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"Israel is doomed," said a friend
of mine some months ago, returning to the U.S. after a trip to
Israel. I asked him why, and my friend, who spent twenty years
working at a high level in the Pentagon, answered, "They've
put in an Air Force man as chief of the General Staff."
He was talking about Dan Halutz,
appointed chief of the General Staff of the IDF in February of
this year.
My friend began his stint in
the Pentagon in the middle Sixties, as one of Robert McNamara's
"whiz kids". He'd spent long years listening to Air
Force generals expounding the virtues of air power, and how their
bombers would wipe out the Viet Cong, without the need for any
ground forces.
Those bombers never did wipe
out the Viet Cong, though they destroyed vast forests while other
USAF planes drenched the ground cover with poisons that plague
Vietnamese and Americans to this day.
A generation later the next
cohort of US Air Force Generals said that air power was all that
was needed to subdue any resistance in Iraq. They claimed that
the attack in the spring of 2003 would begin with Operation Shock
and Awe, and victory would be swift and total.
Air force generals are like
that. The bloodiest battles of their lives are fought against
navy admirals, army generals and marine generals over money.
To persuade the politicians to give them the money requires incessant
boasting about the glories of air power.
The trouble is that history
shows air power doesn't win wars, or even battles. The best known
example is the bombing of Germany by the Americans and the British
in World War Two. The plan, as advanced by Britain's Arthur "Bomber"
Harris, was to kill a million Germans and paralyze industrial
production. Harris began his career with the British bombing
campaigns in Mesopotamia in the 1920s, then Palestine, against
the Great Rising, in the 1930s.
The Allies' bombs killed many
Germans, though not a million. But as postwar investigators headed
by the late J.K. Galbraith found, war production actually increased.
The bombs stiffened German morale and loathing of the enemy.
Galbraith's investigations
failed to dent the myth of air power. America's most famous Air
force general in the postwar period was Curt LeMay, headed of
America's nuclear air fleet, the Strategic Air Command. In World
War Two he had overseen the firebombing of Tokyo. It was LeMay
who boasted to President John Kennedy that his planes could "reduce
the Soviet Union to a smoldering, irradiated ruin in three hours."
Dan Halutz is in the LeMay
tradition, a brutish lout. He raised a storm when he was asked
what feelings, what moral tremors he might have had about the
dropping of a one-ton bomb in a house in Gaza. Halutz's jaunty
reply was to the effect that all he felt was "a slight tremor
in the wing of the airplane."
Writing about Halutz, and that
particular remark, the Israeli columnist Gideon Levy wrote in
Ha'aretz on February 28, "Halutz faithfully represents the
policy in recent years of the air force and the Israel Defense
Forces, which no longer has a place for moral statements in our
war on terror. According to this policy, dropping heavy bombs
on a house is a legitimate and just means, and killing innocent
civilians, including children, does not at all resemble Palestinian
terror."
That one-ton bomb killed many
civilians. Levy continued, "Anyone who saw the ruined apartment
houses also knew that the IDF and the air force lied brazenly
when they initially tried to publicize the claim that there were
only "huts" on the site of the bombing; that it was
impossible to know that people were living in them. The real
moral image of the air force is reflected from among the ruins
in the Daraj neighborhood more than all the statements of its
commander."
So the brazen thug Halutz got
the big job, just at the moment the Israeli high command was
firming up plans for its long planned onslaught on Lebanon. It
was Halutz who sold Olmert and Peretz on the fantasy of swift
and devastating air force raids finishing off Hezbollah.
Since then Halutz has efficiently
united all Lebanese in loathing of Israel, while being an effective
propagandist for Hezbollah. What better recruiter of sympathy
for Lebanon than Halutz screaming "we're going to turn Lebanon
back into what it was 20 years ago," and threatening to
blow up a 10-floor building for every missile.
By the second day in August
Halutz's bombardment had achieved the extraordinary feat of prompting
the Maronite Catholic patriarch - the spiritual leader of the
most pro-Western populace - to assemble Lebanon's religious leaders
-- Shiite and Sunni Muslims and various Christian confessions.
The group issued a joint statement of solidarity, condemning
the Israeli "aggression" and hailing "the resistance,
mainly led by Hezbollah, which represents one of the sections
of society."
All Halutz knows how to do
is to bomb defenseless targets. This ability does not require
brain power or skill in political analysis.
Napoleon said he wanted lucky
generals under his command. Hezbollah is lucky in the Israeli
military commander it faces, even though Lebanon bleeds.
Now
Available
from CounterPunch Books!
The Case
Against Israel
By Michael Neumann
CounterPunch
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