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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: FaultLine who wrote (26424)	4/22/2002 4:47:32 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

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." What a superb piece! Here is the writer's background:(I find that he has published in "Foreign Affairs") Eliot Cohen Professor and Director of Strategic Studies Areas of Expertise: Middle East; Persian Gulf; Iraq; arms control; international relations; military power and strategy; NATO; strategic and security issues Background and Education: Served on the policy planning staff of the secretary of Defense and directed the U.S. Air Force?s Gulf War Air Power Survey; former professor at Harvard University and the U.S. Naval War College; Ph.D., political science, Harvard University Publications: Knives, Tanks & Missiles: Israel?s Security Revolution, co-author (1998); Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in Twentieth Century Warfare, co-author (1990); Citizens and Soldiers: The Dilemmas of Military Service (1985); Commandos and Politicians: Elite Military Units in Modern Democracies (1978); numerous articles; contributing editor to The New Republic and National Review

To: FaultLine who wrote (26424)	4/22/2002 12:32:49 PM
From: Win Smith	Respond to of 281500

Not Quite an Arab-Israeli War, but a Long Descent Into Hatred nytimes.com [ a companion compare-and-contrast piece, much longer though. Intro only quoted ] The Israeli Army largely withdrew today from six of the West Bank towns it had entered three weeks ago, and already the incursions are assuming their own place in the long list of armed conflicts that Israel has fought with its Arab neighbors through its 54-year history. Some have names: the War of Independence, the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur war; some have only dates: 1956, 1982. But each marked a milestone in a history of almost constant struggle, and each created a new distribution of power, geography and grievance. This history has shaped the tactics and obsessed the leaders of this latest conflict, one that is different from any that has come before it. From the Israeli side, this month's fighting had all the trappings of war. Israel called 20,000 of its reserves to the fight, and Israeli flags sprouted from car antennas across the country. But it is a mistake to think of this struggle as a conventional war, for it marks a new form of the fight. There was no clash between military units and no battle back and forth over disputed boundaries. There were no equivalent sovereign powers to sign a cease-fire. There was no one to formally surrender, and no one to claim lasting victory. It is more useful to compare this fight to a police action, or a rolling counterinsurgency fought out in densely populated cities. The Israeli Army was out to kill or arrest Palestinian fighters, and to destroy as many bomb-making laboratories as it could find. It wanted to suppress the Palestinians' fighting capacity, knowing that, political oratory aside, it could not wipe it out. This time, when the Palestinians launched terror strikes, they attacked cities they no longer claimed as theirs, and when Israel went into the West Bank, it went into cities it had ceded to the Palestinians. Both sides know this is not the end of their struggle. Many Israelis believe that more and larger incursions are yet to come, especially if there are more suicide bombings. "Unless we have a political cycle that begins now, as a direct continuation of the military operation, all of our losses are for nothing," said Capt. Michael Vromen, a former intelligence officer serving as an army spokesman.

To: FaultLine who wrote (26424)	4/22/2002 1:03:51 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

One comment: 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. This is true. Going over some old Lebanon '82 coverage yesterday, it hit me that the current operation looks quite benign by comparison on the death and destruction front. Israel's operation also looks good compared to Afghanistan, where I don't think the US ever really had much to say in either apology or defense of the dubious idea of shooting missiles from remote control planes at relatively tall guys who just might be Bin Laden, or at least looked vaguely similar from 20k ft on a TV link, or wiping out random caravans of tribal elders when some competing warlord or other said they were Taliban. Grozny, I'd rather not think about. There's ugly, and then there's ugly.