The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran should stop now, unconditionally. It’s illegal and calamitous. In the (extremely) unlikely event of achieving U.S. war aims (whatever they may be), it would still be wrong and dangerous.
Nobody ever started a long war. Wars of choice invariably begin with the promise of a quick and painless victory over a detested foe. Then they become, as the historian Barbara Tuchman documented from Troy to Vietnam, a march of folly.
History and principle tell us that Iran and Israel, the Middle East and the world need peace, not an awesome display of military supremacy.
Israel appears to have a plan and to have secured a blank check from the U.S.
I use the term ‘blank check’ advisedly, as historians will recall the way in which reckless Austrian aristocrats entrapped the German Kaiser into coming to their aid in their Balkan quarrels in 1914, with world-historic consequences. In the next post I will examine the US, in the hope that its war aims and strategies may have become clearer in the meantime.
In 1863, the British jurist Sir William Harcourt, writing under the pen name Tractatus, counselled bellicose parliamentarians against enforcing the empire’s will by gunboats. He characterized military intervention as:
a high and summary procedure which may sometimes snatch a remedy beyond the reach of law. … its essence is illegality and its justification is its success. Of all things, at once the most unjustifiable and the most impolitic is an unsuccessful Intervention. … The only object and justification of intervention is peace. To interpose without the means or the intention to carry into effect a permanent pacification is not to intervene, but to intermeddle.
Absent any such clear and credible plan for peace, Harcourt concluded, ‘We are asked to go we know not whither, in order to do we know not what.’
Israel may have an idea of where it is going. It’s not peace.
For half a century, Israel has become the world’s supreme practitioner of counter-insurgency. In some places it has near-total control, such as Gaza and the West Bank, in others its ground forces can penetrate, such as Lebanon and Syria, and further afield it mounts aerial punitive expeditions, such as against the Houthis and of course Iran. It’s now a permanent war, to the extent that countries not (yet) on the target list are wondering if they are in Israeli gunsights.
Counter-insurgency – known in the business as COIN – was a late colonial invention of Britain and France, later adapted by the US in Vietnam and revived in Afghanistan and Iraq. Winston Churchill infamously proposed inflicting a lively terror on the peoples of India and Arabia – before the British decided that the word ‘terrorist’ should be pinned on the natives alone.
Britain’s suppression of the Palestinian revolt in the 1930s, in partnership with Zionist paramilitaries, was where many Israelis learned the techniques of what the historian Caroline Elkins has called ‘legalized lawlessness.’ France’s war against Algerian nationalists provided another example. Two French colonels, David Galula and Roger Trinquier, notable for bold and tactically successful operations, wrote accounts of that war – partly as self-vindication, partly to advise the Americans in Vietnam. The military historian Douglas Porch has debunked their claims. He calls them COIN-istas’ and their books, ‘we won the war on my front’ revisionism. Porch writes of Galula that he ‘does not actually admit that he tortured suspects picked up at random in the streets, although it is implied in his narrative.’
Chief among the colonial COIN-istas’ instruments was sowing discord – deepening ethnic and sectarian divides, turning society against itself. They mistook social division and corruption for milestones march towards victory. Trinquier candidly wrote that a military operation ‘must not only have destroyed the [guerrilla] bands, but must leave behind them an area empty of all resources and absolutely uninhabitable.’
What distinguishes Israeli COIN is its permanence. There’s no end in sight. Every prime minister wins the war on his or her watch. None wins the peace.
In 2002, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon remarked that Israel could have won France’s war in Algeria. It was an astonishing statement – did he really believe that Algeria should have remained a French colony indefinitely?
Sharon was inspired by Galula and was reported to be reading Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace, a definitive account of the Algerian war. Horne himself weighed in, asking rhetorically, ‘Should I be flattered, or disturbed? Under the circumstances, I think the latter.’ He concluded, ‘As for [Sharon’s] bedside reading, the only advice is – don’t follow the French example. Don’t misread the lessons of Algeria.’
The basic truth is that colonial-era COIN scored up tactical victories and political defeat. Any strategic successes were related precisely to the speed and credibility with which the colonial power conceded the nationalists’ main political demand, namely independence. Battles won, insurgent leaders killed or captured, areas ‘pacified’, and ‘friendly forces’ armed and trained and sent into combat, only prolonged a pointless and bloody war.
It wasn’t for nothing that COIN earned the name ‘dirty war.’ Its legacy is broken societies and often fragile or failed states. And it poisoned the countries that waged it too.
Because the Israeli government will not compromise with its adversaries, its practice is ‘mowing the grass’ – attacking periodically to kill all the insurgents/terrorists who have emerged since the last grass-cutting exercise. It does this time and again in the Occupied Territories and Lebanon. It seems ready to inflict this on Iran.
Nothing is certain about the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, except that it must stop. Now.
