Crawling from the Wreckage

by Gwynne Dyer

  The two countries (or one country, if you prefer) broke apart almost sixty years ago, and until this week, it was not even possible to travel directly between them: Taiwan-China flights had to go through Hong Kong, and ships had to stop off at the Japanese island of Okinawa. The 180-kilometre-wide Taiwan Strait remains one of the most heavily militarized regions in the world, with an estimated 1,300 Chinese missiles pointing at the island of Taiwan.

  Even under the new government of President Ma Ying-jeou, which is committed to improving relations with the mainland, Taiwan keeps its defences up. Taipei recently signed its largest-ever arms deal with the U.S., agreeing on a $6.5 billion package of guided missiles, attack helicopters and other advanced weaponry. Beijing retaliated by cancelling a series of scheduled meetings between Chinese and U.S. generals—but it did not cancel the visit of Chen Yunlin, the most senior Communist official ever to set foot in Taiwan.

  The first results of the encounter are already known: in future, cargo ships will be allowed to sail directly between Taiwanese and Chinese ports, and there will be over a hundred direct flights a week between cities in Taiwan and China. There are hopes, especially in Taiwan, that this will lead to greatly increased trade between the two states, and the next round of talks (which will be held every six months) will focus on closer financial ties as well.

  But where is all this leading? Reunification? The opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in Taiwan fears so, and a million of its supporters across Taiwan demonstrated against the meeting last week. For his part, President Ma swears that he will make no moves that compromise Taiwan’s sovereignty.

  Well, then, could there be a permanent two-state solution in which Beijing and Taipei recognize each other as legitimate governments of independent countries? Beijing’s leaders would rather die in a ditch, and so would many ordinary Chinese for whom the unity of the motherland is sacred. The truth is that neither side really knows the destination of this voyage, but they are nevertheless setting out on it together.

  There have been great changes in China, where prosperity has soared and the ruling Communist Party has scrapped most of its ideology over the past quarter-century, but Taiwan has changed even more. Sixty years ago, after all, the Nationalist Party that ruled the island for so long was almost identical to the Communist Party in its structure, nationalism, and authoritarian style. Both parties were formed in the wave of nationalist fervour that swept China after the 1911 revolution overthrew the monarchy, and Chiang Kai-shek, who led the Nationalist Party for fifty years until his death in 1975, was just as autocratic as his great rival Mao Zedong, the leader of the Communist Party. But the Nationalists lost the civil war in 1949 and withdrew to Taiwan, where American sea power prevented the Communists from following, and so Taipei became the seat of the government-in-exile of the Republic of China.

  That, at least, was how Chiang saw it, and he harshly suppressed any expressions of Taiwan separatism. His dream was to return to Beijing in triumph as the leader of a reunited China. But in the quarter-century after Chiang’s death, the Nationalist Party in Taiwan, while remaining dedicated to a united China in principle, gradually moved towards a fully democratic system—and so lost power in 2000 to the DPP, a separatist party that wanted to declare an independent Taiwan.

  There was genuine support for that goal in Taiwan, especially in the south, but it was never a real possibility: Beijing made it clear that a declaration of independence would trigger an invasion. So, after eight years of economic stagnation and growing corruption, the separatist DPP lost power in last March’s elections, and the Nationalists returned to power under Ma. They remain committed in principle to the reunification of China, but not under a Communist dictatorship.

  Improving trade with China is very important to Taiwan, which has not done well economically in recent years: the average Taiwanese still earns about five times as much as the average mainland Chinese, but the gap is narrowing. However, closer political ties are more problematic, and the military still stand ready on both sides of the straits. The two governments may be setting off on a voyage to nowhere, but at least it has started well.

  15.

  HOW WAR WORKS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

  What follows is a more detailed examination of a single event than you’ll find anywhere else in the book, and there’s a reason for that. To paraphrase George W. Bush, a lot more shit goes on in a war than ever comes out in most of the media coverage, and I don’t mean the atrocities. I mean the real motives of the players, and the way they measure success or failure, and just how much, or how little, people’s lives count in those calculations. (Civilians generally don’t count for very much.)

  This is about the war that Israel and Hezbollah, the Shiite guerrilla fighters based in southern Lebanon, fought in the summer of 2006. It was obviously one-sided in the sense that Hezbollah has no air force, no navy and no tanks, but it did have rockets that could be fired from almost anywhere in southern Lebanon and reach somewhere in northern Israel. They were not very big or very accurate rockets, but the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) could not ignore them.

  The trigger for the war was a Hezbollah snatch operation: two IDF armoured Humvees patrolling the border were ambushed by anti-tank missiles while other Hezbollah militants fired rockets at an Israeli border town as a diversion. Three Israeli soldiers in the vehicles were killed and the other two were taken as captives. Five more Israeli soldiers were killed in a failed rescue attempt, while Israel launched a massive air and naval bombardment across Lebanon, striking not just Hezbollah but targets across the whole of Lebanon. After some delay, Hezbollah responded by launching hundreds of rockets at towns and cities across northern Israel. Nothing was quite as it seemed, however, for both Israel and Hezbollah (though not the Lebanese government) had been planning and preparing for this war for several years. War is the continuation of politics by other means, as Karl von Clausewitz, the great military philosopher, almost said, and political strategies in the Middle East are particularly subtle, intricate and cynical. The wars, of course, have the same character.

  July 17, 2006

  ISRAEL: RE-ESTABLISHING THE DETERRENT

  “What they really need to do is to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit, and it’s over,” said President George W. Bush over an unnoticed open microphone at the St. Petersburg summit on Sunday, but it isn’t really that simple. There are two sides in every fight, and Israel is doing some shit, too.

  Hezbollah certainly started the fight (by crossing Israel’s border and taking two soldiers hostage), but it is not clear that either Syria or Iran is the mastermind behind the operation. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, is perfectly capable of taking this initiative on his own.

  True, the rockets that have been raining down on northern Israel (two thousand so far, leaving sixteen Israeli civilians dead) were made in Iran. But then the F-16s and Apache gunships that are pounding Lebanon (130 Lebanese civilians dead so far) were made in the United States, and that doesn’t mean that Washington ordered the Israeli offensive against Lebanon.

  Nasrallah knew that the Israeli retaliation for the kidnapping would fall mainly on innocent Lebanese (because they are much easier targets than his elusive guerrillas), but he doesn’t care. He had a few surprises up his sleeve, like longer-range rockets that could strike deep into Israel and radar-guided Silkworm anti-ship missiles to attack the Israeli warships that used to shell the Lebanese coast with impunity. And if he manages to fight Israel to a draw, he will come out of this the most popular Arab leader since Gamal Abdel Nasser.

  General Dan Halutz, the Israeli Chief of Staff, was also spoiling for a fight. His major concern has been that Israel’s “deterrent power” has gone into decline, and he wanted to re-establish it. Some Israeli defence analysts, like Professor Gerald Steinberg of Bar Ilan University, believe that the plan for the massive strikes against Lebanon has been sitting on the shelf for several years, awaiting a provocation that would justify putting
it into effect. But what does “deterrent power” actually mean?

  Understand that, and you understand the remarkable savagery of the Israeli attacks on Lebanon. Of course they are a “disproportionate use of force,” as French President Jacques Chirac called them the other day. That is the whole point. Israel’s “deterrent power” lies in its demonstrated will and ability to kill and destroy on a vastly greater scale than anybody attacking it can manage. Its enemies must know that if one Israeli is killed, a dozen or even a hundred Arabs will die.

  This has been a dominant concept of Israeli strategy from the very foundation of the state, and the “kill ratio” in all of Israel’s wars, including its invasion of Lebanon in 1982 conformed to that pattern. The first time it didn’t apply was in the struggle between Israeli troops and Hezbollah during Israel’s prolonged occupation of southern Lebanon between 1982 and 2000, when the Israelis managed to kill only a few Hezbollah guerrillas for each of their own soldiers who died.

  That steady drain of lives was the main reason the Israeli army pulled out of southern Lebanon six years ago, but many people in the Israeli defence establishment were concerned at the time that Israel’s “deterrent power” had been gravely eroded by Hezbollah’s victory. And subsequent clashes with the Palestinians did not see the old ratio restored: during the years of the so-called second intifada, only three Palestinians were killed for every Israeli.

  Hence the perceived need within the Israeli armed forces to “re-establish deterrence,” that is, to demonstrate that Israel can and may respond with massively disproportionate violence even to minor attacks. The IDF wasn’t actually looking for a fight, but if a fight came along it intended to use the opportunity to make a demonstration of just how big an overreaction it was capable of.

  After a week of mutual bombardment—Hezbollah rockets against Israeli artillery and aircraft—Hezbollah still has at least three-quarters of its rockets left. A large part of northern Israel will remain under attack from the skies—not very accurate attack, but about one rocket in a hundred kills someone—unless the Israeli army is willing to occupy all of southern Lebanon again.

  Even more worrisome for Israel is the fact that deterrence is not really being re-established. This is not just a hiccup; it is evidence of a slow but inexorable shift in the terms of trade. Israel will remain unbeatable in war for the foreseeable future, but the good old days of cheap and easy victories will not come back again.

  I was wrong about one thing: the IDF was actually looking for a fight, and had made its plans for the war clear to its American allies. More about that later, but as the war neared the three-week mark, things were not going well for the Israelis.

  “Qana” refers to a bomb dropped by an Israeli aircraft on the town of that name during the 2006 war that caused a building to collapse on top of dozens of civilians, many of them children, who had taken cover in the basement. Some forty were killed. (This should not be confused with the Israeli shelling of a United Nations compound in Qana in 1996, in which more than a hundred civilians who had taken refuge there were killed.)

  July 31, 2006

  ISRAEL AND HEZBOLLAH: END GAME

  The kill ratio is becoming a problem: Israel has been killing about forty Lebanese civilians for every Israel civilian who is killed. They are all being killed by accident, of course, but such a long chain of accidents begins to look like carelessness, and, even in Israel and in the United States, many people are getting uneasy about the slaughter. Elsewhere, the revulsion at what is happening is almost universal, and the death of so many women and children at Qana has greatly intensified the pressure on Israel and its de facto allies, the United States and Britain, to stop the war.

  They are already making tactical concessions to lessen the pressure. Israel “partially suspended” its bombardment of Lebanon for forty-eight hours, and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice promised to let the United Nations Security Council consider a resolution calling for a ceasefire this week. But Israel’s generals still want another ten days to two weeks of war to batter Hezbollah into submission, and neither Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert or his allies in Washington and London are really willing to override them just yet.

  Israeli Defence Minister Amir Peretz told parliament on Monday that Israel cannot accept a ceasefire now, since if it did so then “the extremists [Hezbollah] will rear their heads again.” In response, the U.S. and British governments have to dodge and weave a bit as doubts grow at home about the morality and feasibility of Israel’s actions, but they can certainly arrange for the Security Council resolution to fail this week.

  The real trick, in terms of keeping American and British public opinion on side, is to blur the sequence of events that led to the war and to present it as a desperate Israeli struggle against an unprovoked onslaught by thousands of terrorist rockets. As Prime Minister Tony Blair told the BBC, “It cannot be that Israel stops taking the action it’s taking but Hezbollah continue to kill, kidnap, and launch rockets into the north of Israel at the civilian population there.”

  The website of the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs goes further, claiming that the operation in which Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldier and killed three others and the rain of Hezbollah rockets on Israeli cities were “simultaneous.” Obviously, these are mad terrorists who must be removed from Israel’s border at once and by any means possible. But unless “simultaneous” means “on the following day” in Hebrew, the website is deliberately distorting what happened.

  There was an unprovoked Hezbollah attack on the Israeli army on July 12, seeking to kidnap soldiers who could be held as hostages and eventually exchanged for Lebanese prisoners who have been illegally held in Israel since the latter ended its eighteen-year military occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000. And no doubt the reason Israel held on to those prisoners in the first place was to have them as hostages in some future prisoner exchange with Hezbollah. That’s how the game is played locally.

  In the course of grabbing the Israeli hostages on July 12, Hezbollah fired rockets and mortars at the northern Israeli town of Shlomi as a diversion, but nobody was hurt there. And apart from that, no Hezbollah missiles struck Israel that day. Indeed, none had been fired at Israel for at least four years, although there were regular skirmishes between Israeli soldiers and Hezbollah fighters along the frontier. Hezbollah had the rockets, but they were not mad terrorists.

  During the following twenty-four hours, however, Israel launched massive air strikes and artillery bombardments the length and breadth of Lebanon, striking Beirut airport, Lebanese air-force bases, the Beirut-Damascus highway, a power station, and all sorts of other non-Hezbollah targets and killing many civilians. It was only on July 13 that Hezbollah rockets begin to hit cities across northern Israel.

  Nobody has clean hands here. Israel seized on the kidnap operation as the pretext for a massive onslaught aimed at destroying Hezbollah’s resources and removing it from southern Lebanon—a goal also implicit in United Nations Security Council Resolution 1559, passed in 2004, which called for all Lebanese militias to be disbanded, but not one that the UN had envisaged as being accomplished by Israeli bombs. Hezbollah may just have been trying to raise its profile in Lebanon and the wider Arab world with a small but successful operation that humiliated the Israelis—or it may have foreseen the likelihood of a massive Israeli overreaction, and calculated that it could ride it out and win from it.

  Whether that was its intention or not, it probably will ride it out and win. Having fired at least ninety missiles at Israeli cities on every day but two since the war began—though they only kill an average of one Israeli a day—Hezbollah launched only two rockets on Monday (probably a crew that didn’t get the message to stop in time). If there should be a ceasefire in the next week, it will emerge the victor, since no international peacekeeping force is going to fight the kind of campaign that would be required to dig it and its weapons out of south Lebanon’s hills and villages.

  And if there is
no ceasefire, then the Israeli Defence Force will be granted a further opportunity to demonstrate that it cannot do so either. At least, not at a cost in Israeli soldiers’ lives that would be remotely acceptable to the Israeli public.

  The war lasted thirty-four days but Israel made few ground advances into Lebanon. During the last few days before the ceasefire Hezbollah launched twice as many rockets into northern Israel as its daily average in the first week of the war. It would be hard to maintain that Israel had successfully re-established deterrence.

  August 7, 2006

  SEEKING INVULNERABILITY

  The three most ill-considered (and probably doomed) political enterprises on the international political scene today are the Israeli assault on Lebanon, the U.S. campaign to force Iran to renounce its alleged nuclear-weapons program, and the similar U.S. campaign that has been mounted against North Korea. What common theme unites these three enterprises? The quest of invulnerability for one side, at the expense of total vulnerability for the other.

  Between 1945 and about 1970, the United States went through one of the most difficult intellectual and emotional transitions in history. The U.S. began that period as the home of almost half the world’s surviving industrial capacity and the sole possessor of the ultimate weapon, the atomic bomb. It was unchallengeable and invulnerable. Yet by 1970, it was ready to concede nuclear-weapons parity to the Soviet Union, an openly hostile totalitarian state, and was negotiating arms-control agreements that limited missile numbers but guaranteed the Soviets the ability to destroy the United States.