1/ This week has evoked many memories of the Mosul offensive which I was a minor participant in while embedded with an Iraqi Army brigade. It was a very formative experience for me as a younger lad and one that colors my perception of what’s likely to come in Gaza.
2/ It did not seem so at the time, but it’s remarkable in hindsight reflecting on just how relatively little pretext was required to convince the intervention-skeptical Obama administration to launch an annihilation war against a newly declared Middle Eastern state.
3/ In response to a handful of snuff videos of executed Westerners, the U.S. and its allies waged a 5-yr continuous bombing campaign, leveling multiple large historical cities across two countries, spanning two administrations, killing tens of thousands + displacing 100k’s more.
4/ This was put in motion *before* high profile major attacks in the West like San Bernardino, the Pulse Nightclub, Nice, and Paris. The public went from deep skepticism about intervention in another Mesopotamian quagmire to buying “ISIS Hunting Permits” in a short span of time.
5/ There were of course other geopolitical factors: the Yazidi genocide, the prospect of Iraq’s disintegration, or the fall of Erbil. But it was the gleeful sadism of beheaders with posh accents that really drove people mad.
6/ Obama’s much-derided “lead from behind” strategy proved to be politically astute and quite lethal. In the years following the Islamic State’s meteoric rise, the Coalition via its proxies in the Iraqi Army and Kurdish SDF did the fighting and dying while ISIS was pummeled.
7/ The accompanying air support to these proxies was indispensable and neither its efficacy or morality were not even remotely questioned in any meaningful way despite the immense collateral damage it entailed for people unfortunate enough to be under the caliphate’s rule.
8/ Perhaps it was the remoteness of these places and the cartoonish villainy of ISIS that made people not entertain such questions. The indiscriminate horrors visited on Western cities at the same time only further validated the strategy.
9/ Given the massive destruction visited on Mosul from 16-17, people might be tempted to assume the Coalition pursued an indiscriminate bombing campaign to cleanse the city of its occupiers. But this was not the case at all.
10/ U.S. targeting practices are heavily regimented and bureaucratized and lawyers are involved in every step. The process of determining whether a building and its occupants are to be vaporized looks much more like a quarterly HOA board meeting than Dr. Strangelove.
11/ All the legal jargon, quotes from Augustine, banal PowerPoints given to deploying soldiers about proportionality, and neat post-strike press releases are revealed as comforting contrivances when you are on the business end of a siege.
12/ The pairing of these illusions with technological advances obfuscate an enterprise which —when stripped down to its essence— is the imprecise incineration of your foes by means of mechanical dragons.
13/ William Sherman (no stranger to urban destruction) knew better than moderns when he stated “war is cruelty and there is no refining it.” The 9-mo siege of Mosul would have been intelligible to him as it would have for Thucydides.
14/ And the experience for both the besieging and the besieged was not materially dissimilar to that of a surrounded city in Antiquity: the privation, the randomness of death, massacres, looting, displacement, and bloody private score-settling as the old regime yields to the new.
15/ We need not dig far in history for precedents. All of this occurred in Mosul just 6 years ago, and its outcome was largely either welcomed or ignored. (Strange to experience an event so personally transformative that hardly anyone knows about)
16/ And yet for all of that, I cannot help but think there was no way it could have been avoided. The insane logic of “destroying the village to save it” somehow becomes logical. The prospect of human sacrifice appears only less horrifying than *not* conducting the sacrifice.
17/ To not administer the purging fire would be to leave the slave markets open, for the captives to languish, for a million souls to remain under the boot of a death-worshipping cult. The choice was not between the high and low but between the terrible and the unthinkable.
18/ Once in motion, such events take on a trajectory of their own in which individual human agency fades in relevance. The Iraqi state could not abide this ghoulish challenger to its sovereignty in its second city. When ISIS failed to win in 2014, its eventual end was inevitable.
19/ The pogrom visited on southern Israel last week represents a cassus belli of a magnitude that dwarfs the comparably trivial one that spurned Americans to commit to killing a new state in its infancy and leveling whole metropolises.
20/ The knifing of mothers and the unborn, the slaughter, the pyres of children, and carting off of women as war booty to the invader’s lairs has much more in common with the genocidal campaign visited on the Yazidis by ISIS in 2014. The future appears obvious, at least to me.
21/ While everyone debates what is to be done, I have been resigned to what I think has been inevitable since last Saturday: Gaza is doomed, the city will be destroyed, its population a mix of dead and displaced, Hamas will cease to exist in its current form.
22/ I say none of that with glee or triumphalism; more a recognition of human nature as it is. Any Israeli government too squeamish to do this would be immediately replaced by one that is. The threat is perceived as existential and the blood must be avenged. They cannot abide it.
23/ There is no technological sorcery that would enable Israel to extirpate its enemy in a way that would be satisfying to people for whom war is abstract and theoretical or merely a problem that can be technocratically managed.
24/ Doubtless many will appeal to illusory concepts like “international law,” “laws of war,” “the international community(!)” and other fictions meant to massage what is [to borrow a jihadist framing] merely the “management of savagery.”
25/ Many are not prepared for what is to come. They harbor illusions about how humans react under such immense pressures and do not realize the die has already been cast. But this is human nature and there is no refining it.
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