Analyzing the Gaza war

I taught in the Strategy and Policy Department of the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island,  from 1990 until 2012.  That department, when I joined it, was by far the most sophisticated center for the study of warfare in the world,  It had developed--and continued to evolve--an extremely effective method for analyzing wars, based in large part on the works of two theorists, Carl von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu.  I cannot say, unfortunately, that we ever had much impact on American foreign policy and strategy.  Shortly after I joined the department several of my new colleagues did go to Washington to discuss certain aspects of strategy in the first Gulf War, which ended quite successfully.  I am sorry to report, however, that no one asked for our advice after 9/11, as far as I know, and that all but three members of the department (among them, myself) supported not only the war in Afghanistan but the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In that same year, a civilian professor at the Air War College, Jeffrey Record, published a courageous article questioning the premises and strategy of the "war on terror," which expressed many of the doubts which some of us felt.  The Bush Administration, however, set its own course.

I was reminded of all this a few days ago when I listened to the latest episode of my friend Glenn Loury's podcast. Glenn, who has repeatedly raised doubts about Israel's war in Gaza since it began, and  his regular partner John McWhorter were joined by Matthew Cockerill, a Ph.D. student in history at the London School of Economics who was a referee for a study of the bombing of Gaza for a London outfit called Air Wars that tracks ongoing air campaigns in the Middle East, and Eli Lake, a journalist and podcaster specializing in national security.  The two guests took up almost all the air time and argued vehemently over what Israel has been doing.  Like so many contemporary analysts, however, they did not dig deeply into the questions that we in the Strategy and Policy Department trained our students to focus on.  As a result, I don't think either one of them shed much light on what is going on in Gaza, or why.

We live increasingly in a world of moral absolutes, and Cockerill and Lake both made moral and legal arguments about what the Israelis have been doing.  Cockerill, relying on the Air Wars study, claims that the Israelis in October 2023--the first month of the war--killed more civilians and  more women and children than any other foreign air campaign (thus omitting the Assad regime's campaign against its own people in Syria) in the 21st century.  He attributes that to Israeli tactics and claims that it amounted to murder under the laws of war.  Lake in response argued repeatedly that Israeli tactics simply reflected their new goal of "eradicating Hamas," and that Israel naturally responded with tremendous force to the shock and horror of the October 7 Hamas attack that killed about 1200 Israelis and abducted several hundred more.  That attack, he said, gave Israel PTSD.  They essentially repeated these arguments for more than an hour, and in so doing, in  my opinion, failed to raise the most important questions about what is going on and why.

We taught at Newport, following Clausewitz, that a successful war requires a clear political objective and a military strategy that will in fact accomplish that objective.  Both Lake and Cockerill seemed to believe that Israel's objective was the eradication of Hamas as an effective military force and political entity.  For reasons that I shall make clear shortly, I am very skeptical that that really is the objective.  One reason for my skepticism was stated by Glenn Loury in the middle of the podcast, when he noted that developments since the cease-fire have made it clear that the Israelis have not come close to eradicating Hamas.  They have killed some of its senior commanders and a good many fighters, but Hamas emerged from hiding in its tunnels as soon as the cease-fire began and clearly remains in full control of Gaza.  Intelligence estimates, moreover, state that Hamas has recruited enough new members to make up for the losses that they have suffered--a finding similar to what developed during the Vietnam War, when the enemy always seemed to be able to make up for its huge losses.   The objective of eliminating Hamas also conflicted with the objective of securing the return of the hostages.  That could only happen, as it now has, via an agreement with Hamas, since it is Hamas that holds the hostages.

There are, it seems to me, only two possible realistic objectives for Israel in this war, which is part of the broader struggle with the Palestinians for all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.  The first objective is the one that the Israeli government has pursued for most of the last 24 years or so, to acknowledge that peace is probably impossible but to keep the conflict within reasonable bounds.  That policy involved retaliation for any terrorist attack.  Israeli retaliatory attacks have consistently killed more Palestinians than the Palestinians managed to kill Jews, but they were still limited in scope, until October 2003.  Meanwhile, some elements within the Israeli government and Israeli society continued to expand the Israeli settlements in the West Bank.  Now, the Netanyahu government has abandoned that objective.

Regarding the Israeli adoption of a completely different strategy after October 7, I cannot accept Eli Lake's argument that this simply reflected the heat of the moment, or PTSD, occasioned by those attacks.  Clausewitz in one of his most important passages acknowledges the role of emotion in war--particularly among the people of a nation at war.  He makes clear, however, that the task of the political leadership of the nation is not to give in to passion, but to base its decision on reason--that is, on a realistic calculation of what any particular military action can achieve.  This was also the failure of the Bush administration in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Unfortunately, in this case I am not convinced that the Israeli government simply gave in to passion.  I think this particular Israeli government has adopted a new objective: to use their bombing campaign to make Gaza uninhabitable and drive most or all of the Palestinian population out of it.  I do not regard this as a campaign of genocide, that is, an attempt to murder the whole Palestinian population, but I am increasingly convinced that it is a campaign of ethnic cleansing, and that those behind it--both the extreme elements of Netanyahu's coalition, and Netanyahu himself--intend to follow it up with a similar campaign in the West Bank, where the pressure on the Palestinian population has already intensified.  I am not saying that all Israelis want this.  Many Israelis would gladly have lived in peace alongside Palestinians in the Gaza strip, and many (although probably not as many) would also give up the West Bank for peace.  Such Israelis are now however in the minority, and alongside them have always lived those who have dreamed of a Zionist state from the river to the sea, or even one including the east bank of the Jordan River as well.  Meanwhile, I am not convinced that the Palestinians as a group and their leadership have ever wanted real lasting peace either.  Too many people on both sides still seek a solution that will exclude the other.

The reduction of Gaza to rubble has not destroyed Hamas, and it made no sense to expect it to. Hamas, we have all known, lives in deep tunnels which the bombing could not reach.  We can't rule out the possibility that the Israeli leadership was ignoring this obvious fact--other governments have carried out equally illogical bombing campaigns.  But in any case, the Israeli leadership obviously knew that they were making the territory uninhabitable, and that they did not object to that result.  Perhaps, in fact, they welcomed it.

Netanyahu and his government, moreover, may now have a critical ally in their quest to expel the Palestinian population of Gaza: President Donald Trump.  Interestingly enough, in a talk at Harvard's Kennedy School four months after October 7, Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner referred to the possibility of moving the civilian population of Gaza into Egypt during Israeli military operations and appeared to suggest that they would not return. Yesterday Donald Trump spoke openly of convincing the Jordanian and Egyptian governments to take nearly two million Gazan refugees into their countries and acknowledged that Gaza has now been reduced to rubble.  Trump seems to be ushering in a new world in which great-power violence will redraw various maps.  The Russians will emerge with at least a good chunk  of Ukraine, the United States will regain the Panama Canal zone and perhaps annex Greenland (I doubt the latter possibility), China may take Taiwan, and Israel will create the Middle East map that Netanyahu displayed before the UN before October  7--one without any Palestinian entity at all.

Netanyahu has been quoted as having told former President Biden that Israel in Gaza was only doing what the United States had done to German and Japanese cities during the Second World War.  He may soon point out that the western allies cooperated in the expulsion of more than ten million Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe after the Second World War.  The Israeli historian Benny Morris has already argued that the United States owes its existence to the dispossession of the Indians. Jared Kushner, in a talk at Harvard a  year ago, noted that millions had been displaced by conflicts in Syria and Iraq.  The whole post-Second World War international order was designed to move us into a new era in which such things would not take place.  We may have to accept that at least for the time being,  it has failed.

Facing the Future

 From 1949, when President Truman appointed my father to be Assistant Secretary of Labor for International Labor Affairs, to 1981, when my father retired, his career depended upon the whims of the American electorate.  When a Democrat won (Kennedy, Johnson, Carter), he received a diplomatic appointment; when a Republican won he had to find something else to do.  That understandably gave him an all-consuming interest in the outcome of the next election, and being who he was, he identified his own fortunes with those of the nation as a whole.  A Republican victory was, by definition, catastrophic both for him and for the nation. and our whole family accepted that view.  

My father's view has now been adopted by the whole intellectual elite of the Democratic Party, which had convinced itself by 2000 that it was the repository of all wisdom and virtue.  I still have never voted for any Republican presidential candidate and have no plans to do so, but I realized a long time ago that I could count on my fellow citizens to share my views.  I have also concluded over the last sixteen years or so that the Democratic Party is now beholden to certain constituencies that have advanced policies that are not only unpopular but disastrous, and that it includes woke elements that essentially reject fundamental ideas of our civilization and think they can replace it with something better.  I have explored that problem in many posts here.  For that reason I cannot regard our current political struggle as a simple battle between good and evil.  It reflects a much broader decline in our political, intellectual and cultural life--one which no one could stop. 

In the current climate anyone who--like me--is trying to accept certain imminent developments as inevitable provokes an immediate backlash.  A good liberal or progressive is supposed to believe not only that everything Trump wants to do is wrong, but that it cannot possibly succeed.  For the moment our leading newspapers are printing story after story about the insuperable obstacles that Trump is bound to confront.  No respectable historian, however--an endangered species, to be sure--can believe any such thing.  History frequently goes wrong for long periods of time.  Humanity has good and bad impulses, neither of which ever completely prevails.  The relationship between reason and emotion changes over time, and emotion has been gaining ground for the last sixty years.  Writing on the eve of a worse catastrophe than anything we have in store--the Second World War--William Butler Yeats kept his sanity by taking a very long view in one of my very favorite poems.  It is in that spirit that I now try to get a handle on what to expect in the next year or so.

Trump and his coalition, it seems to me, are poised to have a first year in office that could only be compared in recent history to FDR in 1933 and LBJ in 1964-65.  This Trump administration will be nothing like the first one, in which he tried to make use of establishment Republicans and senior military leaders.  Eight years later he has a cadre of totally devoted supporters with whom he is staffing the federal government--and make no mistake, some of them are formidable individuals. Watching some of Attorney General-designate Pam Bondi's confirmation hearing, I wondered if we would have been better off with Matt Gaetz.  Bondi is smart, attractive, charismatic, and clearly devoted to Trump.  She is not alone.  Trump's press office runs very smoothly, in sharp contrast to 2017.  And he has used a cadre of Republican intellectuals to plan his first year in great detail, as we shall discover, it seems, on Monday afternoon, as soon as he has been sworn in.  That by the way is not unique.  Biden in 2021 issued an immediate round of executive orders focusing mainly on the two issues that probably brought Trump back into the White House: immigration and DEI programs.   The New York Times also reports today that Trump has planned a massive raid designed to apprehend illegal immigrants in Chicago during his first week.  Meanwhile, Trump also is working with leaders of the tech industry, led by Elon Musk, who have their own plans for reshaping America.  They include drastic cuts in the federal work force, and the elimination of their job protections.

Trump does not, of course, dispose of Congressional majorities as large as FDR and LBJ did, but he may not need them.  Because of his role in the evolution of the Republican Party he has the absolute loyalty of just about every Republican in the House and Senate, who are just as eager as he to set the United States on a completely different path.  And few of them care, in all probability, that majorities of the national electorate oppose much of what they want to do.  Curiously enough, the election victory that may resemble Trump's most closely is John F. Kennedy's in 1960.  Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon with 303 electoral votes to 219 (and 11 for Virginia Senator Harry Byrd, unpledged electors from Mississippi and Alabama.)  A number of key swing states, including Illinois, New Jersey, Minnesota, Texas, and California, were decided by very narrow margins.  Kennedy won 49.7 to 49.6 percent.  This was recognized as one of the closest elections in US history.  Trump  just defeated Harris in the Electoral College, 312-226.  All seven swing states were decided by very close margins.  He won the popular vote, 49.8 to 48.3.  Last week, however, I heard Senator John Cornyn, while questioning Pam Bondi, describe this victory as a "landslide."  It wasn't, but the slim Republican majorities are going to act as if it was.  I won't be surprised if they at least find exceptions to the filibuster rule to get some legislation through the Senate--just as Democratic leaders were suggesting they should do to pass a law codifying Roe v. Wade.  Since Newt Gingrich, more and more Republicans have adopted opposition to the status quo as their fundamental principle, and no respect for existing practices and institutions will hold them back now.

I predict that the immigration issue will create the biggest crisis of the next four years, a crisis in federal-state relations.   States like California and Illinois are prepared to do whatever they can to block large-scale deportations of illegal immigrants.  The Trump administration may use this as attempt to destroy much of their authority and discredit them completely.  I don't understand exactly how or why the Democratic Party decided to defend the millions of people who have entered the country illegally.  I certainly agree that the United States needs most of those people and that our immigration laws should be changed, but I don't think that acting as if our laws were irrelevant was the way to handle the situation--and it is clear that the Democrats have paid a huge price for that move.  Deportations may not be popular, but active state resistance to them, I suspect, will not be popular either.  The failure of the establishments of both parties to deal with the issue has led us to this point.

This administration will on some fronts do some good.  The elimination of DEI bureaucracies and programs from the federal government is not merely desirable, but necessary.  Some major corporations have begun doing this as well, and even colleges and universities may be forced to do so.  DEI wastes money promoting destructive ideologies.  Similarly, in the first Trump administration, the Department of Education rewrote the guidelines on sexual assault proceedings in colleges and universities to give the accused their basic American rights. The Biden administration rolled back those changes.  Nor do I think that DEI programs are doing anything but harm within the US military--although I cannot say of my own knowledge exactly how far they have gone there.

I cannot predict what will happen in foreign policy.  We will know one thing within a couple of months.  Pressure from Trump, which shocked many Israelis, has in fact led to the cease-fire agreement in Gaza--but the key moment will come in 40 days when stage one of the agreement is over and the Israeli government has the option to resume the war.  Trump might tell them that they cannot do so--while agreeing in return to a joint strike against the Iranian nuclear program.  There is some evidence, too, that the Russians and Ukrainians both expect to be forced into a cease-fire shortly.  What will come of Trump's blustering about the Panama Canal, Canada, and Greenland, remains very unclear.  And a new crisis could arise at almost any moment: China continues to escalate its military pressure on Taiwan, and Xi has just declared that reunification must take place.

The administration will try to get the government out of the business of regulating the economy--especially its newest and fastest growing sectors. That could be catastrophic.  Cryptocurrencies are likely to boom, and a bust could send us into another severe recession.  We don't know what the effect of tariffs might be.  There are areas, such as chip production, where the Biden administration took major steps down the Trumpian road towards self-sufficiency, and these will probably continue.  In short, there are serious constituencies for much of what Trump wants to do.  He has provided the emotional demagoguery and leadership--yes--to bring them into a powerful coalition, and it is already changing the United States.

A Bonus Post

I have already seen the movie A Complete Unknown and enjoyed it very much.  It took more than a week, however, for me to be reminded of one of the funniest things I have ever seen on youtube, which is highly relevant to the movie.  Enjoy.

Adams and Jefferson and us

 It was more than 40 years ago, I am sure, that I first purchased a one-volume paperback edition of the complete correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.  Its 614 pages are actually two very different books, separated by a brief interlude.  The correspondence begins in the midst of the outbreak of the American Revolution, but really gets going in 1786, in the time of the Articles of Confederation, when the two men took over the new nation's most important diplomatic posts, Adams in London and Jefferson in Paris.  They wrote frequently until they both returned to the United States in 1789 to become Vice President and Secretary of State in Washington's administration.  During that administration they became the leaders of the rival Federalist and Republican parties, and an unfortunate provision of the original constitution made Jefferson Adams's vice-president in 1797, after Adams had won the electoral college over him.  They did not exchange a single letter until Jefferson was about to succeed Adams in 1801, and none afterwards for nearly a dozen years.  The volume includes seven letters between Jefferson and Abigail Adams in 1804, occasioned by the death of one of Jefferson's two legitimate daughters.

When Jefferson left the White House in 1809, he, like Adams, had lost most of any popularity he had enjoyed.  Three years later, in early 1812, Adams, then 77, re-opened the correspondence by sending Jefferson a book of lectures given by his son John Quincy Adams, who was now a member of Jefferson's party and had served in the Madison administration as Minister to Russia.  Jefferson was then 68 and the correspondence continued--with Adams contributing about two thirds of the letters--until shortly before they both died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.  Finally picking up the book recently, I decided to begin that last chapter in their correspondence, while planning to tackle the earlier periods subsequently.  They promise a fascinating account of the diplomacy of the first, deeply flawed phase of our national history from 1781 to 1789.

I have now made my way from 1812 until the middle of 1816.  The letters are fascinating, not least in what they do not discuss. They include almost nothing about the progress of the War of 1812, although Adams in 1814 mentioned that he had become deeply unpopular in Massachusetts for supporting that war, which had harmed New England very badly and led in that year to talk of secession.  They say just as little about other contemporary political controversies or elections.  Religion occupies the most space of any topic in the correspondence so far.   Both men were Unitarians in the literal as well as institutional sense: they regarded Christ's teachings as the finest guide to human behavior ever written, but they denied his divinity and rejected the authority of all the great religious institutions that had been built around it.  They shared pride in the 18th century which had tried to elevate reason over faith.  Yet between 1812 and 1815, they observed momentous developments in Europe which cast some doubt on their shared gospel of human progress.  They were delighted in 1814 by the fall of Napoleon, but distressed to see the old order reassert itself in the Congress of Vienna, which divided whole nations like Poland among the victorious conservative powers.  Jefferson also commented that there was really nothing to choose between Napoleon and the British government that had helped defeat him, since neither seemed to care about anything but their own power.  When Napoleon returned from Elba in early 1815 they thought he still enjoyed the support of the French nation, but he lasted, of course, only 100 days before Waterloo.  Then the Bourbon dynasty returned to the throne again.  The two men began to wonder where history was going, 

Jefferson on January 11, 1816, commented on the impact of the ideas of the 18th century on European politics.  "With some exceptions only," he wrote, "through the 17th and 18th centuries morality occupied an honorable chapter in the political code of nations."  He regarded the partitions of Poland as an unfortunate exception for which the "barbarous government" of Russia was chiefly responsible.  "How then has it happened," he continued in reference to the last three decades, "that these nations, France especially and England, so great, so dignified, so distinguished by science and the arts, plunged at once into all the depths of human enormity, threw off suddenly and openly all the restraints of morality, all sensation in character, and unblushingly avowed and acted on the principle that power was right? . . .Whatever it was, the close of the century saw the moral world thrown back again to the age of the Borgias, to the point from which it had departed 300 years before"--and, he might have added, with vastly greater forces at their disposal.  

Adams replied on February 2.  "I can only say it present, that it should seem that human Reason and human Conscience, though I believe there are such things, are not a Match, for human Passions, human Imaginations and human enthusiasm. . . .You ask, how it has happened that all Europe has acted on the Principle "that Power was right"  I know not what Answer to give you, but this, that Power always sincerely, conscientiously, de tres bon[sic] Foi, believes itself right.  Power always thinks it has a great Soul, and vast Views, beyond the Comprehension of the Weak; and that it is doing God Service, when it is violating all his Laws."

My entire life as a student of history has taught me that Adams was right, and I have seen how power can persuade itself of the justice of its aims again and again in  my own country, first in Vietnam, then in the Middle East.  With war raging in Ukraine and the Middle East and threatening over Taiwan, the noble dream of a world ruled by law, as promoted by both Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and embodied now for 80 years in the United Nations.  And a parallel drama has played itself out in our domestic affairs.  It has taken half a century since the Powell memorandum for corporate America to convince itself that its power must serve the interests of all, even as its insatiable greed drains more wealth and income from the mass of the people every year.  

Yet I believe that the conflict between reason and passion is more complicated than Adams made out.  Both have a profound appeal to human nature--but neither ever wins a final victory over the other.  Reason has now been retreating for more than half a century and passion may have more terrible victories yet to win.  Eventually, however, passion's excesses, I think, will lead to a new round of restraint based upon reason--domestically, in foreign affairs, and even personally.  This has happened many times before.  That eternal conflict remains the source of what progress we have been able to make, and ensures that every victory and every defeat will always be incomplete and only temporary.  That, I have decided, is where real hope for humanity and progress must come from.