Michael J. Totten

One Fourth of Instapundit

I am going to be one fourth of Instapundit this week. Glenn Reynolds is on vacation and he asked me, Ann Althouse, Megan McArdle, and Brannon Denning to fill in for him.

So you'll see me there as well as here.

Thanks Glenn!

Grim Days Ahead

A Hezbollah member named Ali speaks to the Guardian:

Despite Israel's claims to have inflicted heavy losses on Hizbullah, Ali insists his side is in a strong position. "Things are going very well now, whatever happens we are winning. If they keep bombing us we will stay in the shelters, and with each bomb more people support the resistance. If they invade they will repeat the miserable fate they had in 1982, and if they hold one square foot they will give the Islamic resistance all the legitimacy. If they want to kill Hizbullah they have to kill every Shia in the south of Lebanon."

And even when the battle with the Israelis is over, he adds menacingly, Hizbullah will have other battles to fight. "The real battle is after the end of this war. We will have to settle score with the Lebanese politicians. We also have the best security and intelligence apparatus in this country, and we can reach any of those people who are speaking against us now. Let's finish with the Israelis and then we will settle scores later."

Hezbollah’s Coup d'État

The fog of war makes it impossible for me or anyone else to determine whether or not Israel’s war against Hezbollah is succeeding of failing militarily. But it’s painfully obvious that Israel’s attempt to influence Lebanese politics in its favor is an absolute catastrophe right now.

The (second in a decade) attack on Qana that killed scores of civilians has all but cemented the Lebanese public and Hezbollah together.

Cable news reports that 82 percent of Lebanese now support Hezbollah. Prime Minister Fouad Seniora – whatever his real opinion in private – is now closer to openly supporting Hezbollah in public than he has ever been.

The March 14 Movement (the Cedar Revolution) is, at best, in a coma if not outright dead.

Hezbollah was popular while Israel occupied South Lebanon. When Israel left Lebanon it finally became possible for Hezbollah's power to be strictly relegated to it own little corner because support for the organization evaporated.

Now that Israel is back, Hezbollah's support is back.

It doesn't matter if this support is reasonable or not. (It isn't reasonable. Israel wouldn't even be in Lebanon if it weren't for Hezbollah.) But it was entirely predictable.

Support for Hezbollah will drop again after Israel leaves. But Israel can't (or won't) leave until some kind of arrangement is hammered out. And Israel will now have to deal with a manifestly more hostile Lebanese public while working out that arrangement.

This is a disaster for Lebanon, a disaster for Israel, and a disaster for the United States. It is a tremendous boon to Syria and Iran.

I wish I knew what a possible solution might be, but I don’t. I’m pretty sure, though, that “more of the same” isn’t it.

UPDATE: Tony Badran says "Hezbollah's plan all along was a classic coup d'etat, very similar, as Pierre Akel recently wrote, to the fascisti's takeover in Italy." Seems to be working very well for them right about now.

I'm sorry for not being my usual more-optimistic self. What can I say? It is not always warranted.

When I first arrived in Beirut a British expat friend who lived there for nine years said "Do not underestimate them" when I told him I was going to meet and interview Hezbollah.

Please allow me to second that.

UPDATE: Mary at Exit Zero (no peacenik, she) wrote in my comments:

Asymetric warfare makes the military branch of a terrorist organization hard to hit - but it leaves the supporters of terrorism in a relatively vulnerable position. If the world were an intelligent place, we'd be fighting the strategy of asymetric warfare, not its army or its cities.

The state leaders, bureaucrats and bankers who support Hez would be our targets. As Sun Tsu said:

Thus, what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy's strategy;

Next best is to disrupt his alliances;

The next best is to attack his army.

The worst policy is to attack cities. Attack cities only when there is no alternative.

The world in general seems to have read that advice backwards.

Al Qaeda Heading to Lebanon - And Why Israel Needs to Help Reconstruct Lebanon

Before this war even started I wrote that Israel should leave Lebanon as a whole out of its fight with Hezbollah, that the real enemies were in Syria and Iran. War in Lebanon has destroyed almost every last scrap of political capital Israel had in that country, it has a reduced a modern almost-democracy to a Third World beggar nation de-facto ruled by Hassan Nasrallah, cruelly punished the most liberal and moderate Arab population in the world, and exploded the extraordinarily fragile stability that recently was.

Now Al Qaeda says they are heading to Lebanon.

There is a lot of talk now about a multinational force (made up of who?) to enter Lebanon to protect the Israelis. If there is to be a multinational force, it will also need to protect Lebanese.

The United States contributes millions of dollars to rebuild infrastructure (etc) destroyed in wars that it fights. Afghanistan received post-war aid. Iraq received post-war aid.

If Israel prefers Lebanon on its border instead of chaos, Israel needs to seriously consider paying war reparations. The US does this as a matter of course, out of a sense of decency as well as an understanding that it helps prevent even more conflict. I see no reason why Israel cannot or should not do the same, and for the same reasons.

UPDATE: DP points out in the comments:

The US had never paid war reparations and probably never will. War reparations are what you pay if you lose a war...What the US has done is give assistance in rebuilding. This might sound like the same thing, but it is not. War reparations are mandatory. Assistance in rebuilding is conditional...Assistance to rebuild a devastated country is a wise choice.

Okay then, if "reparations" is the wrong word (and perhaps it is) I suggest Israel contribute to the reconstruction of Lebanon. This will be good for Lebanon and good for Israel...assuming Hezbollah does not become the government or get any of the money.

Too Perfect for This World

Lebanese blogger Ramzi posts a letter from a reader and his response:

hi ramzi:

I have been in the united states for 30 years. every year i think about going to visit Lebanon. but always something happens. this year my 18 year old daughter who was born in the USA graduated from high school and I had promised her 3 years ago that I will take her to Lebanon for a visit. but circumstances were that she had to go with my 20 year old son alone.

and now she cries that she does not want to leave even though she is scheduled to evacuate tomorrow on 7-20-2006. she keeps telling me but mom I did not see the cedars yet! and that tears my heart up.

sincerely,

(the reader)

Hey (the reader),

That story made me hang my head in sadness. But also in shame. In shame because we the Lebanese have failed Lebanon and failed your daughter. I too was like your daughter, at love with a country I have seen very little of. And when I returned after the war, I was on a constant quest to see, hear, smell Lebanon. To make up for years I could never have had anyway because of the war but still felt I owed.

And now, I have lived here enough to see what I observed rebuilt slowly and day by day destroyed in a single blow. I remember every construction site, every road diversion, every ditch. I remember taking a ride on every one of those bridges when they were fist built. And the innocent children killed were not even born when I first came here.

So, what can I say to you? nothing other than to let Lebanon always be in her heart and in her imagination. Let her fall in love with a Lebanon that neither exists nor could ever exist because it is too perfect for this world. And then let her return here when things are calmer, and let her search for that Lebanon in this Lebanon. She will not find it, but she will fall in love with the next best thing.

Ramzi

Damning Photos

Here are pictures of Hezbollah setting up heavy artillery - military targets - in Christian suburbs east of Beirut.

UPDATE: Lots of people in the comments doubt the accuracy of the description of these photos. I cannot vouch for them. There could be any number of mistakes. Or not. (?)

The Real Middle East

The Middle East isn't a cartoon. It's a rich and complex place. Many, if not most, of its citizens refuse to submit to the dumb little categories fanatics and outsiders like to impose on them.

Latest example:

Being interviewed on a European radio station, the interviewer snarls at me when I mention that Haifa has a mixed Jewish/Arab population and that as we speak, many of them were sitting in bomb shelters together, hiding from Nasrallah's rockets.

I was surprised this information could be so irritating. I didn't dare tell him about the guy who came up to me in downtown Haifa, showed me his bombed shop front and told me he was an Arab who wants the IDF to destroy the Hizbullah.

Hat tip: Allison Kaplan Sommer.

UPDATE: Here's another example, this one from Lebanon.

The situation in Ain Ebel is unbearable. Thousands of civilians have fled to the village from nearby villages and more than 1000 rockets have hit the village, there is no more food neither clean water and diseases r spreading.

Now here comes the most sickening part:

Hezbollah has been firing rockets from the village since Day 1 hiding behind innocent people’s places and even CHURCHES. No one is allowed to argue with the Hezbollah gunmen who wont hesitate to shoot you and i ve heard about more than one shooting incident including young men from the village and Hezbollah.

Urgent appeals have been done through phone calls from terrified people who wouldnt give out their name fearing Hezbollah might harm or even eliminate them.

This is the true image of our brave Islamic Resistance, putting the civilians and their homes as body shields to the Israeli bombardements.

Let the message spread and let those criminals move out of the village once and for all.

Free Ain Ebel from the terrorists !

More Opinions Than People

I once mentioned offhand in the comments section that Lebanon has more opinions than people. A Lebanese woman I had never met or encountered online before said she thought that remark was hilarious and gave me credit for "finally understanding Lebanon."

At the time I didn't feel like explaining what I meant. It didn't seem important. But now would be a good time.

Lebanon's bizarre internal political structure creates mental categories in its citizens that do not and never will exist in the West. It's hard enough to understand how Lebanese think even after living there myself for a while, so I don't expect casual readers to "get" this. But there are Lebanese (I know several) who are secular and pro-American, who want peace with Israel, and who also suppport Hezbollah.

I've been thinking for a while now about writing an essay explaining how this is possible, but Lebanon.Profile over at the Lebanese Political Journal beat me to it. So go read. Only a small minority of Shia think this way, but you should know about them. It means they're mentally flexible and can be brought around, under the right conditions, to healthier ways of thinking. Things will not always be as they are.

Everything Exploded

In case you missed it the first time, or if (like me) you feel like re-reading it, exactly three months ago I published Everything Could Explode at Any Moment from the Lebanese/Israeli border. That piece feels heavier now than it did.

Ceasefire

Bush and Blair call for ceasefire.

Off His Meds

Behold the unhinged.

Hezbollah Cries Uncle?

Too soon to pop any champagne corks, but Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Seniora may have convinced Hezbollah to submit to the government. The better of the two options highlighted by Michael Young (see below) might be kicking in.

Human Shields

Caveman (formerly of Beirut) reports that Hezbollah may be using Druze villagers as human shields (after kidnapping a Druze soldier from Israel). This won't be over when it's over...

UPDATE: Hezbollah is doing the same thing to Christians, even shooting civilians who try to flee Israeli fire.

The Stakes for Nasrallah...and Lebanon

Lebanese-American Michael Young in Beirut's Daily Star:

[H]ow long can Nasrallah last? Much has been made of the secretary general's celebrated steadfastness and the fact that he has before him only two choices - victory or defeat. If that's his narrow reading, then he is heading toward heartbreak, because sooner or later the weight of the Lebanese sectarian system is likely to impose defeat on him if he refuses to make necessary concessions. The reason is simple: No Lebanese leader - not Amin Gemayel in 1982, Michel Aoun in 1989, or Emile Lahoud in 2004 - can indefinitely bend the country to the breaking point, or push it toward communal destabilization, without the old sectarian ways kicking in to impose a correction. And in the absence of concessions by maximalist leaders, the system has usually collapsed into war.

Michael is one of the sharpest thinkers in Lebanon. (And he was kind enough to publish an article I wrote some time ago.) Read the whole thing.

Lebanon’s Premature Liberalism

“This is not Norway here, and it is not Denmark.” -- Lebanese Christian militia leader Bashir Gemayel.

Last month I made a terrible mistake.

A reader from Lake Oswego -- a suburb of my city of Portland -- emailed and asked if he thought he should take his wife and children to Lebanon on their next vacation. I said sure. Just stay out of the Hezbollah areas along the border with Israel and in the suburbs south of Beirut. And make sure your kids understand that Lebanese drivers are considerably more reckless than drivers in Oregon, that they should be more careful than usual when crossing the street.

Needless to say, this was absolutely awful advice.

My friend Sean LaFreniere - who drove with me to Northern Iraq on a whim -- was scheduled to be with me in Beirut right now. (I am at home and he is now blogging from Tunisia and Turkey.) He was slightly nervous, but I told him he did not need to worry. Lebanon could become a dangerous country again. There are warning signs to watch out for, I said, and I told him what they were. At the time (and this was only a few weeks ago) those warning signs were not yet flashing red. Who would have thought war could engulf the whole country, and not just the border, in one day with no warning?

I kept my eye on the country, even so, because potential medium-term trouble was quietly brewing. Many Lebanese Christians, Sunnis, and Druze were getting so impatient with the impasse over Hezbollah’s weapons they threatened to reconstitute their own armed militias that were disbanded after the war. Peaceful and diplomatic negotiation over Hezbollah’s role in a sovereign rather than schismatic Lebanon was not going to last very much longer. Once the rest of Lebanon armed itself against Hezbollah, a balance of terror would reign that could explode into war without any warning. That was the danger. That was the nightmare. That’s why Hezbollah had not been disarmed.

Syria’s Bashar Assad threatened to make Lebanon burn if his occupation troops were forced out of the country. Most Lebanese think that’s what last year’s car bombs were about. After former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, a Sunni Muslim, was assassinated downtown, all the car bomb victims were Christian. All the random car bombs exploded in Christian neighborhoods. The idea - or so the Lebanese thought - was to whip up sectarian hatred, to get Christian militias to rearm and retaliate, and to re-ignite the Lebanese war. Assad yearned to burn Lebanon, and he was not shy about saying so. Syria, or so he hoped, might be invited back in to stop the chaos with the soldier’s peace of the Baath.

That plan didn’t work. Hardly anyone wanted a return to civil war. No Christian vigilantes retaliated against Muslims (Sunni or Shia) because they knew it was a trap set by the Baath. That, most likely, is why the siege of the car bombs came to an end.

Sectarian tensions and hatreds run deep in Lebanon, even so, far deeper than those of us in the West can begin to relate to. 32 years ago Beirut was the Paris of the Middle East. But 15 years ago Lebanon was the Somalia of the Middle East. It made the current troubles in Iraq look like a polite debate in a Canadian coffeeshop by comparison. There is no ethnic-religious majority in that country, and every major sect has been, at one time or another, a victim of all the others.

I spent a total of seven months in Lebanon recently, and I never could quite figure out what prevented the country from flying apart into pieces. It barely held together like unstable chemicals in a nitro glycerin vat. The slightest ripple sent Lebanese scattering from the streets and into their homes. They were far more twitchy than I, in part (I think) because they understood better than I just how precarious their civilized anarchy was. Their country needed several more years of careful nurturing during peace time to fully recover from its status as a carved up failed state.

By bombing all of Lebanon rather than merely the concentrated Hezbollah strongholds, Israel is putting extraordinary pressure on Lebanese society at points of extreme vulnerability. The delicate post-war democratic culture has been brutally replaced, overnight, with a culture of rage and terror and war. Lebanon isn't Gaza, but nor is it Denmark.

Lebanese are temporarily more united than ever. No one is running off to join Hezbollah, but tensions are being smoothed over for now while everyone feels they are under attack by the same enemy. Most Lebanese who had warm feelings for Israel -- and there were more of these than you can possibly imagine -- no longer do.

This will not last.

My sources and friends in Beirut tell me most Lebanese are going easy on Hezbollah as much as they can while the bombs are still falling. But a terrible reckoning awaits them once this is over.

Some Lebanese can’t wait even that long.

Here a Christian mob smashes a car in Beirut for displaying a Hezbollah logo. My friend Carine says the atomosphere reeks of impending sectarian conflict like never before. Another Lebanese blogger quotes a radical Christian war criminal from the bad old days who says the civil war will resume a month after Israel cools its guns: "Christians, Sunnis and Druze will fight the 'fucker Shia', with arms from the US and France."

Israeli partisans may think this is terrific. The Lebanese may take care of Hezbollah at last! But democratic Lebanon cannot win a war against Hezbollah, not even after Hezbollah is weakened by IAF raids. Hezbollah is the most effective Arab fighting force in the world, and the Lebanese army is the weakest and most divided. The Israelis beat three Arab armies in six days in 1967, but a decade was not enough for the IDF to take down Hezbollah.

The majority of Lebanon’s people were wise and civilized enough to take the gun out of politics after the fifteen year war. Lebanon was the only Arab country to do this, the only Arab country that preferred dialogue, elections, compromise, and debate to the rule of the boot and the rifle. But Hezbollah remained outside that mainstream consensus and did everything it could, with backing from the Syrian Baath and the Iranian Jihad, to strangle Lebanon’s democracy in its cradle.

Disarming Hezbollah through persuasion and consensus was not possible in the first year of Lebanon’s independence. Disarming Hezbollah by force wasn’t possible either. The Lebanese people have been called irresponsible and cowardly by some of their friends in America for refusing to resume the civil war. Unlike Hezbollah, though, most Lebanese know better than to start unwinnable wars. This is wisdom, not cowardice, and it's sadly rare in the Arab world now. They are being punished entirely too much for what they have done and for what they can't do.

Israel and Lebanon (especially Lebanon) will continue to burn as long as Hezbollah exists as a terror miltia freed from the leash of the state. The punishment for taking on Hezbollah is war. The punishment for not taking on Hezbollah is war. Lebanese were doomed to suffer war no matter what. Their liberal democratic project could not withstand the threat from within and the assaults from the east, and it could not stave off another assault from the south. War, as it turned out, was inevitable even if the actual shape of it wasn’t. Peace was not in the cards for Lebanon. Its democracy turned out to be neither a strength nor a weakness. It was irrelevant.

Holding up as a democracy in a dictatorial region isn’t easy. Chalk this up as yet another thing Israel and Lebanon have in common with each other that they don’t have in common with anyone else in the Middle East -- except, perhaps, for the Kurds in Northern Iraq. Unlike Israeli democracy, though, Lebanese democracy may not have the strength to keep breathing. Already some right-wing American "realists" are suggesting Syria return its forces to Lebanon. (Bashar Assad may be as much a foreign policy genius as his late father.) The March 14 Movement, the Cedar Revolution, may be too weak to survive until the region as a whole is transformed. If the Lebanese, the Americans, and the Israelis are not wise in the coming days, weeks, and months it could die the same death as the Prague Spring in the late 1960s, crushed under the treads of Soviet tanks and smothered until the day the world around it had changed.

When Israel and Hezbollah reach a ceasefire at last, round two of this conflict will commence in short order. No one knows if the Lebanese will be able to keep the gun out of politics after all that has happened. A tiny minority of Lebanese (with help from the remaining Syrian agents) can burn the country to the ground all over again.

“What will become of us?” is the question on everyone’s mind. No one can know what will happen after Israel lifts its siege and the temporary national unity flies apart into pieces. And it will fly apart into pieces. The only question is how far the pieces will fly and how hard they'll land.

During all seven months I spent in Lebanon the overwhelming majority feared an imminent return to civil war. I always told them they were too pessimistic even while I wondered if I was too naïve. Perhaps I’ve absorbed too much of that Lebanese fatalism by spending so much of my time among them. And perhaps my naivete has finally been washed away. I really don't know. It’s an old question that I don’t know how to answer.

Either way, the odds are quite a lot grimmer than they recently were. Lebanon could, indeed, become a free fire zone even if most Lebanese do everything they can to make it not so. Just a few thousand Hezbollah fighters set two countries on fire all by themselves. Don’t discount what bloody mayhem and hell a few thousand armed Druze, Christians, and Sunni can do if they decide to go hunting Shia in revenge for destroying their country. Don't forget, also, that Lebanon is now surging with tens of thousands of furious, displaced, homeless, unemployed, and undisciplined young Shia men enthralled with Iranian-style jihad.

Insha Allah, Lebanon might be okay. Perhaps the status quo ante will return, only with a weaker and even more marginalized Hezbollah seething in its corner and thrown off the border. There may be scattered acts of sectarian violence that threaten to ignite into war and never quite do. Kidnappings could come back in style. Al Qaeda may finally have its turn at the Israeli border if their Hezbollah enemy is no longer there to keep them away. I do not know. The Lebanese themselves do not know. But one thing I do know is that after the first war ends there really could be another.

Don’t take your kids. Stay out until further notice.

Post-script: I was planning a trip to Iran in the near future, but of course I did not see this coming. Iran will have to wait. I’m returning to Lebanon as soon as the airport re-opens. Please hit the Pay Pal button and help me buy airfare.

If you would like to donate money for travel expenses and you don't want to use Pay Pal, you can send a check or money order to:

Michael Totten
P.O. Box 312
Portland, OR 97207-0312

Many thanks in advance.

Please Be Patient

I'm still recovering from jet lag and general exhaustion while scrambling to catch up on everything that got put on hold while I went to Iraq on short notice. (I didn't tell you this before, but I was scheduled to be in Lebanon right now before the Iraq gig came up. Looks like I would not have made it in any case.)

I don't want to get into the quick response style of blogging just yet. First I'm composing a longish essay, a more careful and measured response than what I banged out in haste from Suleimaniya, Iraq, when I didn't really have time.

More soon.

What Now?

by Michael J. Totten

I find myself unsure what to write about now that I’m back and can blog again. I worked in tranquil Northern Iraq -- the Kurdistan region -- for two weeks. I also visited Amman, Jordan, and Tel Aviv, Israel for about 24 hours each during a time of chaos and war.

Because I signed a confidentiality agreement before starting my consulting job in Northern Iraq, there is little I can write about. But of course I learned some things unreleated to my job while I was there, and I took over 1,000 photographs with my spiffy new professional photojournalist camera. There isn’t anything stricly newsy out of Iraqi Kurdistan right now, but it’s an interesting part of the world all the same.

I’ll get to everything in due time, but what do you want first? Posts from Northern Iraq? Brief dispatches from Amman and Tel Aviv? Or my armchair reaction to events in Lebanon and Israel?

Many of you hit my Pal Pay donations button recently, so you tell me what you want most and when you want it.

What do you want me to write about first?
	Northern Iraq
	Amman and Tel Aviv
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I'm Back

by Michael J. Totten

I'm back from my consulting job. As you can see from the photograph I spent most of my time in Iraq, in the Kurdistan region. (Jeez, it is hot there in July!) I wasn't misleading you when I said my work was non-writing related. I don't have nearly as many stories as I would have had if I went there as a journalist. Unfortunately I can't tell you what I was doing or who I was working for. For now, though, I will say that I was not there working for any government. My gig was a temporary private sector one, and maybe (I don't know yet) I'll be able to explain it sometime in the future.

Getting out of the Middle East during the Lebanon/Israeli conflict was a lot more...interesting than being in Iraq. War and the flow of refugees put the kibosh on my travel plans home, and I had to route through Tel Aviv at a time of war to get back. This was totally unexpected and -- I imagine this goes without saying -- unpleasant. I will explain when I recover from exhaustion and jet lag.

Many thanks again to Callimachus for filling in for me when blogging just wasn't possible. Many thanks also to those of you who sent Pay Pal donations while I was away from regular email access. I will try to send individual thank you notes as soon as I can, late though they may be.

Shadows

By Callimachus:

This John Kifner piece is on the New York Times wire tonight:

The Hezbollah guerrilla campaign that ended Israel's 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000 was in many ways a precursor to the kind of asymmetrical warfare U.S. troops are facing in Iraq — and Israeli troops would face again if they entered Lebanon in large numbers.

Suicide bombers, roadside explosives and ambushes were the weapons the shadowy force that called itself the resistance used to drive out a superior conventional army.

"By limiting the firing, we were able to keep the cards in our hands," said Sheik Nabil Qaouk, then and now the Hezbollah commander in the south, in a rare interview six years ago, shortly after the Israeli withdrawal.

"We were able to do small, little battles where we had the advantage," the sheik, a Shiite imam who is also referred to as a general, said at the time in Tyre, Lebanon.

Now, as Israel contemplates the possibility of another land invasion of Lebanon, its commando reconnaissance teams are meeting stiff fighting as they discover that Hezbollah has spent much of the past six years constructing networks of fortified bunkers and tunnels and amassing stores of thousands of rockets.

This article, "Why the Strong Lose," by Jeffrey Record, turned up in the winter 2005 edition of "Parameters." It might be worth a re-visit.

[A]ll major failed US uses of force since 1945 — in Vietnam, Lebanon, and Somalia — have been against materially weaker enemies. In wars both hot and cold, the United States has fared consistently well against such powerful enemies as Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union, but the record against lesser foes is decidedly mixed. ... In each case the American Goliath was militarily stalemated or politically defeated by the local David. The phenomenon of the weak defeating the strong, though exceptional, is as old as war itself. Sparta finally beat Athens; Frederick the Great always punched well above his weight; American rebels overturned British rule in the Thirteen Colonies; the Spanish guerrilla bled Napoleon white; Jewish terrorists forced the British out of Palestine; Vietnamese communists drove France and then the United States out of Indochina; and mujahideen handed the Soviet Union its own “Vietnam” in Afghanistan. Relative military power is hardly a reliable predictor of war outcomes.

Record's piece summarizes observations that others have made -- tentatively, perhaps because they are so disturbing to us. Democracies are particularly vulnerable to losing "protracted conflicts against irregular foes." He cites Gil Merom's observation that "democracies fail in small wars because they find it extremely difficult to escalate the level of violence and brutality to that which can secure victory.”

True. And an honorable military tradition in a free people, even when they face defeat, also recoils from such brutality. The Confederate generals in the Civil War, West Pointers, deliberately rejected the option of guerrilla warfare, though many saw it as their best chance for independence. Forrest, a private man with no military education, proved how effective insurgency could be against the Yankees in Mississippi in 1862. But Lee did not follow his path. After the war, Forrest proved it again by founding the Klan. Americans today routinely list him among the nation's 10 greatest villains.

But the cruel truth is, barbarism works -- if by "works" you means defeats the insurgents at a horrific cost in innocent human lives. The French learned that in Algeria, and they also learned the consequence; a free and democratic state with an civilized population simply cannot sustain such a war.

By 1955, the revolutionary FLN was pursuing a policy of open genocide in Algeria: Kill all the French. Civilians of all ages and conditions were hacked to pieces, infants ripped from the womb and dashed to pieces in front of dying mothers, all the depths of depravity of terrorism. If it managed to kill a French official, it then tried to bomb his funeral, too.

The violence spiraled in 1956. The French got tough. In January 1957, Gen. Jacques Massu and his 4,600 men got carte blanche to clean the insurgents out of Algiers. Torture, which had been banned to French soldiers since the Revolution, crept back into use.

The argument was that successful interrogation saved lives, chiefly of Arabs; that Arabs who gave information would be tortured to death, without restraint, by the FLN, and it was vital for the French to make themselves feared more. It was the Arab belief that Massu operated without restraint, as much as the torture itself, which caused prisoners to talk. [Paul Johnson, "Modern Times"]

Torture was not the end of it. According to one French official in a position to know, some 3,000 prisoners "disappeared" during the Algiers battle. It was the one battle in the insurgency that the French clearly won. Fighting the FLN near its own level, with matching weapons of terror, Massu won the fight for Algiers. But civilized France all but tore itself to pieces in the process.

On the one hand, by freeing army units from political control and stressing the personalities of commanders, it encouraged private armies: colonels increasingly regarded themselves as proprietors of their regiments, as under the monarchy, and began to manipulate their generals into disobedience. In the moral confusion, officers began to see their primary obligation as towards their own men rather than the state. At the same time, news leaking out of what the army had done in Algiers began to turn French liberal and centre opinion against the war. From 1957 onward, many Frenchmen came to regard Algerian independence, however distasteful, as preferable to the total corruption of the French public conscience. Thus the demand for the restoration of political control of the war -- including negotiations with the FLN -- intensified just as the French army was, as it believed, winning by asserting its independence.

This irreconcilable conflict produced the explosion of May 1958 which collapsed the Fourth Republic and returned de Gaulle to power. Record adds:

For democracies, the strategy of “barbarism” against the weaker side’s noncombatant social and political support base is neither morally acceptable nor, over time, politically sustainable. Since 1945, wars against colonial or ex-colonial peoples have become increasingly unacceptable to most democratic states’ political and moral sensibilities. Merom says that “what fails democracies in small wars is the interaction of sensitivity to casualties, repugnance to brutal military behavior, and commitment to democratic life.” Democracies fail in small wars because, more specifically, they are unable to resolve three related dilemmas: “how to reconcile the humanitarian values of a portion of the educated class with the brutal requirements of counterinsurgency warfare, ... how to find a domestically acceptable trade-off between brutality and sacrifice, [and] how to preserve support for the war without undermining the democratic order.”

Dictatorships, of course, have no such constraint. And insurgents seem instinctively to grasp this weakness in their democratic foes. Record introduces Robert Pape's landmark study of suicide terrorism from 1980 through 2003, which speculated that suicide terrorism, like guerrilla warfare, is “a strategy of coercion, a means to compel a target government to change policy.” It is felt to be especially effective against democracies, Record notes, for three reasons:

First, democracies “are thought to be especially vulnerable to coercive punishment.” Their threshold of intolerable pain is lower than that of dictatorships. Second, democracies are believed to be more restrained than authoritarian regimes in their use of force, especially against noncombatants. “Democracies are widely perceived as less likely to harm civilians, and no democratic regime has committed genocide in the twentieth century.” Third, “suicide attacks may also be harder to organize or publicize in authoritarian police states.”

Do you think Israel has learned all this? They could teach us the lessons. Every time the Americans make a military display then pull back rather than bringing down the hammer, as they did in Fallujah in April 2004, the jihadis surge. They make sure the message gets through: We defeated the infidel Marines. We are strong, they are weak. And when they do so they draw power, they suck in thousands of young men with their mirage of victory. And more blood and carnage follows. The image of America pulling back from a fight is what inspired bin Laden in the first place:

"After leaving Afghanistan, the Muslim fighters headed for Somalia and prepared for a long battle, thinking that the Americans were like the Russians. The youth were surprised at the low morale of the American soldiers and realized more than before that the American soldier was a paper tiger and after a few blows ran in defeat. And America forgot all the hoopla and media propaganda ... about being the world leader and the leader of the New World Order, and after a few blows they forgot about this title and left, dragging their corpses and their shameful defeat."

And ... well, I'll let the interviewer tell the rest of the story:

The Somalia operation, in some ways, made bin Laden. During the Afghan war, the CIA had been very aware of him (although the agency now insists it never "controlled" him), but in Somalia, bin Laden had taken a swing at the biggest kid in the school yard and given him a black eye.

This is no secret. CNN's Jeff Greenfield, for example, has connect the same three dots:

It began as a peacekeeping mission in March, 1983. U.S. Marines were sent to Lebanon to try to stop a bloody civil war. Seven months later, 20 years ago today, a massive truck bomb blew up the Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 U.S. servicemen -- the worst single-day loss of life for the American military since Korea.

Grim as the news was, it was, in part, overshadowed by the U.S. invasion of Grenada two days later, to overthrow a hard-left pro-Cuban government.

And when President Reagan ordered the Marines to leave Lebanon in January, 1984, not many Americans paid attention.

But by some accounts, others did pay attention. That terrorist act of 20 years ago may have helped to convince some of America's adversaries that the United States, for all of its might, was vulnerable, that heavy losses could be inflicted upon it at a relatively low price.

After all, the reasoning went, the U.S. had lost a war in Vietnam, not because it was militarily weak, but because it did not have the political will to bear the costs. And over the years, these adversaries seemed to take heart from what they saw as American weakness, from what the U.S. did not do when it left Saddam Hussein in power after the first Gulf War, when it pulled troops out of Somalia in 1993 after 18 Americans were killed -- the Black Hawk down incident -- when it failed to strike hard after the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing or the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa that killed 19 Americans, or the attack in 2000 on the USS Cole that left 17 dead.

That history may have been what Osama bin Laden had in mind when he said, three months after 9/11: "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse." Indeed, one of the principle arguments made for American military action in Afghanistan and in Iraq was that the U.S. had to prove by direct action that America was not a weak horse, that al Qaeda and its allies were misreading America's resolve. If that's true, that Beirut bombing of 20 years ago may have been where that miscalculation began.

Quick Hits

By Callimachus:

A few bytes from around the Web today:

Emergency relief aid should start reaching Lebanon soon.

France mobilized Friday to send urgent aid to Lebanon, the Red Cross managed to get relief supplies to the south — and Israel agreed to allow a safe corridor crucial to ensuring that food and medicine reaches those in need.

We can only hope. But if you're tired of feeling helpless on the sidelines, Beirut Spring has got a donations board up, listing places you can give to help.

Abu Aardvark has a telling piece on the images that the Arab world is seeing in its media. If you want to understand popular reactions, this always is a good place to start.

There's no such thing as a clean war. A nasty oil slick is fouling Beirut's beaches. Doha has a picture.

What the World Needs Now

By Callimachus:

Tom Friedman, walled up like a Poe character behind the NYT's Internet subscription jealousies, has thoughts on what Lebanon needs:

Even though it had members in the national cabinet, Hezbollah built up a state-within-a state in Lebanon, and then insisted on the right to launch its own attack on Israel that exposed the entire Lebanese nation to retaliation. Moreover, unprovoked, it violated an international border with Israel that was sanctified by the United Nations.

So this is not just another Arab-Israeli war. It is about some of the most basic foundations of the international order — borders and sovereignty — and the erosion of those foundations would spell disaster for the quality of life all across the globe.

Lebanon, alas, has not been able to produce the internal coherence to control Hezbollah, and is not likely to soon. The only way this war is going to come to some stable conclusion anytime soon is if The World of Order — and I don't just mean "the West," but countries like Russia, China, India, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia too — puts together an international force that can escort the Lebanese army to the Israeli border and remain on hand to protect it against Hezbollah.

I am not talking about a U.N. peacekeeping force. I am talking about an international force, like the one that liberated Kosovo, with robust rules of engagement, heavy weapons and troops from countries like France, Russia, India and China that Iran and its proxies will not want to fight.

Israel does not like international forces on its borders and worries they will not be effective. But it will be better than a war of attrition, and nothing would set back the forces of disorder in Lebanon more than The World of Order helping to extend the power of the democratically elected Lebanese government to its border with Israel.

Viva la Muerte!

By Callimachus:

Hezbollah rockets kill two Arab Israeli boys in Nazareth, but the Arab resident of the town blame Israel, at least when the microphones are turned on.

"It's war, and we are stuck in the middle," said his brother, Omar Talussi. "All the world knows the reason, everybody knows."

Another mourner chimed in: "It's Israel's fault."

"That's it," Omar Talussi said, wiping his hands in a motion of disgust.

Many Arabs here, who are Israeli citizens, feel they are involved in their own low-level fight with Israel.

Though they make up about 20 percent of Israel's population, their towns often get less development money than comparable Jewish areas and their average incomes are usually far less than those of the general population.

For that you feed your children to the missiles?

"Everybody knows it was an accident," said Afif Zidani, who acted as a translator for the grieving family. Though Hezbollah offered no public apology for the killings, many here heard rumors of one and that was good enough for them.

It would be morbidly funny if it were's so sad. As Amba says:

A supporter of Israel cannot help but writhe in agony at the horrible spectacle of the suffering, death and displacement of Lebanese civilians, their neighborhoods and lives shattered by the wrath of Israeli warplanes hunting down Hezbollah terrorists who hide in their midst.

How do you deal a decisive, clean blow to a terrorist organization that uses its own neighbors as human shields? You don't. You either grant them an unacceptable kind of immunity, or you go after them, whatever it takes, and become a hated slaughterer yourself. The terrorists are not blamed, because, after all, they were not harming their neighbors; only living and quietly stockpiling arms among them, and even dispensing social services. The death and destruction they call down on their neighbors serves their purposes, and they have proven before that they have no scruples about sacrificing Muslim lives for the cause. (Two Israeli Arab boys were killed by a Hezbollah rocket that struck Nazareth.) But they are not blamed. Even though the catastrophe for their people may prove a perverse victory for them. Because their power feeds on chaos, suffering, and rage.

This is how terrorists have the world by the balls.

On the Other Hand

By Callimachus:

The idea of proportionate Israeli action in Lebanon, which I advocate, is getting a lot of slagging from some people who are technically on the same team I am.

And one other note: the "disproportionate" meme is an insult to our intelligence. I do not think it is worth discussing. It should be obvious that the best way to deter a bully is to use overwhelming force so that he will never again be tempted to provoke you. Anything less than that is simply an invitation for further troubles down the road.

Or this:

As an American, I recognize my constitutional right to take whatever measures are necessary to protect myself, my family, and my home. If someone comes after my wife and child, tearing him limb from limb would not be disproportionate. If I showed mercy, and subdued him by other means, that would be my prerogative. But I am in no way required to.

The most vigorous arguments along that line often are cast in such terms. But at the risk of doing a Dukakis, I think this is one case where the metaphor of war as a knife-fight with a lunatic to protect your wife doesn't hold up so well.

There's also a perplexing tendency to couple a solid argument that Israel has too used proportion and restraint in its attempts to snipe Hezbollah, with a "to hell with proportion" call to set loose the dogs of war.

Proportionate response is just. Justice isn't always a sure path to physical victory. In this case, the cost of physical defeat is extermination.

Proportionate use of force is not an absolute; it's a guide. It doesn't mean civilians don't get killed. It doesn't mean you've failed if they do.

It doesn't negate the gunman's rule that, if you're going to shoot, shoot to kill. It doesn't negate the ugly truth that, in many wars, a short-term burst of extreme violence seems to actually save lives in the long run.

You don't do it because you expect the other side to follow suit. You don't do it so people will like you. You don't ever want to do it out of weakness or fear.

Hezbollah wants a fight to the death. With flamethrowers. In a crowded old wooden orphanage. It means you're not required to do it their way.

Turkey and the Kurds

By Callimachus

The latest lede from AP faces both ways:

ANKARA, Turkey - The Turkish military is moving forward with plans to send forces into northern Iraq to clear out Turkish Kurdish guerrilla bases, the prime minister said Wednesday. But Recep Tayyip Erdogan also said officials were holding talks with the United States and Iraq in an attempt to defuse tensions.

Warrior Code

By Callimachus:

I want to take another stab at convincing some of you there's an important -- essential -- distinction between a warrior and a terrorist, and it's not based on the cause they're fighting for. It's a theme I've brought up from time to time in the blogging I've done.

In Greek histories, Spartan mothers sent their sons to war with the commandment, "Come back with your shield, or on it."

Spartan mothers loved their babies, too -- they did not want to see dead bodies of their son brought back, as was the custom, sprawled on their shields. But if a warrior returned alive and unarmed it meant he had broken ranks and run. It meant he had thrown away the shield that protected -- not his own life, but, in the old method of fighting in phalanxes, the life of the man next to him. He had broken faith with his comrades; he had forgotten his warrior's code.

They wanted their sons back alive, but whole in spirit as well as body. They wanted them with honor intact. Everyone today who loves a soldier, sailor or Marine understand this. We want them alive, we want them victorious -- and we want them to have lives worth living when their battles are over.

Modern armies sweep into their ranks hundreds of thousands of people. Not all are fit to be soldiers. Those who are not, when discovered, should be weeded out and sent home, and if they have committed crimes in the meanwhile they should be punished for them.

But this is not a matter of good soldiers and bad apples. Certain kinds of combat, or duty, wear down the military codes of honor. The warrior's code frays, then the seams fall apart. Then horrible things begin to happen.

Warrior codes, whether in Sparta or in West Point, distinguish soldiers from murderers. Warriors have rules that govern when and how they kill. Learning them is part of the purpose of military training. We give soldiers the power to take lives, but only certain lives, in certain ways, at certain times, and for certain reasons.

The purpose of a code "is to restrain warriors, for their own good as much as for the good of others," writes Shannon E. French, an assistant professor of philosophy and author of "The Code of the Warrior: Exploring Warrior Values Past and Present." "The essential element of a warrior's code is that it must set definite limits on what warriors can and cannot do if they want to continue to be regarded as warriors, not murderers or cowards. For the warrior who has such a code, certain actions remain unthinkable, even in the most dire or extreme circumstances."

Yet the greatest danger of crossing that thin, sharp line that separates warriors from murderers is not in a war not among great powers, evenly matched. But it lurks when well-equipped armies are pitted against weak but merciless foes who hit and run and hide among civilians. It lurks in the places where people blow up public buildings to make a political point. There is no warrior code in that; a terrorist is a terrorist, however he justifies himself.

It is not the justness, or lack of it, in a war that makes this happen. Japanese soldiers, brutalized by experience in China, massacred and mutilated surrendering American soldiers in the Pacific in World War II, and Americans did it in turn to the Japanese when they found out about it. Tennessee soldiers who fought with honor and discipline at Shiloh in 1862 turned into murderous bushwhackers by 1864. Many soldiers in Hitler's army behaved to the end with utmost military discipline. Some of the Soviet troops who defeated the Nazis raped and pillaged their path halfway across Europe.

When warriors and murderers clash, the murderers risk nothing but death. The warriors risk more. "Their only protection is their code of honor," French writes. "The professional military ethics that restrain warriors -- that keep them from targeting those who cannot fight back, from taking pleasure in killing, from striking harder than is necessary, and that encourage them to offer mercy to their defeated enemies and even to help rebuild their countries and communities -- are also their own protection against becoming what they abhor."

[That's something written three years ago, thinking of the U.S. in Iraq. I could make the same point again in fresh words, with references to the current situation in the Mideast. But here it is with nothing tilted or spun for the sake of the case in view.]

Back in Three Days

by Michael J. Totten

Once again, I apologize for not being able to write much right now, especially at a time like this.

I am in a Third World country (to be revealed after I leave). I have limited access to telecommunications, and I have little or no time to write. I also have little or no time to moderate comments, and that is one of the reasons I felt the need to temporarily shut them down earlier. (They're back now. Please be reasonable. Thanks in advance.) I have not been in a time or place where I can deal with this crisis properly. Please cut me some slack. I'll be back in three days. Thanks again to Callimachus for helping me out when I really need it.

Some people have emailed and asked if my consulting job is just a ruse, that perhaps I'm in Iran and don't want to say so. I really am consulting right now, and no I am not in Iran.

I won't have much material for the blog because I'm not doing journalism work. But I did get a professional photojournalist camera, and I will have lots of better-quality photographs to publish.

The people of both Lebanon and Israel have my deepest sympathies. The Israelis do not deserve to be bombed by Hezbollah, and the Lebanese do not deserve to be bombed because of Hezbollah.

Hezbollah, though, deserves every last bomb that lands on their heads. There is a special circle in Hell dedicated to terrorists who hijack countries and use civilian populations as human shields. Hassan Nasrallah is using some of my personal friends as human shields, and for that I hope he dies twice.

UPDATE: A tiny scrap of good news. Thank you, Lisa.

Hezbollah Flexes its Missiles

By Callimachus:

NYT reports:

The power and sophistication of the missile and rocket arsenal that Hezbollah has used in recent days has caught the United States and Israel off guard, and officials in both countries are just now learning the extent to which the militant group has succeeded in getting weapons from Iran and Syria.

While the Bush administration has stated that cracking down on weapons proliferation is one of its top priorities, the arming of Hezbollah shows the blind spots of American and other Western intelligence services in assessing the threat, officials from across those governments said.

American and Israeli officials said the successful attack last Friday on an Israeli naval vessel was the strongest evidence to date of direct support by Iran to Hezbollah. The attack was carried out with a sophisticated antiship cruise missile, the C-802, an Iranian-made variant of the Chinese Silkworm, an American intelligence official said.

At the same time, American and Israeli officials cautioned that they had found no evidence that Iranian operatives working in Lebanon launched the antiship missile themselves.

But neither Jerusalem nor Washington had any idea that Hezbollah had such a missile in its arsenal, the officials said, adding that the Israeli ship had not even activated its missile defense system because intelligence assessments had not identified a threat from such a radar-guided cruise missile.

...

But it was Friday’s successful launching of a C-802 cruise missile that most alarmed officials in Washington and Jerusalem.

Iran began buying dozens of those sophisticated antiship missiles from the Chinese during the 1990’s, until the United States pressured Beijing to cease the sales.

Until Friday, however, Western intelligence services did not know that Iran had managed to ship C-802 missiles to Hezbollah.

Officials said it was likely that Iran trained Hezbollah fighters on how to successfully fire and guide the missiles, and that members of Iran’s Al Quds force — the faction of the Revolutionary Guards that trains foreign forces — would not necessarily have to be on the scene to launch the C-802.

At the same time, some experts said Iran was not likely to deploy such a sophisticated weapon without also sending Revolutionary Guard crews with the expertise to fire the missile.

One wonders what else they have we don't know about.

Turkey and the Kurds

Turkey signals it's prepared to enter Iraq

Turkey risks US anger over plan to attack Kurds

Force in Proportion

By Callimachus

One of the most interesting and in some ways infuriating books I've read recently is A.C. Grayling's "Among the Dead Cities," a book by philosopher that argues that much of the Allied air war -- British bombing of German cities and the U.S. bombings of Japanese cities, including the A-bomb attacks -- was an unjustifiable moral crime. I wrote about it (extensively) here but here's a short version, focusing on the salient points.

Grayling's central precept is that "the means used to conduct the war must be proportional to the ends sought." This notion is not entirely accepted today, he acknowledges, but he shows it to be the essential quality of a just war, as that concept has evolved since Aquinas.

He is not concerned here with war crimes law so much as morality. Grayling's non-pacifist stance allows him to invoke the doctrine of double effect: "No wrong is committed by the belligerent if the harm he does to innocents is an unaviodable ancillary to military operations -- even if such harm can be foreseen." In other words, if the primary goal is good and legitimate, the negative secondary effect, even if foreseen, is -- not good, but not wrong.

This, too, is a controversial notion and one rejected outright by strict pacifists, for it legitimatizes some collateral damage. Grayling says the proportion doctrine applies:

Take the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: if these were claimed to be attacks on targets of military value, assuming there to have been industrial units or military barracks in these cities which 'military necessity' demanded should be destroyed, dropping an atom bomb on them is the equivalent to chopping off a man's head to cure his toothache, such is the degree of disproportion involved.

He lists the large arguments in favor of such bombing, then pushes them back. Was area bombing worse than what the Germans did to the Jews or the Japanese did in Nanking? Certainly not. But "the fact that a wrong is less than a competing wrong does not make it a right."

Did bombing civilians hasten the end of the war and thus spare the Allies greater battlefield casualties? Some say so. But saving military lives by substituting civilian ones is, Grayling says, like using civilians as human shields on the battlefield.

What's left among justifications are the lesser ones of whether the bombing did in fact have a military objective important enough to justify the civilian deaths and wanton destruction of culture and property. Grayling enlists the many historians who have argued effectively against this conclusion.

Grayling declares precision bombing aimed at specific military targets as legitimate and morally acceptable. This exempts most of the raids by the American air forces in Europe from his indictment, since they targeted German oil facilities and similar targets. The American bombing campaign "proved highly effective" and "was proportionate and pertinent; it could also legitimately claim to be a necessary part of the effort to defeat Germany. The area bombing of civilian populations was not necessary."

But this has problems, too. The Americans, in avoiding the heavy concentration of anti-aircraft fire around military targets, dropped from high altitudes and often with little ability to really aim for what they were after. The fact that such military targets as rail junctions and large-scale processing and manufacturing industries tend naturally to be surrounded by dense blocks of homes meant this tactic could be, and often was, as lethal as deliberate city-bombing.

And how do the ethics of air power apply to a ground war? The U.S. Army pushed through central Germany in the spring of 1945, with the German military before it mostly reduced to small ill-trained units, but when the Americans met any sustained resistance they pulled back, called in artillery, and blasted whatever was in front of them, whether it was a wooded ridge or a farming village.

The experience of Neuhof in the Frankenhöhe was typical of hundreds of other small German towns. The 92nd Cav. Recon Squadron reached it toward evening on April 15 and ran into a battle group of young SS soldiers north of the town. The Americans held off and pounded the town with artillery all night. In the morning, they waited for the fog to lift, then blasted Neuhof with phosphorous shells, setting everything ablaze. They attacked again at noon with infantry and tanks, but they still met resistance, so they poured more artillery and tank fire into the town. They finally took it at 5 p.m. that evening.

By that time only a few buildings still stood intact in Neuhof, most of the ancient village having been reduced to a glowing pile of ash and shattered stone. Cries from the wounded, strewn about with a dozen or so dead, intermingled with shouts for help from those still fighting fires and the occasional shots from American tanks to create a Dantesque atmosphere. [Stephen G. Fritz, "Endkampf," p.170]

In measuring the "proportion" and "double effect" rules, a philosopher can be content with images of cutting off heads to cure toothaches. A military commander in the field has to deal in more tangible material. Am I more responsible for protecting the lives of the men in my command than I am for those in the enemy's ranks? Yes. What about their civilians? If I kill 50 enemy soldiers and 1 civilian, is that proportionate? Are 10 civilians? If we have a 60 percent chance of killing Hitler if we bomb a certain city of 20,000 on a certain date without warning, is that legitimate?

These are questions more pertinent to the modern face of warfare. But Grayling's book is mute on them. In the end he's shone such a narrow shaft of illumination that "Among the Dead Cities" doesn't add much to what Billy Sherman said about war and hell.

My question is, how does this apply to what's going on now between Israel and Hezbollah and the Palestinians? One obvious point of departure is that World War II was fought in a time when only nation-states had the ability to rain death from the air, and thus the responsibility to consider questions of proportionality and double effect. That's no longer the case.

No Easy Answers

The National Council of Churches wonders, why can't everyone just get along?

Is there ever to be an end to violence in the land we call holy? What has violence solved these last 60 years? What has violence solved these past weeks?

Maybe I've been in the cynical newspaper business too long, but isn't that rather simple-minded? "Give peace a chance" feels good when you chant it, but shouldn't we expect more hard thinking from theologists? What has chanting matras of peace from a safe distance solved these past 60 years other than making the chanters feel good?

What's odd is that after describing the all around mess and chaos of the present Middle East, the NCC calls upon "our own government and all governments, recognizing the success of former peace initiatives ...."

Well, it's a bit hard to recognize them amid the smoke and flying shards and collapsing apartment blocks, isn't it? If it doesn't stick for more than a few months, is it really success?

The NCC statement is absolutist pacifist. That's probably (but not certainly) what Jesus Would Have typed up in a press-release, right?

But maybe a better step, for serious thinkers about religion, would have been to take notice of the fact that not all the faiths involves have the same scriptural foundation. Or to consider the doctrine of just and appropriate use of force as it has been shaped by men and women of faith over the centuries since Augustine.

War Stories

By Callimachus:

Some quick looks around the Web:

Stratfor says the next likely scenario is an Insraeli invasion of Lebanon. And the likely collateral casualty will be Beirut.

1. Israel cannot tolerate an insurgency on its northern frontier; if there is one, it wants it farther north.

2. It cannot tolerate attacks on Haifa.

3. It cannot endure a crisis of confidence in its military

4. Hezbollah cannot back off of its engagement with Israel.

5. Syria can stop this, but the cost to it stopping it is higher than the cost of letting it go on.

It would appear Israel will invade Lebanon. The global response will be noisy. There will be no substantial international action against Israel. Beirut's tourism and transportation industry, as well as its financial sectors, are very much at risk.

* * *

The Independent tells the story of a survivor of one of the Haifa rocket attacks:

Yossi Amergi, a 46-year-old mechanic lay in the emergency ward of Haifa's Rambam hospital, tubes sticking out of his arm, raw skin showing through a bandage on his right leg.

A few hours earlier eight of his workmates were killed by a rocket that burst through the corrugated iron roof of their railway maintenance depot, sending arc lights crashing, splintering carriage windows and covering the concrete platforms with gore.

... "I heard a boom," he recalled. "My ears were bursting; blood was spurting from my leg. I lost friends, Jews and Arabs who worked together."

* * *
Some blogs are pointing to a news release by Lebanese Foundation for Peace, an organization of Lebanese Christian exiles, praising the Israeli attacks.

"We urge you to hit [Hezbollah] hard and destroy their terror infrastructure. It is not [only] Israel who is fed up with this situation, but the majority of the silent Lebanese in Lebanon who are fed up with Hezbollah and are powerless to do anything out of fear of terror retaliation."

Be that as it may, the press release begins with a very unfortunate preposition:

For the millions of Christian Lebanese, driven out of our homeland, "Thank you Israel," is the sentiment echoing from around the world.

I suspect they meant "from," or "on behalf of."

* * *

An L.A. Times piece (subscription required) paints the picture in other Arab capitals:

In Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, governments with ties to the United States have guardedly denounced Hezbollah for the attack on Israel that triggered the fighting -- even as the people began tacking up posters of Hassan Nasrallah, the bearded, turbaned cleric who heads the Shiite militia group and has vowed to bring "war on every level" to Israel's door.

The disconnect between the broad range of public support for Hezbollah and the unease felt by many Arab leaders is one of many reasons that Arab governments have been largely unable to mount an effective diplomatic response to Israel's 5-day-old bombing campaign.

Over the weekend, for example, the Arab League, meeting in Cairo, was able to agree on little more than a statement that urged all parties to avoid actions that may "undermine peace and security," appealed to the United Nations for intervention and unsurprisingly declared the Middle East peace process "dead."

On one level, the divide pits Syria and Iran, long-time backers of Hezbollah, against Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, whose Sunni-led governments fear the rise of Islamic militancy and the influence of Iran.

"The resistance will win, and the Israeli aggression will fail," said Syrian Information Minister Mohsen Bilal in a statement Sunday, pledging a "firm and direct response" if Syria is hit. "The resistance has hit deep inside Israel, and the enemy did not expect this."

Iran, meanwhile, threatened that Israel would suffer "unimaginable losses" if it widened the conflict with an attack on Syria.

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei on Sunday rallied behind Hezbollah, describing Israel as "an evil, cancerous tumor" in the midst of the Islamic world.

Turkey and the Kurds

By Callimachus

The Middle East this morning faces many possible next steps to Hell. Certainly one of them is a flare-up of fighting between Turks and Kurds, which would take place in a region Michael has criss-crossed several times and written about eloquently.

Now it looks like that possible next step is a step closer. Here's the AP version:

Turkey said Sunday that it was weighing an escalation of its fight against Kurdish rebels after the guerillas killed seven Turkish soldiers and a village guard.

The outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, wants autonomy for Turkey's Kurdish-dominated southeast. Its Saturday ambush, which Turkish officials said was launched from neighboring northern Iraq, drove the number of Turks it has killed since Thursday to 13.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan expressed outrage, signaling that Turkey could step up its battle against the rebel group. And high-ranking military, civilian, police and intelligence officials held an emergency meeting of Turkey's High Anti-Terrorism Council to discuss possible new measures against the guerrillas.

Here's the Al Jazeera version.

[I'm going to leave comments open here, but please don't use them to continue grudge matches begun elsewhere.]

Resistance?

By Callimachus

The caption currently accompanying this Associated Press photo, both online and on the AP media wire, is:

Syrian men touring Damascus streets on Sunday, July 16, 2006, in their cars, waving the flags of the Lebanese Hezbollah Party, in a show of solidarity with the Lebanese resistance. A picture of Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, is seen in the rear window of the front car.

Emphasis added. That strikes me as a politically loaded description of Hezbollah, and a word choice that's ... unfortunate, to say the best for AP.

Comments are Closed, and Some Clarifications - UPDATED BELOW

by Michael J. Totten

Insulting my personal friends while they are driven out of their homes as war refugees is not acceptable. My old neighborhood is under attack. My friends are terrified and in danger. How on earth do you expect me to feel about this right now? If you can't factor these things into account before bloviating in the comments, then you do not get to comment. Comments are closed until further notice.

In the meantime, allow me to clarify a few things so (some of you) can stop thinking I've decided Israel is the enemy or that Hassan Nasrallah deserves anything but a headstone or a war crimes tribunal.

Obviously Hezbollah started this and Hezbollah is the main problem. Not only did they drag my second home into a war, the bastards also threatened me personally. So I hardly see the point in telling you what I think about them right about now. I'll get to them later.

I sympathize one hundred percent with what Israel is trying to do here. But they aren't going about it the right way, and they're punishing far too many of the wrong people. Lord knows I could be wrong, and the situation is rapidly changing, but at this particular moment it looks bad for Israel, bad for Lebanon, bad for the United States, good for Syria, and good for Iran.

There is no alternate universe where the Lebanese government could have disarmed an Iranian-trained terrorist/guerilla militia that even the Israelis could not defeat in years of grinding war. There is no alternate universe where it was in Lebanon's interest to restart the civil war on Israel's behalf, to burn down their country all over again right at the moment where they finally had hope after 30 years of convulsive conflict and Baath Party overlordship.

The Lebanese government should have asked for more help from the international community. The Lebanese government should have been far less reactionary in its attitude toward the Israelis. They made more mistakes than just two, but I'd say these are the principal ones.

What should the Israelis have done instead? They should have treated Hezbollahland as a country, which it basically is, and attacked it. They should have treated Lebanon as a separate country, which it basically is, and left it alone. Mainstream Lebanese have no problem when Israel hammers Hezbollah in its little enclave. Somebody has to do it, and it cannot be them. If you want to embolden Lebanese to work with Israelis against Hezbollah, or at least move in to Hezbollah's bombed out positions, don't attack all of Lebanon.

Israel should not have bombed Central Beirut, which was almost monolithically anti-Hezbollah. They should not have bombed my old neighborhood, which was almost monolithically anti-Hezbollah. They should not have bombed the Maronite city of Jounieh, which was not merely anti-Hezbollah but also somewhat pro-Israel.

Israelis thinks everyone hates them. It isn't true, especially not in Lebanon. But they will make it so if they do not pay more attention to the internal characteristics of neighboring countries. "The Arabs" do not exist as a bloc except in the feverish dreams of the Nasserists and the Baath.

UPDATE: I hate closing the comments, and I'm sorry for having to do that. I just simply will not stand seeing some of my dear friends insulted -- some of whom are Americans as well as Lebanese -- while their neighborhoods are on fire and they're being driven to Syria -- Syria! -- as war refugees.

The following comment, sent by email from Shalom Deen, is what I would like to see if I could stand to keep comments open.

Guys- This is one of the greatest blogs for honest analysis of what goes on in the Middle East, so let's try to maintain civility and understanding here as heated emotions are sorted out (which, admittedly, might take a while). Obviously, both Israel and Lebanon are very close to the hearts of many of this blogs' readers and writers. The current situation is going to introduce some strong feelings, and since most participants here are reasonable, intelligent, and informed people, let's just be careful about things getting too heated.

LP certainly has the right at this point to rant, as does Michael. Lebanon is obviously getting the short end of the stick at the moment, and it remains to be seen whether Israel's actions are responsibly calculated for the desired result--and most of all, whether they succeed--or if they're just looking to inflict damage. None of us really know the answer at this point. So at the very least, no matter what our opinion is regarding Israel's operations, we should be understanding of the fear and frustrations of those who are affected--especially when they're the good guys.

For Lebanon it's not just scores killed and hundreds wounded; it's sweat, blood, tears, and money invested in an infrastructure and a fledgling economy that will now take months or even years to rebuild. Whatever the fault of the Lebanese government (and reasonable people can argue the extent of it), it is not the time to berate those who have been passionately committed to peace and dialogue for being very angry at the moment.

I pray (my agnosticism notwithstanding) for the safety of all, and for the successful elimination of those vile Hizbullah murderers. Hopefully, some good will come of this in the end.

My Friend is a Refugee

by Michael J. Totten

My friend Lebanon.Profile at the Lebanese Political Journal once guest blogged for me while I was in Egypt. He is one of the most open-minded people in Lebanon when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict, and I have linked to some of his posts in the past on this very subject. Israel has lost him. And he has lost his country.

You've made this country unliveable for the people fighting to disarm Hezbollah.

Guess what? I'm leaving. Yep. Me.

Where am I going? Syria. Didn't want to, but I have to. The people we marched against are the ones you sent us begging to. The people who assassinated our leaders, kept us from having an operating democracy, and who armed Hezbollah are laughing it up because they've won the game because of you.

Bashar Assad said Lebanon would be destroyed if he left. I didn't know the Israelis would play into his game. It's not surprising that Syrian-allied Hezbollah started the mess, but you guys are just vicious.

All my Hezbollah supporting friends are sticking around. They call the rest of us cowards. I guess we are. We want to do scientific research. We want our children to learn how to play the piano. We want to watch our stock porfolios burgeon. We can't do that here any more.

I tried to sympathize with you. I didn't support Hezbollah, and if you look at the posts before this conflict began, I was maligning the political parties that oppose Hezbollah for not doing enough.

I even gave you guys the benefit of the doubt at the beginning of this, as did most Lebanese. Even the Shia, Christians, and Druze in South Lebanon understood your position. Not any more.

Oh, well. I'm a refugee.

War!

by Michael J. Totten

I'm sorry to be gone and (mostly) unable to blog at a horrible time like this, when a city I love and used to live in is under attack by an ally of my country. I'm scrambling to keep up with what's going on while trying to do my temporary full-time and all-consuming job, which ends in a week. Meanwhile I try, as much as is possible, to console some of my friends while their country burns, while fighter jets scream over head, while columns of filthy black smoke blot out the sun.

Israel has a right - nay, a moral obligation - to defend itself and rescue the kidnapped. But what kind of down-the-rabbit-hole war is this, where the guilty parties - the Baath regime in Syria and the Jihad regime in Iran - sleep warm in their beds while Beirut, a libertine city they hate, takes the punishment for them?

The dictators in the region have always been happy to fight the Israelis to the last Palestinian. Now it looks like they're happy to fight the Israelis to the last Lebanese, too. And why not? Lebanon is a relatively liberal and almost half Christian sort-of democracy. Can't have any of that in the region if you're a totalitarian mullah. It suits Tehran just fine if the Jews slug it out with such people.

Bashar al-Assad promised to make Lebanon burn if his Syrian occupation soldiers were forced out of the country. No doubt he is ecstatic at this latest turn of events. His principal enemies are killing each other instead of teaming up against him like they would in a better and more intelligent world.

Israel and Lebanon are the two freest countries in the Middle East. They are the only countries, aside from tortured Iraq, that hold unrigged elections for parliaments and heads of state. The tyrants to their east have pulled quite a coup, haven't they? The two countries friendliest to America and to liberal Western values are now shooting each other. (The Lebanese army, which has cooperated with Israel in the past behind the scenes, is now firing anti-aircraft guns at Israeli planes.)

It's a catastrophe for Lebanon, which is now under siege because Iran took it hostage. It's a catastrophe for Israel, which could have, and should have, worked toward a peace process with the Lebanese. Lebanese are (were?) far and away the most likely of all Arabs to sign a genuine treaty at some point down the road. And it's a catastrophe for the United States. We have few friends in the region already, none of whom get along well with each other as it is.

The Middle East was in a holding pattern until two days ago. No one knew what would happen next, what the next big thing would be. Now we know. The democracies suffer and bleed and turn on each other while their enemies, our enemies, sit back and watch. The Baath regime and the Jihad regime rest easy knowing that Israel is too cautious or gutless to take the fight to the source and chooses to hit the country of the Cedar Revolution instead.

Closer to War

... or already there?

By Callimachus

Grist for the conversation mill. I don't necessarily agree with all or any of what's said in all or any of these, but they advance arguments worth considering, or refuting:

Ammar Abdulhamid:

All wishful thinking aside, I just don’t think Israel is going to lose this round, and I think the going-ons in Lebanon are only a prelude for the eventual and now inevitable confrontation with Syria, with all sort of disastrous implications and consequences for our people. Some people see this differently I know, they see the Assads and Mullahs emerging as serious contenders in the arena once again, and that they have embarrassed the US and Israel. I kindly disagree. But, be that as it may, the winner of this round notwithstanding, we, the people, are the ones who will get screwed.

Doha:

Sayyid Nasrallah is still alive and declaring an open war. Where is our President? Where are our Ministers? Prime Minister? Members of Parliament? All these institutions and the guardians of these institutions are obsolete at this point. Nasrallah is leading the show. He's defying everything and everyone. He is assuming the position of the guardian of the Prophet's Family, against all odds. This is not about Lebanon anymore; this is about Nasrallah's pride.

Michael Ledeen:

No one should have any lingering doubts about what’s going on in the Middle East. It’s war, and it now runs from Gaza into Israel, through Lebanon and thence to Iraq via Syria. There are different instruments, ranging from Hamas in Gaza to Hezbollah in Syria and Lebanon and on to the multifaceted “insurgency” in Iraq. But there is a common prime mover, and that is the Iranian mullahcracy, the revolutionary Islamic fascist state that declared war on us 27 years ago and has yet to be held accountable.

Mark Perry:

Hezbollah and Israel stand along this border every day observing each other through binoculars and waiting for an opportunity to kill each other. They are at war. They have been for 25 years, no one ever declared a cease-fire between them. … They stand on the border every day and just wait for an opportunity. And on Tuesday morning there were two Humvees full of Israeli soldiers, not under observation from the Israeli side, not under covering fire, sitting out there all alone. The Hezbollah militia commander just couldn’t believe it -- so he went and got them.

The Israeli captain in charge of that unit knew he had really screwed up, so he sent an armored personnel carrier to go get them in hot pursuit, and Hezbollah led them right through a minefield.

Now if you’re sitting in Tehran or Damascus or Beirut, and you are part of the terrorist Politburo so to speak, you have a choice. With your head sunk in your hands, thinking "Oh my God," you can either give [the kidnapped soldiers] back and say "Oops, sorry, wrong time" or you can say, "Hey, this is war."

It is absolutely ridiculous to believe that the Hezbollah commander on the ground said Tuesday morning, "Go get two Israeli soldiers, would you please?”

Israel vs. Lebanon

By Callimachus

So they say:

The violence pitting Arabs and Jews in the Middle East has spilled from the physical into the virtual world, as combatants on both sides lay siege to the Internet sites of one another.

And why should we be left out?

Honestly, though, I'm on a learning curve trying to figure out what's happening. It's times like this I used to go to Michael's site to see what insights he had from his ringside seat. Instead, I'm here with more questions than answers.

Make this an open thread on the current Mideast crisis. What sites or publications do you look to for unbiased information? Or is it more a matter of taking a bite from both sides and trying to find the center of gravity between them?

Also, I've had a nagging feeling that the current Israeli government, being headed by men who, I think, lack the military leadership experience and hawkish track record of many of their predecessors, might feel it has to hit back especially hard in its first test. Is that possibly the case here?

UPDATE: Just after writing this I see my blog-partner Reader_I_Am also is in "read and learn" mode, and she's got a list started of some of the sites that are putting up good information, including the indispensible Lebanese Political Journal.

Bloggers try to emulate journalists in being the first to report. But sometimes it's difficult to write an intelligent opinion until the smoke clears a bit and you can see what's happening.

And Now for Something Completely Different

By Callimachus

Here's one I used to do at my home place, based on one of my odd-ball hobbies. I don't know if it will entertain you folks or not; consider it a summer diversion. Are these pairs of modern English words related to each other or not?

Click to see the answers.

1. cult/occult

2. climate/climax

3. priest/preacher

4. defense/offense

5. wine/vine

6. book/beech

7. grave (n.)/gravel

8. proper/property

1. NOT RELATED

Cult comes from Latin cultus, which meant "care, cultivation, worship," but originally "tended, cultivated." It is the past particple of colere "to till" (the source of colony, among other modern English words, and ultimately related to the root of cycle and circle).

Occult, on the other hand , is from Latin occultus "hidden, concealed, secret," which is the past participle of the verb occulere "cover over, conceal." This is a compound of ob "over" and a verb related to celare "to hide." The ultimate roots of this are in a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European base *kel- "conceal," which also has yielded, via Latin, cell and cellar, and, via its Germanic branch, holster, hole, and helm.

2. RELATED

They come from a pair of Greek nouns, klima "region, zone," and klimax "ladder," both derived from the base of the noun klinein "to slope."

The notion behind klima is "the slope of the Earth from equator to pole." The Greek geographers used the angle of the sun to define the Earth's zones.

From Greek, the words took off down diverging paths. The Romans picked up clima (genitive climatis) in its sense of "region, slope of the Earth," and by Chaucer's time it had made its way into English. But by c.1600 the meaning had shifted from "region" to "weather associated with that region."

Greek klimax "ladder," meanwhile, acquired a metaphoric meaning "propositions rising in effectiveness." The rhetorical meaning evolved in English through "series of steps by which a goal is achieved," to "escalating steps," to (1789) "high point," a usage credited by the Oxford English Dictionary "to popular ignorance." The meaning "orgasm" is first recorded in 1918, apparently coined by birth-control pioneer Marie Stopes as a more accessible word than orgasm.

3. NOT RELATED

Priest is Old English preost, shortened from the older Germanic form represented by Old High German prestar and Old Frisian prestere. All are very early Germanic borrowings from Late Latin presbyter "presbyter, elder." Presumably the words came to the Germanic tribes along with the Christian missionaries who converted them.

The Latin word in turn was a borrowing of Greek presbyteros "an elder," which also was an adjective meaning "older." It is the comparative form of presbys "old."

This word is something of a mystery, but one suggested origin is that it meant "one who leads the cattle," and is a compound of *pres- "before" and the root of bous "cow."

Preach also was an Old English word borrowed from Church Latin. The Anglo-Saxon form was predician, but the word was re-borrowed in Middle English in the Frenchified form preachen.

The source of both forms is Late Latin predicare "to proclaim publicly, announce" (in Medieval Latin "to preach"), a compound of præ- "forth" and dicare "to proclaim, to say."

4. RELATED

The base is a Latin verb (found only in compounds) fendere "to strike, push." Add the prefix de- "from, away" and you get defendere "ward off, protect." Add the prefix ob "against" and you get offendere "to strike against, stumble." The sense of "commit a fault, displease" also was in Latin.

5. RELATED

In fact, pretty much the same word. The Latin root is vinum "wine." From this came vinea "vine, vineyard," which passed into Old French as vigne and thence into Middle Enaglish as vine.

Latin vimun had gone directly into Old English (and most other Germanic languages) as win, which became modern English wine.

The Latin word for "wine" also passed into Old Church Slavonic (vino), Lithuanian (vynas), Welsh (gwin), and Old Irish (fin).

The ultimate root of the Latin word appears to be from a lost language that was spoken in the Mediterranean before the Indo-European peoples arrived there more than 6,000 years ago, which makes it an ancient word indeed. Its other descendants include Greek oinos and words for "wine" in Armenian, Hittite, and non-Indo-European Georgian and West Semitic (cf. Arabic wain, Hebrew yayin, Ethiopian wayn).

6. RELATED

At least we think so. The traditional derivation of the common Germanic word for "book" (Old English boc, German Buch) is from Proto-Germanic *bokjon "beech" (Old English bece, German Buche).

The notion is that the original written documents of the northern European peoples were beechwood tablets on which runes were inscribed, but the derivation also may be from the tree itself; people still carve their initials into them. This is not so far-fetched, as Latin and Sanskrit also have words for "writing" that are based on tree names ("birch" and "ash," respectively).

The base of beech and its Germanic relatives is Proto-Indo-European *bhagos a tree name that has come to mean different things in different places (cf. Greek phegos "oak," Latin fagus "beech," Russian buzina "elder"). It's not unusual for tree names to switch around like this.

The ground sense of the Proto-Indo-European word may well be "edible," if it is related, as some thing, to Greek phagein "to eat." Beech mast was an ancient food source for agricultural animals across a wide stretch of Europe.

7. NOT RELATED

Grave is Old English græf "grave, ditch," from a Proto-Germanic *graban that also yielded Old High German grab "grave, tomb;" Old Norse gröf "cave," and Gothic graba "ditch"). This evolved from a Proto-Indo-European root *ghrebh-/*ghrobh- "to dig, to scratch, to scrape," which also yielded Old Church Slavonic grobu "grave, tomb"). IT is unrelated to the adjective grave.

Gravel is from Old French gravele, a diminutive of grave "sand, seashore," which came into French from one of the Celtic peoples who once inhabited Gaul. IT is related, thus, to Welsh gro "coarse gravel," Breton grouan, and Cornish grow "gravel."

8. RELATED

The roots of both are in Latin proprius "one's own, special, particular to itself."

The Latin word came directly into English (via French) as proper by the early 13th century. In English it originally meant "adapted to some purpose, fit, apt;" the meaning "socially appropriate" is first recorded in 1704. The original sense is preserved in proper name and astronomical proper motion.

Latin proprietas was a noun formed from proprius that literally meant "special character." The Romans coined this to be an exact translation of Greek idioma once they began to absorb Greek ideas. But the Latin word also took on a specific sense of "ownership, property, propriety," in which sense it passed through French and into English by 1300.

But the earliest English usages were in the more vague sense of "nature, quality." The typical modern meaning "possession" was rare before the 17th century. One of the dangers of interpreting old texts is that you may encounter familiar words with meanings that have shifted or narrowed.

Latin proprius is a compound formed from the phrase pro privo, literally "for the individual."

Eisenhower's Ghost

By Callimachus

When President Bush visited Hungary, he helped the nation commemorate its failed 1956 uprising against Soviet domination. But Charles Gati wrote that a Clinton-style apology would have been more in order:

The truth is that at a critical juncture in the Cold War, when Hungarians rose against their Soviet oppressors, the United States abandoned them. After 13 days of high drama, hope and despair, the mighty Soviet army prevailed. For its part, Washington offered a sad variation on "NATO": no action, talk only. The Eisenhower administration's policy of "liberation" and "rollback" turned out to be a hoax -- hypocrisy mitigated only by self-delusion. The more evident, if unstated, goal was to roll back the Democrats from Capitol Hill rather than liberate Central and Eastern Europe from Soviet tyranny.

Gati is an academic and a researcher. It is apparent from his column that he's formed his opinions about 1956 at least in part from digging he's done in the CIA's archives to research a book. They also owe much, it seems, to material from Soviet archives that were available to researchers after the fall of the USSR.

We now know from Russian archives that the Hungarians did have a chance to gain some of what they sought.

I have every sympathy with the Hungarians. I remember reading a white paper account of the events of 1956 when I was a teenager and thinking it was one of the great tragedies of the Cold War. And seeing how the Red Army brought in its Asian units to grind the boot down on genuine factory workers gave the lie to the whole cardboard edifice of Marxist-Leninist rhetoric.

But Gati seems to me to be in violation of one of my cardinal rules: In judging the acts and words of people of the past, judge from what they knew, not what you know now.

The United States, according to the usual version of what happened, could not help the Hungarians because any action would have triggered a military confrontation with Moscow. This explanation misses the point: There were actions short of war that Washington might have taken. It could certainly have urged the Hungarians to temporize and pursue limited, evolutionary goals. It could have taken the issue to the United Nations before, and not after, the Soviet crackdown. In an imaginative move toward post-Stalin detente, it could have proposed immediate talks about withdrawing American forces from a small Western European country in exchange for Soviet withdrawal from Hungary.

Instead, Gati writes, and probably correctly, "[T]he United States had no means available to aid, let alone 'liberate,' Hungary. For despite all the talk about 'liberation' since 1952, neither the National Security Council nor the State Department had devised plans for diplomatic or any other form of assistance. Nor was the CIA ready."

Thanks to people like Gati, we know what the American and Soviet leaders of 1956 said among themselves. But they couldn't hear each other at the time.

Gati says other U.S. approaches to the Hungary crisis would have succeeded. But even after you've read all the archives, you don't know that. Once you take a single step outside the historical flow of events, once you introduce a single "what-if," the butterfly effect kicks in and the entire course of events becomes utterly unpredictable.

It is possible to see similarities between the 1956 uprisings in Poland and Hungary and the events of 1989: A new leader in the East was denouncing old tyrants, admitting mistakes, and promising more openness and better lives for people. Subject populations reacted by rising up not only against their local overlords but the entire Soviet system.

But the similarities mask deep differences. Khrushchev, for instance, was under intense pressure from Mao not to let the Soviet system run off the rails. The audacity, or genius -- or luck -- of Reagan was to see that the moment had come to press against the rotten regime. The mass rising from below in Eastern Europe was strong enough in 1989, and the change at the top was real enough, and the hollowness of the regimes was so advanced, that the circumstances were just right.

But the main thing Gati seems to have forgotten is the awful dilemma that chilled every day of the Cold War. Every international crisis brought a risk of nuclear annihilation. After a few of them in the first post-war years, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. learned to avoid them -- without making that too obviously the main rule of the game.

Stability always is the ideal for world powers, in any era, but in the Cold War it became the only guarantee of survival. Both sides, though they occasionally tested each other (especially at times of a change in administration in Washington) quickly retreated into the fetish for stability. When the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, Kennedy in public used it as an excuse to, correctly, lambaste the Soviet "worker's paradise" ideal as a sham. But privately he accepted it: "It's not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war."

The U.S. invested thousands of lives and millions of dollars in maintaining a status quo that was morally indefensible and that compromised our ideals. We muzzled our commitment to democracy and embraced dictators if they pronounced themselves anti-communists. And what was the inhumane doctrine of "mutually assured destruction" but hostage-taking on a global scale?

It was a system that elevated stability over justice. What was the alternative? Bold moves only drove the world closer to the thermonuclear precipice. Before it's all forgotten, let someone write down the helpless terror felt by average people during the Cuban Missile Crisis; how my parents said good-bye to each other every morning as he went to work, crying and thinking this would be the day the skies blossomed obliteration all over them.

The Cold War need to deter a nuclear war at all costs short of surrender evolved in the minds of leaders from being a temporary and very regret