comment by Jerry Gordon

by Stephen Coughlin, Major, Military Intelligence, USAR, July 2007

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff [of the US Armed Forces], General Peter Pace explained that:

To talk about how we are going to proceed, we need to understand the nature of the enemy. And clearly, the nature of this enemy is different than any we have faced in the past …. Our enemies had declared war on us years before, but the attacks in New York, in the skies over Pennsylvania and here in Washington, D.C. brought home very clearly to us that we were at war.

Consistent with the Chairman’s injunction is the implication that after five years of prosecuting the War on Terror (WOT) we still don’t understand the nature of the enemy, a devastating indictment of the Intelligence Community’s inability to define the jihadi threat. Inherent in the Chairman’s acknowledgment that the enemy “is different than any we have faced in the past,” is the implication that we need to reconsider how we determine what motivates and animates the enemy in order to clarify the jihadi threat. Confident in our ability to meet this challenge, General Pace affirmed that

Continuing with his speech, General Pace suggested a simple starting point for improving our understanding and thereby our mission execution:

I say you need to get out and read what our enemies have said. Remember Hitler. Remember he wrote Mein Kampf. He said in writing exactly what his plan was, and we collectively ignored that to our great detriment. Now, our enemies have said publicly on film, on the Internet, their goal is to destroy our way of life. No equivocation on their part. They’re not saying if you stay home, we will not come after you.

They are saying their goal is to rid the Middle East of all foreigners. Then, overthrow all governments that are not friendly to them, which means every single one of those governments. Then, to use that base as a way to spread their terrorism and their oppression across the globe to include a map that shows 100 years from now that the entire globe will be under their domination.

By singling out Mein Kampf as his example, General Pace focused on Hitler’s declared strategic doctrine, used by the Nazis as the foundation for their tactical employment of Iraq, military, political, economic, and social instruments of power to establish the 1,000 year Reich. Likewise, the nature of today’s jihadist enemies can only be understood within the context of their declared strategic doctrine to dominate the world.

Just as we ignored Mein Kampf “ to our great detriment” prior to World War II, so we are on the verge of suffering a similar fate today. The reason the Intelligence Community is unable to define the nature of the jihadi enemy, the Chairman implies, is because we have not “read what the enemy has said.” In other words, we have failed to undertake an assessment of the threat based on the jihadi enemy’s declared strategic doctrine. This conclusion leads to three fundamental research questions:

A brief discussion of the research questions will be used to frame the hypothesis that Islamic law forms the doctrinal basis of the jihadi threat that can only be understood through an unconstrained review of the the Islamic law of jihad.