How Hazy Is Your Crystal Ball?

Lebanon is carnage; Baghdad is a debacle. Most rational observers, judging from news commentaries, expect both the US administration and the Israeli government to seek a quick way out of the devastation. But as with a blind spot in one's visual field, these analysts assume both that what they "see" our leaders also "see" and that what they, the commentators, don't "see" doesn't exist. Yet there appears little reason to justify any vision of a forseeable end to these conflicts. From the beginning of its attack on Lebanon Olmert has consistently stated that Israel will destroy Hezbollah militarily. Though proving more prolonged and difficult than anticipated, Israel's best hope may be that through consumption and attrition Hezbollah will eventually run out of missiles. Then the ground forces can continue to hunt down and kill the remaining fighters, probably thousands of them. With the US supplying it, Israel will not run out of ammunition. In Iraq, the Decider has shown no sign of pulling back. To the contrary, Bush's equation of Mid East turmoil with Syria and Iran promises an expansion of the war to those countries.

Much ink has been spilled recently recapitulating the sorry history of aerial bombing. Goering's air campaign in the Battle of Britain brought the British together and steeled their resolve. Later the Allies carpet bombed Germany to degrade industrial production yet war production actually increased. The firebombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities did not yield surrender. The one fly in this ointment was the Bomb: shortly after Nagasaki, Japan surrendered.

If the Mid East war(s) spreads it will be an air campaign. But given its questionable efficacy, why would Bush do it?

• You can't prove a negative. While sober analysis of past wars has shown aerial bombing of limited utility and ground warfare being decisive, this is not math or physics: propositions cannot be proved.
• Bombs Away looks good on TV. Saying this is grotesque but it's true. Watch the news videos of Lebanon: cities into wastelands, everything destroyed, it must work. One problem is that the cities were built by people and people can rebuild them. From Indochina to Afghanistan to Algeria to the Lebanon, wars are about people fighting people, not machines fighting machines. To reuse a quotation attributed to Stalin: Bombs don't win wars; people win wars. Statements such as "the Vietnamese never defeated the US militarily" are both true and without meaning. The Mujihadeen never "defeated" the Soviet Union either. People fight wars for reasons and they quit fighting for reasons as well. Short of total annihilation we always have to make up with our enemies at some point. Do Western WarMongers expect to exterminate all Arabs or all Muslims? Maybe they do.
• Pacify the home front. The perversity of modern media that gives vicarious thrills. As with a video game, war reports are both real and unreal, like watching Top Gun. Obviously this depends upon the bombs falling over there, and not over here.
• Minimize the reality at home. With cruise missiles they die, we don't. Ground wars kill people on both sides and the mounting toll of dead and wounded soldiers tends to kill the blood lust of the home population.

I don't have the precise quotation at hand but supposedly Madeleine Albright asked, rhetorically I assume, Colin Powell: what's the point of having this wonderful military if we can't use it? For the first time in memory, I saw a report that the Israelis are dusting off their nukes. Which brings us back to that fly in the ointment: the Japanese did surrender after two atomic bombs. Here too a causal relationship cannot be proved. But for aggressive imperialists like Bush and Olmert the possibility must be attractive indeed. During the Cold War the Soviets pledged a no-first-use policy. The US did not and has not, and, is the only country to have used nukes in war. Also the only country to threaten, at least implicitly, to use them: all options are on the table.

Bush and Olmert have their own Final Solution. Conventional bombs have never been decisive and ground wars are costly. The US Army is overstretched in Iraq. But Bush hasn't backed down. He may not be bright but he is zealous. Listen to him or Rice on the news regarding Lebanon. They demand a "lasting solution" and not a cessation of hostilities. And the neo-cons continue to call for expanding the war into Syria and Iran. Olmert himself threatens this.

A true lasting peace would require respecting the rights of other peoples and their countries: an Israeli pullback from seized lands and the creation of an independent, sovereign Palestinian state; US withdrawal from Iraq and our paying for the destruction we have caused; respect for sovereignty of Iran and making treaties, not war with it. But such sanity and reasonableness is not in the Decider's fundamentalist Bible, nor Olmert's Torah.

Bush has 2 years, 5 months and 12 days left (legally) in office. Has anyone found any evidence that he is changing course? He may have some trouble with domestic legislation but don't await the resurrection of the still-born compassionate conservatism. Can we expect him to simply tread (international) water, in true lame duck status, for all that time? Bush may have trouble with the public; he may have trouble with the Congress. But as Commander in Chief he can kill all the people he wants, and I suspect he wants to kill a lot of them.