The Strategy of Defeat
Mark Silverberg
Inside the
bustling new Hamas television headquarters in Gaza, Saraa Barhoum, 11, the sweet
face of “Tomorrow’s Pioneers”, an immensely popular hour-long Hamas television
children’s show says she wants to be a doctor. If she can’t, she’d be proud to
become a martyr. “Of course,” Saraa says, “it’s something to be proud of. Every
Palestinian hopes to be a martyr.” One can dismiss this as the ranting of a
brainwashed child, but how does one dismiss the fact that this is the most
popular children’s TV show in Gaza? How does one dismiss Palestinians sending
nine year-old children to retrieve used Kassam missile launchers knowing they
will be killed by Israeli retaliatory responses? How does one explain a
demonology expressed by editorial cartoons in the Palestinian press that portray
Israelis as ogres who devour babies and draw on medieval and Nazi imagery? How
does one dismiss “martyrdom” operations conducted by children or a society that
has revived the pagan ritual of human sacrifice for Allah? How does one dismiss
stories, poems, riddles, puzzles and magazines that incite Palestinian youth to
jihad, martyrdom and the glorification of terrorist operations? You don’t
have to be a rocket scientist to realize that there is a serious pathology loose
in Palestinian society – one that is not subject to negotiation, discussion or
accommodation as we would like to believe.
But it’s not
the fault of the children. They are merely the by-products of a society the
Palestinians have created and have shown little inclination to end. So here’s
the real problem and it’s not just the suicide-bomber wannabes or those who plan
the missile attacks or fire those missiles at Israeli towns and cities who
should concern the Israelis, as Prime Minister Olmert and others would have us
believe. They argue that these “issues” can be “managed” by limited, targeted
attacks on terrorist leaders and against those involved in the manufacture and
firing of Kassam missiles, more and deeper ground penetrations to gather
intelligence and to destroy terrorist military infrastructures, more artillery
and air power aimed at Kassam launching bases and, if necessary, greater
sanctions. And then there are those in the Israeli Peace Bloc who have called
upon the government to reach a ceasefire agreement with the terrorists. Their
view suggests that Israel must address terrorist “grievances” in order to reduce
the violence and that the terrorists sense of fair play will resolve their
“problem” with Israel. Unfortunately, this view is based upon an unfounded,
unwarranted and unjustified optimism that has no basis in historical fact for
the unfortunate truth is that Palestinian society has consciously spawned a
culture of death amongst its own children and within Hamas and Fatah. It has
indoctrinated them, funded them, provided them with shelter, eulogized them as
“martyrs” on their TV programs, from their mosques, on their billboards, in
their marketplaces, parades, schools, restaurants, puzzles, video games,
stories, poems, riddles and magazines, and given them the tacit approval
necessary to operate from their territory.
As a result,
Palestinian society as a whole bears responsibility for this culture of death –
and if history is any judge, such societies invariably contain the seeds of
their own destruction. Had Adolf Hitler limited his cult of Aryan supremacy to
Germany alone, disgusting and inhumane as Nazi policies were towards Jews,
gypsies, the mentally handicapped, homosexuals and others, it’s unlikely that a
Second World War would have resulted. But National Socialism included an almost
messianic belief in Aryan supremacy (much like Salafi/Wahhabi Islam’s messianic
belief in a global Caliphate based on Shari’ a) and it was the Nazi attempt to
“export” this belief through conquest that ultimately led to its destruction –
at a terrible cost to the German people. Iran, together with its Syrian,
Lebanese and Palestinian Islamic proxies have set similar terms in dealing with
America and Israel and they too will meet the same fate.
So what
happens when the alternatives fail? What happens when all the negotiations,
sanctions and compromises fail to dissuade an aggressor? What happens when a
nation is forced into war as a last resort? When is “victory” over an aggressor
achieved? The answer can be found in an analysis of American strategic war
doctrine in the late 19th and 20th centuries.
Defining “Victory”
In his review
of David Halberstam’s book The Best and Brightest, Col. Tom Snodgrass,
writing in the January 2007 issue of American Thinker reviewed in
exhaustive detail how, in 1961, President Kennedy and his cadre of social
theorists including Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, George Ball and
others ignored the historical lessons of war strategy and, in so doing, set the
course for an American military doctrine that laid the foundations for American
military defeats from Vietnam to Iraq. Transposing the American experience onto
Israel holds some valuable lessons that had best be learned prior to the next
Arab-Israeli war.
Historically,
the term “total (or general) war” – examples of which include the American Civil
War and World War II – was based on the assumption that there were only two
options in existential wars – total victory or total defeat (hence the term
“unconditional surrender”). For the victor, it meant the achievement of most or
all its strategic objectives and the collapse of the enemy. For the defeated, it
meant the end of its ability to wage war, the futility of continuing the
conflict and, as in the case of the Nazis, the end of their dream of a thousand
year Reich. Nazi Germany was not merely defeated, it was psychologically
vanquished. What distinguished the American Civil War and World War II
experiences from other major American conflicts fought over the past 150 years
(notably the Korean War, Vietnam and – at least to this point – Iraq) was that
both the Union Army during the American Civil War and the Allied Forces during
World War II understood that for a decisive victory to be achieved over Germany,
Japan and their allies, the enemy – not just it’s army or militias or its
regime, but the society who supported them – had to recognize that they had been
defeated and that continuing the war was futile. FDR and Generals Eisenhower,
Marshall and Patton – like Lincoln, Grant, Sherman and Sheridan before them
understood that if wars had to be fought, if blood and treasure had to be
expended, if sacrifice had to be demanded of the nation, then the American
people had the right to demand that wars be prosecuted to insure absolute
victory so the issues over which they were being fought and for which they were
being asked to sacrifice their children would never again have to be
“revisited.”1
In the case of
the Civil War, Sherman, put it rather bluntly: “We are not fighting armies but a
hostile people, and we must make young and old, rich and poor, feel the hard
hand of war.... I would make this war as severe as possible, and show no symptom
of tiring until the South begs for mercy.”2
Sherman, by all accounts, was a decent man who hated war, but he understood
that to end it, he not only had to crush the Confederate army, but the society
in whose name and with whose support it fought. The South, he said, had to be
convinced that a return to the status quo ante was impossible – that the
dream of a Southern Confederacy based on slavery was gone. He understood that
sometimes nations had to act inhumanely; that war was a dirty business, and he
acknowledged that his “scorched earth” policy had inflicted unbearable pain and
suffering on the Southern population. But he also understood that doing so was
the only way to end the war decisively.
Similarly, at
the end of World War II, no Nazi official could stand in the ruins of Berlin in
April 1945 and urge his fellow Germans to “stay the course” until a Nazi victory
was assured. Nor, for that matter, could General Hideki Tojo of the Imperial
Japanese Army convince his people that the destruction wrought by the atomic
bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 were just a “temporary
setback”. It was clear to the German and Japanese peoples that the European and
Japanese wars were over; that the dreams of a greater Japanese empire and a
thousand-year Reich were gone, and that the humiliation of “unconditional
surrender” – the ultimate acceptance of national defeat – was the only
alternative to end the suffering. In the final stages of World War II, the
business of living in Germany and Japan had become so unbearable that what the
German and Japanese people wanted more than anything else was for the war to end
and for their daily lives to return to normal. As Herbert E. Meyer (former
Reagan Administration Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence
and the man who predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union a full decade before
it happened) wrote in late November 2005,
In the minds of their populations, no matter
how terrifying the post-war future might prove to be, it had to be better than
their present condition. While both nations honored their soldiers, they would
no longer support them.
The Fallacy of “Limited War”
All this
changed in the post-World War II era. With the advent of nuclear weapons,
warfare theorists came to believe that a total war between the two superpowers
could lead to mutual annihilation. It was this deterrent concept that led
post-war American military strategists to modify the historical rules of war by
resurrecting the seemingly more logical and humane concept of warfare that came
to be known as “limited war”. The concept of “limited war” assumed that our
enemies would pursue their war objectives in much the same manner and
according to the same rules of engagement that we pursue ours. It assumed
that all war objectives are subject, at some point, to compromise. But
strategists of “limited war” failed to consider the consequences of what would
happen when we confront religiously-inspired enemies who refuse to play by our
“limited war” rules, who do not accept international treaties governing the
rules of engagement or the treatment of prisoners (such as the Geneva
Conventions), who use civilians as human shields, children as human grenades,
“martyrdom” as a tactical weapon, come from a different culture and value
system, and seek nothing less than the destruction of our way of life.
The fallacy of
conducting a “limited war” in an existential conflict surfaced during the Truman
administration in its confrontation with communist North Korea. When Mao Zedong
informed Joseph Stalin that he was ordering Chinese troops into Korea in October
1950, he was concerned that the US would bomb China’s major cities and
industrial centers and use its navy to assault China’s coastal regions. That is
because, in the aftermath of World War II, the perception was that American
military strategy was still based on “total war” against an enemy. But when the
Chinese drove the UN army out of North Korea, Truman failed to escalate.
Instead, he adopted the limited objective of fighting the war in South Korea
rather than destroying the enemy in the north. As a result, American forces
quickly became bogged down with no clear end to the war in sight.
When
Eisenhower became President, he recognized that the North Koreans were committed
to the conquest of the South. He therefore communicated to the North Koreans his
intention to escalate the war by using nuclear weapons if they persisted in
their aggressive objectives – and he meant it – and they knew it. Eisenhower was
convinced that a limited, defensive war was useless against an ideological
adversary committed to the conquest of South Korea. From his perspective and
based on his experiences in World War II with the Nazis, he understood that the
challenge of the North Korean Communists had to be met just as America had met
the challenge of an expansionist Nazi Germany bent on conquest. Eisenhower
believed that the only response to total war was total war – or at least
the enemy’s realistic expectation of it. As a warrior, he opted for the
historically-based doctrine of “massive retaliation” which promised an all-out
war on the North Koreans if their aggression continued.
All that
changed with the advent of the Kennedy administration. President Kennedy and his
social science war strategists decided to rewrite the rules of war by dispensing
with “massive retaliation” and replacing it with another military strategy they
termed “flexible response”. In so doing, Kennedy completely departed from the
strategic thinking that had led to victory in World War II. The change in
mindset was profound as would be the ramifications. American political and
military strategists determined that their new approach to foreign aggression
would be to use limited force proportional to the threat. The concept of
“flexible response” assumed that the enemy (and the surrogates of that enemy)
would “get the message” through gradual escalation. Unfortunately, the
“flexible response” doctrine did not take into consideration that the North
Vietnamese were ideologically (and in the case of Iran and its Middle East
surrogates – theologically) committed to victory and were prepared to spend
whatever blood and treasure were necessary to achieve it over South Vietnam.
While Ho Chi Minh set out to conquer South Vietnam, Presidents Kennedy and
Johnson treated the conflict not as existential but as limited. As a result,
five hundred thousand American troops were confined to a strategically defensive
stance in South Vietnam with no thought of marching on or even destroying Hanoi.
Ho interpreted the limited American response as indicating a lack of will on the
part of American leadership to sustain casualties in pursuit of its strategic
national interests. Once it became evident to him that America would not use its
massive military strength to destroy North Vietnam and the Communist regime that
ruled it, the North Vietnamese began targeting America’s will to fight and
pursued the war with a vengeance. By failing to threaten the continued existence
of the North Vietnamese Communist government and, if necessary, the destruction
of the North, North Vietnamese leaders were able to drag out the war until
America’s will to fight and its spirit were broken – much like what is happening
today with the war in Iraq and much like what the Palestinians aspire to achieve
with Israel. As Snodgrass aptly notes: “
In truth, it was not the media or the
political opposition that “lost the (Vietnam) war,” as is sometimes alleged.
It was a US political and military leadership that was both too timid to be
successful wartime leaders and too blinded by their own hubris to understand
that the impossible asymmetry in the objectives of the warring parties (i.e.:
one fighting a limited war while the other was engaged in a war of conquest)
guaranteed that America’s limited war was a sure strategy for defeat in
Vietnam.
America’s will
to wage war was gradually decimated because of the anti-war propaganda at home
which capitalized on its failed military strategy. The US had replaced the
historically-sound military strategy of massive retaliation with a military
strategy that was defensive and limited in nature and could not possibly have
led to victory in Vietnam.
This same
failed limited war strategy has dogged American strategic war doctrine ever
since. During the Iranian embassy crisis, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini disclosed
that he had no fear of America. “Our youth should be confident that America
cannot do a damn thing,” Khomeini told his followers three days after the
embassy takeover. “America is far too impotent to interfere in a military way
here. If they could have interfered, they would have saved the Shah.” Referring
to America as behaving like “a headless chicken”, Khomeini ordered that the
slogan “Death to America” be inscribed in all official buildings and vehicles.
The US flag was painted at the entrance of airports, railway stations,
ministries, factories, schools, hotels and bazaars so that the faithful could
trample it under their feet every day. Carter contented himself with imposing
ineffectual diplomatic and economic sanctions that included an embargo on
Iranian oil and a break in diplomatic relations. He rejected suggestions to
invade Iran or bomb Iran’s major military assets or its main government
buildings or even capture its oil facilities. His dithering would result in the
deaths of thousands of Americans in the coming decades.
President
Clinton also followed the “limited war” doctrine even as Americans were being
harvested by terrorists from New York to Khobar to Dar-as-Salaam. He sent cruise
missiles to blow up empty tents in the Afghan desert and pharmaceutical
factories in the Sudan, signed agreements with dictators based on the belief
that America would somehow be “safe”, hamstrung American intelligence services
in the name of civil liberties and a supposed “peace dividend” arising from the
fall of the Soviet Union, shrunk the American military in the name of economy,
and chose to use the courts as his battleground, rather than engaging with the
terrorists and taking the war to them and their sponsors.
This same
failed defensive war doctrine reigns today in Iraq. Despite the rhetoric, US
military strategy is not geared to vanquishing its enemies (Iran, Syria and
their terror surrogates in the Middle East) who are committed to the conquest of
Iraq and the spread of radical Islamic dawa throughout the region. Iraqi
terrorism is funded and supported by Iran and facilitated by Syria who have
engaged us in a conflict of global proportions, but unlike the time-tested
strategy that led to victory in World War II, the US has limited its war
objectives to stabilizing, democratizing and reconstructing Iraq before
it has vanquished those who are determined to see the American effort fail
there. During World War II, it would have been unthinkable to stop at the German
border after the liberation of France and begin reconstruction, leaving Adolf
Hitler and the Nazis in power. Had the US done so, it is a fair bet that the
Nazis would have sapped the strength and spirit of the Allies in France just as
Iran and Syria are doing today in Iraq and the Palestinians are seeking to do in
Israel. In failing to recognize the necessity of vanquishing its enemies first,
the US has guaranteed another defeat in Iraq and no amount of “surge” troops can
or will alter that so long as Iran and Iranian society are controlled by the
mullahs.
Understanding the Enemy
On October 4,
2007, tens of thousands of Iranians marched through the streets of Tehran
chanting “Death to Israel” and “Death to United States” and demonstrations such
as this are being echoed throughout the country. For nearly thirty years, the
Iranian mullahs and their well-entrenched Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have
literally been getting away with murder and have exported their revolution
throughout the Middle East and the world on the backs of terrorists – and
America has failed at every attempt (short of total war) to stop them. Now, the
Iranians are on the verge of developing a nuclear shield under which they will
export their global Islamic crusade. Problem is – most Americans (and, I
suspect, many Israelis) still do not understand the mindset of our common
enemies. We tend think its all rhetoric – that the Iranians couldn’t possibly
mean all this nonsense about Caliphates, restoring Andalusia, Hidden Imams and
creating the nuclear chaos necessary to bring on Armageddon – and that’s why
we’re losing the war against them.
Quite simply,
we believe what we see, while our Islamic adversaries (Iran, Hizbullah, Hamas
and al Qa`idah in particular) see what they believe – and they believe that they
are absolutely invincible. And because Paradise is attractive to them, they are
even more dangerous because while we value the sanctity of life; they value the
“benefits” of the Afterlife and have no fear of death (as we know it). In fact,
they welcome it. That makes them a formidable enemy. It also gives them a
psychological and tactical advantage over us and they know it...which is why
a confrontation is inevitable. Ahmedinejad may be a psychopath, but he’s a
psychopath with a vision. The US has always assumed that it is the only nation
with grand visions like peace, democratization, free enterprise and
globalization. But Iran and its Palestinian and Lebanese Islamic surrogates have
their own “grand vision” and the grandest of all tells them that both America
and Israel will never be anything but enemies of their regime, culture and
religion and that victory over both is assured because it has been pre-ordained
by Allah. Their vision is to humiliate the “Great Satan”, annihilate the “Little
Satan” – Israel, and drive Western culture, values and influence from the Middle
East.
For Mahmoud
Ahmedinejad, Ishmail Haniyeh and Shiekh Hassan Nasrallah, the dominance of the
West is over and Islam is set to win the coming war. Since Iran’s pursuit of
nuclear weapons is done in the name of Islam and Allah, it is inherently
legitimate. Period. As far as Ahmedinejad is concerned, refusing to allow Iran
to pursue nuclear weapons is tantamount to an assault on God. End of discussion.
It is this grand vision that propels his jihad against us. In effect,
every move Iran makes is designed to expel American influence from the region
and every time America and Israel are humiliated, attacked or forced to withdraw
or concede, that vision is reinforced. In short, neither the Iranians nor their
Palestinian and Lebanese supporters are interested in our vision for “a new
Middle East”. They have their own. It is to defeat and replace us. That vision
(as was the vision of the Nazis and Confederates before them) will end only when
their societies have been forced – probably by the devastation of war – to
conclude that their vision of Islamic conquest has lost favor in the eyes of
Allah. Quite simply, if we are to win what we call “the global war on Islamic
terrorism”, our mission must be to destroy the Islamic vision of the future
before it destroys ours. That is the only circumstance that will permit the
gradual evolution of an Islamic Renaissance.
If the
American people have grown weary of the Iraqi war, it is because the average
American can no longer accept a national debate on how to win a futile war based
on a flawed defensive strategy. Americans want victory and like it or not, the
road to that victory leads through Tehran and Damascus. Destroying Iran’s
nuclear capabilities, bringing down the Islamic regime and vanquishing all
aspects of the Islamic Revolution are absolutely critical if the greater war
against Islamic fascism is to be won. America’s enemies must be convinced that
the price of pursuing global conquest is simply too high a price for them to
pay. Iran continues to provide money, support, and deadly munitions to Shiite
groups throughout the Middle East. Its growing regional power is threatening
regional stability. It is training thousands of “volunteers for martyrdom” in
Iran, Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank and Syria to spread its Islamic crusade
across the globe, and its success is based upon the belief that both America and
Israel are in strategic retreat.
Conclusions
No one seeking
a decisive victory in World War II spoke of a “ceasefire” or “accommodation”
with Japan or Germany as we do today with Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad,
Hizbullah, Syria or Iran. No one thought it made any sense to merely “disarm” or
“degrade” the German army or to liberate France and stop at the French-German
border while leaving the Nazis in power in Germany to spread their subversive
war into other countries – as the Iranians and Syrians are doing today through
their proxies in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. Perhaps
that’s why Americans refer to the veterans of World War II as “The Greatest
Generation”. World War II was the last major war that America won decisively.
Unfortunately, so long as the US and Israel continue to define their war against
Islamic fascism in terms other than vanquishment, and so long as both continue
to prosecute wars in limited, defensive terms without recognizing that both are
engaged in an existential conflict with enemies dedicated to total war, both are
destined to lose.
The Middle
East will never be stabilized unless and until Islamic fascism has been
vanquished and it begins and ends with Iran, Syria, Hamas, Fatah and Hizbullah.
The “aura of invincibility” lost in the aftermath of the Second Lebanon War must
be restored. If the United States and Israel send a message that they think
absolute and total victory is too costly to pursue, can supporters of Islamic
fascism be blamed for concluding that Washington and Jerusalem may be unwilling
to pay the costs of avoiding defeat? Winston Churchill once wrote that America
(and I suspect Israel as well) will always do the right thing, but only after
they’ve exhausted all the alternatives (i.e.: dialogue, negotiations,
engagement, accommodations, ceasefires, appeasement, inspections, withdrawals,
peace plans, diplomacy, concessions, sanctions, containment and international
peace conferences). It seems to me that both the US and Israel have run out of
alternatives. It is a sad statement on our time that Israel and the US will soon
be forced into a war where vanquishing their enemies will be the final, least
pleasant, but only effective alternative to restoring peace and stability to
this region of the world – at least for the foreseeable future. Israel had best
learn from past and present US mistakes, if only because the consequences of
anything less than total victory will be meaningless.
Endnotes
1 Military historian Victor
Davis Hanson of Stanford’s Hoover Institute wrote recently: “Sixteen years ago
(1991) on the cessation of hostilities (after the first Gulf War), Saddam
Hussein’s supposedly ‘defeated’ army used its gun ships to butcher Kurds and
Shiites while Americans looked on. And because we never achieved the war’s
proper aim – ensuring that Iraq would never again use its petro-wealth to
destroy the peace of the region – we have had to fight a second war of no-fly
zones, and then a third war to remove Saddam, and now a fourth war of
counterinsurgency to protect the fledgling Iraqi democracy” and the war still
rages on.
2
...which makes it
all the more amazing that the Israeli Government has made an open-ended
commitment to the care and feeding of the Gaza population. Morris Amitay, former
head of AIPAC recently wrote: “Sustaining Gaza’s standard of living seems to
have become a solemn Israeli obligation. On an almost daily basis, the IDF
releases ‘a summary of humanitarian activity’”. One recent example: “Throughout
the day, the following humanitarian aid was transferred from Israel into Gaza
through the Sufa and Kerem Shalom crossings with the coordination of the Gaza
District Coordination and Liaison Office – 569 tons of animal feed; 269 tons and
additional 7 truckloads of flour; 22 tons of straw; 187 tons of sugar; 143 tons
of bananas and additional 9 truckloads of fruits; 98 tons of salt; 78 tons of
cooking oil; 28 tons of humus; 12 tons of milk powder and additional 300,000
liters of milk; 300,000 kg of seedlings (not to mention regular supplies of fuel
and electricity). In addition, 480 tons of wheat seeds were transferred through
a conveyor belt near the Karni crossing.” He continues: “It is hard to think of
any precedent in history where a sovereign nation undertakes to provide funding,
food, water, electricity, and fuel to an area whose people have ‘democratically
elected’ a leadership explicitly committed to war with that nation. In World War
II, we didn’t drop wiener schnitzels on Berlin – we dropped incendiaries.”