I’ve report­ed on wars spurred by ide­ol­o­gy,  racism, reli­gion, ter­ri­to­r­i­al claims and resources. Their com­mon denom­i­na­tor was lead­ers who lacked the wis­dom and courage to choose com­pro­mise over delu­sions of the tri­umph of arms. Cue the cur­rent Mid­dle East imbroglio.

Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump and his Pavlov­ian admin­is­tra­tion mouthpi.eces con­sis­tent­ly intone that the U.S. has “the great­est mil­iary force the world has ever seen.”
Maybe, But supe­ri­or fire­pow­er is no guar­an­tee of a rea­son­able descrip­tion of victory.
Over the last six­ty or so years, David and Goliath con­flicts and inter­ven­tions in the name of peace and sta­bil­i­ty have claimed hun­dreds of thou­sands of lives, limbs and livelihoods.
Mil­lions upon bil­lions were squan­dered to dam­age and destroy prop­er­ty and infra­struc­ture, both pri­vate and pub­lic. None of it bought a last­ing con­tri­bu­tion to the greater good of humanity.
The most recent fail­ures and aban­doned efforts by the U.S.alone read like a val­i­da­tion of the title of the writer Bar­bara Tuchman’s 1984 take on war, “The March of Fol­ly”. The tal­ly includes Viet Nam, Lebanon, Iraq,  Soma­lia and Afghanistan. (It’s worth not­ing that the then pow­er­ful Sovi­et Union also retreat­ed igno­min­ious­ly from that one.)
Part of the prob­lem seems to be a lack of his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive, and an inabil­i­ty to think beyond clich­es and dis­graced tropes.
Trump’s inane,  one note drum­beat about Iran being on the brink of attain­ing a nuclear capa­bil­i­ty to strike the  U.S. main­land, echoes George W Bush jus­ti­fy­ing the inva­sion of Iraq because “… we can­not wait for the final proof, the smok­ing gun that could come in the form of a mush­room cloud.”
The” “shock and awe”  that was sup­posed to be fol­lowed post haste with a resound­ing vic­to­ry, drib­bled to  a whim­per­ing end in the form of  Iraq spi­ralling into an almost failed nation, and the birth of the self-pro­claimed Islam­ic State. Its jiha­di-dri­ven ide­ol­o­gy has defied defeat on the ground in Iraq, by metas­ta­sis­ing into ever-expand­ing off­shoots spread across in Africa and oth­er parts of the world.

                         ANOTHER LESSON

The USS New Jer­sey, tout­ed as the most sto­ried and dec­o­rat­ed ship in the U.S. Navy, was prowl­ing off the coast of Beirut. primed with shells described a “the size of a VW Bee­tle,” when a sui­cide bomber in  a bat­tered truck killed 241 Marines and oth­er Amer­i­can ser­vice per­son­nel serv­ing in a peace keep­ing mis­sion in the after­math of the Israeli inva­sion of Lebanon.
Hezbol­lah, the “oth­er half” focus of the war in Iran, was spawned by the inva­sion, and has been the tar­get of Israeli bombs, rock­ets, land incur­sions and intel­li­gence ser­vice assas­si­na­tion oper­a­tions on a reg­u­lar basis ever since.
Cour­tesy of Amer­i­can largesse and its own inno­v­a­tive abil­i­ties,  the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) is the sec­ond most pow­er­ful mil­i­tary in the Mid­dle East (after Turkey),  and is con­sis­tent­ly ranked in the top twen­ty globally.
That Hezbol­lah has sur­vived as an Iran­ian proxy against the Jew­ish state in no small mea­sure due to the Israelis inabil­i­ty to grasp that as is long as they treat south­ern Lebanon like  Gaza, smash it all with­out both­er­ing to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between gen­uine ene­mies and inno­cent vic­tims, they will be seen as Goliath, rather than the David they pre­tend to be.
The death toll in Lebanon since the start of the cur­rent cat­a­stro­phe is in the thou­sands, the maimed and injured even high­er. By any rea­son­able account­ing  all but a frac­tion of them were unarmed, inno­cent civil­ians, includ­ing women and children.
Three weeks ago, a BBC Ver­i­fy analy­sis “… found more than 1,400 build­ings had been destroyed since 2 March based on ver­i­fied visu­al evi­dence.”
The Israeli ratio­nale is that they could be, or were used by Hezbol­lah fight­ers, equipped with low-grade mis­siles and small arms, as fir­ing points.
How sim­ple vil­lages were sup­posed to pre­vent them from doing so, and there­fore have to pay the price, hasn’t been made clear by the IDF.
One thing for cer­tain is that Israel won’t be apol­o­gis­ing or mak­ing repa­ra­tion for any  proven “avoid­able errors”.But they can cite prece­dent for that.
In 1988, at the height of the “tanker war” between Iran and Iraq in the Per­sian Gulf, the guid­ed mis­sile cruis­er USS Vin­cennes, tout­ed as one of the most sophis­ti­cat­ed war­ships in the world, mis­took an Iran­ian air­bus on a sched­uled flight, for an Iran­ian F‑14,preparing to fire, and shot it down with the loss of all 290 peo­ple aboard.
The U.S. Navy award­ed two of the Vin­cennes’ top offi­cer spe­cial com­men­da­tion medals for “mer­i­to­ri­ous service”.
As for the  cur­rent war, mini-war, Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump  blithe­ly quipped:” “I did some­thing that was, I don’t know, fool­ish, brave, but it was smart,” and, appar­ent­ly unaware of the inani­ty of that, he  added “I would do it again”.
I’ll leave the last word to 19^th cen­tu­ry Ger­man essay­ist Thomas Mann:
“War is only a cow­ard­ly escape from the prob­lems of peace.”  

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