Realists and Moderates and Gaza
This is a guest post by Ben Cohen of Z Word
The above photograph is not from Gaza. More about that at the end, though. I want to begin with Anthony H. Cordesman, who is one of the leading thinkers on military strategy in the US. Consequently, his views on the Gaza conflict will be taken seriously, even when they are found to be analytically suspect, as is the case with this article.
Cordesman savages the Israeli leadership for what he regards as their failure to articulate a grand strategic objective. “To paraphrase a comment about the British government’s management of the British Army in World War I,” he says, “lions seem to be led by donkeys.” (As an aside, it’s worth pointing out that Cordesman’s analogy will hardly endear him to those pushing the line about a genocide in Gaza; for them, Israelis are neither lions nor donkeys, but monsters to a man, woman and child.)
But back to Cordesman. It simply isn’t true that Israel hasn’t stated its objective. In essence, its aim is to humble Hamas psychologically and weaken it structurally: to decisively show the Islamists that they miscalculated horribly when they surmised that Israel would not substantively retaliate to intensified rocket attacks; to prevent them from rearming; and to achieve greater security in the south of the country (rocket attacks have decreased by 50 per cent since the operation began.)
True, it’s hard to foresee, in the immediate future, a complete end to the rocket attacks, but the Israeli leadership seems to understand that. “We are in midst of a struggle against terrorism, and it is not a one-time conflict,” Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has said. “This is not a conflict that will end with an agreement. We embarked on this campaign with the intent of achieving military goals and in order to clarify that we will not put up with this situation any longer. We set out to change the equation. Israel is responding with force, and considerable force at that.”
Cordesman, however, is drawing conclusions that are based more on political rather than straight military calculations. An old-school realist, he’s perturbed at the alienating effect which the Gaza operation is having on that strand of Arab opinion which is allied with US power and US dominance. By way of example, he cites the following:
One strong warning of the level of anger in the region comes from Prince Turki al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia. Prince Turki has been the Saudi ambassador in both London and Washington. He has always been a leading voice of moderation. For years he has been a supporter of the Saudi peace process and an advocate of Jewish-Christian-Islamic dialog. Few Arab voices deserve more to be taken seriously, and Prince Turki described the conflict as follows in a speech at the opening of the 6th Gulf Forum on January 6th, “The Bush administration has left you (with) a disgusting legacy and a reckless position towards the massacres and bloodshed of innocents in Gaza…Enough is enough, today we are all Palestinians and we seek martyrdom for God and for Palestine, following those who died in Gaza.” Neither Israel nor the US can gain from a war that produces this reaction from one of the wisest and most moderate voices in the Arab world.
Does it really need to be restated that Arab leaders have always been given to these flights of rhetoric? It is the Palestinians, first and foremost, who will tell you that Arab leaders, particularly the princes and kings among them, are all talk and no action. Prince Turki’s righteous anger doesn’t change the strategic balance one jot. The Arab regimes fear Iran and Islamist radicalism much more than they fear Israel. Privately - and in the case of the Egyptians, not so privately - they are furious with Hamas for provoking this war. And frankly, the Arab states have never much cared for the Palestinians. With all the talk of Israeli “ethnic cleansing,” it’s easy to forget that Kuwait booted out more than 400,000 of its Palestinian population after the Gulf war of 1991 and that Qaddafi’s Libya expelled 30,000 Palestinians in 1995. So much for Arab unity.
Additionally, in his interpretation of Prince Turki’s remark, Cordesman falls into the orientalist trap, more commonly associated with the anti-imperialist left, of arguing that if someone who happens to be an Arab is also angry and despairing, then he is absolved of responsibility for his words. According to Cordesman’s logic, if Israel bombs, then Arabs are entitled to say and do whatever they want, and only Israel and the US are to blame for whatever grief follows. Nor does it seem to occur to him that if an apparently moderate leader can so easily start ranting about martyrdom, we must doubt whether he was really a “moderate” - whatever that may mean - in the first place.
Finally, in indulging Prince Turki’s outburst, Cordesman is buying into the widespread notion that what Israel is doing in Gaza amounts to a total war - what the Nazi analogists would gleefully call a blitzkrieg. Again, that is not a point which can be conceded because it is a malicious falsehood. In actuality, there’s another long war that was reignited around the same time that the Gaza operation began - one that has claimed 70,000 lives over a twenty-five year period, in which 230,000 refugees are currently suffering horribly with little food or shelter - that gives a much better insight into how ugly armed conflict can be. But the solidarity activists aren’t going to demonstrate about it (most of them probably couldn’t find the country in question on a map) and the policy wonks will never assign it the same geostrategic significance as they do Gaza.
Comments
| 12 January 2009, 1:25 pm |
Israel’s military have had a chequered recent record but so has the USA. Comparisons are made with Lebanon both the 1982 and 2006 wars. A glance at the the map will show how very different the two theatres are. True, the intermingling of civilians with military objectives is to a greater extent in Gaza than in southern Lebanon, but there is no Syria next door, nor any convenient road re-supply available from Iran. Gaza is much less able to provide the Hamas militia with ‘wriggle room’.
I suspect Israel is doing no more than punitive actions against pre-selected Hamas targets and subsequent opportunities arising from these actions to inflict further damage. It will of course expect others to draw conclusions, at least one being that, following what was widely seen as a ‘failure in 2006, Israel has not lost its nerve or resolve to act militarily.
Note to Mr Cordesman: The “donkeys” won.
On Prince Turki al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia: If your friends do not stand with you in time of dire need they are not your friends.
Israel takes the view of Palmerston responding to Queen Victoria: We have no friends, ma’am, only interests”.
| 12 January 2009, 2:02 pm |
it’s easy to forget that Kuwait booted out more than 400,000 of its Palestinian population after the Gulf war of 1991 and that Qaddafi’s Libya expelled 30,000 Palestinians in 1995. So much for Arab unity.
So much for Arab hospitality
| 12 January 2009, 2:14 pm |
Hmm. Here’s a piece of advice. When usually dry and analytical types like Cordesman suddenly launch into the floridly rhetorical style that he adopted re Turki, this means one of two things. Either 1. he is just incredibly impressed with rich Gulf Arabs on a human level, and their inherent magnificence makes him talk about them in a fawning tone quite unlike the way he sounds when talking about anyone else.
Or
2. Follow the research grant money.
| 12 January 2009, 2:17 pm |
Cordesman also believes Israel “aided” Hamas
http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Alt/alt.religion.christian/2007-06/msg00164.html
| 12 January 2009, 2:19 pm |
Prince Turki can go fuck himself with a prickly pear.
I will take all of this moderate “discourse” shit seriously when the first cathedral/synagogue/Hindu temple/Arabian Secular Society Office opens in Mecca. Until then he can fucketh off.
He and much of the rest of the Arab “leadership” are brave, brave lions of jihad.They are so clearly prepared to fight the evil Zionist-Crusaders to the last drop of Palestinian blood.
This will only end when the Palestinians wise-up to the fact that they are pawns in the cesspool of ME politics and that the Israelis are better folks to be on side with than depraved fuckers like Turki or Dinnerjacket or that pencil-necked loon in Damascus. I sometimes feel sorry for the Palestinians… They have been treated abysmally by their Arab “brothers”.
| 12 January 2009, 4:01 pm |
Following Weiss’s advice, I’d love to ask Mr. Cordesmann whether Turki or his friends and relations have ever given him any little presents like, for example, the occasional jewel-encrusted Arab dagger, limousine, cigar boat, harem ticket etc.?
| 12 January 2009, 4:10 pm |
The notion that Turki (or any Saudi) is moderate is laughable. Muslim Arabs all buy into a zero-sum game regarding Israel, explained quite well by the Elder of Ziyon. They are really on a different planet; their hatred for Jews (and Christians) runs very deep.
| 12 January 2009, 5:36 pm |
I went on a tour of Israel and Jordan a few years ago, and our tour guide in Jordan was a native Jordanian ie not a Palestinian. He could not find a good word to say about the Palestinians living in Jordan. I suspect his view was not untypical among Jordanians.
| 12 January 2009, 5:50 pm |
The Robert Land Academy is located in the Niagara Peninsula south of Toronto. The headmaster of the school was an officer in the Royal Canadian Army, Colonel Scott Bowman.
“He was a Canadian intelligence officer who had done a yearlong stint in Israel, working with an international peacekeeping delegation around the time of the Yom Kippur War in the 1970’s. During classes Colonel Bowman would talk about the Israeli Military. He told us that the Israelis were-bar-none-the most elite, cutting-edge military in the world.” Aaron became mesmerized by Colonel Bowman espousing over and over that the Israelis were the toughest, smartest, soldiers, and it was the greatest privilege of his military life to work with them. He admired their capabilities as soldiers, their values, and the totality of the commitment to self-defense that the State Of Israel represented.” Every waking hour Aaron spent in the library reading and studying everything available on the Israeli Military.
When he was eighteen-years-old he decided to enlist in the Israeli Army, and when he went to Israel he set even higher goals. He wanted to be in the Israeli Special Forces, and he proceeds to lead the reader through the grueling, mind and body numbing training, that he had to “survive” in order to fulfill his dream. The unit he is selected for is the one that sends operatives disguised as Arabs into the Palestinian-controlled West Bank. The reader is “the-fly-on-the-wall” (up to the point of being limited by classified information) as Aaron and his team take down the number three guy in Hamas, a money guy, a fund raiser, with Aaron undercover as a reporter interviewing the target.
On another occasion the reader is taken along as they go after “the father of the Holy War”, the Hamas mastermind behind the Dizengoff Mall bombing that killed innocent Israeli civilians. Aaron was undercover as a Palestinian selling sweet-corn from a push cart, as the Israeli’s infiltrated a wedding, and nabbed their man in sixty seconds. Throughout this fast-paced story Aaron points out the differences between Israel’s counter-terrorism strategies as compared to the United States. One of the great quotes referred to throughout the book is from a defining speech by one of the greatest military hero’s in Israel’s history *MOSHE DAYAN* who said back in 1955:
“WE CANNOT PROTECT EVERY WATER PIPE FROM BEING BLOWN UP, NOR EVERY TREE FROM BEING UPROOTED. NOR CAN WE PREVENT THE MURDER OF THE WORKERS IN THE ORCHARDS, NOR OF FAMILIES IN THEIR BEDS, BUT WE CAN EXACT A HIGH PRICE FOR OUR BLOOD, A PRICE TOO HIGH FOR THE ARAB COMMUNITY, THE ARAB ARMY, THE ARAB GOVERNMENTS TO PAY.”
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0061236152/littlegreenfo-20
| 12 January 2009, 7:26 pm |
Blitz Krieg (last paragraph of post) means Lightning War, not total war. As in the speed of the successful German attacks early in the second World War. My few words of German don’t run to translating total war.
| 12 January 2009, 8:49 pm |
I don’t know offhand how many died under the Nazi blitzkrieg, but would agree that the tactics in Cast Lead are similar. The connotations of using the term with the implied endgame, however, is manifestly malicious.
The German for total war will, of course, be totalerkrieg. I have a feeling, though, that this did not refer necessarily to all guns blazing on the battlefield and entering towns (maybe, deep-war would be better there) but the complete militarization of society along Nazi ideology, including the doctrinal opposition to women in the workplace even when loosing.
And finally, oh look, Sri Lanka. Has anyone got a spare nappy for Sunny?
| 13 January 2009, 12:43 am |
I have forgotten how many times I have heard these so-called Middle East experts (Follow the Money!) proclaim that if the US does not prevent Israel from defending itself or if the US takes action against an Arab Tyrant like Saddam Hussein in 1991, the entire Islamic world will rise up in rightous anger against the West.
It is ludicious to believe in rhetoric when it is not backed by any action which is exactly what is happening in the current Israeli-Hamas War.
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