The Iqra Files

Notes On Monstrosities and the Garrison - After the Islamabad MOU

Monstrosities are a curious thing. Monstrosities are viewed with a sense of repulsion, but inevitably they must yield some sort of power to those who are brave enough to first of all conceive, create, and then deploy them. Traditional Islamicate commentary that hone in on the military-industrial complex and systems of hyperfinance/financial manipulation make a great fuss on the monstrous part, but fail to neglect that in that monstrosity lies power, and with power alone comes sovereignty. Resistance is necessary of course, as a pathway to sovereignty but the monstrosity itself cannot be negated, it cannot be sanitized, it cannot be wished away. For if the Old Islamicate wants to be reborn and to face the century ahead with some degree of vitality, then the time has arrived to deploy monsters of its own. The military-industrial complex cannot be sanitized, cannot be regulated; it has to be built. Building monstrosities within the borders of the Old Islamicate is what will truly unlock sovereignty.

Palantir is an example of such a monstrosity. It's an abomination that is designed to enslave men using data, metadata, surveillance, all within a larger and more insidious nexus of glorified spyware that is designed ultimately towards a predictive algorithmic form of policing the soul. This is all well known, and it would be futile to think that Palantir can be defeated through appeals to a higher aesthetic sense of what it is to be human or to indulge in Luddite defenses about resisting technocratic managerialism via mechanisms of hyperfinance, which now come to characterize the modern stock market. Yes, on an individual level one must guard the secrets of their soul and for that, one has to engage with the question of technology by focusing on encryption, which is where the cypherpunk dimension comes in. This is why it is so pertinent to any future form of New Islamicate sovereignty. However, the question then remains about offensive capabilities and deploying monstrosities to restrain one's enemies and to cause chaos, havoc, and fitna amongst their ranks through the use of cognitive hyperwar. For such a thing to materialize, you have to accept the necessity of building a Palantir-like structure within the Old Islamicate and then using it against those who would wish the Ishmaelite harm.

And here lies the confusion between maintaining individual fidelity to higher ideals, to religious forms of spiritual elevation and enlightenment, and what is actually required for a state or any form of political organization, a biopolitical organism in actual fact to thrive ahead in the pending century of horror, repulsion, fear, disgust. These can no longer be emotions that preclude one from accessing all forms of extrastatecraft and statecraft - weaponized across all domains.

In totality, all of this stems from war. War is indeed the driving impulse and mechanism for the hyper-optimization of a political organization. Whilst that may run contrary to individual diktats for what constitutes spiritual discernment, it cannot be used as an excuse to bypass the fundamental hard question of sovereignty. There is much to learn from the Iranian experiment. The IRGC has evolved into a mature drone and missile power that is able to exert regional hegemonic dominance that few would have considered possible before the outset of the war. We had envisioned that the conflict would potentially end up in an attritional stalemate that would have potentially caused deep infrastructure decay in the region for decades to come. Despite the Islamabad Memorandum, that scenario is still potentially on the table but we now start to suspect it is waning and fading. The simple reason for that is that the Iranians have contended with the Americans directly within the domain of monstrosity and abomination and the American War Machine is an ageing obsolete colossus that has to contend with rising dissent from the peasants creaking under debt and opioids back home.

The IRGC security policy of forming militias, which transcends the current status quo nation-state borders, has proven to be quite an incredible asset. They have also understood fundamentally, in their own context, the question of technology. It was no mistake that the IRGC had made several threats across the war and across the regional theatre against American technological firms and institutions. Nor was it a mistake that they also threatened to cut the internet cables and delivered on their threat of bombing Amazon datacentres. The mimetic framing of this, which we of course were quite partial to, was that this was a form of Twelver Butlerian Jihad - a Luddite neo-reactionary cataclysm. Discernment on the other hand is much more mundane, the IRGC understood that the technological age in the century ahead has a fundamental physical substrate that is dependent on real-world infrastructure, which in itself is connected to quite fragile supply chains and logistical relationships. Algorithmic and silicon dominance can easily be disrupted by taking real action in the physical world, targeting its most precious supply chain fragilities and weaknesses.

This is something that Sunni groups, whether they were extra-state actors, militias, or jihadi outfits, have failed to fundamentally grasp. Targeting the infrastructure for algorithmic sovereignty, computational sovereignty or to even borrow the terminology of Benjamin Bratton, The Stack is real terror. Cutting down the physical foundations of the Brattonian Stack is the only way to impose horror and unleash monstrosities on the physical realm. It is clear from the way that the recent defensive operation that the IRGC prosecuted, that they understood this dimension and were ready to escalate up the ladder in their conception of technological decimation of the key nodes of Global American Empire (GAE). We hope this understanding spreads more widely in Muslim circles, particularly amongst Sunni groups who are unhappy with the status quo of many parts of the Old Islamicate. Essentially, one can hold to hostage and to ransom nation-states who have higher aspirations towards some form of cybernetic governance. The data center should be the target of fury for such groups who are unhappy with the direction of travel of technocratic managerialism and modernism.

Looking at it dispassionately though, that of course is quite an extreme position because the IRGC, are not Luddites in any sense of the word. They are already pursuing forms of cybernetic governance within their own domestic capabilities and also have evolved a reasonably mature indigenous military industrial complex. To evolve such a sophisticated, integrated network of missiles, drones, and militias is to engage with the questions of the technological age. We also believe, that this term "proxies" doesn't necessarily do justice to the informal and sophisticated relationships the IRGC has formed with regional paramilitary and militia groups across the regional theatre. That in itself is also a form of reasonably mature social technology that has thus far eluded Sunni groups. All of this the reader might glean from what we have said thus far is ultimately related to the question of technology - There are more in-depth debates that must be had about:

It also involves being cognizant and cynically so, of the fragility and weaknesses of these endeavors and then using that to target foes and enemies. Mutually assured destruction was seen to be the theory behind escalating nuclear acceleration. If anything, the India-Pakistan conflict showed that even two nuclear-armed states can have quite spectacular exchanges of military activity with the acknowledgement of the nuclear threshold. In any case, it is quite an extreme scenario. Perhaps what the IRGC has demonstrated is that mutually assured destruction will be more fully realized when nation-states accept and refuse to gamble around the red lines signifying fragility of technological superstructures, logistics/trade routes and planetary computation. To put it quite simply, existential war potentially can be stopped by deploying monstrosities and horrors against inherently fragile technological superstructures for which states, in their quest for cybernetic godhood, have accelerated in building without much thought afforded to contingencies.

There is still much left to be played out with the current chapter of GAE-Zionist aggression across the region. Our initial thesis of attritional decimation for regional infrastructure to such an extent that it could make the Gulf nodes of American Empire even more inherently dependent on the central imperial heartlands is still in play. Those who have read the Islamabad Memorandum are aware that the devil is in the details, and there's still much that can transpire over the next three-month period in particular. All media agitation demonstrating rift between the Israelis and Americans is a form of cognitive warfare that masks a more sinister development, which is a bill that is currently passing through the American legislature. This proposes to fuse the Israeli and American military as one organism, thereby removing any form of audit or rigorous financial oversight. This indeed is the backdrop for Netanyahu's recent statements about weaning off American aid. which is media fluff because if the Israeli military itself becomes a core part of the American armed forces, then there is no longer any disentanglement that is possible. All the funding that Trump has promised to the American military will in fact find its way to Tel Aviv.

The recent setbacks and the emergence of a potential Sunni bloc (here we use Sunni in a nominal-cultural sense rather than theopolitical or ideological), even if it is a bloc consisting of dysfunctional states like Egypt, Pakistan, and Turkey in alignment with Saudi capital, presents a unique opportunity to remilitarise the Levant and to conceive of Syria, particularly, as a form of Sunni strategic depth. Strategic defeats for Israel have now offered Sunni states a moment of reprieve at a time when the expansion of the Abraham Accords seemed all but inevitable. For the first time, perhaps in living memory, we now have an opportunity, with the Americans in full retreat from the region, with no appetite to rebuild expensive and inherently weak bases around the Gulf Coast for the aforementioned Sunni bloc to really focus on Syria as a garrison state to use as a buffer to restrain the Kahanite abomination. Turkey itself has already demonstrated it has the necessary prerequisites to build the domestic military industrial complex. Saudi capital, perhaps now more so with its defense pact with Pakistan will be focused more on computational sovereignty and military independence rather than e-gaming exhibitions, as its ruling elites now have fundamentally understood the existential nature of the competition that they find themselves in. There is potential, with recent developments known to keen observers of the clear moves towards more formal integration of military capabilities between the Saudis, Turks, Egyptians, and Pakistanis, to focus their energies and intentions on Syria and to build it as a militarized garrison state. This window we would envisage, will be short-lived, but at least it has now presented itself.

Unrestrained Iranian hegemony for the region is a problem and challenge that needs to be addressed and is clearly not a desirable outcome. Conversely, we also argued at the outset of the war (against those who wish-casted that the Iranian state would simply collapse under American military pressure) that the prospect of the Islamic Republic imploding was also a welcome one. The total collapse of the Islamic Republic would be a complete and utter disaster for the region that would have taken decades to recover from, and would potentially lead to an incredibly volatile situation where the Iranian landmass would be balkanized across ethnic lines, precipitating endless biomass conflicts rippling across into Turkey and Pakistan.

The uneasy task now facing the Sunni bloc is to contend with two distinct networks that are now in motion in the region:

The Sunni bloc that we have outlined, with Saudi capital (but it also should be mentioned Qatari capital) has to navigate both these threats carefully and systematically. We believe that at the heart of this question is going to ultimately lead towards Syria being focused on as the quintessential militarized garrison state, which can keep both forces in check. Such a project would require hitherto unseen levels of competence from the Sunni actors.

The Israeli challenge is one that is existential and the Iranian challenge is one that will require ultimately building up military deterrence but also more importantly, diplomatic capital to reach some sort of detente and a large regional understanding. During the war, we did mention that ultimately the end goal for the region would be an enhanced and expanded GCC that would also end up including Yemen and Iran, which at this moment in time sounds ridiculous. The GCC has such a unique role to play, given its impressive pools of hyperfinance and capital, geographical location, and also exceptional forms of administration, governance and statecraft to bridge the gap between Iranian hegemony and the Sunni bloc - we can only see an Expanded GCC delivering lasting regional peace in partnership with the Egyptians, Turks and Pakistanis.

And truly God knows best