Israel: a spasm, not a strategy?

Jerry Pournelle relates,

[I]n the first days of McNamara's tenure as Secretary of Defense, he invited the Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) to explain the US strategic war plan (known as the Single Integrated Operational Plan or SIOP). After the review, McNamara said in horror "General, that's not a war plan! All you have is a kind of horrible spasm."

I have been wondering since Tuesday or so, when I started collecting citations for this essay, whether the same might be fairly observed about Israel's response to Hezbollah's provocations.

I say that having already written why, from Israel's point of view, Hezbollah's July 12 cross-border raid indicated a new level of violence by Hezbollah that Israel could not accept nor even risk. The question it faced was not whether to respond, the question was how.

Despite the barrages of essays across media and blog sites about Israel's "disproportionate" response, Israel could not retaliate against Hezbollah with merely a tit-for-tat raid. That would have signaled to Hezbollah that Israel accepted the new terms of the long-going conflict that Hezbollah set with its cross-border raid.

In poker terms, Hezbollah raised Israel $100 and probably expected Israel to call. Instead, Israel raised Hezbollah $1,000. Hezbollah doesn't have it, not in military capital. But Israel may have miscalculated whether Hezbollah can call or even raise in political capital. Its stack of chips may be higher than anticipated.

Not that Hezbollah has been Albert Einstein Israel's Homer Simpson. For example, see Alon Ben-Meir's analysis that there were "Disastrous
Miscalculations" all around.

... it is hard not to conclude that every player involved directly or indirectly has badly miscalculated.

This conflict will not end by a restoration of the status quo ante. Israel will refuse to allow a replay of the last two weeks. This means that there must be a dramatic change in both Lebanon and the Palestinian territories that satisfies Israel’s security concerns and sends the Israelis and Palestinians to the negotiating table in a permanently calm atmosphere. ...

Hezbollah has fared even worse than the Palestinians by badly miscalculating the Israeli reaction and counting on both the tacit and open support of Iran and Syria as well as the support of the Arab masses and governments to save the day.

... Seduced by his own rhetoric about how powerful and mighty Hezbollah is and eager to show solidarity with Hamas, Nasrallah overplayed his hand and now he is likely to pay a crippling price for his grandiosity. ...

But Syria and Iran underestimated the Israeli response. Somehow they were blinded to the fact that Hezbollah had crossed the line drawn in the sand by attacking urban areas inside Israel. To the Israelis this was totally and categorically unacceptable.

As far as the Arab governments' view of the war, Ahmed Al-Jarallah, chief editor of the Arab Times, says that they have swallowed a bitter pill:

Unfortunately we must admit that in such a war the only way to get rid of “these irregular phenomena” is what Israel is doing. The operations of Israel in Gaza and Lebanon are in the interest of people of Arab countries and the international community.

It's highly doubtful that Hezbollah thought it would not get even rhetorical support from Arab governments. The Washington Post:

"What is out there is concern among conservative Arab allies that there is a hegemonic Persian threat [running] through Damascus, through the southern suburbs of Beirut and to the Palestinians in Hamas," said a senior U.S. official who requested anonymity because of sensitive diplomacy. "Regional leaders want to find a way to navigate unease on their streets and deal with the strategic threats to take down Hezbollah and Hamas, to come out of the crisis where they are not as ascendant."

Hezbollah's cross-border raid that captured two Israeli soldiers and killed eight others has provided a "unique moment" with a "convergence of interests" among Israel, some Arab regimes and even those in Lebanon who want to rein in the country's last private army, the senior Israeli official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing conflict.

Israel and the United States would like to hold out until Hezbollah is crippled.

"It seems like we will go to the end now," said Israeli Ambassador Daniel Ayalon. "We will not go part way and be held hostage again. We'll have to go for the kill -- Hezbollah neutralization."

But another point of view is found in Ralph Peters op-ed piece, "War in Middle East A Tragedy of Errors."

Hezbollah got this one wrong. Whoever green- lighted the raid on Israel didn't anticipate the ferocity or scale of the Israeli reaction. Then the Israelis began to miscalculate - reacting impulsively and emotionally themselves. Attacking Hezbollah was fully justified and necessary, but Israel's frustration with the Lebanese government's toleration of terrorists boiled over into folly. Israeli aircraft attacked Beirut's international airport and other targets around the city, doing both Israel and Lebanon's fragile democracy far more harm than good.

Israel hopes to pressure the Lebanese government into taking action against Hezbollah. But Lebanon's leaders can't do that. If they ordered their work-in-progress military to attack and disarm Hezbollah, some Lebanese Armed Forces units would mutiny, others would disintegrate - and any outfits that attempted to take on Hezbollah would be badly and swiftly defeated. And the action would reignite the country's dormant civil war.

After the Israeli strikes in Beirut, Hezbollah then raised the stakes again by raining rockets down on Israeli cities - making it impossible for Israel to limit its offensive.

Counterterrorism Blog analyzes thus about Syria and Hezbollah and the future of Lebanon:

Syria. Reports from military sources suggest that Bashar Assad would like to see Israel enter South Lebanon. For a long time, one of the key drivers of Syria's economy was its domination of Lebanon; after Syria was pushed out last year, its economy took a major hit. Reports suggest that the Lebanese government has essentially ceased being functional. If Israel enters South Lebanon, engages in major combat operations and then withdraws, it will likely leave a power vacuum that the Lebanese government cannot fill. That will pave the way for Syria's return.

Hizballah. Hizballah has already shown that it's capable of taking on the Israeli military. This fact alone will help increase its prestige. Moreover, Lebanon's infrastructure has already been so damaged that Hizballah's social services network is bound to expand -- thus bolstering the terrorist group's standing.

A third consideration is what is likely to happen next. There appears to be little chance of a long-term Israeli engagement in Lebanon. If Israel were interested in a long-term occupation, it would have had to call up far more reserves than it did.

The Lebanese government includes Hezbollah representatives; it's unlikely that any Lebanese will consder the kind of incursion being staged by Israel as I write this to be something other than invasion, no matter how Israel describes it. They risk fighting not only Hezbollah but large numbers of Lebanese soldiers who will desert to join Hezbollah's ranks - except that the Lebanese government might release them to do so in the first place.

Jonathan Steele, writing for The Guardian in Beirut, wonders, "How could both sides have blundered so badly?"

The key questions for Lebanon are whether Hizbullah will emerge from the crisis stronger or weaker, and whether the sectarian divisions that sparked its last civil war will re-emerge deeply enough to launch a new one. ... [A]s Israel continues to destroy the country's infrastructure, killing more than 300 civilians and putting half a million people to flight, anger has forged Lebanon-wide unity. ...

Strongly anti-Hizbullah Lebanese commentators such as the Daily Star's Michael Young fear that Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbullah's leader, will emerge victorious.

"He doesn't need a military victory in order to secure his political resurrection. He needs only to survive with his militia intact and Israel sufficiently bloodied," he argued yesterday.

I personally think that Israel will be bloodied - Hezbollah has already shown it can fight skillfully and with determination. The question is whether Israel will pay the butcher's bill in its soldiers' blood to ensure Hezbollah's militia survives much less than intact.

I fear that Israel's leaders may have failed to remember what Richard Heddleson emailed me three years ago: "starting a war is like entering a dark room blindfolded." Even if Hezbollah's present ranks get badly depleted by Israel's arms, there will probably be no shortage of volunteers from Lebanon's population to reconstitute it. The enormous violence being done to the country and people of Lebanon, including Lebanese Hezbollahans, may propel Hezbollah, after open hostilities wind down, into a stronger domestic position than ever. It may wind up ruling the whole country.

I wrote near the beginning of Israel's operation that Israel was being forced to react to events rather than proactively shape them.

Despite being on the receiving end of Israel’s sword, it’s far from certain that either Hamas or Hezbollah think they are at disadvantage. In their minds, they may have Israel right where they want it, and they may be right in the long term. ...

All of which means that Israel was forced to react to circumstances rather than create them. Yet the real initiative is political, not military, and Hamas and Hezbollah (unjustly) hold the high ground there. I doubt that Israel’s military actions will reverse that.

For now the West, led by the United States, is giving Israel free rein; the Europeans are mouthing their usual "stop!" platitudes, but not very loudly nor earnestly. Even so, the day will come, and probably sooner than we think, when the West will insist on ceasefire, impelled not by military analysis but from the suffering of the Lebanese people. The calls have already started - actually they began almost the moment Israel sent its first F-16s into Lebanon.

Israel's grave risk is that Hezbollah will not be sufficiently degraded by the time the ceasefire negotiations are held. And, to paraphrase Will Rogers, Israel never lost a war or won a conference.

Now, I admit I could be underestimating the will of Europe, whose leaders may be awakened to the threat Iran poses via Hezbollah by proxy and who may actually understand the disastrous long-term consequences of letting Hezbollah survive. Certainly the "avert my eyes" reaction of the Arab countries is out of pattern for them, and that may make some backbone grow in the West.

As in so many things with such high stakes and countless variables, we shall see.

Fighting the wolves at the gate

The shepherd tends his flock at night as the wolves are ever present. He increases his control of the space around his pastures to establish a buffer for his sheep; to keep the wolves out of range. Finally he yields some of that space back to the wolves only to see the attacks against his sheep increase to the point that he begins to lose them to the wolves. What do we expect shepherds to do? We expect them to protect their sheep - to provide tranquility for their grazing and to defend them from the wolves.

The Catholic Church clearly states that peace is not simply the absence of war and that it is indeed a "tranquility of order" that is described as basic freedom. Well, Israel has experienced neither to the extent that we know it here in the US or in much of the western world today - and yet in relative terms it is an island of peace compared to the lives that Arabs live throughout the Middle East and Muslims live in Central Asia at the hands of their own regimes. In fact, until the War on Terror, Israel was the only nation in the region to grant Arabs a legitimate right to vote.

Aquinas teaches us from centuries ago that a "peace" can exist that is so brutal and corrupt that only war can establish or restore true human dignity and respect. Indeed Aquinas addresses war not as justice but as charity - that is, an act of love. Thus we have not only a right but a duty to achieve true peace and to provide legitimate defense for peace. Our common Christian tradition applies our scriptures to our world in a way that we have discerned four primary conditions for a Just War to do just that. They are 1) the threat must be lasting, grave and certain; 2) other means to counter the threat are ineffective; 3) there is a likelihood of success; 4) the actions taken must be proportionate to the threat.

So let us examine this current crisis in the Middle East in the context of Just War conditions.

Condition 1 – Lasting, grave, and certain

Israel has been fighting for its very survival since the day of its modern birth as a state. The threat of its total destruction has lasted its entire existence; and based on the words of its stated enemies that threat continues to exist (most starkly and alarmingly articulated by Iran in the last year; Iran who is the primary supporter of Hezbollah).

The Israelis have tolerated a level of violence for decades - a level that we would consider grave if it happened to us. They have had to live with it. But even their tolerance level knows its limits and when their survival is truly at stake. That day has arrived for them - again. According to STRATFOR.com (the best open source intelligence organization in the world in my opinion) the kidnappings of Israeli soldiers both by Hamas and Hezbollah demonstrated a new level of sophistication Israel has not seen before. In addition, the arms used by Hezbollah also are proving that they represent a far graver threat to Israel than they ever have before - now they can cause mass casualties within Israel itself. That is new and that is grave.

This threat has always existed and isn't going away. The militant threat to Israel is the very definition of "certain." There have been attacks from Gaza every day since the Israeli pullout a year ago and the Intifadah has never really abated. How many wars will Israel have to fight to prove to the UN and mainline Christian churches that the threat is certain? What is the level of violence we expect Israel to accept - while we are unwilling to accept anything close to what many in the West arrogantly expect Israel to "live" with? Chirac of France has already indicated he might use nukes if Muslim countries carried out or sponsored terrorist, WMD attacks in France - how many people and how much property do we think Israel should allow to be destroyed before they may defend themselves?

Hezbollah, Hamas and principal sponsor Iran have made it abundantly clear that they want to destroy Israel. Their desire and the real threat behind it are incontrovertibly lasting, grave, and certain.

Condition 2 - Other means ineffective

In an effort to give land for peace - both by withdrawing from Gaza and from southern Lebanon - Israel has received nothing but rocket attacks from those same areas every day. In 1998, at the Wye River negotiations, Ehud Barak offered almost everything Yasir Arafat had long demanded from Israel and yet he turned it down. (Dennis Ross, the US ambassador to the negotiations, has said that Barak agreed to “ninety-five percent” of Arafat’s long-stated demands.)

Fatah and Hamas continue not to be able to get their acts together to work for peaceful coexistence with Israel while Israel has reached out (peaceful coexistence has become a modern criteria of world harmony by the western world, including the Church). Hezbollah has received ever increasing training and aid from Syria and Iran while al Qaeda has worked diligently to make inroads in Palestinian refugee camps. Every action of the enemies of Israel points in only one direction - its destruction, not peaceful coexistence. They have only sought to buy time and the evidence today is that they believe their time has come or is close enough to provoke Israel. Diplomacy has consistently proved to be a failure. The fact is that the countless peace conferences over the decades have simply proven not that Israel’s interests and its enemies can be reconciled, but precisely that they cannot.

Condition 3 - Likelihood of success

Success is a word that we cannot often even imagine applying to the Middle East (though there have been some amazing successes there in the last five years such as the region has never known before). Yet there are examples of success that Israel has experienced with its neighbors in the past and that serve as a precedent that Israel should not be forced to exist under constant violence.

Israel’s former state enemies, Egypt and Jordan, are now at peace with Israel following past wars. They have diplomatic relations and serve as important intermediaries for one another. They are proof that peaceful coexistence is attainable. Also, the vast majority of Arab nations are not rushing to help Hamas and Hezbollah against Israel (except Syria and Iran who are real culprits and stand outside the current tide of history in that region). Indeed many are angered at these groups for creating a fight the region as a whole does not want.

Until now Syria had an under-the-table agreement with Israel to leave Israel alone while Israel left Lebanon alone and under tacit Syrian control - even with the withdrawal of Syrian forces last year. However, Syria has strengthened its surrogate Hezbollah while Syria in turn serves as a surrogate to Iran. What Syria needs is a change of sponsorship from Iran to someone else. Lebanon also benefits more from an Israeli victory; their problem is that they have been too weak to throw off the Syrian and Hezbollah yoke.

Can Syria and Lebanon come to experience the same peace with Israel that Egypt and Jordan enjoy? Yes, they can – but only if Hezbollah is neutralized. Israel is seeking to eliminate that problem for them. (Syria also would have to dissociate itself from Iran, a very tough problem even if it wanted to do so).

Condition 4 - Proportion

The differences here are compelling and stark. Israel targets military/infrastructure that is related to supporting Hamas and Hezbollah. There have been civilian losses but those are not the purpose of the strikes and are amazingly contained. Indeed Israel has sought to limit these casualties by leaflet drops in the civilian areas wherein Hezbollah and Hamas operate. This effort has come at the cost of operational surprise (that is, warning the enemy at the same time as warning the civilians) but it has saved countless lives.

On the other hand Hezbollah purposely targets Israeli civilians and makes no bones or apologies about it. The rocket fired from southern Lebanon over the last few years have been indiscriminately directed at Israeli towns and civilians. And the common practice of suicide-bomb attacks almost exclusively targets civilians. Again, how many sheep must Israel sacrifice? What level of violence must Israel accept that we utterly reject for ourselves?

Hezbollah needs to be eliminated in Lebanon and Hamas needs to be encouraged to continue their transition to a political entity. Hezbollah has only been getting stronger under Iranian support and the time may soon be coming for Israel when taking action is too late. Hamas needs to know that its example is Jordan and Egypt not Hezbollah.

The implications of the crisis for the US are significant. We are learning the hard way this summer that our enemies do not fear us. North Korea sees the sweet deal we have offered Iran and wants some of the action. Iran sees how stretched our military is and only has to listen to Al Gore and Rep John Murtha to ascertain how weak we are (in their words anyway). Why shouldn't they exploit their opportunity now?

We need to change that perception - indeed we are morally obligated to do so for our own sense of peace and legitimate defense. We need to revive the idea of "peace through strength" and convince our enemies that we are not to be trifled with. Our paramount duty is drastically to increase the size of our military so that deterrence is once again given a chance to work. That is the most moral thing we can do over the next few years.

As for now, the most moral thing Israel can do is to protect its people and rid itself of the cancer of Hezbollah. Israel must act as a good shepherd acts by engaging the wolves that threaten its sheep.

Genocide of Christians in Sudan, persecution elsewhere

Here is a video summary of persecution of Christians around the world, focusing on Sudan. Another entry in the "religion of peace submission" watch.