1. Very Stupid
I predict that in five years Israel will have a presence in and control over Gaza similar to that it has over the West Bank today. No other Middle Eastern country or coalition of countries will agree to be the Gazan constabulary. Neither will the US. No Palestinian government will be allowed to rule Gaza without Israeli approval, and any government that rules Gaza with Israeli approval will not be able to rule at all without Israeli security forces on the ground. If it should first attempt to rule without them, extremists under banners old or new will attack it with the only means available - violence - and it will be unable to persuade a critical mass of young men to do the unpopular work of suppressing them. Lest the same conditions that produced the October 7 attacks be allowed to take hold again, Israel will intervene to protect the Palestinian government. Because they recognize this and to avoid the bloody cost of reducing and re-augmenting control, Israel will reduce its security presence only slowly and gradually once a friendly Palestinian police force has been trained.
Among the reasons that Gazans will remain furious at Israel after the war is that Israel will no longer allow them a border outside its control. The success of the October 7 attacks owes much to Hamas' ability to smuggle contraband into the strip in the preceding years. Securing the border between Gaza and Egypt will require Israel to effectively annex a band of territory within Gaza, creating a fresh wave of displacement without the foreseeable prospect of return. The space on the Gazan side of the border with Israel where structures are prohibited will also expand for the sake of security. Incidentally, the longer Israel feels the need to devote resources to policing the strip, the more favorable conditions become for Israeli extremists to found new settlements in Gaza, since the strongest domestic politics argument against the settlements - that everyone must pay, and the young must risk their lives, to keep them safe - will weaken accordingly. Everyone will already be paying; the young will already be risking their lives.
That this is the outcome only reinforces the moral backwardness of what Hamas has done. The justification of terrorism is always that though the means might be horrible they are effective in advancing a noble end. Clearly the massacres of October 7 were not effective, whatever one thinks of the end. They moved the Palestinian people - or alternatively "Islam" - away from, not toward the recapture of holy lands.
2. It Takes Two
The effectiveness of the Good Cop Bad Cop routine is being proven once again by my favorite duo, Joe Biden and Donald Trump. As the Europeans become more and more convinced that Trump has a genuine chance at regaining the presidency, as he holds present military assistance to Ukraine hostage and threatens to cut it off completely or even abandon the promises of NATO if he does regain the presidency, they begin to hedge, that is, to go to work themselves to source the ammunition Ukraine needs. This is something that all Americans want but the Good Cop alone could not provoke. The US has both a very specific reason (China) to want Europe to take up more of the responsibility for military assistance to Ukraine and a broad one, in short that interstate wars are becoming more common. Of course, Europe will not be able to fill America's shoes for a while - which is why it is very important that Biden be re-elected. But it is equally the case that without a credible threat of a second Trump presidency Europe would have no need to hedge and the US would be more likely to find itself overstretched in five years or ten.
I am no political scientist, but this seems to me to be a way in which democracies might have an advantage over autocracies. I have generally assumed that the advantages of democracies in foreign affairs are indirect - for instance, democracy along with other mechanisms of liberalism promotes innovation and punishes failure, which makes a more wealthy society, better able to defend itself and to exert influence over others. I am also aware that democracy can have direct disadvantages, in fact that the Good Cop Bad Cop routine can have direct disadvantages, namely when it is important precisely to disincentivize hedging, for instance perhaps (and forgetting the last five months for argument's sake) to make a new deal with Iran that the Iranians won't merely use to fund defense programs and proxies ostensibly lest Trump be re-elected but also, if so tempted, to gain whatever advantage history offers up. I'm curious then whether forcing a certain agnosticism on other states is advantageous in the balance. Maybe we are still agnostic about closed or autocratic states, in which case I would rephrase that: I'm curious whether it serves a state well to be able to give other states a rather clear picture of each of the two or more future paths between which it is choosing.
3. The Northern Front
It is hard for me to imagine that Israel will not invade southern Lebanon when the operations in Gaza become low enough intensity. Some eighty thousand Israelis from the north are still displaced, having fled their homes near the border with Lebanon in the days after October 7 both in the fear that Hezbollah would conduct a raid like Hamas' and because of Hezbollah's rocket barrage. The option to escalate very much remains on the table for Hezbollah, and the possibility of falling prey to the same nightmare that was visited on their friends, family and compatriots to the south makes the displaced Israelis loth to return to their homes without strong assurances. In effect, Hamas and Hezbollah have moved the northern border of Israel inward.
I realize that this may seem to contradict what I said earlier, about Hamas completely failing to advance their own objectives. Assuming that the mere shrinkage of Israel - without an actual gain of territory either for Hamas or for Hezbollah or some other Islamic enemy of Israel - is their goal, then I amend my earlier point. So long as Hezbollah manages to keep Israel from making that land safe again they have moved an inch forward. (Ignoring for now that they are losing more in Gaza than Israel is in the north.) But the same could be said of Hamas on the day of October 7. If Israel manages to secure that territory again, that inch is lost again.
In reality, more than that inch will probably be lost. It is very important to Israel to re-establish the safety of the north so that the displaced can return home. There is the personal plight of the displaced, the sense of insecurity among all that their enduring displacement produces, the financial and logistical burdens it imposes, the symbolic significance to Israelis of regaining the land and the extreme discomfort with setting the precedent that enemy groups can shrink their territory by use and threat of force. For all these reasons the Israeli government is anxious to persuade the northerners to return home. Only then will the war begin to end.
The problem is that, whereas until October Israel tolerated mutual violations of the UN Security Council resolution that ended the 2006 war - such that Hezbollah continued to operate and store weapons in the border area and Israel continued to enter Lebanese airspace without consent - now, not through Hezbollah's actions, but through Hamas', Israelis simply cannot live within a few hundred meters of Hezbollah. Either Hezbollah must retreat, or Israel must force them to retreat, or the Israeli side of the border must remain uninhabited.
Israel invading seems to me the most likely outcome. The chief objection to this is that it will escalate uncontrollably. The US Special Envoy Amos Hochstein said about it recently: "There is no such thing as a limited war." What exactly would he call the war that Israel is already in? There is a curious logic at play here. The US and Iran have kept the war limited even as Iran has allowed and encouraged its proxies to attack Israel, to attack our military bases, to sink ships and divert the vast majority of Red Sea traffic around the Cape of Good Hope. We understood that these attacks were not designed to destroy the state of Israel and accordingly we did not escalate. If we can understand that, why can't Iran? A limited invasion to secure the area covered by the UN Security Council resolution will look very different from an all-out attack meant to destroy Hezbollah. Such an all-out attack would prompt a response killing perhaps ten thousand Israelis. They do not want it, and we certainly do not want it.
All that is to say that the option is very much on the table. But I think it is also likely. The Israeli public is not in the mood to trust. The least popular thing their government could do right now is to downplay the risks of giving up to their enemies a measure of control. "If you want something done right, you do it yourself." Netanyahu is particularly vulnerable to the charge of mislaid trust and misleading assurances and has his own personal reasons to prolong the war. The Israeli need for control must necessarily express itself as an invasion of Lebanese or Hezbollahn sovereignty; they will be unlikely to accept a deal that does not give them powers of surveillance that practically amount to Hezbollah surrendering without fighting. Hezbollah seems to have a strong position in Lebanon; they may prefer taking a reputational hit (not such champions of the resistance against Israeli imperialism after all...) to losing the men and equipment they would lose in such a war; but even then, they may simply find it more effective to kill with a thousand cuts after the deal is done when it inevitably gives rise to humiliating disputes. And as for Iran, an incursion would add one more line to the list of Israel's sins in the eyes of the Arab world and burnish their own image as the true champion of Islam.
4. Throwback
A former lieutenant colonel in the US Army and then civilian employee of the US Air Force (assigned to the US Strategic Command in a Nebraska air base) was charged by a Grand Jury today with sharing classified information on a foreign dating app. From the indictment:
In honor of Mr. David Franklin Slater, 63, and because most of you have not seen it before, I am re-sharing a short essay I wrote last year apropos of another leak - enjoy!
APRIL 2023
In The Americans, it is the alluring Elizabeth Jennings, played by Keri Russell, who seduces the FBI agent, coaxing information from him as she unbuckles his belt. Nor were the writers of that show abusing their poetic license: the KGB succeeded in "honey-trapping" an impressive number of targets before the Soviet Union dissolved, among them the British Ambassador Geoffrey Harrison in the 1960s and the aptly named American Marine Clayton Lonetree in the 1980s. No doubt there are many examples throughout our history of secrets military, political and diplomatic being shared in the pleasant prison of a perfumed embrace.
It was not a glamorous Russian blonde, however, that extracted the more than fifty classified documents leaked by Jack Teixeira of the Massachusetts Air National Guard over the last five months. No, it was the promise of something sweeter: the esteem of his friends (to use the term loosely) in the “Thug Shaker Central” discord server, a group of teenagers who had two things in common: addiction to videogames, and the agreement that stupidity and depravity can substitute for wit.
Teixeira seems to have shared the documents with his young friends in an extended and increasingly desperate bid for clout, even writing paragraph summaries of their contents when his audience remained unimpressed (and so they did to the very end). What this, and the depraved subculture aforementioned, reveal, is a kind of social aphasia on the part of the protagonists. A security clearance is not difficult to convert into social capital, if one only knows how to hint. The appeal of sprezzatura is obvious whether or not one speaks Italian. And young men make jokes in bad taste because they do not know how to make them in good taste.
In short, the decline of manners has so long persisted that it now poses a national security threat.
Years ago, when the problem first became a matter of public debate, the left provided no solution beyond browbeating - useless when it comes to boys who would rather be the devil than a loser. The right provided several, of which by far the most popular and (to them) auspicious, was Jordan Peterson.
This too was useless. Dour, wooden and pledged like Luther to wage war against any and all deceits however sweet or light, Peterson could never teach his boys what they most needed to learn, the soft parts of speech. Nor would they pick it up from the abridged literary canon he provided them, a canon always being made in the canonizer's image, so that in this case the boorish Dostoevsky and the sexless Steinbeck share eight spots between them and the great stylists and wits (e.g. in English Joyce, Austen, Wilde, Sterne) are all conspicuously absent, excepting Tolstoy.
Otherwise well served by the Roman legal heritage, we are oppressed today by one of them, de gustibus non est disputandum - a point on which Peterson curiously agrees with me, despite being an expensive beneficiary, only more so for taxing us with the upkeep of his daughter also. In the middle of the last century Walter Benjamin famously said, "There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism." His heirs seem to have derived from this observation the rather unfortunate conclusion that we must oppose both. A more balanced perspective would be the one taken by Matthew Arnold, when he dubbed the elegant English aristocracy, "the Barbarians". Meant for comparison with the middle class "Philistines" - in characteristic British fashion, he exhausted his genius on these two groups, leaving none left for the masses ("the Populace") - the term was uttered with much affection, connoting as it did the ignorance of accounting, the arrogance in taste, and the cheerful bellicosity of the class, of which the most famous example today is also one of the latest, Churchill.
If Nietzsche is to be believed, in order to convert the barbaric peoples of inner Europe, the early missionaries made Christianity crueler. Likewise, to appeal to our own barbarians we must imitate yet another English model: the ruthless competition and cutting satire that produced the first English novels, in almost all of which the ridicule of rivals coexisted with "purer" artistic goals.
To this effect - translating the aggression of our pupils out of the vulgar tongue and back into the latin - the inquisition of taste would of course add another, that is, better hygiene in the greater cultural arena, the repeal of oppressive silences, perhaps even, literature worth reading.
Teixeira could have avoided prison, had he only known how to boast.