Daniel Pipes
National Post
29 April '10
This month, Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak declared that Israel must withdraw from Palestinian territories. "The world isn't willing to accept — and we won't change that in 2010 — the expectation that Israel will rule another people for decades more," he said. "It's something that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world."
Is he right? Is peace even possible? And if so, what form should a final agreement take? Those are the questions we asked National Post writers in our series "What's Your Peace Plan?"
My peace plan is simple: Israel defeats its enemies.
Victory uniquely creates circumstances conducive to peace. Wars end, the historical record confirms, when one side concedes defeat and the other wins. This makes intuitive sense, for so long as both sides aspire to achieve their ambitions, fighting continues or it potentially can resume.
The goal of victory is not exactly something novel. Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese strategist, advised that in war, "Let your great object be victory." Raimondo Montecuccoli, a seventeenth-century Austrian, said that "The objective in war is victory." Carl von Clausewitz, a nineteenth-century Prussian, added that "War is an act of violence to compel the enemy to fulfill our will." Winston Churchill told the British people: "You ask: what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory - victory - at all costs, victory, in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be." Dwight D. Eisenhower observed that "In war, there is no substitute for victory." These insights from prior eras still hold, for however much weaponry changes, human nature remains the same.
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Israel's cowardly and spineless leaders speak only the language of surrender. This is not going to lead to peace with the Palestinians.
ReplyDeleteThe only way peace will be achieved is to vanquish them outright. In that respect, Daniel Pipes is correct: human nature has not changed at all.
Whether leaders are, or are not stronger then their constituencies will always be a question. Theoretically, this difference is what should define the word "Leadership" but alas....
ReplyDeleteWe are still living in the midst of the conception which took hold in the 80's called "Defeatism", to the extent that what Daniel Pipes has written is seen as radical as opposed to the norm not very long ago.