In praise of wars of choice

Whoever declares in advance that he is abandoning Israel's traditional combat doctrine - one founded on preemptive counterattack - is actually inviting the enemy to launch its own first strikes.


Israel Harel
Haaretz
01 July '10

Moshe Sneh, one of the leaders of the Haganah, Israel's pre-independency underground army , was once sent to explain to the Palmach, its strike force, why the pre-state leadership was following a policy of restraint in the face of incessant terror attacks. The authorities' usual explanation - undefined "diplomatic considerations" - seemed weak even to him. "Unconvincing excuses," he wrote in a memo to himself. "I'll have to raise my voice!"

Related: Israel’s fateful withdrawal

That is exactly what Ehud Barak did this week on the stage of the Institute for National Security Studies. In a long, apologetic and at times embarrassing talk, the defense minister tried to rationalize each and every military failure attributed to him. These include beating a hasty exit from Lebanon, failing to respond to the subsequent killing of three soldiers and the abduction of their bodies to Lebanon (after pledging that no restraint would be shown against such attacks following the pullout ), a limp-wristed response to the terror war ignited by Yasser Arafat ("It's ludicrous," Barak loudly asserted, "to link the 2000 withdrawal from Lebanon with the outbreak of the second intifada" ), and even mistakes in the handling of May's flotilla raid.

Only when speaking of the first Lebanon war did Barak lower his voice. He glossed over his own command failings on the eastern front and focused on criticizing the war's strategic goal (as he defined it: the war's architects, prime minister Menachem Begin and defense minister Ariel Sharon, never defined it in this way to either the cabinet or the Israel Defense Forces ). This goal, he said, was effecting geopolitical change by banishing Fatah to Jordan, where it would unseat the Hashemite regime and create a Palestinian state. In that way, he continued (echoing a widespread but unfounded conspiracy theory ), Sharon hoped to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank.

The war's secondary aim (again, as Barak defined it ) also served the defense minister as a basis for his military doctrine: We must not intervene in a neighboring country's internal affairs. Fact: We failed in our attempt to put our Christian allies into power in Lebanon.

The view Barak espoused - that Israel must not wage war to bring about geostrategic changes - is fundamentally flawed. Yet many influential politicians and intellectuals, as well as military chiefs both past and present, have been beholden to this same error. This view has turned into official policy because many of its proponents were personally burned in the first Lebanon war.

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