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2:14:00 AM EDT
Hearing Mavis Staples, "Hard Times Come Again No More"
William Lind on the Israeli-Lebanese war
I came across this via Billmon: The Summer of 1914 Antiwar.com 07/19/06. Billmon linked to it at the Free Congress Foundation, a rightwing group. Here's Billmon's description of Lind (this is William Lind, not Michael Lind):
As regular readers know, I have a great deal of respect for Lind's analytical skills - even though his cultural politics are just plain weird. (To Lind, the western world has been going to hell in a handbasket ever since Kaiser Wilhelm's army failed to take Paris in 1914.)
Still, Lind is generally recognized as the leading U.S. theorist of non-conventional, fourth generation war, and has recently been helping the Marine Corps rewrite its bible on the subject, the Small Wars Manual. This certainly doesn't make him infallible, but it at least means he's operating in the same theatre as reality, instead of attacking straight into the jaws of delusion, which appears to be the preferred military manuever these days.
This idea of "4th generation warfare" (4GW) is one of the major ways present-day insurgency and counterinsurgency war is discussed. The 4GW framework is not without its critics.
David Barno describes the 4GW concept in Challenges in Fighting a Global Insurgency Parameters (US Army War College) Summer 2006. Antulio J. Echevarria II questions how meaningful is the 4GW framework in Fourth-Generation War and Other Myths; US Army Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) Nov 2005.
In "The Summer of 1914", Lind argues that Hizbollah in the war that began a few days ago has already has achieved three important "firsts" in 4GW: a non-state actor (Hizbollah) went to war with a state (Israel) across an international border; Hizbollah successfully retaliated to "terror bombing from the air" with its missiles; and, Hizbollah struck and disabled an Israeli ship. Aerial bombing and naval forces, Lind says, had previously each been considered "a state monopoly" in 4GW.
He writes:
I think the stakes in the Israel-Hezbollah-Hamas war are significantly higher than most observers understand. If Hezbollah and Hamas win – and winning just means surviving, given that Israel's objective is to destroy both entities – a powerful state will have suffered a new kind of defeat, again, a defeat across at least one international boundary and maybe two, depending on how one defines Gaza's border. The balance between states and 4GW forces will be altered worldwide, and not to a trivial degree.
So far, Hezbollah is winning.
And he warns of potentially far-reaching consequences if the Israeli-Lebanese war broadens to regional war involving Iran:
If Israel does attack Iran, the "summer of 1914" analogy may play itself out, catastrophically for the United States. As I have warned many times, war with Iran (Iran has publicly stated it would regard an Israeli attack as an attack by the U.S. also) could easily cost America the army it now has deployed in Iraq. It would almost certainly send shock waves through an already fragile world economy, potentially bringing that house of cards down. A Bush administration that has sneered at "stability" could find out just how high the price of instability can be. (my emphasis)
People like Lind and Gary Hart (for whom Lind was once an adviser on military affairs) aren't just blowing smoke when they talk about how vulnerable the US force in Iraq would be to Iranian attack, especially coupled with support from the Shi'a parties in Iraq.
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