 1970s. As he tells it, the primo high-crime zone from the Port Authority to Times Square needed to be brought to heel. Suddenly police were everywhere. The beneficiary? The criminal. Why? Because normal, local, intimate governance of neighborhoods by their own had been usurped by an outside agency, which knew nothing of the rhythms and needs of the community. They effectively tore down informal management and substituted ignorant force as periodic presence. Outsider-enforcers in effect cleared the way for criminal invaders to run free. Sound familiar?

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Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change Defining the Free Space: Going further, so many places in Iraq have never and can never have effective American presence. So for four years in Iraq, like the NYPD—only not in Times Square—they are here, and then they have gone: abandoned it all after doing nothing more effective than breaking up community webs and authentic neighborhood security. We left them a whole realms of free space. Saddam’s weapon caches were seamless extensions of this free space. Instead of free space we saw waste landfill and leveled inner-city lots. Yet others saw treasure there.

Technology Equalizations Western Technology Diffusion Benefits Them as Much as Us Technology is our talisman. It is both our fetish of victory and the very bringer of victory. How then can we see that we have given our sworn enemy the very tools with which he savages us daily? When the Mahdi annihilated Col. Hicks’ Egyptian army, the righteous captured 10,000 Martini rifles and millions of rounds, plus a nice tranche of field artillery. But it all counted for exactly nothing at Omdurman. Why not? Tribal assimilation of Western “boom” technology led to some stark defeats at the hands of Iroquois-Sioux-Zulu-Rif warriors—slaughtering European and American regiments. Well done! But for nothing! Yet when we approached those we took as equally primitive and savage throwbacks—Taliban or Somali fighters with their Toyota “technicals” acces20 —we smugly incline sorized to the hilt with HBC to the “warm fuzzies” of Rorke’s Drift and the pat icon of “medieval” tribes with modern weapons. This is our undoing. Because for all of our talk about how we do “network centric operations,” it is the enemy that is delivering. Moreover they console themselves that this was exactly how it happened in the age of al Ansar victories against the original seventh-century superpowers: Persia and Rome. “First Muslims” too took what they needed from superior but spiritually degraded civilizations as they proceeded to defeat them. We also give our enemy tools their prayers could only have cried out for. It is almost casually common to assume Muslim backwardness—as in Bernhard Lewis’ What Went Wrong? In fact Muslims show us every day that where it counts, nothing went wrong. They are beating us with our technology. They are keeping their identity and have the technology too.

Ubiquitous Technology Omnivorously Shapes Their “Fit” Go back to Van Creveld’s specific comment about how technology plays in the “fit:” Using technology to acquire greater range, greater firepower, greater mobility, greater protection, greater whatever, is very important and may

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be critical. Ultimately, however, it is less critical and less important than achieving a close “fit” between one’s own technology and that which is fielded by the enemy.21 In the 9/11 War—especially in Iraq between summer 2003 and spring 2007— enemies worked a technology fit to their advantage. A quick sketch shows how this goes. Cell phones are the essential C4ISR network. The Internet nurtures fighter communities and Ummah consciousness alike. The IED and suicide bomber equal American precision ordnance or even surpasses it—with a human not just “in the loop” but there at targetclosure. The enemy took our technology and used it to better effect than we, its creators, have in our war against him. But like ancients deserted by the Gods we return again and again to the fetish-temple of technology to seek succor. Myth tells us how cracking Enigma turned the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic—and there are scores of similarly cherished (if not holy) stories replayed 24/7 on Cable’s History and Military Channels. So as the IED grew into the greatest killer of our soldiers, we turned again to divinely inspired engineering solutions: the true deus ex machina of our war liturgy. Hence billions pour into the IED-Defeat crusade. Yet the god has not emerged, not this time, from the machine.

They Adapt Creatively and Quickly to America’s “Technical Solution” We set up a narrow offense-defense cycle that was easy for them to plug into and work. What our IED response really shows is how we continue to fit ourselves, however unconsciously, into the enemy battle space and their rule sets. Thus they incorporate our technology to enhance the battle of their people. Their rule-sets seek to establish significance moment-to-moment, turning the act itself into a prefiguration. They understand that identity’s future must be realized in the living of war’s mythic passage. We in contrast use technology as tools to tame the phenomena of war: that is, to better kill enemy fighters. But this ignores the larger nature of the war. That it is a war of the whole people; that it is a war of identity. People always adapt better and faster than the machine. Why? Because in the end, any machine simply reflects in its own modest way the habits of the people who made it. American hi-tech and even super-tech is no better than the context of its creators, and its creators for war purposes are bureaucrats in the Tribal Confederacy. Bureaucratic culture will generate fine systems within the stamped process of 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, and on and on, in the grand POM ritual of the Court. But even the most “primitive” fighters can call and raise, and then force a big blind, even though we feel we hold all the cards.

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Our Network/Broadcast Technology Connects New Consciousness The great irony of the 9/11 War is how “the enemy” has appropriated our mythically rock-solid paradigms—even when they are not, like our friend the Emir of Qatar, available as “enemy.” Al Jazeera quickly became a universalistic on-message medium—much like the American media say, during World War II—as the bearer of an Ummahnarrative as much as a distributor of “news.” This was the true counter-narrative to our official story. Meanwhile our media was riven by war. By late summer 2004 the real battle for Americans was not in Iraq but between us. This was in spite of the real dearth of reporting on the ground in Mesopotamia. It was even in spite of the worst move of the Takfiris: the beheading of Americans.22 In any other American war context that move alone would have reunited our national purpose and reified even the most battered and bruised of war-stories. Not this time. Al Jazeera is an example of how a dominant American broadcast paradigm now works for the world of the enemy, while at the same time we can no longer access its power: either for our own domestic unity or as a tool of “strategic communication.” They have the tool for a renewed Ummah-consciousness while our vast media capacity is dead-set against itself. Moreover the Internet we created is stitching their once-terrestrially-imprisoned community nodes into a vast and liberating sense of connectedness, while we celebrate the next narcissistic artifact of evanescent imagined “community,” from Facebook to MySpace to tomorrow’s hot techno-buzz. We have given a long-riven Ummah its awaited, connected consciousness— and this matters more in the sway of their river of identity than any exhumation of deep-enameled lore. The Muslim Commonwealth today—thanks to us—is far more alive and committed than at any time since . . . the eighth century? I would suggest, more alive than at any time. We are the enablers of a renewal of universal Muslim Islamic consciousness. Our Predator and .50-caliber Barrett excursions against “radical extremism” are as nothing to our grand gift to them. Furthermore this lifeblood of new consciousness is a touchstone to future identity-mobilization. The Ummah today has never been stronger, without reference to Takfiri influence. Everywhere our cherished hi-tech is their cathartic enabler. But it is larger Muslim consciousness, infused by our technology, renewing identity, which is likely to endure.

Mythic Blowback for Us—Mythic Renewal for Them? For Us Narrative Transgressed Weakens Identity If we invest our identity in a collective story, that story must be protected as well as extended. This is the great risk in all new renewal enterprises.

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Van Creveld also gave a telling 2002 radio interview. In it he said, If you are strong, and you are fighting the weak for any period of time, you are going to become weak yourself . . . it’s only a question of time . . . The problem is that you cannot prove yourself against someone who is much weaker than yourself . . . No [the Israeli Forces] have not yet lost, but they are as far as I can see, well on the way to losing.23 This is a serious misapprehension about the source and nature of strength and weakness. Strength in a people and their culture is the strength of their identity. From every reflection in this essay, from late antiquity to this ever-present, identity that has its liturgy firmly tied to the life of society can only be put down through extermination. When narrative is broken or worse yet, betrayed and corrupted, then a people are suddenly adrift. They are lost. They may have every material comfort in place and untouched, and all their various arms and engines of power may be in full readiness. But the story, the sacred story has been diminished or even lost. Therefore as Creveld tells us, the Israelis were the strong ones versus Hizbu’llah. But they were not so strong when it came to identity. So suddenly, how the Israelis became weaker because their identity was not winning! Materially untouched in battle, they were nonetheless defeated. They even went so far as to ratify their defeat. How could this have happened? The answer is in sacred narrative. Israeli liturgy required a necessary story to unfold: yet it would not. There is no alternative in their liturgy for another outcome, save defeat. In fact other paths, by being excluded, were made less preferable than defeat. So the nation chose to lose. In this sense van Creveld was wrong: Hizbu’llah was the stronger, and Israel the weaker. He was simply trying to salve the hurt for his people by telling them that everything was all right. The narrative still lived—it simply must wait in infinite patience, for a testing commensurate with the true fighting qualities of a great people. How is the American experience in Iraq any different? In fact it is much worse, and much more destructive, because Israel ended their identity-debacle quickly, while this nation shouldered on, five years and counting toward an eventual century.24By 2007, Gods of War had brought us to the very brink. Iraq is botched narrative beyond the Israel-Hizbu’llah war. In Lebanon the nostalgic cinema of IDF Panzer-Mirage victories simply melted. For us, faith in Biblical narrative was shaken. The United States was at risk of losing its whole mythos. • First, we promised to fight the good fight against (evil within) Islam. But we ended up fighting insurgents who simply hated U.S. occupation. We have ratified by buying-off every insurgent, Sunni Iraqi fighter group. We are the day-to-day nurturers of a failed state of our own creation. • Second, we promised to create a democratic spark whose freedom-flames would engulf the entire Middle East (meaning: the Arab-Farsi-Punjab Muslim world).

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Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change Instead we preside over a puppet-regime whose Shi’a officials petition Iran for political legitimacy. We preside over the most exemplary and harsh—or righteous—Islamist scenes anywhere. • Third, we pledged ourselves to build a secure and prosperous Iraqi society. One million dead later, when open sewers and contaminated water kill some 80,000 young children a year. Yet we now take no responsibility: “It’s up to the Iraqi people,” we say. Yet their parents live in mortal fear of leaving their own walled prison neighborhoods.

Bad Retelling Risks History Hearing this litany might make any American want to rethink what we are doing—not in the sense of asking how we might do it better, but rather if we should be doing this at all. But this is not what we hear. We heard instead that (1) we are doing well, (2) things are improving, (3) we cannot leave without disaster, and (4) we can still win. We are told these things stripped of context, so the actual situation on the ground is unknown. We were being shaped. It is an exercise in perception management. Select language and symbolism were preserved—victory, commitment, sacrifice, democratic ideals—while expectations are everywhere lowered. In this retelling of sacred narrative what we called transcendence was just another word for defeat. This was the Gods of War era at its worst. There is a price to pay for this dishonesty. Dishonest battle narrative failures lead to a double humiliation. The People are often angrier in the end for being lied to than being honestly defeated. But this sets up over time the need to prove again—to remove the stain and somehow transcend again. In the mind this means seizing cleansing victories that must do double-duty—that must go beyond erasing defeat and also expunge the lie and betrayal that took them there. Does this explain the cumulative, repeated outcome of French national defeat? Not only was 1871 not avenged in World War I but that conflict came very close to literally destroying the nation. Even then France did not triumph but rather was succored by America. Then came 1940: the final closing of a circle of shame . . . in a railroad carriage. Even after being succored yet again by America, this time as weeping victim, La Belle France could still not find a cathartic, cleansing victory. Worse yet, Dien Bien Phu and Algeria were defeats at the hands of former servants, of inferiors. Or Germany’s railroad car shame? The German sacred narrative had suffered too. Yet the Third Reich destroyed modern German narrative by replacing it with a new national religion. After the incineration there was, again as it had been for centuries, no Germany at all: just a place and a people in the middle of Europe. What hurt now was not just defeat, but Germany’s betrayal of humanity for a leader’s promise, in a leader’s name. These are ripped from our own historical lifetime: these stories show us how those once-high-rep and most holy can end as the most melancholy narratives of

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their age. They are a reminder of how even the biggest of identities fail: not when they are defeated, but when they betray their binding story.

For Them Resisting Occupation Is Only a Beginning American invasion set up the announcement: a new narrative cycle had begun. Yet embrace—however fabulous the adrenaline rush—is not fulfillment. The narrative had to go somewhere, and there were many competing “somewheres.” As observers we can see this as opportunity taken, and opportunity squandered—in Iraq. Here Muqtada al-Sadr is Iraq’s authentic insurgent model. While other Shi’a became compradors of the occupation, Sadr imagined a resistant Shi’a narrative for Iraq, but also a shared Shi’a-Sunni story and hence, a national future. Like Nasrullah he has a fine sense of how to plug the Iraqi Shi’a resistance into the larger sacred narrative of Islam. But more critically even is his connection to the poor Shi’a of Iraq. Sunni were swept away by old narratives of rule anointed from Ottoman and British eras, still sustained under Saddam. So great was their fall from grace that they embraced adder-Takfiri—to their everlasting regret, and America’s momentary gain, in buying them off. But where are they going? What is to be Sunni identity in the broken and remade place of the two rivers? Surprising Liberations in Ethos Can Follow Furthermore the vision (of how narrative plays out) going in is not the vision coming out. We see this in our own revolution. In 1775 the weight of colonial expectation and belief still hoped for awkward, if painful reconciliation. Yet in just a few months we were somehow committed to an existential gamble—and seven years later an astonishing metamorphosis was complete. America’s transformation was a brief but passionate mythic passage that no one would have bet on in advance. Likewise Muslim transformations push up everywhere but are yet everywhere incomplete. Yet of all the yearning potential almost none of it seeks a new Caliphate. Knife-beheader romance among Takfiri Ghazi did not take fire—it fizzled. Such fighters are suffered now only when they bring armed value to the fight. Small resisters and community fighters are becoming liberators of Muslim ethos—like the original DNA of Islam—which is democratic and altruistic. These are rightly guided people who fight for their own, men and women who take up arms against tyranny as their oath to the whole. It is the power of community-identity, and their example is electric not just to the Ummah but to people everywhere. It is the essence of this epoch that community-fighters can also feel anointed by the struggle of the whole. What we see in the world of Islam is a resurgent Muslim Commonwealth made possible by our technology, and with our aggressive intervention as midwife.

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Encouraging a grand sorting out of the Muslim universalistic story is America’s greatest gift to the Islamic world and its Ummah. Wilderness Ghazi (Takfiri) consciousness has quietly subsided during the 9/11 War, while in its place have risen robust alternative Muslim identity-passages, from Hizbu’llah to the Jaish al Mahdi to the Muslim Brotherhood. So identities yet unrealized—like a Brotherhood Egypt or Pakistani successor states, or even unexpected “restorations” in Saudi Arabia or Iran . . . are simply waiting in the wings. But in a sense these have been made possible through active American engagement.

PART 2: THE COIN “FIT” (2007–?) At first “the surge” looked like a last throw of the die by desperate men—and so it was. Yet it was not as advertised, a military strategy at all. The sublime was hidden from Americans rather than risk ditching the whole narrative—and confessing its failure. The surge was no more than a buy-off and cooptation of warring parties for a blessed (from the needy vantage of American domestic politics) truce. Yet almost at once the United States entered a more “breath-free” space: as Iraq’s factional adjudicator, rather than simply churning forever as its ruthless Olympian SWAT team. We were now in the business of bankrolling insurgencies— no longer just those we initially approved, like the Badr Corps or the Peshmerga— but those we had been fighting so ardently for four years. But where did this contrary notion—so alien to administration worldview— come from? The outline of a new fit was drawn among the cool pines of a swanky summer resort on the shores of Lake Champlain. New war campaigns always seem to get forged in soft pastoral scenes. Basin Harbor in June of 2005 was just that sort of place. Lake Champlain, mock-old money, rustic (but 4-Star service) cabins, and an Errol Flynn silk scarf grass airstrip for well heeled Beech, Piper, and Cessna to make a genteel taxi to Vermont rusticana. But we, ah, we were serious. The big guys were here: a bureaucratically piratical crew. What this means is they had a pirate’s ruthlessness parasite-mated to a bureaucrat’s idea of fun—which is to say the worst of both. Yet here was the next honcho for counter-terrorism, and ownership claimants to irregular warfare (whatever that is), plus a menagerie of Victorian bushwhackers and orotund academics—all gathered ‘round a table to talk counter-, un-, and ir-. Listening to them, the future loomed clear and sweet and sure. We were going to change the fit. We were going to do the thing, the old Malayan Emergency fetishistic thing, sometimes nostalgically graced by the Vietnam American thing (as in, if only we had stayed the Bob Komer-course, then surely we would have won!). Sweet spring of 2005 told the story to be. The future of the tribal confederacy was to be reborn as something old, something new called counterinsurgency: COIN.25 So America’s “What went wrong” in Iraq had at last led to national and military reconsideration. “Staying the course” had finally succumbed to necessity.

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The Gods of War canon of transformation was dead: Long live counterinsurgency! Just over a year later archons converted to the “surge” acclaimed COIN practice. They declared the new “fit.” Van Creveld introduced the fit on the last page of his book, Technology and War. He did not tell us what happens after his celebrated late medieval fits were revealed on the battlefield. What happened after? The Swiss pike-men at Laupen, Sempach, and Granson effectively destroyed Burgundian power, and Swiss mercenaries ruled the battlefields of Western Europe for more than a century. But at last another army with another fighting ethos changed the fit. At Marignano, in 1515, French bronze guns shattered the Swiss Langspiess. Likewise the English bowmen at Crecy managed to keep their favorable fit for about a century too. But at Fomigny (1450) and Castillon (1453) the French finally changed the fit. The power of Swiss ash and English yew had ended. We are Americans, not late medieval French: so it should not take us the balance of a new century to adapt. Right? [But the fit we need to make is not about weapons or even tactics: it is about war liturgy.] The Tribal Confederacy has worked hard to change the fit, especially since the autumn of 2006. Yet it has worked at change only within the narrowest paradigm of war—the only war it knows—which is practice. 2007’s new fit: Counterinsurgency, or COIN, was no eureka-adaptation but only another changeling. A new and improved American Way of War was substituted for a failed vision. But it is still a branded American franchise. So what’s wrong with COIN? Nothing. Just like there was nothing wrong with “Gods of War” Transformation doctrine it replaces. Rather COIN, like “Gods of War,” suffers most when its limitations are unacknowledged. There are five.

War as Phenomenology For America’s soldier ethos thinking about war is an exercise in phenomenology. War is thus all activity and effects, and all about observed energies and material outcomes. War is the sum of its phenomena, because war is existentially tied to fighting only. (As with the knowledge paradigms I raised in Chapter 4, this is an American rather than simply a military failing.) Modernity even more generally is responsible for this outcome, because modernity created a specialized, “professional,” social niche for war where things military and naval were made part of the “arts and sciences.” Just check the hightone décor of any major French city hall from the Second Empire or Third Republic. I would draw your attention specifically to Lyon’s Hôtel de Ville. The grand salon of this baroque pile was clearly given a Louis Napoleon makeover: and there, popping out of the corner crown molding in proud bas-relief, is a crest for military science, and in another for naval science, each holding equal pride of place

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with other knowledge guilds in the other corners. War was as professionally enshrined in modernity as engineering or physics. In America we actually call it “military science,” as if it were equivalent to engineering or physics—suggesting strongly that war is a material phenomenological enterprise to be scientifically measured, analyzed, and managed. This is why we like to weigh wars on heavy material scales, like “limited war” vs. “total war”—with extra geographical precision if possible, as in “major regional conflict.” This phenomenological post–World War II approach to armed conflict eventually created its own iconography of “conventional war” versus “nuclear war”—always represented in an iconic chart called “the continuum (or spectrum) of conflict.” Both words had powerful inherited associations to mathematics and the physical sciences. It is in these devious social pathways that modernity has managed to slowly strip our Tribal Confederacy of formerly deep and ancient understandings of war in human culture, and their now almost forgotten consciousness. In doing so we have helped deprive them of formerly great strength—to truly know the holistic in human conflict. Likewise we have no way to access the sacred dimensions of war, and so we cannot touch the inner force of identity-wars. We are all chained to the mental construct of war-as-phenomenology. Thus we cannot help each other; in awkward or even desperate conversation, we can do no more than adapt to war real transformations by superficially responding to its changing phenomena. The best we can do is to aver that there are “political” and “ideological” dimensions to war. Hence we tell ourselves that activities long ago honestly called, “propaganda”—need to be part of the “war effort.” We know that there is a deeply emotional element to war, which we can access only as “patriotism”—if referring to ourselves—or “winning hearts and minds”—if referring to the enemy. Thus when we decide at last to change the fit we must do so inevitably within a phenomenological framework that is understood and has standing. Moreover this framework must have institutional and subcultural standing, because all concepts are tied to the political status-hierarchies of the Tribal Confederacy. Rethinking is so sensitive that it must be “coordinated” and “blessed” by a hundred hands. So historically when objective material evidence could no longer be denied— that Iraq military operations had failed—the adaptation impulse was to move not toward open rethinking but rather to an available and politically permissible alternative military paradigm. This was counterinsurgency. “COIN” thus had little standing: a formerly discredited legacy of Vietnam. But it had legacy standing nonetheless. Once it had supreme authority within the Tribal Confederacy—during Vietnam. It had legends whose beards still grew. Then legend returned. It came to be decided over the space of a year—between autumn 2005 and autumn 200626—as the new official “truth.” COIN was back.

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The Secret Recipe But why was COIN so reviled? Within the Tribal Confederacy it was simply, inferior war: “Dirty War,” the “War of the Flea.”27 In deep cultural terms it did not celebrate and anoint the soldiering ethos, in part because fighting guerillas and insurgents had only the murkiest of niches in American sacred narrative. Even when Transformation’s Gods of War failed in Iraq, leading to COIN-resurrection, its awkwardly competing constellation of related noms de guerre told the story: ir-regular, un-conventional, a-symmetric. It was not-war. Not-war in texture and feel, but to its practitioners in the tribal confederacy it is still war as phenomenology and thus still as classical as war can get for an American. What this means is that COIN only looks and feels different from the paradigm it replaces. Although it understands that its practice is about people—the famously styled “hearts and minds”—COIN remains stubbornly phenomenological in this sense: it preserves an us-them, subject-object approach where people are to be shaped and controlled like the physical “effects” of classic war. Moreover the paradigm itself is anointed by what Benedict Anderson calls “the idea that a particular script-language offered privileged access to ontological truth, precisely because it was an inseparable part of that truth.” Hence: the secret recipe. War in this sense is always in search of new recipes. Because it takes the form of a material phenomenon to be scientifically measured and analyzed, each New Testament of war can be canonized as new “doctrine” without the sacred component ever being confessed. In this sense the secret recipe is a stand-in trope, an ersatz, a changeling marker, a “stub” for what is really going on. What is really going on, deeply, is the canonizing of scripture, where newly raised “practice” itself becomes precious Mystery, with its own attendant talismanic powers and its very own secret knowledge, tightly held by its hieraticsoldiering guild. Truthfully then COIN is no “secret recipe,” but rather something of far deeper import to collective (Army) identity. But for the Army such deep knowledge—Gnosis—still takes the form of a recipe. Hence defeating insurgencies is a series of steps, based on existential truths called “principles.” Hence there are Robert Thompson’s “Five Principles of Counterinsurgency.”28 David Galula had “Eight Steps.”29 Flowing from them are “28 articles.”30 Even Mao had “The Three Rules and the Eight Remarks.” Now there is a new cookbook, Field Manual 3-24 that puts all the various ingredients, preparations, and steps together—in successful counterinsurgency. It is not so much that current American COIN doctrine is “wrong”—but rather that it is not able to access the existential implications of its own practice. Counterinsurgency piously declares that it has addressed the differences between “irregular” warfare and traditional battle. Yet it is still looking at war with the nonstate within the phenomenology of “modern war”—only now intent on controlling, not earthly, but “human terrain.” Hence there are “insurgents” who must be separated from “the people” so that the “government” may reassert “local security” which is the way to “win support

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of the local populace.”31 A real world of clans, tribes, merchants and middle class, police, army, and ruling elites is reduced to PowerPoint iconography—colored figurines—and counterinsurgency thus to a series of charts that shows how their coloration changes, leading to victory. Yet we know the reality of COIN practice, if we care to look. In Iraq the “new fit” means making of Baghdad a prison-warren, 23 miles of walls . . .32 So given actual reality, just how do polite pictographs, showing little green natives morphing from red (bad) to blue (good) usefully represent real and terrifying social choices?33 How do such hieroglyphs explain how we win “hearts and minds?” But COIN on PowerPoint is not meant to reveal but rather to show the power of gnosis—of secret knowledge. Not hidden, as blazing charts witness, but rather in its colorful opaqueness whispering to inner, mystic knowledge shared only by a select few—the guild of doers. Sacred too is the book that bears such knowledge. It is called doctrine yet it is much more than this. It is a lexicon—a complete language for counterinsurgency. It is a blueprint—for how the society of counterinsurgency should live. It recounts the “truths” of the entire COIN experience, including ancestors and mythic exemplars. Its inherited phenomenological framing lends its reality a “scientific” gloss but the faith-path is scriptural: from gnosis to doctrine to canon. So think of the secret recipe then as the canon of doctrine, which itself is “The Word” (gnosis). What emerges is a new identity-narrative of practice—not for the nation, but for a key subculture in the tribal confederacy: the U.S. Army. COIN is meant to be their new community-identity. Hence for the path to be complete it must be anointed in public ritual. Ceremony not only serves to officially announce new Army practice but also performs an investiture. Suddenly General Petreus has mystical authority because “he wrote the book on counterinsurgency.” Key scribe LTC John Nagl even appeared on The Daily Show—Sukhomlinov-beribboned, hair high-and-tight—while Jon Stewart showered him with encomia.34 Thus the secret recipe becomes almost scriptural— “he wrote the book”—as though we all know it has talismanic powers: the keys to victory. Why then is COIN success so spotty?

“Fighting Identity” If war is the liturgy of identity, then counterinsurgency can be successful only if it backs the rising identity and jacks into its emerging narrative. But it is highly unlikely that the rising identity is the old ruling establishment—and America only very rarely finds itself today on the side of new and unrealized identity! Backing beleaguered old identity is a risk. Historically it is also a risk that COIN-makers always seem to minimize. Look for example at the Crown’s effort at “Americanization” [as in “Vietnamization”] of the Southern Colonies, a serious British counterinsurgency campaign.35 His Majesty’s idea was to take advantage of “the belief, repeated frequently by those British officials and supporters with the most direct knowledge of the

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South, that [the colonies] were hotbeds of Loyalism . . .”36 The classic COIN idea was to use modest British combat power and its exercise to separate loyalist communities from the insurgents and by giving them security, win them over like seeping, spreading “oil spots,” until the whole South was won back. But too many loyalists it seemed were hell-bent on payback against insurgents, and the insurgents were only too happy to terrorize them in return. It was something like a brewing civil war between rival militias, with the British Army, as the most powerful militia, unable to bring order. Add to this the Continental and French “militias” and the irregular Canadian and Spanish Indian-based terror campaigns, and perhaps we might think it a kindness that Cornwallis finally found succor in surrender. I raise this charged symbolism not simply because the analogy is apt but because the line in highest COIN fashion today is how to win “complex insurgencies.” Like the South in 1780? Or like Iraq, 2008? Identities migrating and in-play mean communities in transformation. It is foolish to enter a society based on an abstract and often fatuous lexical division between “the people” and the “insurgents” and “the government.” Even the British did not go this far. Their “expert” source gave a clear warning of the complexities going in. In fighting identity—or worse, many warring identities, as in Iraq—we face a proposition parsecs removed in mental space from the hieroglyph triad of COIN doctrine: People-Insurgents-Government. In Iraq today armed neighborhoods face off against other hoods, communities fight alliances by joining other, shifting alliances, while outsiders and criminal gangs simply add to the violence and politicking and intrigue. A pathetic few Sunni-Arabian Takfiris are in fact the least of the outsiders, in a “realm” where Persians and Americans are the big elbows roiling the mix of today’s Iraq. COIN? The American vantage today is not about winning over the people to support a beleaguered democratic government—it is all about leveraging armed groups we bankroll while proscribing those who oppose us. This is not even about insurgency but really looks like the politics of early medieval Europe. Like imperial Constantinople picking and choosing from among 36 Lombard “dukes” and their “concerned local citizens” to maintain its position in Central Italy: and losing. Are we simply winning the Middle Ages in Iraq? So if Iraq—and Pashtun regions too—represent situations more like the early Middle Ages rather than the reified model of counterinsurgency, why do we persist in teaching it, promoting it, and enshrining it? For the American tribal confederacy in the wake of “Gods of War” failure— COIN represents a talismanic counter-narrative of effective military practice. We were unprepared, we performed poorly, we assisted enemy narrative—and then at last, our eyes were opened. We have come to our senses, adjusted, and in good American fashion “adapted.” We changed the fit—and now we are ready to win. This subcultural narrative of practice is also talismanic for the national leadership. They proudly point to the

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success of “The Surge” as a victory of counterinsurgency, in which “new” practice is the foundation of “new” strategy rescuing the future of this war itself, by slyly substituting mere practice for sacred goals now discarded. The smart line among the cognoscenti a couple years ago—as new-kindled ardor for COIN ramped up—was that Malaya was the gold standard for COIN.37 But Malaya worked because it was a tiny outside movement removed from the people. The British had tight relationships with local rulers, and the people were politically passive. Malaya looks like a classic colonial campaign. But saying that we can only win in well-greased, low-key, neocolonial situations is not the full and necessary takeaway. The magic key to Malaya-like insurgencies was the identity power of the colonial masters. The British had a century-long, club-cozy relationship with its Malayan sultans. The princes even sprang for a brand new Brit super-dreadnought in 1912: hardly the stuff of anticolonial angst. Malay people moreover were not a political issue. There were no rising peoples’ movements, no new visions of identity. What no one said—or perhaps even thought—was the deeper implication of identity in the (limited) success of colonial European counterinsurgency.

A Withering, Deserting Zeitgeist European COIN was strong because European identity was strong, while “native” insurgents, if not weak, inhabited desperately weak positions. Europe’s big identity was the one sold by Mr. Kipling: the “happy warrior” of Victorian religious nationalism. The radiance of British imperial power—after their savage putdown of Sepoy mutiny—was like the sun. Marginal merchant princes clinging to the edges of the Indian Empire happily embraced Britain’s generous protection racket. They did, and they still do. The cultural counterparts of the Malayan sultans are our clients today—Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, the “Trucial Coast” (or UAE)—and they have been under Anglo-American protection now for over a century.38 We unconsciously borrow our phenomenology of COIN from a long-lost Western zeitgeist flush with dominant identity, easily and everywhere able to lay down terms for patron-client relationships. We assume too that, like them, we can “make it so.” The fact that a respected American academic would refer to the campaign in Malay as counterinsurgency’s “gold standard” speaks to an unstated but unmistakable appropriation of British imperial prerogatives and norms—as rightly those of the United States today. Not that we would officially be defending American colonies but rather that we would nonetheless be doing the same things, in the same places, and demanding the same outcomes as British forces a century ago. Many in Washington leadership circles still talk this way—in expert camps of both parties. I have suggested that the very “insurgent” situations we seek to tame

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are also the least amenable to COIN: The Secret Recipe. It is still arguable that lesser, and less-complex insurgencies can be effectively turned. Can we pursue more “Malayas” like a lost “golden age” we might hope to recapture? Or have we entered an era truly resistant to counterinsurgency at any level above the criminal? The COIN range we seek the world of the nonstate has its frisson-fit in late antiquity and the High Middle Ages: Roman-Lombard Italy, circa 600. Today we call this place Iraq. Like imperial Constantinople, we also have a sizable force there, overextended, making expedient deals, buying off local dukes, and so on. Slav Greece, circa 700. This is more like Afghanistan-Waziristan, et cetera, as we survey it from Kabul, like Byzantines watching Slavic tribes from Thessaloniki, as they forayed and fought against them, year after year. Byzantium, circa 1300. Here is Pakistan today, barely holding together, with wars and restless tribes on the periphery, with political divides in its Punjabi-Scindi heartland and deep issues of political legitimacy and succession—and instead of the aggressive, imperialist Papacy threatening to filibuster, it’s the United States. Roman Gaul, circa 450. Think Colombia or any decent former nation-state slowly reworking into competing nonstate governance, and not just in the backwoods, among bandits and insurgents, but among the old elite and their armed retainers.

Each of these represents a different kind of “insurgency” and a different “instability.” In Iraq and Afghanistan we are simply the biggest armed group in a fighting politics of armed constituencies. We keep our pride of place as the baddest fighting force as long as we wish to pay for it and fight for it. We are Hetman in a world of squabbling, feud-proud, trigger-happy Szlachta—while we stay. But that is all. The big takeaway from Iraq and Afghanistan is that we cannot pull off counterinsurgency even in modest-size society—it is beyond our power to do so. We can become the top insurgent force—Number One Militia—and hold that position, but we cannot shepherd and tutor that society through the judicious use of force. Going a step up, big human places on the verge of “boom”—like Pakistan— are simply beyond the beyond. If there is no secret recipe for Iraq what is the secret for a place six times bigger? American counterinsurgency in Pakistan would be our nation’s grave. That leaves us kibitzing at the margins in smaller societies still intact. We did something like that in El Salvador in the 1980s39 and we continue to in Colombia today. We send detachments of super-soldiers to train “armies” across the scorched, jagged, or fetid rimlands of civilization. Most Americans never hear about it. When Washington wants them to, sometimes we pull the curtain an inch or two, and then, perhaps to give it some domestic political gravitas, we call it counterinsurgency. It works, usually. Why is this the only COIN that does? What happened?

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If globalization times are high times for new identity, then a clan with passion is something powerful. Just sometimes the force of small power is bigger than old nations with diminished spirit. New identity-geist can trump today’s Western zeitgeist. This is why we should avoid future military enterprise seeking to occupy and administer an alien society. Global shifts in identity-geist make literary-historical expectations40 of a valorous string of new “Malayas” unlikely. Kipling’s time—the time when Europeans and Americans could do as they willed—was the high tide of Western identity, the time of European religious nationalism unbound. That was when globalization’s first wave—pure creative destruction—washed over traditional societies. They did not stand up well. Old identities lacked technology and the insight to use it against a West on identitysteroids. In dark buoyant contrast Europeans cared not how often or how cruelly they had to fight—to win.41 Today it is the nation-state that is on the defensive. The West gained everything, only to have everything to lose. We avoid risk. Even America sought to wage in its 9/11 War as a modest apocalypse. But even as some proclaimed us “Romans” we still seem wary of the Centurion’s swagger stick. Yet seven years later a defiant 35 percent of us are still full of fight. With its built-for-battle tribal confederacy, American religious nationalism remains the last-standing Western fighting identity. Resistant identities are not simply the response to modernity’s second wave of globalization. Nonstate resistance is not simply a temporary response to collective wretchedness and its anger and frustration. Nonstate resistance did not simply emerge out of the wreckage of Wave One globalization. Resistance is the outgrowth of failed Western successor models. It is not romanticizing—à la Orientalism42— to observe that this is root cultural evolution. What is astonishing in contrast is how casually Westerners assume that what people seek, only we can give—that what they seek is what we value—that any rejection of our value-assumptions and our authority to give them permission is actionable evidence of their deviance and criminality. Our Orientalism—like all complex us-them messages—are messages about ourselves. The final mind-impediment to ditching COIN is our residual but deeply emotional tie to mythic images of Gunga Din or Zulu!—subconsciously carried forward to consciousness at least in how we see the enemy. Hence our battles against “bad guys” in Somalia, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Iraq are shard-like regluings of old European firefights reglazed to refract today’s “struggle for civilization.” Bringing such charged identity-heirlooms to COIN make it triply hard to penetrate to the other side. Instead they only add to and inflame (1) our understanding of war as phenomenology, (2) our deep desire to find the secret recipe, and (3) our playing out of the romance of ancient narrative.

COIN as Way of Life A recent RAND study notes wearily, without expecting an answer: why is it that half of all counterinsurgencies fail?43 They fail because insurgent identity is

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too strong. But what of those that succeed? What is success? COIN’s mesmeric secret is that while not a successful strategy, for its practioners it is always a successful practice. COIN is remarkable among military practice paradigms for being almost infinitely extensible in terms of how long it takes and what success looks like. You can do COIN seemingly forever and yet always be able say that you are doing good work and also be entirely confident that you will, someday, be able to say your work is finished . . . but not (and the smile is always the same) in your lifetime. A marvelous paradigm! Herman Amersfoort, esteemed Dutch military historian, addressed nineteenthcentury Netherlands’ COIN against the Sultanate of Aceh. This is what he said: The Colonial Government sent an expedition against Aceh. It was defeated. So they sent a larger expedition. It was defeated. Then they mounted an even bigger expedition.44 Batavia was able to announce a titular “mission accomplished” in 1903, thirty years after. But the insurgents fought on. Banda Aceh was never wholly subdued by the Dutch—nor by the colonial successor regime in the now-renamed capital of Jakarta. Only the Tsunami of 2004 could finally break the will of Aceh. For now. Douglas Porch celebrated French COIN in Morocco. Understandably for a chronicle called “The Conquest of Morocco” he chose to write only about the years of real French success under their “he wrote the book on counterinsurgency” savior, Marechal Lyautey. The French began their absorption of Morocco with the battle of Isly in 1844, but only through Lyautey’s “direct administration” did they really move toward control: The Rif was subdued in 1926 and Abd el Krim exiled to the island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean. The Middle Atals, the Sus and Tafilalet were, one by one, brought under the protectorate. In his native Lorraine, Layautey [in retirement] busied himself organizing his papers. . . . Questioned about the place where he made his name, he always replied: “Morocco? Never heard of it.” In the summer of 1934 he died, and was buried with full military honors in Rabat. His creation did not long survive his death. In 1956, the protectorate was ended. El Mokri, grand vizier in 1912 when the Treaty of the Protectorate was signed, was also there to see it ended, aged 105.45 When COIN had finally finished the job, so had the French. The lifestyle of the French in Morocco was the same as their counterinsurgency campaign. Hence winning it was also losing it. COIN is your raison d’être for being there, where being there has become what you are. COIN is not about “fixing” but rather about “establishing.” American military authorities like to caution patience with Afghanistan and Iraq. They assert with unbreachable gravitas that insurgencies usually take seven or eight years to win.

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But that is true only of the relatively easy ones like El Salvador, or the ones the West lost in seven or eight years, like Aden or Algeria. Even Malaya’s “gold standard” has impurities. The British simply declared the insurgency over after eight years—but it went on for two decades more, invisibly. What all this should tell us is that fighting identity is the work of generations, or perhaps as the Romans knew, of centuries. The Dutch fought the Spanish Empire for 80 years. The Moros have fought the Manila Power for hundreds of years. Aceh has been fighting Javanese imperialism now for a century and a half. The French took 90 years to subdue Morocco. COIN is in this sense a sure bet, a solid foundation for planning, a steady investment-yield. Hence COIN may seem the ideal identity-solution for an American state and its Tribal Confederacy of Defense. Yet it is also a solution “destined” to create its own special problem. COIN is a refutation of American sacred narrative. For Kaplan to wheatpaste his poster bill of the “Indian Wars” on American consciousness—as authority for intervention everywhere—skirts truth-in-advertisement. Our Indian wars themselves were wrongly conducted and, to many, even evil, but more than this they took place within the constitutionally encompassed world of American (continental) empire. Nineteenth-century Manifest Destiny was venal and narcissistic but its enactment was bound to the physical frame of this nation. It never imagined that it might one day seize the whole world. The notion that the United States would consider the world its stage for endless new “Indian Wars” is simply a reaffirmation of the ways in which universalistic imperium can conflate ancient mythic experience with a modern compass—that is as available as it is unworkable. For one more moment, again consider Rome. What Rome did eventually was to create a zone of Barbaricum et Militum removed from the life of the oikoumene, which remained as always a delicate tracery of cities across the Mediterranean.46 But the new iron archons were building their own world: a world of army and state. This would be Rome’s new world, built from the intimate engagement of war between the creatively artificial ideas of Romanitas and its necessary Barbaricum. Roman COIN in this milieu created through centuries’ long interaction the new identities that wanted in.47 “Barbarian dependence on Roman ideas” was mirrored in the Roman army-state identity being dependent on them. The military-barbarian frontier world became the major force of world change in the Roman oikoumene. It was the primary vehicle transforming barbarian identities and Roman identity. The new identities that rose from this interaction were the constitutional stuff of post-Roman worlds to come. Rather than preserving and defending the old Hellenistic Mediterranean civitates, the Roman forever war and its new identities helped to subvert, tear down, and remake that old world forever. At least in historical prospect and potential, the emerging world of COIN and “The Long War” offer our world: like change.

Conclusion

Where I Came Out

THE ENEMIES OF BELIEF Writing about belief soon leads to direct mediation between belief and other realities. Americans are quite prepared to see how the Islamic belief system rules Muslim reality. But are we ready to see the same of ourselves? We represent civilization, modernity, and reason. Ours is true reality. But belief always bends stubbornly to reality. Usually it is reality that bends before belief. This is especially true for war. The closer war is tied to identity and its narratives, the closer war is to the sacred, the greater the claim of belief, and the lesser the claim of actual reality. This is why society can pursue stated goals that from a reality-based vantage seem counterproductive or even self-defeating. Shared commitment and sacrifice after all is the liturgy: if the passion of sacrifice ensures the goal, then the goal in turn must inspire the sacrificial passion that ensures. The compelling power of what we do is forever tied to the transcendence that belief brings. We saw this unfold in the 9/11 War. The attacks struck our existential-sacred, necessitating classical American Great War. Hence the world of Islam had to be transformed, America had to transcend, and history (finally!) ended. 9/11 drove us naturally and inevitably to Iraq. Among those who gave the orders, or those who, battle-harnessed, stormed out of the desert, or those Everyman-Americans vicariously receiving sacred live video, there was no doubt. We win our Great Wars not just because we are divinely anointed but also because as Americans we mythically rise to transcendental challenge. This is why we cannot soon leave Iraq, unlike Vietnam: not because a compelling outside calculus of interest tells us so but rather because we made Iraq our Great War liturgy. To fail liturgy is not only inconceivable. It is impossible.1 In significant ways we have placed ourselves more at the mercy of the 9/11 War than has the world of Islam. Their Ghazi after all had only prospective legitimacy

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going in, and they remain sufficiently marginal in Muslim narrative to be quietly jettisoned if they fail. Moreover since 2003 new Civil Militia movements have arisen that speak more urgently and authentically to Muslim societies, and they are not on a failure path. But there is a much larger global migration going on. Ultimately the 9/11 War is more important for what it reveals than for what it will ever do—whether do as in “achievement” or do as in “consequence.” The 9/11 War reveals America’s final response to globalization. It presents our evolution of national identity since World War II. Remember that America’s periodic Great Wars also serve to update the national ethos. The sacred narrative is suitably reinterpreted via the authority of the experience of Great War itself, and the result is a new framework for both our nation and its story. Great Wars both reveal and ratify how American identity has changed. This war is no different. America became the world system leader in 1945. The Soviet Union became our instant junior partner, however adversarial and combative. Consider this testament: at the very height of our power and glory, the portrait of JFK occupied a revered place in 100 million third world households—like a household deity. Those were the heights. Defending those heights as system leader required a majestic military. But it was much more than just soldiers. It was a great host of specialized tribes, and it stood guard for American national society. Yet over time its honored role was molecularly severed from our original republican compact of civic virtue: the tribal host evolved into a separate world devoted to America’s defense. The Cold War made the Tribal Confederacy of Defense our guardian of Great War deferred. Moreover Vietnam drove Great War deferral down in scale and scope, almost to nothing. For a moment we pledged ourselves not only to “No more Great Wars!” but also even to “No more small wars!”—permitting ourselves nothing more than short, sweet triumphs like Desert Storm or the cost-free bombing of Serbia. But this evanescent conviction never evolved into equipoise. We were never able to make Great War deferred a steady-state Defense universe. The 9/11 War makes this clear. The events of 9/11 drove us back to Great War, but this time without the people. This Great War from the start was and remains a war of the leadership and its tribal confederacy. It is a state-military enterprise, but far more significantly, it is also now a state-military liturgy. What does this mean? An essentially separate American national identity— that of an empowered intercessor nation serving the state—now represents the American Republic in world affairs and takes on itself the full sacrifice for national defense. Further, it has staked out a world arena where we will defend like Rome against Barbaricum. How could this happen? Like Rome and the later Byzantine Romaioi, Barbaricum is the world of the other: the not-us world, the dark world. We say it is existentially threatening because it refuses to be like us and desires to exist as an alternative to us.

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This is why counterinsurgency is such a special doctrine: because it is the template for military practice as way of life. COIN offers a spin-off American national identity as its business plan. The intercessor nation (leadership and tribal confederacy) now naturally exercises its special mission in American life, and thus its identity, within the context of an eternal struggle against evil. So it is necessary for the former progressive narrative of American world deliverance to be quietly replaced with a Manichaean story of “The Long War.” The changeling seeds were planted as metaphors in the Cold War, but its fruit is the lifework of the 9/11 War. Like the Rome-Romaioi struggle against Barbaricum, the rhythms of struggle themselves become the daily renewal of identity. This is not as in earlier sacred conflicts, a war to be won, but rather a struggle to be realized. Transcendence for this offshoot nation is in the fight itself. Hence the narrative is also transformed from a progressive story for the whole nation to a “way of life” fulfillment for an intercessor nation. What had been a disconnected and fractious gaggle of subcultures has become its own, not inconsiderable, gens. A current Boeing TV ad actually frames its narrative best: We know why we’re here To stand by all who serve, To deliver the technologies vital to freedom To help carry hope to those in need: Around the world the people of Boeing Are working together for what matters most.2 The “need” images flesh out the words to swelling orchestral chords: beginning with purposeful battledress soldiers rushing to the camera, then an attack helo charging head-on, then an F/A-18 catapulting toward a strike, then a new stealth killer-drone. That is one side of America’s world connection. The other is succor, as in medical supplies to hollow-eyed children. Yet these too are delivered by the tribal confederacy. Even when the images at last alight on “for what matters most” it is the image of a soldier reuniting with his family. It is a tribal totality. This is a subtle identity migration, perhaps, but its implications for the nation are profound. In a host of ways we do not look nor act nor think like ancient Romans or medieval Romaioi. Yet look at the very few, important patterns we share with them: Identity and the nation shift. A new nation has emerged, whose migration we can track along with this rising American identity’s uncontested appropriation of old and sacred treasures no longer desired by the larger nation. The new nation is the “world nation.” The intercessor nation has framed and builtout just how America will relate to the world. This vast housing of intermediation can of course be rhetorically repainted and even remodeled at any time. But it was fenced, signed-off, and locked-in long ago.

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Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change Barbaricum is the transcendent mission. The world of the threat is ever-immanent and ever-emanant—from terrorists to drug lords to Islamofascists to failed states to rogue states—and our banner-slogans hold aloft the fruits of American combat gathering for a generation—from Somalia to Bosnia to Colombia to the 9/11 War. As neon-rhetoric it is probably as close as we will come to the spare and forever serviceable Latin: Barbaricum. History’s transformations await. The last Roman cultural pattern we share as system leader is in our whole achievement—“in history”—which will emerge only generations or perhaps even centuries downstream. The Roman state and its military transformed their world: just as our “engagement” is transforming ours. We too will create a grand zone of something new and syncretic: where the nonstate “fighting-they” and the tribal-state “fighting-us” begin slowly to merge.

But be warned: if this becomes humanity’s new dynamic place—no matter how wretched and forever at war—it will have the potential to overturn sedentary established things in all old, “civilized” world centers. Meanwhile the other, majority America at home will applaud and never protest, and so two nations still unwilling to recognize themselves will quietly go their separate ways. A few bitter and marginal commentators will charge, wrongly, that “the national security state” has simply found its Cold War changeling, its new nest. But this is untrue. What is really happening is something altogether different: the rise of a new American narrative. This essay began by talking about the “identity power” of nonstate actors. It is surely true: that in globalization times new standard-bearers of identity will marshal passion wholly out of proportion to physical size. Yet even more critically perhaps, the real power of new identities is in how they drive system-leader imagination— the kind of incitement that inspires the most creative acts and enterprises of such epochs. Hence, Romanitas was transformed by . . . itself, driven by the power of the metaphor it created: Barbaricum. Thus the two places of greatest vitality in the late Greco-Roman world were simultaneously the nonstate, alternative communities of Christian resistance, and the state itself: which having appropriated the sacred identity of Romanitas went on to become the greatest state, nonstate actor. They were still “state” but their identity was now distinct from “nation.” The Roman state/army decoupled from the res publica, and became more like the nonstate Barbaricum they fought—only more so. At the end of Chapter 6, “Them,” I entertained a “new middle ages” scenario. What we must urgently take away from other-globalization times is how system leaders, fighting against themselves and fighting identity, moved the world they sought to preserve toward decomposition. When Patrick Geary tells us that “the Germanic world was perhaps the greatest and most enduring creation of Roman military and political genius,”3 he is offering Americans cold historical comfort— the very arctic opposite of a Fukuyama Roman Triumph. The most intense irony of our age is how we midwife the very future we fear, and with a passionate energy that only grows with gathering failure.

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A late antiquity scenario works like this: our COIN “Long War” roughly ushers the American ethos away from familiar story, thrusting it toward the Manichaean us vs. them. Moreover the long conjugal relationship of the state and its intercessor nation, in fighting Barbaricum works every day to ensure the birthing of their new identity: vibrant counter-narrative where we serve as adversarial mentors of global others’ new consciousness. Then when exogenous global shocks—pandemic, climate change, energy crunch—finally hit home, the whole metamorphosis is instantly, nakedly visible. We reflexively hunker down. Yet this is golden opportunity: this will be our last chance for two American nations to reintegrate and become one again. Just such a last-minute, last-stand reintegration of society and state/army— in extremis of course!—was achieved in the Byzantine East between 610 and 711. But the very opposite occurred in the West. When the state/army became contemptuous of its own origins, and began to celebrate itself, what we call the “Roman Empire”—an integrated Western world ruled by a legitimate state—was already racing apart. My feeling? System-shocks—however tumultuous—are our best hope to renew and reunify national identity. However constrained our material way of life under this scenario, it could be a very good thing for identity. Otherwise, the long COIN-globalization goes on, the greater the possibility that we go the way of the Roman West. This is because the world-relationship that truly came to matter to the late Western Empire was no longer Roman state and Roman people but rather Roman state and Roman enemies. The massive “catchment zone” of Barbaricum became the new home turf of Romanitas. Rome and its barbarians participated together to transform their world. I have no reason to believe that we are not engaged in the very same symbiosis today.

CAN THIS STORY BE RECALLED? The short answer is that it cannot. But what if it were possible to change course?

In the Arena of Strategy and Practice: Decouple Tribal Confederacy Identity from Counterinsurgency This is especially important for the Army and Marine Corps, but includes the Air Force as it continues to exalt the art of bombing as counterinsurgency.4 Naval aviation is part of this practice too, but the Marines also pull the Navy in deeper; moreover, 14,000 Navy personnel are now serving on the ground in Iraq. All military societies are pledged to COIN Rising. How to decouple? Start by cutting off counterinsurgency from “war” and turning its activity toward international law enforcement, or “Type I counterinsurgency.”5 Make it “below the radar.” Then after a “decent interval,” ditch COIN—as oath—altogether. Over time counterinsurgency practice, even if carefully hidden

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from national consciousness, will in ways not even seen slowly create an existential problem for American ethos. We see only a surface problem. The big Rand study sums up this problem in bento-box consciousness. Counterinsurgency shows that (1) historically, half of all insurgencies succeed, (2) U.S. support of bad regimes hurts our cause, (3) democracies do well in COIN, but a democracy (us) teamed with a failed regime (anocracy), will perform no better than an autocracy, and (4) our efforts to date in COIN have overseen a continuing rise in insurgent attacks overall.6 Even in Rand’s supplicant sotto voce the bleakness of this message comes through. Yet the existential problem is more insidious and threatens American national identity. COIN creates an irresistible identity practice for the tribal confederacy. But at the same time COIN also pulls the confederacy deeper into the realm of dark doppelgänger. Forever COIN is in fact a transforming relationship in which war and culture create new identities—them and us. This is the surprising “creative” that might change the world system. But at the same time it also builds the very antithetical identities (in Barbaricum against us) that then fuel our need for counterinsurgency: while dividing and weakening American national identity. Dividing American national identity is the stealth cost of “counterinsurgency.” While building up a tribal confederacy in its chosen world, its divorced placement in national life only pries wider the identity-straits between tribal confederacy and nation. For Rome and later Byzantium this tectonic drift had big cultural and system consequences. We have no way of knowing what American identity will look like after 100 years of “global counterinsurgency.” My judgment is that we would be foolish to want to find out.

Build Nonstate Relationships and Let Change Happen Our classical narrative, like that of Rome, encourages us to enter a story with only one exit. Having set up Western civilization versus Islamist barbarism as the plotline, we are faced with a binary denouement: victory or death. If we could only see that we are in the thrall of a literary artifact—sacred, surely, and so we feel its ancestral weight—but at the same time, it is just a story. We have other choices—we can write other stories. We can nudge the globalization pattern to our favor. Just as Rome and Byzantium grudgingly learned to co-opt enemies rather than always try to destroy them, so we can begin to build relationships with nonstate communities and movements. Yet again our narrative puts us in a reflexively weak position—“You are either with us or against us!” Once upon a time this sounded strong and its very intonation felt like comforting assurance of victory. But today the United States is knee-deep, buying off former enemies. For a year and more we have shelled out tens of millions a month to keep 90,000 Sunni Iraqi fighters quiet. Yet this is an old story for us, and as old as history for empires that prefer not to fight every possible battle—that wisely believe in conserving their strength.

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But in this war we have shown that we like to fight first—and “no deals with terrorists” (most of the time!). By choosing cooptation only under extremis we make our best option a vice and our worst choice (fight!) a virtue. With the exception of glaze-eyed martyr-romantics, where a bullet makes for the best relationship, we should always buy-out, co-opt, and pay-off—and if they refuse our money, then get creative: “make him an offer he can’t refuse.” Here is that offer. The greatest strength America still holds is its authority to grant legitimacy. Like Rome and Constantinople we can make such grant and make it stick. We can raise-up still uncrystallized identities and give them realization. We did it for Kurdistan (but not for Kurds!) and we did it for the most-established Iraqi Shi’a faction (Hakim but not Sadr!). Moreover many fight us in the hope that legitimation surely lies at the end of their struggle against us. Finally, cascading identity-demand we helped unleash cannot be jammed back into the wretched place from whence it came. Our efforts to do so daily degrade us in our own eyes, let alone the gaze of our ancestors. Recognizing our role in freeing new identities should encourage us to recognize them. Denying relationship also robs us of our authority to grant legitimacy. Remember they can still wrest it from us by defeating us—or our clients. But in the circumstance of defeat, rather than being able to grant legitimacy to them on our terms, we must accept its achievement on theirs. This was perhaps the biggest lesson that Rome and Constantinople finally learned—but only after many defeats—too many defeats.

In the Arena of War, Identity, and the Sacred: Reinterpret the Sacred Narrative If our fourth great war failed—only the war part failed. In sacred war the reinterpreting is the really important part. We can make this seven-year experience a national opportunity—to rethink our narrative yet again. All other American Great Wars did that. The story never stayed still. Holy war has been our free space to bring narrative up-to-date with changing national identity. Narrative may be a necessary framing but it still has to do its job. Above all it has to speak to us: it has to show us the way just as it also has to regraft us to ancestral roots, yet it must always speak our language. The Civil War remade an “Appeal to Heaven” militia vision into a promise for mass democracy. World War II anointed a mission to humanity—which Americans still cherish. The 9/11 War taught us that there is no Iwo Jima/Battle of the Bulge finish to American mission. We need to look to other reliquaries—some almost forgotten—in our identity. But they are still there in the national sacristy. Just wipe the dust off and raise them again. Because the world system—the human system—urgently needs our sanctuary and succor. Exogenous shocks from pandemics to climate change to food and energy shortages, await us. There is a classic American genre of national altruism and it represents our very own alternative narrative of mission: a

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mission to humanity. This deep leitmotif is still there, still practiced, and still available. We should seize it while we can because otherwise Great War rhetoric will “ride roughshod” over American politics, as desperate constituencies ever more passionately thirst for its renewal. Imagine: another major attack on U.S. territory and Americans will instantly cry for a roaring return to Great War mythos, as after 9/11—but this time, as Apocalypse Unbound. Our Ghazi enemy wants nothing more than an America back in Great War harness. A story of American altruism and service would not of course inoculate us from another attack and another descent into holy war. But disengaging from war and imperial politics—while offering ourselves to the world with a seriousness of giving not seen since the 1950s—would at least give us another chance with humanity.

Reestablish Civic (Republican) Virtue Stop the cultural migration of the tribal confederacy toward Halo 3 identity— or, Son of Starship Troopers—that such a passage both prefigures and demands. We know where we were before, when the Militia Act of 1792 was still spiritually in force. The vast American “tribal confederacy” of military societies, intelligence agencies, and defense contractors is the legacy of Cold War. But it planted an orchard that in seven years has borne alien fruit. What does the divorce of American society from its own intercessor nation mean? Superficially and anecdotally it means that on one side the regular, maybevoting American citizen is held in contempt by a hoplite of the 300 and the millions who are citizens of the confederacy. Likewise on the other side the regular guy sees the digital-camo dude like he was a Roman legionnaire or a space Marine in Halo 3: honored, but also alien and afar. Now take this snapshot out decades ahead. In a world torn and gouged by global warming and plague-flu, where millions die for want of food, where energy is like pirate treasure, to die for—Americans live inwardly and look to the tribal confederacy to protect them. For their part the 300 hold that ragged “other” humanity down. Mike Davis paints a canvas in us-them pigment: Night after night, hornetlike helicopter gunships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts, pouring hellfire into shanties or fleeing cars. Every morning the slums reply with suicide bombers and eloquent explosions. If the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression, its outcasts have the gods of chaos on their side.7 This is the “dark fear” future, and surely in some ways we have already arrived. But we are also fully invested in the richer, more surprising outcome promised by forever fighting identity.

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Yet at home, the formal separation of American national identity can do this: it can make our majority society less connected to humanity, more self-indulgent, more afraid, and more passive; it can also make the 300 the chosen, and increasingly the main instrument with which a fearful America deals with the world. Our tomorrow’s bottom line tells us that the world is a problem for America, a military problem, and that we will take care of it, ma’am. My prescription is hardly original and almost ordinary: National Service. All citizens. No exceptions. Reintegrate American national identity. I know this will not happen. But as this essay has struggled to explain, I also know what will happen if it does not. So ends my proposal. We should be under no illusion that these measures in themselves would restore the American Republic and renew our national identity. Only an aroused citizenry as a people’s movement could ignite such an effort. Moreover our ruling institutions and our leaders would be almost everywhere opposed to such change, and for reasons that need no retelling. This is why other system-leader states found themselves unable to reform and renew—unless faced by existential crisis. Even then, too often, they just hardened and hunkered down. Yet the one thing they could never do was restart the narrative anew—as makers of original virtue. Acts of creation slip away from mature states, from identities that have strayed too far from the calling of their origins. The calling drifts instead toward the realms of steely-eyed romantics who inhabit the margins of memory, who dream themselves the new Minutemen, waving banners ringing out “Don’t Tread on Me,” or holy warriors riding as al Ansar like a wind from the desert.

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Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. David Cook, Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic (Princeton: Darwin Press, 2003), 374. 2. “Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.” John 7:38. 3. The civil “of poleis” where the citizen-soldier defends his community—the wilderness of the ascetic purifying himself: the wilderness of mythic origins. 4. A point often made in academic literature on globalization; for example, Robert Holton, “Globalization’s Cultural Consequences,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 570 (Dimensions of Globalization) (July 2000). 5. See Chapter 7, note 265. 6. Michael McCormick in Eternal Victory shows Rome’s dependence on the ritual of the triumph as supreme affirmation of natural and forever-authority. We are no different. Only the symbolic venues of ritual triumph have changed.

CHAPTER 1 1. A good description of the battle is in Arthur Ferrill, The Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1986), whereas the heavy use of nonstate forces in Roman civil wars is thoroughly treated in Hugh Elton, Warfare in Roman Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 350–425. 2. Michael Kuliakowski, Rome’s Gothic Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 184. 3. The best analysis of the Byzantine state’s response to the Catalan Company is still Angeliki Laiou’s Constantinople and the Latins: The Foreign Policy of Andronicus II, 1282–1328 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972). 4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k85yhpA0giQ&mode=related&search=. This video was created by a former Russian Air Force lieutenant and aviation engineer, who edited available footage of the battle, and then added biting and bitter commentary as well as a fantastic musical leitmotif. For cooler analysis, see Olga Oliker, Russia’s Chechen Wars, 1994–2000: Lessons from Urban Combat (Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 2001). But then, for an

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even hotter taste of fighting, try Vyacheslav Mironov (Alex Dokin, trans.), Assault on Grozny Downtown, a firsthand account, here: http://www.lib.ru/MEMUARY/CHECHNYA/ chechen_war.txt. 5. http://russmus.net/song.jsp?band=DDT&album=11&song=7#eng. 6. Harry de Quetteville, “Soldiers’ Tale of Bint Jbail bloodbath,” Daily Telegraph, July 29, 2006, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1525207/Soldiers’-tale-of-Bint-Jbailbloodbath.html. 7. Christian Faque, Henri-Alexis Brialmont: Les Forts de la Meuse, 1887–1891 (Namur, Belgium: Les Amis de la Citadelle de Namur, 1987); Francois Klein, Simerhof: Ouvrage d’artillerie de la ligne Maginot (Paris: Citedis Editions, 1998). 8. Mike Whitney, “Bint Jbail; Hezbollah’s Blood Victory,” Information Clearinghouse, September 4, 2006, http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14833.htm; Uzi Mahnaimi, “Humbling of the Supertroops Shatters Israeli Army Morale,” The Sunday Times, August 27, 2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article620874.ece. 9. The preliminary findings in English of the Winograd Commission, April 30, 2007, are here: http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/winogradreport-04302007.pdf. 10. How vividly I remember one of today’s leading neoconservatives gleefully regaling me in 1994 with all the gory Grozny details and as to how absolutely wonderful it was that heroic Muslim fighters had humiliated our Cold War nemesis. I wonder how he feels about that paean now. 11. Sunni forces were themselves battered by Shi’a victory in the Battle for Baghdad, a campaign not only unnoticed by Americans but also denied by their leadership. In this epic, bloody contest, the capital had effectively been cleansed of Sunni. After their repulsion by the main enemy, embrace of the foreign enemy was easy. 12. A wonderful thumbnail summary of transforming identities in the late Roman West is in Patrick Geary, Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3–38. 13. Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971), 62. Globalization in antiquity has a curiously modern ring. 14. Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 15. John P. Sullivan, “Child Soldiers: Despair Barbarization, and Conflict,” Air and Space Power Journal, March 2008, http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/apjinternational/ apj-s/2008/1tri08/sullivaneng.htm. 16. Ayesha Siddiqa, Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy (London: Pluto Press, 2007). 17. Although Elton details late Roman military institutions, J.E. Lendon, Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), captures superbly its ethos. He describes a force eerily evoking our own: “the Romans still managed, until Adrianople, to field a professional army, soldier by solider not demonstrably inferior in any respect to the Roman army of the earlier empire, and in some respects superior. In straitened times, whether by decision or default, numbers on the battlefield and usable reserves had been sacrificed to quality” (p. 308). 18. The nonstate dimension of this transformation comes through in powerful granularity in Mark Bartusis, The Late Byzantine Army: Arms and Society, 1204–1453 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992); and also in Kristian Molin, Unknown Crusader Castles (London: Hambledon and London, 2001). Both help us understand the remarkable strategic leverage of small but high-tech nonstate military units in Early Modernity.

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19. A banderole first hoisted by Russell Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (New York: Macmillan, 1973). 20. George Izenour, Roofed Theaters of Classical Antiquity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). 21. Calling, as the Army does, connecting with local culture a “human terrain system” may metaphorically be the ultimate genuflection to machina. 22. Frankin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, http://www.fdrlibrary. marist.edu/cbtorch.html. 23. Walter Goffart, Barbarian Tides: The Migration Age and the Later Roman Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 78. 24. Herwig Wolfram, The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 250, 253, 257. 25. Michael Vlahos, “The Fall of Modernity,” The American Conservative, February 26, 2007, http://www.amconmag.com/2007/2007_02_26/feature.html. 26. Garth Fowden, From Empire to Commonwealth: The Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); see also Lendon, Soldiers and Ghosts, 233–261. 27. Arthur K. Cebrowski and Thomas P.M. Barnett, “The American Way of War,” Transformation Trends, Office of Force Transformation, OSD, January 13, 2003. 28. Michael McCormick, Eternal Victory, Triumphal Rulership in Late Antiquity, Byzantium, and the Early Medieval West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 3. 29. Peter Paret, Clausewitz and the State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 84, 203, 329, 333, 340. 30. Leila Fadel, “Baghdad’s Sadr City Mourns Its Dead and Injured,” McClatchy, April 1, 2008, http://www.mcclatchydc.com/iraq/story/32348.html.

CHAPTER 2 1. Benjamin Borton, On the Parallels, Or Chapters of Inner History: A Story of the Rappahannock (Woodstown, NJ: Monitor-Register, 1903). 2. Mark Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). 3. Samuel J. Watson, “Religious Motivation in the Confederate Armies,” The Journal of Military History 58(1) (January 1994): 44. 4. Drew Gilpin Faust, “Christian Soldiers: The Meaning of Revivalism in the Confederate Army,” The Journal of Southern History 53(1) (February 1987): 67. 5. Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate Nation: 1861–1865 (New York: Harper Colophon, 1979), 118. 6. Or as the president specifically invoked our civic duty at a 2006 press conference: “A recent report on retail sales shows a strong beginning to the holiday shopping season across the country—and I encourage you all to go shopping more.” http://www.white house.gov/news/releases/2006/12/20061220-1.html. He was even more clear at a 2004 event at Kurtztown, Pennsylvania: “I want the American people to live a normal life. It’s my job to worry about it. It’s your job to go about your business.” http://www.whitehouse.gov/ news/releases/2004/07/20040709-5.html. 7. John Lendon, Soldiers and Ghosts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 229–232.

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8. Lendon argues, persuasively, that this belief among Romans imprisoned them in a reflexive box where “status inconsistency” made them feel they always needed to prove themselves vis-à-vis Homer and the Greek hoplite tradition. This Roman version of arête worked well as long as Rome was the aspiring civilization. Later, on the defensive, it robbed Roman generals of flexibility and became a formula that had to be followed. Reified military-heroic identity came to drive all strategy, to its everlasting detriment. 9. Rodney Stark, Sociology, 10th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, 2006). 10. Ibid., 48. 11. Hence the mortification of proper LDS over the FLDS and the Texas compound contretemps. These are iconic black flags, as Mafiosa movies were for the Italian-American community a half-century ago. They represent the prejudice of residual exclusion. Yet even when they are later embraced as part of the national identity—like Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather series—in their romanticized objectification they still speak to a sense of identity apartness. Perhaps the HBO series Big Love represents just such an “Orientalist” phase in changing national perceptions of Mormon and American identities. 12. William M. Kephart and William W. Zellner, Extraordinary Groups: An Examination of Unconventional Lifestyles, 4th ed. (New York: St. Martins, 1991). 13. Paul Gauguin, 1897, hanging now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, http:// www.mfa.org/collections/search_art.asp?recview=true&id=32558. 14. From conversations with Lawry Chickering, author of Beyond Left and Right: Breaking the Political Stalemate (Ithaca, NY: ICS Press, 1993). 15. J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz, The Decline and Fall of the Ancient City (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), especially 414–415. 16. Raymond Van Dam, Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985). 17. A mysterious passage treated more fully in Chapter 5, “Fieldwork.” 18. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2006) (original edition, 1983). 19. Ibid., 12, 36. 20. Ibid., 7. 21. Ibid., 6. 22. For a flavor of contemporary discussion on dating and origins, see Anna BelferCohen and Erella Hovers, “In the Eye of the Beholder: Mousterian and Natufian Burials in the Levant,” Current Anthropology 33(4), (August–October 1992). 23. Coleen McCollough made this indelible portrait in The First Man in Rome (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 468. 24. Lendon, Soldiers and Ghosts, 36. 25. Susan Locke Siegfried, “Naked History: The Rhetoric of Military Painting in Postrevolutionary France,” The Art Bulletin 75(2) (June 1993): 235–258; Albert Boime, “Louis Boilly’s Reading of the XIth and XIIth Bulletins of the Grande Armée,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 54(3) (1991): 374–387; Isser Woloch, “Napoleonic Conscription: State Power and Civil Society,” Past and Present 111 (May 1986): 101–129. 26. Michael Broers, “Cultural Imperialism in a European Context? Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Napoleonic Italy,” Past and Present 170 (Feb. 2001): 157. 27. Stuart Woolf, “French Civilization and Ethnicity in the Napoleonic Empire,” Past and Present 124 (Aug. 1989): 105. 28. Heath Lowry, The Nature of the Early Ottoman State (Albany, NY: SUNY, 2003), 118–119.

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29. Ibid., 112–113. 30. Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 31. Walter Goffart, Barbarian Tides (University of Pennsylvania, 2006); Patricia Crone, Roman, Provincial, and Islamic Law: The Origins of the Islamic Patronate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 32. Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity (University of Wisconsin, 1992). 33. Samuel J. Watson, “Religious Motivation in the Confederate Armies,” The Journal of Military History 58(1) (January 1994): 53. 34. Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003), 353–379. 35. A transcript of the act is here: http://www.constitution.org/mil/mil_act_1792.htm. 36. John S.D. Eisenhower, So Far from God: The U.S. War with Mexico, 1846–1848 (New York: Anchor Books, 1989), 242, 250. The poet William Cullen Bryant declared him Xenophon’s direct descendant. 37. Bernard DeVoto, The Year of Decision: 1846 (London: Little, Brown, 1943), 420. 38. Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 3. 39. From the book by Robert Crichton. 40. For those still outside the fold, the Borg were the real Americans in Star Trek: The Next Generation. 41. Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 91(1) (Winter 1967). 42. Steven Spielberg, Amistad (Dreamworks, 1997).

CHAPTER 3 1. John Lendon ends his superb Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005) with this fragment. He alone of contemporary scholars has pried open what tiny aperture we have on war and the sacred for the world of classical antiquity. 2. Ibid., 37. 3. Ibid., 38. 4. Ibid., 24. 5. Seamus Heaney, Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2000). 6. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: Pantheon, 1949). 7. Desmond Seward, Henry V as Warlord (London: Penguin, 2002). 8. Jean Starobinski, 1789: Les Emblemes de la Raison (1789: The Emblems of Reason), American ed., (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1982). 9. Peter Brown, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 212. 10. Now hanging at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, http://www.nmm.ac. uk/mag/pages/mnuExplore/PaintingDetail.cfm?ID=BHC2740&letter=L&search=howe 11. J.B. Priestley, Victoria’s Heyday (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 211, 220. 12. E.B. (Chronicle of , Great Patriotic Art (Moscow: 1986).

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13. In glossy-phat coffee table format, like Paul Stillwell, Carrier War: Aviation Art of World War II (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2007). This volume features today’s American socialist realism alongside embedded war artists, and no starker contrast between reporting and iconography could be imagined. Jamieson, Draper, and Schepler have all the urgent force of being there in the theater of war—less the aircraft than the men, dousing flames, stacking projectiles, playing cards—while Kodera and Stokes and Wilbur today cut our sacred memory of mythic aircraft like jewels in a chalice: burnished, glittering, perfect. 14. Francois Robichon, L’armée française: vue par les peintres (Paris: Herscher/ Ministere de la Défense, 1998), 28–29. 15. Ibid., 47, 134–135. 16. Don Stivers has truly expanded the repertoire to include not just other American wars but also American participants whose sacrifice has not been fully celebrated by Americans—but should be and must. Hence his canvases of Buffalo Soldiers, of “Colored” Regiments going over the top in the Great War. 17. Russell Wiegley, The American Way of War (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1977); appropriated often in this war by the likes of Tom Barnett; Mary Habeck, “Following the Method of Mohammad: Jihadist Strategies in the War on Terror,” Heritage Lecture, August 12, 2004. 18. David Cook, Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic, 122–136. 19. Starobinski, 1789, 101–102. 20. Sahih Bukhari, Narrated by Al-Miswar bin Makhrama, Volume 9, Book 89, Number 314, http://www.islamicity.com/mosque/sunnah/bukhari/089.sbt.html#009.089.314. 21. My uncle is buried here: http://www.abmc.gov/cemeteries/cemeteries/ar.php. The overwhelming sacral nature of American war cemeteries overseas can only be apprehended through pilgrimage. 22. The call of Renovatio was first sounded in fourth-century Rome and then became the centuries’ repeating invocation of renewal for the Latin West, Romaion, and Islam; see Charles Davis, “The Middle Ages, in Richard Jenkyns, ed., The Legacy of Rome: A New Appraisal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 68. 23. Judith Miller, God Has Ninety-nine Names (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 472; Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, 4th ed. (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), vi. Speaking of the first edition, the publisher writes, “The book’s thesis was a novel one: radical Islam had in fact seen its heyday and had in fact declined. If the 1970s and 1980s had promised to unleash extreme Islam as a political and social force across the Middle East, the 1990s saw that movements decline.” 24. For Clausewitz this was the metaphysical power of “genius”—the counterpoint of “friction”—that can literally make “new reality.” Peter Paret, Clausewitz and the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 84, 203, 329, 333, 340. 25. Shibley Telhami, 2008 Annual Arab Public Opinion Poll (Bethesda, MD: University of Maryland/Zogby International, March 2008). 26. Americans who say they want out of Iraq: 63 percent.

CHAPTER 4 1. Robert L. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Bombers (New York: Random House, 2005); Marc Sageman Understanding Terror Networks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993); Paul Harvey, The Return of the Strong: The Drift to Global Disorder, (London: MacMillan, 1995).

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2. Identity’s relationship to the group vision of the sacred is central to the concept of primary/core/salient identity that is developed in Chapter 2, “Identity.” 3. The sacred framework of European (and American) religious nationalism is addressed in many works of historical criticism, from, say, Jean Starobinski’s 1789: Les Emblemes de la Raison (Milan: Instituto Editoriale Italiano, 1973) to Earnest Lee Tuveson’s Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1980). But as far as I know, there is no comprehensive framework for understanding religious nationalism in modernity. 4. Two different, and yet very American, visions of progress: Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld (New York: Ballantine, 1995), would do so through “a global civic society,” whereas Tom Barnett, The Pentagon’s New Map (New York: Putnam, 2004), would transform the world through enlightened military intervention, so that “globalization will eventually remake the entire Gap” (p.167). 5. A 2008 Military Operations Research Society symposium on “Emerging Societies” focused on “identifying the modeling and simulation tools . . . applicable for modeling emerging societies.” It is characteristically American to resolve problems by seeking more effective analytic tools, even if their usefulness in modeling culture is limited. 6. William McNeil’s majestic Rise of the West, published in 1964 (University of Chicago), which I read as a child, referred to these globalization epochs as “closures of ecumene” and modernity’s globalization as the “closure of global ecumene” (pp. 572–573). Hence I feel I can use the original Greek oikoumene—or “known world”—as a more traditionally recognized placeholder for our contemporary term, globalization. 7. The end of antiquity divided the Greco-Roman world effectively into three distinct culture areas separated for several centuries: the Latin West, the Orthodox East, and Islam. The end of the Middle Ages saw the reunification of the Byzantine Commonwealth and Arab-Sunni Islam by the Ottomans. 8. We can see this explicitly through the leadership language of the Civil War—on both sides—and in World War I and World War II. Today, as the “greatest generation” fades away, the vision of sacred narrative is romantically rekindled in video series like Band of Brothers, which is especially precious to contemporary American national-religious subcultures (see Chapter 6, “Us”). 9. See Michael Vlahos, “Religion and US Grand Strategy, The Globalist, June 8, 2003, http://www.theglobalist.com/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=3230. The sacred dimension of American Calling is enshrined in the president’s own words, as “the unfolding of a global ideological struggle, our time in history,” pitting “progress” and “freedom” against a “mortal danger to all humanity,” the “enemy of civilization.” Moreover, “the call of history has come to the right country,” and “the defense of freedom is worth the sacrifice.” Ultimately the “evil ones” will be destroyed, and “this great country will lead the world to safety, security, and peace,” a millennial world where “free peoples will own the future.” 10. See Michael Vlahos, Terror’s Mask: Insurgency within Islam (Laurel, MD: JHUAPL, 2003), http://jhuapl.edu/POW/library/terrormask.htm. 11. Geas is a magical obligation in sacred Irish, or Druidic myth, which is also a taboo, in the sense that evil will fall on those heroes who break their geas. Hence America cannot break, or even step back from, its national mission. 12. Why religious, rather than ideological? Both religion and ideology are belief system labels, and thus both by definition include a sense of the sacred. Ideology, however, still carries the baggage of World War II and the Cold War, where ideology was used as a marker for “evil belief system.” Hence the good guys have beliefs and faith, whereas the bad guys have ideology.

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13. Orthodoxy and apostasy played out on the national stage during the 2008 primary season. The reified narrative among Republicans was acclaimed by all candidates—save Ron Paul—concerning the banner of the evil other, Islamofascism, but their mettle was canonically unsettled when it came to defining a “true conservative.” Hence Charles Krauthammer’s comment, “The Apostate Sheriff: How Bush Begot McCain,” Washington Post, February 8, 2008. 14. Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2003); Victor Davis Hanson, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War (New York: Random House, 2006). 15. Robert D. Kaplan, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos (New York: Vintage, 2003). 16. See Joseph Laconte, “The Decade of Appeasement,” The Weekly Standard, February 7, 2008, http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/014/705evxkd. asp; or President Bush’s speech to the Knesset, and its veiled accusation, May 15, 2008, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/05/20080515-1.html. 17. Frederick Merk’s classic, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History (New York: Vintage, 1963), highlights the sacred content of pro-war propaganda in our nation’s lesser—but very revealing—wars. 18. See Clark McCauley’s “Conference Overview” in Jonathan Haas, ed., The Anthropology of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 2–5. 19. E. Adamson Hoebel, The Cheyennes: Indians of the Great Plains (New York: Holt Rinehart Winston, 1960); Frances Berdan, The Aztecs of Central Mexico: An Imperial Society (Case Studies in Anthropology) (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2004); Karl G. Heider, The Grand Valley Dani: Peaceful Warriors (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1996); Heider, The Dugum Dani: A Papuan Culture in the Highlands of New Guinea (New York: Wenner-Gren, 1970); Clayton Robarchek, “Motivations and Material Causes: On the Explanation of War,” in Hass, ed., The Anthropology of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 56–76; Rafael Karsten, “Blood Revenge and War among the Jivaro Indians of Eastern Ecuador,” in Paul Bohanon, ed., Law and Warfare (Garden City, NY: American Museum of Natural History, 1967), 303–325. 20. From the Latin quinta essentia, or “fifth essence or element.” 21. Sociology has used the more popular term lifestyle as a placeholder for subculture, as in William M. Kephart and William W. Zellner, eds., Extraordinary Groups: An Examination of Unconventional Life-Styles (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991). They aver that, “as the term suggests, a subculture is a ‘culture within a culture.’ In a true subculture, the shared beliefs and values may have more influence on members’ behavior than does the larger society.” In terms of war and the sacred, I treat identity as essential group identity, whether that is culture or subculture, or a composite, and shifting, blend. See Chapter 2, “Identity.” 22. See Miguel Leon-Portilla, Bernardino de Sahagun: First Anthropologist (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002). 23. Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971), 18.

CHAPTER 5 1. John Lendon, Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). 2. Mark Bartusis, The Late Byzantine Army: Arms and Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).

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3. A surprisingly neutral phrase, and introduced, apropos by Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971), 189. 4. Janet Abu-Lughod plays this metaphor, as she admits, off of Ferdinand Braudel and even Pirenne—historians who first examined the overlooked yet interconnected worlds at the end of antiquity and the Middle Ages—in Before European Hegemony: The World System, AD 1250–1350 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 5. Walter Goffart, Barbarian Tides: The Migration Age and the Later Roman Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Herwig Wolfram, The Roman Empire and its Germanic Peoples (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Chase Robinson, Empire and Elites after the Muslim Conquest: The Transformation of Northern Mesopotamia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Heath Lowry, The Nature of the Early Ottoman State (New York: SUNY, 2003). 6. Wolfram, The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples, 291, 298–300. 7. Goffart, Barbarian Tides, 197. 8. “The Balkan military milieu from which Theoderic’s Goths arrived in Italy was as diverse as the fifth- and sixth-century Balkan provinces themselves.” Patrick Amory, People and Identity in Ostrogothic Italy, 489–554 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 278–279. 9. Goffart, Barbarian Tides, 58. 10. Amory, People and Identity, 73. 11. Goffart, Barbarian Tides, 107. 12. Guy Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376–568 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 321–327. 13. Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 251–255. 14. Robinson, Empire and Elites after the Muslim Conquest, 98–108. 15. Amory, People and Identity, 47–85. 16. Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 91. 17. Only in Byzantium did the Basileus emperor-state from Roman antiquity still represent universal authority. But as the empire transformed into commonwealth, even this began slowly to migrate to church, a movement sealed by the Ottoman Millet. 18. Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 1999), 194. 19. Jane Webster, “Creolizing the Roman Provinces,” American Journal of Anthropology 105(2) (April 2001): 209–225. 20. Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, 17–18. 21. Fergus Millar, A Greek Roman Empire: Power and Belief under Theodosius II: 408–450 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 1–6. 22. Just one such story from 405, described in Goffart, Barbarian Tides, 76–79: “The fears aroused in Italy by Radagaisus’s attack are documented by hyperbolic estimates of numbers, reaching as high as four hundred thousand. He was said to have vowed to gorge his gods with Roman blood [but] . . . Radagaisus and his innumerable followers proved to be an inept mob rather than an effective fighting force . . . Stilicho’s reinforced army encircled the invaders at Fiesole near Florence and, without a battle, overcame them by starvation.” 23. Holger A. Klein, “Eastern Objects and Western Desires: Relics and Reliquaries between Byzantium and the West,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 58 (2004): 283–314.

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24. Crone, Slaves on Horses, 89–91. 25. Raymond Van Dam, Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 26. Pepe Escobar enjoys playing out this trope: “Exxon-Mobil is bigger than Turkey, Wal-Mart is bigger than Austria, GM is bigger than Indonesia, DaimlerBenz in bigger than Norway, BP is bigger than Thailand, Toyota is bigger than Venezuela, Citigroup is bigger than Israel.” Globanistan: How the Globalized World Is Dissolving into Liquid War (Ann Arbor, MI: Nimble Books, 2007), 27. 27. Ferdinand Braudel gives a good sketch of big state revenue in the early sixteenth century in The Wheels of Commerce: Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Centuries (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 531–532. What amazes in these epochs is how nonstate—or nonhinterland city-state—enterprises could rein in such revenue. 28. Ottoman revenue for 1527–1528 was 277 million akça, but this figure does not include tax revenue collected by Timariot holders, who supplied most of the state’s armored horsemen, as usufruct, or to the Vakfs, or pious foundations, as benefices, which, had they gone directly to the state, would have nearly doubled its liquid revenue. Halil Inalcik and Donald Quataert, An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, Volume I: 1300–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 77–84. 29. In 1527–1528, for example, Egypt contributed 116 million akça! 30. Surely a Shah Abbas moment! 31. Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, AD 300–1000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages; Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System, AD 1250–1350 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 32. McNeil, The Rise of the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 577. 33. Peter Brown’s most powerful works have been The World of Late Antiquity, The Making of Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978); Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); and The Rise of Western Christendom, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003). 34. Michael Angold, The Fourth Crusade: Event and Context (New York: PearsonLongman, 2003). 35. Anthony Bryer and Heath W. Lowry, eds., Continuity and Change in Late Byzantine and Early Ottoman Society: Papers Given at a Symposium at Dumbarton Oaks in May 1982 (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1986); Heath W. Lowry, Fifteenth Century Ottoman Realities: Christian Peasant Life on the Aegean Island of Limnos (Istanbul: Eren, 2002). 36. Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers (New York: Walker, 2007). 37. S.G. MacCormack, “Rome, Constantinopolis, the Emperor, and His Genius,” Classical Quarterly 25 (1975): 131–150. 38. Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity, 70. 39. Ibid., 74. 40. Ibid., 59. 41. Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages, 611. 42. Inalcik and Quataert, An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 81–87. 43. Garth Fowden, From Empire to Commonwealth: The Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Aziz Al-Azmeh, Muslim Kingship: Power and the Sacred in Muslim, Christian and Pagan Politics (London: I.B. Taurus, 1997).

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44. Peregrine Horden, “Mediterranean Plague in the Age of Justinian, in Michael Maas, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 134–161. 45. This excursion is grateful to the treatment of fourteenth-century pandemic in Janet L. Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 46. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony, 95; A. Bryer and Heath W. Lowry, eds., Continuity and Change in Late Byzantine and Early Ottoman Society, Dumbarton Oaks, 1986. 47. Bryer and Lowry, Continuity and Change in Late Byzantine and Early Ottoman Society; Lowry, Fifteenth Century Ottoman Realities. 48. There is something of a consensus about the impact of the sixth-century plagues on Mediterranean antiquity: namely, that it contributed significantly to centuries-long declines in population and economy. There is much more dispute about whether it pushed the world of late antiquity over the edge (see McCormick, Origins of the European Economy, 40–42; Horden, “Mediterranean Plague in the Age of Justinian,” 134–160). The data are better for the Black Death of 1347 and after. The most developed urban and trading centers were the hardest hit, and plague decimated Venice and Genoa, as well as the emerging industrial centers of Flanders, such as Bruges. But it also hit established state systems; hence it effectively finished off Byzantium and fatally weakened the Great Mongol Khanate, giving an important strategic opening to the Ottoman Ghazi and a Chinese resurgence. See the discussion of McNeil and others in Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony, 94–96, 125–130, 171–174. 49. Garth Fowden’s term in From Empire to Commonwealth. 50. Warren Treadgold, The Byzantine Revival: 780–843 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). 51. Michael McCormick, Eternal Victory: Triumphal Rulership in Late Antiquity, Byzantium and the Early Medieval West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Paul Magdalino, The Empire of Manuel Komnenos, 1143–1180 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 52. John F. Drinkwater, “The Germanic Threat on the Rhine Frontier: A RomanoGallic Artefact,” in Ralph W. Mathisen and Hagith S. Sivan, eds., Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996); Lendon, Soldiers and Ghosts. 53. Edward Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). Luttwak protests that he is simply introducing the shallow American mind to the sinuous and subtle Roman mind. But that is clearly not what classicists received. He was taken to task by C.R. Whittaker in Frontiers of the Roman Empire: A Social and Economic Study (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 7. This is Lendon’s epigram (discussing Whittaker): “Luttwak’s absurd premise is that antiquity was essentially identical to modernity.” 54. Lendon, Soldiers and Ghosts, 308.

CHAPTER 6 1. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006). 2. Another human bookmark from Belize is Joe Bageant, “Nine Billion Little Feet on the Highway of the Damned,” Counterpunch, February 6, 2008, http://www.counterpunch. org/bageant02062008.html.

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3. Davis, Planet of Slums, 172. 4. Robert Kaplan, “The Coming Anarchy,” The Atlantic Monthly (February 1996), http://www.globalpolicy.org/nations/future/kaplan7.htm. 5. Ralph Peters, Beyond Terrorism (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2002), 87. 6. Ibid., 209–211, 253. 7. To be fair, trained gurus like Dave Kilcullen carefully use Mao correctly. But the incorrect usage is the more important: http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/03/from-theadvisors-bombs-in-bag/. 8. The president has openly revised history for present needs. On August 22, 2007, he said, “In the aftermath of Japan’s surrender in World War II, many thought it naïve to help the Japanese transform themselves into a democracy . . . Then as now, the critics argued that some people were simply not ready for democracy. With every reform in Japan, experts stepped forward to assert that a democratic Japan was a hopeless dream.” Japan’s parliamentary institutions were developed in the nineteenth century, and by the 1920s Japan had a working democracy with real, vibrant political parties. That lapsed in the constitutional crisis of the 1930s, but the democratic foundation was there to be renewed after 1945, which the Japanese readily implemented. To imply that our reconstruction of Japan was also inherently a civilizing mission, the president reworks history so that Japan establishes an American tradition for the conversion of alien cultures like Iraq. In fact, the historian quoted by the president—Pulitzer winner John Dower—denounced this misuse of history the next day on MSNBC: http://www.breitbart.tv/?p=4844. 9. But today even cell phones have eyes—this is how we know, for example, about some of the brutal state suppression of backwoods protests in rural China. 10. A.H. Maslov, A Theory of Human Motivation, Psychological Review 50 (1943): 370–396. The graphic pyramid can be viewed here: http://chiron.valdosta.edu/whuitt/ col/regsys/maslow.html. 11. John Rapley, “The New Middle Ages,” Foreign Affairs (May/June 2006). 12. Some portraits of Kibera: http://affordablehousinginstitute.org/blogs/us/ 2005/07/kibera_africas.html. 13. Eliza Griswold, “God’s Country,” The Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/ 200803/nigeria. 14. Sara Miller Liana, “On Rio’s Mean Streets, a Rare Credibility,” Christian Science Monitor, December 18, 2007, http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1218/p01s02-woam.html. 15. Raymond Baker, Islam without Fear: Egypt and the New Islamists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 35. 16. A synopsis by Baker, Islam without Fear, 205. 17. Ibid., 118, 139, 169–180, for New Islamist interpretation of Wassatteyya in terms of rule of law, popular will, protection of minorities, separation of mosque and state, and so on. 18. Ibid., 185–186. 19. Ibid., 39. 20. Michael Slackman, “Stifled, Egypt’s Young Turn to Islamic Fervor,” New York Times, February 17, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/world/middleeast/17youth.html?_ r=3&ei=5070&en=6900ea9ab732802d&ex=1203915600&emc=eta1&pagewanted=print. 21. Patrick Geary, Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 37. 22. Paulo Botas, “Rio De Janiero to Spend US$1 Billion on Slum Improvement Program,” http://www.citymayors.com/report/rio_favelas.html.

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23. Janice Perlman, Marginality from Myth to Reality: The Favela’s of Rio de Janeiro, 1968–2005, http://www.megacitiesproject.org/Marginality_from_Myth_to_Reality.pdf. 24. Davis, Planet of Slums, 185. 25. John P. Sullivan, “Maras Morphing: Revisiting Third Generation Gangs,” Global Crime 7(3–4) (August–November 2006): 500. 26. John Rapley, “The New Middle Ages,” Foreign Affairs (May/June 2006): 310. 27. J.P. Sullivan, “Child Soldiers: Warriors of Despair,” Small Wars Journal 2 (July 2005), http://www.smallwarsjournal.com/documents/swjmag/v2/sullivan.htm. 28. Rapley, “The New Middle Ages,” 308. 29. Liana, “On Rio’s Mean Streets, a Rare Credibility.” 30. Roy Parviz Mottahedeh and Ridwan al-Sayyid, “The Idea of the Jihad in Islam before the Crusades,” in Angeliki E. Laiou and Roy Parviz Mottahedeh, eds., The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2001), 23–31. 31. Heath W. Lowry, The Nature of the Early Ottoman State (New York: State University of New York, 2003); Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 32. Mahad Abedin, “The Essence of Al Qaeda: An Interview with Saad Al-Faqih,” The Jamestown Institute, February 5, 2004, http://www.jamestown.org/terrorism/news/ article.php?issue_id=2907. 33. David Cook, Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic (Princeton: Darwin Press, 2003), 234–235. 34. Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 90. 35. Shibley Telhami, 2008 Annual Arab Public Opinion Poll (Bethesda, MD: University of Maryland/Zogby International, March 2008). 36. Abedin, “The Essence of Al Qaeda.” 37. Anthony Lutrell, “Earliest Documents on the Hospitaller Corso at Rhodes: 1413 and 1416,” in Benjamin Arbel, ed., Intercultural Contacts in the Medieval Mediterranean (London: Frank Cass, 1996), 177, 179, 182. 38. Daniel Kimmage and Kathleen Ridolfo, Iraqi Insurgent Media: The War of Images and Ideas (Prague: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, June 2007), 30. 39. Daniel Byman, The Five Front War: A Better Way to Fight Global Jihad (New York: Wiley, 2007), 19. 40. John Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990). 41. Walter Goffart, Barbarian Tides (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 58–61, 63–69; Patrick Amory, People and Ideology in Ostrogothic Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 489–554. 42. Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, Hizbu’llah: Politics and Religion (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 70. 43. Ibid., 70, 73, 75. 44. Ibid., 136. 45. Ibid., 128. 46. Ayesha Siddiqa, Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy (London: Pluto Press, 2007), 51. 47. Penny MacGeorge, Late Roman Warlords (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

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48. Mama Nyongesa, Kenya’s Militia: Armed and Dangerous, Kenya Environmental and Political Weblog, February 24, 2008, http://kenvironews.wordpress.com/2008/02/23/ kenyas-militia-armed-and-dangerous/. 49. Phillip Mason, The Men Who Ruled British India, American ed. (New York: Norton, 1985). The entire account is a paean to the district officer. 50. John P. Sullivan, “Gangs, Hooligans, and Anarchists: The Vanguard of Netwar on the Streets,” in John Arquilla, ed., Networks and Netwar: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy (Washington, DC: RAND, 2002), 61–99. 51. Alex Perry,“How Sri Lanka’s Rebels Build a Suicide Bomber,” Time Magazine, May 12, 2006. 52. Michael McCormick, Eternal Victory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 1. 53. Matthew Innes, State and Society in the Early Middle Ages: The Middle Rhine Valley, 400–1000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 169. 54. Ibid., 174. 55. Chris Wickham, Framing the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 611–612, 56. Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 12. 57. Wickham, Framing, 827–828. 58. Classic us-them code embedded in the Washington establishment, as in Roger Scruton, The West and the Rest (London: Continuum International, 2003).

CHAPTER 7 1. There were, however, many periods in which authority was contested and legitimacy was in transference. It can also be argued that the Ottoman state’s claim on this vision ended with its loss of the Balkans and Egypt. But the idea—that of a long continuity of universalistic polity, looking to the nexus of the Mediterranean and Fertile Crescent—is suggested in Garth Fowden’s From Empire to Commonwealth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 2. “Modern” European empires seem in comparison very short-lived. The Spanish Hapsburg power lasted for about a century, as did the Bourbon French. But more important, these modern powerhouses were not system leaders in terms of anything like a universal leadership within their culture area. By courtesy we imagine that Great Britain occupied this status between 1815 and 1914, but in fact it was more of a balancer than a real leader. Its capacity for strategic orchestration furthermore was a function of its unique naval leverage, a comparative advantage that quickly declined with the spread of rail networks, as Paul Kennedy shows so persuasively in The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London: Macmillan, 1976). 3. Gülru Necipog˘ lu, “Süleyman the Magnificent and the Representation of Power in the Context of Ottoman-Hapsburg-Papal Rivalry,” The Art Bulletin 73(3) (Sept. 1989): 401–427. About Süleyman’s imperial pretensions, Giovio writes: “Per esser di natura cupido di gloria, et fattosi ardito, & audace per la tante vittorie sue, et grandezze dell’imperio, ho inteso da huomini degni di fede, che spesso dice, che i lui tocca di ragione I’imperio di Roma & di tutto Ponente per esser legittimo successore di Constantino imperatore qua1 transfere l’imperio in Constantinopoli”; P. Giovio, Commentari delle rose de’ Turchi, (Venice, 1531), fol. 30r.

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4. Celebrated rulers in all three dreamed of their provenance and future: Justinian in his renovatio, and then a thousand years later Süleyman (like Mehmet before him) with Justinian’s historian Prokopios at his bedside—of course at the time he was hoping, as Justinian was, to reconquer Italy for the empire! 5. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987). 6. Rohan D’souza, “Crisis before the Fall: Some Speculations on the Decline of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals,” Social Scientist 30(9/10) (September–October 2002): 3–30. 7. Christopher Kelley, Ruling the Later Roman Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 1. 8. Ayesha Siddiqa, Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy (London: Pluto Press, 2007). She offers a useful overview of our conventional understanding of civilmilitary relations—emphasizing political systems rather than patterns of culture. 9. Andrew Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); also prefiguring theological debate in 1941 was Harold Lasswell’s article in The Journal of American Sociology: “The Garrison State.” 10. Steven L. Rearden, History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Volume 1, The Formative Years, 1947–1950 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1984). 11. Robert Kaplan, Imperial Grunts (New York: Random House, 2005), 342. 12. Ibid., 8. 13. Patrick Amory, People and Identity in Ostrogothic Italy, 489–554 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 278. 14. Robert D. Kaplan, An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future (New York: Vintage, 1999)—read its opening pages. 15. John F. Drinkwater, “The Germanic Threat on the Rhine Frontier: A RomanoGallic Artefact,” in Ralph W. Mathisen and Hagith S. Sivan, eds., Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996). 16. David Bellavia and John Bruning, House to House (New York: Free Press, 2007), 1. 17. Kaplan, An Empire Wilderness, 323. 18. Heather Havrilesky, “City of Lost Children,” Salon, April 24, 2008, http://www. salon.com/ent/tv/review/2008/04/24/carrier/index.html. 19. Luke Larson, “Thank You, 1st Lt. Shaun Blue, for a Life of Integrity and Service: Do Americans Truly Appreciate the Sacrifice That This Marine Made on Their Behalf?” Christian Science Monitor, April 16, 2008, http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0416/p09s01coop.html. 20. Robert N. Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in a Time of Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975); Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). 21. Apart from the long-standing rituals of Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day, perhaps war movies serve this role most intimately and powerfully. The most recent examples for World War II are Flags of Our Fathers and Saving Private Ryan, and on TV the series Band of Brothers and the Ken Burns documentary. 22. “The Declaration by United Nations” was made by FDR at the Arcadia Conference of 26 nations on January 1, 1942. 23. Robert M. Utley, A Life Wild and Perilous: Mountain Men and the Paths to the Pacific (New York: Henry Holt, 1997). This was a notion in the ether in early America: that the new American republics would have to be small, perhaps in some cases smaller than the

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colonies they succeeded, was generally agreed. Peter S. Onuf, “From Colony to Territory: Changing Concepts of Statehood in Revolutionary America,” Political Science Quarterly 97(3) (Autumn 1982): 455. 24. Stephen Broadberry and Mark Harrison, eds., The Economics of World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). For continuity, American GDP/PPP in 2008 is 19 percent of the world economy. 25. First-Establishment came with the Constitution (1789); civil war was followed by “Reconstruction”; and the League/UN represented world reestablishment, whereas the Marshall Plan and uplifting Germany and Japan represented a model for world reconstruction. 26. The JFK-LBJ tentative, “toe-in-the-water” sacred foray into Southeast Asia became in short order “The Big Muddy.” Their impulse shows how close to the surface sacred narrative remained even in frozen times. 27. A relationship treated at length in Herwig Wolfram, The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Walter Goffart, Barbarian Tides: The Migration Age and the Later Roman Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Walter Pohl, “Justinian and the Barbarian Kingdoms,” in Michael Maas, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 28. But not too fast. Even while he was walking the beach in Grenada he was pulling our Marines out of the rubble of Beirut. 29. A favorite presidential trope: “Transforming countries that have suffered decades of tyranny and violence is difficult, and it will take time to achieve.” Or, “I believe a similar transformation can take place in the Middle East. At this decisive moment in their history, the people of the Middle East can have confidence in the power of liberty to overcome tyranny and terror.” Or, “The military achievements in Iraq have been accompanied by a political transformation.” See http://www.whitehouse.gov/. 30. Harlan Ullman and James Wade Jr., Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance (Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Concepts and Technology, 1996). 31. Attitudes before the invasion are perfectly conveyed by Jim Fallows in “The Fiftyfirst State?” The Atlantic Monthly, November 2002, http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200211/ fallows. 32. Ruel Marc Gerecht, “The Long, Hard Slog,” The Weekly Standard, November 10, 2003, http://www.weeklystandard.com/content/public/articles/000/000/003/317goteu.asp. 33. Senator John McCain reaffirmed this expectation at a Derry, New Hampshire, town hall meeting on January 8, 2008. McCain was careful to portray these prospectively extended occupations as peaceful, which creates ambiguous contrasts with the 2006 Quadrennial Review, suggesting far more active global military activity. Although it is now a stretch to imagine extended peaceful occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan in the midst of vigorous counter-Islamist operations throughout the same region, many also suggest today’s operational intensity continuing, or even expanding, for many, many years to come. See http://www.defenselink.mil/qdr/report/Report20060203.pdf; http://www.guardian.co. uk/world/2006/feb/15/politics.usa1. 34. Measured in representative polling of American opinion for the last two years. 35. A phrase coined by Robert Kintner, Robert Strausz-Hupe, and William Dougherty in Protracted Conflict (New York: Harper and Row, 1963). Theirs exuded the most militant scent of “Cold War”—more like the hot breath of black powder—as we entered Vietnam.

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36. Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2003).

CHAPTER 8 1. Daniel Kimmage and Kathleen Ridolfo, Iraqi Insurgent Media: The War of Images and Ideas (Prague: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, June 2007), http://realaudio.rferl. org/online/OLPDFfiles/insurgent.pdf. 2. Practice is often called variously doctrine and operational art. 3. “The 2000 manifesto issued by the Project for a New American Century, a neoconservative group that advocated ‘regime change’ in Iraq, contained a cautionary line that ‘the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.’” Sidney Blumenthal, The Rise of the Counter-establishment: The Conservative Ascent to Political Power (Somerville, MA: Union Square Press, 2008). 4. James Kitfield, War and Destiny: How the Bush Revolution in Foreign and Military Affairs Redefined American Power (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2005), xiv. 5. Martin van Creveld, Technology and War (New York: Free Press, 1989), 319–320. 6. Boastfully self-awarded to memorialize Operation Iraqi Freedom, where American hoplites “hacked their way through every army that challenged them.” Ray L. Smith and Bing West, The March Up: Taking Baghdad with the United States Marines (New York: Bantam, 2004), 2, 3, 18. Direct comparison to Xenophon is noteworthy also for its presumptive, Creasy-like appropriation history. Xenophon’s march was surely one of history’s decisive events: it was the announcement that the ancient cradle of civilization was Greece’s for the taking. Xenophon led directly to Alexander the Great. This was exactly the attitude of our leaders going into Iraq: that for us too, millennia later, the world was ours. 7. Arthur K. Cebrowski and Thomas P.M. Barnett, “The American Way of War,” Transformation Trends, Office of Force Transformation, OSD, January 13, 2003. 8. “Others . . . see the way Saddam was toppled as signaling a new form of major warfare . . . They see the low cost of unseating Saddam as the result of unprecedented speed, precision, and situation awareness. Speed kills, they argue: it outmaneuvers and demoralizes opponents, defeating enemies without wholesale piecemeal destruction of hostile forces. And speed coupled with precision and networked information enables the critical fighting to be done at standoff ranges. Together, it is argued, these capabilities allowed a force many saw as undersized to prevail at minimal cost.” Stephen Biddle, “Toppling Saddam: Iraq and American Military Transformation,” Army War College Strategic Studies Institute (April 2004): 2. 9. Five-hundred-pound bombs. 10. For example, Barack Obama instantly issues multiple apologies for saying, “We have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted.” See http:// abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=2872135&page=1. 11. Sam Peckinpah’s cult icon strangely resonates with extended hunter-narratives that edge into madness. 12. From the May 4 Rush Limbaugh Show titled “It’s Not about Us; This Is War!” Caller: It was like a college fraternity prank that stacked up naked men. Limbaugh: Exactly. Exactly my point! This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and

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then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some steam off?” http://mediamatters.org/items/200405050003. 13. World Public Opinion/PIPA poll, “Muslims Believe U.S. Seeks to Undermine Islam,” April 23, 2007, http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/home_page/346. php?nid=&id=&pnt=346&lb=hmpg1. 14. Hence the repeated, ringing appeals from the right, conjuring the most sacred, sacrificial moments of American battle—Iwo Jima and the Bulge especially—thrown down like a challenge: Are we no longer worthy of our own ancestors? 15. Leila Fadel, “Baghdad’s Sadr City Mourns Its Dead and Injured,” McClatchy, April 1, 2008, http://www.mcclatchydc.com/iraq/story/32348.html. 16. Patrick Cockburn, Muqtada: Muqtada Al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle of Iraq (New York: Scribner’s, 2008), 9. 17. Ibid., 157. 18. Ibid., 159. 19. Nir Rosen, In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq (Washington, DC: Free Press, 2006), 141. 20. The current production, Russian 12.7 mm heavy machine gun. 21. Van Creveld, Technology and War, 319–320. 22. Now itself a footnote climax of Fitna. 23. World in Focus, interview with Martine van Creveld, March 20, 2002, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/stories/s511530.htm. 24. Although John McCain represents his extended stay at the Baghdad Marriott as a friendly visit, historical realities offer the prospect of a very different long relationship. There are many examples of century-plus COIN engagements, as described later in this chapter. 25. For participants, agenda, and discussion summaries for the June 6–10 Workshop on Irregular Warfare, go to http://www.sais-jhu.edu/merrillcenter/events.html. 26. A frame bracketed by the Merrill Center’s Workshop on Irregular Warfare, Basin Harbor, Vermont, June 6–10, 2005, to the State Department’s conference: Counterinsurgency in the 21st Century: Creating a National Framework, Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs, September 28–29, 2006, http://www.state.gov/t/pm/rls/othr/misc/72027.htm. 27. Robert Taber, The War of the Flea (London: Paladin, 1970). A fave of Col. Nagl, yet what of the title trope’s inevitable arthropod touch? The other as insect, cockroach, flea: human unworthy? 28. John A. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya to Vietnam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002): his discussion of Thompson, 28–30, and Mao, 20–24. 29. David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare, Theory and Practice (New York: Praeger, 1964). 30. David Kilcullen, “Twenty-eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterinsurgency,” Iosphere (Summer 2006), http://www.au.af.mil/info-ops/iosphere/iosphere_ summer06_kilcullen.pdf. 31. Headquarters, Department of the Army, FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency, December 2006, http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-24fd.pdf. 32. Two videos capture life in a city of walled ghettoes: http://www.liveleak.com/ view?i=3ae_1202917543; and the stunning “City of Walls,” http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=mdQeahEgQdM.

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33. David Kilcullen, Counterinsurgency in Iraq: Theory and Practice, 2007, noetic. PowerPoint briefing. 34. Always viewable here: http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml? videoId=92011. General Vladimir Aleksandrovich Sukhomlinov was the Russian Empire’s minister of war in August 1914. His portrait—on maneuvers—became famous in Barbara Tuchman’s Guns of August (New York: Random House, 1962). 35. John Shy, “British Strategy for Pacifying the Southern Colonies, 1778–1781,” in A People Numerous and Armed (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990). 36. Ibid., 198. 37. For example, Eliot Cohen’s NPR interview, “Scoring the War on Iraq: Who’s Winning?” July 1, 2005, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4726795. 38. David Kilcullen introduced me to this cultural analogy in imperial relationships across time and ocean. 39. But El Salvador had a nascent but authentic government that people supported and wanted and that represented a wholesome reality we could help them work toward. See Todd Greentree, Crossroads of Intervention: Insurgency and Counterinsurgency Lessons from Central America (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008). 40. Arms outstretched in the writings of Max Boot, Ralph Peters, and Robert Kaplan: liberally cited here. 41. Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Mariner Books, 1999). 42. The key academic idea is essentializing, meaning that you “image” another culture through caricature and stereotype, whether romantically or contemptuously. The West has indulged in Orientalism in almost endless phases of fear-curiosity-romance-contempt: this being the evolution of Latin Europe’s view of things Romaioi-Ottoman since—well, let’s just say that Bishop Luitprand of Cremona’s mission to Constantinople in 968 is a good place to begin. His choice words describing the Romaioi might have issued unaltered from the mouths of American neocons describing Muslims. When it comes to essentializing, the Latin West treated Byzantium no differently than it did the Ottomans. 43. David C. Gompert and John Gordon IV, War by Other Means: Building Complete and Balanced Capabilities for Counterinsurgency (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Counterinsurgency Final Report, 2008). 44. Herman Amersfoort, “A Historical View on Netherlands Expeditionary Operations,” speech at Expeditionary Operations: “Effects and Challenges,” Netherlands Defense Academy Symposium, Breda, December 13, 2006. 45. Douglas Porch, The Conquest of Morocco (New York: Knopf, 1983), 298. 46. Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity: “We live round a sea, Socrates had told his Athenian friends, ‘like frogs round a pond.’” 47. Guy Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376–568 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 57–62; Walter Goffart, Barbarian Tides (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 229.

CONCLUSION 1. Thomas Powers, “Will We Ever Get Out?” New York Review of Books 55(9) (May 29, 2008). In what I call “traditional strategy-policy consciousness,” he puts it like this: “Our friends are in trouble. The pride of American arms is at stake. The world is watching.” Truly liturgy’s codewords.

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2. This evocative TV ad has been seen by millions, and can be viewed on the Boeing Web site, http://www.boeing.com/companyoffices/aboutus/advertising/index.html. 3. Patrick Geary, Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), vi. 4. Mark Bejamin, “Killing Bubba from the Skies,” Salon (February 15, 2008), http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/02/15/air_war/index2.html. 5. David C. Gompert and John Gordon IV, War by Other Means: Building Complete and Balanced Capabilities for Counterinsurgency (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Counterinsurgency Final Report, 2008). 6. Ibid. 7. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006), 206.

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Index

300 the Corps, 59, 61 the elite of the Tribal Confederacy, 147, 153, 156, 158, 159, 160, 177, 208, 209 the Frank Miller film, 146, 147, 161 9/11 War and American sacred narrative, 106, 117, 169, 175, 198, 201, 203, 207 and American universalism, 71, 202 and America’s relationship to the global other, 116–117, 157, 204 and the Commander-in-Chief, 156, 202 as a “Forever War,” after Joe Haldeman, 18, 126, 158, 169, 170, 187, 200, 226n.33 Muslim responses to, 117, 172, 185, 186, 190 “transforming” the Muslim world, 3, 172, 175, 185, 198, 201 Abu-Lughod, Janet L., 13, 100 Aceh, 138, 200 Sultanate of, 199 Adams, John, 48, 159 HBO television drama, 158 Adams, John Quincy, 48 Agincourt, 58. See also Henry V Al Ansar, Companions of Muhammad, 128, 209 Al Jazeera, 177, 186

Al Qaeda, 17, 65, 98, 106, 133, 169, 170, 177, 178 compared to medieval military orders, 127, 129–130 as Wilderness Ghazi, 69, 72, 127–129, 132, 138 Al-Banna, Hassan, 122 Almoghavers, 7 also Mughaver, 91 Amersfoort, Herman anthropology as fieldwork in history, 83–84 applied to military tribes, 153, 167 as guide to human culture and change, 34, 76, 97 showing continuity and change, 101 why anthropology, 80–83 Antietam, Battle of, 57 Apocalyse, apocalyptic, from ´Aποκα´λυψις apocalypse deferred, 170 Apocalypse Lite, 169 Archontes, or “rulers,” 93, 136 Arête, “virtue,” and its realization through competition, 53, 146 Assassins, 98, 126 Al Qaeda compared to, 17 PCC compared to, 127 Ayyubids, medieval Egyptian dynasty, 94, 109. See also Nur al-Din, Ayyubid Sultan

240

Index

Aztecs, or Meshica, 53, 82 Bagaudae, brigand-“terrorists” of late antiquity, 12 autonomous nonstate sub-cultures compared to, 15–16, 98, 123–125 Baghdad, 13, 14, 72, 131, 132, 136, 182, 194 as medieval heart of Islam, 39, 94, 168 Baker, Raymond, 121 Barbaricum America and its Barbaricum, 17, 117, 202, 204–206 as threat and mission, 95–96, 151 as transformer of Romanitas, 12, 17, 26, 86, 203, 204, 205 as world of the other, 17, 91, 94, 117 as a zone separate from the old oikoumene, 158, 200 Bartusis, Mark, 89 Basileus (Autocrator), Byzantine imperial title, 7, 41, 56, as source of legitimacy, 38, 42, 90, 94, 95, 166, 219n.17 Beowulf, sacred narrative form compared to Dani, Cheyennes, Meshica, 53 Berdan, Frances, 82 Bint Jbail, Battle of, 8 Black Watch, 57 Blackwater, Triple Canopy, Dyncorp, compared to medieval military orders, 98 Boot, Max, 80, 171 Brazil, and PCC, 17, 127, 137 and favelas, 98, 124, 139 and Pentecostals, 120 Brialmont, Henri Alexis, 9 Brown, Peter, x, 85, 101, 103, 104, 108, 144 Bucellarii, in late antiquity, a lord’s favored retainers, 17–18 gang and drug retainers today, 139 Burgundians at battles of Laupen, Sempach, Granson, 174. See also Charles Le Temeraire in late antiquity, 21, 92 Byzantines, Byzantine Empire, 7 continuity with Roman Empire, 38-39, 105, 148, 149

in globalization times, 11, 13–14, 89, 101, 105, 106, 109, 126, 134, 143, 197, 205 icons and identity, 59, 63–64 in the identity of others, 41–42, 65, 90, 91, 94, 97, 108, 127, 129, 229n.42 and pandemic, 108, 221n.48. See also, Romaioi, Romaion; Constantinople as system-leader, 10, 26, 95, 110, 149–150, 152–155, 206 Caesar Claudius Nero Drusus, 96 Gaius Julius, 31, 52 as legitimating title, 96, 166 Campbell, Joseph, 55 Carlos Quinto, 59, 148 Cassiodorus, 92. See also Theoderic Catalans, 7, 10, 91 Chagnon, Napoleon, 82 Charles, Austrian Archduke, 57 Charles Le Temeraire, Burgundian monarch, 58 Charles XII, Swedish King, 57 Chechnya, Chechen, Chechen Tigers, 2, 8, 10, 138, 140, 177 Cheyennes, 53, 82 Ciborium, as sacred chalice in the liturgy of identity, 56 Civil War (American), 28–30, 61, 65, 159, 164, 170, 181 as American battle liturgy, 53–54 in American sacred narrative, 78–79, 117, 163, 167, 174, 207 in sacred art, 63–64 Clausewitz, Carl von “Clausewitzian,” 50 on geist, or spirit, 24, 30 on transformation, 67, 216n.24 Cockburn, Patrick, 182 Cold Harbor, Battle of, 28 Commonwealth British, 99 Byzantine, 13, 38, 39, 41, 42, 94, 108, 109 as Caliphal Ummah, 38, 39, 79 identity, important framing of, 38, 39, 44, 101 Muslim Ummah,14, 70, 99, 101, 106, 109, 142

Index new Ummah-consciousness, 177, 185, 186, 189 Ottoman bridge, 42, 94, 108, 109 Constantinople as heart of Byzantine oikoumene, 13, 14, 100, 109 the source of authority, 97, 119, 142, 166, 195, 197, 207 as successor to Rome, 39, 42, 89, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96 Counterinsurgency (COIN) and American identity, 203, 206. See also “The Secret Recipe” medieval COIN, 195, 197 military rebirth after Gods of War failure, 190–191 phenomenology of, 192–193 as throwback to a colonial ethos, 23, 72, 194, 196, 198, 199 Creveld, Martin van, 174, 184, 187, 191 Crone, Patricia, 128 Crusades, as vehicles for globalization, 11, 13, 126 as mythopoetic passage, 38, 55 Curiales, or Decurions, antiquity’s “city fathers,” 44, 103, 112 Dani, Grand Valley, 53, 82 Davis, Mike, 115, 208 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Gibbon), 83, 87, 101 Defense Science Board (DSB), 137 Diamond, Jarred, 80, 107 Doniphan, Alexander, 46 Drinkwater, John, 110 Dutch, as colonial counterinsurgents, 138, 199 as insurgents, 59, 138 Eaglets, Jefferson’s vision of fledgling American republics, 164, 225n.23 Egypt, 42, 94, 109, 112, 119, 127, 129, 151 al-Ikhwan, 121–123 continuity of revenue generation, 99, 105. See also Fayyum Muslim Brotherhood in, 15, 69, 71, 98, 121–123, 138, 190

241

in late antiquity 34, 93, 102, 105, 141, 143, 144, 176, 177 ExxonMobil, as 16th century Venice, 98 Favelas, 16, 123, 124–125, 139 Fayyum, 34, 102, 103–105 Federated Tribal Regions (FATA), 135 Franks, creators of the Roman successorkingdom of early France, 94, 96, 131, 134 Charlemagne, 41, 148. See also Gaul Charles Martel, 41 Childeric, 41 Clovis, 41, 96 Fredericksburg, Battle of, 27–28, 30 Frigidus, Battle of River, 6 Galula, David, 193 Gaul, 96, 98, 142, 197. See also Lugdunum, Lugduni Ghazi, Wilderness Ghazi, 1, 2, 17, 67, 68, 132, 189, 210, 202 American Ghazi, 29 as dynastic founders, 112 a failed Ghazi vision, 69–72 medieval Muslim “holy warriors,” 126, 128 among Ottomans, 14, 42, 126, 127, 128, 138, 149 Gilbert & Sullivan, and English identity, 46 Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), 71, 80, 167, 168–170, 171 Globalization in late antiquity, 100–102 in the High Middle Ages, 11–12 Gods of War in failure replaced by counterinsurgency, 191, 193, 195 as GWOT practice, 5, 172, 173, 175, 183 in Military Transformation, 22, 166, 168 Goffart, Walter, 89, 91 Gore, Al, 80, 107 Goths, 16, 17, 56, 91, 92, 94, 97, 131 Ostrogoths, 90, 134 Visigoths, 6–7, 10, 25, 26, 90, 97, 134, 142

242

Index

Gravilot Saint-Privat, Battle of, 62 The Great Imposter, 47 Griswold, Eliza, 120 Grozny, Battle of, 8, 211n.4, 212n.10. See also Chechnya, Chechen, Chechen Tigers Halo 3, 208 Heider, Karl G., 82 Henry V, 55. See also Jeanne d’Arc Hilaire Belloc, on the Maxim Gun, 24 History as fieldwork, 76–84, 88–89, 108, 142 as homily, 5, 75, 86–88 of identity, 35–44 History and Military Channels, 25, 50, 185 Hizbu’llah, in Lebanon War, 2, 9, 10, 133, 187 compared to nonstate actors of late antiquity, 17, 25, 97 and the Muslim universal, 73, 99, 133–134, 190 Hoebel, E. Adamson, 82 Homer, as crafter of identity, 37, 51–52, 214n.8 contemporary influence, 146 Hussein, Saddam, 131, 132, 176, 178, 189 Iliad, first canon of identity, 37, 51, 52, 160, 177 Israel fighting nonstate identity, 72, 182, 187 and Hizbu’llah, 8–9, 10, 133–134, 187 Jeanne d’Arc, 55, 57, 63. See also Henry V Jerusalem American vision of a New Jerusalem, 29 in antiquity, 22 in the High Middle Ages, 14, 58, 94 Jihad and martyrdom, 134 and Muslim Renovatio, 72, 79, 123 and universalist narrative, 55, 79, 133 Julian, Roman emperor, 18, 21, 31, 111 Kaplan, Robert as fear-monger of the global other, 115, 116

as GWOT booster, 157, 158, 160, 200 Kelley, Christopher, 151 Kennedy, Paul, 149, 224n.2 Kenya, 18, 139 Kenyan gangs, 18 Mungiki, Kelengin, Sabaot, Chinkororo, Sy-Ndorobo, Kisii, 136 Kilcullen, David, 222n.7, 229n.38 Kipling, Rudyard, and sacralized Victorian identity, 31, 47, 138, 196, 198 Knights Hospitaller, 98, 126, 127, 129–130 Knights Templar, 17, 98, 126, 127, 129, 139 Kuntsler, Mort, American battle-painter, 28, 59, 61 Kurds, Kurdistan, 94, 100, 131, 207 Latifundial, an elite social order rooted in great landed estates, 18, 136 Latin West “closure of the ecumene” in the High Middle Ages, 11, 94, 97, 100 rise of the nation-state out of, 38–39, 94 Western oikoumene in late antiquity, 14, 38, 106 “Left behind” of globalization, 11, 114, 115, 144 missions to, 114, 117 seeking new authority, identity, 36, 116, 118, 119, 139 as today’s Bagaudae, 16 Lendon, John, 37, 51, 52, 89, 111, 212n.17, 214n.8, 215n.1 Leonidas, Spartan King, 146, 161 Liturgy, war’s narrative as, 1–2, 30, 51–58 American and Muslim war-liturgies, 64–69 and the Tribal Confederacy of Defense, 146–147, 154, 202 Lombards, 90, 91, 94, 131, 143, 195, 197. See also Rothari Lord Howe, portrait of, 59 Louis XIV, French king, 40, 95 Lowry, Heath, 43, 89, 101 Lugdunum, Lugduni, 96 as Lyon, 95, 96, 191 See also Gaul Luttwak, Edward, 111, 221n.53

Index Mahdi, as the deliverer, 57, 67 the Islamist movement Jaish al Mahdi, 2, 190 Muhammad Ahmad as, 65, 67, 184 Malaya as COIN “gold standard,” 196–197, 198, 200 sultans compared to Gulf princelings today, 196 Mamluks, medieval Egyptian dynasty after Ayyubids, 94, 97, 101, 105, 109, 128 Mao Zedong, 117, 193 Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), or Maras, 16, 127, 139 as an U.S. creation, 136 Marne, Battle of, 58 Martorell, Joanot, 91. See also Catalans McCormack, Sabine, 103 McCormick, Michael, 100, 110, 111, 141 McNeil, William, 78, 101, 217n.6 Mehmet II, Ottoman Sultan, 42, 107, 225n.4 Militia in late antiquity, 6, 149, 150 in Muslim nonstate politics, 132, 139, 176, 181, 182, 197, 202 original American 45, 46, 159, 195, 207 today’s nonstate fighters, 18, 124, 134, 136 Mithras, 12 Mongols, 14, 65, 94, 97, 100, 134 and medieval pandemic, 107 Moros, 138, 170, 200 Mughal, Afghan-Indian dynasty of early modernity, 69, 94, 97 Ghazi horseman origins, 112, 128, 135 Muqtada al-Sadr, 16, 178, 180–181, 189 Muslim Brotherhood (al-ikhwan almuslimun), 15–16, 69, 121–123, 190 compared to early Christian resistance, 138, 140 Mythic, mythopoetic passage, 30, 38, 39, 163, 174, 185, 189 Nagl, John, 194 Najaf, 68, 131, 181–182 Napoleon Bonaparte, French Emperor, 24, 40, 41, 43, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 71, 148 “Napoleon’s Nose,” 24

243

Louis Napoleon, French Emperor, 58, 191 Nasrul-Lahi-il-Fathi, Nigerian megamosque, 120 Nasrullah, Hassan, Hizbu’llah leader, 73, 97, 99, 189 “New Islamists,” 70, 119 Egypt’s new Islamists, 121–123, 222n.17 Nibelungenlied, 21. See also Burgundians Nur al-Din, Ayyubid Sultan, 94 Oikoumene, the inhabited, known world, 36 usage in this essay explained, 217n.6 O’Malley, Jeff, 112, 114, 115, 117, 118 Origo Gothica, 92. See also Cassiodorus; Theoderic Ottomans, Ottoman Empire, 44, 56, 69, 95, 97, 98, 105, 107, 110, 112, 132, 189 Ghazi origins, 14, 89, 126, 127, 128, 138 tie to Rome and Romaioi, 42–43, 94, 101, 108, 109, 148–150, 152, 153–155 Paideia, the elite sensibility, its education and way of life, 44, 53 Pandemic, plague in antiquity, 102, 105, 107–108, 141, 221n.48 in the High Middle Ages, 107–108, 221n.48 in our world today, 143, 205, 207, 208 Pakistan, 69, 99, 127, 129, 190, 197 as guardian of identity, 18, 112, 135, 139, 151. See also, Zia al-Huq Pape, Robert, 77 Pashtun, 127, 135, 195 Pentecostals, Pentecostalists, as networks of conversion, 15, 16, 114, 118, 120, 125, 140 Peters, Ralph, 116, 137 Porch, Douglas, 199 Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), 17, 137 compared to medieval assassins, 127

244

Index

Qtub, Sayed, Egyptian Islamist and philosopher, 122 Rapley, John, 142 The Real Glory (Samuel Goldwyn, 1939), 170 Renovatio for the contemporary Muslim Ummah, 70, 123, 128–129 by France, 40, 41 by Ottomans, 42, 69, 101 for Romans/Romaioi, or restoration, 31, 216n.22 Robarchek, Clayton, 82 Roger de Flor, 7, 91, 126. See also Catalans Romaioi, Romaion as representing Roman authority and continuity, 42, 90, 96–97, 108, 143, 203 what Byzantines called themselves, 38, 109, 202 Rome, Roman Empire in America, 42, 43 and aspiring new participants in, 89, 92, 94, 96, 142 merges with Barbaricum, decline and fall as historical homily, 83, 86, 87, 88, 112 decompression of, 86, 102, 104, 108, 136, 143 as Romanitas, the Roman world, the Way of Rome, 12, 31, 39, 42, 44, 85, 93 as Western Roman state, 6, 39, 40, 41, 91, 98, 130, 149, 205 as world authority, 109 Rothari, 90, 91, 92 Saad-Chorayeb, Amal, 129, 133 Sacred narrative 9-11 and American sacred narrative, 116–117, 202 and American civil religion, 65, 79, 217n.9 anchored by America’s wars, 78–79, 161–171 and COIN, 193, 196, 198, 200 in the modern Muslim search for identity, 121, 127, 134

as mythic passage of identity, 25–26 and political legitimacy, 94–95 as religious, vice ideological, 217n.12 sacred narrative cycle framed as warliturgy, 58, 64 shaper of system-leader “grand strategy,” 109–111 and the Tribal Confederacy of Defense, 152, 154–155, 160–161, 202–204 war-liturgy and American/Muslim universal narratives, 64–69 Safavid, Iranian dynasty of early modernity, 69, 94, 97, 99, 112 as horseman-dynasty, 128 Sageman, Marc, 77 “The Secret Recipe,” in counterinsurgency practice, 168, 193, 194, 197, 198 Shaharija, 93 Siddiqa, Ayesha, 135 Somali Courts Union, 2, 98 South African gangs, Pagad, Hard Livings, 139 Starobinski, Jean, on The Oath in the birth of modernity, 66 Starship Troopers, 208 Suleiyman, Ottoman Sultan, 42 Sullivan, John, 183 Takfiri, 2, 131, 186, 189, 190, 195 Tamil, 131, 138, 140 Theoderic, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 219n.8 Thompson, Robert, 193 Thucydides, and Homer, 37, 52 Transformation of consciousness, 12, 37, 102–106, 177 contemporary transformation-signs, 108–109 “dark transformation,” 116–117 during globalization epochs, 3, 78, 83–84, 87–89, 100–102, 193 “Military Transformation,” 20, 22, 166–167, 168, 173, 175–176, 191, 193, 227n.8 of military tribes, 147–159, 204 and system-leaders, 109–112 as U.S. strategic policy toward the Muslim world, 3, 72, 79, 169, 226n.29, 227n.3

Index Tribal Confederacy of Defense, 18–19 and COIN, 195, 200, 205–206 compared to the later Roman Empire, 112, 153, 158, 204 membership, 153–154 as a new American identity and intercessor nation, 5, 155, 157–161, 203 origins, 147, 156 Troiani, Don, American battle-painter, 28, 59, 61, 63, 64 Valmy, Battle of, 57 Venice, 13, 94 compared to ExxonMobil, 98 and pandemic, 221n.48

245

“Vietnamization,” 194 Vietnam War, 153, 156, 170, 190, 192, 194, 201, 202 Wagram, 57. See also, Charles, Austrian Archduke Ward Howe, Julia, 54, 55 Wassatteyya, 122, 222n.17. See also “New Islamists” Webster, Daniel, 63 Wickham, Chris, 100, 143 The Wizard of Oz (MGM, 1939), 141 Zia al-Huq, 18, 67, 135

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About the Author MICHAEL VLAHOS has spent his life thinking and writing about war and culture— from service in the Navy, CIA, State, and his thirty-year tie to The Johns Hopkins University: first as Director of Security Studies at the Nitze School, and then with the Applied Physics Laboratory, where he is now a Fellow and Principal. His nine earlier books and monographs include The BLUE Sword: The United States Navy and the American Mission 1919–1941 (1980), and Terror’s Mask: Insurgency within Islam (2003).

Recent Titles in The Changing Face of War Mismanaging Mayhem: How Washington Responds to Crisis James Jay Carafano and Richard Weitz, editors Private Sector, Public Wars: Contractors in Combat—Afghanistan, Iraq, and Future Conflicts James Jay Carafano