Foreign Policy Hawks: Wrong Since 1938

In every international conflict, the side that favors war invariably gets to "own" the flag.  Those favoring diplomacy can complain as much as they choose, but it's always the hard-liners, the hawks, and the "bombs away" crowd that successfully portrays itself as defender of the nation's interests. This is true during the build-up to war, throughout the war, and afterwards.  No matter if the war turns out to have been built on lies or false premises -- or even if its results harm the nation's interests -- the side that pushes for negotiations is always put on the defensive by flag wavers. 

This is hardly new.  Sometimes, it gets pretty hypocritical. 

In 1962, just after the Cuban Missile Crisis, a "White House source" leaked a story to a major national magazine that America would not have prevailed if President Kennedy had heeded the recommendation of United Nations Ambassador Adlai E. Stevenson.  The source -- who, it was soon revealed, was JFK himself -- said that Stevenson had proposed a "Munich." 

Stevenson was outraged and not just because he was being hung out to dry by his own President.  The thing that really upset Stevenson (and was not revealed publicly until he and Kennedy were long dead) was that the "Munich" Stevenson was accused of proposing was also supported by Kennedy himself.  The idea was that, to avoid war, the United States should make a deal with the Soviets.  In exchange for removing their missiles from Cuba, the United States would remove its missiles from Turkey (near the Soviet border).

To a large extent, it was the missile trade that ended the crisis.  The Soviets were forced to publicly remove their missiles.  We quietly removed ours.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but the planet was saved. 

But Kennedy couldn't tell the public that.  To avoid inflaming the right, he had to pretend that he had made no concessions to the Soviets when he knew he had.  Even with the survival of mankind at stake, the White House felt that it had to tell the public it had resolved the missile crisis without compromising on anything. (The Stevenson smear was designed to ensure that if the Turkish missile story ever came out, it could be blamed on the "soft" United Nations ambassador.)

The President's strategy worked and, following the crisis, his poll numbers soared.  He had succeeded in looking tough while secretly compromising. The Democrats did not let the Republicans beat them in the "capture the flag" game and Kennedy was able to move on to pursue detente with the Soviets.  A good ending for all.

That is not usually the case.  The disastrous Vietnam and Iraq wars were both successfully promoted by a combination of lies and the smearing of skeptics all under the cover of the stars and stripes.  The same dynamic could happen with Iran, if we allow it. 

But, hopefully, the lessons of Cuba, Vietnam and Iraq have been learned.  The uncompromising hawks get to wave the flag, but they are not the ones who promote American interests.

A similar case in Israel resulted in the worst moment in that country's history, and almost caused the loss of the state itself.

The year was 1971 and Israel was still occupying the Sinai Peninsula, Egyptian territory that it won in the Six Day War four years earlier.

The President of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, wanted it back.  But, even more, he wanted Israeli forces to pull back a couple of miles from the Suez Canal so that he could re-open the canal to commercially profitable international shipping.  He sent word to Israel, by way of the United States, that if Israel withdrew from the banks of the canal, he would begin peace negotiations with Israel. 

Here is how Israeli historian, Zeev Maoz, who fought in three of Israel's wars, characterized the Sadat offer (in his brilliant Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel's Security & Foreign Policy, University of Michigan, 2006): "The offer could not be overstated...At the end of the road was what Israelis had been, presumably, praying for the previous 23 years: a full-fledged peace treaty....formal acceptance of and peace with the Jewish state by the strongest and most important Arab state."  

He wrote that before 1967 Israel would have accepted the deal in a New York minute.  But in 1971, Israel was already intoxicated with the idea of holding the occupied territories.  That was better than peace.  As Prime Minister Golda Meir said, "we never had it so good."

The United States pushed hard to get the Israeli government to accept the offer. But the prime minister and the majority of the cabinet resisted.  They felt that Egypt would not be in a position to go to war with Israel for years, if ever.  Why concede anything now? They said no.  They would not even consider it.

It was at that point that Sadat decided that the only way he would regain his territory would be through war. He devoted the next two years preparing an attack and then, in October 1973, the Egyptians crossed the canal, wiped out the Israeli defenders, and -- with Syrian assistance -- came close to defeating Israel itself. (Defense Minister Moshe Dayan said that the Jews were in danger of "losing the Third Temple" -- by which he meant Israel.  Prime Minister Meir is said to have considered suicide.) But, in the end, President Richard Nixon -- who had urged Israel to accept the 1971 Sadat offer -- authorized the most massive arms airlift in history, told the Soviets to butt out, and provided Israel with the time and space it needed to prevail.

But it was at the cost of 3,000 young lives -- all of whom would have been spared if Israel had taken up Egypt's offer. And, in the end, in exchange for peace, Israel had to give up not just the 2-3 miles Sadat had originally demanded, but every last inch of the Sinai. 

In Israel, the failings that led to the war were investigated and, following publication of a report, the government fell.  But the mindset that produced the debacle did not really change. To this day -- with the exception of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin -- successive Israeli leaders have adhered to the belief that the risks of aggressively pursuing peace far outweigh the risks of war. 

As for the status quo pro-Israel organizations in the United States -- which backed the Israeli government in its rejection of Sadat's offer and told the US not to pressure Israel to accept it -- they never acknowledged that they were wrong or that the people they criticized for urging Israel to show some flexibility were right.  Not even the 3,000 dead -- and their grieving wives, children, parents, and siblings -- had an impact on a mentality that held that more land meant more security. And that the government of Israel is always right, that the Arabs will never get their act together and that, in the end, Israel can have its cake and eat it too. 

Fortunately, that mindset is now changing, especially after the 2008 Gaza war. 

Proponents of the status quo can no longer succeed in intimidating the proponents of negotiations into silence.  They try.  But their game is lost.  They have been proven disastrously wrong too many times: the 1973 Yom Kippur War, two Lebanon wars, and Gaza.   And no one will silence the critics.  Why should we be silent when it is us who have been proven right over and over again?