It's beginning to look as if the Israeli Defense Force (if not the entire Israeli political and military establishment) may be suffering from the same syndrome -- the disease of hubris. This isn't the army of '67, or even '73, which believed the country's survival was at stake and constantly worried that Israel's qualitative edge might be too narrow to outweigh the quantitative advantages enjoyed by its enemies. The years of U.S. largesse and bloated procurement budgets, the state-of-the-art tanks and fighters, the fascination with technology and push-button war, plus the pitiful state of the Syrian Army and Air Force -- Israel's remaining conventional front-line foes -- all appear to have infected the IDF with the arrogance and complacency that plagued the United States in Vietnam.
Couple that with the long frustrating years spent waging an endless, thankless fourth generation war in the West Bank and Gaza, and it appears the IDF is just aching to fight a normal, conventional battle in which it can use all those shiny toys the Israeli and U.S. taxpayers have bought for it.
Ilan Pappe, a historian (of the radical revisionist school) at the University of Haifa, says he's been watching for the past two decades as former students, now high-ranking military officers, chafed under the constraints the occupation and the various intifadas placed on them:
The Israeli army’s main vision for the battlefield is today still that of ‘shock and awe’ rather than chasing snipers, suicide bombers and political activists. The ‘low intensity’ war questions the invincibility of the army and erodes its capability to engage in a ‘real’ war.
This inability to conceive of guerrilla ambushes or suicide bombings or hit-and-run rocket attacks or the assassination of collaborators as "real war" seems to be one of the chief symptoms of military hubris -- almost as incapacitating as the feverish craving for ever greater doses of air power. One can only wonder what the hard men of the old Irgun or the Stern Gang would have made of it. But, as in Vietnam, contempt for a particular mode of war appears to have induced an equally strong, if unwise, contempt for the men and women fighting on the other side in that war.
Part of it, perhaps, stems from a sense of offended morality: How can people who send suicide bombers to blow up buses and night clubs possibly be considered "worthy" opponents? The Palestinians and the Lebanese might ask the same question about people who fire missiles at old men in wheel chairs or wreak death and destruction on an entire country because a single Army patrol was ambushed. But that's not the point. Effectiveness in war isn't a moral attribute, and leaders who forget that fact do so at their peril -- or rather, at the peril of their troops.
This is even more speculative, but I think there could be an additional, if subtle, psychological incentive for the Israeli defense establishment to underestimate the country's non-conventional enemies. As one of my favorite Israeli writers, Meron Benvenisti, has pointed out, the IDF, like the Israeli Labor Party, has always been more comfortable treating the dispute with the Arabs as a war between states, instead of an inter-communal conflict. (Interestingly, it was the old Likud, under Menachem Begin, that was most willing to do the opposite, but then Begin was one of the hard men of the old Jewish underground, and had no illusions.)
For many Israelis, even those on the left, admitting that the war is at its core a struggle between two communities inhabiting the same piece of land opens up too many cans of worms. It calls into question the artificial distinction between Israel "proper" and the occupied territories, which in turn casts doubt on the justness and feasibility of the two-state solution -- that sacred political icon which all right-thinking people are supposed to kneel before and worship. It also tends to reduce the Israeli Army to the same status as the Bosnian Serb militia (albeit with much better hardware) and nobody, least of all the proud officers of the IDF, wants to look at themselves that way.
But discounting the inter-communal conflict as something other than "real" war also requires that those fighting it be discounted as something other than "real" soldiers. If Pappe is right, this seems to have begat a peculiar mixture of loathing and self-loathing in the minds of many Israeli officers -- not the best psychological state for accurately estimating the enemy's capabilities and intentions.
If this revulsion (and painful memories of past misadventures in South Lebanon) have carried over into similar attitudes towards Hezbollah, then the Israelis have made a very big mistake, and are paying for it now.
The IDF may not like fourth generation war, but not liking something isn't a strategy for fighting it.
Of course, the flip side of the IDF's hatred for low-intensity conflict is a burning desire to come to grips with a "real" enemy. According to Pappe, the current operations against Gaza and Lebanon have allowed the generals to work out some of their frustrations, but it may not be enough:
It can still deteriorate into a full scale war with the hapless army of Syria and my ex-students may even push by provocative actions towards such an eventuality. And, if you believe what you read in the local press here, it may even escalate into a long distance war with Iran, backed by a supreme American umbrella.
Let us hope the professor exaggerates. Having blown the Syrian Air Force out of the sky once (in 1983) it's not clear what strategic goals the Israelis could achieve by doing it again. And any march on Damascus would only end in the same quagmire the U.S. Army found at the end of its drive to Baghdad, except that it would hardly be conducted with the kind of decency and chivalry we've come to expect in Iraq.
As for taking on Iran, well that decision still rests with a higher authority, and while Bill Kristol and David Horowitz can burn up the Internets with their cries to let loose the dogs of war (again), I'm getting the impression that the Cheney administration has had its fill of world wars of choice, at least for the moment. It may be that the IDF is going to have to content itself with shelling and bombing defenseless population centers, at least until after our November elections. But I could be wrong; it has been known to happen. And if I am, and the Third World War, or Fourth, or whatever, now looms, well, it's certainly been nice knowing you all.
The irony of all this is that Israel has the world's leading authority on fourth generation war -- the man who literally wrote the book -- at its immediate disposal, and yet at the moment it looks almost as unprepared to fight one as Uncle Sam. I'm a little surprised by that, but then again the tribes of Israel have something of a track record of ignoring their prophets.
