Let's assume the worst. Israel lost. Hezbollah has been raised in status from a terrorist organization to a 'legitimate' non-state militia, or as I have been hearing 'guerilla army'. What next?
What I've learned in the past couple weeks is more evidence in support of some assumptions I've had about empire. There's only one kind of good war, which is one for territory when you're ready to move people into the conquered area. Ideological conquest can only be 'terrorist'.
So our solution is to get to where Mark Steyn was talking. I read his stuff with incredulity but maybe he was ahead of the curve. Steyn basically said to hell with stability. All strategic bets of that sort are off:
“Stability”, of course, is profoundly unstable. In fact, it’s one of the most powerful weapons in the enemy’s armory. When our side rouses itself, it can bomb enemy targets and topple dictators very effectively. But then we stop dropping bombs, and the war carries on with the enemy advancing in remorseless, incremental ways we find harder to oppose.
If Hezbollah is to be an entity with control and responsibility for any population center, or if any republic is to be held to account, the strategy may very well be to go tit for tat.
You see I'm seeing that the stand that the US is going to have to adopt in the future will be that we are absolutely not going to capture territory, and unless there is some revolution in the planning ability for the Pentagon to win peace through occupation, we are simply not going to try it any longer. That means sooner or later our big stick is going to be more of a pinpoint stick. I envision a future in which we come down to the tactical matters in which the the US says do what we want or it's war. But these wars will be war-lets. Call it selective massacre.
Now I know this is totally crazy and I bring a lot of questions about my sanity by suggesting this, but it's just a kind of brainstorming - thinking out loud. See I'm prepared to believe that our cockeyed occupation was a complete validation of our weakness in assymetry. But that was because we failed to plan with the full capacity of our military. We'll be paying for that. But in the meantime, if we could credibly threaten air campaigns a la Chuck Horner, we might have a lot more leverage. We would need to be very thoughtful in our diplomacy, but we'd have to be very willing to toss bombs, in effect, hold non-state entities hostage. This would count for those kinds of enemies that are like Hezbollah and the Taliban. We destroy their strongholds without needing to convert anybody. Forget democracy, forget stability.
I propose this line of thought in reflection upon the success of Operation Desert Fox as described in Ricks' Fiasco as TigerHawk also reviews:
Ricks also has another interesting and confusing passage on the ultimate effects of Operation Desert Fox, the attacks launched in December 1998 to punish Iraq for having expelled the UN weapons inspectors:
Launched in reaction to a standoff with Saddam Hussein over weapons inspections, the attacks began on December 16, 2008, with a volley of over 200 cruise missiles from Navy ships and Air Force B-52 bombers. The next day another 100 cruise missiles were fired. On the third night of air strikes, B-1 swingwing supersonic bombers made their first ever appearance in combat. After a fourth night, the raids ended. A total of 415 cruise missiles had been used, more than the 317 employed during the entire 1991 Gulf War. They and 600 bombs hit a total of 97 sites, the major ones being facilities for the production and storage of chemical weapons and those associted with missiles that could deliver such munitions. In part because U.S. intelligence was able to locate only a limited number of sites associated with weaponry, the strikes also hit government command-and-control facilities such as intelligence and secret police headquarters.
At the time, Republicans were highly critical of Desert Fox. Not only did they suspect that Clinton was "wagging the dog" to distract attention from his political problems, but they thought that the mere "bombing of empty buildings" was more avoidance of the inevitable in Iraq. Some conservatives persisted rather unfortunately in this view even when the evidence was working against them:
"The Clinton administration was totally risk averse" on Iraq, Richard Perle, a leading Iraq hawk, would argue later. "They allowed Saddam over eight years to grow in strength. He was far stronger at the end of Clinton's tenure than at the beginning." Perle made those assertions in July 2003, just about the time they were becoming laughable to those who understood the situation on the ground in Iraq.
In retrospect, we now know there were two consequences of Desert Fox. First, Ricks argues (fairly persuasively) that the attacks were far more devestating to Iraq's weapons programs than were understood at the time. Second, the 1998 attacks prompted Saddam to clamp down very hard internally, the result of which "Iraqis inside the country in contact with U.S. intelligence grew far more wary." In both cases, Ricks begs obvious follow-up questions that he does not directly address.
Where are the terrorist strongholds and how chaotic can we make their lives from the air? Perhaps more than we have thought so far? If we don't care about what effect we have on prospects for advanced democracy on the ground, which we've obviously put on the back-burner in Afghanistan, this might be a useful weapon going forward.
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