The folly of invasion

On the 5^th of June, 1967, Syria, Jordan and Egypt invaded Israel and started what became known as the Six Day War.  Six years later, on October 6, 1973, Syria and Egypt invaded Israel again, beginning the Yom Kippur War which would last until October 25.  On March 14, 1978, in response to a PLO terrorist attack on a bus in Haifa, Israel invaded Lebanon, occupying the southern part of the country for most of the rest of the year.  On June 6, 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon again, with the purpose of destroying the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), headed by Yasir Arafat.  In January 1985, Israel withdrew its forces to the Litani River, forming a so-called “security zone” that was between two and five miles deep across the south of Lebanon.  Hezbollah was formed in Lebanon to fight the Israeli invasion and occupation.

Israel occupied the security zone, frequently clashing with Hezbollah, until withdrawing past the U.N. “Blue Line” back into Israel in 2000.  Hezbollah continued cross-border missile strikes on Israel and terrorist attacks until July of 2006 when it crossed into Israel and attacked a patrol, killing several Israeli soldiers and taking two prisoners.  Israel and Hezbollah exchanged rocket barrages, and Israel invaded Lebanon yet again, displacing more than a million Lebanese from southern Lebanon and killing more than one thousand, including Hezbollah fighters and Lebanese civilians. The war lasted until August of 2006, when Israel withdrew back across its border.

Hezbollah continued rocket attacks on Israel, which responded in kind over the next decade-plus.  Israel also carried out airstrikes on Hezbollah targets in Syria and the Bekka Valley of Lebanon near the eastern border with Syria.   

One year ago tomorrow, on October 7, 2023, Hamas invaded Israel, killing more than a thousand Israelis and foreign nationals and taking 250 hostages.  On October 8, Hezbollah launched a rocket attack on Israel on the Shebaa Farms.  Israel, after launching a blizzard of missiles and airstrikes, invaded Gaza on October 27.  Since then, more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed, with over two million displaced and nearly all of Gaza’s buildings and infrastructure destroyed.

After exchanging missile barrages for most of the past year, Israel invaded Lebanon a week ago, on October 1.  More than a million Lebanese have been displaced, many of them into Beirut, and more than a thousand Lebanese have been killed since the conflict began.  Israel has struck Hezbollah fighters with its pager-attack as well as airstrikes that have taken out Hassan Nasrallah and much of Hezbollah’s top military leadership.

In February of 2022, Russia invaded its neighbor, Ukraine, and has occupied a strip of Ukraine’s east and south ever since, with constant fighting taking place along a 600-mile front line.  In July of this year, Ukraine launched a cross-border invasion of Russia in its Kursk region near the Ukrainian border, where fighting goes on to this day.

In 1965 or thereabouts, the United States invaded South Vietnam with the aim of…what exactly has never been clear.  In 1975, the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong drove American forces out of Vietnam.  In 2001, after the attack on the Twin Towers the Pentagon, the United States invaded Afghanistan with the aim of destroying al Qaeda.  Twenty years later, on August 30, 2021, the last U.S. military forces withdrew from Afghanistan, turning the country over to the Taliban.  In March of 2003, the U.S. invaded Iraq with the aim of destroying Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction and retaliating against Saddam’s non-existent role in the al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington D.C. on September 11, 2001.  The U.S. withdrew most of its combat forces from Iraq in 2011 and formally ended its “combat mission” in 2021, leaving about 2,500 American soldiers in Iraq serving in an “advisory” role to the Iraqi army.

Do you notice anything about all these invasions?  They have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and without exception, they are bloody and cause the deaths of civilians as well as the deaths of soldiers in the invading and defending armies.  The end of most of the invasions discussed above were ignominious, with the invading armies driven out of the countries they invaded, including the U.S. army’s invasions of Vietnam and Afghanistan.  Israel was caused to leave Lebanon multiple times by treaties, but then invaded again.  Syria and Egypt and Jordan were defeated and driven out of Israel in the 60’s and 70’s.  Israel will be caused to end its invasions of Gaza and Lebanon as well, by some kind of cease-fires or treaties.  We don’t know yet how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will end because at least in part, it depends on politics in the United States.  If Russia is allowed by treaty or by force to maintain some piece of Ukraine, as it has Crimea, it is certain that it will face a guerilla resistance, and the conflict will go on for years.

Here is one problem you don’t see discussed much when these invasions take place.  The invading army leaves its home and goes into a foreign country where it must establish what amounts to little home-countries in order to maintain and supply its presence there.  In Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. built heavily-fortified “base camps,” some of which we still maintain in Iraq and even in Syria.  Here is the problem with those base camps.  They are targets for the invaded countries’ armies.  Our base camps in Iraq and Syria are regularly hit with Kamikaze drones and missiles.  Ukraine shells and rockets Russian base camps inside its borders.  Russia is shelling Ukrainian outposts in Kursk, trying to drive out the Ukrainian army. 

Usually, most if not all the soldiers in the invading armies don’t want to be there and just want to go home.  The U.S. established the “one year tour” method of rotating its soldiers to and from Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan in an attempt to overcome what is essentially homesickness, and in some cases, opposition to what the military mission was alleged to be.  It is well known that in the final years of the war in Vietnam, many American soldiers just simply stopped fighting to the extent they could and concentrated on staying alive until their tours were up. 

Exhaustion is similar among the armies of countries that have been invaded, although their motivation tends to be higher because they are defending their own nations.  They are also supported by the populace of their countries.  Resupply of a defending army is easier than that of an invading army, mainly because the defending army’s “lines of communication” are shorter.  But both defenders and invaders face constant attacks by the other side on their resupply routes and stores of ammunition and food and other military supplies.

Invading and defending armies take prisoners of war, and that presents even more problems.  Both sides must contain prisoners of war within makeshift prisons, and the prisoners of war must be fed and housed and supplied with heat in the winter and the other materials necessary to stay alive.  Remember the calls to bring our POW’s home during the war in Vietnam?  Russia and Afghanistan have already had POW exchanges.  Israel and the PLO and Hezbollah have previously exchanged Israeli civilians seized in terror attacks for PLO and Hezbollah fighters, and prisoners held by Hamas in Gaza tunnels are one of the main remaining issues in the war between Israel and Hamas at this point.

One of the primary follies engaged in by invaders is the belief that they can wipe out the opposing military and its leadership.  Putin thought he could take Kyiv and collapse Ukraine’s government and opposition in five days.  Netanyahu constantly talks about fighting Hamas until Hamas has been “wiped from the face of the earth.”  The U.S. foolishly thought that if enough North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong were killed, the American army could “win” in Vietnam.  That was the genesis of the “body count,” which Robert McNamara thought could measure success in the war in Vietnam. 

The Kremlin’s USSR, its imperialistic union of Soviet Republics of countries it invaded after World War II, ended when the Berlin wall fell and Eastern European nations declared their freedom from Russian domination. Many if not most of them have joined the European Union and NATO.  Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was said to be his attempt to rebuild a new Russian republic.  Nations that border Russia are afraid of Putin’s imperialistic ambitions with good reason:  Ukraine. 

Israel has invaded Gaza and Lebanon for the second or third or fourth time, depending on how you count, and the most recent invasions will come to an end just like the others did.  But Hamas will not go away, nor will Hezbollah, nor will the aim of Palestinians to have a nation they can call their own.

Invasion of one country or tribe by another has been going on as long as there have been so-called civilizations of human beings on this planet.  The folly of conquest is as human an instinct as the will to win by one team over another in sports.  Maybe von Clausewitz’s “On War” needs to be updated.  War isn’t the carrying out of politics by other means.  War is the great game, as the British once called it, that will never end.  Remember the First Battle of Bull Run, the first battle of the Civil War?  Spectators, some of whom were members of Congress, many of whom carried picnic lunches, rode out to Manassas, Virginia, to watch the battle between federal forces and Confederates as if it were a sporting event.

It took the deaths of 600,000 soldiers before the Civil War ended, and you could make an argument that politics, the “other means,” of von Clausewitz, has been fighting that war ever since.

Nearly every war starts with an invasion.  It’s all deadly folly.  Invasions and wars don’t work except as a way of killing human beings.