Goliaths, Davids, and the Rules of War

 

He thought it would be over in three days. Swoop in, decapitate the government, install a new one, piece of cake. Instead it’s turned into an extended exercise in barbarity, targeting civilian populations, destroying infrastructure, and ruining multiple economies, with no apparent strategy or purpose beyond stroking a sociopath’s ego.

Are we talking about Trump or Putin here? Iran or Ukraine? Hard to tell from just that paragraph. The similarities are as striking as the differences, the big difference being that Iran is just getting started, while Ukraine is a more mature catastrophe, four years in the making. Another difference is that Ukraine’s impact on the world economy after four years will prove to be a mere fraction of Iran’s after a few months.

But Ukraine has been the harbinger of a new kind of war, which is now ready for prime time. Asymmetric war. Goliath-versus-David war. Total offense versus shrewd defense. Fertile ground for atrocities and war crimes of every sort.

The Goliaths apply overwhelming force, mostly from the air, wreaking maximum destruction on the population. They confuse destruction with victory, and they never seem to learn what militaries have known since before the Vietnam War: that for all the damage it inflicts, bombing alone cannot overthrow regimes or subdue populations. What it does do is piss off the people whose towns are being bombed, and make them hate you for generations.

The Davids, on the other hand, are invariably outgunned, out-spent, and generally out-resourced. They’re forced to get by on tactical ingenuity, cheap technology, the threat of imminent extinction, and a shared primal rage at the wanton molestation of their homes.

Ukraine was where we in the pampered West first learned that civilians and infrastructure can be fair game for missiles, drones, and artillery. It’s where we first grasped that whole cities, like Mariupol, could be reduced to rubble, and that hellish privation and death could spread across thousands of people at a time.

This is not new at all if you live in Syria or Chechnya, places where Putin first tried out obliteration as a policy initiative. Nor is it new in Gaza, where Israel has created a humanitarian disaster, and where an under-reported ecological emergency is literally rising from the rubble of destroyed buildings, releasing toxic chemicals into the air, water, and earth. Manmade calamities come in many forms.

We might long for the days when the Geneva Conventions actually held some sway among nations, even ours — though our own record has been sketchier than we’d like to admit. We roll our eyes when the subject comes up, knowing full well that international accountability for Trump, Putin, or any of their stooges will always be long shot.

But while there is something surreal about the idea of having rules for something as innately barbaric as war, there has been some comfort — at least in the past — in knowing there were lines that have generally been seen as too catastrophic to cross. Which is why it is so distressing to see those lines being crossed now, on a regular basis.

In the Middle East, there has long been an informal but dead-serious agreement among the various states that thou shalt not attack either petroleum facilities or desalination plants. It is obvious to all parties that the cycle of retaliation and escalation would be mutually suicidal.

And yet, already various oil production installations have come under attack, with Iranian missiles and drones inflicting damage in most of the neighboring petro-states.

But while shutting down oil production threatens livelihoods, shutting down desalination is an immediate threat to lives. In a region where 56 desalination plants account for 90 percent of desalinated water — and where desalinated water accounts for 70 percent of the water in Saudi Arabia, 90 percent in Kuwait, 80 in Israel, and so on — figure 100 million people could lose access to dependable drinking water.

I am posting this piece on Tuesday, the day Trump has given as a deadline to “Open the Fuckin' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in Hell.” He’s threatened to attack Iranian bridges and oil facilities. He didn’t mention desalination plants, but it could’ve slipped his mind, as much about this war tends to do. While it would be absurd to take him at his word, that doesn’t mean he won’t be in the mood to blow stuff up.

As bad ideas go, this would be one of the all-time greats. First of all, Iran is far better equipped to weather a water crisis than any of the other Middle Eastern states, including Israel. But even if looked at from a purely selfish, American national security perspective, there are excellent reasons why we don’t want 100 million people angry at us.

As a country, we have long lived under the illusion that two oceans give us distance from the world’s biggest trouble spots, and that we are therefore immune to any meaningful blowback from strife in other regions. This is delusional, and it assumes that we wouldn’t be stupid enough to poke a major hornet’s nest like Iran, and think we wouldn’t get stung.

Of course, a lot of the blowback will be economic, and wholly Trump-inflicted. By the midterms, we’ll be lucky if we have gas in our cars and food on our table.

But we’ll also be lucky if the carnage we’ve inflicted on others isn’t ultimately inflicted on us. Iranian drones don’t have the range to reach our shores, but what’s to stop Iranian proxies launching them from Cuba or Canada or Mexico, or even building them right here. They’re small, they’re cheap to make, and they can kill a lot of people. And that’s just one sort of threat.

This is happening just as the Trump regime has, with malice aforethought, weakened our ability to deal with such blowback. They’ve eviscerated the State Department, so that credible diplomacy is no longer possible, even with our allies. They’re purging the military, determined to make it exclusively male, white, Christian, and stupid. They’ve crippled the intelligence community, including national cyber defense, just as we’re facing off against one of the most sophisticated cyber-warfare states in the world. When the wifi goes down, we’ll know the war has reached us.

So here we are. Two wars, started by two Goliaths. Neither makes sense. Neither shows any sign of letting up. Neither shows any respect for human life.

We can argue that the rules of war are silly, that treaties aren’t worth the paper they’re written on, that might makes right. But we’d be missing the point, which is that the rules, whatever their pros or cons, are not being followed.

And while most of us don’t like to think of ourselves as Goliath, we’re the ones not following them.