Newsgroup: it.politica.pds
Titolo: Always the Military Option (by Uri Avnery )

Always the Military Option (by Uri Avnery )
War with Syria? Peace with Syria?
A big military operation against Hamas in the Gaza strip? A cease-fire
with Hamas?
Our media discuss these questions dispassionately, as if they were
equivalent options. Like a person in a showroom making a choice between
two cars. This one is good, and so is the other one. So which should one
buy?
And nobody cries out: War is the height of stupidity!
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Carl von Clausewitz, the renowned military theorist, famously said that
war is nothing but the continuation of politics by other means. Meaning:
war is there to serve policy and is useless when it does not.
What policies did the wars in the last hundred years serve?
Ninety-four years ago, World War I broke out. The immediate cause was the
assassination of the Austrian heir apparent by a Serbian student. In
Sarajevo they showed me how it happened: after a first attempt on the main
street had failed, the assassins had already given up hope when one of
them came across the victim again, by sheer accident, and killed him.
After this almost accidental killing many millions of human beings lost
their lives in the following four years.
The assassination served, of course, only as a pretext. Every one of the
belligerent nations had political and economic interests that pushed it
into the war. But did the war really serve these interests? The results
suggest the opposite: three mighty empires – the Russian, German, and
Austrian – collapsed; France lost its standing as a world power beyond all
hope of recovery; the British Empire was mortally wounded.
Military experts point to the shocking stupidity of almost all the
generals, who threw their poor soldiers again and again into hopeless
battles, which achieved nothing but slaughter.
Were the statesmen any wiser? Not one of the politicians who started the
war imagined that it would last so long and be so horrible. In early
August 1914, when the soldiers of all the countries marched into the war
with merry enthusiasm, they were promised that they would be home "before
Christmas." 
No political aim was achieved in that war. The peace agreements that were
imposed on the vanquished were monuments of unbridled imbecility. It can
be argued that the main result of World War I was World War II.
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The Second World War was, seemingly, more rational. The man who launched
it practically single-handedly, Adolf Hitler, knew exactly what he wanted.
His opponents went to war because they had no choice, if they did not want
to be overrun by a monstrous dictator. Most of the generals on both sides
were far more intelligent than their predecessors.
And in spite of this, it was a stupid war.
Hitler was, basically, a primitive person who lived in the past and did
not understand the Zeitgeist. He wanted to turn Germany into the leading
world power – an aim that was wildly beyond its capabilities. He intended
to conquer large parts of Eastern Europe and to empty them of their
inhabitants, in order to settle Germans there. That was a hopelessly
obsolete concept of power. Like all ideas of establishing settlements as a
national instrument, it belonged to centuries past. Hitler did not
understand the meaning of the technological revolution that was about to
change the face of the world. It can be said: Hitler was not only an evil
tyrant and a monumental war criminal, but ultimately also a thoroughly
stupid person.
The only aim that he almost achieved was the annihilation of the Jewish
people. But even this mad endeavor failed in the end: Jews today have a
strong influence on the most powerful country in the world, and the
Holocaust played an important role in the establishment of the state of
Israel.
Hitler wanted to destroy the Soviet Union and reach a compromise with the
British Empire. He belittled the United States and almost ignored it. The
result of the war was that the Soviet Union took over a large part of
Europe, America became the main world power, and the British Empire
disintegrated forever.
Indeed, the Nazi dictator proved, more than anybody else, the utter
futility of war as a political instrument at this point in time. After the
destruction of Hitler's Reich, Germany did achieve his goal. Germany is
now the dominant economic and political power in a united Europe – but
this was attained not with tanks and heavy guns, without war and military
might, solely by diplomacy and exports. One generation after all the
German cities had become heaps of ruins in the Nazi adventure, Germany was
already flourishing as never before.
The same can be said about Japan, which was even more militaristic than
Germany. It achieved by peaceful means what the generals and admirals had
failed to achieve by war.
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From time to time I read enthusiastic reports by American tourists about
Vietnam. What a wonderful country! What a friendly people! What good
business can be done there!
Only a generation ago, a brutal war was running amok there. Masses of
people were killed, hundreds of villages burned, forests and harvests
destroyed by chemical agents, soldiers fell like flies. Why? Because of
dominoes.
The theory went like this: if all of Vietnam were to be taken over by the
Communists, all the other countries of Southeast Asia would fall. Each one
would bring down its neighbor, like a row of dominoes. Reality has shown
that this was complete nonsense: the Communists took over all of Vietnam,
without affecting the stability of Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore. When
the war memories faded, Vietnam indeed followed the path of its northern
neighbor, Red China, but in the meantime China has a flourishing
capitalist economy.
In the Vietnam War, the stupidity of the generals competed with that of
the politicians. The champion was Henry Kissinger, a war criminal whose
towering ego disguised his basic stupidity. At the height of the war he
invaded the neighboring peaceful Cambodia and broke it into pieces. The
result was a gruesome auto-genocide, when the Communists murdered their
own people. Yet many still consider Kissinger a political genius.
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There are those who maintain that for sheer futility, the invasion of Iraq
takes the cake even in this fiercely competitive field.
It seems that the political leadership in Washington foresaw the dramatic
rise of the worldwide demand for oil. They decided, therefore, to
strengthen their hold on the oil of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea
basin. The war was intended to turn Iraq into an American satellite and to
station there, under a friendly regime, a permanent American garrison that
would keep the whole area under control.
The results, up to now, have been the opposite. Instead of consolidating
Iraq as a united country under a stable pro-American regime, a civil war
is raging, the state is tottering on the brink of disintegration, the
population hates the Americans and considers them a foreign occupier. The
output of oil is less than it was before the invasion, the immense costs
of the war undermine the American economy, the price of oil is increasing
incessantly, America's once elevated position in world public opinion has
reached rock bottom, and the American public is demanding that the
soldiers be brought home.
There is no doubt that American interests could have been safeguarded far
better by diplomatic means, using the economic clout of the U.S. That
would have saved thousands of American soldiers and 10 times as many Iraqi
civilians, and trillions of dollars. But the problematic ego of George
Bush, who hides his hollowness and insecurity behind a bluster of noisy
arrogance, caused him to prefer war. As to his cerebral prowess, a
worldwide consensus has been achieved even before the end of his term in
office.
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In the 60 years of its existence, the state of Israel has fought six major
wars and several "smaller" ones (the War of Attrition, the Grapes of
Wrath, the two Intifadas, and more.)
The 1948 confrontation was a war of "no alternative," if one justifies the
Jewish intrusion into Palestine by the fact that there was no other
solution for the problem of their existence. But already the second round,
the war of 1956, was an example of incredible shortsightedness.
The French, who initiated the war, were in a state of denial: they could
not admit to themselves that in Algeria a genuine war of liberation was
taking place. Therefore, they convinced themselves that the Egyptian
leader, Gamal Abdell-Nasser, was the root of the problem. David Ben-Gurion
and his aides (and particularly Shimon Peres) wanted to remove the
"Egyptian Tyrant" (as he was then uniformly called in Israel) because he
had raised the banner of Arab unity, which they considered an existential
threat to Israel. Britain, the third partner, was longing for the past
glories of Empire.
All these aims were totally negated by the war: France was expelled from
Algeria, together with more than a million settlers; Britain was pushed to
the margins of the Middle East; and the "danger" of Arab unity proved to
be a scarecrow. The price: a whole Arab generation was convinced that
Israel was the ally of the nastiest colonial regimes, and the chances of
peace were pushed back for many years.
The 1967 war was intended at the beginning to break the siege on Israel.
But in the course of the fighting, the war of defense became a war of
conquest which drove Israel into a vertigo of intoxication from which it
has not yet quite recovered. Since then we have been captives in a vicious
circle of occupation, resistance, settlements, and permanent war.
One of the direct results was the 1973 war, which destroyed the myth of
our army's invincibility. Yet without this being the intent of our
government, this war had one positive result: three unusual personalities
– Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin, and Jimmy Carter – succeeded in translating
Egyptian pride over the successful crossing of the Suez Canal into a peace
agreement. But the same peace could have been achieved a year earlier,
without war and without the thousands of killed, if Golda Meir had not
arrogantly rejected Sadat's proposal.
The First Lebanon War was, perhaps, the most hopeless and dimwitted of
Israel's wars, a cocktail of arrogance, ignorance, and a complete lack of
understanding of the opponent. Ariel Sharon intended – as he told me in
advance, to – (a) destroy the PLO, (b) cause the Palestinian refugees to
flee from Lebanon to Jordan, (c) drive the Syrians out of Lebanon, and (d)
turn Lebanon into an Israeli protectorate. The results: (a) Arafat went to
Tunis, and later, as the result of the First Intifada, returned to
Palestine in triumph, (b) the Palestinian refugees remained in Lebanon, in
spite of the Sabra and Shatila massacre that was intended to panic them
into fleeing, (c) the Syrians remained in Lebanon for another 20 years,
and (d) the Shi'ites, who had been downtrodden and beholden to Israel,
became a powerful force in Lebanon and Israel's most determined foe.
The less said about Lebanon War II the better – its true character was
obvious right from the start. Its aims were not frustrated – simply
because there were no clear aims at all. Today Hezbollah is where it was,
stronger and better armed, shielded from Israeli attacks by the presence
of an international force.
After the First Intifada, Israel recognized the Palestinian Liberation
Organization and brought Arafat back to the country. After the Second
Intifada, Hamas won the Palestinian elections and later took over direct
control of a part of the country.
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Albert Einstein considered it a symptom of madness to repeat again and
again doing something that has already failed and to expect a different
result every time.
Most politicians and generals conform to this formula. Again and again
they try to achieve their aims by military means and obtain contrary
results. We Israelis occupy an honorable place among these madmen.
War is hell, as an American general pronounced. It also rarely achieves
its aims.
 
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