Dem
51
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49
We will eventually get to the big Middle East news of the day, which involves Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. But first, let's climb in the time machine and go back to the 1860s. We've written about this before, but when the U.S. Civil War began, the world was on the cusp of a new era of warfare. The Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz was among the first to grasp this, writing in the 1820s that the line between the battlefield and the homefront, war and politics, civilian and soldier, right and wrong, had become permanently blurred. It was no longer just a chess game limited to the battlefield.
It took a long time for Clausewitz' ideas to achieve wide acceptance, and many military leaders of the mid-19th century (including of the Civil War) went to their graves in denial of the fact that Napoleonic-style war was passé. This is, perhaps, understandable. Many of these folks had grown up in, and had been educated in, a world of "just," limited war. Not easy to turn your back on what you've known your whole life, particularly if you are career military.
Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman were not among the holdouts, however, and from the beginning of their Civil War service they appreciated that they would have to throw out much of what they had been taught at West Point (not a big problem for Grant, who didn't pay much attention in class, anyhow).
There are numerous ways in which the two generals implemented this new approach to war. One good example of this is Grant's approach to prisoners-of-war. When (Z) teaches the Civil War, students are stunned to learn that in the early years of the conflict, a captured soldier was... told to go home and wait there until he got notice that he had been "exchanged" for a soldier on the other side. There was even a conversion chart called the Dix-Hill Cartel, with privates as the base unit of measure. One private was equal to one private, two privates got you a corporal or sergeant, four privates got you a lieutenant, all the way up to 60 privates for a commanding general. Any equivalent combination was acceptable; for example, the Union could trade four privates, a captain (+6 privates) and a lieutenant colonel (+10 privates) for a brigadier general (worth 20 privates). One can see the chess-like/checkers-like dimension here; get your low-ranking piece to the other side of the battlefield, get a high-ranking piece in return.
This arrangement became less and less tenable over the course of the first 2 years of the war, largely because of disagreements over which soldiers had, and had not, been exchanged. But it was at Grant's urging that Abraham Lincoln put an end to the exchanges entirely. Grant reasoned, quite correctly, that the Union was able to replace captured soldiers while the Confederacy was not. And so, the exchanges were inherently working to the benefit of the Confederates. By ending the exchanges, Grant and Lincoln condemned many tens of thousands of Union soldiers to horrible fates (starvation, disease, and often death), but they knew that would ultimately save lives by bringing the war to a more rapid close.
And how about Sherman? Here, the obvious example is much more well known. In 1864, Grant assumed overall command of the Union Armies, while Sherman succeeded Grant as the commander of Union armies in the Western theater (that is the correct Civil War name, though note that the "Western theater" was largely the Deep South—Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana, the Carolinas—and not the American West). Both Sherman and Grant agreed that it was not enough to defeat the Confederate armies; the Confederate homefront had to be defeated, as well. And so, Sherman marched through Georgia, and then marched to the sea, with the goal of making the Southern homefront feel "the hard hand of war." Sherman tried to limit the amount of indiscriminate harm done to civilians, but the line between indiscriminate harm and necessary harm is often a thin one, indeed.
In the end, the choices made by Grant and Sherman resulted in some true horrors. Does that make them evil bastards? Maybe so. Certainly, plenty of Southerners back in the 19th century felt that way (and some still do). From the vantage point of a historian, such value judgments are largely beside the point. In the end, the job of the historian is to understand what happened and why, and largely to avoid making judgments on who was right and who was wrong. There are some exceptions to that, but that's the general idea.
And that brings us to Sinwar, who sounded positively Sherman-like (Shermanian?) in "leaked" messages first reported on by The Wall Street Journal. We put leaked in quotations because we very seriously doubt that Sinwar accidentally allowed his thoughts to be shared with the U.S. and the world. In any event, there are two main things that the Hamas leader asserted in the now-public messages: (1) that the death of civilians will ultimately work to the advantage of Hamas, and (2) that Hamas is winning the PR war, and now has the upper hand in negotiations.
Is Sinwar an evil bastard? Maybe so. You don't need us to reach your own conclusions on that point (though a trickier question is: Is there a substantive difference between his approach and that of Grant/Sherman?). Is Sinwar right in his strategic analysis of the situation? This is something we've written about many times, and we'll say it again: It certainly looks that way. Fair or not, sensible or not, the response from the international community strongly suggests that Israel is losing the PR battle. And since, as Clausewitz observed, war is policy by other means, then losing the battle on policy renders moot any victories on the battlefield.
CNN's Nic Robertson had a very interesting piece yesterday making this same basic point. The headline pretty much tells the tale: "Hamas gambled on the suffering of civilians in Gaza. Netanyahu played right into it." Robertson writes:
If this were a conventional war, it would be easy to write Sinwar off as deluded; Israel has the upper hand by far in conventional weapons. But the weapons' devastating effectiveness is becoming a liability in this asymmetric conflict, and against the backdrop of a tortured history that Sinwar is adroitly weaponizing against Israel.
There's no doubt that the Netanyahu administration concerns itself with PR and narrative... sometimes. But largely, to put this in the terms laid out above, the Israeli government is fighting a 19th century war, while Sinwar is fighting a 21st century war. Remember, this is not a question of who is right and who is wrong, it's a question of whose approach is more effective in advancing their ultimate goals.
Israel is hardly the only nation to make this mistake. And that brings us—brace yourself for an aggressive shift in gears—to Woodrow Wilson. Once the shooting in World War I stopped (November 11, 1918), Wilson took the unusual step of traveling to the Versailles Conference to personally represent the United States in the treaty discussions. That's basically the only time in American history that's happened (Yalta and Potsdam, at the end of the European phase of World War II, are the other possible additions to the list).
Whatever you might say about Wilson, good or bad, he was certainly very smart. Indeed, he's probably in the top five smartest men to serve as president. He knew that Germany bore primary responsibility for starting the war in the west, and also that the Germans did horrible things in trying to win (that Fritz Haber is known as a Nobel laureate, and not as a war criminal thanks to his role in developing brutal chemical weapons, is truly remarkable). For these reasons, Wilson recognized that the leaders of the victorious European nations, particularly David Lloyd-George of the U.K. and Georges Clemenceau of France, would be out for blood.
Wilson also knew that the Allies' plans for Germany were an unwise play, long-term. He opposed efforts to make Germany suffer, economically and otherwise, for their role in the war. He opposed efforts to gut the German military, so as to leave them in a permanently weakened state. The President's expectation was that these measures would breed resentment and radicalism, and would produce another conflict within a generation or two. He was right about that, although he was unable to do much with that wisdom. Part of the problem was that Wilson was somewhat wanting when it came to diplomatic skill. But the larger part of the problem was that even if he was able to convince Lloyd-George and Clemenceau, they were both representing voters who badly wanted to see Germany punished and gutted. Had they returned home and announced "We decided to take it easy on the Germans!" they would have been tossed out of office.
Is the situation in Gaza all that different? Hamas clearly started this conflict, and has clearly done problematic things. In fact, shortly before this post went live, the U.N. released a report finding that both Hamas and Israel have committed war crimes since October 7. In response, the Netanyahu administration is trying to punish Hamas, and to leave them so weak they cannot come back to life. History makes pretty clear this cannot work. It did not work with the Germans in 1918, it did not work with the North Vietnamese in the 1970s, it did not work with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and it's not going to work here. The PM has his own personal motivations here, but the fact is, he also represents voters who demand the course of action that he is pursuing. If he changes course, he's done for, politically.
And so that is the mess that Joe Biden is currently dealing with. He is Woodrow Wilson in this situation, and surely knows that Sinwar is playing his hand in a manner that is ugly but rational, that Netanyahu is playing HIS hand in a manner that is ugly but rational, and there is not much middle ground between the two. Just in case there was any doubt on that point, Hamas announced yesterday that it has agreed to Biden's ceasefire proposal and that it's Israel that is the holdout. On Monday, when the U.N. Security Council endorsed the proposal, the story was that Israel had agreed to the proposal and that Hamas was the holdout. And so, the fighting and the finger-pointing continue. What a diplomatic nightmare. (Z)