Posts tagged as “Middle East”

Israel Should Ignore Recent American Military Counsel Re: Gaza and Hamas

Israel Should Ignore Recent American Military Counsel Re: Gaza and Hamas

By John R Guardiano on November 11, 2023

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).

Why Winning—in Ukraine and Elsewhere—is Key to a Successful U.S. Foreign Policy

Why Winning—in Ukraine and Elsewhere—is Key to a Successful U.S. Foreign Policy

By John R Guardiano on March 1, 2023

Sending F-16s to Ukraine is critical for many reasons, but mostly because it underscores America’s commitment to ensuring Ukraine wins.

A successful American foreign policy hinges on winning and succeeding in the international arena. After all “nothing succeeds like success. Countries follow the strong or successful horse,” we’ve argued.

Conversely, failure breeds more failure. A good example of this is the Biden administration’s disastrous surrender of Afghanistan to the Taliban. That fiasco led directly to the Russia-Chinese “no limits” partnership and Putin’s subsequent invasion of Ukraine.

Moreover, a big reason China has not yet provided Russia with weapon systems and armaments is because Russia looks like a loser in Ukraine, and China is reticent to throw good money after bad.

But if it looks like Russia can hang on and effect a prolonged stalemate in Ukraine, then China is more likely to come to Russia’s aid. And, if that happens, a wider and larger-scale war in multiple theaters of operation—aka “World War III”—also becomes more likely.

Ukraine. For this reason, it is critical that the Biden administration overcome its misplaced fear of “escalation” and focus on winning in Ukraine.

That means moving expeditiously to arm Ukraine with the full suite of weapon systems—fighter jets, helicopters, long-range artillery, Predator drones, et al.—needed to conduct a combined arms offensive that will finish off the Russian military and end this war.

Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colorado), a former Army Ranger who now serves on the House Foreign Affairs and Intelligence committees, agrees. As he told CNN’s Erin Burnett yesterday (Feb. 28, 2023):

What I’m concerned about is the escalation of failure. If Russia wins this [war] and conquers Ukraine, what message does that send to autocrats, to dictators, around the world? To China? … If we fail, that’s escalatory in and of itself, and that’s not something I’m willing to accept.

F-16s. Crow is one of five military veterans in Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, who have signed a letter urging the Biden administration to send F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine. The Ukrainians have pleaded for these aircraft, but the Biden administration has balked for fear of “provoking Putin.”

Team Biden says F-16s are too complicated to operate and will take too long for the Ukrainians to master in time for the current fight. But as Rep. Crow points out, U.S. military pilots who have actually trained with the Ukrainians say they can become proficient with the aircraft in three to six months.

That’s “much faster than I’ve been told by other folks in the administration,” Crow said.

And the reason we know this is because we have had a nine-year partnership between the California Air National Guard and the Ukrainian Air Force.

For nine years, they’ve been flying and training with the Ukrainians—over 1,000 training engagements in that time. And they’re telling us: ‘The Ukrainians know these systems. They know how to train. They’re capable of getting this done.’

Middle East. And it’s not only in Ukraine that the administration needs to focus on winning. Walter Russell Mead warns:

The U.S. is much closer to getting involved in another Middle East war than most in Washington understand… Minimizing this danger requires rapid and sweeping policy change from an administration still struggling to comprehend the most serious international crisis since the late 1930s…

The best way to avoid war, and to minimize direct American engagement should war break out, is to ensure that our Middle East allies have the power to defend themselves. We must make it unmistakably clear that we will ensure our allies win should hostilities break out. Nothing else will do [emphasis added].

As Vince Lombardi famously put it: “winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” Certainly, it’s the critical and necessary thing to prevent war and preserve the peace.

Feature photo credit: Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colorado), courtesy of NBC’s Today Show.

Why Does the West Embrace Ukraine, but Not Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan?

Why Does the West Embrace Ukraine, but Not Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan?

By John R Guardiano on April 9, 2022

Politics and culture, not race and ethnicity, explain why we in the West feel a real sense of kinship with Ukrainians.

Does racism or ethnocentrism explain why we in the West identify with Ukrainians to a far greater extent than we ever did Syrians, Afghans, or Iraqis? That’s what many commentators would have us believe.

“We care more about Ukraine because the victims are white,” declares Newsweek columnist Michael Shank.

“The alarm about a European, or civilized, or First World nation being invaded is a [racist] dog whistle to tell us we should care because they are like us,” argues Nikole-Hannah-Jones, founder of the hugely influential 1619 Project.

‘The coverage of Ukraine has revealed a pretty radical disparity in how human Ukrainians look and feel to Western media compared to their browner and blacker counterparts,” adds MSNBC host Joy Reed.

The Racial Prism. Of course, it is not surprising that American and European leftists have fabricated a racial angle through which to view Russia’s war on Ukraine and thereby bash the West.

The Left, after all, has a deep-seated antipathy for the West and has long used racism, real and imagined, as a cudgel to try and delegitimize the West.

As usual, though, they are wrong, because they conflate race and ethnicity with politics and culture. They mistake a distinctive Western outlook or attitude with a determinative racial identity.

But the truth is that the West is not defined by race; it is multiethnic and multiracial; and it includes people of all hues, complexions, and colors.

True, most Westerners are caucasian and Christian, and the determinative political and cultural ideas that gave rise to the West originated in Christian Europe.

But that does not mean—and historically, it has not meant—that only European Christians can be Westerners or Western in their outlook.

To the contrary: Israel, Japan and South Korea, for instance, must now be considered part of the West; and these countries have relatively few Christians and few Europeans. But their commitment to liberal democracy and democratic civic engagement places them squarely in the Western camp.

America, likewise, cannot be well understood or appreciated without acknowledging the important contributions to our nation’s history made by Jews and African Americans.

And so, while it is undeniably true that we in the West identify with Ukrainians to a far greater extent than we ever did Syrians, Afghans, or Iraqis, the reason for this has nothing to do with race and ethnicity and everything to do with politics and culture.

Indeed, it is not because Ukrainians “look like us,” but rather because they think and act like us, that we feel a sense of kinship with them.

Ukraine, after all, clearly yearns to be part of the West—something that could never be said about Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan.

That’s why Ukraine seeks membership in the European Union and NATO. And that’s why even Russian-speaking parts of Eastern Ukraine are manifestly anti-Russian and reject Putin’s attempt to subjugate their country within a new Russian empire.

Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, likewise, speaks in Churchillian tones, invokes Shakespeare, and cites critical milestones in American and Western history—Pearl Harbor, 9/11, World War II, Dunkirk, the Holocaust…

Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. No political leader in Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan ever spoke so movingly or so compellingly, or in with such fluency in the Western political and cultural lexicon.

And whereas Afghan President Ashram Ghani fled Afghanistan as the Taliban descended upon Kabul, Zelensky refused to leave Kyiv when the Russians invaded.

In other words, there are very clear and obvious reasons why we in the West feel a real sense of kinship with the people of Ukraine, and these reasons have absolutely nothing to do with race and ethnicity.

Instead, what we in the West identify with is the Ukrainians’ fighting spirit, their desire for freedom and independence, their will to win, and their desire to become part of our political and cultural patrimony.

Indeed, if the Ukrainians were all black or brown, African or Middle Eastern, and exhibited precisely the same Western outlook and behavior, we would feel the same sense of kinship with them that we do now.

Our bond with Ukraine has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Ukrainians “look like us” (meaning caucasian Americans and caucasian Europeans). This is a truly ludicrous and farcical notion that defies the empirical evidence which shows otherwise.

What draws us to Ukraine is the country’s political idealism, the Ukrainians’ manifest commitment to liberal democracy and civic engagement, and their overall (Western) cultural outlook. Race and ethnicity are obviously irrelevant.

Feature photo credit: The stark differences between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (L) and former Afghan President Ashram Ghani (R) go a long way toward explaining why the West has embraced Ukraine much more so than Afghanistan. Courtesy of Khaama Press.

Why Has the West Been So Late to Arm Ukraine?

Why Has the West Been So Late to Arm Ukraine?

By John R Guardiano on March 5, 2022

America and NATO viewed Ukraine through the prism of Iraq and Afghanistan—two countries that seemed to lack the will to fight for themselves. They did not realize: Ukraine is very different.

“We must get aid to Ukraine NOW,” tweeted Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). “No half-measures.”

“Please NATO leaders, send all MIG fighter jets that we have—70 altogether, 27 alone in Poland—to Ukraine right now. NOW!” added Michael McFaul, a former U.S. Ambassador to Russia under President Obama and now a Professor of Political Science at Stanford.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi must “put the Ukraine aid bill on the floor Monday for the U.S. to send desperately needed military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine now,” agreed Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah).

“Waiting on the congressional calendar is unacceptable when people are dying,” he tweeted.

Finally, albeit quite belatedly, America and NATO are arming the Ukrainians. What started out as a token gesture designed simply to show solidarity and friendship with Ukraine has morphed into a serious and sustained effort to enable the Ukrainians to fight off a brutal Russian invasion.

Will it be too little too late? Let us hope not. But it is instructive to understand why the West has been so tardy and myopic about the moral, military, and geo-strategic necessity of arming Ukraine early and earnestly.

The reason is Iraq and Afghanistan. Old generals sometimes mistakenly fight the last war. America and NATO viewed Ukraine through the prism of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The West’s two most recent wars required many American and NATO “boots on the ground” for more than a decade to achieve, ultimately, very little. Western policymakers feared that Ukraine would be another allegedly hopeless cause not worth the hassle and the expense.

The expectation was that, in the face of a vastly superior Russian military force, the Ukrainians would run, hide, and fold—just as, candidly, many Iraqis and many Afghans had abandoned the battlefield in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

“Three U.S. officials have told Newsweek they expect Ukraine’s capital Kyiv to fall to incoming Russian forces within days, and the country’s resistance to be effectively neutralized soon thereafter…

“They expect Kyiv to be taken within 96 hours, and then the leadership of Ukraine to follow in about a week’s time.”

That was written Feb. 24, in the early hours of the Russian invasion. Today, 10 days later, March 5, retired Army four-star General Jack Keane says that Russian military forces are “not even close” to Kyiv.

Ukrainians Fight. “They have not been able to encircle the city, which is their plan,” Keane told Wall Street Journal Editorial Page Editor Paul Gigot on Fox News.

The Ukrainians have held them up… You just can’t give them enough credit… They’re standing off a formidable force in the north [of Ukraine], and that force has stalled.

The [Russians] have lost their operational momentum, and there’s nobody behind them.

I mean, there’s not 50,000, 60,000, 70,000 troops that they’re [the Russians] gonna be able to bring up here. They [the Russians] have committed their forces…

So when Zelensky’s screaming [that] he needs arms and ammunition, and the rest of it, we better be getting it to him.

Because he has real opportunity here to do some serious damage to the Russians, and it certainly, [will] impact what an occupation would look like.

Volodymyr Zelensky. Western policymakers, obviously, did not know or understand Ukraine. They did not know Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and they did not understand the Ukrainian people.

Far from running, hiding, and folding, Zelensky and the Ukrainian people have been profiles in courage, tenacity and determination.

“I need ammunition, not a ride,” said Zelensky when the United States offered to evacuate him from the country, warning that Russian mercenaries had been sent to find and assassinate him.

France 24 reports from Kyiv:

“Our fighting spirit is 120 percent. We’re ready to defend our country. “We’re not going to surrender. Never,” says Mikhail, a military engineer.

“Eight years of war in Donbas and still Putin hasn’t admitted his troops were there. But in those eight years, the Ukrainian military has learned how to fight its vile enemy. And now the Russians are suffering heavy losses.”

Another soldier says, “We’re not afraid. We’ve grown tired of fear. We have no other choice but to defend our country. We have to win for our next generation of children—for our future and our freedom.”

The New York Times reports:

In a matter of days, Kyiv went from a busy, cosmopolitan European capital to a war zone—with many citizens abandoning their day jobs and taking up the arms being shipped in en masse.

Now, the newly armed civilians and members of various paramilitary groups are fighting under the loose command of the military in an organization called the Territorial Defense Forces.

“The national call to arms and the mobilization of ordinary citizens to repel the Russian invader does not have any obvious parallels in recent global conflicts,”Mats Berdal, a professor of conflict and security studies at King’s College London, said.

Indeed, Ukraine ain’t Iraq or Afghanistan, and Western policymakers should have known this. Iraq and Afghanistan were, in many ways, civil wars within existing countries. Ukraine, by contrast, is being invaded by a foreign country, Russia, that seeks to conquer and subjugate it.

Ukrainians recall the horrid brutality of life under Soviet occupation during the Cold War, notes Eugene Bondarenko, a lecturer at the University of Michigan’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literature.

Thus they see Russia’s latest attempt to subjugate them “as nothing less than an existential threat… Putin has come to destroy Ukrainian culture, language, society and statehood. That’s why Ukraine fights,” Bondarenko explains.

Cohen and Clausewitz. “Why did so many highly intelligent and educated observers get so much wrong?” asks Eliot A. Cohen, a professor at The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

In large part because of the conventional Western “focus on technology at the expense of the human element in war.” Cohen references Carl von Clausewitz’s classic On War to understand why Ukraine ain’t Iraq or Afghanistan.

“War,” Cohen writes, echoing Clausewitz,

is a contest of wills; it is unpredictable; it is the domain of accident and contingency; nothing goes as planned; and events are smothered in a fog created by misinformation and fear.

Patriotic fervor, hatred of the invader, and knowledge of place and home weigh a great deal, and thus far so they have.

But a passionate desire for freedom and independence, coupled with an indomitable will to win, can carry a people on so far.

Brute Russian force and a clear Russian willingness to commit war crimes ultimately will prevail—unless America and NATO can rush arms and equipment to Ukraine fast enough to alter the political and military equation.

Will the West succeed or will it be a day late and a dollar short, as they say? We don’t know. Time will tell. Stay tuned.

What we do know is that the war in Ukraine is very different from the recent American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the West needs to respond accordingly.

Feature photo credit: Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky (L) and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin (R), courtesy of Newsweek.

America First—In Ukraine, Asia, and Elsewhere

America First—In Ukraine, Asia, and Elsewhere

By John R Guardiano on February 6, 2022

Some on the Right have learned the wrong military lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Congressional Republicans overwhelmingly believe the United States should support Ukraine and check Russian imperialism. However, there are a few noisy pols, egged on by a small contingent of conservative journalists, who beg to differ. Why?

Because they are isolationists or non-interventionists who recall the Iraq War and vow “never again.”

Fox News host Tucker Carlson, for instance, told the New York Times that his skepticism about U.S. efforts to support Ukraine stem largely from “regrets about his own role in promoting the Iraq War.”

The American Conservative’s Helen Andrews, likewise, laments “seeing a lot of the good-old neocons, like, the same folks from the Iraq War, coming back and getting back in the saddle again, and saying exactly the same things that they did last time.”

Their rhetoric now, she warns, “is not that different from what it was in the Iraq War.”

This skepticism of U.S. military intervention is understandable given the unsatisfactory conclusion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. What, then, ought to be the lessons learned from these two most recent conflicts and how do they apply to the situation now unfolding in Ukraine?

Nation-Building. First, nation-building is difficult and laborious and ought not be undertaken unless we are prepared for many years, and perhaps decades, of military and diplomatic engagement.

But here’s the thing: Ukraine is not Iraq or Afghanistan. It is far more advanced and developed.

A functioning nation-state and a legitimate government already exist. These do not need to be built from scratch. We are not trying to create something new and unique; we are trying to assist something old and established.

Military Occupation. Second, military occupation of a country can precipitate adverse political repercussions, which can be self-defeating—especially if the ultimate goal is simply to eliminate a threat and leave.

But here’s the thing: no one is proposing that the United States invade or occupy Ukraine.

U.S. Military Advisers. Third, small numbers of U.S. military advisers embedded with indigenous forces are a decisive force multiplier. They can dramatically improve indigenous military capabilities and strengthen their will to fight and win.

Afghanistan. The most vivid and memorable example of this, of course, was the initial war in Afghanistan (2001), where small numbers of CIA officers worked closely with the Northern Alliance to drive the Taliban from power.

The Afghanis did most of the fighting and dying; but their military capabilities and will to fight were immeasurably strengthened by the presence of U.S. military advisers.

This same dynamic played out at the end of the war in Afghanistan.

By President Trump’s final year in office, the United States had withdrawn just about all of its troops from Afghanistan, but crucially, retained a small contingent of advisers who helped to buck up the Afghan national military.

Again, the Afghans did almost all of the fighting and dying.

True, this did not result in a classic military victory; however, it did achieve a modus vivendi that kept the Taliban at bay. And many informed military observers, such as Bing West, believe this modus vivendi could have been sustained indefinitely at minimal cost.

The defeat of ISIS, likewise, was achieved with U.S. military airpower and U.S. military advisers playing a crucial support role for Kurdish and Iraqi forces, who did almost all of the fighting and dying.

Since at least 2015, the United States and its NATO allies have advised and trained with Ukraine’s military, albeit on a very limited and circumscribed basis, and far removed from the front lines of combat.

A more robust and strategic military advisory role could be a decisive force multiplier, just as it was in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This does not mean, obviously, that the United States should invade or occupy Ukraine. Nor does it mean that the United States should wage war on Russia.

What it does mean is that the United States should forward deploy to Ukraine and Eastern Europe critical military personnel and weapons systems to buck up our allies and strengthen their military capabilities.

This is the essence of deterrence. It is what Ronald Reagan meant by “peace through strength.”

Lessons Learned. So yes, there are important lessons to be learned from our recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, they are not the lessons of isolationism and non-interventionism that some on the Right seem to have internalized.

Instead, the lesson is this: while the United States can be too heavy-handed militarily, it also can be too averse to military engagement, and neither extreme is wise or good.

For without American military engagement, nothing good in the world ever happens. Our enemies take advantage of our absence to promote a world order that harms our interests and benefits them.

Middle Course. For this reason, we must steer a middle course between isolationism or non-interventionism and military invasion and occupation.

We must remain militarily engaged on the frontiers of freedom—in Ukraine, Eastern Europe, and the South China Sea—to keep our enemies, the enemies of freedom, on their heels, at bay, and on the defensive.

America: first, last, and always.

Feature photo credit: Tucker Carlson, courtesy of The Independent, and Helen Andrews, courtesy of HerAndrews.com.