U.S. military leaders are projecting their experience in Iraq and Afghanistan onto Israel in Gaza. But these are dissimilar conflicts with fundamentally different objectives.
What can Israel learn from the recent American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Much less than U.S. military leaders seem to think.
For example, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Charles Q. Brown, Jr., told reporters recently that the complete destruction of Hamas is “a pretty large order.”
According to The Times of Israel, Brown said he worries that too many civilian Palestinian deaths might radicalize the Palestinian population and thereby create more terrorists.
“That’s something we have to pay attention to,” he said.
That’s why when we talk about time—the faster you can get to a point where you stop the hostilities, you have less strife for the civilian population that turns into someone who now wants to be the next member of Hamas.
This counsel of caution is bad and inapt military advice. The General is mistakenly projecting the recent American experience in Iraq and Afghanistan onto Israel in Gaza today. But this truly is an apples-to-oranges comparison.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military was waging a counterinsurgency campaign designed to legitimize, in the eyes of the populace, new and indigenous national and regional governments.
For this reason, creating more terrorists through excessive civilian deaths and excessive collateral damage was a legitimate concern.
Israel, however, is not waging a counterinsurgency campaign; it is waging a war to destroy Hamas. And the Palestinian population in Gaza already is radicalized.
“Children are marinated from birth in Jew hatred,” notes Andrew McCarthy. “Hamas,” he writes, “was elected by Palestinians because it wants to destroy Israel and murder” Jews.
Moreover, as recent videos from Gaza show, although the Palestinians in Gaza are radicalized and filled with genocidal hatred of the Jews, many Palestinians nonetheless seem to understand that Hamas is corrupt and living high off the hog while they suffer from Hamas-induced war and material deprivation.
Military Objective. This doesn’t mean that Israel should simply destroy Gaza. That would be wrong and immoral, and it would breed righteous diplomatic isolation of the Jewish State. Too many civilians would needlessly die as a result.
Simply destroying Gaza, of course, is not what Israel is doing. Instead, Israel is destroying Hamas, while going to extraordinary lengths to avoid civilian casualties and collateral damage.
Gen. Brown to the contrary notwithstanding, destroying Hamas is a fully achievable military objective. Israel can destroy Hamas as a military force. It can destroy Hamas’ military infrastructure, capability, and wherewithal.
Hamas, obviously, may continue to exist as a political and ideological movement. That is much harder to extinguish. Destroying Hamas, politically and ideologically, is well beyond the purview and capability of the Israeli Defense Forces. But destroying Hamas as a military force is hardily a fanciful or farfetched objective.
As for who rules Gaza after Hamas, that really is not Israel’s concern. Unlike the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, Israel is not trying to establish a civilian government in Gaza: it simply is trying to eliminate a military threat there.
The post-Hamas civilian government will be established and administered by someone else, some other regional or international body—the Palestinian Authority, perhaps; maybe the Arab League; possibly the United Nations.
Israel, meanwhile, will be at the ready, fully prepared to eliminate any nascent military capability or threat that might again emerge in Gaza in the future.
‘Mowing the Lawn’. This is different from Israel’s previous approach to Gaza, which was to permit or allow establishment of a Hamas military base there while periodically brushing it back through military strikes. This was known as “mowing the lawn.”
Israel no longer will “mow the lawn.” Israel now will stop the lawn from ever being planted, even as many Palestinians in Gaza remain eager to grow new grass.
General Colin Powell famously said, “You break it; you own it.” That may have been true of Iraq and Afghanistan, but it is not true of Gaza. Gaza was badly broken before Israel invaded.
In fact, Israel invaded Gaza to fix it. Fixing Gaza, as far as Israel is concerned, means eliminating its military infrastructure, capability, and wherewithal, nothing more and nothing less.
The bottom line: Israel knows what it is doing, and what it is doing bears little resemblance to what the United States set out to do in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Israelis seem to understand this. The United States should, too.
Feature photo credit: the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles Q. Brown, Jr., courtesy of Task & Purpose (Eric Dietrich/U.S. Air Force).
