UPDATE: The War College disputes the charge. Maybe it’s just the research arm involved.
A year ago, I had several posts about a man named Hesham Islam, who appeared to be an Islamic mole in the Defense Department. It appears I may have been premature in celebrating his departure. This story suggests that the problem may not be solved.
“HAMAS’ political and strategic development has been both ignored and misreported in Israeli and Western sources which villainize the group, much as the PLO was once characterized as an anti-Semitic terrorist group,” writes Sherifa Zuhur, a research professor at the War College’s Strategic Studies Institute. “Negotiating solely with the weaker Palestinian party-Fatah-cannot deliver the security Israel requires. . . . The underlying strategies of Israel and HAMAS appear mutually exclusive . . . . Yet each side is still capable of revising its desired endstate and of necessary concessions to establish and preserve a long-term truce, or even a longer-term peace.”
This information is from Thomas Ricks’ blog posts at Foreign Policy. Ricks is the Washington Post’s military reporter. His comments concern this War College publication by a research professor at the College. This could simply be an example of using diverse sources of opinion except that it seems to be a trend. Ricks relates another story suggesting an atmosphere of censorship.
During the lunch in which I was approached by the faculty (three in all), I was told that my experience was not surprising. “The AWC is creating a closed idea environment by their policy of not allowing new ideas in here,” I recall one faculty member telling me. That statement, it seemed to me at the time, was a little too general. I had good contacts in the Pentagon, with very senior commanders and was reassured by them afterwards that my AWC experience was unusual. It would not have happened at Leavenworth, I was told.
The most serious issue is whether the study of militant Islam is being curtailed for political reasons.
As late as early 2006, the senior service colleges of the Department of Defense had not incorporated into their curriculum a systematic study of Muhammad as a military or political leader. As a consequence, we still do not have an in-depth understanding of the war-fighting doctrine laid down by Muhammad, how it might be applied today by an increasing number of Islamic groups, or how it might be countered. (”The Sources and Patterns of Terrorism in Islamic Law,” The Vanguard: Journal of the Military Intelligence Corps Association, 11:4 [Fall 2006], p. 10)
Maybe Hesham Islam has left his legacy after all.