"Caution,"Restraint," and Other Code Words to Get Israel Annihilated

It was only a matter of time, and not much time, before Biden & Co. started wobbling.

The Washington Post is a wonderfully reliable mouthpiece for whatever the Democrats are thinking at the moment, so I took note of its prominent story this morning, “The language of caution creeps into Biden’s message to Israel.” After dutifully noting Biden’s initially quite strong support for Israel, the Post gets to the part it wants to broadcast:

But increasingly, the president and his team have also made fairly gentle appeals for Israeli caution. Over the weekend, Biden delivered a warning amid questions of what an Israeli victory over Hamas might look like, what the Jewish state’s endgame could be as it pounds Gaza Strip rubble into gravel and sets in motion what experts expect to be an unprecedented ground war in Gaza.

Ah yes, the old “endgame.” Did anyone ask after FDR’s speech to Congress on December 8, 1941, what the “endgame” was? And of course the WaPo isn’t about to hold forth without recourse to its ever-present “experts” — a bunch that includes Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib for all I know (since the Post never says).

“I think it'd be a big mistake” for Israel to occupy Gaza, he said, even if eliminating Hamas “is a necessary requirement.”

…said Mr. Biden, who has lots of experience eating ice cream but none anyone has ever seen in military matters.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin chimed in as well. As the Post writes:

Arguably, this month’s onslaught [in Israel] was worse [than the 9/11 attacks in the United States] if you consider the death tolls in proportion to each country’s total population.

But that comparison, as we wrote a week ago, should give everyone pause. And now, it appears, Austin agrees.

In an interview with the NewsHour on PBS, Austin declined to criticize Israel’s response. But he did draw on 9/11 to offer a word of caution.

“One of the things that we learned is that you have to really think through next steps,” he told Nick Schifrin. “You have to be very thoughtful about that because they will have long-term implications.

As Paul showed once again in his last post, he, being younger, is more patient and analytical than I. All this stuff about “caution” and “restraint” and (of course) the “humanitarian crisis” that Gaza brought on itself by years of harboring Hamas barbarians is about to suffer at the hands of an unfeeling Israel — we’ve heard it all before. The “experts” go on about it at length, but their “wisdom” can be summed up in just seven words: “Dear Israel, sit there and take it.”

It’s easy to ridicule this ancient and anciently bad advice to Israel in the face of the gruesome, existential threat it faces, but a more thoughtful treatment of it —one taking a longer view — has come to my attention courtesy of this newsletter, titled “Wars of Necessity, and Wars of Choice.”

Over the last few centuries, powerful states have been getting worse at winning wars against weaker adversaries….Today, the US can struggle for decades to impose its will on one poor nation on the other side of the globe and end up leaving in disgrace.

It seems unlikely that there’s a technological reason for this change. If anything, strong countries should be getting better at accomplishing their objectives. Sure, insurgents now have things like cellphones and IEDs, but that’s unlikely to be as important as new tools primarily available to rich states like nuclear weapons, precision bombs, and advanced satellite and surveillance technology.

The mention of nuclear weapons in the last sentence should provide a clue as to where I’m going with this. The use of nukes in a [regional conflict] is unthinkable. This provides a clear example of how new humanitarian ideas make it more difficult to fight and win wars.

It’s precisely Israel’s embrace of humanitarianism that makes its decision about responding to Hamas so wrenching.

It would be nice to believe that there isn’t a tradeoff between protecting innocent life and winning wars. My theory of the origins of counterinsurgency doctrine is that it emerged in the late 2000s as a way to tell policymakers what they wanted to hear, which is that you defeat an enemy and develop a stable state primarily by winning civilians over to your side, and you win civilians to your side by looking out for their objective interests. Yet this would be quite amazing if it were true. Given that insurgents hide among civilians and live off the local economy and infrastructure, there will often be times when killing them or otherwise hindering their operations will require risking harm being done to the broader public. How much harm one is willing to inflict on noncombatants is a political and moral question.

The basic idea behind [counterintelligence doctrine] was that third world populations will like you if you’re nice to them and hate you if you’re mean to them, and you need to do things to make them like you. This isn’t completely crazy, as all else being equal it is much better to have the people on your side. But insurgents usually have few qualms about killing collaborators, and sometimes even their families, which shapes the incentive structure that civilians face when deciding which side to support. A better model is that some places produce movements that dislike invaders and occupiers no matter what, and the only question is whether you frighten or kill enough of them to get them to do what you want, or otherwise neutralize the threat that they pose. Conflict is generally caused by opportunity, not grievance…

This gets to the heart of what Israel (now, and the United States at some point) must confront. We are dealing with people equipped with all our capacities but none of our scruples. All the liberal blather on earth isn’t going to make that go away.

The United States, obviously, is in a different position from a much smaller Israel surrounded by mortal enemies:

The US can of course afford to fight with one hand tied behind its back. None of these places actually matter to us, and terrorism has always been [relatively] a small risk…It is actually an interesting moral question whether it would be worth forcing third world nations to accept Western institutions at the point of a gun, which would clearly be better for them in the long run, but the point is moot if we’re not willing to use the means to do so. The delusion of neocons and [counterintelligence theory] types was that this could be accomplished just by spending a lot of money rather than utilizing the kinds of tactics that Western leaders deployed when they used to actually win their wars.

Israel is a different story:

Its opponents pose an existential threat to its way of life. Despite this, the country has been remarkably restrained. All of the Palestinian civilians killed in the last fifty years don’t even come close to the number of lives lost in the US war on ISIS, much less the Second World War. This is primarily due to Israel facing a lot more scrutiny than most other nations would under similar circumstances.

That being said, Israel does not strike me as suicidal. The recent attack by Hamas has shocked the current conflict out of the now default war of choice framework and made it clearly a war of necessity. I expect Israel to do whatever it takes to at the very least either dismantle Hamas or establish a buffer zone between itself and the people of Gaza. If it does not, the problem will fester, and the Israelis will find themselves in the exact same position a few years down the line. It would be nice to believe that the Palestinian conflict could be solved by the stronger side being more accommodating towards its enemy. But there is little in the history of warfare, and certainly nothing in the doctrine of Hamas, to suggest this is a viable path forward. The choice faced by Israel is a tragic one, no matter how much in denial those currently calling for restraint are about this fact.