Rethinking Security: Clausewitz, The Rage of the People, and Strategies of Positive Ends

Perhaps the most interesting part of Clausewitz's trinity is the rage of the people, as this quote from the section "The Consequences for Theory" (highlighted by Professor Christopher Bassford)

"War is more than a true chameleon that slightly adapts its characteristics to the given case. As a total phenomenon its dominant tendencies always make war a remarkable trinity--composed of primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; of the play of chance and probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and of its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone. .... The passions that are to be kindled in war must already be inherent in the people."

Shane Deichman makes the point that insurgencies today are driven by the rage of the people. This is what ultimately disquieted Jomini when he wrote of popular wars in his Art of War. While conventional war is a funnel that channels the rage of the people into carefully calibrated violence, insurgency is passionate and uncontrolled. Indeed, many insurgents conceptualize violence as a kind of spiritually redeeming act.

Jean-Paul Sarte's famous introduction to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth is a case in point:

"[Fanon] shows clearly that [the insurgent's] irrepressible violence is neither sound and fury, nor the resurrection of savage instincts, nor even the effect of resentment: it is man re-creating himself. I think we understood this truth at one time, but we have forgotten it — that no gentleness can efface the marks of violence; only violence itself can destroy them. The native cures himself of colonial neurosis by thrusting out the settler through force of arms. When his rage boils over, he rediscovers his lost innocence and he comes to know himself in that he himself creates his self. Far removed from his war, we consider it as a triumph of barbarism; but of its own volition it achieves, slowly but surely, the emancipation of the rebel, for bit by bit it destroys in him and around him the colonial gloom."

Traumatized by the violence and domination of colonialism, the militant must remove this sickness by shedding blood. Though Sarte and Fanon wrote of the actions of the FLN in the Algerian war against France and the pied noirs, the idea of violence as a form of self-realization is a common thread that runs through many insurgencies. One can say that Al Qaeda merely added a religious overlay to it. Through the act of violence, the formerly dominated not only achieves physical liberation but rediscovers his "true" essence--ultimately creating a new self.

This romantic conceptualization of human conflict has its roots in the Belle Epoque, the prewar period lasting in Europe from the late 19th century to the beginning of World War I. The artistic, philosophical, and political currents of this period also produced nationalism, imperialism, and the beginnings of modern terrorism. There is a parallel in the idea, popular among many intellectuals and artists in Europe as World War I dawned, that a good war was the only way to cleanse a decadent society.

Of course, there is an important difference between this conception of war and that of the modern terrorist. The First World War's rage of the people was channeled into violence against military forces and seen as a duty to the sovereign and state. Revolutionary violence is directed at civilians and in many cases is justified on the basis of individual conscience. Al Qaeda calls on Muslims to kill their rulers because they are unjust and irreligious, and this case is made not on the basis of loyalty to a sovereign but the hazy concept of the ummah, the transnational community of believers. Never that, as Olivier Roy argues, this community is a recent invention created by globalization's fragmenting effect.

The romantic idea of an individual's responsibility to an amorphous community and the individual's ability to cast aside the old rules of engagement on the basis of his own conscience is responsible for the bitter and scattershot nature of recent terrorism and ethnic conflict. It is also what, in the end, dooms many insurgents--and why we ultimately do not have much to fear from sub-state enemies whose sole means of defeating us is merely unleashing a "vortex" of confused and savage individual violence.

In a purely tactical sense this violence can have horrific effects. But foes solely driven by a lust to kill are incapable of developing mechanisms to actually achieve their larger objectives. This requires a strategy of positive ends that can build on a shared theme for vitality and growth. In the movie, The Baader-Meinhof Complex, the leftist German Red Army Faction (RAF) is depicted as transitioning from one savage act to the next. But those none of those acts--as brutal and horrifying as they were--can bring the German people to accept their ideas or accede to their demands. The RAF slowly (and violently) burns out as it its members are tracked down and neutralized by the German security services.

Granted, the accumulated effects of non-state violence can cause a state to collapse, as Mexico is on the verge of collapsing now due to the mass of drug violence and internal dysfunction. But this is less due to less to conscious strategy of an individual group and more to the agglomeration of other factors. Emergence can produce strategic outcomes, but emergence doesn't produce strategy in itself.

The rage of the people is also expressed in the form of primal strategy--a kind of shared ethos and single-minded desire that has often driven the strategies of tribes, non-state movements, and emerging nation-states. This can be a mixed thing. Fabius Maximus notes in the linked essay that the men and women who built the empires of the 19th century operated from such a deep-seated (and non-intellectual) sense of mission. The problem is that when nations are driven solely by this desire, they can find themselves emotionally committed to failing strategies. Instead of rational action, primal strategies often drive individuals and nations towards acts predicated on symbolic gestures rather than strategic logic.

Strategy cannot succeed without the passion and energy of the people behind it. But when it is primarily driven by such a passion without subordination to an aim and a mechanism for achieving that aim, it falters.