Paging Doom
Humanitarian concerns aren't in conflict with long-term security; they are long-term security.
This is a Bonus Post. Welcome to Charlottesville will return this Tuesday with history of the city from the 1910s to the 1960s.
Intelligence Agencies: Too Often a Contradiction in Terms
This week Israel detonated bombs in Lebanon hoping to target members of Hezbollah. At least 50 people were killed and hundreds injured, many clearly not members of Hezbollah. The bombs were implanted in pagers and walkie-talkies and of course Israel could not have known who would actually be near the devices when they detonated (And Israel didn’t drop leaflets ahead of time saying, Stay away from communications devices that have anything to do with Hezbollah!) so it was an act of state terrorism, a war crime, and a violation of the Geneva Conventions.
But that’s nothing new in the Middle East these days—or the world generally it seems1—so I guess we’ve reached a point where we need to seriously ask, why not? Why not just set off bombs? Why not bomb civilians?
Diplomacy for Dummies
The countries of the world did not sign on to Geneva Conventions or other international humanitarian laws out of concern for the innocent. Countries saw these agreements to be in their interest. What my country does to yours today—your soldiers and civilians—your country might well do to my country, my soldiers and civilians, tomorrow.
All international law in the world today more or less begins with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia which came out of the Thirty Years War. That was possibly the worst war in European history per capita. Battlefield deaths, wanton killing of civilians, disease, and famine may have wiped out something like 20% of the continent, possibly including 60% of what is now Germany. To keep that from happening again the diplomats met, but how to frame an agreement? When every country has different laws, religions, histories, languages, and customs, what could be the basis of agreement between them? It can’t be morals because morals differ. The answer they arrived at was basic self interest.
No one wants to be invaded.
That’s something all countries share, so that became the foundation of international law. The later Geneva Conventions follow on similar principles. How do you want your soldiers and sailors treated when they get captured? How do you want your civilian population treated during an invasions? You agree to treat my soldiers, sailors, and civilians that way, and I’ll treat yours that way, and we have a deal. And even if our country is facing an enemy that doesn’t follow, say, the Geneva Conventions, it’s still better for us to to follow the Geneva Conventions so that other potential enemies will do so.
(And it’s not like violating international law really accomplishes much. As we’ll see below assassinations, torture, and killing civilians are usually counter-productive.)
The Postwar Honeymoon and the Seventy Year Itch
But from time to time through a combination of fear, vengeance, frustration, arrogance, and myopia, countries lose the ability to imagine that what they do now will one day be done to them—or sometimes it seems the people in charge are too narcissistic to picture the world existing beyond their presence at all.2
Israel is a wealthy, powerful, successful state doing what wealthy, powerful, successful states too often do: hurt themselves. (And hurt a lot of other people even more in the process.) Israel’s supporters and apologists do not think of Israel this way; they think of Israel as a fragile place surrounded by enemies who will never accept its existence. Part of Israel’s power is being able to sell this story. But it’s nonsense. In realty Saudi Arabia, and eventually Egypt, were on the eve of normalizing relations with Israel. That’s why Hamas attacked on Oct 7th— to bait Israel into a vengeful overreaction that would break up the normalization. Israel took the bait and has not only managed to put normalization on hold, they’ve actually driven Saudi Arabia into a rapprochement with Iran, it’s decades-long enemy. This type of blinkered aggression has been the basis of Israeli foreign policy for most of its existence.
Since WWII it hasn’t mattered. The world has been governed by the U.S. Navy, and most of what we take for granted—Middle Eastern oil as the basic energy source, the integrated globalist economy, the safe transport of goods—has been due to the U.S. dominance of the seas. The U.S. has also provided the world’s currency, and maintained its global institutions like the World Bank and the U.N., but the navy is the basis of the rest. And the U.S. supports Israel.
But 20-40 years the United States will not be guaranteeing the safety of the high seas. We won’t be able to afford anything like our own current military budgets much less bankroll Israel (Arguably we can’t afford it now). The Houthi of Yemen have already shown that rockets and drones can wreak havoc on shipping. As the U.S. withdraws to a more sustainable posture of supporting our own mercantile fleet, there will be rockets and drones everywhere. Piracy will make a full comeback, with privateering and so on.
As a result of all that Israel will be fighting on its own, and without overwhelming U.S. support, it will lose battles—real battles that include territory—and absent overwhelming US air support (which is dependent on control of the seas), enemy armies will be able to invade almost as easily as Israel invades them now. Whenever those wars happen Israeli’s enemies will break out the horrific images of Gaza and Lebanon and slaughtered civilians to inspire their own armies, who will inflict similar cruelties on Israeli Jews at every opportunity. And unlike the Gazans today, many of the Israelis will simply leave. (Because they can get visas.)
No matter how many Arab-speaking peoples in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon the Israelis kill, there will always be millions of others with ties to those people and ties to land in Israel. What Israel is doing now is going to haunt the country for generations.
Israel had a forty year window to turn military and economic superiority into a lasting peace, and they barely even tried. Certainly, recent governments haven’t tried at all.
Bad Ideas That Seldom Go Away
Israel isn’t the only place where an echo chamber has blocked out common sense. Notice how many American commentators seem to think that detonating pagers is a cool and clever plan.
It’s part of suite of aggressively stupid ideas that immature men and women in positions of power seem to embrace.
Assassinations.
Assassinating the leaders of a terrorist group or political party is a really bad idea because it creates a scramble for leadership among the survivors. Younger leaders can only win those struggles by being the most ruthless, the most radical, the most fanatical. Constantly assassinating the leaders of Hamas or Hezbollah just makes those groups worse and worse.3
Organizational leaders have benefited the most from the movements they lead and therefore are the ones most willing to compromise in order to avoid losing their personal gains. Those are the people you should negotiate with, not kill.
Corporate Espionage.
Regardless of what Hezbollah does or doesn’t do, any radical Islamic group that wants to make a name for themselves now can just set off a bomb in the headquarters of that pager company or any store that sells the pager anywhere in the world, or the Austrian company that seems to have been involved. Imagine living in the house next to where that Austrian company was located. You’re waiting for a bomb to go off. Imagine how you would think about Israel.
Globalism depends on companies being able to do business wherever markets decide, but from now on every pager and cellphone company is going to have to think about how their products are sourced in a whole new way. One of the futures of Israel could have been exporting high-tech products to their Middle Eastern neighbors. Who will trust Israeli products now?
Torture.
The Israelis seem to be torturing Gazan captives more for fun than information, but it’s worth pointing out that torture was invented to extract confessions. Trying to use it to get information produces terrible results. The U.S. invaded Iraq largely on information from a certain Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. He ran safe houses that often were used by Al Qaida operatives until he was captured. He was cooperating with the FBI and giving useful info, but that made the CIA jealous so they took him and tortured him until he said that there were ties between Al Qaida and Iraq. He claimed this (He said later when the recanted) to get the torture to stop since that’s obviously what his torturers wanted to hear. Despite his recanting, the Bush administration got the evidence they wanted.
The Iraq War followed with hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. The withdrawal of US forces from Afganistan to fight in Iraq led to the resurgence of the Taliban in that country.
Mistakes Were Made
Some countries like the United States, France, Russia, China, Iran, or Egypt can be stupid and get away with it due to geography and resources. But countries occupying the physical space where Israel resides, haven’t historically had as much room for error.
Iron-Age Judah was conquered and destroyed by the Babylonians. Maccabean Judea was conquered, governed, and finally destroyed by the Romans. There was a Christian Crusader state with borders similar to Israel today that was conquered and destroyed by the Ayyubid Sultanate.
All three of those regimes believed that their military superiority, moral superiority, religious faith, and patriotism would protect them.
I can’t think of a war where the legitimate government of a nation-state benefited directly from torture, assassination, corporate espionage, and high levels of civilian deaths. These things please short-sighted leaders and serve as bread and circuses for the nations they lead, but those nations usually pay a dreadful price.
I’m looking at you, Mark Robinson, Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina, you who believe that the cops should just shoot the bad guys. What could go wrong?
In Israel’s case I do not believe the problem is “settler colonialism,” as many of Israel’s critics inside and outside claim, but that’s for another time.
The movie Black Hawk Down did not make this clear, but the anarchy in Somalia was caused largely by the U.S. inviting the leaders of the various militias to a room to parley and then killing them all with missles. So the subordinates of those militias starting fighting one another for supremacy.