Edward Rothstein: Labyrinthine Complexities of Fighting a Terror War
War usually requires absolute clarity about identities. Who are you, and where do you stand? Friend or foe? Combatant or bystander? With whom do you claim allegiance, for whom are you willing to die, and who is responsible for your actions? This is one reason for military uniforms: they establish identity in the midst of war’s dense fog. In uniforms human differences are stripped away. Allegiance is abstracted into uniformity.
But the battles now being fought in Lebanon represent a newer form of warfare. For Hezbollah confusion of identity is not an accident but the principal tactic: no uniforms, no separation of army and populace, no clarity about ultimate responsibility. For its opponent there are always questions. What is being hit? An apartment building or a weapons depot? A farm truck or a munitions carrier? A fighter or a civilian? And who is answerable for Hezbollah’s acts?
Terror warfare deliberately sacrifices innocents and deliberately confounds innocence. It knows that the enemy has moral principles it will be forced to violate; victims serve a higher cause, befuddling the enemy, inspiring loyal cadres.
Issues of identity also figure in these battles in other ways. Despite its recurring military confrontations, Israel has not been involved in a traditional war of nation-states since 1973, when it very nearly lost after Egypt’s surprise attack. And while such wars may still go on in the Middle East (as the million or so dead in the Iran-Iraq war prove), and while the United States mistakenly expected to be engaged in a traditional war of nation-states when it invaded Iraq, terror warfare, with its deliberate confusion of categories and identities, is now the rule rather than the exception.
This may have something to do with the nature of the Middle East itself. The historian Bernard Lewis has pointed out that in Europe nearly every state has a name that is associated with a particular ethnic group and a particular language, a longstanding conjunction of “ethnic, territorial and linguistic nomenclature.” This way of thinking about the state was imposed on the Middle East through imperial power, but as Mr. Lewis points out in his book “The Multiple Identities of the Middle East,” only three countries there — Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran — bear any resemblance to the European model. (Israel, with the diverse origins of its Jewish populations, is a more complicated case.)
Mr. Lewis suggests that while many of the notions that the West associates with the nation-state, including ideas of citizenship (which evolved out of ancient Greece and Rome) eventually found their way into the Middle East, they took root there in a very different form, partly because of the political ramifications of Islam. He points out that in the West the nation is the guiding category of allegiance, under which religious affiliations are grouped; but the opposite is true in much of the Middle East. Religion is the unifying principle, and nations associate under its banner. As Mr. Lewis points out, it is hard to imagine the leaders of the Buddhist nations of Asia or the Lutheran nations of northern Europe meeting for conclaves, the way leaders of Muslim countries do with little but their religion to bind them. ...
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But the battles now being fought in Lebanon represent a newer form of warfare. For Hezbollah confusion of identity is not an accident but the principal tactic: no uniforms, no separation of army and populace, no clarity about ultimate responsibility. For its opponent there are always questions. What is being hit? An apartment building or a weapons depot? A farm truck or a munitions carrier? A fighter or a civilian? And who is answerable for Hezbollah’s acts?
Terror warfare deliberately sacrifices innocents and deliberately confounds innocence. It knows that the enemy has moral principles it will be forced to violate; victims serve a higher cause, befuddling the enemy, inspiring loyal cadres.
Issues of identity also figure in these battles in other ways. Despite its recurring military confrontations, Israel has not been involved in a traditional war of nation-states since 1973, when it very nearly lost after Egypt’s surprise attack. And while such wars may still go on in the Middle East (as the million or so dead in the Iran-Iraq war prove), and while the United States mistakenly expected to be engaged in a traditional war of nation-states when it invaded Iraq, terror warfare, with its deliberate confusion of categories and identities, is now the rule rather than the exception.
This may have something to do with the nature of the Middle East itself. The historian Bernard Lewis has pointed out that in Europe nearly every state has a name that is associated with a particular ethnic group and a particular language, a longstanding conjunction of “ethnic, territorial and linguistic nomenclature.” This way of thinking about the state was imposed on the Middle East through imperial power, but as Mr. Lewis points out in his book “The Multiple Identities of the Middle East,” only three countries there — Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran — bear any resemblance to the European model. (Israel, with the diverse origins of its Jewish populations, is a more complicated case.)
Mr. Lewis suggests that while many of the notions that the West associates with the nation-state, including ideas of citizenship (which evolved out of ancient Greece and Rome) eventually found their way into the Middle East, they took root there in a very different form, partly because of the political ramifications of Islam. He points out that in the West the nation is the guiding category of allegiance, under which religious affiliations are grouped; but the opposite is true in much of the Middle East. Religion is the unifying principle, and nations associate under its banner. As Mr. Lewis points out, it is hard to imagine the leaders of the Buddhist nations of Asia or the Lutheran nations of northern Europe meeting for conclaves, the way leaders of Muslim countries do with little but their religion to bind them. ...