Some scattered links I collected over the previous week:
John Cassidy: Gaza: More Funerals, More Questions: A thoughtful piece putting the small picture in big picture context.
As is often the case in Israel, some of the most enlightening commentary is coming from former intelligence officers and members of the armed forces, who have learned the hard way the limits of military action. Writing in Monday's Financial Times, Efraim Halevy, the former head of Mossad, noted that the operation, although militarily successful, could have unanticipated and negative effects, such as strengthening Hamas' standing in the Arab world and causing unrest in countries friendly to Israel, such as Egypt and Jordan. If it doesn't want to become increasingly isolated, Israel will have to "contribute to an Egyptian-crafted and American-supported formula for the region," Halevy wrote. And moreover:"Israel will have to do what no government has done before: determine a comprehensive strategy on the future of Gaza and its 2m inhabitants."
It's worth noting that these are issues that didn't need a war to discover, and can't be fixed by war -- although some people evidently need to be reminded of war's futility before they're willing to move on and do something constructive. The Israeli exes are always a good case in point: invariably, they rose through the ranks by being hawks, only to discover by their retirement that they hadn't accomplished a damn thing.
Helena Cobban: West Point Military Historian Denies the Net Value of a Decade of War: Cites a New York Times piece by Elisabeth Bumiller on Col. Gian Gentile, a name I've run across in several books on Iraq. Bumiller writes:
Narrowly, the argument is whether the counterinsurgency strategy used in Iraq and Afghanistan -- the troop-heavy, time-intensive, expensive doctrine of trying to win over the locals by building roads, schools and government -- is dead.
Broadly, the question is what the United States gained after a decade in two wars.
"Not much," Col. Gian P. Gentile, the director of West Point's military history program and the commander of a combat battalion in Baghdad in 2006, said flatly in an interview last week. "Certainly not worth the effort. In my view."
Colonel Gentile, long a critic of counterinsurgency, represents one side of the divide at West Point. On the other is Col. Michael J. Meese, the head of the academy's influential social sciences department and a top adviser to General Petraeus in Baghdad and Kabul when General Petraeus commanded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. [ . . . ]
The debate at West Point mirrors one under way in the armed forces as a whole as the United States withdraws without clear victory from Afghanistan and as the results in Iraq remain ambiguous at best. (On the ABC News program "This Week" on Sunday, the defense secretary, Leon E. Panetta, called the Taliban "resilient" after 10 and a half years of war.)
But at West Point the debate is personal, and a decade of statistics -- more than 6,000 American service members dead in Iraq and Afghanistan and more than $1 trillion spent -- hit home. [ . . . ]
In Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal so aggressively pushed the doctrine when he was the top commander there that troops complained they had to hold their firepower. General Petraeus issued guidelines that clarified that troops had the right to self-defense when he took over, but by then counterinsurgency had attracted powerful critics, chief among them Mr. Biden and veteran military officers who denigrated it as armed nation building.
When Mr. Obama announced last June that he would withdraw by the end of this summer the 30,000 additional troops he sent to Afghanistan -- earlier than the military wanted or expected -- the doctrine seemed to be on life support. General Petraeus has since become director of the Central Intelligence Agency, where his mission is covertly killing the enemy, not winning the people.
Cobban, of course, didn't have to do the math to figure out that the "war on terror" wasn't worth it. It never is. Cobban talks more about Syria and Iran: countries that the US threatened to invade from Iraq in 2003, and which are still in the warmongers' planning book. Elsewhere, she's trying to raise money to get Gareth Porter to write what promises to be an important book on Iran: Manufactured Crisis: The Secret History of the Iranian Nuclear Scare. She also wrote Obama Admin Willfully Blind on Gaza Crisis?.
Juan Cole: Top Ten Steps That Are Necessary for Lasting Gaza-Israeli Peace (or, Good Luck!): Most of this is basic and should not be controversial. I would emphasize that every Palestinian should be a citizen with full and equal rights wherever he or she resides. If, in any given locale, Israel does not offer such citizenship, that locale should be completely independent of Israel, with a democracy established there and freedom to trade and travel with the rest of the world. And while, as a practical matter, I think it is Israel's choice what to keep and what to discard, a Palestinian state in the West Bank must be contiguous, have external borders, and control of its own air space in order to be completely independent, so not just any arbitrary whim would work there. (Return to the 1967 borders would work, and is preferable for many other reasons.) Also, it is important to recognize that whoever wins elections in Palestine should be absolved of any past "terrorist" associations. Indeed, that's pretty much the norm throughout the world, where there have been many leaders of independence movements who were once branded terrorists but wound up as respectable heads of state -- Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir are two who somehow come to mind.
Cole's blog, by the way, has numerous pieces since this one on Egyptian President Morsi's executive power grab, which instantly turned him from the hero of the Gaze cease fire to anti-democratic demon. It certainly looks like he overreached, but bear in mind that thus far the only targets of Morsi's efforts have been residual elements of the Mubarak dictatorship.
Gershom Gorenberg: Israel's New Gaza Mess: Israel's strategy of acting unilaterally, as opposed to negotiating, is inherently unstable, in large part because it lets each side choose its own favored narrative, whereas agreements bind both sides to a common resolution. Case in point: Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, which Hamas viewed as vindicating their militancy, Fatah regarded as a step toward negotiation, and Sharon saw as a way of simplifying the firing zone.
Of course, those talks never happened. Sharon chose a unilateral pullout precisely to avoid peace negotiations, since they could only succeed if Israel agreed to leave nearly all of the West Bank as well. As he planned, disengagement squelched interest in Israel in the Geneva Accord, the model for a peace agreement unofficially hammered out by Palestinians and Israelis. As one of Sharon's top advisers predicted, the disengagement put President George W. Bush's roadmap for peace "in formaldehyde." It allowed Sharon to evade the challenge posed by Mahmud Abbas's accession to the Palestinian presidency: Abbas very publicly wanted (and wants) to negotiate Palestinian independence in the West Bank and Gaza.
Sharon believed that Israel could safely leave Gaza without peace, and without the security arrangements of a peace agreement. Israeli military power and its control of Gaza's borders would deter Palestinian attacks.
He was mistaken. What failed was not withdrawal from occupied territory. The failure was doing so unilaterally. Abbas's unfulfilled promise of diplomatic progress contributed to Hamas's victory over Fatah in the 2006 legislative election. That was the first step in the chain reaction leading to the violent split in the Palestinian Authority, the Hamas takeover of Gaza, and all that has followed. [ . . . ]
Dealing with Gaza, one American option is to promote rather than block creation of a Palestinian unity government. Another is to push to extend the indirect Israel-Hamas negotiation of recent days in Cairo, and aim at turning Gaza into a Taiwan-style non-state: able to claim all of Palestine as long as it does nothing about it, able to develop free of the Israeli blockade.
MJ Rosenberg: Ugly Senate Gaza Resolution, and Ceasefire Agreement: What It Means: The two posts mostly quote core documents, providing a neat summary of Israel's latest Gaza war. I started to write a post on the former, which shows how completely Congress has given up both mind and heart to AIPAC. If you follow their subservience through, the logical conclusion is that the US can have no foreign policy of its own in the Middle East -- we should just let Israel call the shots. It's not clear what exactly Obama and Clinton did in the run up to a cease fire agreement that they graciously let Egypt take credit and blame for, but despite some lame and embarrassing statements[*], they don't seem to have goaded Israel on, like Bush and Rice did with Lebanon in 2006. I don't see any winners in war, but will note that faces in Israel were most often glum after the cease fire while those in Gaza were jubilant. The ugly blood lust spewed by right-wing Israelis wasn't even attempted[**], and the "significant degradation" of the rocket arsenal in Gaza was mostly accomplished by provoking "militant" groups in Gaza to fire the rockets harmlessly over the wall. But it wasn't really the resolve of either side that endured or failed. The cease fire validates the new normal, which is mostly the result of Egypt's revolution opening up the Gaza border, putting an end to Israel's stranglehold over "the world's largest outdoor jail."
[*] Aren't you sick of hearing about "Israel's right to defend itself," especially when that claim is used to justify attacking others? Rockets from Gaza were a nuisance this year, but had killed zero Israelis until Israel started this operation, which provoked the firing of over 1,450 rockets, resulting in six Israeli deaths -- all of which could have been avoided by relaxing the blockade that had been strangling 1.7 million people in Gaza. By Israel's same logic, Mexico would have been more than justified using F-16s to bomb gun shops in Arizona and Texas.
[**] Israel killed 189 Palestinians (Israel's own stats say 177), a senseless and totally unnecessary number -- far below the 1,417 killed during Operation Cast Lead in 2008. Six Israelis were killed: two soldiers and four civilians. Injuries, of course, were far more numerous. On the last day, 21 Israelis were injured (none killed) by a bomb on a Tel Aviv bus -- the first such bombing in eight years. Whether this bombing or the use of more powerful, longer range Iranian rockets had any influence on Israel's decision to agree to the cease fire is anyone's guess. Hamas"militants" are likely to conclude that they should replenish their missile stocks to deter future Israeli attacks -- an argument that can be undercut by Israeli actively seeking to normalize relations with an independent Gaza. Israel has shown no interest in any such thing -- a stance where the "militants" on both sides reinforce each other.
Adam Shatz: Why Israel Didn't Win: The cease fire stopped the shooting (for now) but didn't solve the conflict:
The fighting will erupt again, because Hamas will come under continued pressure from its members and from other militant factions, and because Israel has never needed much pretext to go to war. In 1982, it broke its ceasefire with Arafat's PLO and invaded Lebanon, citing the attempted assassination of its ambassador to London, even though the attack was the work of Arafat's sworn enemy, the Iraqi agent Abu Nidal. In 1996, during a period of relative calm, it assassinated Hamas's bomb-maker Yahya Ayyash, the 'Engineer,' leading Hamas to strike back with a wave of suicide attacks in Israeli cities. When, a year later, Hamas proposed a thirty-year hudna, or truce, Binyamin Netanyahu dispatched a team of Mossad agents to poison the Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Amman; under pressure from Jordan and the US, Israel was forced to provide the antidote, and Meshaal is now the head of Hamas's political bureau -- and an ally of Egypt's new president, Mohamed Morsi.
Operation Pillar of Defence, Israel's latest war, began just as Hamas was cobbling together an agreement for a long-term ceasefire. Its military commander, Ahmed al-Jabari, was assassinated only hours after he reviewed the draft proposal. [ . . . ]
Israeli leaders lamented for years that theirs was the only democracy in the region. What this season of revolts has revealed is that Israel had a very deep investment in Arab authoritarianism. The unravelling of the old Arab order, when Israel could count on the quiet complicity of Arab big men who satisfied their subjects with flamboyant denunciations of Israeli misdeeds but did little to block them, has been painful for Israel, leaving it feeling lonelier than ever. It is this acute sense of vulnerability, even more than Netanyahu's desire to bolster his martial credentials before the January elections, that led Israel into war.
Hamas, meanwhile, has been buoyed by the same regional shifts, particularly the triumph of Islamist movements in Tunisia and Egypt: Hamas, not Israel, has been 'normalised' by the Arab uprisings. Since the flotilla affair, it has developed a close relationship with Turkey, which is keen to use the Palestinian question to project its influence in the Arab world. It also took the risk of breaking with its patrons in Syria: earlier this year, Khaled Meshaal left Damascus for Doha, while his number two, Mousa Abu Marzook, set himself up in Cairo. Since then, Hamas has thrown in its lot with the Syrian uprising, distanced itself from Iran, and found new sources of financial and political support in Qatar, Egypt and Tunisia. [ . . . ]
The Palestinians understand that they are no longer facing Israel on their own: Israel, not Hamas, is the region's pariah. The Arab world is changing, but Israel is not. Instead, it has retreated further behind Jabotinsky's 'iron wall,' deepening its hold on the Occupied Territories, thumbing its nose at a region that is at last acquiring a taste of its own power, exploding in spasms of high-tech violence that fail to conceal its lack of a political strategy to end the conflict.
Stephen M Walt: The Real Lessons of L'Affaire Petraeus: Best snark I've seen so far was on the back page of Entertainment Weekly which proclaimed All In, Paul Broadwell's hagiography of her paramour ex-Gen. David Petraeus, the yuckiest book title of all time. Walt makes several good points, including that Petraeus's reputation d for Iraq wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and that his performance in Afghanistan came up even shorter. Also:
Second, this whole episode reminds us of the corrupt and incestual relationship that exists throughout the national security establishment, to include lots of people in the media and commentariat. As I've written before, the excessive deference -- indeed, veneration -- often given the U.S. military is not healthy, because it encourages both journalists and academics to suck up to powerful and charismatic generals instead of treating them as public servants who need to be aggressively challenged.
He also quotes Glenn Greenwald:
So all based on a handful of rather unremarkable emails sent to a woman fortunate enough to have a friend at the FBI, the FBI traced all of Broadwell's physical locations, learned of all the accounts she uses, ended up reading all of her emails, investigated the identity of her anonymous lover (who turned out to be Petraeus), and then possibly read his emails as well. They dug around in all of this without any evidence of any real crime -- at most, they had a case of "cyber-harassment" more benign than what regularly appears in my email inbox and that of countless of other people -- and, in large part, without the need for any warrant from a court.
Walt also links to Michael Hastings: The Sins of General Petraeus, who offers this:
But the warning signs about Petraeus' core dishonesty have been around for years. Here's a brief summary: We can start with the persistent questions critics have raised about his Bronze Star for Valor. Or that, in 2004, during the middle of a presidential election, Petraeus wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post supporting President Bush and saying that the Iraq policy was working. The policy wasn't working, but Bush repaid the general's political advocacy by giving him the top job in the war three years later.
There's his war record in Iraq, starting when he headed up the Iraqi security force training program in 2004. He's more or less skated on that, including all the weapons he lost, the insane corruption, and the fact that he essentially armed and trained what later became known as"Iraqi death squads." On his final Iraq tour, during the so-called"surge," he pulled off what is perhaps the most impressive con job in recent American history. He convinced the entire Washington establishment that we won the war.
He did it by papering over what the surge actually was: We took the Shiites' side in a civil war, armed them to the teeth, and suckered the Sunnis into thinking we'd help them out too. It was a brutal enterprise -- over 800 Americans died during the surge, while hundreds of thousands of Iraqis lost their lives during a sectarian conflict that Petraeus' policies fueled. Then he popped smoke and left the members of the Sunni Awakening to fend for themselves. [ . . . ]
Petraeus was so convincing on Baghdad that he manipulated President Obama into trying the same thing in Kabul. In Afghanistan, he first underhandedly pushed the White House into escalating the war in September 2009 (calling up columnists to "box" the president in) and waged a full-on leak campaign to undermine the White House policy process. Petraeus famously warned his staff that the White House was "fucking" with the wrong guy.
The doomed Afghanistan surge would come back to bite him in the ass, however. A year after getting the war he wanted, P4 got stuck having to fight it himself. After Petraeus frenemy General Stanley McChrystal got fired for trashing the White House in a story I published in Rolling Stone, the warrior-scholar had to deploy yet again.
The Afghan war was a loser, always was, and always would be -- Petraeus made horrible deals with guys like Abdul Razzik and the other Afghan gangsters and killed a bunch of people who didnt need to be killed. And none of it mattered, or made a dent in his reputation. This was the tour where Broadwell joined him at headquarters, and it's not so shocking that he'd need to find some solace, somewhere, to get that daily horror show out of his mind.
My first guess was that the affair was just one more aspect of Petraeus' cultivation of the press -- although it did make me wonder what Thomas Ricks got out of him. Walt also links to Robert Wright: The Real David Petraeus Scandal, which focuses more on Petraeus' tenure at the CIA:
The militarization of the CIA raises various questions. For example, if the CIA is psychologically invested in a particular form of warfare -- and derives part of its budget from that kind of warfare -- can it be trusted to impartially assess the consequences, both positive and negative, direct and indirect? [ . . . ]
What's wrong with this opaqueness? For starters, you'd think that in a democracy the people would be entitled to know how exactly their tax dollars are being used to kill people -- especially people in countries we're not at war with. But there's also a more pragmatic reason to want more transparency.
These drone strikes are a radical departure from America's traditional use of violence in pursuit of national security. In contrast to things like invading or bombing a country as part of some well-defined and plausibly finite campaign, our drone strike program is diffuse and, by all appearances, endless. Every month, God knows how many people are killed in the name of the US in any of several countries, and God knows how many of these people were actually militants, or how many of the actual militants were actual threats to the US, or how much hatred the strikes are generating or how much of that hatred will eventually morph into anti-American terrorism. It might behoove us, before we accept this nauseating spectacle as a permanent feature of life, to fill in as many of these blanks as possible. You can't do that in the dark. [ . . . ]
The vision implicit in this program is of an America whose great calling is to lead the world into a future of chaos and lawlessness.
This prospect was vividly highlighted when, a bit more than a year ago, Obama had David Petraeus turn in his stars so he could move to the CIA and keep fighting wars. There have been other military men who headed the CIA, but never has there been one whose move to Langley brought so much continuity with what he was doing before he went there.
The circumstances of Petraeus's departure from the CIA are a little alarming; you'd rather your chief spy not be reckless. But the circumstances of his arrival at the CIA a year ago were more troubling. Yet no alarm was sounded that was anywhere near as loud as the hubbub surrounding Petraeus now. That's scandalous.
Also, a few links for further study:
Gershon Baskin: Israel's Shortsighted Assassination: Hamas military chief, Ahmed Al-Jabari, the person who negotiated the Gilad Shalit deal: can't have people like that running free; they night negotiate with you again, and then where would you be? Of course, the title could have referred to nearly any of Israel's assassinations. One of the most short-sighted was when Shimon Peres ordered the murder of Yahya Ayyash (a previous Hamas military commander, one of a neverending supply) in 1996, triggering a series of reprisal attacks that cost Peres his job. But then Peres wouldn't have been Prime Minister at the time but for another Israeli assassination, the one that killed Yitzhak Rabin, and with him the Oslo Accords Peace Process.
Brad DeLong: The Morgenthau Plan and the Marshall Plan: How to rebuild (or wreck) post-WWII Germany.
Brad DeLong: Somehow I Think that They Are Still in Kansas, Toto: An outsider's analysis of what's happening in Kansas politically -- some useful comments here, especially from "Kansas Jack"; I wanted to do a whole post on this, but never got to it -- partly because I only have minor quibbles.
Michelle Goldberg: The Obama-Bashing Book Bonanza: On Dinesh D'Souza's Obama's America, and the market for histrionic Obama-bashing books. Goldberg also has a review of Robert O. Self:The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s, Breadwinner Conservatism:
Self has set himself an ambitious goal in his new book: to explain why, ever since the 1960s, battles over sex, gender and the meaning of family have become inextricable from battles over the size and scope of the government. For conservative activists since the '80s, the defense of the autonomous, idealized nuclear family "was intimately linked to the way they also sought to limit government interference in the private market," Self writes. "These stories are not often told together. Questions of gender, sex, and family have been isolated as part of the 'culture war' -- a struggle that has been seen as tangential to the politics of equality, power, and money."
Jim Lobe: Israel Ranked World's Most Militarised Nation: As ranked by Bonn International Centre for Conversion (BICC). Looks like US was underrated at 29 (China 82, India 71, Iran 34) -- seems to be a bias toward small countries (Greece 14, Jordan 5), not that Israel didn't win fair and square. (North Korea, which might have been a rival, was disqualified.)
Oded Na'aman: Is Gaza Outside Israel?: Quotes from the bookOur Harsh Logic: Israeli Soldiers' Testimonies From the Occupied Territories, 2000-2010 (Metropolitan Books).