Incidentism
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
Once upon a time it was the objective of the
military to win wars. Now the objective of the
military is to avoid incidents.
An incident happens when civilians are killed,
prisoners mistreated or some other event that is
photographed, videotaped and then flashed around the
world. This results in an Incident, capital I, that
triggers much artificial soul-searching by the media
which spends the next two years beating the incident
to death and flogging its corpse across television
programs, newspaper articles, books, documentaries
and finally, if it's a big enough incident, a real
life movie version that is based on the book, which
was based on the article, where the idealistic
reporter/lawyer/activist who uncovered the truth
about the incident will be played by Matt Damon or
George Clooney.
The main objective of the military in most civilized
countries is to prevent this chain of articles,
programs, books, documentaries, dramatized plays and
Matt Damon movies from coming about by making sure
that no Incident can ever happen. And the best way
to do that is by not fighting. And if the enemy
insists on fighting, then he must be fought with
razor sharp precision so that no collateral damage
takes place. And if someone must die, it had better
be our own soldiers, rather than anyone on the other
side whose death might be used as an Incident.
Incidentism isn't derived from a fear of Matt Damon
movies, but from the perception that wars are not
won on the battlefield, but in the minds of men. And
that perception has a good deal to do with the kind
of wars we choose to fight.
The military, whether in the United States or
Israel, does not exist to win wars. It exists to win
over the people who don't want it to win a war.
The guiding principle in such conflicts is to use
the military to push back the insurgency long enough
to win over the local population with a nation
building exercise. This program has never worked out
for the United States, but that doesn't mean that
generations of military leaders don't insist on
going through the motions of applying it anyway.
In Israel, the last time the military was sent to
win a war, was 1973. Since then the military has
been used as a police force and to battle militias
in Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank. In the
Territories, the ideal Israeli soldier was supposed
to be able to dodge rocks thrown by teenagers hired
by Time correspondents looking to score a great
photo. Today the ideal Israeli soldier is capable of
visiting an American college campus to dodge the
overpriced textbooks hurled at him by the local
branch of Students for Justice in Palestine or the
International Socialist Organization, while
explaining why the IDF is the most moral army in the
world except for the Salvation Army.
The ideal Israeli soldier, like his American,
British and Canadian, but not Russian or Chinese,
counterparts, is supposed to avoid Incidents. That
means operating under Rules of Engagement which make
firing at an assailant almost as dangerous as not
firing at an assailant.
The ideal American soldier is supposed to avoid the
Taliban, or as one set of orders urged, patrol in
places where the Taliban won't be found. And that's
sensible advice, because if the goal is to avoid
creating an Incident, then avoiding the enemy is the
best way to avoid an Incident. Unfortunately the
enemy has a bad habit of appearing where he isn't
supposed to be and creating his own Incidents,
because Taliban and Hamas commanders are not
concerned about being yelled at in a fictional
courtroom by Matt Damon. They actually welcome
Incidents. The bigger and bloodier the Incident, the
more hashish and young boys get passed around the
campfire that night.
American soldiers operate under the burden of
winning over the hearts and minds of Afghans and New
York Times readers. Israeli soldiers are tasked with
winning over New York Times readers and European
politicians. But some hearts and minds are just
unwinnable. And most wars become unwinnable when the
goal is to fight an insurgency that has no fear of
the dreaded Incident, while your soldiers are taught
to be more afraid of an Incident than of an enemy
bullet.
Israeli leaders live in perpetual fear of "losing
the sympathy of the world", little aware that they
never really had it. The "Sympathy of the World" is
the strategic metric for conflicts. And so Israel
does its best to minimize any collateral damage by
using pinpoint strikes and developing technologies
that can pluck a bee off a flower without harming a
single petal. But invariably the technocratic genius
of such schemes has its limits, an Incident happens,
the Israeli leftist press denounces the Prime
Minister for clumsily losing the sympathy of the
world, and international politicians order Israel to
retreat back behind whatever line it retreated to
during the last appeasement gesture before the last
peace negotiations. And its experts ponder how to
fight the next one without losing the sympathy of
the world.
American and Israeli generals live in fear of losing
political support and so they never put any plans on
the table that would finish a conflict. Instead they
choose low intensity warfare with prolonged bleeding
instead of short and brutal engagements that would
finish the job. They talk tough, but their enemies
know that they don't mean it. Worse still, that they
aren't allowed to mean it because meaning it would
be too mean.
Incidentism leads to armies tiptoeing around
conflicts and losing them by default. Avoiding them
becomes the objective and that also makes Incidents
inevitable because the enemy understands that all it
will take to win is a few dead children planted in
the ruins of a building; in a region where parents
kill their own children for petty infractions and
frequently go unpunished for it. The more an army
commits to Incidentism, the sooner its war is lost.
Prolonged low intensity conflicts are ripe with
opportunities for Incidents, far more so that hot
and rapid wars. And so the hearts and minds, those
of the locals and those of New York Times readers,
always end up being lost anyway.
War is no longer just politics by other means, it
actually is politics with the goal of winning over
hearts and minds, rather than achieving objectives.
The objectives of a war, before, during and after,
have become those of convincing your friends and
your enemies, and various neutral parties, of your
innate goodness and the justice of your cause.
Propaganda then has become the whole of war and
those who excel at propaganda, but aren't any good
at war, now win the wars. The actual fighting is
just the awkward part that the people who make the
propaganda wish we could dispense with so they can
focus on what's really important; distributing
photos of our soldiers protecting the local children
and playing with their puppies.
Take all that into account and the miserable
track records of great armies are no longer
surprising. Armies need to prove their morality to
win a war, but are never allowed to win a war
because it would interfere with proving their
morality. Conflicts begin on the triumphant moral
high ground and end with the victors slinking back
defeated after an Incident or two has been splashed
all over the evening news and the book based on the
article on it has already been optioned by Matt
Damon's production company for a movie to be funded
by the same people who fund the terrorists.
The war of words, the conflict of images and videos,
the clash of arguments, has become the sum of war.
And that war is unwinnable because it must be fought
on two fronts, against the cultural enemies within
and the insurgents outside.
An army cannot win a war and win over the New York
Times at the same time. And so long as it fears
Incidents more than operating in an aimless
counterinsurgency twilight that eventually shades
into defeat, then it is bound to lose both to both
the terrorists and the New York Times.