Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country by Andrew J. Bacevich Read Free Book Online Page A

nation’s reigning definition of peace shapes its proclivity to use force. A government committed to peace-as-harmony will tend to employ force only as a last resort. The United States once subscribed to this view—or beyond the confines of the Western Hemisphere at least pretended to do so.
    A nation seeking peace-as-dominion will use force more freely. This has long been an Israeli predilection. Since the end of the Cold War and especially since 9/11, it has become America’s as well. As a consequence, U.S. national security policy increasingly conforms to patterns of behavior pioneered by the Jewish state. In employing armed force, decision makers in Washington (regardless of party) claim the sort of prerogatives long exercised by decision makers in Jerusalem (regardless of party). Although this “Israelification” of U.S. policy may have proven beneficial for Israel, it has not been good for the United States, nor will it be.
    Credit Israeli statesmen with this much: they express openly views that American statesmen hide behind clouds of obfuscation. Here, for example, is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in June 2009 describing what he called his “vision of peace”: “If we get a guarantee of demilitarization … we are ready to agree to a real peace agreement, a demilitarized Palestinian state side by side with the Jewish state.” 13 Now, the inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank, if armed and sufficiently angry, can annoy Israel, though not destroy it or even do it serious harm. By any measure, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) wield vastly greater power than the Palestinians could possibly muster. Still, from Netanyahu’s perspective, “real peace” becomes possible only if Palestinians guarantee that their putative state will forgo even the most meager military capabilities. Your side disarms, our side stays armed to the teeth; that in a nutshell describes the Israeli prime minister’s conception of peace.
    Netanyahu asks a lot of Palestinians. Yet however baldly stated, his demands reflect long-standing Israeli thinking. For Israel, peace derives from security, which must be absolute and assured. Security thus defined requires not military advantage but military supremacy.
    Given the importance that Israel attributes to security, anything that threatens it requires anticipatory action, the earlier the better. The IDF attack on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 provides one example. Israel’s destruction of a putative Syrian nuclear facility in 2007 provides a second; its 2013 attack on a Syrian convoy allegedly delivering weapons to Hezbollah offers a third.
    Yet alongside perceived threat, perceived opportunity can provide sufficient motive for anticipatory action. In 1956 and again in 1967, Israel attacked Egypt not because its leader, the blustering Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, possessed the capability (even if he proclaimed the intention) of destroying the hated Zionists, but because preventive war seemingly promised a big Israeli payoff. In the first instance, the Israelis came away empty-handed; their British and French allies caved in the face of pressure imposed by an angry President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Israel had no choice but to follow suit. In 1967, Israelis hit the jackpot operationally, albeit with problematic strategic consequences. Subjugating a substantial and fast-growing Palestinian population that Israel could neither assimilate nor eliminate imposed heavy burdens on the victors.
    Adherence to this knee-to-the-groin paradigm has won Israel few friends in the region and few admirers around the world (Americans notably excepted). The likelihood of this approach eliminating or even diminishing Arab or Iranian hostility toward Israel appears less than promising. That said, the approach has thus far succeeded in preserving (and even expanding) the Jewish state: more than sixty years after its founding, Israel persists and even prospers. By this rough but not