On War

Billmon has written another good one.

Given that Israel is unlikely to achieve its strategic objectives (the destruction of Hamas and Hezbollah). Lind suggests the result is likely to be an unprecedented defeat for the Jewish state, with implications that will be felt worldwide:

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 world-wide, and not to a trivial degree.

Lind is almost certainly correct about Israel's inability to deal its antagonists a decisive blow.

[...]

The key question, of course, is whether Israel will then proceed to fail upwards -- turning its frustrating cat and mouse game with Hezbollah into a more satisfying, if equally indecisive, air war against Syria or Iran. Lind paints the possible results of a war with Iran in apocalyptic terms, although more for the first 50 states than for the 51st:

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.

It's hard to argue with that -- not when you consider that whatever Hezbollah has managed to do the Israeli Navy and the Egyptian merchant fleet is probably less than 10% of what a hostile Iran could do to the tanker fleet in the Persian Gulf.

The larger point here, which Lind suggests but doesn't actually articulate, is that the United States is now a global trading and commercial power (instead of a continental industrial power as it was when it entered World Wars I and II.) Such powers can become vulnerable if protracted wars threaten their far-flung interests -- as demonstrated by the abrupt collapse of Dutch power in the last half of the 17th century. It takes an exceptional position of strength, such as the one enjoyed by Great Britain during the Napoleanic Era, to both fight a world war and defend a global economic empire. Does the USA still have what it takes? Do our ruling elites really want to find out?

Lind closes with an historical analogy of his own, arguing that "Israel is to America what Serbia was to Russia in 1914." But here I think Lind's Germanophilia is showing. Under the circumstances, it seems more accurate to say that Israel is to America what Austro-Hungary was to the Second Reich -- a reckless ally bent on vanquishing a weak but troublesome neighbor, whom Kaiser Wilhelm foolishly allowed to start a chain reaction that no one, him least of all, could control.

I've already said who I think is playing the role of Kaiser Wilhelm this time around.