Thinking It Over

There is a military intelligence crisis in Jerusalem and in Washington; or better, a military intellectual crisis. In both capitals resides the realization that whatever long-term security plans there were, if there were any, they are insufficient to the reality we face. Two stories in two weeks make us feel oddly better about both crises and both governments.

There is a military intelligence crisis in Jerusalem and in Washington; or better, a military intellectual crisis. In both capitals resides the realization that whatever long-term security plans there were, if there were any, they are insufficient to the reality we face. Two stories in two weeks make us feel oddly better about both crises and both governments.

The now famous Rumsfeld memo sent to JINSA Report readers last week was initially portrayed by the media as a “leak” expressing the “failure” of the U.S. military plan in Iraq. Belatedly, both supporters and critics of the liberation phase of operations in Iraq have admitted that the Secretary captured a crucial point by looking forward, not back. Liberating Iraq was relatively easy; the war against terrorists and the states that harbor and support them is hard. New questions have to be asked to produce new strategies and tactics and the questions are military, political, social, educational and economic. The Rumsfeld Memo should go down in Defense Department history as a seminal document in understanding that the war we are fighting in the 21st Century requires resources beyond those found in the armies and navies of the 20th century, fine as those are and necessary as they remain.

The story out of Israel is of a rift between the Defense Minister and Chief of Staff about strategy and tactics in the Palestinian war that since October 2000 has claimed nearly 900 Israeli lives and injured thousands in the most heinous ways possible.

Without commenting on Israeli politics, suffice it to say that the ferment in the government and the military is an indication they both understand that there is a long-term as well as a short-term requirement for facing the disintegration of the Palestinian Authority as Arafat (too) slowly passes from the scene. MENL reports: “The military and the Defense Ministry’s Office of the Coordinator for the Territories have concluded that the PA has abandoned responsibility over the West Bank and parts of the Gaza Strip and in many cases control has been seized by insurgency groups and criminal gangs.” The difficulty is exacerbated by steep cuts in the Israeli military budget that constrict the military options.

Both wars are of a single kind: liberal democracies find themselves facing enemies that deliberately choose previously inviolable targets (Red Cross or UN workers, children eating pizza, people celebrating a Seder or praying in a mosque in Faluja) for the shock value rather than the military value, as they kill soldiers at a rate just high enough to cause unease, but not high enough to prompt a full-scale retaliatory assault.

In neither case can the terrorists win on military terms, so making the civilians – Iraqis, Israelis, Palestinians – suffer has become a prime objective; to bully the people into accepting their “protection” and to push out the liberalizing and democratizing forces – American and Israeli – by calling them “responsible” for the civilian pain.

In both wars, it is fortunate that the political/military structure is flexible enough to ask unsettling questions and demand answers even as the war continues.