Boots and Bombs

The collateral damage generated from missile and artillery strikes, even smart bombs and drone attacks, has two ugly faces: (i) inadvertent and often unavoidable civilian casualties and (ii) the negative publicity that attaches to the attacker as innocent casualties mount. Shamelessly willing to sacrifice their own citizens to expected carnage, Hamas seemed to invite Israeli strikes, almost begging for them, carnage that would and did generate the desired publicity “for the cause.” Bloody videos and photographs of dead and maimed women and children, schools, hospitals and even U.N. facilities were exactly what they wanted. They know that the Iron Dome is protecting Israelis from Hamas inordinate levels of rocket fire. No good photo ops for the Jews, they reckon, but those Israelis are giving us recruiting and fund-raising publicity every time we ask for it… and the world is rapidly coming to our side.

It’s particularly horrible when the group you believe you need to attack actually wants the attack. And once the carnage is in the books, that the Israelis might then switch policies, deploy more selective targeting by pushing forward their boots on the ground, the damage to the Israeli cause is done. And yes, it is strange when the Obama administration is pressing for peace but is using ceasefires to rearm Israeli forces with the munitions that they expended in the attack. As comedian Jon Stewart (himself a Jew) put it, it’s like the rehab hospital resupplying alcohol for its patients. It’s a lose-lose for the Americans and the Israelis, despite the fact that Hamas violated treaties, fired rockets unprovoked, redirected masses of concrete that could have been used to benefit Gazans with schools, jobs and hospitals into malevolent tunnels directed at infiltrating Israel.

When the attacks are not “invited” or effectively provoked, when there is genuine genocide that needs to be stopped, the next question is how to respond. Take the recent use of American airpower to help an isolated Kurdish community avoid annihilation. Americans are justifiably concerned about being sucked into another winless war in Iraq. And despite Hillary Clinton’s suggestions that had we armed moderates in Syria earlier, ISIS would never have happened, there is always a question of what is “enough” and “when” to deploy.

Air strikes – with guns, smart bombs and missiles – tend to decimate everything they hit… and often a lot of people and property in the same vicinity. Further, there is only so much information about ground targets that can be reliably gleaned “from above.” The propensity of terrorists to hide among “human shields” is becoming standard operating procedure. As our forces successfully protected the small community of Yazidi religious minorities on a southern Kurdish mountaintop, we now face questions of the efficacy of relying on more air strikes.  While ISIS on the march is one easier target to hit from the air, other situations are a bit more complex. As they settle into conquered lands, the civilian casualty component becomes increasingly challenging.

Here’s one rather obvious view: “Bombing is most effective when coordinated and informed by competent, well-trained forces on the ground. Air power is an enabler that must be synchronized with other operational assets and intelligence sources to achieve maximum strategic effect; bombing is a potential means to an end but it’s not an end in itself.

“The challenge in Iraq today is that there is no counterpart with ground forces able and willing to collaborate with U.S. air power to go on the offensive. The Iraqi Army and pesh merga [Kurdish fighters] have limited capabilities and many Sunni tribes continue to tolerate ISIS because they fear the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government. More sobering still, we can’t bomb what may be the most insidious threat in the fight against ISIS and other extremists: The hostile ideology that inspires misguided young Muslim men from around the world to travel to Iraq and Syria to fight with ISIS.” Joe Felter, a retired United States Army Special Forces officer with service in Iraq and Afghanistan and a senior research scholar at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, writing for the August 13^th New York Times

But given the political cacophony on the ground in Iraq, exactly who are we relying on for that information? And is it trustworthy and reliable? Another view: “To accomplish that longer-term objective and reach beyond [ISIS] containment, the United States will need to partner more closely with local actors, including Kurdish pesh merga forces, Iraqi security forces and, potentially, Sunni tribal militias, who can provide ground forces to actively confront ISIS. Local partners will have to take on that burden, as U.S. combat forces will not and should not be introduced as an offensive fighting force…

“The United States should actively lead regional diplomatic efforts based on the common threat posed by ISIS, which spans both sides of the region’s sectarian divide. But diplomacy and a more responsive Iraq, while necessary prerequisites to challenging the rise of ISIS, cannot in and of themselves reverse their stunning gains. What is required is a broader and more sustained use of U.S. air power and an expanded advisory role. With U.S. interests firmly in mind, the Obama administration should now publicly state its objectives and goals and build the political support necessary to sustain a broader but still limited military strategy. And it will be faced with the even more vexing question of how to combine its emerging approach to Iraq with a complementary policy on the protracted civil war in Syria.” Also writing for the NY Times, Michael Wahid Hanna, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. But can the United States actually build a relationship with such a politically fragile consortium of competing regional factions?

In the end, air strikes work well to destroy everything they hit, and if that’s the goal, damned the international consequences, it will continue to favor nations with maximum hitting power aerial/satellite surveillance – mostly the United States and its allies and possibly Russia and her followers. But if the goal is to effect change and truly defeat a bigger “cause-driven” power, it is going to take boots on the ground. Sending arms to selected factions always carries the possibility of “blowback.” We can lock down weapons only for a limited use that we condone. So unless we want to deploy our own “boots” on the ground, we need to be able to rely on those already there. And if we cannot or should not so rely, unless we are once against prepared to fight on the ground in battle zones where we have not fared well at all, we need to be very cautious on using those air strikes in the first place… and we need to know when to stop and withdraw. The Yazidis would have died without us; it was a genocide worthy of preventing, but… now what?

 I’m Peter Dekom, and we have a moral imperative to cooperate to stamp out genocide where it occurs, but the complexity of the underlying decision-making cannot be taken lightly.