HOME | BIO | MUSIC | JOURNEYS BY DJ | STUDIO BLOG | POLITICAL BLOG | BOOKING INFO | CONTACT

Interesting piece in today's Boston Globe from Laura Rozen.... The title? Islamic radical groups are not all alike. Here's the part that caught my attention:

While there's been ample discussion of why terrorist groups attack US interests, it's also vital to understand why some terrorists hold back.

Almost all counterterrorism specialists agree that Hezbollah, a Lebanese Shi'ite terrorist group backed by Iran and Syria, has the capability to strike US targets. Indeed, until Sept. 11, 2001, Hezbollah had killed more Americans than any other terrorist group. Yet since the 1980s, when Hezbollah killed hundreds of Americans in strikes on a Marine barracks and the US embassy in Beirut , the group has not attacked US targets, but Israeli ones.

Recent US intelligence community analyses raise the question: What would change Hezbollah's current posture of standing on the sidelines and not actively targeting Americans?

In April , the community produced a National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism, which, according to people who have read it , says that Hezbollah is the only major terrorist group with global reach currently not trying to kill Americans. The document also raised the intelligence community's concern that, if the United States were to attack Iran over its nuclear program, Iran might use Hezbollah to strike US targets once again...

According to former Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Bob Graham, Hezbollah has a larger presence in the United States than Al Qaeda does. Nevertheless, experts say the group will continue to exercise restraint against Americans. ``I don't see much prospect of Hezbollah attacking US targets," Koch says . ``They've got their hands full with the war against Israel, and this is their winner."

One would think that having the world's most well-armed, well-funded, and well-organized terrorist groups not directing its energies towards the US would be a good thing, no?

But combine that with this new piece in the New Yorker from Sy Hersh:

According to a Middle East expert with knowledge of the current thinking of both the Israeli and the U.S. governments, Israel had devised a plan for attacking Hezbollah—and shared it with Bush Administration officials—well before the July 12th kidnappings. “It’s not that the Israelis had a trap that Hezbollah walked into,” he said, “but there was a strong feeling in the White House that sooner or later the Israelis were going to do it.”

The Middle East expert said that the Administration had several reasons for supporting the Israeli bombing campaign. Within the State Department, it was seen as a way to strengthen the Lebanese government so that it could assert its authority over the south of the country, much of which is controlled by Hezbollah. He went on, “The White House was more focussed on stripping Hezbollah of its missiles, because, if there was to be a military option against Iran’s nuclear facilities, it had to get rid of the weapons that Hezbollah could use in a potential retaliation at Israel. Bush wanted both. Bush was going after Iran, as part of the Axis of Evil, and its nuclear sites, and he was interested in going after Hezbollah as part of his interest in democratization, with Lebanon as one of the crown jewels of Middle East democracy.”

[...]

“The Israelis told us it would be a cheap war with many benefits,” a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said. “Why oppose it? We’ll be able to hunt down and bomb missiles, tunnels, and bunkers from the air. It would be a demo for Iran.”

A Pentagon consultant said that the Bush White House “has been agitating for some time to find a reason for a preëmptive blow against Hezbollah.” He added, “It was our intent to have Hezbollah diminished, and now we have someone else doing it.” (As this article went to press, the United Nations Security Council passed a ceasefire resolution, although it was unclear if it would change the situation on the ground.)

According to Richard Armitage, who served as Deputy Secretary of State in Bush’s first term—and who, in 2002, said that Hezbollah “may be the A team of terrorists”—Israel’s campaign in Lebanon, which has faced unexpected difficulties and widespread criticism, may, in the end, serve as a warning to the White House about Iran. “If the most dominant military force in the region—the Israel Defense Forces—can’t pacify a country like Lebanon, with a population of four million, you should think carefully about taking that template to Iran, with strategic depth and a population of seventy million,” Armitage said. “The only thing that the bombing has achieved so far is to unite the population against the Israelis.”

So much to say here its hard to know where to begin.

First off, despite the findings of the previously mentioned NIE that Hezbollah was not interested in striking the US, Bush and co. were agitating for a preemptive strike. Rather than focus solely on the people known to be actively working to strike the US, they once again diverted their attention towards someone or something that didn't pose an active threat. Why? What is wrong with these people that they have to focus so obsessively on people who aren't currently working to cause the nation harm? Why is it so difficult for them to stay focused on active threats?

Second, we now have two examples where a conventional military force was used to take on an unconventional enemy., and both times it was the enemy that was strengthened as a result. Virtually every serious voice I've heard paints the conflict in Lebanon as a net win both for Hezbollah and for other radical groups throughout the region. At what point are people going to learn that this approach isn't going to work?

"The Israelis told us it would be a cheap war with many benefits." Like Iraq, it was a fantasy, based on a reading of the world as they've imagined it, rather than it actually is. I've said this before, and I'll say it again. You can kill people, but you cannot kill ideas. Confuse the two and you're likely to achieve the opposite of your intended result.

So what's the alternative? Kevin Drum is definitely helping to point us in the right direction. As hard as it might be to sell to the public in times of crisis, forbearance might at times be our best answer. Kevin borrows the thought from this section of Caleb Carr's piece in Saturday's LA Times.

Is there an alternative to this pattern of mistakes and countermistakes? There is, but it involves a quality that neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians have ever come close to mastering: tactical restraint in order to achieve strategic advantage. Simply put, this involves looking past immediate and all-out retaliation as the best method of countering threat. It is not a call for turning the other cheek; rather, it suggests that savagely swinging back every time one's cheek is dealt so much as a brushing blow does not amount to effective boxing, much less enlightened belligerent behavior.

I've no doubt that both Kevin and Caleb are right when they say selling forbearance to an angry public will be difficult, perhaps even impossible. But as Kevin points out, it has been done before:

I wonder at times how Harry Truman managed the trick at the dawn of the Cold War, fending off the "rollback" hawks and convincing the public that containment was a more realistic strategy. But despite reading a fair amount about the era, I still don't know what the key was — though the presence of a sane faction in the Republican Party at the time was certainly a factor.

Unfortunately, I think the one of the primary ingredients for Truman was WWII itself. In the early days of the Cold War, the nation was exhausted from the herculean effort of that conflict. Although there were indeed some who called for a new war on the Soviets, the American public simply wasn't interested. In the absence of outright Soviet aggression, there simply wasn't an interest in fighting another world war.

World war by proxy, however, was different. Less than a decade later the nation was in fact engaged in a new war, and it was Gen. Eisenhower, the hero of the Allied effort in the European theatre, who ran on a promise that he would bring that war to an end. And Kevin's claims of "a sane faction in the Republican Party" notwithstanding, remember that it was the efforts of Republican Joseph McCarthy and other rabid anti-Communists that helped spur the nation to fight.

But Kevin, I suspect, is more focused on the adoption of the policy of containment during the late 1940's. And there, I think Caleb's history lesson could prove vital to our understanding. Forgive the long excerpt, but I think its critical here:

Imagine, for example, that either Israel (in the case of the initial Palestinian and Hezbollah attacks) or the Palestinians and Hezbollah (in the case of the original Israeli reprisals) had decided: "Patience; we will absorb this assault, and wait to focus our attacks until we can strike at what we know to be — and can prove to the rest of the world are — the enemy military or paramilitary units responsible. That will get us our principal objective: the certain backing of global public opinion. We will refuse throughout to engage in disproportionate assaults on indiscriminate targets, and if for a period we risk suffering more losses than our opponent, we will nonetheless profit in the long run. When we have netted the world's sympathy, we will receive more backing, even as our enemies' support dwindles, and what had seemed to be tactical peril will in fact prove to be strategic advantage."

This notion — absorbing smaller blows in order to deliver decisive later strikes — has important historical precedents. It forms a central tenet of the philosophy of ancient China's Sun Tzu, arguably the world's greatest military thinker. But even during modern American history, we can find the idea at work: For it decisively influenced the pre-World War II steps taken by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In 1937, when imperial Japanese aircraft "mistakenly" attacked and sank the U.S. gunboat Panay and several other vessels on China's Yangtze River, some in the U.S. called for war; but FDR realized that the U.S. was in fact neither politically nor militarily ready for such a conflict. And so he (rather unhappily) bided his time, accepting what seemed to his enemies a craven reparations deal and awaiting an event that would allow the overwhelming majority of the American public to appreciate the dangers of Japanese medievalist militarism. The wait also gave the American Navy extra years to prepare.

Similarly, when Roosevelt later tried, after the outbreak of the European war in 1939, to engineer American entrance into the conflict through elaborate trickery centered on luring Nazi subs into attacking U.S. warships in the North Atlantic, he quickly found that, much as the Allies might match his own desire to get the U.S. into the war, his own people were still not ready. And so he did not act, convincing Adolf Hitler of his own degeneracy, as well as that of the people he led.

BUT ROOSEVELT WAS, of course, waiting for a precise set of conditions that would allow him not simply to be the just party in the war but to appear to be as much, at home and abroad. And, of course, by the time the U.S. entered the European and the Pacific wars, there was no doubt about our moral rectitude or our increased military and naval strength.

Lives had been lost, shipping endangered, prestige — personal and otherwise — sullied, but FDR had, by bending with the early blows and waiting for what turned out to be the disaster of Pearl Harbor, pulled off the stroke that would garner the United States, over the course of World War II, so much moral authority that even his less internationally adept successors — from Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush — have not been able to drain it; not quite yet, at any rate.

It's here that I think Kevin could find his answer. As much as it might seem a cop out to say it, that answer, I believe, is leadership. FDR was able to balance both the short and the long term, often putting aside his personal preferences in favor of what appeared to be the more rational choice. Rather than respond to the 1937 attacks, he waited, believing that a better opportunity awaited down the road. Then, when his efforts in 1939 failed to arouse the nation to war, he listened to its citizens and waited once more. Until, of course, there was no choice but to act.

The result of his forbearance, of course, was not simply victory, but victory on our terms, resulting in a half century of American dominance that would have seemed impossible amidst the Great Depression just 10 years before.

Truman, I would argue, led in precisely the same manner. Recognizing that a pre-emptive war would not serve the nation's long term interests, he called on the nation to fight in other ways. Containment was more than a military strategy. It was, like WWII, also a moral campaign. Here's how Truman described it in March of 1947:

I am fully aware of the broad implications involved if the United States extends assistance to Greece and Turkey, and I shall discuss these implications with you at this time.

One of the primary objectives of the foreign policy of the United States is the creation of conditions in which we and other nations will be able to work out a way of life free from coercion. This was a fundamental issue in the war with Germany and Japan. Our victory was won over countries which sought to impose their will, and their way of life, upon other nations[...]

At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one.

One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression.

The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.

I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.

I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.

I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes[...]

The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want. They spread and grow in the evil soil of poverty and strife. They reach their full growth when the hope of a people for a better life has died.

We must keep that hope alive.

Truman understood that national security was a multi-facted concept, one that required the nation to confront its enemies on a variety of different battlefields. Although military strength would always be required, it was just one one component of many, and often not the most important one at that.

And that, I would argue, was the key to Truman's success in arguing for forbearance. Rather than paint it as a choice between military action and inaction, Truman argued for action on other terms. By widening the terms of engagement, Truman shifted the battle to terrain that greatly favored our side.

That, I would argue, is what is most needed today. However strong our military, it is our ideas that will provide our great advantage, and it is on that battlefield that we must more fully engage.

UPDATE: Want more details on how our lack of forbearance has hurt our cause? John over at Ezra's place has you covered.