How to Lose a War

By Noah Rothman

Monday, September 30, 2024

 

Retired U.S. Army general Stanley McChrystal was summoned to the set of CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday to talk about his endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, not Israel’s war against Iran’s terrorist proxies. He should have stuck to that plan.

 

“I spent a long time in counterterrorism,” McChrystal replied when asked if Israel should continue to “take Hezbollah to the mat” or take the opportunity presented by the organization’s decapitation to de-escalate. “We killed a lot of people, and what I learned was, unless you have an outcome, a political outcome that is durable, that all of those kinds of activities don’t last,” he said.

 

Right now, the war is “spiraling,” and more “violence is unlikely to produce a good outcome,” McChrystal added. But “I can sympathize with both sides, the visceral desire to go after the other.”

 

It’s not hard to sympathize with Israel’s aggressive prosecution of the defensive war imposed on it by Hamas’s genocidaires — a war joined by Iran’s various terrorist cutouts within hours of the 10/7 massacre. It requires no special benevolence to empathize with the Israelis displaced from their homes and forced to cower in bunkers for the better part of a year under a regular barrage of rocket, missile, and drone attacks launched by Iran’s agents. That’s easy. What, exactly, is the sympathetic reading of Hezbollah’s actions?

 

The blood-soaked terrorist outfit responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans, to say nothing of the Israelis and Sunni Arabs it has slaughtered over the decades, launched a campaign of unprovoked aggression. Its fighters and commanders have been targeted with more precision than any other Western power could hope to emulate. The Israel Defense Forces are incurring less collateral damage than one might expect in a war against non-state actors whose tactics revolve around hiding behind civilians. The Israelis are defending themselves against millenarian sects with explicitly eliminationist goals. Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis are meting out indiscriminate violence against civilians while the Israelis aren’t. The moral equivalency here is elusive.

 

McChrystal’s misplaced commiseration served to burnish his self-set reputation as a peacemaker. “I think he’s got a strategy to try to push Iran into a corner,” he said of Benjamin Netanyahu’s remorseless liquidation of one terrorist leader after another. “And he may be doing that, but the long-term outcome in Palestine writ large is going to be from a statesman-like view. And so, if he’s taking a wartime view only, I think at some point he’s either going to have to widen that aperture or take a longer view of it.”

 

“The more you press the fight, the harder you go for the jugular, the more you create scar tissue that’s going to last for generations,” McChrystal concluded. That sums up McChrystal’s approach to the management of a counterinsurgency operation — to win wars by not fighting them.

 

The general announced that the U.S. mission in Afghanistan had “turned a corner” by early 2010 following a “surge” of troops into Central Asia. But McChrystal was too quick to pivot from warfighting to an omnidirectional campaign of peace overtures. “He emphasized the need to win over the Afghan public and focus the fighting on the Taliban heartland in the south,” a summer 2010 New York Times profile of the general read. “He withdrew troops from peripheral areas and publicly announced military operations well before they began.” He “issued directives ordering his troops to drive their tanks and Humvees with courtesy, and he made it more difficult to call in airstrikes to kill insurgents because they risked civilian casualties.”

 

Indeed, McChrystal “issued strict guidelines forbidding air strikes except in the most dire circumstances,” Wired’s Noah Shachtman reported at the time. “The U.S. needed to rob the militants of popular support, he argued. Dropping bombs only disrupted lives and drove people into the arms of the Taliban. So civilian casualties from air strikes had to stop — immediately.” McChrystal’s approach necessarily put American soldiers in more danger than was strictly necessary, and his troops resented it.

 

A June 2010 Times report clocked the “palpable and building sense of unease among troops surrounding” the restrictions imposed on their lethality. It noted a “perception now frequently heard among troops that the effort to limit risks to civilians has swung too far, and endangers the lives of Afghan and Western soldiers caught in firefights with insurgents who need not observe any rules at all.”

 

“Winning hearts and minds in COIN [counterinsurgency] is a coldblooded thing,” McChrystal told the late Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings for the profile that put an end to his career in the armed forces. The remark constituted McChrystal’s response to a soldier who warned that NATO troops weren’t “putting fear into the Taliban” because “the more we restrain ourselves, the stronger it’s getting.” McChrystal was unmoved. “I can’t just decide, ‘It’s shirts and skins, and we’ll kill all the shirts,’” he explained.

 

But that’s what Israel is doing. It’s taking every shirt off the battlefield with ruthless disregard for how that makes its terrorist targets or their foreign sponsors feel. What McChrystal seems to off-handedly dismiss is that the rapid degradation of the Iran-backed terrorist networks that ring Israel’s borders is more likely to produce a durable settlement to Israel’s post–October 7 wars than a premature cease-fire that leaves Israel’s tormentors intact. “The Iranians understand that their main investment in recent decades is falling apart in terms of its status and ability to pose a strategic threat to Israel,” an Alma Research and Education Center report said. “Therefore, at this time they will not want to place additional capabilities under threat.”

 

As for the “outcome in Palestine writ large” about which McChrystal fretted, it’s unclear what connection that bears to the battlefield calculus in southern Lebanon, save for the fact that Israel’s enemies justify their murderous aggression on that tenuous basis. The long-term peace McChrystal envisions is more realizable if Iran and its proxies are materially weaker after this campaign. What were the Abraham Accords but an informal defensive compact between Israel and its Sunni neighbors designed to deter Iran and its proxies? That initiative was successful because it sidelined the intractable Palestinian question.

 

Why would the region’s anti-Iran neighbors resume the process of diplomatic and military integration with Israel if it relents just as it has the Islamic Republic on the ropes? There are some justified fears that Iran, lacking the operational capacity to effectively attack Israel, will turn on the Jewish state’s Arab partners. That is a real risk, but it’s hard to see how it would derail the inducements that resulted in the Abraham Accords in the first place.

 

McChrystal’s outlook is representative of a particular sort popular among those in the defense establishment who cannot conceive of victory as an outgrowth of terms dictated on the battlefield. They don’t believe wars are won by force of arms alone, so they cannot comprehend what Israel is seeking to achieve by neutralizing its enemy. Yes, the party that loses a war it starts may bitterly resent its fortunes. But if you take away its capacity to do anything about it and convince others to align with the stronger party against the weaker one, the “scar tissue” nursed by a vanquished adversary is a tertiary concern. That’s how wars are won. America’s generals may have forgotten how to achieve that sort of lasting victory, but Israel has not.