Month: June 2010

Three related things about Israel and the Gaza blockade.

1. From The Economist:

I'm not sure it could be more painfully obvious that the sole purpose of this blockade is to be senselessly obstructionist – in essence, to fuck with people in Gaza and manufacture an excuse to slow the flow of supplies to a trickle. If there's a valid military or strategic purpose to more than a fraction of the stuff that is "banned" (by a country that totally isn't an occupying power, it just controls the borders and everything that passes through them) I'd be shocked. But what could be more pointless than trying to derive logic from Israeli foreign policy.
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Banning an item appears to require no more than a fertile imagination, raging paranoia, and balls the size of geodesic domes – see David Frum's matter-of-fact explanation of how concrete is banned because it "could be used to build bunkers." And food could be used to feed terrorists, so you should probably ban that too. I have a future in Israeli politics.

In any case, if there was any real strategic purpose to this blockade they wouldn't have goddamn fertilizer – star of such homemade explosive hits as The Oklahoma City Bombing and the first World Trade Center attack – on the Permitted list.

2. Not to get all stuff-you-don't-care-about on the average ginandtacos reader, but let's briefly scratch our heads at the blockade idea from a strategic perspective. Israel has one of the largest, most active, and most expensive militaries on the planet, but one thing they don't have is much of a navy.

It would not be out of line to say that their navy is pretty pathetic. Their air force may be laden with 4th-generation fighter planes and their ground forces may be among the most formidable (esp. their mechanized infantry) but their navy is basically a bunch of lightweight patrol boats and three corvettes. This is about the lamest navy that has ever attempted to blockade something larger than a retention pond.
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If a real warship from a real navy sailed with a future "flotilla" heading to Gaza there wouldn't appear to be a whole hell of a lot that Israel could do about it except sink it (presumably from the air). Sinking a ship with a European, Russian, or Chinese flag would require a level of stupid that even the Israeli far-right can't reach. So this scenario merits a lot of attention if/when it happens. What are they going to do if confronted by a real vessel?

3. I am starting to understand why the pro-Israel lobby gets along so famously with neocons. Listen to Jennifer Rubin:

There is a single question that every individual, group, and nation must answer. To borrow from the most pro-Israel president since Harry Truman: if you are not with Israel, you are against her. And if you do not oppose with every fiber of your being and every instrument at your disposal that which intends the Jewish state harm, you are enabling her destroyers.

And what's more, if you don't send a monthly donation to AIPAC you personally murdered a dozen Jews in Buchenwald.

I struggle to recall a more fascist opinion expressed in print recently without resorting to links to fringe websites. This passes as not only mainstream opinion but a fairly widely held one – the kind of thing one can express at a cocktail party without being thought a tinfoil-hatted extremist or a potential truck bomber.

Oh, Israel. You're going to be entertaining for the next few months, aren't you?

The past decade has proven that the American public and their elected leaders have very little restraint when it comes to waging war. The financial costs don't matter. Neither does international law or opinion. Ditto the inevitable and often substantial civilian casualties. Hell, we don't even need a reason to go to war, hence we concoct one with little regard for accuracy or logic and present it as a formality. The only thing we care about, unsurprisingly, is ourselves. We care how many of Our Guys are going to get killed. Four or five thousand KIA in Iraq and Afghanistan – spread out over nearly seven years – is an acceptable loss to Congress, the public, and two White House administrations. The 60,000+ over the same seven years in Vietnam were unacceptable. Justification and intent are largely irrelevant to the strength of public opposition to wars these days. It's largely just a question of body counts – American ones, anyway.

Understandably, the Department of Defense spends a lot of time and money trying to minimize the number of American casualties in combat. A slew of technological advances have led to dramatically reduced casualty rates over the years. Some of it has involved the nuts and bolts of war (armor, field medicine, etc.) but lately the research has been focused on taking the soldier out of combat. This is doubtlessly a good thing for the American soldier. It is less clear that this is a good thing for our political system and the process by which decisions about going to war are made.

You've heard remarkably little but presumably some nonzero amount of news about drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) were originally used for reconnaissance but, as the military promised it would not do when introducing the technology, they are now armed with missiles. Military personnel pilot these drones over the skies of South Asia and the Middle East from the air conditioned safety of the Nevada desert. By any remotely objective account, this is a messy way to conduct war. Estimates are on the order of ten civilians killed in drone strikes for every "militant" – although conventional manned airstrikes suffer the same problem, of course. They do appear to be quite effective at killing al-Qaeda's "number two in command", though. As a note to the un- or under-employed, do not take a job as the #2 or #3 in al-Qaeda, as USAF drone strikes kill about four of those every week according to the press releases.

Although problematic in the extreme, I'm not talking about civilian casualties at the moment. I'm more concerned with the extent to which the calculus of going to war is altered when increasing portions of it can be conducted remotely. Predator and Reaper are but two of many UAVs in use or under development, many of which are man-portable or barely the size of an apple. Soon the Army hopes to have tiny autonomous R2-D2 analogues buzzing around the streets of Baghdad as part of an all-seeing surveillance network. DARPA has been developing autonomous land vehicles for the better part of two decades. Won't it be great when the military can send in the tanks without having to put crews in harm's way?

Yes and no. The fewer casualties, the better. But what becomes of our reluctance to send the military galavanting around the sordid parts of the world once American casualties are taken out of the equation? We have almost no restraint as it is. I shudder to think of how easily Presidents and legislators will make the decision to go to war when the attitude of "We can just send robots to do it!" becomes entrenched. We saw what the advancements in design of cruise missiles in the 1980s did to the Executive Branch; if someone's acting up, just lob a dozen Tomahawks at them from a few hundred miles away. It became the easy way to intervene without actually making a commitment or putting Americans at risk. Collateral damage isn't much of a deterrent to our political class. UAVs are another step in that direction, a step toward a future with more remotely operated and even autonomous means of doing the dirty work.

It's great that technology allows more American soldiers to come home alive and in one piece, but if we remove the U.S. body count from the decision-making process the only restraints on waging war will be common sense, morality, and logic. Yeah, let's start taking bets on how well that works.

For most of my life I believed that the close relationship between the U.S. and Israel was analogous to that of an eccentric scientist/inventor and a superhero. America has, and has had for the last six decades, an obscenely large and powerful defense industry with a captive market for its products. The Department of Defense will buy just about anything at the drop of a hat as long as it's newer, somehow More Advanced, and either kills people or keeps Americans from getting killed a little better than whatever is in use at the time.

But the problem, frankly, is that the U.S. just doesn't get that many chances to try out all these fabulous toys. I know that sounds silly given our fondness for military engagement since WWII – Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Iraq I and II, Afghanistan, Somalia, Bosnia, etc. etc. – but the defense industry is so adept at selling new product to the DoD that even all these conflicts aren't enough to keep up.

We can test this stuff in the Nevada desert, of course, but it's just not the same as using it on brown people and/or Commies. This is where Israel comes in. Those sonsabitches are always fighting, frequently with weapons of American vintage. So the DoD was like the Whistler to Israel's Blade. "Hey guys, I invented this new (whatever). Give it a try tonight and let me know if it works, OK?"

Pictured: Golda Meir

Since the George W. Bush era, however, I realize that I have been wrong. Our special pals arrangement with Israel is based mostly on the fact that both nations have the same fundamental view of international law and foreign policy: exceptionalism.
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One set of rules for Me, a different set for Thee. Our motives are pure and thus Our actions justified; Your motives are evil and thus so are Your actions. That's really what connects us. Not the pro-Israel urgings of the Religious Right, not the AIPAC-led Israel lobby (what foreign nation doesn't lobby in Washington?), not the common enemy, and certainly not an American desire to stand up for a country we didn't care about until the Soviet Union started handing out MiGs like candy in the Arab world. America and Israel just fundamentally see the world similarly.

Despite the close ties at present, even America has gotten weary of our Special Friend lately. George W. Bush expressed frustration, as did his predecessor and successor. Israel, for its part, has seemingly been engaged in a contest since 2005 to see how quickly it can make its long-time supporters stagger away mumbling "Jesus, what a bunch of assholes" under their breath. I actually thought that this Gaza kidnapping/boarding/shooting incident would inspire some kind of moderation from Israel and the pro-Israel people in the blogosphere. You know, something like "Man, this doesn't look good. Maybe we should chill out for a few days." That would seem like a good reaction to boarding a group of ships full of humanitarian aid (not to mention 25 EU parliament members) and killing a bunch of people. I was quite wrong (and that's one of the saner right-wing commentaries).

"They attacked us," the Israelis say, perhaps unintentionally parroting what the U.S. military and private contractors say whenever they gun down a group of Iraqi civilians. And that's the end of the discussion. We decided that we were threatened and we reacted with what we defined as the appropriate response. We have thoroughly investigated the matter and determined that we have done nothing improper. Here, these are the pen knives, metal rods, and slingshots (fucking slingshots!) with which they were "armed", thus justifying our use of automatic weapons.

Does this not sound like an argument that Washington policymakers could love? And as always, Israel has the luxury of deflecting any criticism of its government with the pathetic, tired recourse to accusations of antisemitism.

As the last 10 years made clear with the United States, the world can no longer tolerate one set of international laws for Israel and another for the other 191 countries. Their foreign policy ranges from the counterproductive (Hmm, I wonder if strangling Gaza with a blockade is somehow making Hamas stronger there?) to the indefensible. I claim no expertise in Middle Eastern affairs and I recognize the overwhelming complexity of the cultural, religious, and military history of the warring parties. Nonetheless, it strikes me as ridiculous to see the Western governments, and particularly mine, tiptoeing around the obvious. This shit isn't helping. It's driving the odds of peaceful coexistence close to zero. Like the U.S., Israel usually adopts the "We don't care if anyone else likes us" attitude, which strikes me as a very strange position for a country that very badly needs allies. Perhaps they actually mean "We don't care as long as Washington has our back." How much longer that will be the case remains to be seen, although I suspect that Americans will continue to see enough of themselves in Israel to stand by them as they drift farther away from a justifiably militant foreign policy and closer to state-sponsored terrorism.