by Gwynne Dyer
That was logical and necessary, because you couldn’t stop the Russians from building more and bigger nuclear weapons. America’s military thinkers had grasped the essential fact that no number of nuclear weapons on their side, however large, could stop an enemy with the ability to deliver even a few hundred nukes from effectively destroying their country.
The enemy would also be destroyed by U.S. retaliation, of course, so let’s work with that fact. Let us stabilize the U.S.-Soviet relationship by accepting this unavoidable situation of mutual vulnerability—Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), as one critic of the policy named it—and even enshrining it in international treaties. It made good strategic sense, and it may well have saved the world from a nuclear war.
Accepting America’s vulnerability was so emotionally repugnant that many leading politicians and generals spent the rest of their careers promoting new technologies like “Star Wars” that they hoped might restore U.S. invulnerability, but most of the U.S. political and military elite had the wisdom and maturity to support the policy. America could use their like today. So could Israel.
Israel’s period of invulnerability began later, after the 1973 war, and has lasted far longer. No combination of Arab armies can defeat Israel in war, or even inflict major casualties on it. And should Israeli generals ever prove so incompetent that Arab armies did make a little headway, Israel still has its regional nuclear-weapons monopoly forty years after developing the things. (America lost its own nuclear monopoly after only four years in its confrontation with the Soviet Union.)
Israel faces a bigger “terrorist threat” than the U.S., but this is still a pretty marginal concern. Hezbollah’s activities on Israel’s northern borders were an occasional nuisance, but until Israel’s quite deliberate overreaction to its hostage-seizure operation on July 12, it had not fired rockets at Israeli towns in years. Hezbollah had the capability to do so, and thus Israel was theoretically vulnerable (though not very, since the rockets hardly ever hit anyone), but it wasn’t actually doing it.
In one sense, this war is an absurd attempt to eliminate this last little vulnerability by grossly disproportionate means. In a more serious sense, it is driven by the Israeli military’s desire to re-establish deterrence: that is, to demonstrate anew that Israel can respond with grossly disproportionate violence to any provocation, spreading death and destruction far beyond the location of the original offence.
But that is another way of saying that Israel wants to show that everybody else in the region is completely vulnerable to its power, completely insecure. There is no stability in such a relationship, as the past forty years have amply demonstrated, and, in any case, this time deterrence will not be re-established. Israel is unable to eliminate Hezbollah, and its attack merely highlights the limitations of Israeli military power when deployed against non-state opponents.
The Lebanese government had no control of Hezbollah’s forces in the south and no say in Hezbollah’s operation to take Israeli troops hostage, which triggered the war. But Israel deliberately attacked Lebanese infrastructure and other targets not connected with Hezbollah in a deliberate attempt to make the non-Shia majority of Lebanon’s population see Hezbollah as a threat to their own security. It did not succeed; just as in the Second World War, bombing civilians tends to strengthen their support for the government or other organization that is the real target of the enemy’s hostility.
Nor was “deterrence” re-established on the ground. Hezbollah’s fighters were so well dug in that air power and artillery could not budge them. They were also so well trained that trying to dig them out with Israeli ground troops would be prohibitively expensive in terms of casualties, and the IDF wisely chose not to attempt it. Olmert’s government did launch what amounted to an airborne public-relations stunt on the day the ceasefire was signed, in an attempt to present the appearance of a victory. But those whose opinions really mattered were not fooled.
August 15, 2006
THE NEW MIDDLE EAST
Common sense has prevailed. Most of the Israeli troops who were sent into south Lebanon last weekend have already retreated, and the last thousand or two will be back inside the Israeli frontier by next weekend. They are not waiting for the Lebanese army and the promised international peacekeeping force to come in and “disarm Hezbollah.” They are getting the hell out.
The last-minute decision to airlift Israeli troops deep into the one thousand square kilometres of Lebanon south of the Litani river made good sense politically. That way, Israel didn’t have to fight its way in and take the inevitable heavy casualties. Rather, it simply exploited its total control of the air to fly troops into areas not actively defended by Hezbollah just before the ceasefire. The goal was to create the impression that it had defeated the guerrilla organization and established control over southern Lebanon.
However, those isolated packets of troops actually controlled nothing of value, and they were surrounded by undefeated Hezbollah fighters on almost every side. Hezbollah could not have resisted for long the temptation to attack the more exposed Israeli units, perhaps even forcing some to surrender. So the Israeli troops are coming out now, in order to give Hezbollah no easy targets.
General Dan Halutz, the Israeli chief of staff, was right to make this decision, but it removes the last remote possibility that Israel can extract any political gains from the military stalemate in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah says it has no intention of disarming, and Lebanese defence minister Elias Murr says that his army will not try to disarm the militant organization. Hezbollah is staying put in southern Lebanon, and so are its weapons. At the end of this “war of choice,” Israel has achieved none of its objectives.
Israel’s assault on Hezbollah was as much a “war of choice” as the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Seymour Hersh claims in this week’s New Yorker that the Bush administration approved it months ago, and the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a senior Israeli officer made PowerPoint presentations on the planned operation to selected Western audiences more than a year ago. “By 2004, the military campaign scheduled to last about three weeks that we’re seeing now had already been blocked out,” Professor Gerald Steinberg of Bar Ilan University told the Chronicle, “and in the last year or two it’s been simulated and rehearsed across the board.”
Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert was seduced by this plan because, lacking military experience himself, he needed the credibility of having led a major military operation. Otherwise, he would lack support for his plan to impose unilateral borders in the occupied West Bank that would keep the major settlement blocks within Israel, while handing the rest to the Palestinians.
So Olmert seized on the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers on July 12, the latest in an endless string of back-and-forth border violations, as the pretext for an all-out onslaught on Hezbollah. But it didn’t work. The Israeli armed forces have effectively been fought to a standstill by a lightly armed but highly trained and disciplined guerrilla force, and there will be major repercussions at home and abroad.
The Israeli politician likeliest to benefit from this mess is Binyamin Netanyahu, the hardest of the hard-liners, who flamboyantly quit the Likud Party last year in protest over former prime minister Ariel Sharon’s policy of pulling out of the occupied Gaza Strip. The last opinion poll in Israel gave Netanyahu an approval rating of 58 percent.
Much graver, in the long run, is the erosion of Israel’s myth of military invincibility. It is always more economical to frighten your enemies into submission than to fight them, but Arabs have been losing their fear of Israel for some years now. This defeat will greatly accelerate the process, and there are a lot more Arabs than there are Israelis.
Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad summed up the matter brutally but accurately when he said on Monday that Israel is at “an historic crossroads. Either it moves towards peace and gives back [the Israeli-occupied lands], or it faces chronic instability until [a new Arab] generation comes and puts an end to the problem.”
16.
EUROPE
There is a North American view of Europe, especially popular on the right in the United States, in which the continent consists mainly of medieval city centres full of Gothic cathedrals and tourists, surrounded by festering slums full of feral Muslim immigrants. Ridiculous statistics are cited on Fox News, preposterous predictions of social cataclysm are bandied about even on the European right, and, occasionally, something happens that can be used by the ignorant media and politicians to reinforce that view.
November 4, 2005
NOT THE PARIS INTIFADA
“Scum,” French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy called the rioters who have seized control of many working-class “suburbs” around Paris every night since October 27, when two teenagers died in an accident that many blame on the police. Accused of pouring fuel on the flames, Sarkozy responded: “For too long politicians have not used the right words to describe reality.”
Sarkozy plans to run for the presidency next year, and he wants to seem even tougher on crime and on immigrants (two separate issues that he regularly conflates) than his main rival, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin. But his conviction that the policy of multiculturalism has failed has become the new popular wisdom in France, where right-wing commentators refer to the riots as the “Paris intifada”—as if the rioters were all Muslims.
Even William Pfaff, the best informed of American commentators, has stopped believing that people with different traditions can live side by side. Writing in the Observer after the terrorist bombs in London in July, he said: “A half-century of well-intentioned but catastrophically mistaken policy of multiculturalism, indifferent or even hostile to social and cultural integration, has produced in Britain and much of Europe a technologically educated but culturally and morally unassimilated immigrant demi-intelligentsia.”
Pfaff was in effect arguing that the London bombs would not have happened if only British immigration policy over the past fifty years had worked to extinguish any sense of solidarity between the descendants of Muslim immigrants to Britain and Muslims elsewhere. That is no doubt true, so far as it goes, but not invading Iraq would have prevented the London bombs at a much lower cost.
The real problem with all this ranting about the failures of multiculturalism is that the Paris riots are actually a splendid demonstration of the successful integration of immigrants into French culture (which has, after all, a long tradition of insurrection and revolution). The riots in Paris are not a Muslim uprising. They are not even race riots. They are an outburst of resentment and frustration by the marginalized and the unemployed of every ethnic group.
The low-income housing estates that ring Paris and other big French cities are the dumping ground for people who haven’t made it in the cool twenty-first-century France of the urban centres, and they include the old white working class as well as immigrants from France’s former colonies in Arabic-speaking North Africa and sub-Saharan black Africa and from the poorer countries of Europe. Unemployment there is often twice the national average of 10 percent. Furthermore, they are not Muslim majority communities, or even non-white majority communities.
Every ethnic group lives jumbled together in the apartment towers, and the kid gangs that dominate the estates steal from strangers and residents alike and fight among themselves for control of the drug trade, but they are models of racial and cultural integration. This can be little consolation to the owners of the twenty-eight thousand vehicles that have been burned on those estates so far this year, but what we are seeing is an incoherent revolt by kids, many of them gang members, who would once have formed the next generation of the French working class.
The trouble is they are no longer needed in that role and they know that they have no future, so they are very angry. This said, they are not politically organized, and so, after a few more nights, the violence will die down again for a while.
In Britain, where unemployment is half the French level and the council estates are less grim and less isolated geographically, there is much less anger. There haven’t been French-style riots in Germany either, although many Germans have deeply racist attitudes towards non-Christian and non-white immigrants. German cities also do not concentrate their poor people, immigrant and non-immigrant alike, in densely populated one-class “suburbs.”
The French have little to be proud of in their immigration policy, but what has been happening there since late October is neither American-style race riots nor a Muslim rebellion. About half the kids burning the cars and the buildings are white, working-class, post-Christian French, and they get along with the black and Muslim kids just fine.
Europe has spent the last fifteen years tidying up after the great upheavals that first broke up the post-1945 Soviet empire in Central Europe, then the Soviet Union itself (which was really the old Russian empire under another name), and finally the Serbian mini-empire in Yugoslavia between 1989 and the mid-1990s. Apart from Yugoslavia and some parts of the Caucasus, the dismantling of the old empires was accomplished in a remarkably non-violent manner, but figuring out how to put the pieces back together in new patterns that made sense (and served the interests of the people concerned) was a long, hard slog. In Central Europe and the Balkans, what made it all work was the prospect of membership in the European Union.
April 28, 2006
THE UTILITY OF EUROSLAPS
“Sofia gets Euroslap,” shrieked the headline in the Bulgarian newspaper Trud in early April, and it was true. Olli Rehn, the European Union’s Commissioner for Enlargement, reporting to the European Parliament on Bulgaria’s readiness to join the EU next January, had said that “the jury is still out,” and that Sofia needs to do much more about fighting high-level corruption and organized crime if it hopes to get in next year.
This sort of foreign criticism provokes nationalist outrage in most countries, but the Bulgarians took it almost meekly. Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev promised to work hard to meet the EU‘s standards and deadlines, and, in his first eight months in office, his government has passed sixty new laws to that end. Euroslaps work.
Romania, also scheduled to become a full member of the EU next January, has done even better. Just two years ago, it was still seen as the more problematic of the two candidates, with high levels of corruption, an easily bought judiciary and rigged elections. But the combination of euro-sticks and euro-carrots worked so well in Romania that it is now no longer seen as a problem candidate.
Bulgaria still has some distance to go. There have been 157 contract killings in public places in Bulgaria since 2000, as gangsters battle it out over the proceeds of organized crime, and no high Bulgarian official has ever been convicted on corruption charges, but the threat to postpone its EU entry by a year is having the desired effect, and now Bulgaria is scrambling to fix things in time. “Enlargement,” as the EU calls the process of bringing in new members, has been an amazingly effective tool for getting the former Communist countries of Europe to root out the corrupt systems and arbitrary habits that they inherited from their former rulers. Millions of people who served the Communist states are still serving their successors today in the government, the civil service and the judiciary, but the European Union has found a way to impose reform from outside without generating nationalist resentment and resistance.
“The heart of the EU’s enlargement policy is conditionality,” Olli Rehn wrote in the Financial Times recently. “The conditions for membership are clear and rigorous, and … require nothing less than a top-to-bottom reform of a would-be member’s institutions and policies,” and the benefits of membership are so attractive that the candidates jump through the hoops willingly. If Bulgaria doesn’t fix its justice system in time, EU monitors will keep track of how many organized crime figures actually get prosecuted and how m
any corruption cases are brought against senior Bulgarian officials. It’s undignified for a sovereign state to accept such supervision (which will last until the EU is satisfied that Bulgarian justice meets the EU standard), but the Bulgarians have decided that it’s worth it.
The job is almost done: with the admission of thirty million Romanians and Bulgarians next January, all of the former Soviet satellites in Europe (plus the three Baltic states once part of the Soviet Union itself) will have been brought into the family. The EU will have grown from fifteen to twenty-seven members in less than five years, and all that remains to do to clear up the mess left over from the Communist era in Eastern Europe is to bring in the “Western Balkans”: Albania and the now-independent countries of former Yugoslavia (except Slovenia, which is already an EU member).
The Western Balkans contains only twenty-five million people, but it now consists of six separate countries and will grow to eight when Montenegro and Kosovo get their formal independence from Serbia. Most of these countries are deeply scarred by the nationalist wars and massacres that ravaged the region in the 1990s, and nobody needs the EU process more than they do.
With the final goal almost in sight, however, “enlargement fatigue” is now sapping the will of some existing members (notably France and Germany) to continue with the process. Hence Olli Rehn’s plea to the existing EU members last month: “Our conditionality works only if it is credible. Countries have to be sure that they have a realistic chance of joining the EU—even if it is many years away—if reformist leaders are to convince their public that it is worth making enormous efforts to meet the EU‘s conditions.”
He’s right, and with luck enlargement fatigue will turn out to be just a temporary phenomenon. But if it deprives the Western Balkans of hope at this point, all of Europe will regret it.
