For future reference (an excellent piece):
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It's a War. Now, to What End?
washingtonpost.com
By Eliot A. Cohen
Sunday, April 21, 2002; Page B01
How rare it is that politicians, pundits and journalists call what has been going on in Israel and the occupied territories since September 2000 by its true name, which is war.
Instead they contribute to the lack of clarity about what is transpiring there by using fuzzy or even fatuous terms to describe it. "The peace process" label lasted long after the situation had metamorphosed into a bloody war process. "Violence" may seem a safely neutral shorthand but it is usually preceded by the misleading word "senseless." Moreover, "violence" could refer to the spontaneous mayhem of a riot as opposed to a contest between organized groups -- and what has been going on for the last 18 months is anything but spontaneous.
This is war and requires analysis as such. It may seem inhumane to self-consciously refrain from deploring the "cycle of violence," but it is worthwhile to do so, if only temporarily, in order to judge aright what is happening.
The Middle East these days is dominated by what Prussian military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz called "a paradoxical trinity" composed of three interacting forces: calculation, which he associated with governments; creativity, which he associated with commanders; and passion, which he associated with peoples.
Consider the element of calculation -- and dispense with the notion that this war in the Middle East is merely a series of misunderstandings, accidents or incidents that have slipped the control of leaders on both sides. This is a conflict for which both sides have been preparing for a long time. Ariel Sharon's provocative visit to the Temple Mount, on Sept. 28, 2000, may have served as nominal casus belli. But the deepest causes lay in the unwillingness of the Arafat government to accept the kind of peace that seemed tantalizingly close at talks held at Camp David in July 2000 and in Taba, Egypt, in January 2001. That peace would have left the Palestinians with a state comprising 97 percent of area of the pre-1967 West Bank and Gaza. But Yasser Arafat would not accept limits on the return to Israel of Palestinian refugees and their descendants, effective Israeli control over most of Jerusalem or constraints on the Palestinian state. Believing he could get more, he turned to arsenals accumulated and tactics developed over a period of years, including the period after the Oslo peace accords were signed.
The immediate objective of Arafat's purposeful strategy was to secure an agreement on his terms through the use of escalating violence in the territories and in Israel proper. He believed that his chosen means -- a combination of riot, terror and guerrilla warfare -- would fatallyweaken Israel so that it would acquiesce to the return of larger numbers of Palestinian refugees to Israel, a more favorable division of Jerusalem and few if any constraints on Palestinian sovereignty. He drew encouragement for this belief from Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon, the result of a trickle of casualties inflicted by Hezbollah guerrillas. The clamor and self-doubt of Israeli society in the 1990s -- afflicted with the neuroses of affluence and internal strife between secular and religious, Ashkenazi and Sephardi, immigrant and native, Zionist and post-Zionist -- no doubt reinforced this assessment.
The Israeli government, and Israeli people, took a very different view of this war, seeing it as a conflict not over the terms of a peace treaty but over the Jewish state's very existence. Arafat may not have expected this. Believing Palestinian insistence on the right of return to be part of a strategy to inflict demographic suffocation on the Jewish state, Israel tried three strategic responses to the Palestinians. First, Israel sought, by punishing the incipient Palestinian state, to prod it into abiding by its promises to abjure and prevent violence. Hence Israel destroyed symbolic targets such as police headquarters, television towers and eventually the Gaza airport, all in the hope that Israel itself would not have to confront the most violent Palestinian groups directly. Then, as that hope faded, Israel strove to disrupt the terrorist networks attacking Israelis by killing or capturing key individuals. In the past few weeks, Israel has launched a frontal attack to uproot those networks and overawe Palestinians by reoccupying their cities, conducting wholesale arrests and killing Palestinian gunmen in large numbers.
As for the second element of Clausewitz's peculiar trinity, both sides demonstrated remarkable creativity. The Palestinians began with demonstrations featuring children throwing stones at, and being shot by, Israeli soldiers -- a sight that made for effective television and applied pressure that was more psychological than military. As the conflict escalated, Palestinians exploited yet another tactic -- suicide bombings -- to use against an enemy that is infinitely superior from a conventional military point of view. The routine resort to premeditated suicide has rarely featured in warfare: It requires an ideology of death, a variety of incentives and sociological reinforcement, and a degree of ruthlessness not present in most military organizations. To attribute this to "desperation" (another thought cliché of the coverage of the war) does not give credit to Palestinian groups involved, such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and those within the Palestinian Authority itself. Finding scores if not hundreds of people to blow themselves up in order to kill and maim large numbers of enemy civilians requires organizational skills in recruiting, collecting and hiding explosive materials, setting up safe houses and finding holes in Israel's security net. It is, in a technical sense, impressive.
The Israelis have, for their part, demonstrated remarkable skill in two respects: first, the collection of intelligence that allowed them to target particular Palestinian leaders early on, and second, the ability to occupy hostile cities in the face of fierce opposition without resorting to mere devastation. The United States military could not have done a better job at urban warfare than the Israel Defense Forces has; Jenin has been badly battered, but neither it nor any other Palestinian city is Grozny. There's no antiseptic way of fighting in a city, but the Israelis did not resort to indiscriminate bombardment and slaughter of civilians. Palestinian civilians have died, but not en masse, more on the scale on which Americans have unintentionally killed noncombatants in Iraq, Somalia and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Israeli casualties -- fewer than 50 killed in recent operations -- though painful, have been far below the norms of urban warfare, which is the most difficult kind of fighting.
There is, finally, the most elusive element of Clausewitz's triangle: passion or popular will. Because mutual hatred has grown beyond levels seen in other periods of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the clash of societal wills is sharper than ever. The important question from an analytical point of view is resilience. Palestinian society has shown a tremendous willingness to suffer for its cause, some of which may be explained by the sense of solidarity it can detect through regional Arab television broadcasts, the flow of material support from countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and awareness of European sympathy for their situation. Moreover, there is the exhilarating effect of the knowledge that the Palestinians have discovered a way of making the Jews suffer.
At the same time, the Palestinian strategy rests on a misunderstanding of Israel's underlying social strength and sense of purpose. For Israelis, the war has brought about a profound sense of depression, as the Palestinian leadership no doubt expected and Palestinians in general gladly discovered. But Israeli society remains remarkably coherent and determined. Motivation of conscripts and reservists is no longer an issue; in a war understood as a struggle for existence, expect little internal discord. Liberal democracy, once again, proves itself to have a tougher core than one might think. Let us hope that as in the past it shows itself to have more stamina, too, for in this as in many more tangible ways the United States has a stake in the outcome of this conflict.
The Palestinian strategy, whatever it has done to Israelis, is enormously self-destructive. The collapse of the Palestinian economy, the chaos resulting from the destruction of even the corrupt and ineffective institutions of the Palestinian Authority, and the shock of reoccupation and house-to-house fighting means that soon -- perhaps already -- there will be very little left to hold Palestinian society together other than hate. Furthermore, in Yasser Arafat, Palestinians have a leader who is simply incapable of concluding a real peace agreement, and he has no successor.
This war will continue and probably worsen. The Palestinians, it would appear, have delegated (or have no choice but to delegate) their decisions to a machine-gun toting old man trapped in his headquarters in Ramallah. They have no means other than putsch of picking a successor when, sooner or later, Arafat passes from the scene. For his part, Arafat is incapable of making the transition from insurgent nationalist calling for martyrdom and jihad to the president of a small, underdeveloped and overpopulated state worrying about unemployment, street crime and building codes. Even those who sympathize deeply with the Palestinian people now recognize in him the leadership traits not of Nelson Mandela, but of Robert Mugabe. Only a reshuffling of the deck -- through the disappearance of Arafat, or an event (such as the overthrow of Saddam Hussein) that profoundly changes the mood in the Arab world -- will make something approaching truce, let alone peace, possible.
For the Israelis, the challenge is one best described by Winston Churchill: "I thought we ought to have conquered the Irish and then given them Home Rule; that we ought to have starved out the Germans, and then revictualled their country; and that after smashing the General Strike we should have met the grievances of the miners. . . . As it is, those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace, and those who could make a good peace would never have won the war."
The Israelis have those who can make a good peace and those who can fight a skilled war, but they lack a statesman who can do both, and they need one. The United States, for its part, should accept the logic of war, not its apocalyptic shadows. War, as Clausewitz put it, tends to "mask the stage with scenery crudely daubed with fearsome apparitions," in this case the specter of an Arab world dangerously convulsed in anger against the United States. The United States should encourage the Israelis to find an ambidextrous strategy, while remembering that its own war on terror is far from over and is linked with this one.
"It cannot go on like this," one hears, and ultimately, it will not. But it may continue for months or years, and when it ends it will most likely be as a result of dramatic events, not interim agreements to get to Tenet to return to Mitchell to revive Camp David to restore Oslo. It is war, and, as Churchill put it, no one -- Palestinian, Israeli or American -- who "embarks on that strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter."
Eliot Cohen is a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies and the author of the forthcoming "Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen and Leadership in Wartime" (Free Press).
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