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You Need To Have Something Worth Fighting For

The truth is that U.S. forces and the IDF looked good fighting Arabs only as long as Arab political leaders insisted on fighting on Western terms. As long as they persisted in pitting tank against tank or fighter plane against fighter plane, Arabs were never going to get the better of either the Americans or […]

The truth is that U.S. forces and the IDF looked good fighting Arabs only as long as Arab political leaders insisted on fighting on Western terms. As long as they persisted in pitting tank against tank or fighter plane against fighter plane, Arabs were never going to get the better of either the Americans or the Israelis. His stupidity perhaps matched only by his ruthlessness, Saddam may well have been the last Arab leader to figure this out. ~Andrew Bacevich, The American Conservative

I am reminded of that old Italian joke that sprang up after WWII, “What is the Italian salute?”  (The very un-PC answer is holding up both your hands in surrender.)  For students of Italian military history, this is a grievous insult, since Italian arms have been famous for good reason for centuries before the unification of Italy.  This joke only makes sense in the context of the poor morale and complete lack of zeal that Italian soldiers had in fighting for Mussolini and more generally in fighting for the Republic since unification.  Why was Mario from Naples going to die for some idiotic northern Italian warmonger who wanted to conquer Greece?  Who wanted to die for fascism?  (Yet another reason, gentle reader, why Islamofascism is a very, very stupid word–most of the soldiers fighting for the actual Fascists had little zeal for the cause, much less a willingness to embrace death!)  Long after the Romans made their small contribution to military history, Italians have been legendary fighters and Italy has produced some of the greatest generals (Prince Eugene of Savoy, though of mixed heritage and in service to the Habsburg emperor, was such a one)–when they were fighting for something or someone to whom they had a real attachment and loyalty.  But to die for La Reppublica?  Who will fight to the last for that?  There may be some who will, but just as no one will die “for the free market” (in Beneton’s catchy phrase), relatively few people want to die for an artificial republic that does not necessarily have anything to do with their sense of local patriotism or religious faith. 

In the same way, the ill-fated Arab nationalist armies of 1956, 1967 and 1973 did not fail because of their method of warfare but because their morale, organisation and commitment to their respective nations’ causes were all of poor or middling quality.  What conscript really was ready to die for Nasser and the United Arab Republic?  The absurdity of the question already provides the answer.  Thus the Arab armies in these wars were not as effective, suffered from poor organisation and often suffered large scale desertion or surrender–not because the method of war they were using was faulty or because they were incapable or using this method, but because they did not have the moral elements needed to make that way of war succeed against highly motivated, well-organised and disciplined forces and, in my obligatory Clausewitz reference, we should remember that the moral is to the material element in war as three to one. 

Any state that loses air superiority as quickly as Iraq did in 1991 (by flying a large part of its air force out of the country for “safe keeping”–whoops!) cannot fight an open-desert tank war and not get slaughtered.  This may have convinced some Arabs that this kind of warfare was foolish (or at least that fighting this kind of war against Israel and America was foolish), and I’m sure it convinced a lot of Westerners that Hussein was a buffoon, but it does not demonstrate that it would necessarily be ineffective if Arab states could combine the kind of cohesion and zeal that Hizbullah possesses with the technological means and know-how that several of them do possess.  The trouble is that the governments of the Arab states typically cannot generate the loyalty or zeal that Hizbullah does because, well, they have no credibility and they represent nothing that anyone wants to believe in. 

Partisan warfare, though effective to a degree, did not make “the Western way of war” obsolete in 1944, and modern guerrilla fighters do not necessarily make it obsolete now.   If Israel had combined its air assault with a large ground invasion and if it had been willing to accept the casualties that go with such an invasion and if it had been willing to fight a much longer, more arduous campaign than it has fought in the past and if it were in the political position to continue a hot war against an Arab country for months or even years, Hizbullah might very well have been defeated once and for all.  Whether that would have “solved” Israel’s security problems in the north or not is another question, but the outcome of the Lebanon war, remarkable as it is, does not necessarily prove any obvious superiority of Hizbullah’s method of warfare.  It took them longer to not lose a war that was called to a halt by international intervention, but it is not clear that they could have ultimately “won” except insofar as winning means staying alive.  Their method is superior only in the sense that they can significantly drive up the costs of their enemy’s victory to a point where he is less inclined to continue to fight. 

As Prof. Van Creveld suggested in the same issue, Israel was in a sense fighting with at least one arm tied behind its back (that it chose to use its other arm to devastate an entire country to no clear purpose unfortunately does not rate much mention in his article), in no small part because of the mistaken model used for the attack on Lebanon, namely Kosovo.  Following the Kosovo script assumes two things: 1) air power alone is sufficient to achieve the objective and 2) that you have three months to bomb the enemy into submission.  The first was a flawed conclusion from the beginning, and as it turned out Israel was not going to be allowed that much time.  Had NATO called off its unjust bombings after five weeks, it would have had similarly disappointing results, because the “Western way of war” being employed in Kosovo and Lebanon is not the same kind of Western war that was applied in the Arab-Israeli wars or the Gulf War, because the nature of these conflicts differs significantly.  They represent trying to dislodge an entrenched force that is in its own country vs. conventional fighting in the open field with massive air superiority on one side.  Had the Germans fought in Yugoslavia with nothing but the Luftwaffe, they would scarcely have gotten anywhere.

However, I do take Prof. Bacevich’s larger points that, so long as Western governments wage wars as they have been doing for the last 15 years, the guerrillas and insurgents of the Islamic world are able to “deny us victory” and that there is not a military solution to the political problems of the Near East.  But we should take care not to assume that differences in the method of warfare are the crucial difference in the relatively greater success of Arab peoples in war; if they are dedicated and trained Muslim fighters, their motivation seems remarkably greater than any ever inspired by the nationalist cause, and if they are particularly fanatical in their religion they possess a moral advantage that, if coupled with the conventional arsenal of a modernised Near Eastern military, could be quite formidable.  That is not to run around  like a little child screaming that we face impending doom, but to bear in mind that having something worth fighting for sometimes makes all the difference in determining the outcomes of conflicts.      

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