Security

As most of you probably know, over the past few years the U.S. military has been engaged in an extensive internal debate about counter-insurgency warfare. This is partly a debate about COIN tactics and techniques -- in other words, about how to do COIN better -- but the more important debate is about the priority that COIN should receive in U.S. defense planning. Specifically, should the United States continue to focus primarily on preparing for "great power" wars and strive to retain "command of the commons" through air power, naval power, and other sophisticated warfare capabilities, or should it retool for the various small wars that it seems to have been fighting lately? This latter view dovetails with the idea that United States also needs much greater civilian capacity for nation-building, development assistance, and the like.

Unfortunately, most of the attention seems to have focused on "how to do it better" issue, and much less on the desirability of the proposed shift. Those who argue for radical change invariably point to the various wars the United States has fought in recent years -- notably Iraq and Afghanistan -- and simply assert that we need to get ready to do a lot more of them.

Unfortunately, this line of argument ignores the fact that these wars are the result of past American mistakes. The first error was the failure to capture Bin Laden and his associates at the battle of Tora Bora, which allowed al Qaeda's leaders to escape into Pakistan and thus ensured that the United States would become enmeshed in Afghanistan. Had we captured al Qaeda's top leaders then, we could have declared victory over al Qaeda and come home and we would be far less worried about events in Central Asia today. Who would care about a "safe haven" in Afghanistan if Bin Laden had been killed or captured back in 2001?

The second mistake was the foolish decision to invade Iraq in 2003, which led us into yet another costly insurgency. Not surprisingly, those charged with waging that war eventually focused on COIN, because that was the problem they were expected to solve. But the only reason they had to do so was the fact that the Bush administration decided to wage an unnecessary war in the first place.

In short, the current obsession with counterinsurgency is the direct result of two fateful errors. We didn't get Bin Laden when we should have, and we invaded Iraq when we shouldn't. Had the United States not made those two blunders, we wouldn't have been fighting costly counterinsurgencies and we wouldn't be contemplating a far-reaching revision of U.S. defense priorities and military doctrine.

The obvious question is: Does the United States really want to base its military strategy on two enormous blunders?

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There is grim news from Baghdad: A twin suicide truck bombing of two Iraqi ministries has left over 130 dead and wounded more than 500. It is the largest such attack in all of 2009 and a reminder, unfortunately, that the oft-heralded "surge" was not the success that its architects and advocates like to claim. 

As my FP colleague Tom Ricks noted in his book The Gamble, the "surge" was a partial tactical success that succeeded in bringing casualty levels down. (I say partial, because we still do not know how much of that success was due to the surge itself, and how much was due to changing circumstances within Iraq, most notably the ethnic separation created by earlier violence and the realignment of some key Sunni groups who were repelled by the wanton violence perpetrated by Al Qaeda in Iraq.) 

The larger strategic objective of the surge was political reconciliation among the main contending groups within Iraq. There have been a few encouraging signs in recent months, but yesterday's bombing is another brutal indication that that goal remains unmet. Among other things, this means that pro-war pundits who invoke the purported "success" of the surge in Iraq in order to justify major troop increases in Afghanistan are not to be trusted, especially when they are the same geniuses who helped get us into Iraq in the first place.

Barack Obama inherited two losing wars from his incompetent predecessor.  If he's not careful, he'll still be fighting (and losing) both of them when his first term ends. And neither will be "Bush's war" at that point; Obama will own them both by then. 

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I've blogged a lot about Iran and Afghanistan over the past few months, but I've been remiss in not highlighting an important connection between the two issues. As Spencer Ackerman noted a few days ago, U.S. Afghan commander Stanley McChrystal offered this intriguing comment during his remarks at IISS headquarters in London last week:

Iran, of course, being, you know, in such proximity to Afghanistan and having significant influence inside Afghanistan, is a big player. They, in my view, they have a lot of very positive influence inside Afghanistan, some of it cultural, some of it financial, just things that any neighbor would have to try to build the stability. I think that if Iran takes a very mature look at a stable Afghanistan and support the government of Afghanistan, then we'll be -- we'll be in good shape. If they were to choose not to do that, and they were to choose to support insurgents, I think that would be a significant miscalculation.

I don't think this comment was an idle remark by McChrystal. What he's telling us is that Iran could be a positive influence in Afghanistan, and that it could also be a real hindrance to our efforts. And that means that an attack on Iran would make our situation in Afghanistan even worse than it is already, because Iran would have both the capacity and the incentive to retaliate.

There's no love lost between Iran and the Taliban, in part because the Taliban murdered ten Iranian diplomats in Mazari Sharif back in 1998. But Iran does retain some influence there -- as McChystal points out --and they would undoubtedly be looking for some way to pay us back if we were foolish enough to strike them. McChrystal is probably aware that advocates of a hardline approach to Tehran have a lot of clout in the Obama administration, and that plenty of other voices -- such as GOP Senator Lindsay Graham -- continue to wave the big stick even as negotiations get underway.

So McChrystal's seemingly innocuous remark might actually be something of a pre-emptive strike against those who keep suggesting that our only approach to Iran is preventive war. If so, then this might be another illustration of Richard Betts's argument in Soldiers, Statesmen, and Cold War Crises, which showed that at least in the U.S. context, civilians are often a lot more bellicose than the uniformed military. In any case, I hope Obama is paying attention.

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Kyrgyzstan has reversed an earlier decision to end U.S. access to Manas air base, a valuable hub supplying U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Both Reuters and the New York Times describe this step as a "victory" for the United States and for the Obama administration.

In fact, it's a victory for the government of Kyrgryzstan, which had threatened to close the base earlier this year, shortly after Russia had offered them a $2 billion loan. Like a smart landlord in the midst of a housing shortage, Krygyzstan threatened to evict us if we didn't pay more rent. So the annual charge for using the base will rise from about $17 million to $60 million, and the United States also agreed to spend $36 million to expand the airport and additional millions on economic development and drug eradication programs.  

When Washington cares more about Central Asian security than Central Asian governments do, it will be child's play for them to charge us whatever they think the market will bear. Admittedly, it's small change when you consider the overall cost of the Afghan operation (over $200 billion in defense costs since 9/11 and currently running $2-3 billion per month, according to the Congressional Research Service). But when the federal budget is hemorrhaging red ink and state and local governments are slashing budgets and programs right and left, I don't see why succumbing to this sort of blackmail is a "victory" for us. Krygryzstan gets a bigger air base, and we get a less well-educated and less healthier population here, not to mention crummier public infrastructure. Maybe it's the best of several bad alternatives, but let's hold the high-fives.

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Like many of you, I'm sure, I remain preoccupied with the events in Iran. It's impossible to know exactly how events will evolve or what the medium-term significance will be, but the turmoil is as gripping as it was unexpected. In terms of Iran's people having a government that is more responsive to their wishes -- and in particular, one that is open to the sort of relaxation of tensions that the Obama administration has sought -- my hopes are with the anti-Ahmadinejad forces.   

But we shouldn't succumb to the illusion that Ahmadinejad's defeat and Mousavi's triumph (or more broadly, the triumph of the anti-government demonstrators) would produce a dramatic shift in Iran’s foreign policy, and especially its nuclear energy program (and any nuclear weapons ambitions it may have).  

For one thing, Moussavi himself has been a supporter of the nuclear program for many years, and the Times reported today that it was he who authorized the purchase of Iran's first centrifuges back in the 1980s. For another, public opinion surveys in Iran have shown that the vast majority of Iranians support the nuclear program. This means that a lot of the people wearing green and marching in the streets are not going to subsequently demand that Iran abandon its efforts to master the full fuel cycle.

Even if Iran were to become a full-fledged liberal democracy, it would not necessarily abandon its nuclear ambitions, including the possible acquisition of nuclear weapons. Right now, five of the world's nine nuclear weapons states are democracies (the United States, France, Great Britain, India and Israel), so being democratic hardly precludes wanting a nuclear arsenal.   

The good news is that the history of the nuclear age demonstrates that nuclear weapons do not enable their possessors to conquer or threaten others with impunity, and thus don't provide much in the way of an offensive or coercive capability. Having tens of thousands of nukes didn't permit the United States or Soviet Union to blackmail other countries during the Cold War, having a handful of nukes hasn't enabled Kim Jong Il to dictate to anybody, and having a sizeable nuclear arsenal doesn't allow Israel to tell Hezbollah, Iran, Syria, or its various other adversaries what to do.  

In fact, nuclear weapons are good for only one or two things: 1) protecting your own territory (and maybe the territory of especially close allies) against conquest and occupation, and 2) making it hard for others to coerce you. As IAEA head Mohammed El-Baradei said of Iran yesterday, "They want to send a message to their neighbors, to the rest of the world, 'Don't mess with us,'" adding that "it is also an insurance policy against what they have heard in the past about regime change."

So while I continue to hope that the reformist forces triumph, we shouldn’t be under any illusions about the short-to-medium term impact of the "revolution" on the major issues that currently divide us.

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The United States has the world's largest economy (so far), and the world's most powerful conventional military forces. It spends about as much on national security than the rest of the world combined, and nearly nine times more than the No. 2 power (China). It has several thousand operational nuclear weapons, each substantially more powerful than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. America is further protected from conventional military attack by two enormous oceanic moats, there no great powers in the Western hemisphere, and it hasn’t been invaded since the War of 1812. (A few southerners may want to challenge that last statement, but I'm not going to get into that).

9/11 reminded us American security is not absolute, of course, and the strategic advantages I just outlined are no defense against climate change, pandemic disease, or financial collapse. But surely the United States is about as secure as any great power in modern history. Yet Americans continue to fret about national security, continue to spend far more on national security than any other country does, and continue to believe that our way of life will be imperiled if we do not confront an array of much weaker foes on virtually every continent.

One reason Americans exaggerate security fears is the existence of an extensive cottage industry of professional threatmongers, who deploy a well-honed array of arguments to convince us that we are in fact in grave danger. (The United States is hardly the only country that does this, of course, but the phenomenon is more evident here because its overall strategic position is so favorable). Debunking these claims is easier once you know the basics, so I hereby offer as a public service:

The Threatmonger's Handbook:
(Or, How to Scare Your Fellow Citizens for Fun and Profit.)

Rule #1: Emphasize that small decisions can mark the difference between victory or defeat.

The core logic of threatmongering depends on convincing others that world is highly elastic; that very small policy changes will have dramatic effects on one’s overall position. Threatmongers argue that cancelling some weapons system or failing to take action against some minor danger may leave you vulnerable to a devastating attack. At the same time, spending just a bit more or taking aggressive action now will cause potential threats to dissipate and guarantee security for years to come.

Rule #2: "Everything is connected."

This principle is a corollary to Rule #1: a good threatmonger wants to convince you that events in one area will have far-reaching effects everywhere else. They portray a world where credibility is fragile, where dominos fall easily and where one's allies will be quick to jump on the enemy's bandwagon after a single setback. By the same logic, threatmongers promise that success in one place will quickly lead to further triumphs elsewhere. During the Vietnam War, threatmongers predicted that defeat there would lead to dominos falling all across Southeast Asia and undermine U.S. alliances all over the world (which of course didn't happen). More recently, the architects of the Iraq war argued that toppling Saddam would trigger a wave of democratic transformations across the Middle East and put dictators on notice elsewhere. In a world where everything is connected to everything else, there are no minor problems and nothing can be safely ignored.

Rule #3: Emphasize threats that are inherently impossible to measure.

This principle was the essence of McCarthyism: his claim that communists were infiltrating the U.S. government was impossible to disprove with 100 percent confidence, and it made many Americans fear that a vast network of subversives were secretly at work across the entire country. The problem is that there's no way to know for certain if his accusations were true or not: that flag-waving Boy Scout next door might have been an especially cunning Marxist-Leninist with a truly effective disguise. Today, threatmongers try to scare us by portraying all Muslims as potential subversives, and by suggesting that Western civilization itself is under siege from immigration, the internet, cyberterrorism, or some other covert form of infiltration. And don't forget Rule 3A: when an alleged threat is easy to measure and not really that serious, just classify the information so that nobody finds out.

Rule #4: Portray allies as a liability rather than as an asset.

States normally seek allies in order to pool their assets and make both more secure. Threatmongers see this differently: the more allies you have, the more interests that must be protected and the greater your security requirements actually become. Logically, U.S. defense requirements should be lower because we are allied to some of the world's wealthiest and well-armed states. But the logic of threatmongering suggests the opposite conclusion: as the United States recruits an ever-increasing network of allies, it has to defend more and more places and must therefore worry about an ever-widening array of problems.

Rule #5: Whenever possible, depict opponents as part of a strong and highly cohesive movement, and preferably one united by strong ideological convictions.

This is the flip side of Rule #4: our allies are weak and feckless, but our opponents are always strong, cunning, resolute, and well-organized. During the Cold War, the enemy was "monolithic communism," an image that downplayed the deep schisms within the communist world. Under Bill Clinton, the danger was a motley collection of "rogue states" whose combined capabilities were a tiny fraction of our own and who weren't even in cahoots with one another. George W. Bush went one step further, and placed Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and North Korea in a mythical  "axis of evil." Today, other threatmongers rail about the looming danger of "Islamofascism," thereby suggesting that all Islamic groups are part of some vast and well-organized conspiracy. In all these cases, the same basic principle is used to make dangers look bigger than they really are.

Rule #6: "We must act now!"

To a skilled threatmonger, trends are always against us and time is always short. If we do not act soon, we are told, the window of opportunity will close and our security will be compromised forever. This is the mindset that drove Germany's decision to provoke World War I and led the Bush administration to attack Iran in 2003, and those now favor military action against Iran invoke essentially the same logic. They've forgotten Bismarck's warning: preventive war "is committing suicide for fear of death."

Rule #7: Always describe opponents as irrational, unalterably aggressive, and impossible to deter.

If the enemy is aggressive, irrational, and willing to run great risks, then it will take overwhelming superiority to deter them and even that may not be enough. In fact, if the adversary is as nasty as the threatmongers say, then deterrence or containment probably won't work and war is probably inevitable. And if war is going to occur sooner or later, we should look for a favorable opportunity to take them out first. Kenneth Pollock of the Brookings Institution used Rule #7 to perfection in his 2002 book The Threatening Storm, thereby helping convince potentially skeptical liberals that invading Iraq was a good idea.

Rule #8:  When it comes to national security, there is no such thing as opportunity costs.

The goal of threatmongering is to convince a country to spend more money on defense or to undertake more aggressive actions in the name of national security. Leaders or citizens may object if they think such a policy might entail real costs or require genuine tradeoffs, so skilled threatmongers often argue that increased military spending will be cost-free (for example, by claiming it will stimulate the economy and create jobs), or by suggesting that military action in one arena will produce lots of positive externalities elsewhere (see Rule #2). At the same time, they will downplay the possibility that military action lead to a costly quagmire or make it impossible to take action elsewhere (see under: Iraq). 

Rule #9: Assume that opponents are able to do anything they say they want to do.

One easy way to scare people is to look at your enemies' wildest dreams and assume that they have the capacity to actually bring them about.  During the Cold War, threatmongers studied Soviet military writings and argued that the most fantastic Soviet battle plans were an accurate measure of what the Red Army could actually accomplish, even though there were sound military reasons to reject that assessment. Or they took the rabble-rousing rhetoric of revolutionary leaders at face value and assumed that it would be as easy to spread revolution as these radicals thought. Today, threatmongers tell us that Osama bin Laden wants to topple governments throughout the Islamic world and eventually restore the medieval caliphate, even though he is as likely to achieve that goal as I am to win the Wimbledon singles title or make the finals on American Idol. It obviously makes sense to know what an adversary’s objective might be, but only a dedicated threatmonger equates desires with actual capabilities.  

And don't forget Rule 9B (the Cheney Corollary): if there is a one percent chance that some bad thing might happen, act as if it is a 100 percent certainty. A purer illustration of threatmongering would be difficult to find.

Rule#10: When challenged, immediately question your critics' patriotism, credentials, or seriousness.

Nothing can disarm critics who claim that the nation is needlessly squandering blood or treasure more effectively than accusing them of being unpatriotic, naïve, excessively idealistic, or insufficiently "serious." And if that doesn't work, bring up Neville Chamberlain.

These tried-and-true methods do not work all of the time, of course, but they are undeniably effective. This is partly because a few leaders turn out to be hard to deter, sometimes seemingly minor events do have large consequences, and losing a war or being forced to compromise with an adversary is never a pleasant experience. In short, there are good reasons for any country to national security seriously, which is why realists like me oppose pacifism, radical disarmament, or reflexive appeasement. But squandering resources is never a good idea, and exaggerating dangers can be as harmful to a state's long-term interests as understating them, especially when it leads to wars of choice that turn out badly. So when you see arguments like this being used to justify hawkish policies, hang onto your skepticism (and your wallet).

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The Council on Foreign Relations sponsored a one-day conference on "NATO at 60" last week, and I participated in a panel discussion with Charles Kupchan of Georgetown/CFR, Ole Waever of the University of Copenhagen, and James Goldgeier of George Washington University, and I thought each of the other participants had lots of smart things to say. (I especially liked Waever's metaphor for NATO as an Old Master painting -- a valuable masterpiece that you'd want to protect but not something you could duplicate, even if you wanted to).

Charlie, Ole and I published a little book on NATO about ten years ago, and I used part of my time on the panel to revisit my earlier arguments and assess what I got right and what I got wrong back then. (Short answer: I was right that the disappearance of the Soviet threat and several other structural forces were gradually pulling NATO apart, but I underestimated U.S. willingness to continue subsidizing its allies' security and understated European willingness to continue deferring to U.S. leadership).

I ended my remarks with five "heretical questions," and thought I'd share them with you.

First, how will generational and demographic change affect NATO in the future?  (It was not exactly a youngish crowd at the meeting). If you're 20 years old today, you were born the year the Berlin Wall came down. You were twelve years old when George W. Bush became President, which means you came of age in a period when the U.S. image in much of Europe sank to new lows. The various Berlin crises, "Flexible Response," the Euromissiles controversy, MBFR talks, and all the other familiar landmarks of NATO's glorious past are ancient (and largely irrelevant) history to the next generation. Is an alliance led by the United States really the only world that young Europeans can or will imagine? What about Americans who trace their ancestry to Asia, India, or Latin America, and whose famiy ties or economic interests lie elsewhere?  

Second, why does anyone think that Europe is going to do more to provide for collective defense? The alliance has been arguing about "burden-sharing" since its inception, and we have both well-developed theories and sixty years of history demonstrating why the United States still bears most of the burden while Europe tends to "free-ride." A continent with a larger population and combined GDP than America, and with over a million men and women under arms, still can’t assemble the wherewithal to put 60,000 troops in the field and sustain them for any reasonable length of time. I'm not picking on them, mind you, because it's not obvious to me that Europe needs a lot more capability in order to be secure, especially with Uncle Sam devoting a much higher share of its GDP to defense. But given that NATO's European members have a declining and aging populations and face no imminent external military threats, does anyone seriously believe that they are going to take on a more equal share of the collective burden?

Third, over the next ten to twenty years (at least), America's strategic attention is likely to be focused on the Middle East, Central Asia, and East Asia.  In light of these priorities, what is the basis for close strategic cooperation between Europe and America? (Note that several NATO allies have already declared that they will be withdrawing troops from Afghanistan in the next year or so, just as the United States is ramping up). If the United States were one day to decide to make a greater effort to contain China (not a certainty, of course, but hardly a far-fetched possibility), would Europe join in that mission?  What would be its interest in doing so? Wouldn't it be more likely to seek good relations with Washington and Beijing, and cultivate profitable economic ties with both sides?

Fourth, and following from the third point, why do so many people think that NATO can or should strive for common positions on literally dozens of contentious international issues? For example, a recent joint study by the RAND Corporation and the Bertelsmann Stiftung in Germany calls for major diplomatic efforts to "harmonize" positions across a whole range of problems, including terrorism, WMD, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Central Asia, the reform of Bretton Woods institutions, energy security, global poverty, and a whole lot more.  But is there any reason to expect NATO to do this? If not, what is that point of making this level of agreement on that many issues the benchmark of alliance cohesion? Might we be better off picking the two or three most important issues confronting NATO's members, working hard to reach agreement on them, and agreeing to disagree on the others?

Fifth and last, is there are a point one can now foresee when NATO might actually end, or at least be recognized as essentially irrelevant? Back in 1998, I compared NATO to Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Grey: it appeared youthful and vigorous, continually holding meetings, exercises, summits, and subsequently managing to fight minor wars in Kosovo and Afghanistan (albeit without much actual coordination), but in reality, the alliance was growing old and tired. Perhaps that’s why the titles of so many recent studies of NATO use the prefix "Re-," as in "Renewing the Atlantic Partnership," "Revitalizing the Transatlantic Security Partnership," or "Alliance Reborn." If so many smart people think NATO badly needs repair, isn't that rather revealing?

There's no need for an acrimonious divorce -- and I don't actually expect NATO to formally dissolve -- but it is hard to see it as America's core alliance network going forward. Perhaps NATO at 70 will be enjoying a quiet and well-deserved retirement. Still alive and kicking, but like most retirees, a lot less active.

Many supporters of Israel will not criticize its behavior, even when it is engaged in brutal and misguided operations like the recent onslaught on Gaza. In addition to their understandable reluctance to say anything that might aid Israel's enemies, this tendency is based in part on the belief that Israel's political and military leaders are exceptionally smart and thoughtful strategists who understand their threat environment and have a history of success against their adversaries. If so, then it makes little sense for outsiders to second-guess them.

This image of Israeli strategic genius has been nurtured by Israelis over the years and seems to be an article of faith among neoconservatives and other hardline supporters of Israel in the United States. It also fits nicely with the wrongheaded but still popular image of Israel as the perennial David facing a looming Arab Goliath; in this view, only brilliant strategic thinkers could have consistently overcome the supposedly formidable Arab forces arrayed against them.

The idea that Israelis possess some unique strategic acumen undoubtedly reflects a number of past military exploits, including the decisive victories in the 1948 War of Independence, the rapid conquest of the Sinai in 1956, the daredevil capture of Adolf Eichmann in 1960, the stunning Israeli triumph at the beginning of the 1967 Six Day War, and the intrepid hostage rescue at Entebbe in 1976.

These tactical achievements are part of a larger picture, however, and that picture is not a pretty one. Israel has also lost several wars in the past -- none of them decisively, of course -- and its ability to use force to achieve larger strategic objectives has declined significantly over time. This is why Israelis frequently speak of the need to restore their "deterrent"; they are aware that occasional tactical successes have not led to long-term improvements in their overall security situation. The assault on Gaza is merely the latest illustration of this worrisome tendency.

What does the record show?

Back in 1956, Israel, along with Britain and France, came up with a harebrained scheme to seize the Suez Canal and topple Nasser's regime in Egypt. (This was after an Israeli raid on an Egyptian army camp in Gaza helped convince Nasser to obtain arms from the Soviet Union). Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion initially hoped that Israel would be allowed to conquer and absorb the West Bank, parts of the Sinai, and portions of Lebanon, but Britain and France quickly scotched that idea. The subsequent attack was a military success but a strategic failure: the invaders were forced to disgorge the lands they seized while Nasser's prestige soared at home and across the Arab world, fueling radicalism and intensifying anti-Israel sentiments throughout the region. The episode led Ben-Gurion to conclude that Israel should forego additional attempts to expand its borders -- which is why he opposed taking the West Bank in 1967 -- but his successors did not follow his wise advice.

Ten years later, Israel's aggressive policies toward Syria and Jordan helped precipitate the crisis that led to the Six Day War. The governments of Egypt, Syria, the USSR and the United States also bear considerable blame for that war, though it was Israel's leaders who chose to start it, even though they recognized that their Arab foes knew they were no match for the IDF and did not intend to attack Israel.  More importantly, after seizing the West Bank, Golan Heights and Gaza Strip during the war, Israeli leaders decided to start building settlements and eventually incorporate them into a "greater Israel." Thus, 1967 marks the beginning of Israel's settlements project, a decision that even someone as sympathetic to Israel as Leon Wieseltier has described as "a moral and strategic blunder of historic proportions." Remarkably, this momentous decision was never openly debated within the Israeli body politic.

With Israeli forces occupying the Sinai peninsula, Egypt launched the so-called War of Attrition in October 1968 in an attempt to get it back. The result was a draw on the battlefield and the two sides eventually reached a ceasefire agreement in August 1970. The war was a strategic setback for Israel, however, because Egypt and its Soviet patron used the ceasefire to complete a missile shield along the Suez Canal that could protect Egyptian troops if they attacked across the Canal to regain the Sinai. American and Israeli leaders did not recognize this important shift in the balance of power between Israel and Egypt and remained convinced that Egypt had no military options. As a result, they ignored Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's peace overtures and left him little choice but to use force to try to dislodge Israel from the Sinai. Israel then failed to detect Egypt and Syria's mobilization in early October 1973 and fell victim to one of the most successful surprise attacks in military history. The IDF eventually rallied and triumphed, but the costs were high in a war that might easily have been avoided.

Israel's next major misstep was the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The invasion was the brainchild of hawkish Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, who had concocted a grandiose scheme to destroy the PLO and gain a free hand to incorporate the West Bank in "Greater Israel" and turn Jordan into "the" Palestinian state. It was a colossal strategic blunder: the PLO leadership escaped destruction and Israel’s bombardment of Beirut and its complicity in the massacres at Sabra and Shatila were widely and rightly condemned. And after initially being greeted as liberators by the Shiite population of southern Lebanon, Israel's prolonged and heavy-handed occupation helped create Hezbollah, which soon became a formidable adversary as well as an avenue for Iranian influence on Israel's northern border. Israel was unable to defeat Hezbollah and eventually withdrew its troops from Lebanon in 2000, having in effect been driven out by Hezbollah's increasingly effective resistance.  Invading Lebanon not only failed to solve Israel’s problem with the Palestinians, it created a new enemy that still bedevils Israel today.

In the late 1980s, Israel helped nurture Hamas -- yes, the same organization that the IDF is bent on destroying today -- as part of its long-standing effort to undermine Yasser Arafat and Fatah and keep the Palestinians divided. This decision backfired too, because Arafat eventually recognized Israel and agreed to negotiate a two-state solution, while Hamas emerged as a new and dangerous adversary that has refused to recognize Israel's existence and to live in peace with the Jewish state.

The signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 offered an unprecedented chance to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict once and for all, but Israel's leaders failed to seize the moment. Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Benjamin Netanyahu all refused to endorse the idea of a Palestinian state -- even Rabin never spoke publicly about allowing the Palestinians to have a state of their own -- and Ehud Barak's belated offer of statehood at the 2000 Camp David summit did not go far enough. As Barak's own foreign minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, later admitted, "if I were a Palestinian, I would have rejected Camp David as well." Meanwhile, the number of settlers in the West Bank doubled during the Oslo period (1993-2001), and the Israelis built some 250 miles of connector roads in the West Bank.  Palestinian leaders and U.S. officials made their own contributions to Oslo's failure, but Israel had clearly squandered what was probably the best opportunity it will ever have to negotiate a peace agreement with the Palestinians. Barak also derailed a peace treaty with Syria in early 2000 that appeared to be a done deal, at least to President Bill Clinton, who had helped fashion it. But when public opinion polls suggested that the Israeli public might not support the deal, the Israeli Prime Minister got cold feet and the talks collapsed.

More recently, U.S. and Israeli miscalculations have gone hand-in-hand. In the wake of September 11, neoconservatives in the United States, who had been pushing for war against Iraq since early 1998, helped convince President Bush to attack Iraq as part of a larger strategy of "regional transformation." Israeli officials were initially opposed to this scheme because they wanted Washington to go after Iran instead, but once they understood that Iran and Syria were next on the administration's hit list they backed the plan enthusiastically. Indeed, prominent Israelis like Ehud Barak, Benjamin Netanyahu, and then-Foreign Minister Shimon Peres helped sell the war in the United States, while Prime Minister Sharon and his chief aides put pressure on Washington to make sure that Bush didn’t lose his nerve and leave Saddam standing. The result? A costly quagmire for the United States and a dramatic improvement in Iran's strategic position.  Needless to say, these developments were hardly in Israel's strategic interest.

The next failed effort was then-Prime Minister Sharon's decision to unilaterally withdraw all of Israel’s settlers from the Gaza Strip in August 2005. Although Israel and its supporters in the West portrayed this move as a gesture towards peace, "unilateralism" was in fact part of a larger effort to derail the so-called Road Map, freeze the peace process, and consolidate Israeli control over the West Bank, thereby putting off the prospect of a Palestinian state "indefinitely." The withdrawal was completed successfully, but Sharon's attempt to impose peace terms on the Palestinians failed completely. Fenced in by the Israelis, the Palestinians in Gaza began firing rockets and mortars at nearby Israeli towns and then Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections in January 2006. This event reflected its growing popularity in the face of Fatah’s corruption and Israel's continued occupation of the West Bank, but Jerusalem and Washington refused to accept the election results and decided instead to try to topple Hamas. This was yet another error: Hamas eventually ousted Fatah from Gaza and its popularity has continued to increase.

The Lebanon War in the summer of 2006 revealed the deficiencies of Israel's strategic thinking with particular clarity. A cross-border raid by Hezbollah provoked an Israeli offensive intended to destroy Hezbollah's large missile inventory and compel the Lebanese government to crack down on Hezbollah itself. However worthy these goals might have been, Israel's strategy was doomed to fail. Air strikes could not eliminate Hezbollah's large and well-hidden arsenal and bombing civilian areas in Lebanon merely generated more anger at Israel and raised Hezbollah's standing among the Lebanese population and in the Arab and Islamic world as well. Nor could a belated ground attack fix the problem, as the IDF could hardly accomplish in a few weeks what it had failed to do between 1982 and 2000. Plus, the Israeli offensive was poorly planned and poorly executed. It was equally foolish to think that Lebanon’s fragile central government could rein in Hezbollah; if that were possible, the governing authorities in Beirut would have done so long before. It is no surprise that the Winograd Commission (an official panel of inquiry established to examine Israel’s handling of the war) harshly criticized Israel's leaders for their various strategic errors.

Finally, a similar strategic myopia is apparent in the assault on Gaza. Israeli leaders initially said that their goal was to inflict enough damage on Hamas so it could no longer threaten Israel with rocket attacks. But they now concede that Hamas will neither be destroyed nor disarmed by their attacks, and instead say that more extensive monitoring will prevent rocket parts and other weapons from being smuggled into Gaza. This is a vain hope, however. As I write this, Hamas has not accepted a ceasefire and is still firing rockets; even if it does accept a ceasefire soon, rocket and mortar fire are bound to resume at some point in the future. On top of that, Israel's international image has taken a drubbing, Hamas is probably more popular, and moderate leaders like Mahmoud Abbas have been badly discredited. A two-state solution -- which is essential if Israel wishes to remain Jewish and democratic and to avoid becoming an apartheid state -- is farther away than ever. The IDF performed better in Gaza than it did in Lebanon, largely because Hamas is a less formidable foe than Hezbollah. But this does not matter: the war against Hamas is still a strategic failure. And to have inflicted such carnage on the Palestinians for no lasting strategic gain is especially reprehensible.

In virtually all of these episodes -- and especially those after 1982 -- Israel's superior military power was used in ways that did not improve its long-term strategic position. Given this dismal record, therefore, there is no reason to think that Israel possesses uniquely gifted strategists or a national security establishment that consistently makes smart and far-sighted choices. Indeed, what is perhaps most remarkable about Israel is how often the architects of these disasters -- Barak, Olmert, Sharon, and maybe Netanyahu -- are not banished from leadership roles but instead are given another opportunity to repeat their mistakes. Where is the accountability in the Israeli political system?

No country is immune from folly, of course, and Israel's adversaries have committed plenty of reprehensible acts and made plenty of mistakes themselves. Egypt's Nasser played with fire in 1967 and got badly burnt; King Hussein's decision to enter the Six Day War was a catastrophic blunder that cost Jordan the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and Palestinian leaders badly miscalculated and committed unjustifiable and brutal acts on numerous occasions. Americans made grave mistakes in Vietnam and more recently in Iraq, the French blundered in Indochina and Algeria, the British failed at Suez and Gallipoli, and the Soviets lost badly in Afghanistan. Israel is no different than most powerful states in this regard: sometimes it does things that are admirable and wise, and at other times it pursues policies that are foolish and cruel.

The moral of this story is that there is no reason to think that Israel always has well-conceived strategies for dealing with the problems that it faces.  In fact, Israel's strategic judgment seems to have declined steadily since the 1970s -- beginning with the 1982 invasion of Lebanon -- perhaps because unconditional U.S. support has helped insulate Israel from some of the costs of its actions and made it easier for Israel to indulge strategic illusions and ideological pipe-dreams. Given this reality, there is no reason for Israel's friends -- both Jewish and gentile -- to remain silent when it decides to pursue a foolish policy. And given that our "special relationship" with Israel means that the United States is invariably associated with Jerusalem's actions, Americans should not hesitate to raise their voices to criticize Israel when it is acting in ways that are not in the U.S. national interest.

Those who refuse to criticize Israel even when it acts foolishly surely think they are helping the Jewish state. They are wrong. In fact, they are false friends, because their silence, or worse, their cheerleading, merely encourages Israel to continue potentially disastrous courses of action.  Israel could use some honest advice these days, and it would make eminently good sense if its closest ally were able to provide it. Ideally, this advice would come from the president, the secretary of state, and prominent members of Congress -- speaking as openly as some politicians in other democracies do. But that's unlikely to happen, because Israel's supporters make it almost impossible for Washington to do anything but reflexively back Israel's actions, whether they make sense or not. And they often do not these days.

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