Eric Umansky

"Stupid, Incompetent, and Obsolete"

Military analyst Anthony Cordesman rips the strategy so far by Israel--and the U.S.:

Most modern combat...will be wars against enemies that use terrorism, insurgency, and asymmetric tactics and fight at the political and ideological level. Winning will require victory at that political and ideological level, and in the tactics of shaping the psychological, perceptual, and media dimensions of the conflict.

Defeating the enemy will not be more important than winning the support, or at least tolerance, of the population. Local, regional, and global perceptions of the conflict will be as important in sustaining a war, and in terminating conflict on favorable and lasting terms, as the number of enemies captured and killed.

Israel has so far failed to understand this in Lebanon as the US to some extent failed to understand it in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. This is all too natural in wartime, and Israel - unlike the US 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....

Modern war is going to be war fought by both state and non-state actors that seek to compensate for US, Israeli, and other countries' conventional military superiority by using populations and civil facilities as a shield, and constantly finding and exploiting new ways to use civilian casualties and collateral damage as ideological, political, psychological, and media weapons. It is also a duel that favors the enemy actor. It is easier and cheaper to disperse, shelter, hide, and collocate, and then exaggerate and lie if civilian casualties and collateral damage occur.

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 US 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.

It may simply be too late for Israel to react in this war. It entered it based on deeply flawed grand strategic and tactical principles, and seems to have fought the ideological and political dimension on the basis of the perceptions of Israelis and Americans. The IAF and IDF have so far been clumsy in both air and artillery operations, and sought tactical advantage at serious risk of excessive civilian casualties and collateral damage. Military cultures do not change in mid-operation and the incredibly clumsy IDF and Israeli government response to Qana is a case in point. Israel will, however, have to learn in the future if it does not want to take a largely passive region and turn it into an active enemy.

The question for the US is will it learn in time to win in Iraq and Afghanistan, and seek the new military reality it faces in shaping its force transformation. One critical case will be the battle of Baghdad, where any major American mistake could alienate large numbers of Sunnis - or more seriously - turn a large number of Shi'ites against the US. Baghdad is a political struggle for stability and security; not a counterinsurgency campaign...

More broadly, however, the Bush Administration and US military need to drastically reshape their priorities and methods to deal with suspected terrorists and detainees.

(Cordesman's analysis arrived via email, and it's not online yet that I've seen.) 
Israel's response, says Greg  Djejerian,    was more an "ill-advised temper tantrum than a serious military operation."   That's a notch more condescending than  I'd put it. But it gets the general dynamics right: Israel, I suspect did act out more out of emotion than reason. Israel certainly had a right to respond. The question--that I think we know now the answer to--is whether it was wise to respond with such an overwhelming air campaign.*

* I think one of the underappreciated dynamics  that's driven Israel's strategy so far has been the degree to which Israel was traumatized by its 20-year grinding ground-war  in Lebanon.

The air war, I suspect, was basically an attempt at a cheap solution: This time, the thinking went, our soldiers won't get stuck in the mud.  We'll take down Hezbollah via the air. It was such a perfect solution--we can take down Hezbollah without the kind of messy ground-war that so traumatized us-- that what was tossed aside was the overwhelming evidence that fighting guerrillas via the air almost never works.

 

 

"Hezbollah is getting stronger"

Fareed Zakaria  speaks some painful trtuhs  on ABC's This Week*:

The idea that you will be able to eliminate Hezbollah just doesn't make any sense, because what they feed on more than anything else is hatred, and intensity of emotion....

I would argue that Israel is of coure justified. Hezbollah is the bad guy here. But ask yourself a simple question: Is Hezbollah  stronger than it was three weeks ago? It has some sympathy from the Maronites. It has more sympathy for the Sunnis. It has more sympathy from the Shiite and Sunni of Iraq. On a very fundemental level I would argue Hezbollah is getting stronger.

And Zakaria was saying this before he seemed to know of air strike that killed about 50 Lebanese civilians, mostly children. 

Contrary to much of the chatter about how the dynamic developing--of Hezbollah essentially fighting Israel to a statement (and thus effectively winning)--that really shouldn't be a surprise. Fighting a counter-guerilla campaign has never worked well from the air, nor have efforts to bomb people into submission. 

But that's all (recent) history. The question is what should Israel do now. And honestly, I'm just not sure.

I've argued for the past two weeks that Israel has made a big mistake by using such heavy force. But now that it's done so the calculation has changed. If Israel outright stops its campaign today or tomorrow, then there will be a near consensus: Israel failed. It failed to protect its soldiers at the outset, it failed to protect its citizens from rockets, and it failed to crush Hezbollah.

Israeli leaders know that, which is why I can't imagine they'll agree to a ceasefire right now.  They'll lose too much strategic street cred. And honestly, that gives me pause too. But I don't know that Israel can regain that cred by fighting. In fact, time so far has been working against Israel. More pictures of Lebanese suffering, more time that Hezbollah has held out, etc. etc.   So maybe the best Israel can hope is to  stop the fighting, and push for international forces to form their own buffer zone and (fingers-crossed) keep Hezbollah at bay....

*No transcript is up yet. I just happened to watch--and Tivo--it.

CIA thinks offensive will make Israel less safe

That's what retired defense intelligence man  Pat Lang  hears:

Serving senior and former U.S. intelligence officials said that this
latest Israeli onslaught against the Hizballah will work to further
undermine Tel Aviv's security in the near future.

They said that the American public and especially officials in the Bush
administration appear to be laboring under several potentially disastrous  illusions regarding the Israeli-Hizballah fighting.

One of the first of these is that Hizballah can be uprooted and destroyed.
On the contrary, they insisted that it is an integral part of Lebanese society and an authentic
representative of the Shia population and cannot be gotten rid of by
bombing installations or capturing some strong points.

They also insisted that HIzballah is NOT a puppet of Iran. One former very
senior CIA official told me that Iran did NOT want this current upsurge in
violence, nor had Iran given any previous green light for the kidnapping
of the Israeli soldiers' Magnus Ranstorp, a British expert on Hizballah
said in an e-mail to me that Nasserallah (sic) made the decision himself, an
opinion which four former or serving U.S. government officials agreed
with. Ranstorp said there are two Iranian representatives from the Iranian
Embassy in Beirut that provide a direct link for matters that require
strategic guidance but said Nasserallah was the source of the kidnap
decision.Both Ranstorp and U.S. officials believe the notorious Imad
Mughniyeh who belongs both to the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and
Security (MOIS) and HIzballah, had a part in the implementation of the
decision but was not the author of it.

I don't know about the connections to Iran, but the overall dynamic of anger at the offensive outweighing the military benefits  makes general sense to me.

UPDATE: As Cal points out in comments and I noted in TP, there's a poll out that--if accurate--shows serious uptick in Lebanese support for Hezbollah. From the Christian Science Monitor:

According to a poll released by the Beirut Center for Research and Information, 87 percent of Lebanese support Hizbullah's fight with Israel, a rise of 29 percent on a similar poll conducted in February.

More striking, however, is the level of support for Hizbullah's resistance from non-Shiite communities. Eighty percent of Christians polled supported Hizbullah along with 80 percent of Druze and 89 percent of Sunnis.

Just Asking

Take a look at this photo from the LAT:

The caption reads:  " Israeli soldiers stand near bodies, which they claim are dead Hezbollah fighters, after transporting them from Lebanon to the northern Israeli town of Yiron Wednesday."

How does it usually work with enemy bodies? Is it standard to take them across borders? Could it be that Israel is gathering them up as bargaining chips for later?

A Cease-fire: Bring it on

From Belgravia Dispatch:

We must remain very focused on reducing the winds in the sails of radical Islamist groups like al-Qaeda, but our basic carte blanche to Israel these past weeks, and our total conflation of Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda and seemingly every other group under the sun that we don't care for in the Middle East--is not only leading to far too simplistic foreign policy analyses among too many in the Beltway--but also, more important, serving as recruiting sergeant for more radicalized Islamists to proliferate, not only in the region, but in Europe and perhaps even the United States itself.

And what of Israel, you ask, an ally of long-standing that deserves staunch (but not blind) US support, in my estimation: it is clear, to me at least, that Israel’s long term security and existence will only be guaranteed by a two-state solution, one that the entire international community gets behind, involving binding resolution of the Sheba Farms, Golan Heights, West Bank, East Jerusalem and other so-called final status issues. America has to reclaim the mantle of ‘honest broker’ and lead this effort to a successful conclusion, whether a year or five years or ten years from now.

In the immediate context, of course, what is needed is a cease-fire.

One problem:  I can't imagine  Israeli  going anywhere near a ceasefire at the moment. Whatever the deeper reality, at the moment it looks like Israel is losing and no way Israeli leaders will agree to a ceasefire when it looks like that. Until they get some sort of momentum on their side, I have to imagine the campaign continues.   

The Opportunity to Split Hamas

I've talked plenty of times about the apparent rift in Hamas. Now Brad Plumer at Mother Jones notices a potential opportunity for the U.S. deepen the split. Read it, because it's a reasonable proposal.  But it would mean the administration would have to dealwith Hamas, so the chances of it happening...

Oh, My Times

I'm not sure how widely available it is now, but I just happened to click* on the NYT's MyTimes button and whatdayaknow, I got right in.  To my untrained eyes, it looks like a B-list MyYahoo---except in terms of loadtime, I'd put it at C-list.

But... you can see how various Timesians have set their  "MyTimes" pages. (One of the top items of Adam Nagourney's page: a list of Adam's Nagourney's recent work. Ditto Nick Kristof, Frank Rich, and others. Modesty points to Michiko, whose own work is way down at the bottom.)

Also, you can get a good sense of what the Timesians are reading.  See who's smitten by Raw Story and who's taking in Little Green Footballs and the Al Jazeera blog.

 

*Procrastination pays again!

A Wild Throw of the Dice

Smart take in a Wash Post op-ed by Philip Gordon  on why Israel's air war won't work :

The issue is not whether Hezbollah is responsible for this crisis -- it is -- or whether Israel has the right to defend itself -- it does -- but whether this particular strategy will work. It will not.

[Airstrikes] will not render Hezbollah powerless, because it is simply impossible to eliminate thousands of small, mobile, hidden and easily resupplied rockets via an air campaign. And it will not lead the weak Lebanese government to confront Hezbollah, because the civilian casualties caused by Israel's bombing are infuriating the Lebanese population and providing fodder for Israel's enemies throughout the Muslim world.

Perhaps recognizing that an air campaign alone might not bring about the desired effects, some have been calling on Israel to launch a ground invasion. What is less clear is why an Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon now would be any more successful than the one carried out in 1982, which led to the creation of Hezbollah, a bloody 18-year occupation and, ultimately, to Israeli withdrawal. Again the strategy seems to be based more on hope than on experience....

Those calling on Israel or the United States to use force against Lebanon, Syria and Iran legitimately ask what the alternatives to decisive action are. But they asked the same question about Iraq, and they seemed to overlook the possibility that a bad situation can be made even worse.

Given the long odds against Israeli or U.S. bombing campaigns actually producing the desired effects, a more focused and sustained strategy of proportional retaliation, increased support for the Lebanese government, international pressure on Iran and incentives for Syria to end its support for Hezbollah would seem a better approach than another wild throw of the dice.

Jagged Justice

I did a piece for Slate last month arguing that the military's justice system could be improved by the introduction of independent prosecutors.  As it stands  now, commanders have full discretion to impose charges on their underlings. And big surprise, turns out when politically sensitive issues are involved, such as abuse of detainees, commanders have in fact used that authority to put the kibosh on cases.

I'm bringing it up again, because today's Wash Post has yet another example:

On Sept. 11, 2003, a soldier shot handcuffed Iraqi detainee, Obeed Radad, in an isolation cell in a detention center in Camp Packhorse near Tikrit, supposedly when the Iraqi attempted to cross a barbed-wire fence. Radad had turned himself in nine days earlier, after learning that U.S. forces were looking for him. The bullet passed through his forearm and lodged in his stomach.

Eighteen hours later, an Army investigator began to look into the incident, according to an internal Army summary. Maj. Frank Rangel Jr., the executive officer of a military police battalion attached to the 4th Infantry, was assigned to investigate. He didn't believe the soldier's account that Radad was trying to escape.

"I thought the suspect might have committed negligent homicide" and lesser offenses, Rangel said later. Lt. Col. Poirier, Rangel's commanding officer, thought the shooter should be court-martialed. "This soldier had committed murder," Poirier said.

But [General Ray] Odierno overruled that recommendation, and ultimately the soldier was simply discharged from the Army for the good of the service. "I made the decision to dishonorably discharge him because of mitigating circumstances," Odierno said in an interview. "He was a cook, he didn't get proper training, and this detainee was very aggressive, a bad guy."

Odierno has seen been promoted, and he's about to become the No. 2 commander in Iraq.

Sadr's Lebanon Trip

TNR's Spencer Ackerman notices Sadr's people saying they're about to send 1,500 militiamen to fight in Lebanon.

As Ackerman notes, that's the kind of escalation President Bush is risking by not trying to tampt things down.