Copycat

Interest in 4gw concepts continues, understandably, since the jihadists have mastered these concepts to greater and lesser degrees (depending on the group) and it seems that we should master them as well. Therefore I think a look at the limitations of 4gw concepts is in order.

At the end of the recent war between Israel and Hizbollah, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad remarked on his intention to create a Hizbollah like group on the southern border between Syria and Israel, on the grounds that Hizbollah had shown much greater success than Syrian troops had ever shown against the IDF.

What Assad was glimpsing was the efficacy of 4gw in battle, albeit in a hybridized form specific to southern Lebanon and the particular politics of Hizbollah. The ability to blend with the population, recast a military battle as a moral one, fight with little or no battlefield communications and manage expectations so that merely surviving amounted to winning were a few of the advantages that Hizbollah enjoyed in that war.

Another key advantage, a subtle one and one that is shared with all Islamic terror groups, is that surrounding populations are able to quietly support them at no nominal cost. What that means is that individuals can and do claim no responsibility for the actions of this or that faction, deplorable as those actions surely are, and reject the argument that appeasement, apologetics and passive support of various kinds amount to culpable participation. Because the groups are not officially responsible for the population, the population does not have to claim responsibility for them. It's a scheme that challenges the protection racket foundation of every social order we know of, going back as far as you like.

I say 'nominal cost' because obviously the living conditions in a place like Gaza surely amount to a cost that would not otherwise be born. Having your village wiped out by the Israeli air force is also a stiff cost. The benefits of culpable deniability in these cases are limited to gaining sympathy after the fact. The benefits on the ground in western countries are far less limited, and I'm sure all of you can name the organizations that reap those benefits.

Another downside to 4gw is that there are moral consequences to society. If the fighting class is not responsible to protect people and territory in the traditional sense, and the people have no duty to claim allegiance to the fighting class, then forthrightness is simply lost as a social value. Since the viability of 4gw fighting groups is based on their being unofficial and under the radar (and therefore hard to target by a traditional military, which is the whole point), the more important they are to the group they're fighting for, the more perverted morally and intellectually that group must become.

The 4gw warrior is an anti-hero. He provokes and then exploits the misery of his people and is willing to corrupt them for the cause. A hero doesn't do these things.

For these reasons it's obvious that no prominent western counter-jihad groups can adopt 4gw concepts wholesale without substantial risk to the culture itself.

These same risks would necessarily attend the creation of a Syrian backed freelance fighting group on the Golan. However, since conditions in Syria are completely different from those in Lebanon, the risks to Assad as a copycat are far higher. His regime already lacks even marginal legitimacy. Leaving aside the logistical weaknesses of the idea, any effort to disclaim the activities of this fighting group, say volleys of rockets into Israel, would undermine it further.

So what do we have? 4gw threatens the bonds of loyalty and faith that ideally exist between a population and its fighting class, ultimately leading the society itself to become morally corrupt and unhealthy. We've seen this among Palestinians in a most acute form, as well as in other places.

At the same time, adopting some 4gw ideas both appears to be necessary as a counter to jihad and appears to be inevitable as a response to the failure of western governments to mount a sufficient response. In other words people are picking it up, risks and all, and we're left with the question of how to manage those risks.