In the Middle East, recent events have faced an inexperienced national leadership with a tough test– and so far, they have been failing it. I’m talking about Ehud ‘the hair trigger’ Olmert, Israel’s recently elected Prime Minister, a man with almost no previous experience of strategic affairs, and his Defense Minister Amir Peretz (even less.)
I think this makes the current crisis more volatile than it would have been if– say– Ariel Sharon were still actively on the scene. Sharon was a pugnacious bulldozer of a military (and political) commander, it is true. But he did have a learning curve. Olmert and Peretz, by contrast, still have a lot to prove (and, I think, even more to learn.)
After the militants in Gaza had shown their determination to capture an Israeli soldier from near the border– and in light of long past history– dohn’t you think Israel’s military and political leaders should have been ultra-alert to the possibility that Lebanon’s Hizbollah might do the same? Hizbollah’s ability to do so surely showed a terrible lack of preparedness among the Israeli troops of the “Northern Command”. You can understand why the Israeli leadership felt embarrassed, angry, and just plain pissed off.
But what did they do with all that welter of emotions? They had a number of options they could have pursued since Wednesday– including conducting a rigorous investigation into how exactly the rreadiness in the Northern Command had fallen so low, launching some measured and focused military response, playing the “injured party” card and building a huge international campaign to persuade Hizbullah to release the captured soldiers, etc etc. Instead of which, there has been this infantile, primal-scream type of blanket military response against the infrastructure of much of Lebanon, backed up by some chest-thumping,angry-boy-in-schoolyard type of rhetoric.
To kill (so far) 86 Lebanese people, many or most of them civilians, and to rain fear, injury and massive and sometimes life-threatening destrucrion on many thousands more– all because some Israeli units on the Northern Front forgot their operational discipline and allowed a Hizbullah squad to infiltrate the border and seize control of a Humvee-full of soldiers? This is– as the EU has finally had the guts to say– far from being a proportional response.
I saw one Israeli leader– forget who– quoted as saying “we have to restore our deterrent power in order to restore stability.” This is a way to restore stability???
The WaPo’s David Ignatius had a thoughtful piece in the paper today. I disagree with some of David’s worldview. But he’s a solid and sensible thinker, well-versed in the strategic dynamics of the Middle East and well connected with some of the wiser people in the US intelligence agencies.
In today’s piece he writes this, which I largely agree with:
- Israeli and American doctrine is premised on the idea that military force will deter adversaries. But as more force has been used in recent years, the deterrent value has inevitably gone down. That’s the inner spring of this crisis: The Iranians (and their clients in Hezbollah and Hamas) watch the American military mired in Iraq and see weakness. They are emboldened rather than intimidated. The same is true for the Israelis in Gaza. Rather than reinforcing the image of strength, the use of force (short of outright, pulverizing invasion and occupation) has encouraged contempt.
I think he is right to link Israel’s doctrine with the US’s in this way. Both rely heavily on a unilateralist application of “shock and awe” tactics in order to bludgeon their opponents into political submission.
But what happens if you apply massive “shock and awe” tactics and the opponents don’t submit? Then, it seems to me, you end up looking really bloodthirsty, and also rather stupid. (As the US military posture now does, in Iraq.)
Along the way, you also have many further decision points that come along. Some of these can lead you into really serious over-reaching. Liike Sharon’s reckless and bullying decision in 1982 not just to pound Lebanon from air, sea, and land — but to send a large land force in, seize control of opver one-third of the country, andf “cleanse” it of all the Palestinian militants who were (then) his nemesis there… That ill-considered decision cost Israel, its people, and its economy dear… It took Israel a further 18 years that time to dig itself out of the hole it had dug for its forces inside Lebanon. (Hizbullah got born along the way there.) But Sharon also developed something of a learning curve there regarding the disutility of a policy of simply using bullying (and alwasys highly lethal) military force.
Ignatius makes another good point in his piece, too. Noting the importance of world public opinion he wrtites:
- To fight the Long War, America and Israel have to get out of the devil suit in global public opinion. For a generation, America maintained a role as honest broker between Israel and the Arabs. The Bush administration should work hard to refurbish that role.
Now, I disagree wityh David that America and Israel are required to fight any kind of a “Long War” at all. Finding reasonable, negotiated resolutions of outstanding political problems is the only way to exit from the existing cycles of hostilities in the Middle East and in US-world relations. There is no “Long War” to be fought. (The campaign against global terrorism is not, strictly speaking, a “war”.)
But David’s right to note that the salience of the fact that there is currently no ongoing Arab-Israeli peace diplomacy. Of course that affects the political dynamics in the whole of the Middle East. I saw one recent statement from Condi Rice when she talked about the importance of “getting back” to the Road Map and to– this is from my memory– “the shared goal of two democratic states living side by side for Israelis and Palestinians.” Well her attitude towards the democratically elected leadership that did emerge among the Palestinians wasn’t very supportive, was it? And similarly, her commitment to pursuing any serious peacemaking diplomacy between Israelis and Arabs has been just about non-existent.
I could write a lot more about this. I did want to write something about the radical strategic changes in the region since the Bushites recklessly (1) not only overthrew Saddam Hussein but then proceeded to dismantle the Iraqi state, and (2) recklessly broke off their previously close ties with the Saudis… To the point where of courser Iran is emerging as a newly self-confident power in the region. But I don’t have time to do it. It’s been a long couple of days.
One other thing I wanted to note regarding the current crisis is the noticeable dissonance between what Condi Rice is saying, as she continues to speak about the need for all sides to avoid hitting civilians and civilian infrastructure, and her boss the Prez, whose spokesman has just continued saying that he’s “going to second-guess Israel’s military decisions”, etc etc.
So guess which of those two the Israelis seem to have been listening to?
(Meanwhile, some very interesting political developments from Israel. I saw a family member of one of the two latest Israeli POWs saying on the BBC that Israel should negotiate for their release. (As Gilad Shalit’s father has also said.) And Gush Shalom– the Peace Bloc– has reported that just a few hours after Wednesday’s Israeli assault against Lebanon started, some 200 peace demonstrators were on the streets outside the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv.
On their website they report this:
- The reaction of passers-by was much less hostile then anticipated. Some drivers shouted curses at the activists, but quite a number honked in agreement. Most drivers seemed to be fatalistic.
The police brought a much larger force than usual, including a special unit for riot control. It seems that they feared a blocking of the traffic by the demonstrators.
The veterans among the demonstrators were reminded of the first demonstration not far from there which took place on the first day of Ariel Sharon’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. That time, also about 200 activists gathered – but their number grew within a few weeks to ten thousand, until the 400 thousand gathered to protest the Sabra and Shatila massacre.
Who knows how all this will end? I certainly make no claim to. I do know, though, that the vast majority of Lebanese, Palestinians, and Israelis all want to be able to escape from the horrors of repeated wars and to live lives that are secure, hopeful, and dignified. As I wrote before, it’s high time the Security Council stepped back into Arab-Israeli peacemaking and resolved the remaining dimensions of the conflict once and for all.