Hi Tom,

Quote Originally Posted by Tom Odom View Post
But in a COIN environment, that sort of training is ultimately counter-productive because if you are fighting to win the support and trust of the locals, you have to put a human face on those locals. Moreover you can ill-afford to dehumanize the enemy or worse demonize the enemy because ultimately, you hope to win him over too, through amnesty or similar programs.
Exactly! What's even worse about it is that we can be 99.9% sure that it is going to keep happening since the process is part of our neurophysiology <sigh>. On the whole, "we" have gotten rather lazy when it comes to stereotyping, and this is a really good example of how we have gotten lazy.

Consider who we a "fighting" against. It's not "the locals", but the "insurgents" (another stereotype). What are we really fighting against? Actually, as that small unit leaders handbook points out so well, we are really fighting against a set of perceptions held by individuals rather than against a collection of individuals. The AO, in addition to be geographic, is also perceptual and in the minds of "the locals".

So, given this, why do we keep using words (the "ordinance" of perceptions) in a manner that supports the insurgents? That, reworded somewhat, was the essence of Jim Guirard's condemnation of the Western (mis)usage of Arabic terminology (see the SWJ Blog for an intro on this). One of the things I really like about Jim's points is that he gives us "categories" (words) to describe who we are fighting that already exist inside the cultural matrix of the "perceptual battlespace" (i.e. the "hearts and minds" of the Iraqi in the street).

So, given this, why do we hear terms like "muj"? The slang comes from "mujahadeen" and denegrates the entirety of Islam. Why not cal them, in a diminutive, stereotype fashion as "irhabi"? That already has the semantic connotations in the Iraqi mind of "evil", "piece of sierra", etc. Calling them this, since we can be positive that slang diminutives will be used, has one added benefit - a local may shift from being a "irhabi" back to being a "true muslim".

Quote Originally Posted by Tom Odom View Post
Finally such terms are in fact self-destructive in the long run.... By my second month in Rwanda, I began to despise the killers in a way that left me in a slow boil anger. I pretty much stayed that way for the next year and a half and I paid for it when I got home.
Too true, Tom. In some ways, the "ideal" mindset for dealing with combat was described by Musashi in the Book of Five Rings. Unfortunately, that thype of mindset requires so many precursors and skills to achieve that are a very low priority in the West that we are unlikely to be able to properly achieve them at the general, social level <sigh - No Dave, I'm not angling for a new emoticon ).

In all honesty, Tom, the corrosive effect of activating a hate-filled stereotype based on actions rather than phenotype is, probably, less than the other type, but it is still there. What is missing, at the general social level, is the psychological (spiritual?) technologies for dealing with those effects. A long time ago, I spent a number of years counseling street kids - I've seen the effects and how the social system doesn't know how to deal with them.

Marc