Sultan Knish
Once upon a time it was the objective of the military to win wars. Now the objective of the military is to avoid incidents.
An incident happens when civilians are killed, prisoners mistreated or
some other event that is photographed, videotaped and then flashed
around the world. This results in an Incident, capital I, that triggers
much artificial soul-searching by the media which spends the next two
years beating the incident to death and flogging its corpse across
television programs, newspaper articles, books, documentaries and
finally, if it's a big enough incident, a real life movie version that
is based on the book, which was based on the article, where the
idealistic reporter/lawyer/activist who uncovered the truth about the
incident will be played by Matt Damon or George Clooney.
The main objective of the military in most civilized countries is to
prevent this chain of articles, programs, books, documentaries,
dramatized plays and Matt Damon movies from coming about by making sure
that no Incident can ever happen. And the best way to do that is by not
fighting. And if the enemy insists on fighting, then he must be fought
with razor sharp precision so that no collateral damage takes place. And
if someone must die, it had better be our own soldiers, rather than
anyone on the other side whose death might be used as an Incident.
Incidentism isn't derived from a fear of Matt Damon movies, but from the
perception that wars are not won on the battlefield, but in the minds
of men. And that perception has a good deal to do with the kind of wars
we choose to fight.
The military, whether in the United States or Israel, does not exist to
win wars. It exists to win over the people who don't want it to win a
war.
The guiding principle in such conflicts is to use the military to push
back the insurgency long enough to win over the local population with a
nation building exercise. This program has never worked out for the
United States, but that doesn't mean that generations of military
leaders don't insist on going through the motions of applying it anyway.
In Israel, the last time the military was sent to win a war, was 1973.
Since then the military has been used as a police force and to battle
militias in Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank. In the Territories, the
ideal Israeli soldier was supposed to be able to dodge rocks thrown by
teenagers hired by Time correspondents looking to score a great photo.
Today the ideal Israeli soldier is capable of visiting an American
college campus to dodge the overpriced textbooks hurled at him by the
local branch of Students for Justice in Palestine or the International
Socialist Organization, while explaining why the IDF is the most moral
army in the world except for the Salvation Army.
The ideal Israeli soldier, like his American, British and Canadian, but
not Russian or Chinese, counterparts, is supposed to avoid Incidents.
That means operating under Rules of Engagement which make firing at an
assailant almost as dangerous as not firing at an assailant.
The ideal American soldier is supposed to avoid the Taliban, or as one
set of orders urged, patrol in places where the Taliban won't be found.
And that's sensible advice, because if the goal is to avoid creating an
Incident, then avoiding the enemy is the best way to avoid an Incident.
Unfortunately the enemy has a bad habit of appearing where he isn't
supposed to be and creating his own Incidents, because Taliban and Hamas
commanders are not concerned about being yelled at in a fictional
courtroom by Matt Damon. They actually welcome Incidents. The bigger and
bloodier the Incident, the more hashish and young boys get passed
around the campfire that night.
American soldiers operate under the burden of winning over the hearts
and minds of Afghans and New York Times readers. Israeli soldiers are
tasked with winning over New York Times readers and European
politicians. But some hearts and minds are just unwinnable. And most
wars become unwinnable when the goal is to fight an insurgency that has
no fear of the dreaded Incident, while your soldiers are taught to be
more afraid of an Incident than of an enemy bullet.
Israeli leaders live in perpetual fear of "losing the sympathy of the
world", little aware that they never really had it. The "Sympathy of the
World" is the strategic metric for conflicts. And so Israel does its
best to minimize any collateral damage by using pinpoint strikes and
developing technologies that can pluck a bee off a flower without
harming a single petal. But invariably the technocratic genius of such
schemes has its limits, an Incident happens, the Israeli leftist press
denounces the Prime Minister for clumsily losing the sympathy of the
world, and international politicians order Israel to retreat back behind
whatever line it retreated to during the last appeasement gesture
before the last peace negotiations. And its experts ponder how to fight
the next one without losing the sympathy of the world.
American and Israeli generals live in fear of losing political support
and so they never put any plans on the table that would finish a
conflict. Instead they choose low intensity warfare with prolonged
bleeding instead of short and brutal engagements that would finish the
job. They talk tough, but their enemies know that they don't mean it.
Worse still, that they aren't allowed to mean it because meaning it
would be too mean.
Incidentism leads to armies tiptoeing around conflicts and losing them
by default. Avoiding them becomes the objective and that also makes
Incidents inevitable because the enemy understands that all it will take
to win is a few dead children planted in the ruins of a building; in a
region where parents kill their own children for petty infractions and
frequently go unpunished for it. The more an army commits to
Incidentism, the sooner its war is lost. Prolonged low intensity
conflicts are ripe with opportunities for Incidents, far more so that
hot and rapid wars. And so the hearts and minds, those of the locals and
those of New York Times readers, always end up being lost anyway.
War is no longer just politics by other means, it actually is politics
with the goal of winning over hearts and minds, rather than achieving
objectives. The objectives of a war, before, during and after, have
become those of convincing your friends and your enemies, and various
neutral parties, of your innate goodness and the justice of your cause.
Propaganda then has become the whole of war and those who excel at
propaganda, but aren't any good at war, now win the wars. The actual
fighting is just the awkward part that the people who make the
propaganda wish we could dispense with so they can focus on what's
really important; distributing photos of our soldiers protecting the
local children and playing with their puppies.
Take all that into account and the miserable track records of great
armies are no longer surprising. Armies need to prove their morality to
win a war, but are never allowed to win a war because it would interfere
with proving their morality. Conflicts begin on the triumphant moral
high ground and end with the victors slinking back defeated after an
Incident or two has been splashed all over the evening news and the book
based on the article on it has already been optioned by Matt Damon's
production company for a movie to be funded by the same people who fund
the terrorists.
The war of words, the conflict of images and videos, the clash of
arguments, has become the sum of war. And that war is unwinnable because
it must be fought on two fronts, against the cultural enemies within
and the insurgents outside.
An army cannot win a war and win over the New York Times at the same
time. And so long as it fears Incidents more than operating in an
aimless counterinsurgency twilight that eventually shades into defeat,
then it is bound to lose both to both the terrorists and the New York
Times.
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