Post the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, Israel has, in the name of re-establishing deterrence has essentially embarked on a ‘total war’ strategy in the Middle East. To paraphrase a Foreign Affairs magazine essay,’ The Axis of Resilience’ by Reynad Mansour a strategy of total war unmoored from politics or a political approach re the end game will do nothing but exacerbate the conflict in the Middle East to the detriment of civilians’.
The implication is stark: the conflict, militarized to the hilt, will now, in all likelihood, spill across generations. Peace and stability in the region, then remain elusive. With due respect to the author of the essay in contention, the insights that are adumbrated in it are pretty prosaic and pedestrian. It is a given, for instance, that decapitation of militant groups work- but only up to a point. While this is neither the central insight of the essay nor what the author is actually saying but insurgent and militant groups mutate and evolve. A clear-cut instance of this is the mutation of Al Qaeda into ISIS.
Even though both exist in a rump form but these still remain. Al Qaeda, from the perspective of Ondrej Filipec, mutated into ISIS not merely because of ideology but in terms of structure, strategy , tactics and approach: while Al Qaeda preferred a more gradualist approach with an emphasis on ‘winning hearts and minds ‘of people with spasms of spectacular violence ISIS made wanton violence as its centerpiece. And while structurally Al Qaeda was a network, ISIS morphed into a proto-state. These are well known documented facts; there is nothing insightful about these. What, however, is important is both Al Qaeda Central and ISIS were born and begotten in an ambiance and atmosphere of repression, violence, chaos and an overall structural condition where politics was missing.
If we talk of ISIS, the prelude to that was the neo-conservative penchant for war in the Middle East. Going by the nomenclature of ‘regime change,’ the neo cons employed the stupendous concentration of power in the US after the Cold War’s end to -reshape the Middle East to their preference. Their ‘logic’ held that once US hard power would give the ‘fragile regimes’ of the Middle East a push, state society relations in these states would align and articulate a preference for democracy. In retrospect, it appears that the ideational well springs of the now cons was the ‘democratic peace theory’. DPT posits that democracies do not go to war against fellow democracies. The DPT had obvious limitations. But those did not detain the now-cons. In terms of military strategy and tactics, the neo cons assumed that the technologically enabled ‘Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) would collapse the regime of Saddam Hussain and it would be all over in a jiffy. What actually happened was an Iraq that drifted into total collapse, creating a power political vacuum and an ambiance that was open to ISIS filling in this vacuum. Ultimately, the US had to exit. None of its goals were accomplished.
Now there is a parallel with post Saddam Iraq and the strategy of ‘total war’ employed by Israel. Israel’s degradation of militant outfits, their decapitation, and so on in Gaza and Lebanon can yield structural gains, even tactical ones. But what Israel is also doing is creating power-political vacuums. If, for the sake of hypothesis, degrades Iran’s military infrastructure or goes for ‘soft regime change’, what will be the consequences? The answer remains in the ‘unknown unknown’ but the Iraqi case is instructive here. Add in the Shi’ite ethos of resistance and martyrdom, the picture that presents itself is not a sanguine one. Into this mix, sprinkle in the ‘Muslim Street’- both in the Arab and the non-Arab Muslim world, what we have is a brew that can explode anytime and take any shape or form. It, then is not just the civilians in Gaza, Lebanon and potentially Iran that will suffer. The historical memory of peoples of the Persian Gulf, the Middle East and the non-Arab Muslim world will be revived. The world will be on a collision course with global, regional and internal securities of all states across the world in great flux. How it will denoue, what shape and form will this fluidity take, no one knows. The exigent need of the hour is to disavow total war and root for the primacy of politics. Broken down and pared to essence, the starting point for this should and must be a ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon now. The world, region and global peace stands at the cusp of deep uncertainty. The moment needs to be grasped and peace crystallized. Is anyone listening?
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