Posted on 04/19/2004 3:43:53 PM PDT by yonif
"Fighting against suicide bombers, you have to follow the assumptions that modern society uses when confronting viral epidemics," says Dr. Hanan Shai (Schwartz), an Israel Defense Forces reserve colonel and an expert on political and military strategy.
Dr. Shai expounded this thesis in an address to the first international conference on limited conflict, held in March in Tel Aviv, and sponsored by the IDF. Shai admits that the analogy between human beings and viruses sounds infelicitous, however, he adds, "The confrontation with terror wrought by suicide strikers is like the fight against viruses in terms of the inability to seize the [terror] leaders and the visibility of the suicide assailants. The remedy in the fight against terror can be compared to medicine against viruses."
Alongside his academic work - at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Bar-Ilan University, Shai serves as a strategic consultant for the defense establishment. Among other subjects, his expertise extends to the topic of asymmetric warfare. Shai contends that military commanders in the Western world, along with academics who deal with military-strategic studies, have failed to draw a genuine distinction between terror caused by suicide strikers and other forms of terror. One conclusion he reaches in his work is that "in wars fought by regular armies against terror organizations or entities which do not have an army, and especially in the fight against suicide strike terrorists, the assassination of leaders is legitimate."
As a strategic consultant, Shai has ready access to offices of top IDF officers. Some of them trained under him. In the early 1980s, after studying the performance of officers during the Yom Kippur and Lebanon Wars, Shai concluded that the IDF's senior officer corps lacked knowledge in the art of warfare. He proposed new courses of study, and the IDF General Staff supported his initiative: Shai headed the founding staff of the IDF Staff and Command College, and then became the institute's first director.
From 1983-1988, after being promoted to full colonel, he headed the Command & Control Systems and Doctrines Branch at the IDF. Shai observes that nomenclature for types of warfare that has been coined in recent decades - terms such as asymmetrical warfare and low intensity conflict - is not new. Great army commanders in the past confronted problems of asymmetrical warfare, terror and guerrilla conflict. But in this historic context, suicide strikers pose an unprecedented and extraordinary challenge.
Suicide terrorists, contends Shai, represent a type of warfare that civilization has never experienced. Such terror strives to return human society to circumstances that held thousands of years ago, to early pagan periods before monotheistic codes were upheld. Faith in one God sanctified the value of human life - this value did not apply in pagan times, Shai believes.
"The battlefield is an arena of uncertainty, but it is not a theater of chaos," claims Shai. "Paradoxically, the human thirst for life enabled human warfare to be waged in a logical fashion, in a manner consistent with principles and moral codes. The value of life created circumstances in which it became possible for the losing side to surrender, either because of the lack of utility to be gained from continued fighting, or because of the heavy price to be paid for refusal to surrender. The effort to force the enemy to surrender, and not to massacre it, runs like a supplementary thread throughout the history of warfare, alongside the death and destruction. Some of the great military commanders became exemplary figures because they forced their enemies to make a choice, to decide between alternatives of continued fighting or surrender; the option of surrender led to a relatively low level of casualties for both sides."
Suicide strikes, Shai argues, represent a post-modern form of terror. They differ from modern warfare in several respects. Perhaps the most conspicuous difference relates to the objective. In modern warfare, antagonists on both sides of the conflict have an identical purpose - to attain prosperity and happiness in this world. In post-modern conflict, the aggressor side lacks an interest in victory. In many cases, the objective is the struggle itself - the goal is to sow destruction, despair and fear, while enduring enormous pain and sacrifice, which guarantee bliss in the next world. Such wars cannot conclude with anything other than the destruction of the enemy, says Shai. The suicide terrorist phenomenon, he adds, leads to the erosion of the values of civil society. It breeds escapism, and the cheapening of human life.
Shai says these conclusions have yet to be learned by Western society.
Shai: "Western society didn't grasp soon enough that it is facing an enemy that goes into battle in the expectation that it will not come out alive. This is a new situation."
Can you discern any logic in suicide strike terror?
Shai: "Those who are behind the suicide strikes have an objective, a strategy and a system. The aim of the terror, as its perpetrators announce, is to destroy open society and the advances of modern life. Their strategy relies on exploiting the advantages of open society in order to reap chaos - in order to protect itself against such terror, modern society will gradually have to become totalitarian. The system is the placement of suicide strikers within open society, and attacking that society from within - bin Laden's idea is one of evil genius. Via a relatively small amount of terror attacks and of the loss of life and property, bin Laden has significantly damaged individual rights, compared to the situation before September 11, 2001.
"Today travelers to New York and Washington are prohibited from standing up on flights, even to go to the bathroom - such a right was not even denied to prisoners in the Soviet gulag."
How can Western society defend itself against suicide terrorists?
"Warfare against suicide bombers, even if it is waged the right way, cannot bring about a strategic victory. Take, for example, the U.S. Army. Fighting the Iraqi army, the American forces had no problem. But in a conflict against the various tribal groups in Iraq, they have a problem. Their army isn't built for this sort of conflict, and it has become ineffective. That's what happened in Vietnam. It's only a matter of time before the Americans do one of two things: they will use a nuclear bomb, or they'll get out of there by the skin of their teeth. It all depends upon the number of casualties that mount there."
Will the next stage involve a mega-terror attack?
"If the enemy is smart, it won't carry out a mega attack. An attack of that scope will give legitimacy to the sort of response that would not be utilized in other circumstances, for moral reasons."
So this means that Western society is helpless in the confrontation with suicide terrorists?
"In the era of suicide strike terror, the army has lost its monopoly on warfare. So warfare must be moved to another level. Terror should be severed from all the sources that allow it to operate. In this connection, I bring up the example of the world's preparation in the fight against the SARS epidemic. You have to fight against terror as you fight against viruses.
"Terror is invisible. Terror cells in the U.S. are amorphous. Still, an extraordinary amount of planning and coordination is needed to carry out a terror attack of the scale of September 11, 2001 in the U.S. It takes a lot of money. Everything runs through a leadership, which is located far away. And this leadership uses systems which modern society has itself developed: computerized banking, cell phones, the Internet. These are achievements of modern society and terror capitalizes on them."
Shai continues: "Modern society has an advantage in that all of the attainments are its own. Societies and countries that provide support to terror can be cut off from the systems of modern society. Intelligence, not force, is needed in the fight against terror. We must move warfare from the military battlefield to the economic-financial-media arena. This will be a global blitzkrieg - countries or societies supporting terror will be isolated in a forthright, complete manner."
The world will agree to this?
"Society must understand that there is a problem threatening it. The enemy creates chaos. Suicide bombings create chaos on the battlefield. An antagonist has arisen that cannot be threatened or deterred. This is what society still fails to understand. And even when it grasps the reality, there remains the problem of forging a consensus due to tensions in society between various values: liberty, truth, nationalism."
"As in the fight against a virus, we must take a small part of the virus itself in order to develop antibodies, and so strengthen our resistance. We will have to adopt a limited amount of totalitarianism as a defense against complete totalitarianism. For instance: the Internet is supposed to be an open, free system. When there is no other alternative, security systems of supervision and monitoring must be utilized, as a counter-weight [to the use of the Net by terrorists]."
Do you believe it is legitimate to kill terrorist leaders?
"War is generally conducted between armies; each side tries to convince the other that it is stronger. When the other side does not build an army, and relies instead on something amorphous, you face moral questions. If you have sophisticated technology enabling you to reach the [terror] leaders and convince the other side [of your strength] by making a direct strike, and if you do so without causing collateral damage, such [assassinations] are entirely logical."
Shai lists four reasons explaining why there has not yet been a global effort to defeat suicide terrorists:
"First, there has been a failure to understand that the suicide terrorists have effectively disarmed armies. Second, there is a problem fighting an enemy which believes that any means can be used to attain its goals. Third, there has been financial and moral support for the Palestinians, even though they utilize suicide terror. By giving such support, modern society legitimizes the use of suicide terror against itself, not just by Islam but also by cultures that bear grudges against it owing to past conquests and to the subjugation of Third World states, economies and societies to large Western corporations.
"The fourth reason is European hesitation. Europe created modernity, but it also fostered movements that virtually destroyed modern society and the world at large. History proves that Europe lacks the ability to identify horrible threats posed to it from outside and from within." The U.S., Shai adds, has aroused Europe from a false set of assumptions, and a series of errors. However, he concludes, "there is reason to criticize the U.S. for not being forthright enough in terms of grabbing the reins in the global struggle against terror."
A fair assessment
Plenty of armies have gone into battle in the past not expecting to survive. The idea that nothing is worse than death is a modern secular view, alien to most of mankind for most of history, and certainly not the ethos of most soldiers.
Entirely rational men understand that all men are mortal, that death may be an evil but is not an avoidable one, while other evils are avoidable. Including dishonor. The article treats ordinary courage as though it is an unprecedented mental illness. It is not. Courage isn't even scarce. Justice is much, much scarcer. Any kind of real insight or wisdom is scarcer still.
What is bad about the terrorists is not their willingness to die, but their willingness to kill innocents, deliberately. Their systematic avoidance of targets of real military utility. Everyone notices the way this spreads a sense of danger beyond the confines modern western ways of war tried to keep it within.
But this is not new in history either. Nor unknown in modern times. Russians and Poles were not exactly treated well by occupying Nazis, who in the long run planned their systematic extermination. In pre-modern eras, violence was routinely directed at civilian populations by armies.
Slavery was normal in most of the world for most of history. The civilian population was treated as loot - men killed, women raped, children sold into slavery. Only the prospect of oppression to the point of outright ownership of other human beings interested conquerors in the conquered. Where the political traditions of the conquered made it unlikely they would prove willing subjects, they were often exterminated.
The mores of chivalry that changed that in the west have been imperfectly observed for only a few centuries, and only over a small portion of the world. And not by all parties even there. They have almost never been observed on some entire continents.
Then there is his justification of assassinations. I think they are justified as military operations against an enemy one can rarely get to, only reachable for fleeting moments. But this must be seen as a fall back position justified only by a hard necessity and by a practical difficulty.
The best thing is simply to sweep the whole opposed populace and capture those one would otherwise target. If they resist of course they can be fought. If they submit to arrest, if they are guilty of war crimes or attacks on civilians, of course they can be tried and punished, capitally. Otherwise they can be held indefinitely, as long as conflict continues.
Sometimes this may not be practical. It is acknowledged. But the justification of such tactics is that this standard way is not practical, not that the enemies are somehow so awful they deserve it. Desert has nothing to do with it. And it is not at all obvious the alternative is actually impractical in some contemporary cases. When we could not easily grab him, we tried to bomb Saddam. When we could, we grabbed him instead.
Then there is the lament that the EU and west continue to support the PA. I sympathesize, it is ridiculous. The deference still shown by Israel is no less so. Perhaps it is partially excused by external pressure, but plenty of it seems to have the same muddle headed internal left wing pressure causes as we have here.
Why, for example, are any of the borders to the territories still open? Why isn't the entire west bank under curfew until all attacks cease? Why does Israel continue to collect taxes for the PA and give it access to bank accounts? They come and blow up buses. So, don't let any of them come. Duh.
Being willing to blow up oneself and others did not make the suicide belt a wonder weapon in the western front in WW I. The only reason it isn't just as impotent in Israel is Israeli reluctance to do the obvious, practical, un PC thing, and simply cease all contact between the populations, if necessary with barbed wire, land mines, machineguns, and on call artillery.
Or, if you also want the ground, you can send soldiers into the west bank and put all the young men behind barbed wire indefinitely, shooting those who resist. "But everyone would howl". So what? Do they not howl at targeted assassinations? - to say nothing of the writer's comments about atom bombs. It is crazy to be talking about slaughtering people you aren't even willing to arrest, as though the latter were somehow worse.
You can defend or you can attack, as seems to you best, with conventional military means. The writer's statement that terrorism "has disarmed armies" is just horsefeathers. It has done nothing of the kind. Your unwillingness to use your army is not anything terrorists have done to you, or any magical power in the tactic.
None of these things requires "negotiating" with enemies willing to die. Those willing to die you accomodate, those prefering to live you give a much more structured life behind barbed wire until they think better of their present course. They aren't going to get semtex into a camp.
But if you don't want to do this, you just put the wire between the populations instead. What you don't do, is let Palestinians freely enter and leave Israel in the middle of a terror war. That is PC madness. And entirely self inflicted.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.