The 33 Strategies of War (87 page)

Most often their behavior is relatively harmless: perhaps they are chronically late, or make flattering comments that hide a sarcastic sting, or offer help but never follow through. These common tactics are best ignored; just let them wash over you as part of the current of modern life, and never take them personally. You have more important battles to fight.

There are, however, stronger, more harmful versions of passive aggression, acts of sabotage that do real damage. A colleague is warm to your face but says things behind your back that cause you problems. You let someone into your life who proceeds to steal something valuable of yours. An employee takes on an important job for you but does it slowly and badly. These types do harm but are excellent at avoiding any kind of blame. Their modus operandi is to create enough doubt that they were the ones who did the aggressive act; it is never their fault. Somehow they are innocent bystanders, helpless, the real victims in the whole dynamic. Their denials of responsibility are confusing: you suspect they have done something, but you cannot prove it, or, worse, if they are
really
skillful, you feel guilty for even thinking them at fault. And if in your frustration you lash out at them, you pay a high price: they will focus attention on your angry, aggressive response, your overreaction, distracting your thoughts from the passive-aggressive maneuvers that got you so irritated in the first place. The guilt you feel is a sign of the power they have over you. Indeed, you can virtually recognize the harmful variety of passive aggression by the strength of emotions it churns up in you: not superficial annoyance but confusion, paranoia, insecurity, and anger.

To defeat the passive-aggressive warrior, you must first work on yourself. This means being acutely aware of the blame-shifting tactic as it happens. Squash any feelings of guilt it might begin to make you feel. These types can be very ingratiating, using flattery to draw you into their web, preying on your insecurities. It is often your own weakness that sucks you into the passive-aggressive dynamic. Be alert to this.

Second, once you realize you are dealing with the dangerous variety, the smartest move is to disengage, at best to get the person out of your life, or at the least to not flare up and cause a scene, all of which plays into his hands. You need to stay calm. If it happens to be a partner in a relationship in which you cannot disengage, the only solution is to find a way to make the person feel comfortable in expressing any negative feelings toward you and encouraging it. This may be hard to take initially, but it may defuse his or her need to be underhanded; and open criticisms are easier to deal with than covert sabotage.

The Spaniard Hernan Cortes had many passive-aggressive soldiers in the army with which he conquered Mexico, men who outwardly accepted his leadership but were inwardly treacherous. Cortes never confronted or accused these people, never lashed out at them at all; instead he quietly figured out who they were and what they were up to, then fought fire with fire, maintaining a friendly front but working behind the scenes to isolate them and bait them into attacks in which they revealed themselves. The most effective counterstrategy with the passive-aggressive is often to be subtle and underhanded right back at them, neutralizing their powers. You can also try this with the less harmful types--the ones who are chronically late, for instance: giving them a taste of their own medicine may open their eyes to the irritating effects of their behavior.

In any event, you must never leave the passive-aggressive time and space in which to operate. Let them take root and they will find all kinds of sly ways to pull you here and there. Your best defense is to be sensitive to any passive-aggressive manifestations in those around you and to keep your mind as free as possible from their insidious influence.

Authority: As dripping water wears through rock, so the weak and yielding can subdue the firm and strong.

--Sun Haichen,
Wiles of War
(1991)

It is not pathological to attempt to gain control of a relationship, we all do this, but when one attempts to gain that control while denying it, then such a person is exhibiting symptomatic behavior. In any relationship that stabilizes, such as that between a husband and wife, the two people work out agreements about who is to control what area of the relationship.... A relationship becomes psychopathological when one of the two people will maneuver to circumscribe the other's behavior while indicating he is not. The wife in such a relationship will force her husband to take care of the house in such a way that she denies she is doing so. She may, for example, have obscure dizzy spells, an allergy to soap, or various types of attacks which require her to lie down regularly. Such a wife is circumscribing her husband's behavior while denying that
she
is doing this; after all, she cannot help her dizzy spells. When one person circumscribes the behavior of another while denying that he is doing so, the relationship begins to be rather peculiar. For example, when a wife requires her husband to be home every night because she has anxiety attacks when she is left alone, he cannot acknowledge that she is controlling his behavior because
she
is not requiring him to be home--the anxiety is and her behavior is involuntary. Neither can he refuse to let her control his behavior for the same reason.

S
TRATEGIES OF
P
SYCHOTHERAPY
, J
AY
H
ALEY
, 1963

REVERSAL

The reversal of passive aggression is aggressive passivity, presenting an apparently hostile face while inwardly staying calm and taking no unfriendly action. The purpose here is intimidation: perhaps you know you are the weaker of the two sides and hope to discourage your enemies from attacking you by presenting a blustery front. Taken in by your appearance, they will find it hard to believe that you do not intend to do anything. In general, presenting yourself as the opposite of what you really are and intend can be a useful way of disguising your strategies.

Terror is the ultimate way to paralyze a people's will to resist and destroy their ability to plan a strategic response. Such power is gained through sporadic acts of violence that create a constant feeling of threat, incubating a fear that spreads throughout the public sphere. The goal in a terror campaign is not battlefield victory but causing maximum chaos and provoking the other side into desperate overreaction. Melting invisibly into the population, tailoring their actions for the mass media, the strategists of terror create the illusion that they are everywhere and therefore that they are far more powerful than they really are. It is a war of nerves. The victims of terror must not succumb to fear or even anger; to plot the most effective counterstrategy, they must stay balanced. In the face of a terror campaign, one's rationality is the last line of defense.

THE ANATOMY OF PANIC

In Isfahan (in present-day Iran) toward the end of the eleventh century, Nizam al-Mulk, the powerful vizier to Sultan Malik Shah, ruler of the great Islamic empire of the period, became aware of a small yet irritating threat. In northern Persia lived a sect called the Nizari Ismailis, followers of a religion combining mysticism with the Koran. Their leader, the charismatic Hasan-i-Sabah, had recruited thousands of converts alienated by the tight control the empire exercised over religious and political practices. The influence of the Ismailis was growing, and what was most disturbing to Nizam al-Mulk was the utter secrecy in which they operated: it was impossible to know who had converted to the sect, for its members did so in private and kept their allegiance hidden.

"Brothers," says an Ismaili poet, "when the time of triumph comes, with good fortune from both worlds as our companion, then by one single warrior on foot a king may be stricken with terror, though he own more than a hundred thousand horsemen."

QUOTED IN
T
HE
A
SSASSINS
, B
ERNARD
L
EWIS
, 1967

The vizier monitored their activities as best he could, until finally he heard some news that roused him to action. Over the years, it seemed, thousands of these secret Ismaili converts had managed to infiltrate key castles, and now they had taken them over in the name of Hasan-i-Sabah. This gave them control over part of northern Persia, a kind of independent state within the empire. Nizam al-Mulk was a benevolent administrator, but he knew the danger of allowing sects like the Ismailis to flourish. Better to snuff them out early on than face revolution. So, in 1092, the vizier convinced the sultan to send two armies to bring down the castles and destroy the Nizari Ismailis.

The castles were strongly defended, and the countryside around them teemed with sympathizers. The war turned into a stalemate, and eventually the sultan's armies were forced to come home. Nizam al-Mulk would have to find some other solution, perhaps an occupying force for the region--but a few months later, as he was traveling from Isfahan to Baghdad, a Sufi monk approached the litter on which he was carried, pulled out a dagger from under his clothes, and stabbed the vizier to death. The killer was revealed to be an Ismaili dressed as a peaceful Sufi, and he confessed to his captors that Hasan himself had assigned him to do the job.

The death of Nizam al-Mulk was followed within weeks by the death, from natural causes, of Malik Shah. His loss would have been a blow at any time, but without his crafty vizier to oversee the succession, the empire fell into a period of chaos that lasted several years. By 1105, however, a degree of stability had been reestablished and attention again focused on the Ismailis. With one murder they had managed to make the entire empire tremble. They had to be destroyed. A new and vigorous campaign was launched against the sect. And soon it was revealed that the assassination of Nizam al-Mulk was not a single act of revenge, as it had seemed at the time, but an Ismaili policy, a strange and frightening new way of waging war. Over the next few years, key members of the administration of the new sultan, Muhammad Tapar, were assassinated in the same ritualistic fashion: a killer would emerge from a crowd to deliver a deadly blow with a dagger. The deed was most often done in public and in broad daylight; sometimes, though, it took place while the victim was in bed, a secret Ismaili having infiltrated his household staff.

A wave of fear fanned out among the empire's hierarchy. It was impossible to tell who was an Ismaili: the sect's adherents were patient, disciplined, and had mastered the art of keeping their beliefs to themselves and fitting in anywhere. It did not help that when the assassins were captured and tortured, they would accuse various people within the sultan's inner circle of being either paid spies for the Ismailis or secret converts. No one could know for certain if they were telling the truth, but suspicion was cast on everyone.

Losses to which we are accustomed affect us less deeply.

J
UVENAL, FIRST TO SECOND CENTURY A.D.

Now viziers, judges, and local officials had to travel surrounded by bodyguards. Many of them began to wear thick, uncomfortable shirts of mail. In certain cities no one could move from house to house without a permit, which spread disaffection among the citizenry and made it easier for the Ismailis to recruit converts. Many found it hard to sleep at night or to trust their closest friends. All kinds of wild rumors were spread by those who had grown delirious with paranoia. Bitter divisions sprang up within the hierarchy, as some argued for a hard-line approach to Hasan, while others preached accommodation as the only answer.

Meanwhile, as the empire struggled to somehow repress the Ismailis, the killings went on--but they were highly sporadic. Months would pass without one, and then suddenly there would be two within a week. There was no real rhyme or reason to when it happened or which high administrator was singled out. Officials would talk endlessly about a pattern, analyzing every Ismaili move. Without their realizing it, this little sect had come to dominate their thoughts.

In 1120, Sanjar, the new sultan, decided to take action, planning a military campaign to capture the Ismaili castles with overwhelming force and turn the region around them into an armed camp. He took extra precautions to prevent any attempt on his life, changing his sleeping arrangements and allowing only those he knew well to approach him. By making himself personally secure, he believed he could stay free of the panic around him.

As preparations for the war got under way, Hasan-i-Sabah sent ambassador after ambassador to Sanjar offering to negotiate an end to the killings. They were all turned away. The tables seemed to have turned: now it was the Ismailis who were frightened.

Shortly before the campaign was to be launched, the sultan awoke one morning to find a dagger thrust neatly in the ground a few feet away from the position where his breast lay on the bed. How did it get there? What did it mean? The more he thought about it, the more he began to literally tremble with fear--it was clearly a message. He told no one about this, for whom could he trust? Even his wives were suspect. By the end of the day, he was an emotional wreck. That evening he received a message from Hasan himself: "Did I not wish the sultan well, that dagger which was struck into the hard ground would have been planted in his soft breast."

On their voyage Pisander and the others abolished the democracies in the
[
Greek
]
cities, as had been decided. From some places they also took hoplites to add to their forces, and so came to Athens. Here they found that most of the work had already been done by members of their
[
antidemocratic
]
party. Some of the younger men had formed a group among themselves and had murdered without being detected a certain Androcles, who was one of the chief leaders of the
[
democratic
]
party.... There were also some other people whom they regarded as undesirable and did away with secretly.......
[
Athenians
]
were afraid when they saw their numbers, and no one now dared to speak in opposition to them. If anyone did venture to do so, some appropriate method was soon found for having him killed, and no one tried to investigate such crimes or take action against those suspected of them. Instead the people kept quiet, and were in such a state of terror that they thought themselves lucky enough to be left unmolested even if they had said nothing at all. They imagined that the revolutionary party was much bigger than it really was, and they lost all confidence in themselves, being unable to find out the facts because of the size of the city and because they had insufficient knowledge of each other.... Throughout the democratic party people approached each other suspiciously, everyone thinking that the next man had something to do with what was going on.

H
ISTORY OF THE
P
ELOPONNESIAN
W
AR
, T
HUCYDIDES, CIRCA
460-
CIRCA
399
B.C.

Sanjar had had enough. He could not spend another day like this. He was not willing to live in constant fear, his mind deranged by uncertainty and suspicion. It was better, he thought, to negotiate with this demon. He called off his campaign and made peace with Hasan.

Over the years, as the Ismailis' political power grew and the sect expanded into Syria, its killers became almost mythic. The assassins had never tried to escape; their killing done, they were caught, tortured, and executed to a man, but new ones kept on coming, and nothing seemed to deter them from completing their task. They seemed possessed, utterly devoted to their cause. Some called them
hashshashin,
from the Arabic word
hashish,
because they acted as if they were drugged. European crusaders to the Holy Land heard stories about these devilish
hashshashin
and passed them on, the word slowly transforming into "assassins," passing forever into the language.

Interpretation

Hasan-i-Sabah had one goal: to carve out a state for his sect in northern Persia, allowing it to survive and thrive within the Islamic empire. Given his relatively small numbers and the powers arrayed against him, he could not hope for more, so he devised a strategy that was surely history's first organized terrorist campaign for political power. Hasan's plan was deceptively simple. In the Islamic world, a leader who had won respect was invested with considerable authority, and to the extent that he had authority, his death could sow chaos. Accordingly Hasan chose to strike these leaders, but in a somewhat random way: it was impossible to see any pattern in his choices, and the possibility of being the next victim was more disturbing than many could bear. In truth, except for the castles they held, the Ismailis were quite weak and vulnerable, but by patiently infiltrating his men deep into the heart of the sultan's administration, Hasan was able to create the illusion they were everywhere. Only fifty or so assassinations are recorded in his entire lifetime, and yet he won as much political power through them as if he had an enormous army.

This power could not come by merely making individuals feel afraid. It depended on the effect the killings would have on the entire social group. The weakest officials in the hierarchy were the ones who would succumb to paranoia and voice doubts and rumors that would spread and infect those who were less weak. The result was a ripple effect--wild swings of emotion, from anger to surrender, up and down the line. A group caught by this kind of panic cannot find its balance and can fall with the slightest push. Even the strongest and most determined will be infected in the end, as Sultan Sanjar was: his attempts at security, and the harsh life to which he subjected himself as protection, revealed that he was under the influence of this panic. One simple dagger in the ground was enough to push him over the edge.

Understand: we are all are extremely susceptible to the emotions of those around us. It is often hard for us to perceive how deeply we are affected by the moods that can pass through a group. This is what makes the use of terror so effective and so dangerous: with a few well-timed acts of violence, a handful of assassins can spark all kinds of corrosive thoughts and uncertainties. The weakest members of the target group will succumb to the greatest fear, spreading rumors and anxieties that slowly overcome the rest. The strong may respond angrily and violently to the terror campaign, but that only shows how influenced they are by the panic; they are reacting rather than strategizing--a sign of weakness, not strength. In normal circumstances individuals who become frightened in some way can often regain their mental balance over time, especially when they are around others who are calm. But this is almost impossible within a panicked group.

As the public's imagination runs wild, the assassins become something much larger, seeming omnipotent and omnipresent. As Hasan proved, a handful of terrorists can hold an entire empire hostage with a few well-calibrated blows against the group psyche. And once the group's leaders succumb to the emotional pull--whether by surrendering or launching an unstrategic counterattack--the success of the terror campaign is complete.

Victory is gained not by the number killed but by the number frightened.

--Arab proverb

KEYS TO WARFARE

In the course of our daily lives, we are subject to fears of many kinds. These fears are generally related to something specific: someone might harm us, a particular problem is brewing, we are threatened by disease or even death itself. In the throes of any deep fear, our willpower is momentarily paralyzed as we contemplate the bad that could happen to us. If this condition lasted too long or were too intense, it would make life unbearable, so we find ways to avoid these thoughts and ease our fears. Maybe we turn to the distractions of daily life: work, social routines, activities with friends. Religion or some other belief system, such as faith in technology or science, might also offer hope. These distractions and beliefs become the ground beneath us, keeping us upright and able to walk on without the paralysis that fear can bring.

Under certain circumstances, however, this ground can fall away from under us, and then there is nothing we can do to steady ourselves. In the course of history, we can track a kind of madness that overcomes humans during certain disasters--a great earthquake, a ferocious plague, a violent civil war. What troubles us most in these situations is not any specific dreadful event that happened in the recent past; we have a tremendous capacity to overcome and adapt to anything horrible. It is the uncertain future, the fear that more terrible things are coming and that we might soon suffer some unpredictable tragedy--that is what unnerves us. We cannot crowd out these thoughts with routines or religion. Fear becomes chronic and intense, our minds besieged by all kinds of irrational thoughts. The specific fears become more general. Among a group, panic will set in.