The views expressed here are my own, and do not reflect the official views of the U.S. Naval Academy, the U.S. Navy, or the Department of Defense.
There are obviously different ways to approach Twitter—to each their own, after all—but IMO the first principle of Twitter is never, ever take it too seriously. So when the FB outage hit, I couldn’t help but make snarky comments about the connections between Whatsapp and American military advising/air power.
But to be somewhat more serious—and one of the reasons why I am trying to get this Substack going is to find a more serious venue for regular writing—Verini’s piece deserves more attention than I think it’s received, and there’s a decent chance I will assign an excerpt of his book as a course reading at one point:
This notion of Mosul as an arena of the occult, where different types of black magic orchestrated by the internet came together in a charnel house of carnage is a powerful one. And this passage seems especially pregnant in light of the disastrous US airstrike that slaughtered a bunch of kids as US forces skedaddled out of Kabul in disgrace:
Hypocrisy and self-deception aside, there is something genuinely impressive in how a social media company run by a Harvard drop out can create a communications network so robust and ubiquitous that it could become a conduit for dropping ordnance in a war zone. And while it’s right to look askance at USG rhetoric regarding the accuracy and efficacy of its airstrikes, the reality is that the kill chain did cut ISIS up into pieces during its territorial peak, and it would have kept Kabul out of Taliban hands indefinitely if the US had decided to continue its presence in Afghanistan.
But there is still obviously an element of farce here, especially since if there ever was a just war, crushing ISIS fits the bill. Savage violence as spectacle, the open creation of a system of sexual slavery, deranged grandiosity—if there was a ever group of miscreants who needed killing, it was ISIS.
But the excessive reliance on air power during the US war against ISIS always cast a pall over the effort. Iraqi troops in Mosul, along with small numbers of US advisers, closed with the enemy, but the Whatsapp coordinated air campaign in Mosul’s Old City—driven in large by American casualty aversion—always struck me as having shades of Tacitus’ quip that the Romans made a desert and called it peace. The dark sorcery of ISIS deserved to be crushed and burnt to a crisp, but there still feels something discreditable to me that the anti-ISIS coalition had to resort to its own black magic. This was by no means entirely the fault of the United States Government—Mosul was part of an Iraqi war, and the Iraqi state’s desperate shortage of quality infantry was mostly Baghdad’s fault—but what a testament it is to both American might and insouciance that Zuck’s FB empire stumbled its way into being a messenger of death.
As such the Battle of Mosul fits in a larger story of American decadence—and how the high modernism of the Cold War and the “liberal international order” is being replaced by internet-enabled sorcery and superstition.
Huh i think I heard of the term "techno-witchcraft" on a kids show once cant believe something like that turned into a scholarly term