Israel is making the mistake America made, which is making the mistake America made
Nobody learns from history.
I’ve told this story before, I think, so bear with me.
About 20 years ago, before he became the top commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus led a team at Fort Leavenworth here in Kansas that rewrote the armed forces’ counterinsurgency manual. During that time, he came over to the University of Kansas to talk about that manual — about how it prioritized protecting the local population instead of treating native people as automatic enemies, about hearts and minds and that sort of thing.
Given how badly the American forces were doing in Iraq at the time, the manual seemed a necessary corrective.
Petraeus took questions. A friend of mine — an older colleague that I’d known since my childhood — raised his hand and asked a very simple question:
“Didn’t we learn all these lessons already in Vietnam?”
Some people in the audience gasped.
My friend was right. Petraeus, haltingly, acknowledged as much. We’d learned about counterinsurgency in Vietnam then discarded those lessons because generals had other types of wars they — understandably — preferred to fight.
Anyway, I thought about that when I read David French today.
When I read my colleagues Aaron Boxerman and Iyad Abuheweila’s outstanding report last week about Israel’s recent fight to take Al Shifa hospital after raiding it last year, this sentence caught my attention: “But as the war ground on, Israeli forces closed in on the hospital again in mid-March in an attempt to root out what they said was a renewed insurgency by Palestinian armed groups in northern Gaza.”
Think of those words: “renewed insurgency.” That means Israel was doing exactly what we did for much of the Iraq war — fighting again over ground we had presumably already seized. And the sad reality of those terrible battles reminded me of a seemingly counterintuitive truth: In the fight against terrorists, providing humanitarian aid isn’t just a moral imperative; it’s a military necessity.
“Didn’t we learn those lessons in Vietnam?” has become “Didn’t we learn those lessons in Iraq?”
And the answer — as always — is “no.”
What I’m reading
I mentioned last time that I was doing “Middlemarch Madness,” a six-week plan to read what’s reputed as one of the greatest novels in the English language. I enjoyed it so much that I finished it in five weeks — though I’m glad for the plan, which gave me a framework to see that this thick novel is in fact doable even for a slow reader. Is it one of the greatest? I can’t speak to that. What I can say is that “Middlemarch” is full of sly and timeless observations about human nature. And one of the most important is this: We all have our follies. A good marriage can make them bearable. A bad marriage will only make them worse. It made me newly glad for my good marriage.
Goodness, Middlemarch is certainly one of the greatest English novels. I’ve just read it again and my perspective at 66 is much different than it was at 40.
If you have the time and inclination, read a bit about the Reform Act of 1832 and the ascension of William IV. It explains a lot of the book’s climate.
Given your willingness to tackle long books, please allow me to recommend Trollope’s The Way We Live Now. It’s an evisceration of London’s greed and artifice in the Victorian period.
They say we always fight the last war. I think we just fight one war, over and over.