Questioning Israel's (And Tom Friedman's) Theory Of Success In Gaza

So a couple of days ago, I wrote a post thinking aloud about what Israel's goals could be in its war in Gaza. The following day, Tom Friedman wrote a column in the NYT wondering about the same thing, and referenced Israel's 2006 war against Hezbollah:

Israel’s counterstrategy was to use its Air Force to pummel Hezbollah and, while not directly targeting the Lebanese civilians with whom Hezbollah was intertwined, to inflict substantial property damage and collateral casualties on Lebanon at large. It was not pretty, but it was logical. Israel basically said that when dealing with a nonstate actor, Hezbollah, nested among civilians, the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians — the families and employers of the militants — to restrain Hezbollah in the future.

Israel’s military was not focused on the morning after the war in Lebanon — when Hezbollah declared victory and the Israeli press declared defeat. It was focused on the morning after the morning after, when all the real business happens in the Middle East. That’s when Lebanese civilians, in anguish, said to Hezbollah: “What were you thinking? Look what destruction you have visited on your own community! For what? For whom?”

Friedman then goes on to argue for and countenance a military strategy that explicitly targets Gazan civilians. I will leave the question of the morality of this argument to people like Glenn Greenwald and Matthew Yglesias. What I want to tackle instead is the intellectual and strategic basis of the argument: namely, that targeting civilians works in war.

The argument goes thusly: we want you to change your behavior. We will therefore punish your civilians in the hope that (a) the high punishment costs either drive you to change your behavior or (b) that your civilians turn on you for supporting policies that lead to us punishing them, or (c) both of the above.

The strategy above can be broadly construed as"punishment" and has been employed by states both against other great powers (the U.S. against Japan in World War II) and non-state actors (the Soviet Union against the mujahideen in the 1980s). Another possible strategy in war is "denial" - a strategy which changes the opposition's calculations of victory on the battlefield by making them realize that they cannot win. The distinction, I hope, is clear: punishment is aimed primarily at civilians, denial primarily at military forces.

The question is: which is more efficacious in war? As it turns out, denial is significantly more useful in making a state or group accepting that it has lost. I will quote Robert Pape - a professor here at U of C - who wrote a book (some would say, the book) on denial and punishment by studying thirty three strategic bombing campaigns from 1917 to 1991. This is his central argument on the basis of the evidence:

The evidence shows that it is the threat of military failure, which I call denial, and not threats to civilians, which we may call punishment, which provides the critical leverage in conventional coercion...governments are often willing to countenance considerable civilian punishment to achieve important territorial aims. Consequently, coercion based on punishing civilians rarely succeeds.

The key to success in conventional coercion is not punishment but denial, that is, the ability to thwart the target state's military strategy for controlling the objectives in the dispute. To succeed, the coercer must undermine the target state's confidence in its own military strategy.

So, to conclude: Tom Friedman does not know what he is talking about. When Israel bombs the hell out of Lebanon or Gaza, Lebanese and Gazans do not blame Hezbollah and Hamas for the destruction that is wrought. They blame Israel. Any strategy premised on Tom Friedmanesque ideas about civilian punishment and war is doomed to fail.

UPDATE: Shimon Peres echoes the Friedman logic:

Israel's aim, he said, was to provide a strong blow to the people of Gaza so that they would lose their appetite for shooting at Israel.