decapitation discussed

Max Fisher offers some caveats to the imminent regime downfall narrative, using Sri Lanka as an example:

Sri Lanka's long conflict between the government and ethnic minority rebels is far too brutal and complicated to be truly analogous to any war, particularly Syria's. Yet the rebel gains were at times so dramatic, and yet their ultimate defeat was so total, that it's a reminder of the difference between wounding a regime, no matter how severely, and actually toppling it. In 1991, suicide bombers killed 19 people in the capital, including the hardliner defense minister, a major victory for the rebels. Later that year, they killed 50 more, some of them top officials, at a major military headquarters. Two years later, they killed the president. Yet the government's forces became only more inhumanly brutal, and in a 2009 orgy of killing, they won.

I think the difference in that case was the fact that the Sinhalese were a majority in Sri Lanka, while the Alawites are a minority in Syria. If not given time to think, they can potentially be stampeded out of power. On that note, it's been astonishing watching the aftermath to the bombing on twitter this afternoon. If the first part of operation decap attack was the assault launched by 2500 rebels earlier this week, and the second part today's transformation of Assad's war cabinet into Stauffenburgers, then the third part is the offensive launched on social media. Obviously, there was a lot of random crowing but behind that there seems to be a focused attempt to panic the regime and its active supporters into defecting, fleeing or just giving up. It's the first time I've ever seen political warfare unfold, in real time, right in front of me, and directly allied to kinetic operations.

Comments

[Strategist]

the offensive launched on social media...seems to be a focused attempt to panic the regime and its active supporters into defecting, fleeing or just giving up.

As I understand what is happening, the rebels are beholden to the Saudis for their weapons, but where is this sophisticated approach coming from? Is it really homegrown? Where are the Israelis in all this, surely not standing by, idle?

Sorry for having to ask such basic questions, but I only have what I get from the BBC to go on, and they seem to think that the only question of importance in all this is "when will "the west" intervene'?

[nick s]

where is this sophisticated approach coming from?

YouTube and Facebook, apparently. The future is weird.

[dsquared]

I am not 100% sure that "where are the Israelis in this?" is necessarily a productive direction for research. It is not exactly as if "putting a load of stuff on Twitter" is really all that sophisticated an approach.