A farewell to 'glorious' war

Shlomo Ben-Ami H | Wednesday March 7, 2007 00:00

Donald Rumsfeld's dogma of military 'transformation' - the technological upgrading of an army's capacity to enable decisive victory with fewer troops - failed resoundingly in Iraq.

For could Israel, with its overwhelming technological advantage, defeat Hezbollah in Lebanon. More rockets and missiles fell on northern Israel in 33 days than hit Britain during all of World War II. So the Israelis now must reckon with an entirely new phenomenon: an asymmetric entity, Hezbollah, with nation-state firepower.

So the fierce debate over whether to increase the size of American ground forces in Iraq is beside the point. Neither the Soviet experience in Afghanistan in the 1980's nor NATO's today vindicates the claim that troop numbers are what matter most on the modern battlefield. When geo-strategic military front lines are non-existent, as in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, mass no longer equals victory. The great military thinker Carl von Clausewitz's notion of 'decisive battles' as the 'centre of gravity' of war is simply irrelevant to conflicts that have no visible 'centre of gravity.'

Indeed, while wars from the time of Hannibal's defeat of the Romans in 216 B.C. to the Gulf War of 1991 had this centre of gravity, with a massive concentration of force capable of bringing an enemy to its knees, such industrial inter-state wars have now become a historical anachronism. Most states nowadays lie within borders that are widely accepted as legitimate, and they increasingly abide by international norms of behaviour in times of war.

In fact, the obligation of states to abide by humanitarian rules of conduct while their enemies are free to barbarise warfare is what makes asymmetric wars especially insoluble. Moreover, in an era of global media and international war crimes courts, the criteria for states' use of military force have become more complex than ever.

Inter-state combat may still occur where strategic front lines can be found, such as Israel's border with Syria, India's border with Pakistan, and the border dividing the two Koreas. In such cases, war, as the Egyptians showed in 1973, might still serve as an avenue to resolving a conflict. The Syrians might be tempted to launch an offensive against Israel with the objective of breaking the deadlock over the future of the Golan Heights.

However, in the case of Kashmir, the asymmetric conflict currently fought by proxies and terrorist groups might not degenerate into all-out war precisely because India and Pakistan have mutual nuclear deterrence. Indeed, such asymmetric conflicts through proxies have become the new conventional way that states avoid the price of a general war.

This changing nature of the battlefield essentially means that war as a conclusive event in an international conflict has become obsolete. The facile Clausewitzian wisdom that military action ultimately leads to a political solution is no longer convincing. 'Victory' cannot bring peace, simply because there will always be a war after the war.

Thus, for example, the conventional war in Kosovo lasted for two months, only to usher in a six-year asymmetric conflict. Likewise, America's three-week 'shock and awe' campaign in Iraq in 2003 ended in 'victory,' but opened the gates of hell for occupiers and ordinary Iraqis alike. And six months after the merciless pounding of southern Lebanon, Hezbollah is as strong as it was before. Nor does the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan six years after their overthrow now seen too far-fetched. It is during the war after the war that the occupier's inferiority is revealed, with constant reinforcements increasing the number of targets for the insurgents far more quickly than the occupier can adapt to the changing battlefield. The insurgents in Iraq, as the British admit, were able in just three years to cope with their enemies' technological superiority in a way that the IRA in Northern Ireland was unable to do in 30 years.

The Iraq war and Israel's wars with Hamas and Hezbollah show the limits of what military power can achieve, as well as vindicate diplomacy and conflict resolution. When it comes to tackling complex political and cultural conflicts, forging international and regional alliances around a legitimate objective is more important than sheer military capacity.

That said, it would be dangerously naive to believe that the exercise of power and the capacity to intimidate are unnecessary. But the objectives of the use of force need to be linked to the recognition that in today's asymmetric conflicts, victory is no longer achieved on the battlefield. Only better-informed foreign policies that can address the genuine anxieties of civilisations in crisis will yield more sustainable results. (www.project-syndicate.org)

Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former Israeli foreign minister who now serves as the vice-president of the Toledo International Centre for Peace, is the author of Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy.