To the surprise of many, even in Sweden, Nordbat 2 quickly established a reputation as one of the most trigger-happy UN units in Bosnia. The troops and officers from some of the least belligerent nations in the world turned out to be quite adept at both using force and playing the odds in a high-stakes political game. This article outlines how a well-entrenched culture of mission command enabled Nordbat 2 to take on completely new and unexpected situations with remarkable results. While this culture of mission command turned out to be a potent force multiplier and an exceptionally effective strategic asset, it also had another side: Nordbat 2 on multiple occasions utterly disregarded orders from its highest political authorities, to the frustration of the Swedish government.
The culture of mission command in Sweden dates back to 1943, when senior Swedish army officers were taking note of the tactical superiority of German troops fighting Soviets on the Eastern Front. Sweden, being a small nation with several large and frequently hostile neighbors, had to prepare to fight an enemy which possessed overwhelming numerical superiority.
.. The Swedish Army estimated that a breakdown of command and control was a likely scenario as the Soviets would inevitably disrupt communications, destroy command centers, and seize territory, thereby isolating segments of the Swedish Army. In order to cope with this contingency, all units were trained to engage in what was known as “the free war,” (i.e. autonomous operations against local targets, without centralized command). The free war was intended as a last resort, which would only end when the invader had finally retreated. The official doctrine stated that all Swedish citizens were to, without exception, consider any order to surrender to be false, regardless of its origin
.. The officers and non-commissioned officers (NCOs), all the way down to the lowest-ranking enlisted men, were taught that the only truly mortal sin was to hesitate. To seize the initiative and act was the primary imperative. There was no priority higher than that of achieving the mission objectives at hand. Orders could be disobeyed, rules could be broken—as long as the mission was successful.
.. While several other countries preferred to send lightly armed vehicles to avoid provoking the parties to the conflict, Henricsson wanted the main infantry fighting vehicle of the Swedish Army at the time. This vehicle, known as the Pbv 302, featured a 20mm automatic cannon and fairly respectable armor for a vehicle of its type.
.. Henricsson even decided to bring the latest portable Swedish anti-tank guided missiles.
.. Henricsson, however, had his own set of expectations. He let the media know he would personally ensure Nordbat 2 brought body bags and that everyone who served under him would be ordered to write their wills before departing.
.. Henricsson made it clear that his interpretation of the mission objectives (which he had developed himself on the basis of the original UN mandate, rather than taking clues from his political superiors) was that protection of the civilian population was the highest priority. In order to achieve this, Henricsson expected that force might be used, and that losses were a real possibility.
.. When fired at, Nordbat 2 often shot back, frequently disregarding the UN rules of engagement. Colonel Henricsson made it clear that he would not respect rules and regulations that threatened to prevent him from achieving his mission objectives.
.. When his own government tried to rein him in, he simply told his radio operator to pretend that the link was down until he had a fait accompli to present to Stockholm.
.. Nevertheless, Nordbat 2 had once again refused to let the parties to the conflict dictate the terms of its deployment. In several other incidents, Nordbat 2 personnel intervened to protect refugees and took action to prevent the cover-up of ethnic cleansing operations.
.. On several occasions this took the form of forcing passage through roadblocks. During one such event, the battalion commander himself forced a sentry to remove the anti-tank mines used to block passage by threatening to blow the sentry’s head off with a heavy machine gun.
.. Instead of taking on regular troops in mechanized combat, Nordbat 2 found itself in a conflict characterized by ethnic cleansing, massacres, smuggling and random violence. Nevertheless, it was able to operate with a surprising degree of effectiveness.
.. The Dutch peacekeepers, representing a professional elite airborne unit, were more or less helpless for more than a year inside the Srebrenica enclave because they were unwilling to initiate any confrontations with the parties to the conflict, and because they were willing to be micromanaged by their home government. Nordbat 2, on the other hand, was something of a loose cannon, and earned a reputation as a force to be reckoned with. It even became known as “Shootbat” for its tendency to return fire, regardless of the formal rules of engagement.
.. Nordbat 2’s willingness to bend or even break the rules, and disregard direct orders from both UN command and its own government, enabled it to achieve its mission objectives as defined by the first battalion commander: protect the civilians at all cost.
.. on several occasions Nordbat 2 did not accept the control of its civilian leadership. Accustomed to mission command, Nordbat 2 acted as it had been taught: rules can be broken as long as it is done to achieve the mission objectives.
.. As long as political leaders can trust the local commander to make the right choices, mission command can be an incredibly powerful force multiplier
.. Even though Nordbat 2’s first battalion commanders were very unpopular with the Swedish government for their refusal to take orders from home, they were nevertheless greeted as heroes upon their return and remain viewed so to this day.
.. This meant the Swedish government did not have to deal with the political fallout of the otherwise failed UN mission. The Dutch government, for example, was hard-pressed by public opinion after the massacre at Srebrenica in the summer of 1995.
.. the basic rule of mission command remains relevant: it is better to make a mistake than to do nothing at all.
The Body Language of Power
In this, as in so many other ways, Germany’s chancellor is a near-perfect opposite and foil to Mr. Trump. And when it comes to modern power, she is the model. She is in her twelfth year in office and odds-on to stay in it for another four after the election on September 24th. Behind her stretches a long line of failed challengers and rivals — men who had charged at her hard and who are still wondering what went wrong.
.. Mr. Schröder, whom the German press called an “alpha animal”, decided to create facts on the ground. He burst out with a forceful verbal barrage, insinuating that the moderators were biased, asserting that he was the real winner and disparaging Ms. Merkel. Constantly interrupting all his interlocutors as though in some dominance ritual, he blurted out, “Do you seriously think that my party will take up an offer of coalition talks from Ms. Merkel in this situation, in which she says she wants to be chancellor?”
.. Ms. Merkel’s reaction was more interesting. Whenever the camera strayed from the dueling silverbacks and zoomed in on her, she had a neutral expression, or a look of mild puzzlement, but never one of anger or annoyance. Her hands mostly stayed folded on the table in front of her. She hardly spoke at all. In effect, she responded to Mr. Schröder by not reacting.
.. Something had revealed itself that day on television between Mr. Schröder and Ms. Merkel. “When he entered the room, she had lost the election. When he left, she had won the chancellor’s office,” recalls Wolfgang Nowak, a former adviser to Mr. Schröder, who nowadays also has the ear of Ms. Merkel.
.. “Nobody is like her,” says Gregor Gysi, who was opposition leader in parliament for much of Ms. Merkel’s current term. Mr. Gysi is widely considered the wittiest speaker in German politics, and his job in the Bundestag was to needle and provoke the chancellor. But all of his attacks fell flat. Merkel never took his baits; he never got a rise out of her.
.. Ms. Merkel, he says, reminds him of his experience in the 1970s, when he was a lawyer in the East German dictatorship. During interrogations he could always crack the men, he says, but against a certain kind of woman he had “no chance”, provided they did not make the mistake of trying to be like men. Hillary Clinton made that mistake, Mr. Gysi says. She blew a presidential election in America against a man who is almost comical in his pseudo-virility. By contrast, Mr. Gysi says, “Merkel’s secret is that she has found a method against the men, but the men have found no method against her.”
“Merkel gets stronger by letting the men be men,” Mr. Nowak agrees. Many of these encounters resemble that televised encounter with Mr Schröder. “She let him do all his wrestling poses,” recalls Mr. Nowak. And in the end the macho always throws himself on the mat, with her left standing.
.. Take sex out of the equation for a moment, and her approach is reminiscent of the Japanese martial art called aikido. Its fighting style is based on channeling, rather than countering, the energy (ki) of an opponent, in such a way that the opponent overcomes himself. The underlying insight is that, as an aggressor attacks, his center of gravity is necessarily in flux and becomes unstable. A skilled fighter uses this. The result has less to do with tipping the opponent than with letting him fall.
.. The ultimate origin of aikido, as of Merkel’s style, is thus not strength but weakness. Morihei Ueshiba, who founded the martial art in the 1920s and 30s, was frail in his youth and so short (155cm) that he missed by one centimeter the height requirement to be drafted into the Japanese army for the Russo-Japanese war. Humiliated, he started hanging himself from tree branches and steel bars to stretch. He realized that he would never win through brawn, so he needed another method.
.. She has what Germans call “X legs” (knock knees) that make her appear to waddle more than walk. She takes a certain pride in her lack of athletic ability. A few years ago she fell and cracked her pelvis while cross-country skiing. Her spokesman, as part of his press briefing, said that “we assume low speeds.” She found that hilarious.
.. Machos such as Mr. Putin have themselves photographed riding horses bare-chested and flying with cranes. Mr. Trump cannot resist rebutting suggestions that he has “small hands” with unsubtle hints that “there is no problem” elsewhere. As though aware that she is their foil, Ms. Merkel embraces, even emphasizes, her physical frailty.
.. He speaks fluent German, just as Ms. Merkel, who spent the first half of her life in communist East Germany, speaks fluent Russian. When they converse, they often speak German and address each other with the informal du.
.. Ms. Merkel’s advisers, aware of Putin’s black Labrador Koni, had informed him in advance that she does not like dogs because she was once bitten by one.
.. The ploy backfired on Mr. Putin spectacularly. The German and foreign press was beside itself with indignation, whereas nobody got the idea that the chancellor’s vulnerability in the presence of the dog made her weak vis-à-vis Russia or its president. Instead it was Mr. Putin who looked as though he was compensating for a shortcoming. He had “to prove he’s man,” Ms. Merkel later told reporters, because “he’s afraid of his own weakness. Russia has nothing, no successful politics or economy. All they have is this.”
Today, according to people who have been in their meetings, Angela Merkel is the only Western leader Mr. Putin genuinely respects.
.. Ms. Merkel’s strategy is called “asymmetrical demobilization”. It means taking all the excitement out of the campaign so that voters for the other side stay home on polling day, thinking nothing much is at stake for them.
.. Her Social-Democratic challenger, Martin Schulz, tries desperately to whip up excitement at campaign events, with sweeping hand gestures and jabbing fingers. Ms. Merkel, meanwhile, keeps her hand movements to a minimum. Often she just defaults to her characteristic “Merkel rhombus”, which is really more of a kite formed between her hands.
.. “She manages to keep her finger tips barely touching even in stressful situations. That suggests that Merkel has a low cortisol level. And we choose those people as leaders who take longer to feel stress. So she is signaling something that she is not even aware of.”
.. Her body language is thus calming — to herself and her audience. The subliminal message is that politics is endlessly complex and demands expertise and subtle analysis — hers. In parliament and during debates, she often does what has been called her “dance of trust”: She sways back and forth, as though weighing alternatives, with her hands fine-tuning invisible air buttons.
.. Completely missing from her body language are dominance gestures. Ms. Merkel “gets on a stage, gets applause, lifts her hands for a greeting, but in that expansive gesture simultaneously ducks her head,” says Mr. Verra. She makes herself large and small at the same time. She does not lunge at an opponent but waits until her opponents fear looking weak and attack, thus initiating their undoing.
How does Angela Merkel wield power? If she gave an honest answer, she might cite Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of Aikdo: “It’s not that I am so strong—they [are] wrestling with themselves and spending their energy on the air.”
He used to rule Germany. Now, he oversees Russian energy companies and lashes out at the U.S.
For seven years, Gerhard Schröder was the leader of the most populous democracy in Western Europe. He modernized the country’s social security system, angered George W. Bush by refusing to participate in the invasion of Iraq and was only narrowly ousted in an election defeat to Angela Merkel in 2005. Schröder could have easily spent the rest of his career as an elder statesman, attending summits and writing books.
Instead, Schröder — a friend of Vladimir Putin who has defended Moscow’s top man as a “flawless democrat” — opted for a career in the Russian business world.
Schröder has spent much of the past decade working for the Russian energy industry, serving as a board member of several consortia in which Russian-government-controlled energy company Gazprom is either the majority or sole shareholder
.. At a time when Russian business connections among members of Trump administration have come under growing scrutiny, Schröder’s case stands out as the perhaps most blatant example of a Western politician having conflicts of interests when it comes to Moscow. “By becoming a well-paid official of a foreign, aggressive power he has damaged the reputation of the political class more than any other living politician,”
.. he went on to criticize the United States’ “monstrous” political influence, and he urged Germans to ignore Trump’s demands to spend at least 2 percent of GDP on defense. There was long applause for his remarks, which implied the need to improve relations with Russia.
.. Schröder’s renewed popularity among parts of the German left has also stunned conservatives, who are concerned about possible Russian election interference in September.
.. As chancellor, Schröder championed the North Stream pipeline deal with Russia. The German government pursued the offshore pipeline between Russia and Germany to cut energy costs and establish a reliable supply route, but the U.S. largely viewed it as a Russian attempt to make Europe more dependent on the Kremlin.
.. Fears in Washington over the pipeline date back to 2005, when Schröder hastily signed the deal during his last days in office. Then, just weeks after leaving politics, he began to oversee the implementation of the gas pipeline project himself — this time as a businessman in Russia and as the head of Nord Stream AG’s shareholder committee.
.. In 2014, at the height of the Ukraine crisis, Schröder celebrated his 70th birthday with Putin, sparking an international backlash. By opting for a post-politics business career in Russia, his critics said, Schröder had essentially chosen to join the Putin administration.
.. He’s also remembered as a “fighter with guts,” as Benner put it, for standing up to the U.S. during the Iraq War — something the Trump era may call for again.
.. Schröder’s rehabilitation also fits in with the traditional patterns of German politics. “Germans on the left and the far right have always had a weak spot for Moscow
.. “If Putin had not invaded Crimea and eastern Ukraine, many Germans would see him as a natural ally in times of transatlantic estrangement.”
.. With global confidence in the U.S. in free-fall due to the Trump administration’s policies, Schröder and other pro-Russian voices in Germany are finding it easier again to defend Putin, said Bierling — and so, too, are many Germans finding it easier to forgive and forget when it comes to their former leader.
Dinesh D’Souza on ‘The Big Lie’: ‘Fascism Has Crept Deeply into the Bowels of the Left’
“There’s a deep fascist streak in politics now. Ironically, the fascism of today marches under the banner of anti-fascism, and it claims the moral credibility of anti-fascism,” D’Souza said. “In other words, it tries to take all the odor of fascism – stained as it is with the Holocaust, Auschwitz – and project it onto Trump and on the right.”
“This is a massive historical deception. That’s the Big Lie at its core,”
.. D’Souza saw the election of former President Barack Obama as the tipping point for left-wing fascism.
.. “When Obama came in with his sort of Alinskyite sensibility, and Hillary, of course, having the same, a kind of gangsterism came into American politics.” he continued, “a gangsterism that said things like, ‘Let’s deploy the IRS against our opposition. Let’s wiretap using the FBI. Let’s try to put our opponents in prison.’ This is sort of fascist behavior, and this is the kind of thing that I don’t think – I mean, Jimmy Carter would not have dreamed of it. Neither would JFK or Truman.”
.. D’Souza said the left was driven to embrace these tactics by “the glimpse of being able to establish exactly what the fascists always wanted: a complete centralized state.”
.. “Remember, for example, that with the NSA today there are surveillance technologies that were completely unavailable to Mussolini in the 20s or Hitler in the 30s,” he pointed out. “So in a sense, true fascism, full-scale fascism, is more possible today than it was in the twentieth century.”
“This is sort of the leftist objective. Now, they thought that they were almost there – and then, out of nowhere, comes this bizarre guy Trump, and he sort of turns the tables. He takes over, and they’ve suddenly lost all three branches of government, and they can’t believe it. This is the fury out of which they’re striking back,” he said.
.. “Now, I’m not comparing the left to the Nazis of Auschwitz,” he added. “But I am comparing them to the early Nazis, and, in fact, I would insist that the history of the Democratic Party – look at its 150-year history of racism, slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan. This history is actually more reminiscent of Nazism than of, say, Mussolini-style fascism.”
.. “Mussolini didn’t actually have concentration camps,” he elaborated. “He didn’t persecute the Jews in the systematic fashion Hitler did. He didn’t have segregation. Mussolini’s fascism, in a sense, was much less racist. So if you want to compare racism, you’ve got to compare the Democratic Party with the Nazis – both those groups imbued, over most of their history, with deep racism.”
.. Kassam proposed that much of this truth has been hidden by rebranding left-wing heroes of the past, such as Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger’s transformation from eugenicist to “women’s health” pioneer.
“Margaret Sanger’s basic premise was eugenics,” D’Souza agreed. “More children from the fit and less from the unfit. She was in support of fairly extreme measures, including segregation and then, notoriously, forced sterilization in order to deprive lower-class and uneducated women of the chance to reproduce. She was very explicit about that.”
“Now, when the Nazis did it in 1933, Margaret Sanger gave speeches praising it. She said, ‘Look, the Nazis, the Germans, are ahead of us. We’ve got to catch up to them.’ This is the actual Margaret Sanger, but it’s not the Margaret Sanger you’ll find in Planned Parenthood brochures,” he said.
.. “Number one, I notice that the Republicans very rarely answer the accusations that are made against them,” D’Souza replied. “For example, all Trump needs to say is something like, ‘Hey, guys, it’s very interesting you call me a fascist. First of all, you guys slay me on every existing platform. I turn on the TV, comedians are ridiculing me. The media is blasting me. Hollywood people are railing. If I was really a fascist, do you think I would allow that to happen? Do you think Mussolini would allow the radio in Rome to be blasting him? No, he’d send some people over. They’d shut down the radio station. That would be the end of that.’”
“Real fascism doesn’t tolerate that kind of dissent,” he noted. “The pervasiveness of it is clear proof that Trump is not an authoritarian; he’s not a fascist.”
.. The guys, for example, who wrote the Nuremberg laws, the senior Nazi officials, are literally standing there and debating these laws holding in their hand the blueprints of Democratic laws of the Jim Crow South. And they’re basically saying, ‘All we need to do, in effect, is cross out the word black and write in the word Jew, and we’re home free.’ Literally, the Nuremberg laws were not parallel to, they were based upon – they were directly derived from – Democratic laws formed in America, in the South,” he said.