Marble Composition

Tactics

There's a great discussion about the book The Accidental Empire going on over at the TPM Cafe. The author, Gershom Gorenberg, even provides us with an excerpt from the book. The subtitle to the book is: Isreal and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977. I've switched around the names and places of things from this part of the piece, so let's see how this sounds:

...the Marines carried out “stranglehold ops” in the casbah, the crowded old town, of Fallujah. Troops encircled the area, all men were ordered to gather at a central point, soldiers searched houses and rooftops for suspects and arms caches. Though terror did not ignite popular revolution or spur Iraqis to slaughter, it did help ensure that the occupation was not invisible.

I highly recommend Gorenberg's reasons for writing the book, as well as the excerpt that I sliced and diced above. Here's the original quote from the book:

...the army and Shin Bet carried out “stranglehold ops” in the casbah, the crowded old town, of Nablus. Troops encircled the area, all men were ordered to gather at a central point, soldiers searched houses and rooftops for suspects and arms caches. Though terror did not ignite popular revolution or spur Israelis to slaughter, it did help ensure that the occupation was not invisible.

I must be an insane, ranting, Bush Derangement Syndrome victim to even comtemplate the above, right? How did I get so crazy?

The US military has adopted tough-minded Israeli occupation strategies. Longstanding ties between the Pentagon and Israeli Defense Forces have grown much closer since the run-up to the Iraq campaign. Israel has shared advice on counterinsurgency and even allowed US training for urban combat at mock villages in Israel's Negev desert.
...

"Jenin does come to mind [in Iraq]," says Phebe Marr, an Iraq expert and former US government intelligence analyst, referring to Israel's controversial two-week siege of that West Bank city in April 2002 that left 52 Palestinians - 22 of them civilians, according to Human Rights Watch - and 23 Israeli soldiers dead. Continuing unrest prompted Israeli forces to storm back three more times that spring.

Ms. Marr questions the US strategy in Fallujah.

"I don't think you can have a good strategy to drain the swamp if you don't know what's in the swamp," says Ms. Marr, who spoke by telephone from Doha, Qatar. "I don't think the entire [Iraqi] population wants to see us fail there. [But] we saw what happened in Jenin - you must hit them hard, and not kill all of Fallujah."

The kind of tactics described above are deplorable, and I would argue they stem from viewing the occupied not just as enemies, but nearly as some sub-human species. It's vile and nauseating. Look at it this way (while we're flipping things around here): is there an American that exists that would ever dream of this sentence?

I don't think the entire American population wants to see us fail there. They saw what happened in Jenin - you must hit them hard, and not kill all of Cleveland.

Yes, there is a freakish dissonance when you flip American primacy on its head, and of course the nuanced hand of history plays a role, but the thought of foreign troops on U.S. soil is absolutely unfathomable to the American mind. It doesn't even compute. And that's the point. Our Founding Fathers, having just thrown off the yoke of oppression, would be astounded to find the way America looks and treats the rest of the world today. I guess we've come full circle.

posted by FuzzFinger @ 3/08/2006 09:40:00 PM