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

To: tekboy who wrote (50877)	10/10/2002 2:05:25 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

<<...War is unpredictable. And that's what people always need to remember when they decide to go to war -- that things will not turn out to be the way you expect. The famous military philosopher Karl von Clausewitz spoke of "the fog of war." It is something very dense and thick, something which creates lots of friction and a lot of things go wrong...>> Comments by Johns Hopkins' Gal Luft... [Gal Luft is a reseacher with the School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University in Washington and a former battalion commander in the Israeli army.] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Originally published October 10, 2002 The Baltimore Sun War is unpredictable. And that's what people always need to remember when they decide to go to war -- that things will not turn out to be the way you expect. The famous military philosopher Karl von Clausewitz spoke of "the fog of war." It is something very dense and thick, something which creates lots of friction and a lot of things go wrong. My own experience started with the war in Lebanon (in 1982), which was a guerrilla war, and then the first Intifada (in 1987) which was a popular uprising. And finally there was the gulf war, in which I was especially unlucky because a Scud missile hit my house. In each case, war brought different threats and different outcomes. When Israel entered southern Lebanon, we thought it would be over in a couple of weeks -- clean up, and that would be the end of it. Well, that turned out to be a 20-year adventure. On the other hand, sometimes wars create favorable conditions for peace -- not that it has succeeded in the case of the Palestinians, at least so far. But the gulf war created the conditions of the Madrid Conference that opened a whole peace dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians and brought about the peace with Jordan in 1994, something the Jordanians had not been previously willing to accept. We came out of the gulf war very happy to have very few casualties, but no one expected to have thousands of people with gulf war syndrome. So you are always surprised. There are always new conditions on the ground. One final thing is very, very important: If you start a war and 50 percent of the people are not in favor, you can assume this number will go up and up and up. Unless it's a very quick war, like a blitz war and ends very fast in a decisive way. But if it is long and protracted, it means trouble. It means uncertainty. It affects the economy. It can create all kinds of problems. I would like to see people have more humility and more doubt and more skepticism when they deal with complicated issues like war. That's the only thing. You may decide to go and do this, but it is always the kind of action you cannot underestimate. Copyright © 2002, The Baltimore Sun sunspot.net