Washington’s
Interests In Israel’s War
By Seymour M Hersh
14 August, 2006
New
Yorker
In the days after Hezbollah crossed
from Lebanon into Israel, on July 12th, to kidnap two soldiers, triggering
an Israeli air attack on Lebanon and a full-scale war, the Bush Administration
seemed strangely passive. “It’s a moment of clarification,”
President George W. Bush said at the G-8 summit, in St. Petersburg,
on July 16th. “It’s now become clear why we don’t
have peace in the Middle East.” He described the relationship
between Hezbollah and its supporters in Iran and Syria as one of the
“root causes of instability,” and subsequently said that
it was up to those countries to end the crisis. Two days later, despite
calls from several governments for the United States to take the lead
in negotiations to end the fighting, Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice said that a ceasefire should be put off until “the conditions
are conducive.”
The Bush Administration,
however, was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s retaliatory
attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced,
current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that
a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah’s
heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes
in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve
as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy
Iran’s nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep
underground.
Israeli military and intelligence
experts I spoke to emphasized that the country’s immediate security
issues were reason enough to confront Hezbollah, regardless of what
the Bush Administration wanted. Shabtai Shavit, a national-security
adviser to the Knesset who headed the Mossad, Israel’s foreign-intelligence
service, from 1989 to 1996, told me, “We do what we think is best
for us, and if it happens to meet America’s requirements, that’s
just part of a relationship between two friends. Hezbollah is armed
to the teeth and trained in the most advanced technology of guerrilla
warfare. It was just a matter of time. We had to address it.”
Hezbollah is seen by Israelis
as a profound threat—a terrorist organization, operating on their
border, with a military arsenal that, with help from Iran and Syria,
has grown stronger since the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon
ended, in 2000. Hezbollah’s leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, has
said he does not believe that Israel is a “legal state.”
Israeli intelligence estimated at the outset of the air war that Hezbollah
had roughly five hundred medium-range Fajr-3 and Fajr-5 rockets and
a few dozen long-range Zelzal rockets; the Zelzals, with a range of
about two hundred kilometres, could reach Tel Aviv. (One rocket hit
Haifa the day after the kidnappings.) It also has more than twelve thousand
shorter-range rockets. Since the conflict began, more than three thousand
of these have been fired at Israel.
According to a Middle East
expert with knowledge of the current thinking of both the Israeli and
the U.S. governments, Israel had devised a plan for attacking Hezbollah—and
shared it with Bush Administration officials—well before the July
12th kidnappings. “It’s not that the Israelis had a trap
that Hezbollah walked into,” he said, “but there was a strong
feeling in the White House that sooner or later the Israelis were going
to do it.”
The Middle East expert said
that the Administration had several reasons for supporting the Israeli
bombing campaign. Within the State Department, it was seen as a way
to strengthen the Lebanese government so that it could assert its authority
over the south of the country, much of which is controlled by Hezbollah.
He went on, “The White House was more focussed on stripping Hezbollah
of its missiles, because, if there was to be a military option against
Iran’s nuclear facilities, it had to get rid of the weapons that
Hezbollah could use in a potential retaliation at Israel. Bush wanted
both. Bush was going after Iran, as part of the Axis of Evil, and its
nuclear sites, and he was interested in going after Hezbollah as part
of his interest in democratization, with Lebanon as one of the crown
jewels of Middle East democracy.”
Administration officials
denied that they knew of Israel’s plan for the air war. The White
House did not respond to a detailed list of questions. In response to
a separate request, a National Security Council spokesman said, “Prior
to Hezbollah’s attack on Israel, the Israeli government gave no
official in Washington any reason to believe that Israel was planning
to attack. Even after the July 12th attack, we did not know what the
Israeli plans were.” A Pentagon spokesman said, “The United
States government remains committed to a diplomatic solution to the
problem of Iran’s clandestine nuclear weapons program,”
and denied the story, as did a State Department spokesman.
The United States and Israel
have shared intelligence and enjoyed close military coöperation
for decades, but early this spring, according to a former senior intelligence
official, high-level planners from the U.S. Air Force—under pressure
from the White House to develop a war plan for a decisive strike against
Iran’s nuclear facilities—began consulting with their counterparts
in the Israeli Air Force.
“The big question for
our Air Force was how to hit a series of hard targets in Iran successfully,”
the former senior intelligence official said. “Who is the closest
ally of the U.S. Air Force in its planning? It’s not Congo—it’s
Israel. Everybody knows that Iranian engineers have been advising Hezbollah
on tunnels and underground gun emplacements. And so the Air Force went
to the Israelis with some new tactics and said to them, ‘Let’s
concentrate on the bombing and share what we have on Iran and what you
have on Lebanon.’ ” The discussions reached the Joint Chiefs
of Staff and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he said.
“The Israelis told
us it would be a cheap war with many benefits,” a U.S. government
consultant with close ties to Israel said. “Why oppose it? We’ll
be able to hunt down and bomb missiles, tunnels, and bunkers from the
air. It would be a demo for Iran.”
A Pentagon consultant said
that the Bush White House “has been agitating for some time to
find a reason for a preëmptive blow against Hezbollah.” He
added, “It was our intent to have Hezbollah diminished, and now
we have someone else doing it.” (As this article went to press,
the United Nations Security Council passed a ceasefire resolution, although
it was unclear if it would change the situation on the ground.)
According to Richard Armitage,
who served as Deputy Secretary of State in Bush’s first term—and
who, in 2002, said that Hezbollah “may be the A team of terrorists”—Israel’s
campaign in Lebanon, which has faced unexpected difficulties and widespread
criticism, may, in the end, serve as a warning to the White House about
Iran. “If the most dominant military force in the region—the
Israel Defense Forces—can’t pacify a country like Lebanon,
with a population of four million, you should think carefully about
taking that template to Iran, with strategic depth and a population
of seventy million,” Armitage said. “The only thing that
the bombing has achieved so far is to unite the population against the
Israelis.”
Several current and former
officials involved in the Middle East told me that Israel viewed the
soldiers’ kidnapping as the opportune moment to begin its planned
military campaign against Hezbollah. “Hezbollah, like clockwork,
was instigating something small every month or two,” the U.S.
government consultant with ties to Israel said. Two weeks earlier, in
late June, members of Hamas, the Palestinian group, had tunnelled under
the barrier separating southern Gaza from Israel and captured an Israeli
soldier. Hamas also had lobbed a series of rockets at Israeli towns
near the border with Gaza. In response, Israel had initiated an extensive
bombing campaign and reoccupied parts of Gaza.
The Pentagon consultant noted
that there had also been cross-border incidents involving Israel and
Hezbollah, in both directions, for some time. “They’ve been
sniping at each other,” he said. “Either side could have
pointed to some incident and said ‘We have to go to war with these
guys’—because they were already at war.”
David Siegel, the spokesman
at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, said that the Israeli Air Force
had not been seeking a reason to attack Hezbollah. “We did not
plan the campaign. That decision was forced on us.” There were
ongoing alerts that Hezbollah “was pressing to go on the attack,”
Siegel said. “Hezbollah attacks every two or three months,”
but the kidnapping of the soldiers raised the stakes.
In interviews, several Israeli
academics, journalists, and retired military and intelligence officers
all made one point: they believed that the Israeli leadership, and not
Washington, had decided that it would go to war with Hezbollah. Opinion
polls showed that a broad spectrum of Israelis supported that choice.
“The neocons in Washington may be happy, but Israel did not need
to be pushed, because Israel has been wanting to get rid of Hezbollah,”
Yossi Melman, a journalist for the newspaper Ha’aretz, who has
written several books about the Israeli intelligence community, said.
“By provoking Israel, Hezbollah provided that opportunity.”
“We were facing a dilemma,”
an Israeli official said. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert “had to decide
whether to go for a local response, which we always do, or for a comprehensive
response—to really take on Hezbollah once and for all.”
Olmert made his decision, the official said, only after a series of
Israeli rescue efforts failed.
The U.S. government consultant
with close ties to Israel told me, however, that, from Israel’s
perspective, the decision to take strong action had become inevitable
weeks earlier, after the Israeli Army’s signals intelligence group,
known as Unit 8200, picked up bellicose intercepts in late spring and
early summer, involving Hamas, Hezbollah, and Khaled Meshal, the Hamas
leader now living in Damascus.
One intercept was of a meeting
in late May of the Hamas political and military leadership, with Meshal
participating by telephone. “Hamas believed the call from Damascus
was scrambled, but Israel had broken the code,” the consultant
said. For almost a year before its victory in the Palestinian elections
in January, Hamas had curtailed its terrorist activities. In the late
May intercepted conversation, the consultant told me, the Hamas leadership
said that “they got no benefit from it, and were losing standing
among the Palestinian population.” The conclusion, he said, was
“ ‘Let’s go back into the terror business and then
try and wrestle concessions from the Israeli government.’ ”
The consultant told me that the U.S. and Israel agreed that if the Hamas
leadership did so, and if Nasrallah backed them up, there should be
“a full-scale response.” In the next several weeks, when
Hamas began digging the tunnel into Israel, the consultant said, Unit
8200 “picked up signals intelligence involving Hamas, Syria, and
Hezbollah, saying, in essence, that they wanted Hezbollah to ‘warm
up’ the north.” In one intercept, the consultant said, Nasrallah
referred to Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz “as seeming
to be weak,” in comparison with the former Prime Ministers Ariel
Sharon and Ehud Barak, who had extensive military experience, and said
“he thought Israel would respond in a small-scale, local way,
as they had in the past.”
Earlier this summer, before
the Hezbollah kidnappings, the U.S. government consultant said, several
Israeli officials visited Washington, separately, “to get a green
light for the bombing operation and to find out how much the United
States would bear.” The consultant added, “Israel began
with Cheney. It wanted to be sure that it had his support and the support
of his office and the Middle East desk of the National Security Council.”
After that, “persuading Bush was never a problem, and Condi Rice
was on board,” the consultant said.
The initial plan, as outlined
by the Israelis, called for a major bombing campaign in response to
the next Hezbollah provocation, according to the Middle East expert
with knowledge of U.S. and Israeli thinking. Israel believed that, by
targeting Lebanon’s infrastructure, including highways, fuel depots,
and even the civilian runways at the main Beirut airport, it could persuade
Lebanon’s large Christian and Sunni populations to turn against
Hezbollah, according to the former senior intelligence official. The
airport, highways, and bridges, among other things, have been hit in
the bombing campaign. The Israeli Air Force had flown almost nine thousand
missions as of last week. (David Siegel, the Israeli spokesman, said
that Israel had targeted only sites connected to Hezbollah; the bombing
of bridges and roads was meant to prevent the transport of weapons.)
The Israeli plan, according
to the former senior intelligence official, was “the mirror image
of what the United States has been planning for Iran.” (The initial
U.S. Air Force proposals for an air attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear
capacity, which included the option of intense bombing of civilian infrastructure
targets inside Iran, have been resisted by the top leadership of the
Army, the Navy, and the Marine Corps, according to current and former
officials. They argue that the Air Force plan will not work and will
inevitably lead, as in the Israeli war with Hezbollah, to the insertion
of troops on the ground.)
Uzi Arad, who served for
more than two decades in the Mossad, told me that to the best of his
knowledge the contacts between the Israeli and U.S. governments were
routine, and that, “in all my meetings and conversations with
government officials, never once did I hear anyone refer to prior coördination
with the United States.” He was troubled by one issue—the
speed with which the Olmert government went to war. “For the life
of me, I’ve never seen a decision to go to war taken so speedily,”
he said. “We usually go through long analyses.”
The key military planner
was Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, the I.D.F. chief of staff, who, during
a career in the Israeli Air Force, worked on contingency planning for
an air war with Iran. Olmert, a former mayor of Jerusalem, and Peretz,
a former labor leader, could not match his experience and expertise.
In the early discussions
with American officials, I was told by the Middle East expert and the
government consultant, the Israelis repeatedly pointed to the war in
Kosovo as an example of what Israel would try to achieve. The NATO forces
commanded by U.S. Army General Wesley Clark methodically bombed and
strafed not only military targets but tunnels, bridges, and roads, in
Kosovo and elsewhere in Serbia, for seventy-eight days before forcing
Serbian forces to withdraw from Kosovo. “Israel studied the Kosovo
war as its role model,” the government consultant said. “The
Israelis told Condi Rice, ‘You did it in about seventy days, but
we need half of that—thirty-five days.’ ”
There are, of course, vast
differences between Lebanon and Kosovo. Clark, who retired from the
military in 2000 and unsuccessfully ran as a Democrat for the Presidency
in 2004, took issue with the analogy: “If it’s true that
the Israeli campaign is based on the American approach in Kosovo, then
it missed the point. Ours was to use force to obtain a diplomatic objective—it
was not about killing people.” Clark noted in a 2001 book, “Waging
Modern War,” that it was the threat of a possible ground invasion
as well as the bombing that forced the Serbs to end the war. He told
me, “In my experience, air campaigns have to be backed, ultimately,
by the will and capability to finish the job on the ground.”
Kosovo has been cited publicly
by Israeli officials and journalists since the war began. On August
6th, Prime Minister Olmert, responding to European condemnation of the
deaths of Lebanese civilians, said, “Where do they get the right
to preach to Israel? European countries attacked Kosovo and killed ten
thousand civilians. Ten thousand! And none of these countries had to
suffer before that from a single rocket. I’m not saying it was
wrong to intervene in Kosovo. But please: don’t preach to us about
the treatment of civilians.” (Human Rights Watch estimated the
number of civilians killed in the NATO bombing to be five hundred; the
Yugoslav government put the number between twelve hundred and five thousand.)
Cheney’s office supported
the Israeli plan, as did Elliott Abrams, a deputy national-security
adviser, according to several former and current officials. (A spokesman
for the N.S.C. denied that Abrams had done so.) They believed that Israel
should move quickly in its air war against Hezbollah. A former intelligence
officer said, “We told Israel, ‘Look, if you guys have to
go, we’re behind you all the way. But we think it should be sooner
rather than later—the longer you wait, the less time we have to
evaluate and plan for Iran before Bush gets out of office.’ ”
Cheney’s point, the
former senior intelligence official said, was “What if the Israelis
execute their part of this first, and it’s really successful?
It’d be great. We can learn what to do in Iran by watching what
the Israelis do in Lebanon.”
The Pentagon consultant told
me that intelligence about Hezbollah and Iran is being mishandled by
the White House the same way intelligence had been when, in 2002 and
early 2003, the Administration was making the case that Iraq had weapons
of mass destruction. “The big complaint now in the intelligence
community is that all of the important stuff is being sent directly
to the top—at the insistence of the White House—and not
being analyzed at all, or scarcely,” he said. “It’s
an awful policy and violates all of the N.S.A.’s strictures, and
if you complain about it you’re out,” he said. “Cheney
had a strong hand in this.”
The long-term Administration
goal was to help set up a Sunni Arab coalition—including countries
like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt—that would join the United
States and Europe to pressure the ruling Shiite mullahs in Iran. “But
the thought behind that plan was that Israel would defeat Hezbollah,
not lose to it,” the consultant with close ties to Israel said.
Some officials in Cheney’s office and at the N.S.C. had become
convinced, on the basis of private talks, that those nations would moderate
their public criticism of Israel and blame Hezbollah for creating the
crisis that led to war. Although they did so at first, they shifted
their position in the wake of public protests in their countries about
the Israeli bombing. The White House was clearly disappointed when,
late last month, Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister,
came to Washington and, at a meeting with Bush, called for the President
to intervene immediately to end the war. The Washington Post reported
that Washington had hoped to enlist moderate Arab states “in an
effort to pressure Syria and Iran to rein in Hezbollah, but the Saudi
move . . . seemed to cloud that initiative.”
The surprising strength of
Hezbollah’s resistance, and its continuing ability to fire rockets
into northern Israel in the face of the constant Israeli bombing, the
Middle East expert told me, “is a massive setback for those in
the White House who want to use force in Iran. And those who argue that
the bombing will create internal dissent and revolt in Iran are also
set back.”
Nonetheless, some officers
serving with the Joint Chiefs of Staff remain deeply concerned that
the Administration will have a far more positive assessment of the air
campaign than they should, the former senior intelligence official said.
“There is no way that Rumsfeld and Cheney will draw the right
conclusion about this,” he said. “When the smoke clears,
they’ll say it was a success, and they’ll draw reinforcement
for their plan to attack Iran.”
In the White House, especially
in the Vice-President’s office, many officials believe that the
military campaign against Hezbollah is working and should be carried
forward. At the same time, the government consultant said, some policymakers
in the Administration have concluded that the cost of the bombing to
Lebanese society is too high. “They are telling Israel that it’s
time to wind down the attacks on infrastructure.”
Similar divisions are emerging
in Israel. David Siegel, the Israeli spokesman, said that his country’s
leadership believed, as of early August, that the air war had been successful,
and had destroyed more than seventy per cent of Hezbollah’s medium-
and long-range-missile launching capacity. “The problem is short-range
missiles, without launchers, that can be shot from civilian areas and
homes,” Siegel told me. “The only way to resolve this is
ground operations—which is why Israel would be forced to expand
ground operations if the latest round of diplomacy doesn’t work.”
Last week, however, there was evidence that the Israeli government was
troubled by the progress of the war. In an unusual move, Major General
Moshe Kaplinsky, Halutz’s deputy, was put in charge of the operation,
supplanting Major General Udi Adam. The worry in Israel is that Nasrallah
might escalate the crisis by firing missiles at Tel Aviv. “There
is a big debate over how much damage Israel should inflict to prevent
it,” the consultant said. “If Nasrallah hits Tel Aviv, what
should Israel do? Its goal is to deter more attacks by telling Nasrallah
that it will destroy his country if he doesn’t stop, and to remind
the Arab world that Israel can set it back twenty years. We’re
no longer playing by the same rules.”
A European intelligence officer
told me, “The Israelis have been caught in a psychological trap.
In earlier years, they had the belief that they could solve their problems
with toughness. But now, with Islamic martyrdom, things have changed,
and they need different answers. How do you scare people who love martyrdom?”
The problem with trying to eliminate Hezbollah, the intelligence officer
said, is the group’s ties to the Shiite population in southern
Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and Beirut’s southern suburbs, where
it operates schools, hospitals, a radio station, and various charities.
A high-level American military
planner told me, “We have a lot of vulnerability in the region,
and we’ve talked about some of the effects of an Iranian or Hezbollah
attack on the Saudi regime and on the oil infrastructure.” There
is special concern inside the Pentagon, he added, about the oil-producing
nations north of the Strait of Hormuz. “We have to anticipate
the unintended consequences,” he told me. “Will we be able
to absorb a barrel of oil at one hundred dollars? There is this almost
comical thinking that you can do it all from the air, even when you’re
up against an irregular enemy with a dug-in capability. You’re
not going to be successful unless you have a ground presence, but the
political leadership never considers the worst case. These guys only
want to hear the best case.”
There is evidence that the
Iranians were expecting the war against Hezbollah. Vali Nasr, an expert
on Shiite Muslims and Iran, who is a fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations and also teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey,
California, said, “Every negative American move against Hezbollah
was seen by Iran as part of a larger campaign against it. And Iran began
to prepare for the showdown by supplying more sophisticated weapons
to Hezbollah—anti-ship and anti-tank missiles—and training
its fighters in their use. And now Hezbollah is testing Iran’s
new weapons. Iran sees the Bush Administration as trying to marginalize
its regional role, so it fomented trouble.”
Nasr, an Iranian-American
who recently published a study of the Sunni-Shiite divide, entitled
“The Shia Revival,” also said that the Iranian leadership
believes that Washington’s ultimate political goal is to get some
international force to act as a buffer—to physically separate
Syria and Lebanon in an effort to isolate and disarm Hezbollah, whose
main supply route is through Syria. “Military action cannot bring
about the desired political result,” Nasr said. The popularity
of Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a virulent critic of
Israel, is greatest in his own country. If the U.S. were to attack Iran’s
nuclear facilities, Nasr said, “you may end up turning Ahmadinejad
into another Nasrallah—the rock star of the Arab street.”
Donald Rumsfeld, who is one
of the Bush Administration’s most outspoken, and powerful, officials,
has said very little publicly about the crisis in Lebanon. His relative
quiet, compared to his aggressive visibility in the run-up to the Iraq
war, has prompted a debate in Washington about where he stands on the
issue.
Some current and former intelligence
officials who were interviewed for this article believe that Rumsfeld
disagrees with Bush and Cheney about the American role in the war between
Israel and Hezbollah. The U.S. government consultant with close ties
to Israel said that “there was a feeling that Rumsfeld was jaded
in his approach to the Israeli war.” He added, “Air power
and the use of a few Special Forces had worked in Afghanistan, and he
tried to do it again in Iraq. It was the same idea, but it didn’t
work. He thought that Hezbollah was too dug in and the Israeli attack
plan would not work, and the last thing he wanted was another war on
his shift that would put the American forces in Iraq in greater jeopardy.”
A Western diplomat said that
he understood that Rumsfeld did not know all the intricacies of the
war plan. “He is angry and worried about his troops” in
Iraq, the diplomat said. Rumsfeld served in the White House during the
last year of the war in Vietnam, from which American troops withdrew
in 1975, “and he did not want to see something like this having
an impact in Iraq.” Rumsfeld’s concern, the diplomat added,
was that an expansion of the war into Iran could put the American troops
in Iraq at greater risk of attacks by pro-Iranian Shiite militias.
At a Senate Armed Services
Committee hearing on August 3rd, Rumsfeld was less than enthusiastic
about the war’s implications for the American troops in Iraq.
Asked whether the Administration was mindful of the war’s impact
on Iraq, he testified that, in his meetings with Bush and Condoleezza
Rice, “there is a sensitivity to the desire to not have our country
or our interests or our forces put at greater risk as a result of what’s
taking place between Israel and Hezbollah. . . . There are a variety
of risks that we face in that region, and it’s a difficult and
delicate situation.”
The Pentagon consultant dismissed
talk of a split at the top of the Administration, however, and said
simply, “Rummy is on the team. He’d love to see Hezbollah
degraded, but he also is a voice for less bombing and more innovative
Israeli ground operations.” The former senior intelligence official
similarly depicted Rumsfeld as being “delighted that Israel is
our stalking horse.”
There are also questions
about the status of Condoleezza Rice. Her initial support for the Israeli
air war against Hezbollah has reportedly been tempered by dismay at
the effects of the attacks on Lebanon. The Pentagon consultant said
that in early August she began privately “agitating” inside
the Administration for permission to begin direct diplomatic talks with
Syria—so far, without much success. Last week, the Times reported
that Rice had directed an Embassy official in Damascus to meet with
the Syrian foreign minister, though the meeting apparently yielded no
results. The Times also reported that Rice viewed herself as “trying
to be not only a peacemaker abroad but also a mediator among contending
parties” within the Administration. The article pointed to a divide
between career diplomats in the State Department and “conservatives
in the government,” including Cheney and Abrams, “who were
pushing for strong American support for Israel.”
The Western diplomat told
me his embassy believes that Abrams has emerged as a key policymaker
on Iran, and on the current Hezbollah-Israeli crisis, and that Rice’s
role has been relatively diminished. Rice did not want to make her most
recent diplomatic trip to the Middle East, the diplomat said. “She
only wanted to go if she thought there was a real chance to get a ceasefire.”
Bush’s strongest supporter
in Europe continues to be British Prime Minister Tony Blair, but many
in Blair’s own Foreign Office, as a former diplomat said, believe
that he has “gone out on a particular limb on this”—especially
by accepting Bush’s refusal to seek an immediate and total ceasefire
between Israel and Hezbollah. “Blair stands alone on this,”
the former diplomat said. “He knows he’s a lame duck who’s
on the way out, but he buys it”—the Bush policy. “He
drinks the White House Kool-Aid as much as anybody in Washington.”
The crisis will really start at the end of August, the diplomat added,
“when the Iranians”—under a United Nations deadline
to stop uranium enrichment—“will say no.”
Even those who continue to
support Israel’s war against Hezbollah agree that it is failing
to achieve one of its main goals—to rally the Lebanese against
Hezbollah. “Strategic bombing has been a failed military concept
for ninety years, and yet air forces all over the world keep on doing
it,” John Arquilla, a defense analyst at the Naval Postgraduate
School, told me. Arquilla has been campaigning for more than a decade,
with growing success, to change the way America fights terrorism. “The
warfare of today is not mass on mass,” he said. “You have
to hunt like a network to defeat a network. Israel focussed on bombing
against Hezbollah, and, when that did not work, it became more aggressive
on the ground. The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same
thing and expecting a different result.”
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