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Political warfare
ANGELO CODEVILLA

Political warfare is the art of heartening friends and

disheartening enemies, of gaining help for ones cause and causing the
abandonment of the enemies through words and deeds. The concept is
sometimes misunderstood as the preposterous proposition that political,
meaning non-violent, means can substitute for the violent measures of
war. Sometimes, the term is thought meaningless because all of warfare
aims at political results.
All warfare is indeed political. But political stratagems are
weapons of war among others. Just as shooting usually occurs in a
political context, seldom is violence or the prospect thereof absent from
political stratagems. Far from substituting for reality on the battlefield
and other fields of strife, psychological operations are effective insofar
as they reflect it, even as effective diplomacy is the verbal
representation of coercive reality. Seldom do people strengthen,
weaken, or shift allegiances on the basis of tricks, nor are effective
political allegiances merely reflections of opinion polls. People
redouble their support for leaders and causes, or abandon them, on the
basis of the evidence before them about what people and events mean
for them which persons or causes are to be feared or despised. Words
are powerful to the extent that they refer to powerful realities. Political
warfare is about reflecting or changing those realities. It is a
fundamental element of any strategy worthy of the name.
Any and all means that produce such changes coercive
diplomacy, economic coercion, propaganda, agents of influence,
sabotage, coups de main, and support for insurgents are acts of war in
the same sense that armies crashing across borders or airplanes
dropping bombs are acts of war because their results can be as intrusive
or conclusive as the results of armies and bombs. In public as well as in
private affairs words have bloody consequences. Whether any act,

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regardless of the admixture of violence it may contain, is an act of war

depends on the seriousness of the actors commitment, and on how
reasonably the action is calculated as part of a plan to produce victory
to bend the enemys will or to remove him as an obstacle to the peace
one seeks. Not used seriously, political stratagems are bloody
foolishness, just as are politically unserious or incompetent feats of
arms.
Political warfare
Political warfare is a term that covers a set of means for
achieving political ends. That set is distinguished from another set of
instruments for achieving those same ends, which we might call
military warfare and from others yet on which we would pin labels
such as economic warfare or information warfare. Anyone who
would list the tools or techniques in all of these sets would find himself
placing in any one set, items that he had already placed in others.
Deception, for example, is as important in military affairs as it is in
political or economic stratagems.
Nevertheless the sets are somewhat distinct. In taxonomic
language, political warfare is akin to a genus, while the set of means
that we group under it, such as coercive diplomacy, public diplomacy,
propaganda of various colors, bribery, subversion, deception,
paramilitary pressure, etc. are akin to species. Case studies of
subversion, for example, would be studied as individual exemplars of
one or more of these tools or techniques.
Before delving into the genus of political warfare however we
take note of the environment in which all conflict takes place namely
the underlying dispositions of the peoples involved. Only in recent
years has that environment been given the name by which it is now
known, soft power.1 Just as sailors must take into account the
strength and direction of the prevailing wind, warriors must deal with
the disposition of the peoples involved in the conflict.
Political warfare and soft power
Two things must be kept in mind about soft power, just as they
must be about the weather: By itself, it determines nothing. And it
presents challenges and opportunities to all sides in the conflict.
Visiting his native Poland in 1979, Pope John Paul II struck what
turned out to be a mortal blow to its Communist regime, to the Soviet
Empire, and ultimately to Communism. We do not know whether the

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Pope intended this political result directly, indirectly, or whether he

thought of what he was doing in any political terms at all. Polands
Communist leaders however thought of it in no other terms. They used
all their power to show a true fact: the Popes Polishness did not alter
their capacity to distribute the goods of society, to promote, demote,
and punish. They hoped that the Popes abiding by the rules they set
would show the Polish people that they too must abide by those rules.
And if the Pope dared to stir up riots here and there, they would crush
them while blaming the suffering on him. They had all they needed to
win the political struggle.
The Pope won that struggle by transcending politics. His was what
Joseph Nye calls soft power the power of attraction and repulsion.
He began with an enormous advantage, and exploited it to the utmost:
He headed the one institution that stood for the polar opposite of the
Communist way of life that the Polish people hated. He was a Pole, but
beyond the regimes reach. By identifying with him, Poles would have
the chance to cleanse themselves of the compromises they had to make
to live under the regime. And so they came to him by the millions.
They listened. He told them to be good, not to compromise themselves,
to stick by one another, to be fearless, and that God is the only source
of goodness, the only standard of conduct. Be not afraid, he said.
Millions shouted in response, We want God! We want God! We want
God! The regime cowered. Had the Pope chosen to turn his soft power
into the hard variety, the regime might have been drowned in blood.
Instead, the Pope simply led the Polish people to desert their rulers by
affirming solidarity with one another. The Communists managed to
hold on as despots a decade longer. But as political leaders, they were
finished.
Note well that by 1979 the Polish regime was waging its war under
certain self imposed restrictions. Stalin would not have given his
enemies the chance to gather under one leader, and if millions had
shouted We want God! he would have expedited their departure to
the Pearly Gates. Even as the Polish regime was collapsing in 1989,
events in China confirmed that, at least in the short run and against a
determined enemy, soft power is no match for the hard kind. People
who try to stop tanks by standing in front of them with flowers can be
run over at the touch of a gas pedal.
Yet even in the face of the hardest military facts, one can see
the power of politics. Chinese tanks would not have rolled over the
1989 political movement in Beijings Tiananmen square had the last
unit called upon to do so refused, just as previous ones had. The 1989

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movement almost succeeded politically in depriving the regime of the

option to disregard soft power.
In 2004 the Ukrainian opposition succeeded where the Chinese
had failed. To TV viewers around the world the sight of some half
million Ukrainians blocking government buildings in their capitals
central square to protest a fraudulent election backed by Russia looked
like the triumph of pure soft power over hard. Yet the signs were
unmistakable that the oppositions political victory involved much
more than spontaneous demonstrations of adolescents in the streets.
The Ukrainian Interior Ministrys troops, though ready, willing, and
able to roll over the bodies in the square, did not move. Any observer
could guess why: high officials of the countrys intelligence service had
told the crowd that they and presumably their comrades, and hence
presumably the army they well-nigh controlled stood with the people
and for legality. And in fact, the highest officials of the army and the
intelligence service had been in league with the opposition for months,
for a variety of reasons.
The Interior Ministrys troops would have had a fight on their
hands, at the very least. Moreover, the peoples invasion of the central
square had been organized long in advance with some help from prodemocracy activists indirectly financed in part by the U.S. government
through the National Endowment for Democracy. In short, Ukraines
turn westward rather than eastward in 2004 resulted from a variety of
hard political maneuvers that empowered the Ukrainian peoples soft
preferences.
Another, often overlooked essential aspect of soft power is that
different parts of populations are attracted or repelled by different
things, ideas, images, or prospects. Moreover, the power to affect
events is spread very unevenly among and within nations. Hence to
note that one sector of a population, though it be the majority,
entertains a certain set of sympathies and antipathies, that its hearts
and minds are disposed thus and so, says little about how any given
political struggle will turn out.
How important the dispositions of any set of persons may be
depends on what role those persons turn out to play in the conflict. The
disposition of one set of hearts and minds matters little if the persons
in whom they reside are irrelevant to the conflict.
There is no better example than the Vietnam War. Today as
during that war American elites insisted that it was a struggle for the
hearts and minds of the people of South Viet Nam. Nonsense. If ever
that had been the case, the people of South Viet Nam rendered their
judgment unambiguously and invariably by fleeing from Communist

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controlled areas never toward them and by taking to the seas in all
manner of craft to escape the Communist victory. Their hearts and
minds did not matter. The hearts and minds whose changing
dispositions determined the course of the war resided in Washington,
D.C., New York, Los Angeles, and faculty lounges in countless
American universities. The decisive battles of the Vietnam War were
political, and were fought in carpeted rooms, not jungles. The winners
were the Communist powers, who were astute enough to realize that
the winds of elite opinion in America were blowing their way. And
their political military maneuvers made use of those winds. While
American elites were sacrificing their underlings in a largely irrelevant,
superfluous effort to win hearts and minds in Southeast Asia, their own
hearts and minds were tacking into a kind of cultural political war
against the majority of their countrymen.
Still, even if we consider the soft power of public sentiment
to be a kind of wind, and the craft of political warriors akin to that of
skillful sailors, we must recognize that regimes well supplied with the
hard power of well controlled armies and police forces are like walls
and rocks against which wind-driven ships smash. Thus for nearly a
half-century Cubas Fidel Castro has stood against his peoples
unremitting preference for nearby America, thwarted foreign political
maneuvers, and preempted any and all from within the regime who
might have wanted to take advantage of the peoples preferences. His
tools have been from the ancient kit bag of tyrants: nip opposition in
the bud, rotate subordinates, break the ones which become popular, and
load on them the responsibility for harm that the regime inflicts on the
people.
No lines demarcate the practice of political warfare from that
of vigorous politics on one side, and from subversion, countersubversion, and war on the other. Such names describe concepts by
which we distinguish phenomena that, in reality, exist intermingled
with one another.
The elements of political warfare
Each individual is beset by private urges, hopes, and fears. He wants
to know what is right, as well as what will affect him and those dear to
him, with whom he will have to deal tomorrow. When deciding
towards which side in a conflict he should lean, he wants to know
which way the wind is blowing. Each sides prospects in the struggle
do more to attract or repel, encourage or dis-spirit, than do love or hate.

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Contempt for the enemy is more encouraging than hate for the
enemy. But contempt for the enemy must be based on faith in the
success of ones own cause, and that must be based on the people who
embody that cause. Causes live in persons just as much as in words.
Hence, each combatant side must convince all that the causes and
people against which it is fighting have no future and that anyone
who stands with them will suffer. Each side must show that it is
capable of winning, committed to winning, that it has a plan for
winning, and that it is in fact winning.
The audience must know that it is facing people who will not
waver, who, like Hernan Cortes upon landing in Mexico, burned his
ships behind him or who, like the signers of the American Declaration
of Independence, had committed not just their fortunes and honor to the
cause, but their very lives as well. In 2004 Ukrainians trusted Viktor
Yushchenko in part because his body bore the obvious scars of the
governments attempt to assassinate him. Such people will not betray
you because they will not betray themselves. Seriousness is politically
potent.
No mere commitment of resources conveys politically potent
commitment. Much less do declarations of policy. Between 1991 and
2003 U.S. leaders of both parties vied with one another in using strong
language to denounce Iraqs Saddam Hussein. The U.S. Congress
voted resolutions that he be overthrown, and (oxymoronically) publicly
approved money for covert actions to do it. President Clinton and his
successor George W. Bush ordered air strikes against Iraqi air defenses.
Clinton even ordered cruise missiles to destroy the headquarters of
Iraqs intelligence service at night, killing only cleaning ladies. No
surprise then that these dozen years ill conceived political war
proved counter-productive, bolstering Saddams claim to be the Arab,
and even the Muslim, worlds leader against an impotent America.
The acme of this principle was President Jimmy Carters
dispatch of a squadron of F-15 fighters to Saudi Arabia in 1979, to
reassure the Saudis against Iran. But Carter did not want to appear
threatening to anyone. So he announced that the F-15s would be
unarmed. But airplanes deliberately stripped of their armaments
conjured up the exact opposite of the image of a powerful ally ready,
willing, and able to come to the rescue.
Even the commitment of resources to actual operations is
politically ineffective unless these are part of a success-oriented plan.
From 1981 to 1988 President Ronald Reagan spoke eloquently about
the evils of Nicaraguas Sandinista regime and of the dangers it posed
to the United States. He also asked for money to support the armed

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resistance to that regime. But since Reagan also claimed that the United
States planned to get along with the Sandinistas in the long run, they
concluded, logically, that they needed fear no more than some
harassment. And in fact though the Sandinistas suffered a setback as
the Soviet empire fell, they never had to fear for their lives and, two
decades later, retained more power, wealth, and privilege in Nicaragua
than any other group.
The bottom line in war, and hence in political warfare, is whose
enemies die or fear for their lives, and who gets to live confidently.
This was illustrated as well as it ever has been by the assassination of
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981. Sadat had inherited a country
deeply en-meshed politically and financially with the Soviet Union and
taken up by war with Israel. He expelled the Soviets from Egypt,
ceased paying for Soviet arms, and became the annual recipient of
some $2 billion of American aid. This made him public enemy number
one of the Soviet Union and of its sympathizers. In 1979, after the Shah
of Iran, a longtime ally of the United States, had been overthrown by
Islamists allied with the Palestine Liberation Organization, one of the
Soviet Unions allies in the region, progressive propaganda blared
that Sadats end was near and began referring to him as Shah-dat. No
sooner did Sadat die in a hail of bullets in October 1981, than anyone
who turned the dial of a shortwave radio could hear in a variety of
languages from the four corners of the world that the same would
happen to anyone else who dared to stand with the Americans in the
great worldwide struggle. Whos next?
The tools of political warfare
Most political warfare works by sowing dissention in the
enemy camp. However, two of Thucydides better known accounts
illustrate how diplomacy can turn neutrals into allies even without
pitting foe against foe. The Spartan General Brasidas moved his army
deep into Athenian territory by convincing neutral cities to open their
gates to him by professing friendship for them, and eagerness to treat
them as allies, while surrounding them and making it clear that he had
the power to destroy them. But he requested little of them as proof of
friendship just that they facilitate his passage. That was all he needed
from them. The cities, impressed by the small price they had to pay for
safety from so grave a threat, gave in. In short, Brasidas offered the
whole city a deal it could not refuse.
A similar deal emerged from the confrontation between
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Athenians promised the Camarineans that, if they would help Athens

defeat Syracuse, they would be out from under any imperial power.
Athens, they said, was too far away to play the oppressive role that
Syracuse was then playing in Sicily. The Syracusans drew attention to
the fact that they would continue to live close by no matter what, and
added that they would never forgive the Camarineans were they to side
with Athens. The Camarineans found Athens offer attractive. They
hated Syracuse. But they were most impressed by Syracuses ability to
do them harm in the long run. Again, the point is that coercive reality is
a potent political tool, and that mere diplomacy can be enough to wield
it.
The standard approach is simply to state that if the people
would just upset the existing balance of power amongst themselves,
there would be no need to fight foreigners. The point is to divide the
target countrys population, or at least to split the population from its
government. The statement can be made diplomatically, or by various
kinds of propaganda. But it is usually driven home by policies
consistent with the statement, as well as by a variety of political tools
that we ordinarily think of as subversive. Overt policy forcefully
backed by reality is the most powerful tool of political warfare. This is
not to deny the occasional usefulness of minor currents of policy that
run secretly against the mainstream. These can target different
audiences simultaneously with messages tailored for them. But any
undercurrent always carries the danger of self-contradiction.
The most politically damning self-contradictions however stem
from actions. The Anglo-American bombing of German cities
discredited Allied propagandas insistence that the Allies were only
fighting Nazis and meant no harm to the German people. This and
insistence on unconditional surrender confirmed Goebbels propaganda
and weakened the cause of the anti-Hitler opposition in Germany.
The U.S. governments conduct of its Iraqi wars in 1991 and
2003 was another polar opposite of political warfare. In 1991 the U.S.
aimed its guns and its words at the invasion of Kuwait, for which
effectively it held all of Iraq responsible. This gave neither Saddam
Hussein nor the Baathist regime any reason to fear, nor the Iraqi
people any cause for hope. In 2003 the U.S. made the opposite mistake
by aiming its guns and words at Saddam and his closest collaborators
alone. So, unwittingly, instead of warning Iraqs Sunni minority to
distance itself from the Baath or die with it, the U.S. did its best to
reassure the Sunnis. This convinced the bulk of the Baath that it could
shield itself within the Sunni community as it fought to retain its

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privileges. Effectively, U.S. policy pushed together the Baathist

regime and its natural Sunni constituency. Bad politics.
Even more self-contradictory were the U.S. governments
policies toward the Soviet Union in the 1980s. On the one hand
President Reagan rhetorically practiced classic political warfare, telling
the world that the Soviet regime was illegitimate, doomed, and that the
U.S. considered those who lived under it to be captives. On the other
hand, the U.S. government was extending concessionary, untied loans
to the regime, practicing what it called exemplary compliance with
treaties that it was accusing the Soviets of violating, and treating its
members most ceremoniously. Days before Ukraine, the Kremlins
major captive, seceded from the Soviet empire and killed it, President
George Bush told Ukrainians not to do it. Political warfare requires, as
all warfare does, serious coordination between ends and means.
Domestic support and gray propaganda abroad
Domestic support strengthens a governments hand in political
warfare. A governments policies appear more politically potent to the
extent that they are supported by a variety of unofficial as well as
official sources at home. When a government calls forth such sources it
is said to be practicing gray propaganda (in contrast to white
propaganda of an overt nature, and black propaganda, whose source is
completely camouflaged). In the late 1940s Europeans who were
wondering how deep was Americas official commitment to fighting
communism saw that commitment confirmed through U.S. newspapers,
labor unions, chambers of commerce, and letter writing campaigns by
private citizens. These sources had been partly inspired and sometimes
paid for by the U.S. government.
Gray propaganda can also allow a government to disclaim
responsibility for the events and pressures it is fostering. Thus in our
time acceptance of the fiction that the television station al Jazeera is
independent - though it is owned jointly by Qatars ruling family and
by the government the family runs - has allowed the Qatari regime to
be perhaps the Middle Easts major purveyor of anti-Americanism
while retaining good relations with this country. Information (true or
false) that appears to come from a source other than the one from which
it actually originated, known as black propaganda, enjoys the further
appeal of appearing to come from a disinterested source when in fact it
does not.
But, speaking while avoiding responsibility for what they say
tempts governments to say things that they do not really mean, or have

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not really thought through. For example, in the 1950s the U.S.
semiofficial Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty gave East Europeans
the impression that were they to revolt against Soviet rule the United
States would come to their aid. But U.S. policy makers had spoken,
thoughtlessly perhaps, though unofficially. So, when Soviet tanks
crushed the East German and Hungarian rebellions of 1953 and 1956
with impunity, it turned out that the U.S. government had really
subverted itself and the political forces in the Soviet empire which it
favored. Thereafter, embarrassed U.S. policymakers pointed out that
the radios were not the voice of official U.S. policy. But they had never
claimed to be. Nor had they specifically promised that U.S. troops
would come to the aid of Eastern Europe, any more than had U.S.
officials. But both sets of people had used euphemisms that a
reasonable audience would interpret as in fact they were interpreted.
The transcripts of the broadcasts and the official statements of U.S.
policy makers differed in vehemence not substance. This was no
mistake. The euphemisms ambiguities reflected unresolved differences
within the U.S. government. Some officials at the State Department and
CIA fully expected to support the uprising actively. Countless
heartbreaking requests for action flowed up these bureaucracies chain
of command. In the case of the East German revolt, the decision not to
act was taken by John Bross, who was substituting for his vacationing
boss who would have decided otherwise. Three years later, when the
Hungarians revolted, the U.S. decision not to help so surprised CIAs
Frank Wisner that it broke his spirit and his health. The point here is
that words, especially unofficial ones, are so cheap as to be tempting.
Agents of influence and spies
Subversion through various kinds of agents is a potent
tool of political warfare. Agents of influence are people whom the
enemy mistakenly believes are on his side. Good ones cannot be
bought. Their work can be far more valuable, subtle, and dangerous
than that of a mere spy. Thus in the final stages of World War II Alger
Hiss, a major Soviet agent who was also a minor spy, helped shape
U.S. foreign policy toward the Soviet Union. When he was exposed, he
enjoyed the support of most of the Democratic Partys elites. He went
to jail only because he had lied under oath about illegally passing
documents to Soviet intelligence. By contrast Harry Hopkins, President
Franklin Roosevelts alter ego, fully identified his agenda with Stalins
but never went to jail. He exercised more power over U.S. foreign
policy than anyone other than President Franklin Roosevelt. But he

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never did anything illegal, and his pro-Soviet attitude was widely
shared within the Democratic Party, as Vice President Henry Wallace
(1941-45) showed.
The point here is that these agents were effective because they
were part of a friendly faction within the enemy camp. The most
valuable agents are potent in their own right. They are not puppets, but
allies with their own agendas. In most cases it is futile to try steering
them against those agendas. Josef Stalin became the incomparable
master of agent management by extending to his foreign networks the
deadly rigid discipline he instilled in the Soviet communist party. But
not even Stalins carnage combined with faith in Communism kept the
network intact as the twists of his foreign policy forced agents into
conflicts with their own personal commitments. Some prominent
Soviet agents simply turned into anti-Stalinists, and then anticommunists. The very great successes of Soviet subversion which
continued until the very end of the Soviet state came from the work
not of controlled agents but of persons the Soviets called fellow
travelers whose agendas paralleled the Soviets and who needed
little if any coordination. Agents are allies. Allies are problematic. But
when governments try to control their agents tightly, to get them to do
things that they really do not want to do, the result is often that they
lose potent agents and retain only impotent ones.
Useful idiots
Much has been written about the art of marshaling
support in the enemy camp through what Comintern founder Willi
Mnzenberg called innocents clubs or useful idiots, and are best
described by the Stalinist title popular fronts. The term applies both
to individuals and to governments. The craft consists of a few outright
witting agents of a foreign power gathering many unwitting persons
around an ostensible common cause, say the promotion of peace or the
uplift of the poor, and then making sure that the groups activities
actually support the foreign powers policies or simply sow
dissension. The essence of the craft however, is to tap into sectors of
the target countrys population whose enmity for their own country is
great enough to dim their understanding of what in fact they are doing.
Dangers of agents
Governments less expert than Stalins have scarcely a prayer of
making worthy agents follow instructions that run against their

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agendas. Hence, for example, though the intelligence services of all

Arab countries infiltrate the terrorist groups in their own and in other
countries with people they consider their own, and through them entice
and prod these groups to support their agendas, they seldom can
manage more than simply to direct them towards the targets they
prefer. When these countries want to pull off a specific assassination at
a particular time and place, they rely on their own intelligence
services.
Even when individuals or groups used as tools of political
warfare hit their designated targets, their inherent independence makes
them dangerous to their masters. Thus during World War I, German
political-warfare strategists transported V. I. Lenin back from
Switzerland to St. Petersburg in a sealed train to aggravate an already
grave revolutionary crisis and get Russia out of the war in 1917. The
Bolsheviks seized power, sued for peace and granted Germany a peace
at Brest-Litovsk that was fabulously advantageous. But Lenins
Communist comrades, heartened by the Bolshevik revolution, helped to
bring the fall of Imperial Germany, and came close to seizing power in
Central Europe. Worse, Lenins Soviet Union became so powerful that
it ended up occupying Germanys Eastern third, including its capital,
for half a century.
Recruitment
No agents worth having join losing causes or merely enlist as
paid pawns. Recruiting allies requires at least pretending to be
committed to victory. True, foreign factions are often used as pawns,
and using them as such requires much deception. But doing this leads
to the discrediting, isolation, and defeat of whoever does it. For
example, in 1975 and again in 1991 the U.S. encouraged Iraqs Kurds
and Shiites to fight Saddam Hussein, only to abandon them to his
tender mercies. Hence in 2003 as U.S. armed forces invaded Iraq there
was no reason for Americans to wonder why Kurds and Shiites did not
respond to Americas invitation to rise. They waited to see what
Americas intervention would mean for them.
Subversion
Subversion is the proximate end of most political warfare,
whether it is affected by agents, propaganda, or policy. Deception is so
essential to subversion that the two words describe almost the same
phenomenon. The paramount fact essential to understanding deception

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is that it requires cooperation between the deceiver and the deceived.

Just as no one has ever been seduced or subverted against his will,
seldom is anyone convinced that something is true that he does not
wish were true. Hence the craft of deception and subversion lies mostly
in discovering what the target wants to hear and to do. The essence of
execution lies in providing just enough excuse for the target to deceive
and subvert itself.
Tactical deception
Tactical deception, such as the Western Allies effort to
convince Hitler that their 1944 invasion of Europe would take place at
Calais instead of Normandy, functions by the same mechanism
accentuating self deception as does strategic, political deception. But
the latter is actually much easier, since it aims at and uses judgments
with which enemy politicians have identified themselves more fully
than they ever could with tactical judgments. The best illustration may
well be the Soviet Unions generation-long deception of U.S. officials
that arms control especially the banishment of anti-missile defense
was an enterprise for mutual benefit. Not once since 1961, when the
Soviet Union broke a mutual moratorium on nuclear testing did U.S.
officials see any evidence that the Soviets were restraining their
strategic weapons programs in any way.
Until 1968 Soviet leaders and diplomats actually told their U.S.
counterparts that it was immoral for any nation to eschew missile
defense. But so much did U.S. officials want to believe that the Soviets
thought of arms control just as they did, that no facts or arguments
could prevent them from deceiving themselves. Many Americans made
faith in arms control a test of social acceptability for other Americans.
The Soviet Unions political war against U.S. strategic forces hardly
needed the agents and propaganda that Soviet leaders put into it.
Americans were subverting themselves quite well.
Now consider the Spanish Civil War of 1936 39. Like most
civil wars, it invited the intervention of foreign powers that used the
war to fight each other politically. To do that, Germany and Italy on
one side and the Soviet Union on the other had to bend the Spanish
sides who sided with them to their own purposes. The story of the
Spanish Civil War, in a nutshell, is the story of how the Soviet Union
seduced, subverted, used, and abandoned the people and the cause of
Republican Spain, while at the same time Spains nationalists used the
massive help they received from Italy and Germany while avoiding
subversion. The nationalists were not subverted because they, and

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especially their chief, Francisco Franco, focused tightly on their

objectives for Spain. Unlike the Republicans, the Nationalists were
hardly tempted to become part of whatever larger enterprises their
foreign allies represented. In short, the Republicans subverted
themselves by erasing distinctions between themselves and
communists, who lived not for Spain but for Stalin. The Republicans
bitterest enemies, from day to day, would be the Trotskyites and
whoever else were Stalins enemies du jour. Stalins political warfare in
Spain was easy and fruitful, while Hitlers was hard and gained him
nothing.
Special operations
Special operations are often misunderstood as consisting of
physically demanding acts. In fact, their special quality comes much
less from the character of the troops than because they are specially
crafted to have a bearing on wars political issue out of proportion to
the small forces they employ. Such operations can hold or gain allies,
influence neutrals to stay neutral or stray from neutrality, help
resistance movements in enemy-occupied territory, and introduce
sabotage and dissension into the enemy country.
In September 1943 King Vittorio Emmanuele III of Italy
constitutionally cashiered his prime minister, Benito Mussolini, and
appointed a new one who promptly imprisoned his predecessor in a
mountain fortress. Overnight, Germany faced the prospect of enemies
on its undefended southern borders. But Major Otto Skorzenys
commandos landed under Mussolinis prison by glider. Within hours, Il
Duce was organizing an Italian collaborationist counter-government
that made it possible for Germanys General Kesselring to conduct a
brilliant elastic defense in Italy until the end of the war.
Special operations can be used to establish relationships with
foreign forces, to coordinate actions with them, and to gather
information from them. Of course, during such operations troops can
take and interrogate prisoners and, if they can slip in and out unnoticed,
emplace and maintain networks of remote sensors. Whether they are
helping resistance forces, sowing dissension among the enemy, or
influencing third countries, special troops must be political leaders.
They must organize people who have their own priorities and
idiosyncrasies. Hence a well-stocked special operations department
must have officers of widely different backgrounds and widely
different personal, religious, and political preferences.

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Paramilitary
Affecting the enemys polity through paramilitary means differs
from open, across-the-border warfare only in its pretense that
something other than war is happening. Just as the effectiveness of
deception depends more on the deceived than on the deceiver, so the
effectiveness of paramilitary operations depends less on the quality of
those operations than on whether the target country chooses to deal
with them as if the paramilitaries themselves were the enemy, as if it
did not know whence they come, or whether it chooses to make war
directly on the paramilitaries sources and causes.
Paramilitary operations are a form of indirect warfare, the
essence of which is the (inherently thin) pretense that the country
whose cause the paramilitaries serve is somehow not responsible for
them. The reason why the pretense ever works at all is that the target
countys official eyes may not see what real ones do. The body politic
as a whole may lack courage, or a significant part of it may sympathize
with the enemys cause, or so dislike its fellow citizens as to inhibit the
common defense.
When paramilitary operations target innocents, they are
properly described as terrorism. But regardless of whom they shoot or
bomb, the political purpose of paramilitary operations is to discredit the
target government. A government that proves powerless to stop armed
attacks on its citizens or territory is useless. If it is afraid to confront the
sources of its troubles it earns contempt. Because of this, small military
operations can win definitive political victories without ever scoring
any militarily significant ones. All that paramilitary forces have to do is
to survive. The target governments may make their devastating political
points for them. The political success of paramilitary operations often
simply terrorism comes about as, and is signified by, the target
governments acceptance of claims of innocence it knows are not true.
Hitlers conquests in Europe between 1933 and 1939 were political
triumphs of will over victims wanting in conviction, resolve, and
courage. Hitlers whiff of violence, the pro forma pretense that Nazi
violence across Europe was independent of the Reich, combined with
protestations of peace, broke the will of those who might have resisted
him. His table talk records his view that political operations would
break the enemys will to resist, much as artillery prepares the way for
the success of infantry. Hitler was neither the first nor the last to think
this way about the political effect of physical fear and moral discredit.
In our time, the successes of Arab countries in cowing
Europeans and Americans, and even Israelis, comes from the

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Westerners acceptance of the proposition that the terrorists who come

from Arab countries, Iran and elsewhere, and who fight for those
countries causes are somehow private individuals for whom the
countries are not responsible. So eager have Western governments been
to find some authorities to which they can confer benefits in exchange
someone for a cessation of terrorist attacks on themselves that they
imagine it possible that Arab governments, and even the largest
terrorist groups, are both not responsible for terrorism and have the
power to put a stop to it. They imagine it though they know perfectly
well that it is not true.
Perhaps the prototypical illustration of this point came from an
Associated Press report concerning the long running struggle of the
British and Irish governments to end the Irish Republican Armys
terrorism by making some deal with the ostensibly non-violent
representative of the IRAa political causes, Sinn Fein:
IRISH OFFICIAL SAYS SINN FEIN COMMANDS IRA.
Government weary of assertion groups are separate.
In an unprecedented confrontation the Irish government yesterday
publicly identified three of Sinn Feins top figures including party
leader Gerry Adams as members of the Irish Republican Armys
command.
The governments blunt declaration indicated it no longer would
tolerate Adams protestations that his party should not be held
accountable for IRA actions. . . . Over the past decade of Northern
Ireland peacemaking, leaders of successive Irish and British
governments have privately considered Adams and Martin
McGuinness, Sinn Feins deputy leader, to be members of the sevenmember IRA command. To maintain good relations with Sinn Fein
neither government has confronted them in public. . . .
The Irish minister of justice condemned the Sinn Feins leaders
deep, deep, dishonesty. But of course he had proved his own, his
governments and the British governments equally deep dishonesty by
confirming that they had dealt with a negotiating partner on the basis of
a claim of innocence it knew very well to be a lie. Thus do
governments discredit and defeat themselves in political war.

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Using the tools

In our time, the past master in the techniques of
political warfare may well have been Iraqs Saddam Hussein. Between
1991 and 2003 politics was Saddams weapon of mass destruction.
With it he reversed the results of his military defeat of 1991, became
the most important personage in the region, forced support from states
like Saudi Arabia that feared him, hampered the Americans will to
deal with him, destroyed what respect the Americans had earned in the
Arab world in 1991, used the United Nations economic sanctions
against him to corrupt officials from Paris to New York, gather billions
of dollars for his terrorist regime, turned some of Americas European
allies against it, put himself at the head of the cause of Islam in the
world despite his bloody anti-Islamic record, and quite simply ended up
driving the worlds agenda. In the end however he wound up facing the
gallows because his political virtuosity was not backed by military
power.
Better than his American enemies, Saddam understood that
since they had declared victory in the Gulf War without having
overthrown him, any attempt they might now make to do it would be a
self-indictment of their previous judgment. So he calibrated his
challenges to a level high enough to embarrass the Americans but just
below what would make it necessary for them to come get him. Twice
he moved troops a few miles toward Kuwait, then as American forces
were mobilized and at sea, he played yo-yo with them, pulling them
back a bit and leading the world in laughter as the Americans went
back to the other side of the globe. By the time the Americans got wise,
they had become objects of contempt in the Arab world and Saddam a
hero.
The Arab worlds masses were looking for a symbol of
revenge, a savior of their pride. Saddam presented himself as just that.
As early as the autumn of 1991, crowds of hundreds of thousands filled
the capitals of the Arab world shouting pro-Saddam slogans. Even
(indeed especially) the Muslim leaders who had sent military
contingents to the U.S. side in the Gulf War hurried to speak of
brother Iraq (Moroccos King Hassan) and to look forward to
working with Saddam (Egypts President Hosni Mubarak). The Saudi
royal family began treating Saddam as someone who its subjects
revered more than their rulers and the Americans as more trouble than
they were worth. Because of Saddam, the Arab world feared the
Americans less and hated them more. By the turn of the 21st century

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his activities earned greater attention on Arab television than those of

any other Arab leader.
Saddam saw that the U.S.-sponsored United Nations rules that
empowered a host of officials to administer his sales of oil were his
chance to funnel millions of dollars both to those very officials and to
persons in Europe who would become his advocates and would help
turn European opinion against America. He caused shortages of food
and medicine among his domestic enemies, then publicized their
suffering and blamed the Americans for them. Clandestinely, his
intelligence service trained and sent forth anti-American terrorists.
Publicly, he became a cheerleader and financier of suicide bombing
against Israel. His cheerleading for anti-American violence was even
louder than that for anti-Israeli violence.
Debate in America has only just begun on the role that
Saddams intelligence service played in the 1993 bombing of the World
Trade Center, on the meaning of the overlap between the organizers of
the 1993 attack and the 2001 attack, and on connections with al Qaeda.
But there is no doubt that his intelligence services had infiltrated the
regions terrorist groups at least as deeply as had the services of other
Arab countries. Nor is there doubt that of the existence in Iraq of
training programs for non-Iraqi terrorists. The Iraqi services stand
accused credibly of having attempted the assassination of the first
President Bush. There is no explanation for the fact that the commander
of the 1993 attack, Ramzi Youssef, carried Kuwaiti identity papers
falsified during Iraqs occupation of Kuwait other than that Iraqs
services falsified them. In short, there can be little argument with the
proposition that if Saddam did not sponsor any given terrorist act
against America, it was not for want of trying.
Saddam understood his opponents political vulnerabilities
better than they understood his, and used all the tools of political
warfare as well as they might be used. He ended up driving the worlds
agenda. Then his well calibrated political war was overcome by
military force majeure, and he ended up facing the gallows. Even then,
he turned his trial into another propaganda theater against the United
States and the legitimacy of the new Iraqi government. Saddam taught
an important lesson by showing both the strength and the weakness of
political warfare.
Note
1 Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics
(Public Affairs, 2004).

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