Reason Magazine - Topics > Lebanon

Not the Last Hurra, Unfortunately

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 11:06:00 EDT

So how's that whole winning-hearts-and-minds-through-government-broadcasting thing working out in the Middle East? About as badly as you'd expect, according to the Washington Post.

Al-Hurra − "The Free One" in Arabic − is the centerpiece of a U.S. government campaign to spread democracy in the Middle East. Taxpayers have spent $350 million on the project. But more than four years after it began broadcasting, the station is widely regarded as a flop in the Arab world, where it has struggled to attract viewers and overcome skepticism about its mission. [...]
Since its inception, al-Hurra has been plagued by mediocre programming, congressional interference and a succession of executives who either had little experience in television or could not speak Arabic, according to interviews with former staffers, other Arab journalists and viewers in the Middle East.
It has also been embarrassed by journalistic blunders. One news anchor greeted the station's predominantly Muslim audience on Easter by declaring, "Jesus is risen today!" After al-Hurra covered a December 2006 Holocaust-denial conference in Iran and aired, unedited, an hour-long speech by the leader of Hezbollah, Congress convened hearings and threatened to cut the station's budget.

Whole thing here. The cynic in me wants to say that the truly bad news here is that the station seems to be making marginal improvements, which sounds like a recipe for throwing money down this sinkhole in perpetuity.

I wrote about the on-its-face ludicrous idea that you could make a Radio Free Europe for the Middle East back in March 2006. Michael Young attacked the idea two years before that.

Nothing Left

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 12:00:00 EST

When Hezbollah official Imad Mughniyeh was assassinated earlier this month in Damascus, the collateral damage was felt in academic departments, newsrooms, think tanks, and cafes far and wide. That's because it quickly became apparent how wrong many of the alleged "experts" writing about the militant Shiite organization had been.

At Mughniyeh's funeral, Hezbollah leaders placed him in a trinity of party heroes "martyred" at Israeli hands. The secretary general of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, vowed "open war" against Israel in retaliation. Tens of thousands of people attended the ceremony, and for days Hezbollah received condolences. Iranian officials stepped over each other to condemn the assassination, many of them affirming that Israel's demise was inevitable. In the midst of all this one thing was plain: Mughniyeh was a highly significant figure in Hezbollah, and the party didn't hide it.

And yet over the years, an embarrassing number of writers and academics with some access to Hezbollah dutifully relayed what party cadres had told them about Mughniyeh: He was unimportant and may even have been a figment of our imagination. It was understandable that Hezbollah would blur the trail of so vital an official, but how could those writing about the party swallow this line without pursuing the numerous sources that could confirm details of Mughniyeh's past? Their fault was laziness, and at times tendentiousness.

Hezbollah is adept at turning contacts with the party into valuable favors. Writers and scholars, particularly Westerners, who lay claim to Hezbollah sources, are regarded as special for penetrating so closed a society. That's why their writing is often edited with minimal rigor. Hezbollah always denied everything that was said about Mughniyeh, and few authors (or editors) showed the curiosity to push further than that. The mere fact of getting such a denial was considered an achievement in itself, a sign of rare access, and no one was about to jeopardize that access by calling Hezbollah liars.

But there was more here than just manipulation. The Mughniyeh affair highlights a deeper problem long obvious to those who follow Hezbollah: The party, though it is religious, autocratic, and armed to the teeth, often elicits approval from secular, liberal Westerners who otherwise share nothing of its values. This reaction, in its more extreme forms, is reflected in the way many on the far left have embraced Hezbollah's militancy, but also that of other Islamist groups like Hamas or Islamic Jihad—thoroughly undermining their ideological principles in the process.

The primary emotion driving together the far-left and militant Islamists, but also frequently prompting secular liberals to applaud armed Islamic groups as well, is hostility toward the United States, toward Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians, and, more broadly, toward what is seen as Western-dominated, capitalist-driven globalization.

Fred Halliday, himself a man of the left, wrote scathingly of the dangers in the accommodation between Islamists and the left based on a perception of shared anti-imperialism: "All of this is—at least to those with historical awareness, skeptical political intelligence, or merely a long memory—disturbing. This is because its effect is to reinforce one of the most pernicious and inaccurate of all political claims, and one made not by the left but by the imperialist right. It is also one that underlies the U.S.-declared ‘war on terror' and the policies that have resulted from 9/11: namely, that Islamism is a movement aimed against 'the west.'"

A bizarre offshoot of this trend has been the left's elevation of Islamist "resistance" to the level of a fetish. You know something has gone horribly wrong when the writer and academic Norman Finkelstein volunteers to interpret Hezbollah for you, before prefacing his comments with: "I don't care about Hezbollah as a political organization. I don't know much about their politics, and anyhow, it's irrelevant. I don't live in Lebanon."

In a recent interview on Lebanese television, Finkelstein made it a point of expressing his "solidarity" with Hezbollah, on the grounds that "there is a fundamental principle. People have the right to defend their country from foreign occupiers, and people have the right to defend their country from invaders who are destroying their country. That to me is a very basic, elementary and uncomplicated question."

It is indeed uncomplicated if you remain mulishly unwilling to move beyond the narrow parameters you've set for discussion. But the reality is that Hezbollah is an immensely complicated question in Lebanon, where a majority of people are at a loss about what to do with a heavily armed organization that has no patience for state authority, that refuses to hand its weapons over to the national army, that is advancing an Iranian and Syrian agenda against the legal Lebanese government, and that functions as a secretive Shiite paramilitary militia in a country where sectarian religious assertiveness often leads to conflict. That many Lebanese should have seen Finkelstein praise what they feel is Hezbollah's most dangerous attributes was surpassed in its capacity to irritate only by the fact that he lectured them on how armed resistance was the sole option against Israel, regardless of the anticipated destruction, "unless you choose to be [Israeli] slaves—and many people here have chosen that."

But Finkelstein is no worse than Noam Chomsky, or that clutter of "progressive" academics and intellectuals who, at the height of the carnage during the 2006 Lebanon war, signed on to a petition declaring their "conscious support for the Lebanese national resistance," described resistance as "an intellectual act par excellence" and condemned the Lebanese government for having distanced itself from Hezbollah, even though the party had unnecessarily provoked a devastating Israeli military onslaught that led to the death of over 1,200 people.

This behavior comes full circle especially for the revolutionary fringe on the left, which seems invariably to find its way back to violence. In the same way that Finkelstein can compare Hezbollah admiringly to the Soviet Red Army and the communist resistance during World War II ("it was brutal, it was ruthless"), he sees in resistance a quasi-religious act that brooks no challenge, even from its likely victims. What is so odd in Finkelstein and those like him is that the universalism and humanism at the heart of the left's view of itself has evaporated, to be replaced by categorical imperatives usually associated with the extreme right: blood; honor; solidarity; and the defense of near-hallowed land.

Blind faith in the service of total principle is what makes those like Finkelstein and Chomsky so vile. But their posturing is made possible because of the less ardent secular liberal publicists out there who surrender to the narratives that Islamists such as Hezbollah, Hamas, or others peddle to them—lending them legitimacy. That's because modern scholarship, like liberalism itself, refuses to impose Western cultural standards on non-Westerners. Fine. But as the Mughniyeh case shows, when Islamists dominate the debate affecting them, there are plenty of fools out there dying to be tossed a bone.

reason contributing editor Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon.

Imad and Me

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 13:29:00 EST

A couple of things struck me about the New York Times coverage of Hezbollah leader Imad Mugniyah's assassination. First of all, in this publicity shot from the Hezbollah Media Office, Mugniyah looks like a an older, pudgier, camouflage-wearing version of me:

I gather this picture was taken before the plastic surgery he supposedly had. Despite his Semitic looks (I know, I know: Arabs are Semites too!), this was a guy who considered blowing up a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires a legitimate tactic in a war with Israel. In his view, killing any random Jew, anywhere in the world, was just retaliation for wrongs committed by the Israeli government. Yet I was still surprised to see the Times unambiguously call Mugniyah, who headed Hezbollah's Islamic Jihad Organization, a terrorist.

The headline over the main story about Mugniyah's death, "Bomb in Syria Kills Militant Sought as Terrorist," equivocates a bit, but the text calls him "one of the most wanted and elusive terrorists in the world." A sidebar summarizing his murderous career calls him "perhaps the world's most feared terrorist" before 9/11 and notes that "the list of those who might seek justice or revenge against him was a lengthy one." By contrast, the Times usually calls Arab terrorists who target Israelis "militants." The Times story about last week's suicide bombing at a shopping center in Dimona, for instance, called the Fatah-affiliated Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which initially claimed responsibility for killing an Israeli woman at the shopping center, "militant groups." (It also called the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades a "militia.") Later, when the Qassam Brigades took credit for the murder, the Times described that organization as "the military wing of Hamas," which it called a "militant Islamic group."

So what exactly does it take for a "militant" to be recognized as a "terrorist" in The New York Times? Evidently he needs to target Jewish civilians not only outside Gaza and the West Bank but outside of Israel, preferably on a different continent. I think it also helps if he attacks Americans, as Mugniyah repeatedly did. The Times does not seem to be squeamish about calling Al Qaeda "a terrorist group." If Osama bin Laden had crashed a plane into a building in Tel Aviv instead of New York City, would he be merely a militant?

In Stable Condition

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 12:00:00 EST

For months, we've been hearing the presidential candidates promise American voters "change." But as the U.S. primaries move beyond their half-way point, here is a prediction: Whoever becomes president in 2008 will pursue the same policies as the Bush administration in the Middle East, because there is little latitude to do otherwise.

Iraq is the rare regional issue about which one sees some sunshine between the candidates' positions. On the Republican side, John McCain's view is similar to that of the Bush administration. The war has to be won, and the military "surge", which McCain backed, has been a success. For the Republican frontrunner, "a greater military commitment now is necessary if we are to achieve long-term success ... [and] give Iraqis the capabilities to govern and secure their own country." McCain prefers honesty to deadlines, and believes Americans need to be told that the war will be a long one, because "defeat ... would lead to much more violence in Iraq, greatly embolden Iran, undermine U.S. allies such as Israel, likely lead to wider conflict, result in a terrorist safe haven in the heart of the Middle East, and gravely damage U.S. credibility throughout the world."

Mike Huckabee's chances of being nominated are so slender as to make a rundown of his Middle East policies unnecessary. But on the whole, his approach to Iraq is little different than that of the administration. He too supports the surge, opposes establishing a withdrawal schedule, and sees the war in Iraq as part of the war on terror.

The Democrats, in contrast, have focused their Iraq strategy on setting a withdrawal timetable. Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton promise to begin an immediate pullout of troops after their election. Obama wants to do this at the rate of one or two brigades every month, to be completed by the end of 2009. Clinton is less specific, but promises to direct the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the defense secretary, and the National Security Council "to draw up a clear, viable plan to bring our troops home starting with the first 60 days" of her administration.

Both candidates leave themselves wiggle room in the event they win the presidency. As Clinton understands, drawing up a plan to remove troops is different than setting a deadline for finalizing a withdrawal. The senator also intends to stabilize Iraq as American soldiers head home. But that link between stability and withdrawal can cut both ways. If a pullout generates instability, this would undermine the logic of Clinton's plan, justifying a delay. Indeed, both she and Obama have waffled on whether they would go ahead with a withdrawal in such a case. When the Illinois senator was asked by 60 Minutes whether he would stick to his timetable even if there was sectarian violence, he replied: "No, I always reserve, as commander in chief, the right to assess the situation."

The candidates also differ over whether to engage Syria and Iran in assisting to normalize Iraq. Obama has often said he would talk to the two countries, while Clinton vows to "convene a regional stabilization group composed of key allies, other global powers, and all of the states bordering Iraq." McCain disagrees, refusing to enter into "unconditional dialogues with these two dictatorships from a position of weakness." He insists that "the international community [needs] to apply real pressure to Syria and Iran to change their behavior."

Much of this is bluster. For Obama, the rationale to talk to Syria has declined since Iraqi tribes began defeating Al-Qaeda in Anbar province. The Syrian card in Iraq is much weaker than it was when the senator first formulated the idea, making the political cost of opening up to Damascus—at a time when it is actively undermining Lebanese sovereignty and is isolated in the Arab world—significantly higher. Clinton's proposal, meanwhile, is mostly old hat. Iraq's neighbors already meet periodically to discuss the situation in the country, and the U.S. too has participated in these gatherings. As for McCain, his instincts are right, but he has no good reason to abandon the current dialogue taking place between Iran and the U.S. in Baghdad. The Iraqis back it and it might calm the situation on the ground.

In the shadow of Iran's growing power in the Gulf, there is no realistic withdrawal option in Iraq. The United States fought a war against Saddam Hussein's army in 1991 to deny Iraq hegemony over the oil-rich region after the invasion of Kuwait. That goal hasn't changed with respect to Iran. Washington is boosting arms sales to its Gulf allies, but knows that without a U.S. military presence such assistance only has a limited impact. The U.S. also continues to warn of Iran's nuclear ambitions, with even Russia openly questioning why Iran needs intercontinental ballistic missiles if it doesn't seek a nuclear military capacity.

There is also the matter of Israel. All the candidates loudly support the security of Israel, which regards Iran's nuclear capacity as a strategic threat. To cede ground to Iran in Iraq could harm Israeli interests, justifying the candidates' eventually backtracking on withdrawal.

In the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, don't expect much new either. All the candidates support negotiations (who wouldn't?) and Israel's right to live in peace and security. Depending on who gets elected, the president might push a bit more or a bit less for a se ttlement. But the U.S. has limited scope to do very much, because, more than ever before, the dynamics of the process are much less Washington's to manipulate.

The Palestinian territories are physically and ideologically divided, with rival Hamas and Fatah governments ruling over Gaza and the West Bank. Hamas offers a menu of armed struggle, while the mainstream Fatah movement (the party of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas) defends peace talks. But Israel, wracked by its own internal divisions, will not significantly bolster Fatah's fortunes by ceasing settlement building until the Palestinians put their house in order. Palestinian moderates respond that unless Israel makes serious concessions, they will lose all credibility. It's a Catch-22, and U.S. pressure to force a solution would only exacerbate internal contradictions in both societies.

Facing such obstacles, a new administration can, at best, actively pursue the negotiating process in the hope that some breakthrough will take place. But that's what the Bush administration is already doing today.

A new administration is also as unlikely as the present one to subordinate political interests to defending freedom and human rights. President George W. Bush is as good as it gets on that front. He may be responsible for what, until recently, was a full-blown fiasco in Iraq, but his actions did overthrow a tyrant, while in Lebanon the U.S. played a key role in forcing the Syrians out of the country. But Bush's rhetoric on liberty notwithstanding, the deterioration in Iraq and Iran's rise have prompted him to again rely on autocratic U.S. allies such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan as a counterweight. This situation will only persist in a polarized Middle East, and none of the presidential candidates has expressed particular displeasure with Bush's conduct on this front.

Things are more likely to change, however, on the specific issue of how to deal with terrorist suspects. None of the candidates care for the Bush administration's "extraordinary rendition" policy, or its ambiguous position on torture. This will have a marginal impact on human rights in general in the region, but discontinuing such practices will be sold by a new administration as a sign that America cares, even as Arab regimes resort to their old habits by brutalizing their foes.

On Lebanon, expect little transformation as well. The country is not high on the list of priorities of any of the candidates, which means that no one feels strongly about altering the current approach. To quote a former U.S. ambassador in Beirut, Washington for once has a Lebanon policy. It is mainly focused on consolidating the gains of the so-called Cedar Revolution of 2005. This means that the U.S. will continue to block escalating Syrian efforts to return to Lebanon; it will pursue efforts to contain Hezbollah and limit its military activity, particularly through the United Nations; and it will press forward with the Lebanese-international court now being set up in The Hague to try suspects in the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri.

Though continuity is likely, candidates will sell this as difference. For example, recently Obama issued a statement on the occasion of the third anniversary of the Hariri assassination. The senator praised the Cedar Revolution, condemned Syrian actions in Lebanon, and backed U.N. resolutions seeking to prevent Hezbollah from rearming. However, he framed his proposals as a stark contrast with those of the Bush administration. But what Obama prescribed was almost exactly what the administration has been doing for the past three years.

That's very much a paradigm for how all the candidates approach the Middle East: they differentiate themselves from Bush without acknowledging that even his administration has been compelled in the last three years to behave like its predecessors, once the supposed neoconservative interregnum ended. The region has always been adept at imposing its rhythms on others as a means of resisting change. Barring something dramatic, none of the candidates will disturb that stasis.

Contributing Editor Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon.

Mixed Bag in the Middle East

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 15:15:00 EDT

As usual, both good and bad news from the Middle East. The good news, from Gaza, is that Palestinians are fast losing patience with their fundamentalist government, with a majority saying that Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah Party is the "legitimate Palestinian ruling authority." Perhaps Israeli (and Western) assistance to Fatah has had its desired effect, though it seems much more likely that, as this Near East Consulting poll suggests, Palestinians simply don't like being bullied by government thugs ("58 percent of respondents said they are now afraid to express their political views following the Hamas takeover, and 60 percent say Hamas' paramilitary police, known as the Executive Force, has done a poor job respecting individual rights.) From the AP, via the International Herald Tribune:

Most residents of the Gaza Strip are afraid to openly express their political views following Hamas' takeover of the area in June, according to a poll released Wednesday, the latest sign of public discontent with Gaza's Islamic militant rulers.
The poll found that a majority of Gazans oppose rocket attacks on Israel, favor a peace agreement with the Jewish state, and do not consider the Hamas authority in Gaza to be the legitimate Palestinian government. It also concluded that Hamas would lose elections if a new vote were held today.

And now for the bad news: The AP reports that one year after the Israel's war with Hezbollah the Iran-backed fundamentalist group has "regained strength" and is now "solidly entrenched across southern Lebanon":

When 30,000 U.N. and Lebanese troops deployed across southern Lebanon at the end of last year's Israel-Hezbollah war, the Islamic militant group's presence shrank in the zone bordering Israeli and its influence seemed likely to diminish as well.
But more than a year later, Hezbollah appears to again be solidly entrenched across Lebanon's south - looking, in fact, as if its fighters never really left but merely went underground.
The Shiite militia's banners hang everywhere, boasting of the "divine victory" over Israel and thanking its chief sponsor, Shiite-majority Iran, for helping with post-war reconstruction. Villagers report the militia's recruitment of young men is booming and its popularity is firm.

Full story here.

reason's Beirut-based contributing editor Michael Young James Joyner on why Israel failed in its 2006 war against Hezbollah.

But Our War Crimes Were Heroic and Honorable

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 10:57:00 EDT

Hezbollah is angry about a new Human Rights Watch report that condemns the group's rocket attacks on civilians during last year's war with Israel. Since Hezbollah deliberately launched thousands of anti-personnel rockets into Israeli towns and bragged about doing so, it cannot very well deny that it committed war crimes. Instead, its leaders argue that Human Rights Watch should save its criticism for Israel, whose air attacks on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon killed far more civilians than Hezbollah's crappy rockets did.

But Human Rights Watch, which plans to release what will undoubtedly be a scathing report about Israel's conduct during the war next week, insists this is not a numbers game and that two wrongs don't make a right: Deliberate or indiscriminate attacks on civilians are always wrong. "The fact that more Israeli civilians didn't die is not a tribute to Hezbollah but a tribute to Israeli bomb shelters," says Sarah Leah Whitson, director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa division. "The point we're making is that even though they say 'only 43 Israeli civilians were killed' that doesn't make it OK."

Israel's war with Hezbollah was disastrous in several ways, not least because of the many innocent people it killed. To the extent that the Israeli government could have reduced or avoided those deaths (by responding to Hezbollah's initial cross-border raid in a less dramatic fashion, for example), it is culpable for them. And even if the invasion and air campaign had made sense, there are reasons to question some of Israel's judgments about which targets to attack and how. But Israel was at least ostensibly attacking legitimate military targets and inadvertently killing civilians in the process, as opposed to deliberately targeting civilians, which strikes me as an important moral distinction. To put it another way, the IDF considers killing civilians a mark of shame, while Hezbollah wears it like a badge of honor, which is why its leaders are dismayed by the criticism from Human Rights Watch.

Capitalist Dybbuk Weakens Israel?

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 14:06:00 EDT

According to the Wall Street Journal ($), some Israelis are blaming the country's lackluster performance in last year's war with Lebanon on the dissipation of socialist solidarity and the rapid expansion of an "entrepreneurial economy":

The makeover shows how Israel has flourished beyond the wildest dreams of the ardent socialists who founded the Jewish state. Powered by high-tech exports, the Israeli economy grew 6.3% in the first quarter this year, with a 28% jump in personal consumption of durable goods, such as cars and refrigerators. Sales ofPorsches doubled in 2006 from 2004, and last year Lexus opened shop in the Jewish state.

Yet prosperity has not brought security. As Israelis begin another summer fraught with regional instability, some are pondering a troubling question: Is the idea of an advanced consumer society, with its attendant individualism, compatible with the solidarity and focus required to defend a small state bordered by hostile neighbors? And could the growing gap between poor and wealthy Israelis undermine its national drive to protect itself?

...

In recent years, the socialist ideals of the founding Zionists have given way to one of the most successful entrepreneurial economies on earth. In place of solidarity, some Israelis argue, there is a growing gap between haves and have-nots. Rates of poverty are high among the country's 20% Arab population, but are also growing among Israeli Jews. Though the average Israeli salary has risen steadily, to more than $22,000 a year currently, one in four families live below the official poverty line. The poverty rate among children is 35%.

There are many reasonable explanations for the outcome of last summer's war in Lebanon, though "materialism" is likely low on the list. For an interesting dissection of the IDF's manifold military failures during last summer's (as of yet unnamed) war, check out Efraim Inbar's post-mortem here.

And it's easy to forget, but Cpl. Gilad Shalit, the soldier whose capture precipitated the IDF invasion, is still being held by Hamas. Yesterday, his captors released an audiotape of Shalit calling on the Israeli government to release Palestinian prisoners. Story here.

Liberal Lebanon

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 24 May 2007 12:01:00 EDT

Last week, while being driven through Chicago, I heard one Flynt Leverett speaking in a news report aired on National Public Radio. Leverett, a former National Security Council official who now plies his trade at the New America Foundation, has long been an advocate of U.S. collaboration with Syria—and it's probably fair to add he would like to be a middleman in that collaboration. That's perhaps why he was quoted in his interview as saying that the Bush administration had "romanticized" the 2005 "Cedar Revolution", in which hundreds of thousands of Lebanese took to the streets demanding an end to 29 years of Syrian hegemony.

Rare are those today in the United States who look at Lebanon and remember that bracing year. That's not surprising given the heavy fighting this week in the north of the country between the Lebanese army and a group calling itself Fatah al-Islam, the detonation of bombs in Beirut on Sunday and Monday and in a mountain resort on Wednesday, and a persistent domestic political crisis as the pro-Syrian opposition continues to demand the resignation of the Lebanese government, which is backed by the parliamentary majority hostile to Syria. Lebanon's reputation is again that of a place cursed by chronic instability.

The interpretation is tendentious. Instability does not just materialize from the ether. It's always a mistake to oversimplify Lebanese politics, but it would be fair to say that what is under threat today is Lebanon's liberal future. And that future is threatened mainly by Syria, which never accepted its forced withdrawal from Lebanon in 2003, after the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafiq Hariri. The fighting in the north, the bomb blasts, and the political crisis are almost certainly the direct results of Syrian policy, despite what Damascus and its proliferating promoters are saying in Washington, as they try to peddle the idea that Syria holds a key to stability in Iraq. The explicit or implicit message of many of those worthies is that the U.S. is better off dealing with Syria over Iraq, even if it means surrendering to the Syrian regime "influence" in Lebanon.

However, the Syrians don't "do" influence. What they understand is unquestioned domination. On top of that, today they see an existential threat to their regime from the creation by the United Nations of a tribunal to try suspects in the Hariri killing. Syria is the only serious suspect in the crime, something that has been indirectly affirmed by U.N. investigators. The regime of President Bashar Assad fears that any accusation directed against it could be a fatal blow. The mixed Lebanese-international tribunal was to have been set up through constitutional Lebanese channels, but Syria's allies in Beirut blocked the process. In the coming weeks, unless developments in Lebanon encourage Russia and China to undermine the effort, the Security Council will establish the tribunal under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter.

That's why the bombs continue to go off, and why there is fighting in north Lebanon. The international media have underlined that Fatah al-Islam is a group with ties to Al-Qaeda. That may be the case when it comes to specific militants, but the top leadership is most likely acting today on behalf of the Syrian security services, which have allowed the group access to Lebanon through Syria's borders. The group claims to be an Islamist offshoot of a pro-Syrian Palestinian group called Fatah al-Intifada. For many observers, however, that rift was probably contrived by Syria to provide it with deniability as it uses the group to destabilize Lebanon. Fatah al-Islam may indeed include Islamists, its funding may come from sources not necessarily Syrian, it may operate in collaboration with rather than as an extension of the Syrians, and its advanced weaponry may have been bought on the market, but its decision to launch attacks against the Lebanese army on Sunday was also very clearly a Syrian effort to show both Lebanon and the international community that a Chapter VII tribunal would have nefarious consequences.

If there was any doubt, in separate statements both Syria's foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem, and its ambassador to the United Nations, Bashar Jaafari, linked stability in Lebanon to what happened on the tribunal. Assad himself is said to have recently issued a threat (which he did not deny) to U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki-moon. Syrian determination seemed plain in that the bomb that exploded on Monday evening was placed near, among other places, the Russian cultural center. It's unlikely that this was a coincidence. Russia is already hesitant about passing the tribunal under Chapter VII, although it is unlikely to veto the step. One of the objectives of the bombing could have been to make Moscow think again on that front.

Can anyone take Lebanese liberalism seriously, given that the country, at least to outsiders, seems perennially divided? The Lebanese are undeniably divided, but not as much on Syria as you might think. The only powerful ally Syria still has in Lebanon is Hezbollah. Take away Hezbollah, and Syria's other comrades would shrivel away. Given that a vast majority of Sunnis, Christians, and Druze are opposed to the return of Syrian rule, with many Shiites themselves little enthusiastic about Syria, although they will not or cannot oppose Hezbollah in the polarized sectarian atmosphere today, the constituency for a Syrian restoration is small. However, Syria still has friends in high places. Lebanon's president and speaker of parliament are on Syria's side; Syria and its friends still have sway in the Lebanese army's officer corps; and Hezbollah is the best armed and cohesive military force in the country.

What is being described here may seem more like Lebanese factional politics than a liberal struggle. Perhaps, but Lebanon, precisely because of its factionalism, is a country that has long rested on an imperfectly liberal, sometimes even libertarian, social contract: the state remains fairly weak amid strong religious communities that are allowed to develop as they see fit. Factionalism has meant that no one side, least of all the state, can dominate the country's disparate groups. That's why Lebanon, unlike most Arab countries, has been unkind to budding dictators. The fractured political structure has also led to the growth of a fairly free and pluralistic media. The weakness at the center has left much space for a free-market economy--despite the persistence of oligopolies in some sectors--as well as openness to private investment and a carefree embrace of the benefits of globalization.

What lies on the other side? A Syrian state governed by a family propped up by intelligence services that have imprisoned thousands of political prisoners. This has prompted even "friends" of Syria to protest. The country is afflicted by an archaic economy, often a kleptocracy, dominated by those with ties to the regime. All media are controlled by the state or members of the ruling family, and the parliament primarily includes yes-men and -women. So little is expected of them that recently participation in parliamentary elections, though officially set at 56 percent, was estimated to be much lower by independent sources, with Syrian opposition figures saying it could have been in the single digits. There are no presidential elections, but in three days' time President Bashar al-Assad will hold a referendum to give the Syrian people the opportunity to renew his mandate for another seven years. Syria is not North Korea, but it is the very antithesis of what most countries aspire to becoming.

What Flynt Leverett wouldn't admit was that while the so-called Cedar Revolution may have been romanticized, there was good reason to see it as something novel in the Middle East. For the first time, for example, several intelligence and security chiefs were forced out of office because of popular discontent. Place that against the grim order the Syrians and their Lebanese allies, notably the theocratic, authoritarian Hezbollah, seek to resurrect. Many in the West want to close the door on an Arab world that seems permanently overcome by its pathologies. Fine, but in abandoning a weak but genuine liberal system they are also abandoning a part of themselves.

Reason contributing editor Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon.

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McCain: Surging Away from Cut and Run

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 18:52:00 EST

Our beloved former colleague Matt Welch, now hanging his editorial fedora at the LA Times, digs up some fine examples of John McCain's sensible non-interventionist foreign policy thinking--alas, from decades and conflicts gone by.

Hoodwinked by Hezbollah

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 12:52:00 EDT

Hezbollah beat Israel in the latest war in Lebanon, and if you have any doubts, listen to what a certified expert on defeat, Syria's President Bashar Assad, had to say:

"We tell [Israel] that after tasting humiliation in the latest battles, your weapons are not going to protect you—not your planes, or missiles, or even your nuclear bombs... The future generations in the Arab world will find a way to defeat Israel."

Some pundits agreed. This unqualified, air-punching evaluation is from one Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a professor at the Lebanese-American University and author of a book on Hezbollah: "In military terms this is a victory that the Arabs haven't tasted in decades by Israeli standards even. Hezbollah is fully aware that it has emerged victorious. The Lebanese government has called it a victory and it is a victory that is unprecedented and if anything it is going to change the balance of power here."

Iran's ambiguous response on Tuesday to an international request to cease uranium enrichment, underscores the regional dimension of the recent Lebanese conflict. The author of a New York Times story on the Iranian counteroffer, Helene Cooper, offered up this assessment: "Iran has emerged stronger from the Lebanon crisis by showing the world that it is capable of wreaking havoc through its support of the Hezbollah militants"—a view echoed by George Perkovich, the director for nonproliferation at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Well, since it's all settled that Hezbollah has won, let's just open a six-pack of non-alcoholic beer and drink to the health of the party's secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, the Arab world's latest Che Guevara.

But what kind of victory is this that, even by Hezbollah's unexacting standards, must qualify as a major setback? In its public appraisals of the conflict, Hezbollah has ignored what Israel did to those parts of Lebanon the party cannot claim as its own. Its cries of triumph have been focused on the stubborn resistance put up by Hezbollah combatants in south Lebanon. Nothing has been heard from party leaders about the billions of dollars of losses in infrastructure; about the immediate losses to businesses that will be translated into higher unemployment; about the long-term opportunity costs of the fighting; about the impact that political instability will have (indeed has already had) on public confidence and on youth emigration; and about the general collapse in morale that Lebanon faces.

Let's forget such trifles for a moment and use Hezbollah's own benchmark. Even there, the evidence points to a net loss for the Shiite militia.

Take the rationale for Hezbollah's rockets. For some time it has been obvious that the weapons, estimated to number between 10,000 and 15,000, were mainly there to help deter an American or Israeli attack against Iran's nuclear facilities. Nor did the Iranians distinguish between aggressors. Last May, Iranian Revolutionary Guards Rear Adm. Muhammad-Ebrahim Dehqani stated, "We have announced that wherever America does something evil, the first place that we target will be Israel." He didn't mention Hezbollah or Lebanon, but it didn't take much discernment to see that Iranian retaliation would at least partly come from across Israel's northern border.

Does that deterrence option still exist? Yes and no. Hezbollah is believed to have many more rockets in storage and its network of bunkers in south Lebanon is probably mostly intact. However, it cannot initiate a conflict without facing the political fallout of imposing new suffering on its already traumatized Shiite community. Almost a million Shiites were thrown into the streets by Israeli bombardments between July and August. Hezbollah has started distributing money to the community, but that won't pay for much of the horrendous suffering—lives lost, profitable businesses closed, self-respect gone for those without homes or livelihoods, and much else that cash handouts cannot remedy.

Nasrallah would likely obey an Iranian request to attack Israel once again if the Tehran regime deemed that to be necessary. However, Shiites making up Hezbollah's base of support may not be so eager to be turned into cannon fodder for a country thousands of miles away. That's why the party's deterrence capacity has suddenly become very costly.

It has also become more costly because the month-long fighting brought the Lebanese Army into south Lebanon, after an absence of several decades—soon to be accompanied by an expanded United Nations force. Nasrallah, in order to protect Hezbollah's autonomy in the south, has sought in recent weeks to empty those deployments of their meaning, even as he has pretended to welcome the army. That is hypocritical. Hezbollah had repeatedly refused to allow the army to go south, and only agreed to do so because this was seen by an increasingly impatient Lebanese public as a means of ending the Israeli onslaught. If Hezbollah brings out the rockets again, however, it will mean not only confronting the Lebanese consensus, but also the international community, and that's before a shot is fired in anger against Israel. Again, the party's deterrence capacity, while still there, will be much tougher to revive.

Nasrallah also has accounts to settle with Iran. The regime in Tehran has not only seen its main reason for supporting Hezbollah go up in smoke in a largely futile endeavor, but must now dole out large sums of compensation money to Lebanese Shiites so the party can hold on to its base of support, even as Iran's poor complain their regime has left them by the wayside. Iran will probably pay out the money (though I've heard unconfirmed reports of delays), but of what value is this if Hezbollah cannot fire on Israel in the event of an attack against Iran's nuclear facilities? Or, to the contrary, of what value is the compensation if, by firing on Israel at Tehran's behest, Hezbollah only brings new destruction down on the heads of Shiites, who might then turn against Nasrallah?

Some analyses suggest Iranian officials are livid with Nasrallah for having squandered massive Iranian investment in Hezbollah. Missing from this, however, is that the party has also managed to turn the Lebanese consensus squarely against the party. Despite Saad-Ghorayeb's assertion that the balance of power will change in Lebanon, in the past week the opposite seems to have been true, as both the government and the parliamentary majority, made up of the so-called March 14 forces hostile to Syria and critical of Hezbollah, have worked to curtail any effort by Nasrallah to transform his so-called victory into political gains. Indeed, as the costs of the war are tallied, there has been a noticeable lack of enthusiasm in Lebanon to see the war as anything but a calamity. With the party itself deeply occupied with the Shiites' rehabilitation, it has not been able to reverse this mood.

So perhaps a victory it is, but in that case Hezbollah's victory is no different than most other Arab victories in recent decades: the "victory" of October 1973, where Egypt and Syria managed to cross into Israeli-held land, their land, only to be later saved from a thrashing by timely United Nations intervention; the "victory" of 1982, where Palestinian groups were ultimately expelled from West Beirut, but were proud to have stayed in the fight for three months; the Iraqi "victory" of 1991, where Saddam Hussein brought disaster on his country but still held on to power. Now we have the Hezbollah "victory" of 2006: the Israelis bumbled and blundered, but still managed to create a million refugees, to kill over 1,000 people, and to kick Lebanon's economy back several years. One dreads to imagine what Hezbollah would recognize as a military loss.

Bombing to Lose

info@reason.com (James Joyner) — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 13:50:00 EDT

Just hours after the cease-fire with Lebanon took effect Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert gave a speech to the Knesset acknowledging "deficiencies" in the way the war was conducted. Buffeted by critics on the left and right, he added that, "We will have to review ourselves in all the battles" and pledged, "We won't sweep things under the carpet." At the same time, though, he proclaimed that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had crippled Hezbollah as a "state within a state as an arm of the axis of evil" and that the "strategic balance" in the region had shifted against Hezbollah. President Bush agreed, proclaiming, "There's going to be a new power in the south of Lebanon."

Like O.J. Simpson's search for the real killer, however, Olmert's review begins with a false premise. By any meaningful measure, Israel lost this war. Wars, Clausewitz tells us, are fought to achieve political objectives. Intermediate military objectives—targets destroyed, enemy personnel killed, and so forth—are merely a means to an end. Reasonable people can debate whether the offensive created more terrorists than it killed, but it is beyond dispute that Israel ended up accepting a truce that falls far short of its original war aims.

Olmert and his planners appeared oblivious to the asymmetric strategic environment. Ralph Peters, a retired intelligence officer deeply sympathetic to Israel's cause, noted early in the conflict that, "All Hezbollah has to do to achieve victory is not to lose completely. But for Israel to emerge the acknowledged winner, it has to shatter Hezbollah." Unfortunately, as the editors of New Republic pointed out, "Israel can cripple Hezbollah, but it cannot destroy it, since Hezbollah is a movement with a social and philosophical foundation in its country; and Hezbollah will certainly never renounce its power or its philosophy, since it regards both as holy."

That proved prescient. The evidence continues to mount that Hezbollah has emerged emboldened and with increased respect in the Arab world. The group was lauded as "The Best Guerrilla Force in the World" in a front page story in Monday's Washington Post.

Hezbollah's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, has claimed a "strategic, historic victory" and the group's standing in Lebanon has been buoyed by its having stood up to the vaunted Israelis. Syrian President Bashar Assad said the region has changed "because of the achievements" of Hezbollah, and U.S.-supported political changes were "an illusion."

Kuwaiti actor Daoud Hussein, appearing on al Jazeera television, proclaimed, "If there was just one Nasrallah in every Arab country—one person with his dedication, intelligence, courage, strength and commitment—Arabs would not have had to suffer stolen land and defeat at the hands of Israel for 50 years." Anecdotal evidence suggests that view is widely held.

While even some moderate Arab governments initially conceded that the war was provoked by Hezbollah, Israel's response was almost universally condemned as disproportionate and every civilian casualty was touted by the international media. From the beginning, as Williams College Middle East scholar Mark Lynch reported, scores of photographs of maimed children were filling the front pages of the region's newspapers and "shaping Arab views towards the Lebanon crisis—particularly in the key anti-Hezbollah Arab states (Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt)."

Politicians faced with the pressure to "do something" about terrorist strikes but unwilling to commit ground forces early or the risk a prolonged fight ignored the realities of panoptic war and appeared genuinely dumbfounded when they got hammered in the press for their tactics. By bombing civilian infrastructure, being indiscriminate in their targeting, and just being generally ham-handed, they played into the jihadists' hands.

The Qana fiasco likely ended permanently any chance Israel had of winning the propaganda war, which, as conservative pundit Tony Blankley rightly noted, was crucial to winning the larger war: "[T]o the extent that defeating radical Islamism is enhanced by winning the hearts and minds of so far non-radical Muslims, corrosive world opinion against us only deepens the deep hole in which we currently find ourselves."

Powerful states simply can not combat terrorists using the same tactics they would apply to a conventional war with a traditional enemy. Massive aerial bombardment and armored invasion are excellent for, say, toppling Saddam Hussein's regime, but they're actually counter-productive in counter-terror/counter-insurgency operations.

The editor of the Defense and the National Interest website explains "As important as finding and destroying the actual combatants, for example, is drying up the bases of popular support that allow them to recruit for, plan, and execute their attacks. Perhaps most odd of all, being seen as too successful militarily may create a backlash, making the opponent's other elements of [4th generation warfare] more effective." Robert Pape noted in his 1995 masterwork Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War that aerial bombing usually "generates more public anger against the attacker than against the target governments."

Commando raids, which have the advantage of minimizing non-combatant casualties, and other precisely targeted strikes are simply much more reasonable and effective options in this environment. They of course take away some of the force multipliers enjoyed by modern armies and, ironically, make the fighting far less asymmetrical. Such tactics, too, may well mean more friendly casualties in the short term. They are, however, the only proven way of defeating insurgencies and terrorist groups.

Clueless in Condi-land

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 14:05:00 EDT

With the war in Lebanon one month old this week, the jury is still out on whether the Bush administration can call the Israeli military campaign it is actively supporting a success or failure. The country will not return to the status quo ante which existed before July 12, when Hezbollah abducted two Israeli soldiers and killed three others in Israeli territory, and that's a good thing; but U.S. management of the diplomatic initiative since then has been halting, raising doubts again about whether the administration is better at launching bold initiatives than successfully seeing them through.

Time will tell how carefully the Americans and Israelis planned their riposte to Hezbollah's kidnapping of the Israelis. Two weeks ago, a Hezbollah spokesman, Mahmoud Komati, declared that the party had been surprised by Israel's reaction. Many took this as an admission of error. It was more likely a self-serving effort to deflect blame away from Hezbollah for having provoked the conflict. After all, in a speech the same day, Hezbollah's leader Hassan Nasrallah declared that he had discovered that Israel intended to launch a major military operation in October. Therefore, he must have known that the Israeli government might engage in harsh retaliation before that deadline.

But Hezbollah's inconsistencies don't necessarily mean there was no Israeli-American collusion; there likely was. The real question is how comprehensive a plan both sides had, and how well advanced it was when Hezbollah decided to kidnap the Israelis. Nasrallah's point about the October deadline was that Hezbollah had pre-empted the Israelis, therefore forcing them into a fight advantageous to his combatants. He might have been spouting propaganda. But is it possible he was right?

The U.S. took 12 days to make a grand entry into the diplomacy of the war, then stalled. On July 24, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived in Beirut to meet with Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. She also presided over a lunch at the U.S. ambassador's residence, mainly with members of anti-Syrian groups--the so-called "March 14 movement." At that session, she announced that the U.S. wanted to create a 20-kilometer buffer zone in south Lebanon where an international force would be deployed. The Druze leader Walid Jumblatt reacted by saying that such a zone wouldn't prevent Hezbollah from firing over the peacekeepers' heads. Several of those present agreed, and Rice told her assistant secretary of state, David Welch, to take note of the comments. The American attitude then changed from advocating a thin buffer zone to bringing about the demilitarization of south Lebanon.

After Lebanon, Rice traveled to Israel, and planned to return to Beirut the following Sunday, July 30. However, when more than two-dozen people were killed in the bombing of a home in Qana that day, Siniora told her that he could not receive her before a full ceasefire was in place, and she cancelled her visit. This was followed by over a week of virtual political inaction in Washington.

Rice was caught in proliferating dilemmas. The administration wanted the Israelis to gain a decisive military advantage over Hezbollah before moving to negotiations. That meant delaying a ceasefire for as long as possible. However, delaying a ceasefire also meant allowing the carnage to continue, which discredited the U.S., but also the United Nations and the Siniora government, those parties expected to squeeze Hezbollah hardest on its disarmament and for a deployment of the Lebanese Army to the Israeli border. Rice also had to be careful that U.S. support for Israel would not embarrass Siniora, who was keen to see Hezbollah weakened, but who didn't want to be denounced as an American-Israeli agent.

Worse, Rice's Beirut stopover confirmed that the Bush administration wasn't sure about what it wanted to achieve. It took a Lebanese politician to make the obvious point that Hezbollah would not go along with an American-imposed peace plan and that a 20-kilometer buffer zone would be useless in protecting Israel; yet surely someone at Foggy Bottom could have told Rice that before she alighted in Beirut. And if her rather sudden default plan was a full demilitarization of the south, then who was supposed to implement such an ambitious scheme?

The answer was perhaps obvious to Rice: Israel. The only problem is that Israel wasn't much clearer about its ultimate aims than the U.S. Its first reaction to the abduction of its troops was to launch a vast air campaign directed against Lebanese infrastructure, particularly roads and bridges, and against predominantly Shiite areas. The point was to break Shiite morale, make it infinitely more difficult for Hezbollah to attack Israel in the future, since this would involve absorbing similar suffering, mobilize a majority of Lebanese society against the party's adventurism, and cut off rearmament routes between Syria and Hezbollah fighters.

The plan was partly successful. Hezbollah's vaunted deterrence capability, which was supposed to protect Iranian nuclear facilities from an American or Israeli attack, was used up to no real benefit. The party will indeed think twice before hitting Israel again, and given the massive devastation of Shiite areas, it will have to spend the next several years behaving more like the Salvation Army than a militant revolutionary movement if it wants to preserve its base of support. And Hezbollah's standing in Lebanese society has taken a massive tumble, with a firm consensus among many non-Shiites that it's time for the party to surrender its arms and join the system.

The thing is, the Israeli plan has to date failed to achieve much on the ground. Hezbollah continues to fire rockets into Israel, retains control over much of south Lebanon, and has leveraged this to claim it is defeating Israel. Nor are there signs the Israelis quite know what they want to do next, with the government of Ehud Olmert saying it might make a grand thrust into Lebanon, pushing Hezbollah to the Litani River, but also worried this might provoke casualties and drag Israel back into a quagmire. On Wednesday the long-awaited Israeli invasion seemed to have started; on Thursday, however, Olmert said he would allow more time for diplomacy. Some Israelis are criticizing the initial over-reliance on air power, while others say the government was never offered an operational plan by the military.

This is not good news for the Bush administration. If the gist of the American plan was to subcontract Hezbollah's military elimination to Israel (and is the flip side of this a future American attack against Iran?), the U.S. is now dependant on Israeli dynamics over which it has limited control. Indeed, as the Israeli planning stumbled forward, so too did American diplomacy. Earlier this week the administration and France agreed a draft U.N. resolution that would begin the process of resolving the crisis. Since then, the two sides have differed over a Lebanese desire to amend the proposal, and they are currently trying to reconcile their views. Whatever the merits or demerits of Lebanon's position, it was the Lebanese, not Rice, who appeared to be better playing the negotiation process.

The outcome of the Lebanon war remains very uncertain. The likelihood is that things will escalate much further before getting any better. Israel needs to prove to the U.S. that it can be militarily effective, while no one--not the international community, not the Arab states, not most non-Shiite Lebanese, and not the Siniora government--can afford to let Hezbollah, and the party's Svengali, Iran, emerge from the free-for-all in a better position. But in all this confusion it would be reassuring to know the Bush administration has a better grasp of the endgame. In fact exactly the opposite looks to be true.

Assigning Blame in the Middle East

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 15:03:00 EDT

Who is to blame for the bombings and deaths in Lebanon in the past couple of weeks?

Let's consider the suspects:

The Israelis. Certainly, many have taken this position. The first unsophisticated thought that might come to mind when considering who is to blame for a blameworthy action is, those performing the actions. In this case, we have the nation of Israel. Or, to notch it down a level of abstraction, the Israeli army. Or even the specific human beings whose names are not generally reported in the media ordering the attacks, and the even less-likely-to-be-named people actually triggering the bombs and missiles.

States get cut moral slack that individuals never do. No individual would be forgiven for carrying out a private grudge, against even the most evil of people, by blowing up his entire neighborhood—not even after giving 24 hours' warning. Much of the world nods understandingly when such acts are acts of state.

Even hewing doggedly to moral individualism can lead to a defensible argument that every individual Israeli service member causing every individual act of destruction or death is fully justified, regardless of any assumed prerogatives of Israel; Israelis as individuals have their lives and property threatened by Hezbollah actions and likely future Hezbollah actions. By this thinking, if Israel or Israelis are the relevant actors, then "blame" is the wrong word—Israel's actions, death and destruction notwithstanding, are perfectly proper.

Which leads us to number two on the obvious list of suspects:

Hezbollah. Israel's actions did not arise in a vacuum. They were a response to both a specific action of Hezbollah (or specific Hezbollah members—I'll cease spelling out these individual/collective distinctions pedantically, but I think it best not to forget them entirely) and to a pattern of past behavior and likely future behavior of attacking Israeli soldiers and bombing Israeli civilians. The current fighting alone has taken the lives of 40 Israelis.

Samir Franjieh, a Christian member of Lebanon's parliament, expressed this viewpoint clearly (as have more people than I could link to with all the pixels on the Internet), while also limning the moral difficulties with such assignment of blame: "Hezbollah took two Israeli prisoners, and the result now is that 3.5 million Lebanese are being held hostage... It's the political path chosen by the Hezbollah and its allies that led to this situation."

That raises the important moral issue of proportionality. Is Hezbollah's perfidy, past and present, sufficient moral excuse to blame it and not Israel, for 400 Lebanese deaths? Most of us don't treat all violations of a moral code as deserving of any level of retaliation.

If all punishment fits any crime, then the only appropriate role for any of us in this life, to be truly moral, is to spend it brutally killing as many other human beings as we can, since most assuredly we have all committed moral crimes. This becomes especially tricky when failing to act to stop the moral crimes of others is seen as being as blameworthy as committing the act itself.

Jonathan Chait in the Los Angeles Times thinks that all talk of proportionality regarding this conflict is a moral dodge. What is relevant is the sufficiency of means toward the end goal of crushing Hezbollah, not their proportionality to the specific Hezbollah provocation this month. In other words, the end justifies the means when the end in question is stopping a terrorist gang.

Option number three in the blame game:

Everyone else. The rogues' gallery of potentially responsible third parties is long and comprehensive. Let's start big:

* Don't we have a United Nations to help in situations like this? Shame on you, UN! UNIFIL, we hardly knew ye!

* Despite all the initial excitement over the Cedar revolution-turned-fizzle and the departure of actual Syrian troops from Lebanon, President George Bush knows that it's still Syria's fault that Hezbollah hasn't been hobbled.

*But while Bush wonders scatologically why Syria can't contain its satraps, shouldn't he examine the U.S.'s patron relationship to Israel? Blame America First!

* But where has Hezbollah been getting some of the weapons with which it set this tragedy in motion, and continues it with every house hit in Haifa? None other than Iran, which thus wins its fair share of the blame.

* One of the more controversial blamings has been: the Lebanese people themselves. Haven't they, softened to uselessness by all that democracy-whiskey-sexy, dropped the ball on their own responsibility to rid themselves of the viper in their midst? The Cedar Revolution has rotted in short months, Hezbollah has infiltrated normal Lebanese civilian life to the point that there is no way to separate the guilty from the innocent; but then how innocent are the "innocent" who didn't act to beat back Hezbollah, either through politics or arms? This is a country where Hezbollah makes up nearly a fifth of the elected Parliament. It's too late to complain when the bombs drop.

And what are the principles at stake dictating these assignments of blame?

If we start with the assumption that killing people and destroying things is wrong and stop there, we have Israel in our sights. If we complexify it with some uncontroversial utilitarianism—that we are concerned with the long-term greatest good for the greatest number, and some apparent crimes are justified in accomplishing this, as per Chait in his dismissal of proportionality—then we can give Israel a bye, on the presumption that without strong action on its part its enemies in the Arab and Muslim world will continue killing Israeli innocents.

Complexifying that is the empirical observation that no amount of Israeli toughness seems ever get us to where they've successfully killed people to prevent future killing, rather than just laying the groundwork for the next wave of killers. Hezbollah's very existence is a product of Israel's last get-tough-on-terrorists incursion into Lebanon in 1982.

OK, if Israel succeeds in crushing Hezbollah after a few more weeks of bombing and death, 20 years from now (as is likely) we'll have The Avenging Hammer of Allah (or its snazzy Arabic-to-English equivalent). And who will be to blame for its actions? Will it be the fault of the active members of that group, then? Or will any blame accrue to the Israelis acting to destroy Hezbollah now? Indeed, given the history of Israeli/Arab relations dating back decades, might not some of Hezbollah's actions that triggered Israel's reaction this month be Israel's fault for its past actions in Lebanon—which were in Israel's mind of course a just reaction to Palestinian actions, which were in the Palestinians' mind a just response to past Israeli actions...

Which brings us to the moral question of proximity, of both space and time. How long are the crimes of the collective to rain down on its members, and how wide are our obligations to act? Why shouldn't a Lebanese have been allowed to enjoy a latte rather than hang Hezbollah? Unless you believe that it is everyone's moral obligation to expend their life's blood righting all possible wrongs—in which case the blogger who bitches about Hezbollah from Santa Monica is just as culpable as the latte-sipper in Beirut for failing to uproot them from Lebanon—moral obligations to fight evil have some limits based on proximity. We are responsible for our own back yard's evils, but not necessarily the whole world. But maybe not. Indeed, the moral philosophy that seems to animate Bush administration foreign policy comes from that great philosopher Ben Parker, Peter Parker's sainted uncle: "with great power comes great responsibility."

Other big-deal philosophers agree. Peter Unger of NYU has argued that the same moral intuitions or principles that dictate that it is wrong to pass by a drowning child in a pond without attempting to save that child's life also make us morally culpable for not giving everything we have above our own barest sustenance, including what we can cheat and steal out of others, to those who cannot survive without such help. To him, life ought morally to be simply about ensuring others can simply live. His most vivid example has to do with charity, but surely being bombed is as bad for children and other living things as poverty, or a too-deep pond. Could it be that, if we wouldn't pass a drowning child in a pond, we ought not pass up an opportunity to take up arms and blow up some terrorist bastard whose actions might kill a child—or cause Israel to kill a child?

To bring the blame game back home, for those who can blithely excuse either side of this conflict—who think the life of an Israeli civilian is justly forfeit because of the actions of the Israeli state, or that of a Lebanese civilian because of its sort-of state's failure to curb Hezbollah—could you admit, even to your self, in the deepest most secret part of your blog, that any bomb dropped or missile shot by the U.S. government anywhere—Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Japan, Panama, Grenada—could possibly have been the moral equivalent of the ones Hezbollah lobbed at Israel, or Israel at Hezbollah, and suck it up and admit that you are to blame as your home and families are killed when someone decides to retaliate on our territory?

It might be that in a truly just world, we all are getting exactly what we deserve for moral crimes of commission and omission, for letting evils be committed by states in our name, for failing to stop whatever wrongs we could stop, or die trying. And in the face of recent Lebanese events, dithering online about who is to blame might seem morally suspect itself. But moral thinking about blame and responsibility (and attempts at finding such moral arguments that are convincing beyond national, ideological, or religious communities of affinity) is important even when the grim realities make morality seem the most ineffectual of phantasms: There will be many living aggrieved victims, and families of dead ones, of what is happening in Lebanon now.

And while some of them will just try to go on with life as best they can, some of them will want answers, and justice, and vengeance. And in the year 2025, if blogs are still alive, if armchair commenters still thrive, we will find another maddening, conclusionless, muddled discussion of morality and blame regarding a fresh series of bloody attacks and counterattacks in the Middle East.

Rah-Rah IDF!

info@reason.com (Jeff Taylor) — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 00:00:00 EDT

Put away your straw men. We won't hash out some sort of moral equivalence between Israel and Hezbollah, nor endlessly chew over what a "proportionate response" to Hezbollah might be.

The goal here is merely to start thinking about the idea that whatever Israel accomplishes in Lebanon (and we still do not know the actual aim), it might not be completely and unquestionably in the United States' best interests.

A selfishly American foreign policy need not stand in opposition to Israeli aims. It would simply recognize that the United States might, on occasion, need to look to its interests and merely be indifferent to how securing those interests might impact Israel.

For evidence that the Bush administration is reluctant to do this, look no further than Washington's oddly delayed—if not criminal—one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, three-Mississippi effort to get American citizens out from underneath Israeli airstrikes. Sweden, using the new superpower assets of cell phone text messaging and chartered cruise ships, managed to get 5,000 Swedes out of Lebanon before the U.S. even had a plan to evacuate its citizens. Sweden did this without the benefit of an embassy in Beirut.

By contrast, it took nine days to get the Marines ashore to rescue Americans.

Days into the fighting the Bush administration seemed reluctant to embarrass the Israelis by suggesting, let alone confirming, that Israel's attacks against Hezbollah just might produce threats to the civilian population in Lebanon. If someone wants to argue that that reluctance was merely gross incompetence by the State Department, your call for Condi Rice's resignation needs to be part of that particular appeal to be considered serious.

But giving Israel the "atta-boy" treatment creates other serious problems for legitimate American interests. Already Turkey is explicitly citing Israel's unrestrained move into Lebanon as a precedent to move into Kurdistan. Turkey's Hezbollah is the Kurdish Workers Party (PPK) and Turkish forces have had running gun battles with their long-time foe in recent weeks.

The Turks are basically demanding that U.S. forces take out the Kurdish guerillas or the Turks will. But Kurdistan is the one corner of Iraq that is relatively peaceful and shows signs of one day becoming a functioning society that respects the rule of law, a rarity for the region. Even though the PPK does not enjoy widespread popular support among Iraqi Kurds, U.S. moves against it might complicate U.S. aims for Iraq.

The Kurdish angle alone, then, is solid footing upon which to craft a U.S. policy that is something other than, "Whatever Israel wants." It is also worth noting that nascent links between Kurdistan and Israel did not stand in the way of Israel doing what it thought it had to do to secure its aims. But there is more.

Part of Britain's reluctance to go as far as the U.S. in backing Israel without reservation no doubt stems from the placement of 7,000 British troops in Shiite-dominated southern Iraq. Were there to be some sort of sympathetic Shiite response to Hezbollah's fight against Israel, the area around Basra would be one of the first places in the region you'd look for it.

Sure enough, the past few days have seen clashes between the Mahdi army of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and British forces. The British foreign ministry has strenuously tried to beat back any linkage between the two conflicts, but has been tripped up by the issue of Iranian involvement in both.

As cable news analysts and The Weekly Standard never tire of pointing out, Iran is up to its eyeballs in Hezbollah. And the British have cited Iranian fingerprints in aiding Shiite militants in Iraq. The British press then put two and two together and deduced that Iran is calling the shots in both cases. "No" came the answer from the Blair government, an odd denial that nonetheless points exactly at a central question of this burgeoning conflict.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page almost gets the question right, but lets its obsession with removing the mullahs from power in Tehran blind it to the best U.S. response. The paper correctly sees the regional strategic implications of the fight in Lebanon, but assumes it is "Iran's first strike" in a bid to secure nuclear capability for itself. Consequently, the Journal prescribes the wrong solution, a free hand for Israel against Hezbollah:

The question going forward is whether the Bush Administration will acknowledge this Lebanon conflict as the strategic threat it is and fight back accordingly. That means at a minimum allowing our ally in the region, Israel, the time and diplomatic support to deal Iran's Hezbollah proxies a heavy blow.

But what if Iran has decided to cash its Hezbollah chips? What if it is counting on an all-out Israeli effort to destroy those elements? There are at least two very good reasons why Iran would do this: One, the Shiite population and militias in Iraq offer a better, improved opportunity to spread mayhem not against a U.S. ally like Israel, but against the U.S. itself. If Iran is truly Terror, Inc., think of it as closing down one aging if profitable product line while introducing the next big thing.

And second, the Israeli operation in Lebanon may create more terrorists than it destroys, or at least create opinion in the Muslim world more useful to Iran strategically than an ongoing low-level conflict along Israel's border. There is certainly historical precedent for a Hezbollah-Israeli clash in Lebanon inspiring Muslim terrorists the world over.

Back in April 1996 Israeli artillery hit a U.N. compound in Qana crowded with Lebanese refugees;106 people were killed. Israel said it was trying to hit a nearby Hezbollah mortar site and mistakenly used old maps; a U.N. investigation found the attack was "unlikely" to be completely in error. Take your pick, but that is what happens in war fought among civilians—murderous mistakes. By August of that year Osama bin Laden cited "the massacre of Qana" prominently in his first fatwa against the U.S government.

The current round of fighting is certainly grim, horrifying even, for the civilian population, but there has been no singular Qana-like incident. Yet.

We are left then with two distinct areas where U.S. interests might diverge with those of Israel. First, it makes U.S. goals in Iraq harder to achieve. Second, it may give Iran something more valuable than a guerilla force in Lebanon while increasing the total population of persons motivated to do harm to do Americans and American interests.

These things are not certain to transpire and may, in any event, be considered second-tier concerns when weighed against the chance to take out Hezbollah as a military force. Fair enough. But it is past time to put down the pom-poms and think hard about what comes next.

The New Generation of War

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 11:13:00 EDT

For 17 years, a small tribe of military analysts has explored the rise of Fourth Generation warfare, or 4GW, a term coined in a 1989 article for the Marine Corps Gazette to describe conflicts that pit a state against a transnational, non-state opponent. Unlike traditional guerrillas, who try to overthrow their host government, these non-state groups take on other states. For an example, look no further than the war now unfolding in Lebanon between Hezbollah and Israel.

Chet Richards, 59, has spent more time than most pondering the implications of Fourth Generation warfare. A retired Air Force Reserve colonel, Richards is editor of the invaluable website Defense and the National Interest and author, most recently, of Neither Shall the Sword: Conflict in the Years Ahead. Written with far more wit and clarity than is usually found in military texts, his book argues that the modern Department of Defense, designed to wage the Cold War, is ill-suited to protect Americans against the threats we face today. It also examines a range of strategic and structural alternatives, including such radical notions as privatization.

Reason: In Neither Shall the Sword, you wrote that Hezbollah "may represent the wave of the 4GW future more than does al-Qaida." Why so?

Chet Richards: I was tossing out a possibility more than making a prediction. I think Al Qaeda has shot its wad. It can perhaps still act as a catalyst or an inspiration for people who are inclined to do that sort of thing. Osama is still a very riveting speaker to that particular audience. But when you look at what they can actually do, it barely rises above the level of the criminal.

Hezbollah, because it lives within a population—it "swims within the sea of the people," like Mao said—it can draw strength from those people. Al Qaeda can't, at least since it got kicked out of Afghanistan.

So if Israel's going to get back at Hezbollah, who does it strike? Well, it strikes Lebanon. But that also gets a lot of people who could care less about Hezbollah and may even be hostile to it.

Reason: Some people argue that, since it essentially has its own territory in Lebanon, Hezbollah is effectively a state in its own right. Does that pose problems for the Fourth Generation thesis?

CR: Not really. Because it's not a state. It's more like a tribe. It doesn't have a clearly defined territory. It exercises some of the functions of a typical government, but if it's attacked, it'll just pull back. They've done it before. They're not going to go head to head with Israeli armor.

They have some of a state's advantages, because there is a population. Even if they get driven out, that population will probably welcome them back in when the time comes. Al Qaeda doesn't really have a state structure at all. They're more of a philosophy than a group at this point.

Reason: The other argument people make is that Hezbollah isn't an independent actor but is a catspaw of an outside state, Iran or Syria.

CR: Well, you see the problem right there. Which outside state is it?

I think Hezbollah clearly draws support. It's in Syria or Iran's short-term interest, or at least they think it is, to support them. Though these extreme non-state sects make the Syrians nervous. Remember, Hafez el-Assad took down the city of Hama in 1982 to get rid of a non-state threat, killing—depending on who you believe—between 10,000 and 40,000 people. Iran's farther away, and they're more in the same ideological camp, so it may not be as big a deal to them.

Reason: What do you think Israel's game plan is?

CR: That's a really, really good question. I think a lot of it's driven by domestic politics. They've got to be seen as doing something. On the other hand, they're clearly hesitating about sending large numbers of ground forces into Lebanon. They did that before, and it didn't turn out too well. I don't think they want to get back into the business of occupying south Lebanon. That just makes them a better target, as they were before.

Maybe they'll go up to the Litani River. That would certainly push the Katyushas beyond the range of Haifa—they're a fairly short-range weapon anyway. But then what happens? Do you occupy it in perpetuity? It would be a hostile Lebanese population, just like it was before. Do you have an ethnic cleansing? Could Israel get away with that?

If the bombardments don't produce whatever result it is that they want, which I assume would be a commitment by the Lebanese to keep Hezbollah out of the area where they could launch attacks against Israel, then you might see a deep stab into Lebanon followed quickly by a withdrawal. Basically a punitive raid. In the end it would accomplish nothing. At that point, if you're Lebanese, how do you stay neutral? The thing about invasion is, it turns dissent into treason.

Reason: If you were an Israeli, what would you want to see the government in Jerusalem doing right now?

CR: If their goal is to ensure rockets aren't directed at them, the only conceivable way they can do that is, eventually, to work some kind of deal with the government of Lebanon. And I don't see that you can do that if you've invaded Lebanon. I think there's going to have to be some behind-the-scenes negotiating between Israel and Lebanon and eventually Syria, which probably means the United States is going to have to throw some serious carrots in the way of both Lebanon and Syria.

Reason: If you were Lebanese, what would you want to see the government in Beirut doing right now?

CR: Right now there's got to be war fever. If you're living in the south, you're definitely going to be under a lot of pressure to support the Hezbollah resistance.

If you're living in the north, which means you're probably a member of one of the Christian or Druze sects, then maybe you figure, "What the heck. We're not involved with these guys. Maybe Hezbollah had it coming." Hezbollah is a political adversary in Parliament, and they've been a military adversary on more than one occasion.

Reason: Some of the places Israel has bombed have traditionally been anti-Hezbollah, which I would think would push some of those people into the other camp.

CR: It would. All I can figure is that for some reason Israel had some targetting information that there was stuff there that they wanted to hit. It might be traditionally anti-Hezbollah as a neighborhood, but there were specific targets in there that they wanted to go after. Otherwise it makes no sense at all.

If I'm a Hezbollah leader, it's a really good idea to have a safe house that's away from known Hezbollah locations. If Israel has been able to find and target those—and I assume they have their usual good human operations going on—then they would strike at them. But it seems to me there's a limit to how long they can keep doing that if they want to have any chance whatsoever of eventually getting the Lebanese government to control Hezbollah.

And of course, Hezbollah is part of the government.

Reason: You had a line in Neither Shall the Sword that reversed Clausewitz's most famous quote. You said that for groups like Hezbollah and Sinn Fein, politics is the continuation of war by other means.

CR: Martin van Creveld is the first guy I heard that from. Clausewitz thought in terms of war in early 19th century Europe. If you look at the map of Europe at that time, it looks like a calico quilt. There's little pieces of statelets all over the place, typically non-contiguous. If you were a princeling, one of the things you might want to do is consolidate your holdings a bit. War was another tool they could use for that.

For organizations like Hezbollah, war is sort of their raison d'etre. It's how they rose to the top: They opposed Israel, they claimed to have driven the Israelis out of south Lebanon. At times, when there's no war, they'll enter the Lebanese government and attempt to use the political process to advance their cause. But their natural state is armed conflict. They refuse to disarm, obviously. War is good for them.

Reason: The other Fourth Generation war on everyone's minds is the occupation of Iraq.

CR: It's not clear that what we have there is a Fourth Generation type conflict. Bill Lind [co-author of the paper that coined the phrase "Fourth Generation warfare"] goes ballistic whenever he hears me say this. But if the main purpose of the fighting there is to push us out, that's just garden variety guerrilla warfare. If there are transnational jihadis coming in, that gives it more of a Fourth Generation flavor, but revolutions have always attracted soldiers of fortune and adventurers and malcontents from all over the world. We invaded, and then after a while some of the elements in there started to attack. It's a largely Christian army plunked down in the middle of the Muslim Middle East. What do you expect?

However, if what we're really seeing is a communal civil war, things are really different. Because now each of the sides tries to figure out how they can use us to their advantage. You can see that now where some of the Sunni leaders are reported to have said, "Please don't leave, United States, because we'll get massacred by the Shi'ites." Originally the Shi'ites in the south were our friends. Now perhaps things are shifting. It's like we've gotten in the middle of this five- or six-way family dispute. Even the Shi'a are split among several different factions. We're one more player in a game we really don't understand.

Reason: If Dick Cheney called you up tomorrow and asked for your advice on how to proceed there, what would you tell him?

CR: I'd say, "Dickie, you've got two choices: Get in or get out." And by "get in," I mean open your Roman history. You can see how it has to be done. We're talking 27 million people in Iraq, so figure a couple percent, 500,000 to a million people, and lock the place down. Get it back under control, and then you can think about withdrawing.

If you're not going to do that, then just get out. What we have now is the worst of all possible worlds. We've got enough force in there to be an irritant and a target, but not nearly enough to influence the situation.

If you go in, you have to go in with enough force and enough people. You have to go house to house to take the weapons away. If you don't bring that much force in, you're better to get out.

Reason: Does the U.S. have that much force?

CR: We spend half a trillion dollars a year on defense, equal to the rest of the world put together. We choose to spend it on Cold War weapon systems. But if we wanted to spend it on a force that big, it would not be difficult to do. Look at it this way: We're spending more than we were at the height of the Vietnam War, when we had 500,000 troops in Vietnam, plus our commitments in NATO and the rest of the world. So if we wanted to do it, we certainly could. The question is, Why would we want to do it? Because we get tired of watching the war on CNN?

But if you're not going to do that, you might as well get out. If we tell them, "Hey, we're out of here by the end of the year, you guys figure it out," then we at least give them some incentive to come up with arrangements that they can live with.

It may not look anything like Iraq today. As you know, that's a pretty artificial creation. They're going to have some horse-trading, and there might be some little statelets; you might see the Sunni section becoming part of Jordan or Syria or something along those lines. I don't know what it will look like. But I can't imagine that beginning to coalesce as long as we're still in there stirring things up.

Reason: Suppose Cheney were to ask you about Afghanistan. How would your advice be different?

CR: The classic solution to Afghanistan is just get out. I think in this case that's probably not a bad one.

Reason: The U.S. went into Afghanistan because it was a failed state that allowed Al Qaeda to put bases there. How do you keep them from filling the void that reappears?

CR: I think they're already doing it. If we could go in and somehow change them, I'd say great. But people have been trying to do that for a long, long time. Alexander broke his pick in Afghanistan. He won several battles, but at such enormous cost that he had to withdraw.

We can probably do raids that ensure the Al Qaeda training camps don't become particularly effective. I don't think Clinton's drive-by shootings were the way to go. But if we had to we could put about a thousand special forces into an area and operate for a couple of weeks, disrupt the hell out of it, and then just leave. In the meantime they'll grow poppies and they'll fight among themselves. Let them play that game of polo with each other's heads and have a great time back in the thirteenth century.

Besides, most of the people who went through the Al Qaeda training camps, including that young American, were sent up north to fight the Northern Alliance. And of course the Northern Alliance is gone now.

I worry about Pakistan a lot more than Afghanistan. They have a well-educated population, they've managed to cobble together several nuclear devices, they can operate F-16s quite nicely, and yet they probably harbor more of what we'd call Islamic extremists than any other country in the world. They have a lot more potential to cause us problems, especially if the government is ever overthrown by Taliban lookalikes.

Reason: So what would you do about Pakistan?

CR: I don't know. I think I'd have some long talks with my new Indian allies about what to do about Pakistan. Not that we're going to intervene with the Indians. But they might be able to give us some insights.

As long as they don't attack us, and as long as they don't harbor large-scale facilities for training people who are going to attack us, then let them be Pakistanis and let them go on. If you have to intervene, do it, hopefully, in conjunction with some of your allies. Now that we've had those bombings in Madrid and London, I think the Europeans will be much more inclined to work with us—if we have a good case. If we're seen as just cowboying around the globe in defense of our own security, the rest of the world's just gonna let us do it. So when we're not doing anything else, we need to work on our alliances and our intelligence-sharing.

We might not always be the lead on this. There may be times when we need to go along and someone else is the lead.

Reason: You look at a range of general options for the United States, from isolationism to containment to rollback. Is there a breaking point between isolation and containment, or is it more of a continuum?

CR: I'd like to say that it's a continuum, because that sounds intellectually more defensible, but in fact they are almost discrete. Clearly, isolationism is sort of an extreme form of containment. But you can be isolationist in the sense that you're going to withdraw as much as you can from the rest of the world but still punish people. That's what Bill Lind pretty much recommends: isolation plus retaliation. You try to cut yourself off, but if you are attacked or attack is imminent, you have this big spasm out into the Third World.

He's not against using nuclear weapons in that case. It's kind of scary if you read the stuff that he writes. But it's logically consistent. If you're going to be isolationist, then you've got to make sure that nobody's lurking or plotting away behind your back.

Containment basically says, "What we want to do is keep the threat level down to something that we can stand, while staying actively involved in the rest of the world through other means to try to lure people to us."

Reason: By "other means," you mean diplomacy, trade...?

CR: Well, go back to George Kennan's original idea. That's where the term containment comes from. He said to contain the Soviet Union militarily so we didn't have World War III, but then to try to involve them in as many things as you can.

The other thing about Kennan is that by '48 or so, he was saying, "Hey, they're contained. Now we really need to start trying to involve ourselves with them." Everyone ignored him, and he had to spend the rest of his life saying this wasn't the containment he had in mind.

Reason: The terms "containment" and "rollback" carry a lot of baggage from the Cold War. It drove me crazy, in the lead-up to the Iraq war, to hear people debate whether we could "contain" Saddam, because I knew the largest possible sphere of influence Iraq could have would be smaller than the territory the Soviet Union started with. Do you think those words can get in the way of the conversation?

CR: Yeah. I'm certain there are some better words.

Reason: I don't have any to offer.

CR: But you raise a good point. Saddam was so weak, it didn't take very much to contain him. A tripline in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and that was about it. Turkey was more than capable of taking care of itself, and he already tried to attack Iran and that didn't work well. So basically, with just a little bit of stuff along his southern border, he was pretty well contained.

Reason: Did you oppose the war in 2003?

CR: Yeah, I thought it was a really dumb idea.

Reason: Five years after 9/11, what do you think is the most important legacy of the attacks?

CR: It was sort of a strategic bombing attack, by Osama and that group around him that we call "Al Qaeda" for the lack of a better name. It certainly had perturbations on our internal system—things like the USA PATRIOT Act and what appears to be the migration of political power to the executive branch.

The major change would probably be that near-term shift of power to the executive. But I'd have to qualify that by saying it hasn't been nearly as bad as I was afraid it was going to be. People predicted that we were going to suspend the Constitution, we'd suspend habeas corpus like we did during the Civil War, and the president would become an elected dictator. That, fortunately, didn't happen. Or at least hasn't happened yet.

Reason: Your book suggests a broad restructuring of the US military. In layman's terms, what would that entail?

CR: What we have right now is a military set up to fight large-scale state-versus-state war. So you have to ask, Who would we fight? If a country has nuclear weapons, you really can't have a large-scale conventional war. You can have military theater, but the fate of either side is not going to be decided purely through conventional weapons. And in any case, you probably aren't going to take the risk of trying to force another country to do what it really doesn't want to do if it has nukes. The India-Pakistan war came to a screeching halt as soon as India tested a nuclear device. The Arab-Israeli wars rode into history as soon as the Israelis made clear they had nuclear weapons.

What about the non-nuclear powers? Well, some of them are U.S. allies. Germany, Italy, Norway—looking down through the rest of human history, I guess you couldn't totally rule out a war with them, but in a world of limited resources you'd be hard put to spend billions and keep a big force just in case we fight a war with Italy someday.

So who's left? Brazil is an ally right now, but at some point it might have a Hugo Chavez type revolution. There's Hugo himself. There's Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. There's the junta in Myanmar. These guys all put together spend about three billion a year on defense. How much do we spend? 500 billion? There's something wrong with this picture.

We're spending half a trillion dollars, and when you look around, who's it going to defend us from? It didn't defend us from Al Qaeda. What are all these armored divisions doing out there, these mech divisions, all this other stuff that's basically left over from the Cold War and for that matter even World War II? I couldn't think of a good reason. So I think we should shrink the force down to match the threat. Keep a residual force, and get rid of the rest of that nonsense.

Then you ask what you need to fight non-state threats. And that's interesting, because it's not always clear when you're talking about non-state threats that you're talking about war. There's a lot of non-state threats—gangs, MS-13 for example—that are law enforcement problems. Armored divisions aren't going to help you much there.

So what about security threats that are a step up from that? Al Qaeda, or something like the FARC in Colombia if somehow we were to come into contact with them—if Mexico starts to go south, for example. Van Creveld said that basically, those are already private military organizations, and people who can afford it are already turning to other private military organizations to protect themselves from them.

If you look back through human history, this monopoly of force by the state, even in Europe, came along pretty recently. Privateers were legal up until the early 1900s. Up until then, much of the world's naval power was provided by private security companies.

Reason: We've still got that passage in the Constitution about letters of marque and reprisal.

CR: Exactly. So then you start looking around, and you see there's a huge industry out there today supplying this stuff. So why don't we harness that?

This gets into my natural loathing of monopolies. What we need in the United States is a way to harness creativity and initiative and entrepreneurship to solve at least a chunk of the problem of national security. Why leave that in the hands of state-sponsored bureaucracy, which has proven to be the least efficient, the least creative, the least dynamic sector of our society?

That was an interesting idea, so I decided I'd put it in the book and see what happens.

Reason: I'm naturally sympathetic to turning government functions over to private enterprise, but I'm also naturally suspicious of government contractors. When you talk about contracting with private companies, how do you avoid all the familiar problems we've had with, say, Pentagon procurement?

CR: I'm not sure you can. But if you have competition, and if you've got incentives for companies to rat out other companies if they break the law, then at least you have a mechanism for shutting down the ones that break the rules too egregiously and put the perpetrators in jail. Obviously it's not perfect, and obviously it could be easily abused. But over on the government side, unless you're willing to court-martial somebody, those mechanisms aren't there at all. When was the last time we court-martialed the commanding general of a division? But if you're the commanding general of a professional company and you're not getting the job done, you lose your contract. And if you start doing illegal things, you can be dragged into both civil and criminal court.

Enron screwed up, it went away. Military units screw up, we reconstitute them. We often promote the general in charge. General Sir Douglas Haig, the guy responsible for the Battle of the Somme, was given great honors and lived out his life in comfortable retirement, even though he killed 20,000 of his own compatriots on the first day of the battle.

Reason: What's the possibility of private military companies being retained by Americans who aren't in the government? Say some people decide they want to assist the people in Darfur and raise the funds and hire a company to do the job.

CR: I think there's a 100 percent chance of that happening. I couldn't tell you when.

Reason: Do you think it's desirable?

CR: Oh, yeah. Again, let's have some competition there.

Reason: Private security companies can be used for ill, too. We all know the history of the Pinkertons. How do you guard against that?

CR: You can't outlaw human nature. It's gonna happen. There is no doubt in my mind that there's going to be abuses. Then again, the Declaration of Independence lists all the abuses of standing military forces against the people. The thing the Founding Fathers were just deathly afraid of, and thought the biggest threat to people's liberties, was large standing military forces. Look down through history at all the times that armies have turned against their own citizenry. At least on the private side, they'll have some competition. It's difficult for one of those companies to do too much damage, because companies can bring the abuses of their competitors to the surface. If Blackwater starts doing things that are too egregious, there's an incentive for a Triple Canopy to rat them out. The Second Armored Cav doesn't have any incentive to rat out the Third Armored Cav.

I'm not sure private military companies, the way we have them right now, are going to evolve into what I'm talking about. They might. But they bring a lot of baggage with them.

Reason: Your book compares the Department of Defense to "the experience of large commercial organizations since the end of WWII. Most of them will go out of business before they make the changes necessary to survive." Government bureacuracies tend to be even more calcified than large corporations. How likely do you think it is that the military will restructure itself, in the directions you suggest or any other directions?

CR: Not until they lose a big war.

Reason: Do you see them losing a big war anytime soon?

CR: Nope.

I think transformation is a cruel joke, not just on the U.S. taxpayer but on members of the military, many of whom are really trying hard to make it work.

Reason: So do you feel like you're writing science fiction? Or do you think the change is going to come from some direction, you just can't predict where?

CR: I think it's the latter. What's going on today just can't go on.

It's like working for General Motors 10 or 15 years ago. The handwriting was on the wall. Their market share was starting to come down. Their quality was still terrible. Their costs were going through the roof. You might not have predicted that it would be Toyota that finally shoved you over the brink. You just knew that you were eventually going to open up a big enough hole that somebody was going to walk through it.

General Motors is not going to make it. But thank God for Toyota. As General Motors goes down and outsources more U.S. jobs overseas, Toyota is insourcing more jobs into the United States. It and other companies that have adopted the Toyota type production system are building better cars—faster, cheaper, quieter, more fuel-efficient.

Reason: So can I quote you as saying Al Qaeda is the Toyota of the military-industrial complex?

CR: Probably more like the Yugo.