Anthony Cordesman has also been writing about Qana and the Lessons for Modern War (Center for Strategic & International Studies [CSIS]) 07/31/06
He departs from his dispassionate tone at times in this one, apparently because he's seems to be appalled at how ham-fisted the Olmert government has been handling Israel's war against Lebanon:
Qana is more than a horrifying human tragedy; it is a brutal lesson in the changing nature of modern war. It is also a lesson that applies just as much to Iraq, Afghanistan, and the war on terrorism as it does to the fighting in Lebanon. The lesson is simple: Limited wars must be fought in ways that give avoiding collateral damage and civilian casualties at least as much priority as destroying the enemy. ...
Israel has so far failed to understand this in Lebanon as the U.S. to some extent failed to understand it in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. This is all too natural in wartime, and Israel – unlike the U.S. with the exception of the attacks on 9/11 – is under direct attack. “Understandable,” however, is not “excusable” in modern war. Carelessly seeking immediate tactical advantage at the cost of major strategic risks and penalties is stupid and dangerous. Creating more enemies than you kill is self defeating; making it politically and ideologically impossible to end a war and so is spreading new levels of anger and hatred to other countries and/or factions.
The U.S. has long seen the consequences of careless treatment of civilians even in allied countries in peacetime. The actions of a few bad Marines in Okinawa have had major long-term strategic effects. More recently, expediency in treating detainees in the war on terrorism, Abu Ghraib, and the murder of innocent Iraqis has had a serious impact on the war in Iraq. The Serbs used collateral damage and civilian casualties as their primary weapon against the U.S. and NATO in Kosovo. Every real and reported air strike against civilians in Afghanistan has come at a serious price in terms of Afghan support.
He also is sounding fed up with a lot of moralistic and propaganda talk about the Evil Terrorists:
The officer or official who responds by accusing such enemies of being cowards or endangering their own people is simply stupid, incompetent, and obsolete. Quite aside from the fact that the U.S. and UK found no problem in using the same tactics against Nazi Germany, and democratic resistance fighters have used them in many wars, such talk is based on the fundamental strategic and tactical fallacy that wars have rules based on the past. Enemies always seek to fight on advantageous terms and modern enemies will seek to fight below our level of conventional military advantage at the tactical level and above it at the ideological level.
It is equally stupid, incompetent, and obsolete to simply call such enemies “terrorists” and talk about “democracy.” This may work within the confines of Israel or the Beltway, but wars are being fought for the minds and perceptions of very different people with very different values. Ethnic identity; perceiving such tactics as authorized by God or as the only workable route to liberation and “freedom fighting;” putting faith and culture first are military realities that no amount of prattle about universal Western values is going to defeat. (my emphasis)
7 comments:
Civilian casualties are unavoidable in this kind of conflict, however Israel has made two mistakes that have exacerbated the problem:
1. In their desire to avoid the bad PR associated with an invasion and re-occupation of Lebanon, the Israelis sought to rely on airpower and artillery fire -- two tactical approaches that were bound to produce civilian casualties given Hezbollah's use of villages and civilain areas for military purposes
2. Also for PR reasons, the Israelis have acted from the start with the knowledge that their use of force would immediately result in an outcry from the safe self-righteous and somewhat unsympathetic nations of Europe (their love for Jews being well known) -- so they have acted in haste, in the belief that even their American allies would soon begin to press them for a cease fire. Some civilian casualties no doubt can be attributed to this terrible error in their judgment.
It seems very clear to me that Israel need not worry about PR, and needs only to ensure that the mullahs in Iran and the regime in Damascus get the point - that their provocations will be met with a sharp, effective, and forceful military response.
As for Qana, it is being exaggerated by people who have watched impassively as Israel has been tormented by terrorism. The Israelis are fighting for their survival. They tried "land for peace". It didn't work. Now they must try deterrence.
Anthony Cordesman is a terrific analyst, and I always give weight to his viewpoint. But most of the criticism of Israel just seems so unbalanced and unreasonable. We fire-bombed German and Japanese cities. We dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Who are we kidding? Qana is not even worth mentioning on that scale.
I hope Israel takes more care to avoid civilian casualties, but they should make sure they crush Hezbollah, whatever the cost.
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Your TBV post quoting Jess Stern was excellent: honorable, and thought-provoking. I do believe this is a fight Israeli has to make, and one they have to carry to a clearly successful conclusion - even if there are civilian casualties.
Though such casualties are not completely avoidable, Israel could have done more to avoid some of the suffering and death.
What I think is mostly overlooked in the discussion, due to excessive attention to this question of whether some civilian casualties could have been avoided, is whether Israel made the right choice to use force against Hezbollah.
Personally, I think it was the only course of action open to them. And, unlike our misadventure in Iraq, this is a fight for survival. I hope they succeed.
Neil
Neil, interesting and thought-provoking comments. That's why you need to be posting regularly on politics on one of your blogs.
I'll mention a few points. Though obviously this war presents a lot of issues. On the initial July 12 attack: Hizbullah had been shelling Israeli troops in the occupied Shaaba Farms off and on for years. The Farms officially belong to Syria, though Lebanon claims them.
The July 12 raid by Hizbullah was a raid into Israel proper. It was perfectly legitimate for Israel to make some response to that. But no way did it justify waging all-out war on Lebanon.
We're probably more-or-less in agreement on the fact that Israel could have and should have done more to avoid civilian casualties. That's a question apart from the scope and justification of the war itself.
The same is equally true of Hizbullah. The mutual demonization on all sides of Israel's various conflicts has not only inflicted a horrible cost on the innocent - and even excessive costs to the guilty in some cases - but it also makes achieving a lasting peace more difficult.
I think you're right also on the miscalculations about air power. More generally, in any war one central question is how likely the means to be employed are to achieve the desired ends. The Olmert government didn't seem to have a clear idea of the ends to be achieved. If the goal had been to make some retaliatory strike against Hizbullah, air strikes on known Hizbullah locations would have been an adequate and appropriate approach. (cont.)
Bruce
(cont.) But if their goal was to diarm Hizbullah, destroy the organization, or put the Lebanese army in control of southern Lebanon, their means were grossly inadequate. Any of those goals would require sustained ground warfare. In the case of the latter goal, attacking Lebanese facilities and even the Lebanese army in places far removed from the Shi'a areas was actually counterproductive.
There's also a question of costs. Military observers right now seem to think that Hizbullah has the capacity to inflict heavy casualties on the IDF in a ground war. They've done it before, and they've been preparing for something like this for five years now. By all accounts, Hizbullah fighters are good at what they do.
If the end result of this is to make the IDF look less threatening to other countries in the Middle East, and to Hamas and other Palestinian groups, the costs may well far outstrip the gains. That's not an abstract speculation. The US military looks a lot less invincible today than it did in March of 2003 when the Iraq invasion began.
In *that* sense, there may be an element of fighting for survival in Israel's current war with Lebanon. Hizbullah has no conventional aggressive capabilities. They are not capable of taking over Israel or any part of it.
I also think you have a good point about the Olmert government's haste. I doubt that it was mainly focused on European opinion, though. They probably grossly overestimated their ability to devastate Hizbullah rapidly. Interestingly enough, there is some indication that the Cheney-Bush administration was pushing Israel to hurry up with their campaign. (cont.)
Bruce
(cont.) Altogether, this war is already looking like a classic example of how events can spin out of control. I doubt that the Israelis would have approached it this way if the decision-makers thought that three weeks into the war, Hizbullah would be firing more rockets into Israel than on any previous day, that Hizbullah would have inflicted surprisingly high casualties in guerrilla fighting and in what were really small-unit conventional military operations in some cases, and that they were now facing a possible new occupation of Lebanon of uncertain outcome.
Also, on the Second World War bombing experience: they didn't bear out the expectations of air power advocates, on either side.
They didn't break the "will" of the enemy's population; it made them hate the enemy who destroyed their houses and killed their family members even more. In Germany, the bombing had the unexpected, counterintuitive and perverse effect of *increasing* war production. (Very short explanation: so many civilian businesses were destroyed in the bombing of cities that a large new labor force was released to work in war production.)
Qana actually contains some of the same lessons as other demonstrations of air power. In this case, the hatred and resentments from the civilian casualties far outweigh any military benefit - if there was any military benefit at all. Israel's credibility took a new hit, even among Americans over this one. (cont.)
Bruce
(cont.) Qana was also the scene of what many people in that part of the world called the "Qana massacre" back in 1996, during Israel's Operation Grapes of Wrath. There were 106 civilians killed in air attacks on Qana, of which 55 were children. Another mass killing of civilians there by the same method resonates with the Lebanese public in a way that it does not with Americans. Most Americans of only heard of Qana as the place where Jesus turned water into wine at a wedding feast. (And even then, another city in Israel claims to be that place.)
The official Army postwar survey of the Second World War bombing results is available online. I'm going to blog about it one of these days. This one is the one on Europe:
http://www.anesi.com/ussbs02.htm
Chapter 25 of the 2006 edition of the "U.S. Army War College Guide to National Security Policy and Strategy" also gives a good survey of the hopes and disappointments of air power enthusiasts.
http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB708.pdf
Bruce
Did you see "Fog of War" - the documentary on Robt McNamara? In it, he admits to being a war criminal for the deliberate bombing of cities in Germany and Japan during WWII. I think you are correct -- Israel was unwise and unethical (taking a page from her sponsors in Washington) to rely on air war tactics to achieve the suppression of Hexbollah.
Let's hope that when they are done with the ground war, they will have impressed their neighbors with both their strength and resolve -- although at the moment, I believe you are also correct in assessing their performance to date as weak and ineffective (as well as brutal).
America's dismal performance in Iraq combined with a feeble and ineffective Israeli performance in Lebanon would surely enhance Iranian hegemony and reinforce the Iranians in their strategy to exert influence through Hezbollah. Worse yet, one must assume they will proceed more boldy towards acquisition of nuclear weapons.
Consequences such as these are unacceptable. America must support Israel, and should quadruple its resources and efforts in Iraq.
I believe we must negotiate with Iran, but Bush has succeeded in placing us in a position from which no such negotiations -- except for complete surrender -- are possible. And of course, we have only that twit Condi to handle the negotiations.
Ugh!
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