Useless in Gaza

As always, if you don't know what you're doing.

My dashboard says that I have 4499 subscribers today, which is a lot more than I ever expected. Thanks in particular to those who have taken out paid subscriptions. These essays will always be free though, and you can also support my work by liking and commenting, and most of all by passing essays on to others and to other sites that you frequent. I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here.☕️ Thank you to all those who have already contributed.

A reminder, with a word of thanks, that translations of my essays into Spanish are now available here, and some Italian versions of my essays are available here. Marco Zeloni is now also posting some Italian translations.And now ….

Near the beginning of Joseph Conrad’s 1902 novella The Heart of Darkness, the narrator Marlow describes how, on his way to the Congo, his ship passes a French Navy ship anchored off the African coast. The ship—several of whose crew, we learn, are dying every day from unspecified causes—is engaged in firing one of its six-inch guns incessantly, blindly, into the jungle, in the apparent hope of hitting an “encampment.” Why, we never learn.

The episode is highly symbolic, and is in a sense the summation one of the book’s themes: the impossibility for westerners to ever subjugate properly Africa by force. But it also seems to me a powerful symbol of the futility of misdirected military activity in general, where you have military power, but no idea what you want to achieve with it, and thus you will never know whether you have succeeded or not. This essay is about the consequences of the gap between military power and political results that has typified the western approach to the crises in Ukraine and Gaza.

That’s the shade of Carl von Clausewitz peering over my shoulder again, and he wants to emphasise, once more, that military activity without a defined political goal is pointless and self-defeating. But it’s more than that, he says. There has to be some logical relationship between the military power you have, and the effect you want to create. Even more than that, you need a coherent plan for getting where you want to go, through a series of steps which link a given interim political situation to a given application of military power. Otherwise, you have no idea where you are or where you are going, and you wind up as the US did in Vietnam and Afghanistan: inventing military waypoints and then regarding them as political objectives fulfilled.

In reality, the relationship between the use of force and the attainment of a defined political objective is a highly complex, inexact and uncertain art, and is much easier to explain theoretically than to do in practice. It implies a whole series of complicated, asserted relationships that don’t necessarily exist tidily in real life. To begin with, of course, you need to have a defined political objective, which is agreed, practicable and measurable. Bombing somebody, or firing off some shells like the French ship, is not an objective in itself, and is often indistinguishable from a display of pique to make yourself feel better. What the military call the “end-state” has to be clearly distinguishable from the current state, not to mention better than it, or there is no point in pursuing it.

You also have to be reasonably sure of how the political end-state will play out, or you could be in a worse situation than you were at the start. This implies a realistic knowledge of the political situation you are trying to affect, and what the political consequences of your military actions might be. So the NATO bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999 was intended to humiliate the government of Slobodan Milosevic by forcing the surrender of Kosovo, and so remove him from power in the elections the following year. It was assumed that the government that replaced his would be grateful to NATO for bombing them, and would adopt a pro-western, pro-NATO stance. What was not anticipated  (well, except by those of us who were paying attention) was that Milosevic would be brought down by nationalist agitation, and replaced by a hard-line nationalist President, Kostunica. And as for the idea that a teetering Gaddafi, perhaps on the point of being overthrown in 2011, could be pushed over the brink by western intervention, leading to a stable, pro-western democratic system … well if there is a stronger word than “catastrophic” to put before “misunderstanding” let’s by all means use it. Oh, and let’s not even get into the political fantasies of western capitals about what would follow the forced resignation of Vladimir Putin.

So this use-of-force-for political-objectives thing looks a bit more complicated than we thought at first sight, doesn’t it? It also means that you might just get your fingers trapped in the wringer. For example, the US has deployed two carrier battle groups to the eastern Mediterranean. Now, this is a traditional action of governments that have no other options really open to them, and not, of itself, necessarily criticable. In the circumstances there is a political obligation to do something, whatever that something might be. And to be fair, carriers are very useful for evacuating foreign nationals, under military protection or otherwise, as the French showed in Beirut in 2006.

The problem is that it’s virtually certain that the carrier groups have been deployed according to this “do something” logic, which is to say that there is almost certainly no accompanying political strategy: as often, the US is making it up as it goes along. (Talking about “deterrence” or “stabilisation” is not a strategy, it’s an attempt at a justification.) The difficulty with all such deployments, though, is that they are much easier to start than stop. To withdraw the force is to send a political message that you think the crisis is over, or at least manageable, which may not be the message you want to send. So you keep the force in position, and eventually you replace it, because you don’t have any choice. The difficulty is that, apart from evacuations, there’s almost nothing for which the career group can be usefully employed. Intelligence gathering maybe, but there are far easier and more discreet ways of doing that. In the meantime, they are large targets, probably limited to flying patrols and not much else. (I’m assuming that the US would not be so insane as to join in the bombardment of Gaza itself.)

In turn, this reflects the effective impotence of the US in the present conflict. Its historical attempt to combine the positions of independent facilitator with doglike devotion to one side was always dubious, but was tolerated insofar as the country was actually able to have some influence. That’s clearly no longer true. Nobody in the Arab world is going to be influenced by the US now, and it has also ruled itself out of any influence over Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas. Biden’s initial maximalist rhetoric has effectively given away most of the influence the US might have been able to assert over Israel as well. Which doesn’t leave a lot, and doesn’t leave a lot for US military power to actually do, either.

In any event, even if a decision were made to use military power, in a political vacuum, and just to look threatening, what could the US actually do? For the moment, nothing. Now if a major ground invasion were to start in Gaza, and if Hezbollah were to react militarily along the northern frontier, then theoretically the US could target them, but with massive attendant risks to the Lebanese population, and considerable risk of casualties to itself, in other places where there are US troops. Put simply, an attack agains Hezbollah which is large enough to make a difference could cause massive collateral damage to Lebanon, whereas anything smaller will not make a difference anyway. The US has invested massively in the stability of Lebanon in recent years, and is not to going to put that investment in jeopardy now.

There is certainly every chance that Iran would consider a large-scale attack on Hezbollah to be an unfriendly action, and then retaliate. The problem for the Americans is that the Iranians can inflict far more damage on them and their interests than they can inflict on the Iranians. This is nothing to do with the sophistication, or even numbers, of weapons: it’s a lot more mundane than that. Get out a map, and have a look at the region, and ask yourself, where could US carrier groups safely go? Which countries could be expected to provide airfields, ports and harbours and logistic depots? In the present political situation, the answer is probably “none.” No doubt an air- and sea-launched missile attack on Iran could do some damage, but what would be the point? What possible proportional political objective could be served thereby? No conceivable amount of damage caused to Iran could compel the government, for example, to cut off support for Hezbollah, or for the current government in Syria. By contrast, severe damage to a single carrier, even if it were not sunk, would  be enough to drive the US  out of the region.

I think we can draw some general lessons from these examples, which in turn may help us understand how the current Gaza crisis may eventually resolve itself. We can start by recalling that the theory of using military power to achieve political end-states is important, but primarily as a limitation. That’s to say that, whilst military action without a political objective is pointless, the mere fact of starting military action towards a declared political end-state doesn’t mean that you will automatically get there. You still have to do the hard work of turning the one into the other, and it’s that that I want to talk about now.

Consider a political end-state of some kind. It doesn’t have to be heaven on earth or for that matter the surrender of your enemy. It can be something simpler, such as an enforceable decision by your neighbour to stop supporting separatist groups in your country. So let’s assume you define that political end-state, which we’ll call P(E). Now the first thing to say is that this political end-state must actually be politically (not just militarily) possible. It must be within the capacity of the other government to agree to, or failing that the balance of political forces at the end of the conflict must at least make it possible. It is pointless and dangerous to attempt to force a country or a political actor do do something that is beyond their power to do; not that this hasn’t been attempted often enough.

A good and important example is the British and American strategic bombing of Germany in World War 2. The expressed aims were to demoralise and frighten the civilian population so that their morale would break, and, if all went well, they would rise up and overthrow the government. In the early stages of the War the British dropped propaganda leaflets telling the German people that they could insist on peace at any time, and they hoped that the collapse in morale would lead to social and economic collapse more generally, and thus the end of the War. But this was never going to happen, and indeed it was politically and practically impossible that it should happen. No amount of bombing could change that.

But let’s assume that P(E) is possible. However, it’s not going to appear magically after the last shot is fired. There are going to be a succession of political stages (P1, P2 etc) which have to happen sequentially and all move in the same direction. Thus, a forced end to a civil war may create the conditions for new elections, but it can’t magically organise those elections, make sure they are fair, and make sure the results are accepted. This is why the military talk of “creating a secure environment” to enable political things to then happen. But making them happen is the responsibility of others.

Then, of course, there’s the military action itself, which has to be staged and sequential, to take military operations as far as they can go. Because everything is dependent on everything else, there has to be some idea of what military operations can achieve, what the final target is and how close to the target you are at any one point. So you also need a military campaign plan with stages (we’ll call them M1, M2 etc) each of which brings you progressively closer to the point at which the military have done all they can and the political process has to take over. And I’ve seen this in any number of campaign plans, just as I’ve seen total confusion in practice about what stage of the plan we have actually reached, if any.

And above all, there has to be some reason why the achievement of military objectives (say a secure environment) should then led to the political outcome (P(E)) that you want. Astonishingly, this is simply assumed to be the case in most planning, although it scarcely ever happens in practice. I can’t remember how many campaign plans I saw for Afghanistan which essentially consisted of the following steps:

• Invade Afghanistan.

• A military miracle happens.

• Secure environment and the defeat of the Taliban.

• A political miracle happens

• Peace love and utopia.

Yet there is no reason why the end of fighting, or the imposition of a secure environment should actually lead to any political progress at all (see Bosnia since 1995). But more widely, there is no reason of principle to think that any particular military actions will bring about any particular political result, once you get beyond Powerpoint presentations. Which brings us neatly back to Gaza.

From the above (which admittedly is highly simplified) you can see that to successfully reach a political objective by military means requires a whole series of logically-related and individually practicable steps, as well as an opponent who is ultimately prepared, as Clausewitz put it, to “do our will.” This why you should be wary of so-called “long-term plans,” which are frequently alleged to exist. Most of them are, in fact, long term aspirations or even fantasies. They have no resemblance at all to the careful and detailed process I’ve outlined. And in a way that’s not surprising, because such careful and detailed proposals can’t be implemented over long periods of time: circumstances change too much. They are essentially short-term exercises, but conducted against a simple but clear set of long-term goals.

Let’s divert to Ukraine, for a moment. It’s fairly clear that the Russians had a very long term objective (perhaps not even a strategy) of living in a Europe which was not a threat to them. It’s doubtful if their thinking had much more detail than that. As the situation began to deteriorate,  and NATO became progressively more politically hostile, this strategy became more activist, trying to make it clear, among other things, that Ukraine in NATO, in theory or in practice, would never be acceptable. When this was rejected, and Ukraine became both heavily armed and politically unstable, the Russians went for military option (minimalist at first) in support of the same political objective. They are now conducting a maximalist military option designed to achieve forcibly what could not be achieved politically: a Europe which they do not find threatening. Whether they will succeed is too early to say, but, as good students of Clausewitz, they do at least know how the bits are supposed to go together.

The West has long had fantasies of overthrowing the current Russian political system and dismembering the country, taking it firmly into the “western orbit.” But nothing resembling a plan has ever existed (if you have any experience of NATO you will understand immediately why.) Isolated incidents, such as the entry of new countries, have been welcomed as contributing to this objective, but without anyone being able to explain exactly why and how. At the same time, NATO has adopted a policy of verbal and political hostility, while continually running down its conventional forces and its defence industry, so making itself increasingly less capable of confronting Russia if this hostility produced an equally hostile response, which it has. The only strategy that NATO has had since February 2022, if you can call it that, is to keep the war going in the hope that a miracle occurs, and that Putin is forced from power and replaced by a compliant NATO-friendly figure. That’s it. And by now you may see why it’s not working, and indeed why it never can. For example, NATO cannot fight Ukraine’s battles, and only exercise a loose control over its tactics. Its ability to influence political developments in Kiev is limited. Self-evidently it does not understand what Russian plans are, at any level, so it substitutes fantasies of the restoration of the Soviet Union. and the conquest of Europe. It has no strategy other than hope of forcing a change of government in Russia, and no idea what factors would bring such a change about. It has no understanding of the dynamics of Russian domestic politics, nor by which miracle the overthrow of a moderate President is expected to lead to the emergence of a NATO friendly government, nor the mechanics by which the nationalist parties could be pacified, nor what conceivable concessions a Russian parliament and government could be expected to make. Does that sound to you like a winning  strategy? It’s like trying to make an IKEA chest of draws with the assembly instructions and the list of parts missing.

So how does this map onto Gaza? Well, I’m not about to plunge into the history of Zionism, which is hardly one of my areas of expertise, but here, I think it’s worth coming back to the distinction between vague aspirations and long-term plans. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, at a time of nationalism and colonialism, but also at a time when many Jews were becoming assimilated into western European society, it was natural enough that some Jewish figures began to think the same way, towards a national home for the Jews, as for all other “races”, either in the historically-associated Palestine (then part of the Ottoman Empire) or somewhere else in the world. Historians have unpicked and compared a plethora of different and conflicting schemes, many philanthropic and well-meaning. But in some ways the clearest thinker (and thus relevant to this argument) was Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940), the founder of Reform Zionism, who was able to see and articulate that a Jewish home in Palestine would require the acceptance of its current Christian and Muslim inhabitants, and this might not be easy, or even possible, to procure. (Quite what his views on peaceful coexistence vs expulsion were, are deeply controversial, and well beyond my pay-grade to decide).

But if you seek the creation of a national home for one people on a territory occupied by others, then your strategic objective is in practical terms impossible to achieve without violence. Moreover, if we glance back at the list of stages above, it’s clear that you need a clear idea of what that strategic objective amounts to in practice, the objective itself must be politically and practically feasible, there must be a military plan that achieves the necessary preconditions for that objective, you must have the resources to put that plan into effect, and some idea of what sequences of military stages you need to go through to achieve the military plan successfully. It’s not clear to me, as an outside observer, that any Israeli government has ever had a coherent plan along these lines, which is why it is now confronted with the consequences of this failure; (It’s not clear either that a coherent plan of this type, with all the stages I have set out was even possible in the first place.) And the failure to implement the plan has, of course, changed the nature of the problem itself, which is now far more difficult and complex than it was half a century or more ago.

On the subject of vague aspirations, this is the moment to look at the US experience, since they are the other major player staring into the abyss at the moment. It’s true that there has been a long tradition in Washington of wanting to control the oil-producing states of the Middle East (if only to deny control to others) and to support Israel as a forward western base, and an asset ready to carry out tasks the US could not publicly be associated with. Israel has also developed into a main source of intelligence on the Middle East for Washington which not everybody thinks is a good idea. And by the familiar tail-wags-dog process so often found in these relationships, successive Israeli governments have generally established themselves as the dominant partner where it matters

This is not, to put it mildly, a coherent strategy, and indeed the US does not have and never has-had a coherent strategy for the region at anything beyond a declaratory level. Which is why it is in such a mess over Gaza.

Consider, what overall strategy could the US have for the Gaza crisis now? Does it want a ceasefire, and a return to the pre-7 October status quo? Presumably not, or it would not have vetoed UN Security Council resolutions in that sense. Does it want the population of Gaza killed or driven out? Well, it’s hard to be sure, but the indications seem to be not, or at least not at this stage. The problem is that the disjointed and often incoherent statements coming out of Washington seem to me to imply a government taken by surprise that has no idea what it wants, and so makes up policy from day to day. The risk, of course, is that it will simply be dragged along by Israel, since one of the constants of US non-policy is to avoid public differences with that country, and of course Israel itself will be dragged along by events. There is no knowing where the US will wind up, since, as indicated above, it now has very little influence on any of the principal actors.

But the US does have lots of weapons, doesn’t it? Well, yes, but as we’ve seen the whole point is that using force without a clear political objective is a waste of time and potentially dangerous. The one rational political objective the US might have at the moment is the maintenance of its great power status in the Middle East, in the hope of eventually influencing the outcome of the present crisis. But such a strategy is by definition a short-term one, and it invites the question, what are the objectives and what is the outcome that the presence of large US forces in the region are intended to further? Because if you don’t know that (and I don’t think Washington does know that) then you are wasting your time. Being a player is pointless if you can’t decide what card to play, and if you haven’t got that many cards anyway.

The best rationale I have come across is that, as mentioned above, the forces could be some kind of a deterrent to Iran (via Hezbollah) becoming more involved in the crisis, and opening a front to the North. The problem, of course, is that there are far more factors operating on Tehran (and Hezbollah) than US pressure, and many of them will be more powerful. Indeed, it is likely that Hezbollah, without doing anything very much, is itself acting as a deterrent to Israel, which cannot remove forces from the North and send them to Gaza, just in case.

We may, therefore, be at the first crisis for a very long time in which no-one is really in control, and no individual state has enough influence to substantively affect the behaviour of enough other states. For once, there seem to be no “sides” in the accepted sense of the term, and it’s hard to look around and see a nation which is actually pursuing a consistent policy. This applies equally to the speculation about mediation. OK, between who and whom? What would the purpose of the mediation be? How would it be negotiated? Who has the power to speak for which group? If some kind of a settlement were hammered out, how could it be monitored, let alone enforced? And, once more, what could the subject-matter of such a settlement possibly be? This makes the crisis especially dangerous, because it’s impossible to see what an off-ramp would actually look like. Because it’s not clear really who the “sides” are (they clearly go beyond Israel—or some of its political figures—and the Palestinians, or at least Hamas) how could you even assemble a negotiating team, let alone give them a mandate, or for that matter agree with the “other side” what it was you were supposed to be talking about? This doesn’t mean we are headed for World War 3, thankfully, but it definitely means that this is a crisis without an obvous diplomatic solution, that will probably have to be settled by brute force.

Let’s talk about that. By “brute force” I mean that one party will eventually find itself in a situation where it has no choice but to behave, or stop behaving, in a particular manner. It may still have weapons and troops left, it will certainly have leaders and fighters demanding that the struggle should continue, but effectively it will have no chance of getting what it wants by organised military action. I say “organised” because there are militants in every community who will insist on prolonging the fight in some fashion or other, through such tactics as bombings and assassinations.

But once again, we have to ask what the objectives of the “struggle” are, in the present context. For Hamas (leaving aside the degree of support among the Palestinian population, which is not know) it has been to put an end to the rapprochement between Israel and various Arab states, enhance the political support for Palestinians in the world more generally, and to puncture the myth of Israeli military dominance. These are, interestingly, entirely political objectives, which Clausewitz would have understood, and it looks as though they are on the way to being accomplished. How far other declaratory Hamas objectives concerning territory, recognition etc. should be taken seriously is hard to say, but clearly they are hoping to make use of the current momentum to progress towards at least some of them. Thus, Hamas has used, and continues to use, brute force in pursuit of political objectives, in a context where those political objectives are at least in principle achievable   

Israel faces the difficulty of not knowing what it wants, and having many potential objectives ruled out as unachievable anyway. Western commentators have generally argued that Israel will “win” in Gaza, but this seems to me to be a conceptual misunderstanding of the situation. Nobody knows how many fighters Hamas actually has—I have heard figures as high as 50,000—but assuming the figure to be, say, half of that, then Israel can bring perhaps ten times as many troops with armour and airpower, and so surely “win” the resulting combat. It all depends, of course, what you mean by “win,” and, as I have suggested, Israel seems to have no settled idea of what “winning” actually means, anyway. Suggestions of “wiping out” Hamas don’t make much practical sense, and betray the inability of a military brought up on conventional western precepts to understand what combat with organised but irregular forces is like. (They clearly haven’t learned much since Lebanon in 2006, and, to be fair, it is extremely difficult for any conventional army to fight in this way.) A little thought suggests that sending troops on foot (since that is what it will be) through devastated cities honeycombed with tunnels to seek out an destroy people who look as though they might be Hamas, might not be the easiest task for young conscripts and reservists trained in armoured warfare. It doesn’t take much imagination to think of infiltration and stay-behind cells, staging attacks in the rear area, for example.

If the statements of some Israeli politicians are to believed, the aim might be to drive the Palestinians  into a smaller area of Gaza, or even out of the territory altogether. The first makes no real sense, because it is the size of the population, rather than the size of the territory, that is the problem, and garrisoning even half of Gaza in the face of armed resistance might be too much for the Israeli  forces, even in the short term. In the case of some larger forced transfer of population, assuming that were even possible, it needs to be remembered that only about 10km of Gaza’s frontier is with Egypt: the rest is with Israel. It is this frontier, high-tech, and costing billions of dollars, that was breached on 7 October. Oh, and of course there’s the sea as well, through which Hamas managed to infiltrate troops. So any move to occupy part of Gaza would have to be accompanied by massive and continued surveillance of the frontier, constant maritime patrols, constant patrolling in the occupied areas to find and destroy stay-behind groups, or groups re-infiltrated back into the area, in addition to the enormous requirements of the invasion itself, and the need to keep large forces elsewhere in the country against possible threats from Hezbollah and others. And these tasks we should recall, would involve not only countering Hamas fighters, but somehow dealing with tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of sick and injured, or people too frail and elderly to move by themselves, as well as young children separated from their families. And all in an environment where hunger and disease will be rampant, and unburied corpses will be everywhere

At this point, I think, Clausewitz would probably shake his head, and say “can’t be done.” There are some political objectives, even if they are properly framed, which simply aren’t reachable by military means. I leave it to specialists to speculate about what the Israeli government might actually decide to do, but the minimalist option—death and destruction over a limited period, proclaim victory, go home—is militarily feasible, even if it only postpones the resolution of the problem. But then as I’ve said before, there are some questions in politics which have no resolution: a good guide is if the territory concerned was ever part of the Ottoman Empire. It is for that reason, perhaps, that there has been no rush of peace plans, no serious attempts to mediate, and no sign, in any case, that either side is interested. Postponement of the absolute worst outcome may be the best-case scenario available in the circumstances.