“Uninformed Comment”
Juan Cole makes a big deal on his “Informed Comment” blog today (7/23) of a story by Matthew Kalman in the San Francisco Chronicle. Kalman reports that since the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, the IDF has been planning for possible action against Hezbollah.
More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail. Under the ground rules of the briefings, the officer could not be identified.
I have absolutely no doubt that Kalman has it right, but Professor Cole turns the entire story into some sort of vast Zionist conspiracy. He “comment” is clearly “uniformed” concerning the nature of military planning.
For example, I worked for the Department of Defense for eight years and one day I was rummaging through old war plans when I ran across a copy of an American plan from the 1920s for an invasion of the island of Jamaica, then part of the British Empire. It was one of a number of contingency plans for possible operations against Great Britain, just as there were contingency plans for operations against Japan. But the existence of that plan did not mean that the Coolidge administration was planning to seize Jamaica.
Given the history of the Israeli experience with instability in southern Lebanon, the nature of Hezbollah, its ties to Syria and Iran, its past behavior, and its stated aims, the IDF would be derelict if it did not have plans for actions in southern Lebanon. Those plans would require the gathering of intelligence information regarding targets, just as the United States identified potential targets in the Soviet Union. The fact that we did so (while they were doing the same) did not mean that we intended to attack them, or vice versa. Nevertheless, Cole writes:
That this war was pre-planned was obvious to me from the moment it began. The Israeli military proceeded methodically and systematically to destroy Lebanon's infrastructure, and clearly had been casing targets for some time. The vast majority of these targets were unrelated to Hezbollah. But since the northern Sunni port of Tripoli could theoretically be used by Syria or Iran to offload replacement rockets that could be transported by truck down south to Hezbollah, the Israelis hit it. And then they hit some trucks to let truck drivers know to stay home for a while.
Preplanned? Of course. But that does not mean that the timing was determined by Israel. As for the blockade of ports and strikes at truck convoys on highways, we know that the Iranians are flying supplies into Syria and then trucking them south. We do not know what supplies may have been at sea when the crisis began. Perhaps the Israelis did. And if, as Cole states, the U.S. knew what the Israelis were planning, why didn’t we supply them before they struck, rather than rushing them resupplies now?
Coles also writes critically of SECDEF Donald Rumsfeld: “Iran also supports Syria, and Rumsfeld believes that Syria is helping destabilize Iraq, and is also a patron for Hezbollah.” Duh! Does Cole think that Syria has been helping to stabilize Iraq and is not a patron of Hezbollah? Thank God that’s what Rumsfeld thinks, because if he didn’t, he’d be an idiot.
But Cole goes on:
Because of their fetish for states, the Neoconservatives of the Bush administration are unable to see that the Levant and points east are now the province of militia-parties that dominate localities and wield asymmetrical paramilitary force in such a way as to stymie states, whether local host states, local adversaries, or imperial Powers.
I would argue that the Bush administration does see the reality of the threat posed by non-state actors. That is why it is working to shore up failed and failing states in the region. Lebanon is one of those states.
But the most amazing Cole comment is this: “Israelis tend to launch their wars of choice in the summer, in part because they know that European and American universities will be the primary nodes of popular opposition, and the universities are out in the summer.” I find this truly incredible. Does Cole really believe that when the Israelis choose times for their periodic invasions of their peaceful Arab neighbors, the IDF’s primary concern isn’t the most recent anti-Israeli actions of their neighbors, the current state of the Islamic world, the likelihood of international diplomatic pressure, or the probability of good weather and hard ground for tanks in Lebanon, but rather the academic calendar of western universities? Talk about the self-absorbed and self-important academic.
BTW, do the Israelis actually strike in the summer? Suez ’56 was in October. The Six Day War as technically a spring war, but it was after the end of universities’ spring semesters, so I suppose it was “summer” from an academic point of view. Then there was the Yom Kippur War, also known as the “October War.” The last invasion of Lebanon came early in June, technically spring, but summer for an academic calendar. Nevertheless, I could just as easily argue that the Israelis time their wars to coincide with Oktoberfest, so that Germany is otherwise occupied.
Not everything Juan Cole writes is wrong. Some of it is “informed.” Some of it is debatable, but nonetheless reflects legitimate points of view. But some of what he writes is downright inane.
