Rejecting COIN Wisdom

By Cernig

I forget where I picked up the link to this December in-depth study from the US Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute (PDF) on the causes and antecedents of Palestinian/Israeli rivalry and thus the current conflict in Gaza. But this paragraph from the summary seemed to me to encapsulate where the disagreement begins between between pro-Israeli propagandists, primarily on the right, and the rest of us:

Israel claimed significant victories in its war against Palestinians by the use of targeted killings of leadership, boycotts, power cuts, preemptive attacks and detentions, and punishments to militant's families, relatives, and neighborhoods etc., because its counterterrorism logic is to reduce insurgents' organizational capability. This particular Israeli analysis rejects the idea that counterterrorist violence can spark more resistance and violence, but also admitted that Israel had not "defeated the will to resistance" [of Palestinians]. This admission suggests that the tactics employed might not be indefinitely manageable, and that Palestinians, despite every possible effort made to weaken or incriminate them, to discourage or prevent their Arab non-Palestinian supporters from defending their interests, and to buy the services of collaborators, could edge Israelis back toward comprehensive negotiations, or rise up again against them. Moshe Sharett, Israel's second Prime Minister, once asked: "Do people consider that when military reactions outstrip in their severity the events that caused them, grave processes are set in motion which widen the gulf and thrust our neighbors into the extremist camp? How can this deterioration be halted?"

That analysis is of course what differentiates those who were always pro-Iraqi occupation from the rest of us too - and in a wider sense is the thinking behind the neoconservative movement's constant war drums. They just don't get what everyone else long ago realised - including their lionized hero General Petraus: war crimes beget war crimes, just as atrocities beget new militants on all sides, and rushing to the lowest common denominator of mindless violence does not and cannot halt an insurgency. And it matters not whether that insurgency takes the moral low ground itself or not.

Playing endless whack-a-mole just ensures you always have enemies to continue playing whack-a-mole with. What's so difficult about that concept? At what point does even the most rabid closet moral relativist or hypocritical "nihilist" of the far right work out that Israel or the US repeatedly hitting their national heads against a wall isn't solving anything?

Then there are the Palestinians – who will still be Israel’s neighbours after the bloodletting has stopped. Israeli official rhetoric suggests that the government hopes a massive attack on Gaza will turn the population against Hamas. But violence against Israelis has always made public opinion there more hawkish. Why should the Palestinians be any different? In their more reflective moments, even senior Israeli politicians recognise that more killing is likely further to radicalise the Palestinians. A columnist in Haaretz, a liberal Israeli paper, recalled this week that Ehud Barak, the defence minister, who is masterminding the attack on Gaza, once told him that if he were a Palestinian “I would join a terror organisation”.

The Israelis sometimes suggest that their ultimate goal is in fact to displace Hamas, which still refuses to recognise Israel, rather than simply to stop the rockets. But any new Palestinian government that rode to power on the back of Israeli tanks would be maimed from the start.

The Israeli government may acknowledge the force of some of these objections. But its response is that it had no alternative. Hamas is a terrorist organisation that forced Israel’s hand.

In fact, there was an alternative that was never tried: relax the blockade of Gaza in return for a renewal of the ceasefire that ran out in December. Israel appears to have done the opposite. In November the blockade became harsher, putting serious pressure on the supply of food and fuel into Gaza.

Ending the blockade of Gaza in return for a ceasefire remains the best option – for both humanitarian and strategic reasons.

But the longer the bloodshed goes on, the more both sides in the conflict will be sucked into a logic of revenge and retaliation.

Maybe that's just the way these rightwing sociopaths want it. I'm at a loss to think of any other reason they continually deny accepted counter-insurgency expertise to bang the gong for more bloodshed.

Update: Marc Lynch has more of the same non-sense from the Israeli ambassador to the US.

... After he failed to respond to an initial question about the end-state Israel hoped to achieve, I asked him directly about his government's strategic logic. How, precisely did Israel's government expect its military campaign to achieve its goals? His answer tellingly focused almost exclusively on body counts and targets hit: over 1000 Hamas targets hit ("not a small number"), many headquarters and tunnels and rocket production facilities destroyed. Tactics over strategy.

But as to a political strategy tied to the military campaign, nothing. No guidance as to whether Israel would re-occupy Gaza, or on what terms it would accept a cease-fire. No thoughts as to whether the campaign would cause Hamas to fall from power or help the Palestinian Authority regain political power. An absolute refusal to entertain a question about the negative effects of the images from Gaza on the wider region (the important image of the war, he nearly spat, should be that "terror is not allowed to win"). Would the military assault at least change Hamas's strategic calculus? "This is for the future, only the future will tell."

In short, Meridor quite literally offered no strategy beyond hitting Gaza hard and hoping for the best. "In terms of creating damage we are certainly on the right path," noted the Ambassador. Few would disagree with that assessment, at least. But some might hope that the bloody, battered path might actually be leading somewhere.

Comments

[anderson]

One way logic: Hamas killing Israeli civilians will necessarily make Israeli citizens anti-Hamas and demand repercussions. But the IDF killing Palestinian civilians is, by some bizarro world calculus, supposed to turn remaining Palestinians away from Hamas. Apparently, the Israelis believe that Palestinians are a different species of mammal altogether.

[Andy]

I'm at a loss to think of any other reason they continually deny accepted counter-insurgency expertise to bang the gong for more bloodshed.

You think the Israeli's should be practicing COIN in gaza?

[Peter G.]

Cernig I so wish you would cross post this sort of analysis at C&L. It is both more insightful and nuanced then the posts concerning civilian casualties. Not that those aren't important but the regular diet of red meat is causing a most uncivil blog war. I don't see anyone budging a hair on their positions and the atmosphere over there is getting quite toxic at times.

[anna missed]

This is simply classic vicious circle type reasoning, that one usually expects from addiction behavior. In Israel's case the addictive behavior is not unlike the child of a molester repeating the offense when he becomes an adult himself, where the ends (to a problem) are lost in the significance of the means - at least until the means become the ends, and the circle is satisfied temporarily, or they run out of victims aka achieving genocide.

[zak822]

"They just don't get what everyone else long ago realised".

They can't get it; it's not in them to understand that people will fight you if you hit them. They believe that they can compel agreement that goes beyond mere fear. Authoritarians deeply believe that they are right, by gum, and they will beat you until you acknowledge this.

Science fiction writer AE Van Vogt called it the "Right Man Syndrome". Philosopher Colin Wilson, in a 2003 writing, spoke of "The inverted logic of the Right Man, who is incapable of admitting that he is to blame"--or that he is wrong.

Wilson went on to say that "the difference between the Right Man Syndrome and clinical psychosis is that the psychotic is the victim of his delusions while the Right Man's separation from reality is to some extent voluntary".

There is little hope for these folks. We just need to gently move them aside; they are not amenable to reason.

[Erroll]

As a Vietnam veteran, I find what is going on in Gaza [and in Iraq and Afghanistan] to be so reminiscent of the thinking that went on in Southeast Asia over forty years ago and that is that the United States believed that they could crush an insurgency with overwhelming force. That idea and execution was a total failure. Israel seems to believe that if it somehow kills enough Palestinians [as evidenced by the Israeli ambassador's obsession with, as in Vietnam, body counts], regardless of whether they are members of Hamas or not, that it will defeat the Palestinians.

As this post sensibly points out, the best way for peace to occur is for Israel to lift the blockade. But since the Israelis seem determined not to engage in logical thinking, then the Palestinians, like the Vietnamese and the Iraqis and the Afghans, will continue to fight and resist against their oppressors.

[Paul]

It isn't mindless violence, or ill-considered strategies, or stupidity or foolishness brought on by pig-headed adherance to some particular ideology that we are seeing. It's deliberate violence, deployed with a specific intent to destroy the peace; deliberate injustice strategically implemented in order to foment never-ending strife. The entire point is to create unending strife and perpetual wars, while at the same time manipulatively breeding unending fear amongst that portion of the home populace that is prone to such things...all of it in order to create a boogeyman enemy who can be used to prop these warmongers up on a permanent gravey train that rolls on biscuit wheels. It's about the acquisition, wielding and retention of power, power for its own gratuitous sake. It's about deliberately and meticulously created wars-without-end, crafted from deliberately inflicted serial injustices and ever-escalting provocations. These methods and the inevitable outcomes are the life's breath of the sociopathic despots who are committing these serial crimes and atrocities, be they neocons or zionists.

It isn't stupdity, blindness or fooolishness that spawns these atrocities, its predatory, animal cunning willfully deployed by malignant personalities who have chosen the despot's perpetually easiest path to power, the darkest side of the sickest minds - made manifest in the world of deeds. To shake our heads in disbelieving astonishment as to how they can be so blind or foolish, is to miss the point. The destruction of peace, the establishment of a permanent enemy class, the establishment of ceaseless warfare is their carefully considered intent. These people aren't leaders who are struggling to do the best that they can for their nations and their people. The are malignant sociopaths who are using every ruthless talent and trick they can summon in order to secure power for themselves. They are evil preists, willing to turn every defenseless innocent into disposable sacrifices upon their altars to power. They are people without conscience. They serve no one but themselves. They do not belong in seats of official power, they belong in maximum security prisons, in cells reserved exclusively for those who will never be reformed.

[Jack]

That was an awful lot of gobbledy-gook to sort through. What I took from it was if someone disagrees with you they are some kind of sociopath or kook.

Boy that sort of logic is good. Good and useless. I won't waste time calling you names, it is a waste.

But let's remember a few things. Many of the conflicts of the world were solved by violence. You may not like it, but sometimes you have to kick someone so hard they refuse to get back up.

What do you think happened to Japan and Germany. Did they just wake up and decide that the Allies were right.

Where is the condemnation of Hamas. Why not speak out against their terrorism. Why not rail against the pro Hamasniks in the US who shout antisemitic slogans. Or talk about the increase in antisemitic acts around the world.

I guess that it is just easier to close your eyes and recite your mantra. You're no better than those you lampoon.

There is a history of people living double lives in Gaza. Reuters Story that says school headmaster was a rocket maker for Islamic Jihad.

[Erroll]

Pro-war apologists like Jack never fail to bring up World War II while conveniently leaving out examples such as Vietnam, Algeria, Northern Ireland, etc. The common denominator between these examples and what is going on in Gaza is that no country will allow itself to be oppressed by a foreign power. Despite Jacks's ill-served statement, "many of the conflicts of the world [as in the examples previously stated] were [NOT] solved by violence." Or will he claim that that statement is anti-semitic?