As a country faced with nonstop war and terror since its inception, Israel
naturally accords great respect to the views of its defense professionals.
politics, where their performance received more scrutiny than the shadows of the
defense establishment allow. Ehud Barak and Moshe Dayan, for instance, were both
IDF chiefs of staff, yet the former’s handling of the second intifada as prime
minister was universally panned, as was the latter’s performance as defense
minister during the Yom Kippur War. Former air force commander Ezer Weizman
opposed attacking Iraq’s nuclear reactor as defense minister, yet the 1981
airstrike succeeded brilliantly. Mossad veteran Tzipi Livni boasted of crafting
UN Security Council Resolution 1701 to end the Second Lebanon War as foreign
minister in 2006, yet this resolution enabled Hezbollah to rearm so quickly that
by 2009, it had three times as many rockets as it did before the war.
But
such failures don’t seem to have affected the reputation of serving or retired
defense officials who aren’t in politics: Their “professional assessments” of
defense-related issues are still eagerly solicited and deferentially received.
And that, as two recent examples showed, is a dangerous mistake.
One was
former Mossad chief Meir Dagan’s speech at the President’s Conference last
month, where he said the IDF needn’t remain in the Jordan Valley under a deal
with the Palestinians; it could defend the country even from the 1967 lines. Had
he asserted this without explanation, listeners might well have assumed he had
good reasons for this position. But fortunately, he explained his rationale –
and it wasn’t just lame; it was astoundingly stupid.
“The Jordan Valley
had importance in 1991,” he declared. “At that time, there was a threat from
Jordan, Syria and Iraq, but now it is of less importance.”
Dagan is
obviously correct that right now, these countries pose no real threat to Israel.
Yet the man who headed our premier intelligence agency for eight years is
evidently incapable of entertaining the possibility that this could someday
change. Such shortsightedness would be disturbing at any time – but especially
when the situation in all three countries is highly unstable.
preoccupied with its civil war, but that won’t last forever. And once it ends,
Israel may well face a heightened threat: either an Assad regime completely in
thrall to Iran, whose aid is all that’s currently keeping it alive, or a new
government dominated by Islamic extremists, whose militias constitute the
rebels’ most effective fighting forces.
sectarian violence intensifies. If this continues, Iraq’s Shi’ite-dominated
government may well seek help in crushing Sunni extremists from neighboring
Shi’ite powerhouse Iran. That would further Tehran’s goal of turning Iraq into a
wholly-owned subsidiary, which would obviously make the latter a renewed threat
to Israel.
Finally, Jordan has experienced repeated unrest over the last
three years, and there’s no guarantee this unrest won’t someday lead to King
Abdullah’s overthrow. That would almost certainly result in a government hostile
to Israel: Jordan’s population, which is two-thirds Palestinian, is
overwhelmingly anti-Israel, and so is the main opposition party – the Muslim
Brotherhood.
In short, there’s a real possibility that one or more of
these countries could again become a threat – not just in some distant future,
but in the next few years. Yet Dagan advocates completely ignoring this
possibility and setting long-term security arrangements as if the current
security situation will prevail forever.
Command Nitzan Alon’s assertion last month that the Palestinian Authority has
supported Washington’s efforts to restart negotiations by cutting off funds for
a Palestinian group that foments anti-Israel riots.
“The PA, for example,
almost stopped financing a group that dealt with some riots and protests against
Israel, and they halted the funds of this group in the last couple of months,”
Alon told diplomats and journalists during a briefing at the Jerusalem Center
for Public Affairs. “They weren’t looking for diplomatic recognition for the
move but rather for the territory to quiet down.”
It doesn’t take an
Einstein to realize that if PA President Mahmoud Abbas is currently tamping down
anti-Israel violence by halting funding to a group that foments it, then until
now, he has been encouraging such violence by funding this group. And if he’s
encouraging anti-Israel violence whenever it suits his purpose, then he’s no
more committed to peace than his predecessor, Yasser Arafat.
realization evidently escaped Alon: Instead of calling out Abbas for fomenting
violence, he lauded the PA leader for temporarily ceasing to do so. Nor does he
seem bothered that the PA, whose continued funding he once deemed essential to
Israel’s security, is instead using this funding to undermine Israel’s
security.
Clearly, there are questions that defense professionals are
uniquely qualified to answer – technocratic ones requiring highly specialized
knowledge. If you wanted to plan an intelligence-gathering operation in Iran,
you’d consult Dagan, not me. And if you wanted to know how many tank divisions
are needed to keep a given army from crossing the Jordan River, you’d ask Alon,
not me.
debate rarely fall into that category. Instead, they are primarily political
assessments: Could Syria’s civil war result in a government even more hostile to
Israel? What does Abbas’ stop-and-start funding of violent anti-Israel groups
say about his intentions? Would a beefed-up UNIFIL force be willing to clash
with Hezbollah to prevent its rearmament? How would Baghdad and other world
capitals react if Israel bombed Iraq’s nuclear reactor?
professionals’ training enables them to make such political assessments better
than other people. If anything, the opposite is true: Because defense
organizations are hierarchical, defense professionals have less experience than
do politicians in identifying and weighing competing interests and assessing the
likely outcome.
So by all means, let’s make use of our defense
professionals’ specialized knowledge. But it’s past time to realize they’re no
better than anyone else at interpreting the data they amass, and deserve no
special deference when doing so.
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