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[NousDefionsDoc]

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Hundreds of Iraqi troops backed by U.S. forces stormed a Sunni Muslim mosque in Baghdad after Friday prayers, killing four people and wounding at least nine, witnesses and an influential group of Sunni clerics said.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&e=1&u=/nm/20041120/ts_nm/iraq_dc

from the front pages of PS.com
Foreign Internal Defense (FID). These are operations that involve participation by civilian and military agencies of a government in any of the action programs taken by another government or other designated organization, to free and protect its society from subversion, lawlessness, and insurgency. Both conventional and SOF units have a role and capability to conduct FID missions. SOF's primary role in this interagency activity is to assess, train, advise, and assist Host Nation (HN) military and paramilitary forces with the tasks that require their unique capabilities. The goal is to enable these forces to maintain the HN's internal stability, to counter subversion and violence in their country, and to address the causes of instability. Internal stability forms the shield behind which a nation-building campaign can succeed. Successful FID missions can lead to strategic successes for US foreign policy. FID activities include the following:

HN Military Assistance. These are operations that train HN military individuals and units in tactical employment, sustainment, and integration of land, air, and maritime skills, provide advice and assistance to military leaders, and provide training on tactics, techniques,and procedures required to protect the HN from subversion, lawlessness, and insurgency, and develop indigenous individual, leader, and organizational skills.


Population Security. These are operations that strengthen population security by providing supervision of tactical operations conducted by HN military units to neutralize and destroy insurgent threats, isolate insurgents from the civil population, and protect the civil population. As a subset of FID, designated SOF units may also train select HN forces to perform counterterrorist missions.

[Airbornelawyer]

This "influential group of Sunni clerics" is the Muslim Clerics Association, which has been the most prominent Wahhabi apologists and supporters of Zarqawi's butchers. But in Reuterville, one man's terrorist is another man's "influential group of Sunni clerics".

[magician]

I see a parallel with Shining Path.

The Party, (Shining Path is actually a misnomer, the actual correct name of the organization is the Communist Party of Peru) was once geographically focused in the department of Ayacucho in the highlands of Peru.

The Peruvian Army mounted a "final offensive," and went into Ayacucho to flush out the guerrillas. What ended up happening is the guerrillas migrated up the Andean spine of the country and dispersed nationally.

The so-called "final offensive" ended up being a catalyst for a mestastasis.

The Allawi government is focusing on Sunni allies of the Sunni resistance, and this is good. But care should be taken to ensure that the terrain remains inhospitable for Sunni guerrillas in the Kurdish north and the Shia south, as well, and measures need to be maintained, neutralizing eruptions of Shia unrest.

I particularly believe that false flag operations should be mounted by ostensible Sunnis against Shias on the sidelines, with the goal being Shia enmity. Sunni resistance fighters should find no open doors, no open mosques, in the south. A couple of well-placed car bombs, followed by propaganda against "apostates" should do the trick.

[magician]

and, here we go:

"...In Basra, a group called the "Brigades of Anger" has emerged, vowing to defend Shiites in Iraq from any group deemed a threat. A leader of the group, Dheya al-Mahdi, told The Associated Press that he will give the go-ahead for his followers to avenge the killing of Shiites.

Al-Mahdi blames Wahhabis, an extreme sect of Sunni Islam dominant in Saudi Arabia, for encouraging and funding operations aimed at Shiites in Iraq."

from Bounties Offered On Americans in Iraq (http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,FL_bounty_111904,00.html).

[NousDefionsDoc]

I see a parallel with Shining Path.

The Party, (Shining Path is actually a misnomer, the actual correct name of the organization is the Communist Party of Peru) was once geographically focused in the department of Ayacucho in the highlands of Peru.

Not so. The Partido and the SL are two different entities. The PC del P was founded in 1928 and like most LATAM PCs, follows Leninist-Marxist doctrine.

SL was founded in the late '60s by Guzman et al and is or at least was Maoist in orientation.

The two were very often at odds with each other over the appropriate ways to advance the revolution. Much like Che didn't get on very well with the old traditional PCs in Latin America and was eventually ruined by the PC de Bolivia.

Very rarely do the old men with cigars of the traditional partidos coministas advocate radical and violent means. It upsets their incomes.

[magician]

wrong.

there is one partido comunista del peru, and it is the one hijacked by Guzman and company.

the other guys are posers.

[magician]

sorry to inflict this on you...but this is an excerpt from a study I did back in the early 1990's on Sendero.



Origins

Shining Path is the product of national, regional and international processes. Nationally, Shining Path emerged from the wreckage of the Peking-line communist parties in the late 1960’s, which themselves split from the orthodox Marxist movement and the Castroite guerrilla groups earlier in the decade. In regional terms, educated, mestizo Shining Path cadres exploited the economically, socially, and politically marginalized Quechua and Aymara Indian populations of the Andean highlands. Internationally, Shining Path was midwifed by the Sino-Soviet split of 1965, and energized by Maoist revolutionary ideology.

National Origins

During the IVth National Conference of January, 1964, the orthodox Communist Party of Perú fissioned into the Moscow-line PCP (Unidad) and the Maoist PCP (Bandera Roja). PCP-Unidad advocated evolution towards socialism through participation in elections and other, primarily non-violent, methods. PCP-Bandera Roja conversely embraced the Maoist strategy of “protracted people’s war,” and declared its intention to violently seize political power.

After the Vth National Conference of November, 1965, in Abimael Guzmán’s words, “the Party exploded,” with a faction called PCP-Patria Roja expelled for “...negating Chairman Mao, negating Mariátegui, (and) negating the existence of a revolutionary situation in Perú.” Four “fractions” remained in PCP-Bandera Roja, all claiming to be the legitimate Communist Party of Perú: PCP-Puka Llacta, PCP-Estrella Roja, the “PCP-Marxist-Leninist,” and Guzmán’s group, which consisted mainly of student militants from the National University of Engineering and the University San Martín de Porres, both in greater Lima, and the Ayacucho Regional Committee (“José Carlos Mariátegui”) at the University San Cristóbal de Huamanga.

The young doctor of philosophy Abimael Guzmán was PCP-Bandera Roja Secretary of Propaganda, and responsible for “youth work” as a leading communist in Ayacucho. The etiology of the name Sendero Luminoso or Shining Path that the modern-day PCP eschews also dates from this period: among Guzmán’s supporters at the University San Cristóbal de Huamanga, the Revolutionary Student Front (FER) published a newspaper with the subtitle, “On the Shining Path of Mariátegui.” Known as the Ayacucho fraction, Guzmán’s group remained within the Bandera Roja Communist Party for the moment. But they were not idle.
In 1968, the Peruvian military deposed President Fernando Belaúnde Terry, seeking to prevent the APRA Party from taking power after looming elections. The golpe de estato was also triggered by near-chaos in Perú: unprecedented economic crisis, paralyzing labor strikes, corruption scandals at the highest levels of government, diplomatic disputes with the United States and Chile, and growing peasant unrest in the highlands.

Radicalized by the suppression of Castroite guerrilla groups from 1962-65, and imbued with a paternal and nationalistic self-image, the Revolutionary Military Government of General Juan Velasco Alvarado preemptively dismantled the largest, most productive latifundias, and implemented crippling land reforms that were applauded by leftists worldwide. For the moment, peasant land seizures abated.

Expulsion of US military attachés punctuated the nationalization of the International Pretroleum Company’s Peruvian facilities, further alienating a Nixon administration already testy over seizures of American fishing trawlers sailing within the self-de-clared 200-mile Peruvian territorial limit. The Velasco government, dominated by the most nationalistic officer strata, then moved to import large amounts of Soviet weaponry, accompanied by Soviet military advisers.

For their part, the Peruvian Moscow-line Communist Parties followed Fidel Castro’s lead, supporting Velasco. Cuban-supported guerrilla groups in Perú subsequently withered. The original PCP-Unidad gravitated to a coalition of other left-wing parties that became the modern-day United Left (IU), which was represented in the Peruvian Congress until President Fujimori’s April, 1992 autogolpe. In the late 1970’s, splinters from the IU and the APRA Party of former-President Alán Garcia Pérez (1985-90), devolved into the other violent revolutionary organization in Perú, the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), which prosecutes a Castroite form of armed struggle. While it perpetrates significant guerrilla attacks, MRTA lacks Shining Path’s peasant base and proven activating ideol-ogy. It is consequently far less relevant to this study, and not considered a future contender for state power. While the Peking-line Parties were in disarray, the radical Ayacucho fraction enjoyed superlative leadership which adroitly forged a disciplined, focused organization.



Keep in mind that this excerpt was written circa 1992 or thereabouts...and it betrays a bias: I am dismissive of the "old school" Communist Parties, where you are, perhaps, are not.

I guess one thing has happened to me in the long course of years studying Shining Path: I know a communist when I see one. The gentlemen who call themselves "communist" and sit around in tweed jackets and argue dialectics in universities cannot hold a candle to that nefarious old jackal who raised his fist and chanted in a Lima courtroom mere days ago. That guy is a communist, and the party that he nurtured and led, that was a communist party, a real communist party.

:)

[NousDefionsDoc]

I understand what you are saying, I just see it a different way. We can agree to disagree. I never said Guzman isn't a communist, I am saying he isn't the communist. I will leave you with this thought - the gentlemen in the tweed jackets are still around in every LATAM country, while the "real" communists are pretty much either dead, in prison, or dying of prostate cancer. Revolution didn't bring Chavez to power in Venezuela, Gutierrez in Ecuador, Lula in Brazil (they are all populist/communists) nor did revolution give Bogota its first mayor who is also a card carrier. Tweed jackets and compromise did. ;)

[The Reaper]

That guy is a communist, and the party that he nurtured and led, that was a communist party, a real communist party.

:)

I would disagree with this as well, though you do present an excellent argument.

Do you really believe that Guzman and SL advocated a truly classless society with popular ownership of the means of production, from each, according to his means, to each according to his needs? That strikes me as propaganda for the masses in order to gain popular support, when what they really wanted was to overthrow the government and take over for themselves.

They struck me as anarchists, or at best, oligarchists wanting to get their own snouts into the trough.

Just my .02.

TR

[magician]

If you ever spoke to campesinos who had run from villages administered by Sendero comites popular, you would know that these guys had a real handle on nuts and bolts socialism at the grass roots level. They had studied the Chinese revolution in detail, in fact, many of them, and I believe that Abimael was one of them, had even gone to China on study programs earlier in their careers.

Everything was organized, there was no individual liberty. Everyone worked together, everyone was involved. Where you fit into the paradigm was dictated by your class consciousness. It was not uncommon to find youths in charge of older people, and God help you if you showed the slightest disrespect, or inclination to disobey.

It all began with village assemblies, where everyone was addressed by cadres. At that point, local village members who may have gone away for a time to "join the revolution" might make a reappearance, and suddenly, they would be in charge. The women were organized in women's groups. These were both study sessions where they were taught how to read and write, with political subjects at the heart, and they were also used to gauge suitability: those who were more bourgeois would be subjected to "rectification" and required to engage in "self-criticism," though everyone did this. Men had their own groups, as did the young.

Work details were meted out, and military training was conducted, and military units formed. There was no free time. The village was run like a military encampment. All your time belonged to the revolution. As they phrased it, your life belonged to the people, el pueblo.

When we walked through these villages....they were absolutely eerie. Unlike the average village in the Upper Huallage, with chickens and dogs and hogs running around, kids everywhere, Sendero villages were ordered, clean, quiet....and hostile. When they were not deserted, the people just stared. Revolutionary slogans would be painted on the walls....there would be lessons carefully lettered on the blackboard in the school....rice would be cooking in a communal kitchen...there would be a village medical clinic, it would be locked up, it would be stocked, and no one would have a key. The people would be remarkably healthy.

Of course, no one had seen colochos or terrucos, and you could see from their eyes that they would as soon stick a knife in us as talk to us. The Peruvian police that I advised in those days knew, of course, that we were walking through a Sendero village, and were on alert...I was careful to advise correct behavior, cautioning the utmost respect for derechos humanos. The cops got it, to their credit.

In those days, early 1990, in the Upper Huallaga, the US was proscribed from formal involvement in the insurgency. The spooks were involved, they had their programs, but I will not get into those here. Formally, we were fighting the drug war, under the artificial premise that it was possible to target the trafficking infrastructure without coming into conflict with Sendero. Events would demonstrate the fallacy of this concept, but the Andean Strategy was still new, we were allied with the Peruvian police, and ended up fighting Colombian traffickers, Sendero, and the Peruvian Army, pretending all the while that we were only chasing narcos.

Sendero was far from a bunch of elitists who merely sought state power. They were definitely a Leninist vanguard, a so-called "party of a new type," but they saw this as a development which was required to elevate the class consciousness of the people so that they could be led by professional revolutionaries in seeking goals far beyond a five day work week, or an eight hour day, or even a fair working wage.

In sum, Sendero was a Maoist communist party. And what that means, by way of definition, is that Peru was merely a vital first step to a regional war that was itself just a component in a global historical transition to worldwide communism.

Were they dreaming? No doubt. And this is why they have ended up, so to speak, on the proverbial dustbin of history. And thank God for that. They clearly overreached.

This does not make them any less dangerous. Abimael himself said that the revolution would continue as long as a single cadre remained free. These are people who interpret defeats as temporary reverses. They view communism as an historical process, an inevitability.

[DanUCSB]

the gentlemen in the tweed jackets are still around in every LATAM country

Not just. Those 'gentlemen' are still around at every UC campus, as well.

[magician]

reminds me of my professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Tom Mayer.

he was one of the few guys I met who actually taught me something useful about Maoism.

how so? He was one.

got me reading the Revolutionary Worker (http://rwor.org/home-e.htm).

clued me into Revolution Books (http://www.google.com/search?q=revolution+books&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8) in NYC.

I have no idea what Tom was really up to, but then, he certainly did not know what I was doing, either. I learned a lot from him. Whether he intended it or not.

[NousDefionsDoc]

Magic Man,
I have no argument with anything you posted, you could be describing word for word the ELN of 8 years ago or the FARC in some areas. Like I said, I don't see them as the only communist party. The ELN, SL, etc. are the extremists, maybe the true believers, but in the need for violent revolution to bring change. It doesn't work. And the old CP members know it. This was one of the big problems they had with Che and why nobody wanted him. Far more dangerous in my mind is the insidious spread of communism disguised as populism and the revolution at the voting booths. The ELN, SL et al, are relatively simple to resolve - requires a military solution. The others commit no crimes. Colombia was fortunate in that there is a counter-balance, the narcos and paras, that hate communists more than they hate the government. What they did to the UP is the only thing, IMO, that kept Colombia from being completely taken over.

[magician]

interesting, brother.

very interesting.

[lrd]

....I know a communist when I see one. The gentlemen who call themselves "communist" and sit around in tweed jackets and argue dialectics in universities cannot hold a candle to that nefarious old jackal who raised his fist and chanted in a Lima courtroom mere days ago. That guy is a communist, and the party that he nurtured and led, that was a communist party, a real communist party.

:)This is almost a direct quote from one of my college lit professors...something to do with that huge leap between theory and practice, I think. :) He also seemed to think that if the "communists" at the university ever became real communists, they would be removed.

Very interesting thread, gentlemen.

[magician]

pshah.

leftists, extremists, oppositionists, of any persuasion that you can envision, have abused the sanctuary of the educational system in America, and everywhere else, for as long as such systems have existed. It is a cherished tradition, part of the educational "experience."

universities are recruiting grounds, fertile audiences for propaganda, safe zones for organizational work, they provide office space for publishing newspapers and pamphlets and today, websites and email...

universities are battlegrounds, and the hearts and souls of students are key terrain. But more importantly, they are, indeed, sanctuaries, from which campaigns can be plotted and launched, and the movement of accomplices covered.

when you think about it, universities have a key place in the wars of this century, where front lines are ephemeral (except in cases like Iraq, Afghanistan, et al, where we create conditions luring Jihadis to their deaths like moths to the flame). There are universities everywhere. In every university, there is an organization sympathetic to every cause.

If you study organizational theory, that is, if you study conspiratorial organizational theory, you come to realize that virtually all organizations come to harbor a cabal at their heart, with concentric circles buffering them from increasingly clueless facilitating layers as you proceed from inner to outer layer.

the one saving grace: the fact that organizations abuse universities means that security forces can also readily target them, and penetrate them.

who wants to go back to "school?" Anyone interested in a little, er, post-graduate work?