War with Syria? Peace with Syria?

A big military operation against Hamas in the Gaza Strip? A cease-fire with Hamas?

Our media discuss these questions dispassionately, as if they were equivalent options. Nobody cries out: War is the height of stupidity! Carl Von Clausewitz, the renowned military theorist, famously said that war is nothing but the continuation of politics by other means. Meaning: War is there to serve policy and is useless when it does not.

What policies did the wars in the last hundred years serve?

Ninety-four years ago, World War I broke out. The immediate cause was the assassination of the Austrian heir apparent by a Serbian student. But this was only a pretext. Every one of the belligerent nations had political and economic interests that pushed it into the war. But did the war really serve these interests? The results suggest the opposite. Three mighty empires — the Russian, German and Austrian — collapsed; France lost its standing as a world power beyond all hope of recovery; the British Empire was mortally wounded.

The peace agreements that were imposed on the vanquished were monuments of unbridled imbecility. It can be argued that the main result of World War I was World War II.

World War II was, seemingly, more rational. The man who launched it practically single-handed, Adolf Hitler, knew exactly what he wanted. His opponents went to war because they had no choice, if they did not want to be overrun by a monstrous dictator.

Hitler wanted to turn Germany into the leading world power, but the only aim that he almost achieved was the annihilation of the Jewish people. But even this mad endeavor failed in the end: Jews today have a strong influence on the most powerful country in the world, and the Holocaust played an important role in the establishment of the State of Israel.

Indeed, the Nazi dictator proved, more than anybody else, the utter futility of war as a political instrument at this point in time. The same can be said about Japan, which was even more militaristic than Germany. It achieved by peaceful means what the generals and admirals had failed to achieve by war.

From time to time I read enthusiastic reports by American tourists about Vietnam. What a wonderful country! What a friendly people! What good business can be done there!

Only a generation ago, a brutal war was running amok there. Masses of people were killed, hundreds of villages burned, forests and harvests destroyed by chemical agents, soldiers fell like flies. Why? Because of dominoes.

The theory went like this: if all of Vietnam were to be taken over by the Communists, all the other countries of Southeast Asia would fall. Each one would bring down its neighbor, like a row of dominoes. Reality has shown that this was complete nonsense: the Communists took over all of Vietnam, without affecting the stability of Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore.

There are those who maintain that for sheer futility, the invasion of Iraq takes the cake even in this fiercely competitive field.

It seems that the political leadership in Washington foresaw the dramatic rise of the worldwide demand for oil. They decided, therefore, to strengthen their hold on the oil of the Gulf and the Caspian Sea basin. The war was intended to turn Iraq into an American satellite and to station there, under a friendly regime, a permanent American garrison that would keep the whole area under control.

The results, up to now, have been the opposite. The Iraqis hate the Americans and consider them a foreign occupier. The output of oil is less than it was before the invasion, the immense costs of the war undermine the American economy, the price of oil is increasing incessantly, America’s once elevated position in world public opinion has reached rock bottom and the American public is demanding that the soldiers be brought home.

In the 60 years of its existence, the State of Israel has fought six major wars and several “smaller” ones. The 1948 confrontation was a war of “no alternative”, if one justifies the Jewish intrusion into Palestine by the fact that there was no other solution for the problem of their existence. But already the second round, the war of 1956, was an example of incredible short-sightedness.

The French, who initiated the war, could not admit to themselves that in Algeria a genuine war of liberation was taking place. Therefore, they convinced themselves that the Egyptian leader, Nasser, was the root of the problem. David Ben-Gurion and his aides (and particularly Shimon Peres) wanted to remove the “Egyptian Tyrant” because he had raised the banner of Arab Unity. Britain, the third partner, was longing for the past glories of Empire.

All these aims were totally negated by the war.

The 1967 war was intended at the beginning to break the siege on Israel. But in the course of the fighting, the war of defense became a war of conquest which drove Israel into a vertigo of intoxication from which it has not yet quite recovered. Since then we have been captives in a vicious circle of occupation, resistance, settlements and permanent war.

One of the direct results was the 1973 war, which destroyed the myth of our army’s invincibility. Yet without this being the intent of our government, this war had one positive result: Three unusual personalities — Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin and Jimmy Carter — succeeded in translating Egyptian pride over the successful crossing of the Suez Canal into a peace agreement. But the same peace could have been achieved a year earlier, without war and without the thousands of killed, if Golda Meir had not arrogantly rejected Sadat’s proposal.

The First Lebanon War was, perhaps, the most hopeless and dim-witted of Israel’s wars, a cocktail of arrogance, ignorance and complete lack of understanding of the opponent. Ariel Sharon intended — as he told me in advance, to — (a) destroy the PLO, (b) cause the Palestinian refugees to flee from Lebanon to Jordan, (c) drive the Syrians out of Lebanon, and (d) turn Lebanon into an Israeli protectorate. The results: (a) Arafat went to Tunis, and later, as the result of the first intifada, returned to Palestine in triumph, (b) the Palestinian refugees remained in Lebanon, in spite of the Sabra and Shatila massacre that was intended to panic them into fleeing, (c) the Syrians remained in Lebanon for another twenty years, and (d) the Shiites, who had been downtrodden and beholden to Israel, became a powerful force in Lebanon and Israel’s most determined foe.

The less said about Lebanon War II the better — its true character was obvious right from the start. Its aims were not frustrated — simply because there were no clear aims at all. Today Hezbollah is where it was, stronger and better armed, shielded from Israeli attacks by the presence of an international force. After the first intifada, Israel recognized the Palestinian Liberation Organization and brought Arafat back to the country. After the second intifada, Hamas won the Palestinian elections and later took over direct control of a part of the country.

Albert Einstein considered it a symptom of madness to repeat again and again doing something that has already failed and to expect a different result every time. Most politicians and generals conform to this formula. Again and again they try to achieve their aims by military means and obtain contrary results. We Israelis occupy an honorable place among these madmen.

War is hell, as an American general pronounced. It also rarely achieves its aims.