Robert Gates and Amir Peretz, two ignoramuses with no military experience command the military professionals. Classic military doctrine, practiced by Germans in the WWI, postulates that political leadership should state the objectives and relinquish the prosecution of war to military professionals. Lyndon Johnson’s micromanagement and Bush’s absence of realizable political objectives underscore the same problem. Unable even to formulate goals of the war, political bureaucrats manage it and determine the strategy.
Both in Vietnam and Iraq, total victory was misperceived as the military objective. Not so. Heavy punishment is equally viable strategy. Fixed defense against communism was akin to the Maginot line. Large-scale threats are efficiently countered by mobile defense. Israelis offer an example in the Golan tank battle in 1973: retreating and maneuvering, we stopped Syrian onslaught and inflicted unbearable losses on the enemies. In fighting a numerically hugely superior enemy, the goal is to make a victory non-feasible for him rather than to achieve a total victory yourself. Peripheral wars, vehement fighting for every country threatened by communist or Islamic fundamentalist takeover sufficiently checks the enemy’s expansion. The West should punish and inflict immense costs on culprits. Victory is defined in the large perspective of the West against the world of Islam. Pacification of Iraq is a minor intermediate step in that war, politically no more beneficial than just punishing Iraq. The world of Islam would remain an enemy of the West regardless of the Iraqi developments.
Muslims must be considered as a single army. Prevailing against its Iraqi division is meaningless: the logistics of war allows other parties, from Iran to Al Qaeda, to step in. Rather, the West should control its costs and inflict only feasible damage on the enemy. Total aerial destruction of the Iraqi military and oil facilities would cost a tiny fraction of the current war, end in weeks, and provide larger military and political benefits than the current indecisive conflict. The Western military advantages are the concentration and projection of firepower; in protracted ground wars, guerrillas and local defenders win because the West cannot realize its military advantages in urban combat. Similarly, Taliban should be punished by defoliating campaigns against the poppy plantations, enforcement of no-Afghani-heroin policy on Western drug dealers (security services are capable of reaching such an arrangement with criminals), and either the moderate financing of mujahedeen bandits to engage Taliban military without overcoming them, or isolating Afghanistan with aerial attacks on trucks crossing the border. America would be free then to deal with the extreme threat of nuclear Iran, Egypt, and Libya.
Israel, for her part, must finally accept that preemption upon the smallest provocation is the only workable strategy for a country without the depth of defense. Don’t break your head on how to setp up the “moderate” PLO-Fatah against the Hamas, rather keep destroying Palestinian government buildings in retaliation for rocket launches and suicide bombers.
