Dafydd ab Hugh, of Big Lizards, referred Rovin, and through Rovin, me, to the parable A Difficult Lesson. The author, David Bogner, lives in Israel, and concluded:
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President (Emile) Lahoud (of Lebanon) has already begun to shriek like a school girl to the UN Security Council to “Stop the violence and arrange a cease-fire, and then after that we’ll be ready to discuss all matters.”
Uh huh. Forgive me if I find that a tad hard to swallow. He allowed Hezbollah to take over his country. He allowed the regular Lebanese army to provide radar targeting data for the Hezbollah missile that struck the Israeli destroyer. He has turned a blind eye while Iranian and Syrian weapons, advisers and money have poured into his country.
And now that his country is in ruins he wants to call it a draw.
As much as it may sicken the world to stand by and watch it happen, strong hands need to hold back the weak-hearted and let the fight continue until one side finally admits unambiguous defeat.
In World War II, the Germans lost somewhere on the order of six million soldiers and two million civilians killed. The Japanese lost, in very broad terms since no one really knows, almost three million soldiers and over a million civilians. Those countries were successfully occupied and controlled and rehabilitated, because the Allies defeated them utterly, destroyed almost all of their infrastructure, and killed most of their fighting age men.
We went to war in Iraq, and did our best to keep casualties low. We defeated the government of Saddam Hussein, but we never defeated the country of Iraq; the vast majority of the fighting age men remained alive.
The same holds true in the Middle East: the Israelis won several battles, and their enemies were granted cease fires, but while the Israelis won battles, they never won a war — and the Arabs certainly never surrendered. The Israelis occupied lands populated by the Arabs, and the vast majority of the fighting age men lived on, seething with resentment, rearing another generation to hate, but always available to fight again another day.
There will be a lot of people appalled by this (and I’m pretty appalled by it myself), but it’s necessary to face the fact that occupying countries in which the majority of the fighting age men have not been killed is a prescription for disaster.
The Israelis should have forcibly expelled every Arab from Gaza, Judea and Samaria in 1967, pushed them east of the Jordan River, and set up shortened, more defensible borders. Because they didn’t do that in 1967, they are dealing with the impossible consequences of trying to live with a captured people, of almost their own population and a much higher birthrate, living inside of the lands they control. They didn’t expel a few hundred thousand in 1967 — and are now dealing with a few million people!
It may simply be that Western democracies can no longer wage wars, save for the quick, clean strikes against places like Grenada: in and out fast, do the job and leave. Anything else requires the willingness to kill the enemy on a scale much larger than we are willing to do.
Heck, I doubt that we could win World War II now, because we wouldn’t be willing to destroy German and Japanese industry, wouldn’t be willing to kill German and Japanese industrial workers, wouldn’t be willing to burn German and Japanese cities to the ground. The firebombing of Tokyo and Kobe and Dresden, as well as the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki might well be impossible decisions for British and American governments to take, were they infected with the bacillus of modern Western thought.
Googleâ„¢ up “firebombing of Tokyo,” and you’ll come up with several articles, such as this one, which classify the firebombing of Tokyo as a war crime.
- Any deliberate mass slaughter of civilians is a war crime. And what happened in the early hours of March 10, 1945, was the greatest slaughter a single air raid produced in world history.
Some of the idiots our friends on the left are already braying about charging George Bush and Don Rumsfeld with war crimes, some of them sincerely hope to see American leaders hauled off to The Hague, thrown in the dock and put on trial — over a war launched to depose a dictator who had killed hundreds of thousands of his own people. And the estimates of Iraqi casualties in three years of war are only a bit above 50,000 (and probably fewer than would have been killed had Saddam Hussein retained power), because we have tried to keep casualties to a minimum.
Mr Bogner lives on the front lines, living in Israel. He can see, first hand, the death and destruction of war. But while Israel’s Arab enemies, while the civilized world’s Islamist enemies, are not the least bit afraid of killing people, are not concerned in the slightest about the morality of killing civilians, Western democracies have come to the philosophical conclusion that killing people, even in defense of the nation, is wrong. Israel was attacked (again!) by its Arab enemies — yet it is Israel which gets blamed for responding to the attacks, it is Israel which is excoriated for trying to kill the people who have attacked them.
Mr Bogner is right, of course: for Israel to win the war against the Arabs, she has to go ahead and win the war, to kill enough of her enemies that they surrender, rather than to give them yet another respite via cease fire, that allows them to rest and rearm and prepare to continue their struggle. But the idea that Western democracies might actually defend themselves by killing their enemies is anathema to our liberal culture.
One of the points of the Talmud is the lesson of Rava, Let yourself be killed, but do not kill. What the Israelis are facing is a people who would happily slaughter them, as a people, as a country, as a race, an enemy who has been honest enough to write down exactly what his intentions are.
Israel is now conceding defeat in the face of its own victory, by calling for a NATO force to stand as a buffer between Hezbollah and Israel, on the Lebanese border. Such a buffer would allow Hezbollah time to recover and rearm, and reorganize its fighting age men into yet more attacks upon Israel.
All of which has me questioning whether Western democracies can ever win wars again. If Israel, a nation bordered by enemies who have openly vowed to destroy Israel and drive its people off the land, a nation whose people have their lives nailed to their spines, a civilized nation which can see how barbarians act and live, cannot come up with the backbone to actually win a war against its enemies, how can soft and fat and happy nations like the United States ever do so?
The suggestion that we can kill enough people to end the conflicts in the Middle East is insane. Yes, we can commit genocide if we want (maybe) but it is indeed immoral and all sane people should reject the notion outright.
What we need is better leadership on the Arab side and better leadership on the US/UK/Israel side such that we can implement a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine crisis, which is a major issue that keeps inflaming the situation. I know, some Arabs will never be happy that there is an Israel. They will have to live with it or their governments will have to kill or incarcerate them if they don’t. At the same time, the US/Israel mentality that you describe above has got to go. Arabs are not our enemies. The US and Israel can have peace with Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. We can keep working towards a stable Iraq and we can sustain perhaps an uncomfortable peace with Iran. It takes compromise and diplomacy and a stubborn loyalty to the peace process. Not this hawkish bullshit we are seeing from the US and Israel.
This is a culmination of a lack of leadership by all parties involved.
What some fail to see about this is a complex use of pawns and surrogates. In some cases, the problem involves efforts during the Cold War to use regional factions to gain leverage. Some thougt that the new state of Isreal (with a strong scent of socialism) might fall into the Soviet Bloc. They were weaned away from that folly and the pro-Western Baghdad Pact evaporated as pseudo-socialist regimes were established. Muslims and Americans found a common enemy in the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan. Many former informal allies of both the Soviets and the United States are left without a sponsor (and moderator) and have no desires to turn swords into plowshares. This has given us an irrational terrorism for its own sake, a mindset that could have come from the works of deSade.
Some of these elements had been used by some rather nasty ‘leaders’ in Iraq, Syria, and Iran. Wile Iran has traditionally be the ‘odd nation out’ (ethnically and religiously) in the region, they have built up a network of subsidized surrogates.
It appears that corrupt regimes with little regard for human rights (look at the recent hanging of a mentally disturbed girl whose ‘crime’ was being a victim of statutory rape) continue to use Israel as a whipping-boy for inflaming an Arab ‘street’ that epitomizes an unhealthy blend of ignorance and superstition.
Perhaps the best approach might be the political decapitation of certain regimes. It could be the most humane approach. Even a failed attempt could prove beneficial, as in Libya.
To the author of “can we win wars today?”
I’m Moroccan, ie “barbarian” in your view.
We have your kind of silly people in our countries as well. the kill-them-all kind of person.
Hopefully, I know there are plenty of Israeli people, some of whom are friends I met with when I was in the US, and they are not like you.
In reading your article, I wonder what is really your objective.
It is definitely not to have everybody live in peace. It’s rather: I WANNA WIN whatever is the cost and let everybody know I do.
Well, go play some sport. It calms down.
Sorry, but the Neville Chamberlain approach just doesn’t work any more. Bill Clinton tried the “diplomacy” route for 8 years, and got nowhere. Arafart played him like a Stradivarius. Bush is smarter. He knows the only way to deal with terrorists is to kick their asses.
Both Michael and Adil are upset with my article, and they certainly have a right to hold their own opinions. But facts are facts, and it is undeniable that wars are won by killing people and destroying their ability to continue to fight. That may be an unpleasant fact, that may be an ugly fact, but it is true nevertheless. Israel thinks that it has won several wars against the Arabs, but it has not; had Israel actually won any wars, the Arabs would have been defeated, surrendered, and come to terms with Israel, terms including recognition and agreed borders. Only Egypt agreed, and that was the result not of Israeli victory but diplomatic negotiation; the Egyptian people appreciated Anwar al-Sadat’s peace mission so much that they killed him.
The Palestinian position, which is well-documented in their own words, is that all of the Levant, including Israel, must be an Arab nation, a Palestinian nation. Israel’s position is also clear: it wants to survive as a nation and a Jewish state, in the Levant. Those positions are mutually exclusive; for Israel to exist, the Palestinians must surrender on part of their dreams, and for the Palestinians to achieve their goals, Israel must be destroyed. Someone has to lose!
Well, with the stakes so high, it’s difficult to see either side just giving up on their goals. Thus far, Israel has won all of the battles, and to my Western logic, the Palestinians ought to understand and accept that Israel will continue to exist, get over their anger, and learn to live with that fact.
The outlines of a diplomatic “solution” are hardly unknown; professors and scholars and ambassadors have been publishing their plans for Middle East peace in Foreign Affairs and other journals ad infinitum since 1967, and while the details of the instrumentality of how we get from Point A to Point B differ, the details of Point B are prety clearly known: Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders, the Palestinians get their state in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, and some sort of compromise on Jerusalem is obtained. e could have had peace years and years ago — if the broad details of Point B were acceptable to the Palestinians. So far, they have not been.
And the Palestinians have chosen, democratically, to continue to fight. The al-Fatah government of the Palestinian Authority at least tried to treat with Israel, at least consented to negotiate with Israel, and the Palestinian people promptly voted Hamas, which vows no surrender, which says that no part of the Levant may be surrendered to the Zionist invaders, into power.
Hamas says no surrender, and the Palestinian people voted for Hamas. Personally, I believe that they have been very honest in all of this.
Adil objected to my use of the description “barbarian” to describe Israel’s enemies. To me, any group that would wage war not by attacking military installations but by sending terrorist bombers into shopping malls, grocery stores and busses qualifies as barbaric. I’m sorry that Adil doesn’t like it, but there it is.
Modern, modern warfare began on August 8, 1945. WW2 was the last man standing war. With the threat of instant vaporization it seems the world wants to stop a conflict right after it starts. Great, that humanitarian. But issues are never resolved, they fester. With no clear winner, the agressor/defender pulls back, rearms, and waits for another day.
Since I was a child and aware threre was a world outside my neighborhood and listened or watched world news, this area has been fighting and killing. It’s almost for what anymore.
Today it’s islamic facsism. Tomorrow?? But listening to the crop of muslims that are fanatical, it’s a war to the last man standing is what they want. The only goal of these fanatics is kill every Jew alive, then move on from there. If you’re a muslim reading this, you need better press for those who want only peace, raise a family and live with their neighbors. Unfortunately, in my years they don’t seem to exist, and when they do, they are killed as in Anwar Sadat.
It is being talked on the radio and other places that Israel has a disproportional response. I suppose that if it were August 10, 1945, Hiroshima would be labeled a disprortional response too. The overall problem is wars are not won anymore, but the problems that cause them are just like the can kicked down the road.
Perhaps I should have written the original more briefly. Here it is, briefly: wars are won by killing the fighting men of the enemy and destroying his ability to produce more weapons.
That’s unpleasant, but it happens to be the truth. If the Israelis are going to have a war with the Arabs, they must be willing to kill their fighting age men and destroy their ability to produce or secure weapons, period. That the Arabs are willing to kill the fighting age men of the Israelis is obvious: they’ve said as much, many times.
If the Israelis are not willing to engage in that much death and destruction, they cannot win.
Liberal Western culture wants any wars that happen to be quick and clean, with nobody getting killed. That’s a complete contradiction in terms.
Dana sez,
If the Israelis are not willing to engage in that much death and destruction, they cannot win.
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I believe this is what Israel wants to do. However, the countries that should support this have gone squeemish and are looking for excuses, root causes, and anything else to label the defender as the aggressor. Every war Israel won ended with Israel giving back their winnings. The only exception is the Golan Heights. Not only does Israel have to fight terrorism, the have to fight the Euroweenies and the third world with Kofi Annan leading the pack.
Dana, your point is clear.
Let’s say, Israel would win by killing all the arab fighting men. what about their children in 20 years? You would just postpone the problem to next Israeli’s generation, and give them a very psychological burden.
Not to mention that the arab fighting age men count more than 20 million, much more than the holocaust jewich victims.
Dana: Would your starve for “real” military victory go to that number. would one million be OK? how much would suit you best?
Shame on you.
If today’s attitude existed in 1941, we’d be speaking Japanese or German. But it looks like we’ll be speaking Spanish.
Our popular culture isone of instant gratification and potential enemies willing to engage in protracted, assymetric warfare appear to have an advantage.
Our first hint of this came in Korea, where President Truman’s career foundered. The Nation went for Ike, butnot because he advocated appeasement. Still, much of the population did not understand the struggle even in the contect of an on-going Cold War.
Our efforts in Vietnam were even more protracted and many did not percieve a vital interest. Kennedy died before receiving his share of the blame. LBJ defeated Goldwater, thanks to the challenger’s willingness to tell the truth. Vietnamization was largely ruined by the folly of Watergate.
The ludicrous and weak-kneed Carter response and Soviet adventurism in Afghanistan and lunacy in Iran helped doom his presidency.
Americans got what they wanted in Desert Storm, despite the appeasers. It was a quick and easy victory in spite of dire warnings from the nay-sayers.
Woven through our recent history has been discord in the Middle east fomented by thuggish rulers who can whip up the angry dullards who constitute the ‘Arab Street’. A contrived hatred for Israel creates a diversion from kleptocrats who enrich themselves and their closest sycophants while doling out crumbs to the masses. This irrational hatred has caused suffering beyond the borders of Israel. Munich, Beirut, Achille Lauro, and the outrages of 9/11 are burnt deep in the American psyche, just as the Holocaust is ingrained in the mind of any thinking Jew.
Domestic politicians may exploit a the lust of some for instant answers and easy ways out. We have only to remember the image of innocents jumping to their deaths to say ‘never again’.
Some people need reminders. Those in the ‘Arab Street’ who persist in engaging in (and celebrating) mindless violence may yet sow a whirlwhind best avoided. A people slow to anger may demand the harshest of responses.
It should be noted that most of the wealth of the Muslim world had been the bounty of the earth, something initially developed by others. Centuries of decadence has created a global welfare state with little achievement. The current violence can only help to worsen the situation. The instigators of this should be the first to lay down their hidden arms and initiate an era of sanity in which all mankind can prosper.
Adil pointed out:
We’ve gone through three generations of German and Japanese young men since the end of World War II, and the problems did not recur.
But if I am to take your point as an insoluble problem, then I would have to say that wars never end — and the fact is that some wars have ended.
I am, of course, perfectly willing to give you a chance. Please, tell me how Israel solves the problem of the Palestinians, in a manner which allows Israel to continue to exist as a Jewish state, and at least satisfies Arab desires sufficiently that Israel doesn’t need to be constantly on guard for Palestinian terrorism. I will grant you all of the space you need.
To Arthur Downs:
Please get focused.
Your post is long as well as inadequate to the present subject which is: Can Israel win wars in recent times without mass killing?
Dana,
Your question is now much more realistic, and I welcom it.
My answer:
Israel should stop terrorizing Palestians, let them live in peace and agree once and for all that Palestine should exist (in the 1967 borders) as a sovereign and a viable neighbour.
I agree that, for many Israelis who were raised in the fear of the so-called Arab Terror, it would be a gift for nothing in return. But, what if it work? Israel would get a big deal of Arab opinion in their side, mainly the elite side that is emerging in the last decades.
The Arab Street is poor, opressed, and still largely uneducated. Democracy in the Arab world is gaining ground though.
The arab corrupted regimes do not say it but they like the current situation because there is an exterior enemy who kills palestinian children, destroys the Al-Aqsa mosq and want to invade us all from the ocean to the gulf (meaning from Morocco to Iraq). In the meantime, they strenthen their crual power over their people.
Israel should gain the sympathy of its neighbor’s street, not the fear of its arab corrupted regimes.
It is possible.
Going back to your arguments: German and Japanese WW2 regimes were fanatic, crual and have no fair political cause; they only wanted to destroy the other and expand.
That is not what Arabs want. They want their spoiled land nad their dignity.
That is not what Arabs want. They want their spoiled land nad their dignity.
Where is this written as fact????
To Yorkshire,
I’m Arab, and I know what Arabs really want.
Facts are: Arabs went to peace negociations. They returned 8 years later empty-handed!
(Sorry : there is was a typing error in my last sentence: “and” in stead of “nad”).
I’m Arab, and I know what Arabs really want.
Facts are: Arabs went to peace negociations. They returned 8 years later empty-handed!
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Arafat got 95% of what he wanted and chose terror instead.
I know that there are Arabs and Muslims who want peace. There are Radical Muslims and the State of Iran (not Arab) and Syria who are determined not to give it to you. They want you enslaved like the Taliban. You’re for peace, not spread that word because it is not getting out.
[...] In our discussion concerning whether Israel (specifically) or Western democracies (in general) could still win wars under current Western liberalism, I wound up asking Adil: Please, tell me how Israel solves the problem of the Palestinians, in a manner which allows Israel to continue to exist as a Jewish state, and at least satisfies Arab desires sufficiently that Israel doesn’t need to be constantly on guard for Palestinian terrorism. I will grant you all of the space you need. [...]
Adil, I have addressed your response to me above, but did so in a separate article, Part 2.
[...] OK, major blog flog here: I wrote and posted Can we win wars today? on July 23rd! [...]
[...] It may be that civilized Western nations are no longer capable, under the values and morés of their own people and the people of the Western democracies as a whole, to win wars, because winning a war involves killing people on a very large scale. (See Can we win wars today? and Can we win wars today? Part 2.) In the 1940s, Americans and Britons and Frenchmen saw little wrong with the firebombing of Dresden or Tokyo or Kobe, nor with the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki — because we were in an all-out war, and those terrible aerial attacks were part of it, a part that hastened the defeat of our enemies. Today, every single death, by car bomb, by sniper attack, by whatever means, in the war zone in Iraq is reported by The New York Times; every individual death is suffered by the American public, and events that would have been seen as a normal part of warfare in the 1940s are now taken as the argument against a war, regardless of the reasons for going to war. We have taken the conduct of war as the issue just as much as the reasons and goals for war — and in such a situation, it becomes difficult to see how countries in which that is the case can ever wage war with popular support. [...]
[...] It may be that civilized Western nations are no longer capable, under the values and morés of their own people and the people of the Western democracies as a whole, to win wars, because winning a war involves killing people on a very large scale. (See Can we win wars today? and Can we win wars today? Part 2.) In the 1940s, Americans and Britons and Frenchmen saw little wrong with the firebombing of Dresden or Tokyo or Kobe, nor with the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki — because we were in an all-out war, and those terrible aerial attacks were part of it, a part that hastened the defeat of our enemies. Today, every single death, by car bomb, by sniper attack, by whatever means, in the war zone in Iraq is reported by The New York Times; every individual death is suffered by the American public, and events that would have been seen as a normal part of warfare in the 1940s are now taken as the argument against a war, regardless of the reasons for going to war. We have taken the conduct of war as the issue just as much as the reasons and goals for war — and in such a situation, it becomes difficult to see how countries in which that is the case can ever wage war with popular support. [...]
[...] Can we win wars today? (July 23, 2006) [...]
[...] years ago, I asked, Can We Win Wars Today (Parts One, Two, Three and Four). It’s a relevant question, because the way to win wars is to kill your [...]