by Dore Gold
At a time when the political discourse in
Israel is focusing on how the current operation in Gaza should have come
to an end, it is useful to look at a classic book on international
affairs called "Every War Must End." The author of this study is Fred
Ikle, who was not only an undersecretary of defense in the Reagan
administration, but also a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and the head of the prestigious RAND Corporation in Santa
Monica, Calif.
The book really is about what perpetuates wars
unnecessarily. Ikle’s analysis was written with the Vietnam War in
mind, but he has revised it since then. He appears to have been mainly
concerned with how states handle guerrilla wars. Some of its principles
are useful to review in the Israeli context, if mistakes that many other
countries have made are to be avoided.
Ikle’s first principle is that the purpose of
the use of force is to defeat the military forces of the enemy. This is
not as obvious as it seems. Many states locked into difficult guerrilla
wars eventually turn to “punishment” strategies that are used to break
the will of their adversaries, or what he calls “peace through
escalation.” When a state is stuck in what appears to be a stalemate,
there will always be people who look for more extreme solutions, hoping
that the use of more force will change the situation fundamentally.
Ikle reminds his readers that the use of force
against the civilian population will not work. Despotic rulers will not
seek peace simply because his soldiers and civilians are suffering from
the war. The U.S. tried punishment strategies in the Korean War against
Kim Il-sung and in the Vietnam War against Ho Chi Minh and failed to
get either leader to seek a peaceful outcome. The Iranians tried to
punish Iraq’s allies in the Iran-Iraq War by striking their oil
infrastructures, but by expanding the conflict they only brought in the
U.S. against them.
Thus there are unintended side effects for a
state adopting punishment strategies that can be totally self-defeating.
In the current Gaza conflict, it is Hamas that is using a punishment
strategy by striking larger numbers of Israeli cities and reaching
northward as far as Tel Aviv and the outskirts of Jerusalem. But what
Hamas has done is to create far greater solidarity on the Israeli side
rather than break the will of the Israeli public. Rather than splitting
the Israeli public it has put Tel Aviv and Ashdod in the same boat,
thereby forming a strong Israeli consensus for waging a war to stop the
rocket attacks.
A second issue that Ikle raises that
perpetuates modern wars is the existence of outside support for the
guerrilla forces a state might be fighting. This is not just a matter of
the supply of weapons or funding, it is has a broader impact on the
morale of guerrilla fighters involved in an insurgency against a
well-equipped army. If they are isolated and have no reinforcements
coming they are psychologically more prone to halt their fight.
Israel has acquired experience in this area in
the last decade. One of the cardinal strategic errors in the 2005
Disengagement was the decision of Prime Minister Sharon to withdraw
Israel’s military presence from the Philadelphi Route along the
Gaza-Sinai border, after which the number of supply tunnels increased
dramatically. Prior to the Disengagement, only short-range rockets were
fired at Israel, like the Qassam, that was manufactured in Gaza. But in
2006, suddenly the longer-range Grad rocket that is manufactured in Iran
was fired for the first time at Ashkelon, indicating how the improved
lines of supply to Hamas was changing the battlefield.
It became extremely difficult to reach a
decisive outcome in the war in Gaza and defeat Hamas as long as it had
this link to external sources of supply, like Iran. In comparison, the
IDF was able to defeat Hamas and other organizations in the West Bank in
2002, during Operation Defensive Shield, partly because their forces
had no external source of supply. Israel continued to seal off the outer
perimeter of the West Bank — the Jordan Valley — and did not pull out
from this strategic area, as it had withdrawn from Philadelphi Route. As
a result, the war in Gaza continued from the Disengagement until today,
while no such armed conflict on a similar scale erupted in the West
Bank.
There is a third issue that Ikle raises that
sometimes keeps conflicts going for longer than they should: a
pessimistic outlook in Western democracies has taken hold that guerrilla
forces cannot be defeated. As a result many people tend to doubt the
ability of their own armed forces to win modern wars and popular support
for guerrilla conflicts tends to evaporate very quickly.
In Israel it is frequently stated that “only a
political process can vanquish terrorism.” But what happens to
“political solutions” when Israel confronts an organization like Hamas
that is unwilling to compromise on its rigid ideology of muqawama and
armed struggle against Israel?
Yaakov Amidror, who is now the National
Security adviser, wrote a study showing that historically
counterinsurgency wars have actually been won by the West when certain
conditions were fulfilled.
Amidror reviewed the U.S. victory in the
Philippines in 1954, the British victory in Malaya in 1952 and that in
Oman in the 1970s as classic textbook cases. More recently there was the
counterinsurgency campaign waged by General David Petraeus, who
converted what looked like an American defeat in Western Iraq to a
victory against al-Qaida in 2007.
What emerges from all these theoretical
writings is the obvious point that wars against terrorism come to an end
if they are won. But it is important to remember that victory is not
achieved in these kinds of wars with a photograph of the enemy emerging
from a bunker holding a white flag. In Operation Defensive Shield in
2002, as Amidror wrote, the wave of suicide bombings that the
Palestinians employed against Israel came to an end. That result alone
constituted a victorious outcome.
In the Gaza conflict we just had [Operation
Pillar of Defense], the stated goal of military operations was to bring
to an end the constant rocket fire on Israel by Hamas and other
organizations which receive sanctuary in the territory Hamas controls.
If the cease-fire stabilizes in the weeks
ahead, then the IDF will have achieved its stated goal. But to preserve
what it has accomplished, Israel and the U.S. will have to put in place
arrangements for the Philadelphi Route to prevent Iran from replacing
all the weaponry that Israel has destroyed. Closing the outer perimeter
to a territory where an insurgency war is being waged has been proven
time and again to be a prerequisite for assuring stability in the long
term.
Hamas escalated its rocket war on Israel in
2011 and especially in 2012, largely because it felt that the regional
balance of power had changed with the outbreak of the Arab Spring and
the rise of Islamist regimes, especially in Egypt, where the Muslim
Brotherhood and the Salafists became the dominant political force. It
did not feel regionally isolated any longer. The Hamas leadership
assumed that it could attack Israel while hiding behind the protective
umbrella of President Muhammad Morsi of Egypt and Prime Minister Erdoğan
of Turkey.
Israel demonstrated that nothing would deter
it from exercising its right to self defense, even in the era of the
Arab Spring. Hamas miscalculated. Essentially, the Muslim Brotherhood in
Egypt felt strongly that now was the time for it to consolidate its
control on power and not to get drawn into the military adventurism of
Hamas, despite the full ideological identification of the former with
the latter. But this change appears to be tactical in nature.
Dore Gold
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=2931
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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