‘Institutional Failures’ Led Military to Teach War on Islam

A class urging senior US military officers to wage “total war” on Islam wasn’t just the work of one misguided teacher. According to an inquiry ordered by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, it was the result of “institutional failures in oversight and judgment” at one of the military’s top educational institutions.

Those are the results of a months-long, military-wide review into the US armed forces’ educational programs, prompted by a series of Danger Room articles on counter-terrorism training that sought to portray the world’s billion-plus Muslims as enemies of the United States.

The worst of those courses was taught at Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia. Titled “Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism,” the course began years ago as an inoffensive examination of the roots of violent extremism. But in later years, the class was “modified to adopt a teaching methodology that portrayed Islam almost entirely in a negative way,” said Col. Dave Lapan, a spokesman for Gen. Martin Dempsey, the nation’s top military officer.

The instructor of the course, Army Lt. Col. Matthew A. Dooley, spent weeks arguing that the US was at war with the Islamic faith. In planning for that war’s next phases, Dooley invited his students to use the lessons of “Hiroshima” to wipe out whole cities at once, and to target the “civilian population wherever necessary.”

Dooley has now been stripped of his teaching position at the college and formally reprimanded — but not cashiered from the Army. Two civilian officials at the college are being reviewed for possible “administrative or disciplinary action,” according to Lapan. “A second military officer will receive administrative counseling.”

With the exception of Dooley’s class, however, the Pentagon review “confirmed that adequate academic standards for approving course curricula, presentations and selecting qualified guest lecturers were in place” at the rest of the military’s teaching centers, Lapan added.

That brings the inquiry to a close — without resolving several questions about the course. Nor will the officers exposed to the anti-Islam message receive retraining to correct what the military itself considers an inappropriate and offensive instruction.

Dooley’s course, first reported by Danger Room, explicitly encouraged the lieutenant colonels, colonels, lieutenant commanders and captains to reduce Islam to “a cult status” and consider the Geneva Conventions against protecting civilians in wartime “no longer relevant.” Dooley discussed apply “the historical precedents of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki” to achieve the “destruction” of Islam’s holiest cities.