War is no board game in which humanity is not a player

Less than a week ago, former congressman, White House chief of staff, CIA director and secretary of defense Leon Panetta said in a "CBS News Sunday" interview that Israel's pager attacks in Lebanon were "a form of terrorism." The form it took was terrorism's core, in that it "makes people ask the question," he continued, "What the hell is next?" — the prime objective of all terrorist acts.

Few people with even the slimmest knowledge of foreign affairs, which excludes everyone involved in Trump's campaign, would dispute Panetta's competence to make such a judgement. The assessment also applies to his additional remark. "The forces of war are largely in control right now of what’s going on. [And if] the nations of the world ... don’t try to deal with it now, mark my word, it is the battlefield of the future." (Quotes from The Times of Israel.) 

Yet one person in dispute is Andrew Exum, whose résumé speaks for itself. He was once the deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East. Writing for The Atlantic, he inserts the aside of "Panetta went so far as to describe" Israel's pager attack as “terrorism.” His choice of predicates also speaks for itself: The defense secretary's remark was out-of-bounds. The reader soon realizes where Mr. Exum is headed. 

He is fine with "The forces of war" being "in control" and it's pretty clear that he's either in disagreement with, or indifferent to, Panetta's follow-up observation of  "deal with it now" or "it is the battlefield of the future." For Exum is gung-ho when it comes to "Israeli attacks over the past two weeks that have wreaked havoc on Hezbollah as an organization."            

That's his enthusiastic focus: Israel's incessant leveling of Lebanon's structures in pursuit of this or that Hezbollah leader, notwithstanding the civilian masses that are "leveled" right along with them. Exum thrills at Israel's "making it very hard for Hezbollah to organize itself coherently," "taking away the ability of Hezbollah operatives to securely communicate with one another at the tactical level," and with the aggressor dealing "a serious blow to its adversary."      

Most Western observers haven't a problem with "much of Hezbollah’s senior leadership" being "devastated" (by other means), as Exum writes, yet he's more than content with it. He's ecstatic. He revels in writing that it's "Israel’s relentless air strikes this week" that are delivering the devastation, that "never before has Hezbollah’s rank and file been so publicly exposed and, worse, humiliated," and that "Hezbollah is surely reeling." 

But aren't others surely reeling? Only in his penultimate paragraph does he "spare a thought for the innocent Lebanese living in the high-rise buildings that collapsed in Israel’s air strike. They didn’t ask for Hezbollah to build its command center underneath their home following the 2006 war. They didn’t ask for any of this." There, Exum is word-perfect. They didn't ask for any of this, just as Palestinians didn't request the same of Hamas. 

Sure it's a darn shame that hundreds and soon into the thousands of Lebanese innocents are being massacred by Israeli airstrikes. (Photo, one of its "precision" strikes.) On the one hand, those faceless Israeli bomber pilots manage, on occasion, to whack one or two Hezbollah bad guys. Otherwise, Exum does spare a thought, the briefest of thoughts, to the atrocities befalling blameless Lebanese civilians.

He also bounds from word-perfect to word games in writing of "the high-rise buildings that collapsed in Israel’s air strike" — not "the Israeli airstrike that obliterated the high-rise and residential buildings into choking dust and rubble." Exum could not have missed the straight reporting on these strikes. "Israeli warplanes flattened several residential buildings just south of Beirut ..." is the first sentence in a NY Times piece.

In that there is no suggestion of a kinda proximate cause; THE BUILDINGS COLLAPSED! in an Israeli airstrike. Exum also thought it advisable to omit that the buildings were residential, miles more to the point and more painful than just "high-rise buildings." Yes, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense knows how to mitigate reality, soften indiscriminating brutality and convert a tale of mass slaughter into an exciting story about delivering "serious blows to an adversary."

Nestled among the sanitized "metrics" of Pentagon war plans and stars and clusters on shoulders is where Andrew Exum once belonged — and where he should be today, not in The Atlantic. 

Comments

[Anne J]

It must be very easy to have a casual attitude about human collateral damage when you know you will never be in the line of fire.