FIRE IN THE HOLE: HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN

"After this I'm going to get out of surveillance," said one of the Watchers on the Watch.
"Good idea," he responded. "It's not good for you, it's not good for the target, and it's not good for the country."
There was a tragic double blind. Old Alex had pretended to be more stupid than he was all the days of his life.
But as their number came to an infinite zero, or at least a finite quantity, he threw away all the old modes, hiding in the ordinary. 
There wasn't enough time left to waste. 
"If you're not prepared for death you are not prepared for life." The Laughing Buddha. Author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.
To this day he remembered the book, remembered the interview.
The unfolding nightmare of Mosul continued to haunt him, day in and day out, the gods roiled by the extreme nature of the harvest, the extreme suffering.
He was here in the remotest outpost of consciousness. 
There was no one he could talk to about anything. 
But even the tabloid The Daily Telegraph, ironically perhaps, had the previous day lamented the dumbing down of society. 
The Telegraph, their offices had been upstairs from where he worked for 15 years at The Australian, had itself been chronically dumbed down, turned into a low-rent down-market cartoon pastiche of the owner Rupert Murdoch's concerns and the overpaid editors guesstimates of what would appeal to the public.
It had once, despite the sneers of Sydney's elites, particularly under the editorship of David Penberthy, been a very good, on market tabloid which addressed the major issues of the day and assumed its audience had an IQ above grade school, or primary school as it was known in Australia.
The suffering. He heard the intel on the poor behaviour of the Iraqi troops. Horrific, there was no other way to describe what was happening there. A Western created fiasco being either ignored by Western audiences, or so heavily propagandised into a "liberation" that the ordinary reader, if they cared at all, had no idea of the truth of what was happening there.
Old Alex tried not to be incensed.
It did him no good.
Because incensed he was. 
Once again, the previous day, to his discordant amusement, The Telegraph had been pontificating on about the "ordeal of social engineering". 
That organ which had done as much as any in the country to manipulate public opinion and to dumb down debate to moronic, almost sub-human levels. 
They could have lifted up the public.
They dumbed it down.
They could have been a force for good.
They were not. 
One of the many reasons for the dumbing down was to cover the miscreants, self servers, the massive dysfunction of government, the killers in high places, the nation's involvement in counterproductive and utterly immoral wars at the behest of, or in lockstep with, their "allies" America.
The alliance had more to do with tens of billions of dollars of military contracts, more than 400 active contracts at any one time, than it did with security, or, as often claimed, the intelligence gains of the Five Eyes Agreement between Australia, Canada, UK, US and New Zealand.
Much of that intelligence, as the many recent exposures from the NSA and the CIA clearly showed, was worthless. 
And in one notable instance when that intelligence came to the public consciousness, the justification for going to war in Iraq, Australia had misused it when former Prime Minister John Howard claimed the intelligence they had backed up America's justification for the war, when in fact it was the same "intelligence".
The War on Terror, so often stated, so blithely ignored, had become a War on The People.
We all suffered the resultant poverty of mind and the poverty of culture in the winter sun, in the decline of reason and of commonsense. In a far off place where fake noise trolled through the public imagination, people stared mindlessly at television screens and sports stories spread up and down the nation's news lists. 
While the Sunni Arabs of Mosul carried their dead and injured children. 
And the bodies of the holy warriors, the martyrs, rotted in the heat. 
The gods, indeed, were roiled.

THE BIGGER STORY:

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/07/mosul-isis-propaganda/532533/

Eight and a half months into the coalition-backed campaign to liberate Mosul, Iraq’s second city looks like it is finally on the brink of freedom. After launching the last phase of the battle in mid-June, the Iraqi security forces slowly but surely penetrated the Old City, one of the final ISIS redoubts in Mosul. And, on Thursday, just after recapturing the Nuri Mosque—at which ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi accepted his role as “caliph” in June 2014, and which ISIS demolished one week ago—the Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared the “end of the Daesh [ISIS] state of falsehood.”

While this is indisputably good news, we must rein in our optimism. The truth is, ISIS has been planning for defeat in Mosul for months, if not years. Losing the city has long been part of its global plan. And even though the loss of its self-declared Iraqi capital will be a genuine blow to the group’s territorial pretensions, ISIS is not going to evaporate just because it has fallen.

Since October 2016, when the campaign to retake Mosul was first launched, ISIS has been putting up an immensely stiff resistance: thousands of its fighters have been killed by coalition forces, and hundreds more blown up in suicide operations. But no matter how fiercely it fought, the group was never realistically going to repel the onslaught. The few thousand fighters that ISIS had holed up in the city faced about ten times as many members of a reconstituted and determined Iraqi security forces that was backed by U.S. air power.

What, then, were the strategic objectives of ISIS’s doomed resistance these last few months? While its leaders persistently proclaimed that victory was just around the corner, and while the rank-and-file were probably fighting under the pretense that they might actually win, something more abstract seems to have been driving the battle. At its heart has been a compulsive obsession, not so much with defense as with narrative—the caliphate has been doing all it can to make sure it could be seen to be putting up a fight. In that sense, much of what has happened since late 2016 can be seen as an exercise in propaganda—expensive, wasteful propaganda, but propaganda all the same.

ISIS has almost certainly been planning for this moment since 2014. By seizing as much territory as it did back then, its leaders were violating one of the key principles of non-state on state irregular warfare: Act scarce, and never present an obvious target. Given their proven insurgent pedigree, they will almost certainly have been aware of this. Nevertheless, by taking over Mosul—a city of some 2 million people—they laid the foundations for the apparent catastrophe that their organization now faces.

But what if this “catastrophe” is what ISIS wants? The group has been counter-intuitive in the past, so why not now?

If statehood was indeed the Islamic State’s aim, it has resoundingly failed. However, if it really hoped to establish a lasting, viable administration, it would not have raped, murdered, and terrorized its way across the Middle East and North Africa in the way it did, let alone systematically provoked the international community into forming a coalition to destroy it.

What if, more than anything else including territory, the group just wants permanence, to be the ideological hegemon of global jihadism? In this pursuit, the realization of ideological aspirations is far more important than the permanent administration of any piece of land, even if it comes at great material cost.

Viewed through this lens, ISIS’s most counter-intuitive acts become intuitive, if not ingenious, parts of a narrative-led strategy, one that prioritizes conceptual longevity over anything else.

For example, while the beheadings and war crimes that provoked the international intervention in Iraq and Syria may have materially hurt it, they also allowed it to wrest control of the global jihadist mantle, and claim to be singlehandedly taking the fight to the “Crusader enemy.” So too did its capture of Mosul and caliphate declaration in June 2014, even though neither made insurgent “sense.”

The fact is that, although ISIS’s audacious ultraviolence ultimately set the scene for its material undoing, it also meant that it could work towards creating the world it wanted to inhabit—a polarized, turbulent place that accommodated the jihadist ideology uncannily well.

For ISIS, this is what success looks like and, as short-lived as it was, the group has already gotten a good deal of what it wanted from the Mosul experiment. Seizing and administering the city for over a thousand days was more than enough for the group to make its mark as caliphate, and will be sufficient for it to boast in years to come of the jihadist utopia that once was. It alone will be enough to keep the true believers in its ranks in tow, even once it has lost everything else.

Long after the city has fallen back into the hands of the Iraqi government, it will continue to be a prop for ISIS, although an altogether different one. No longer will it be a paragon of jihadist governance. Instead, it will be a prototype for insurgency. ISIS will continue to propagandize through Mosul and, provided it can use it as a baton of instability with which to hit the Iraqi government (and the rest of the world too), the self-proclaimed caliphate is not going anywhere anytime soon.