Ever since the beginning of time, people who built
something worth having and were subjected to marauders who coveted what they
had, and attacked them to steal it –– the builders thought of ways and means to
scare and deter the marauders from coming too close.
And there lies a long story because a deterrent that
does what it's supposed to do, is a complex set of approaches invoked to
ascertain self-defense. And even then, a deterrent can only be a temporary
stopgap that will protect its user for a finite period of time, after which it
will be rendered ineffective.
From the passive wall of China that was supposed to
keep marauders out, to the fierce looking statues of Egypt that signaled to
potential marauders the country had the strength of crush them, to the Roman
outposts at the periphery of the empire that served as a first line of defense,
nothing proved good enough to save those empires from attacks and eventual
defeat.
In the modern era, nations that feared being invaded
by someone, have conducted maneuvers to show off the kind of weaponry they had
with which they will “aggressively” defend themselves. Other nations relied on
putting out rumors to the effect that they developed secret weapons so
powerful, they will obliterate any invader who will dare to attack them.
And then, as usual, the Israelis came up with
cockamamie ideas that were invented more to impress their worldwide
rank-and-file than to scare a potential foe. They did three things: (1) They
put out unconvincing rumors that they had an arsenal of nuclear weapons. (2)
They pretended to have initiated a never-ending stream of restoring deterrence
with Iran and its proxies. But because these activities proved to have been a
laughable joke, the Israelis resorted to the third thing: (3) They called on
the Americans to come and do what's necessary to prevent Israel's anticipated
defeat.
The sad part is that instead of learning from this
experience the reality that quackery does not work well when it comes to
matters of war and peace, the Americans emulated the Israelis, thus made their
approach to defense, a laughable joke similar to that of Israel. You can see it
for yourself when you go over the article that came under the title: “Trump
restores deterrence with Iran,” written by Matt Nackowiak, and published on
January 8, 2020 in The Washington Times.
Talking about the assassination of the Iranian general
Qassem Soleimani, Matt Nackowiak said this: “Perhaps more importantly, Mr.
Trump has restored deterrence with Iran.” What's that about? Well, long ago,
America had a program to assassinate foreign leaders, especially in Latin
America, such as the many attempts they mounted to get rid of Cuba's Fidel Castro.
But the Americans did so clandestinely because they wanted to retain the luxury
of denying what they were doing.
Because this proved to be a bad idea, the Americans
were eventually forbidden from doing it by the Church Commission. For the Trump
Administration to come now, revive the practice and brag about it as having
“restored deterrence with Iran” is to imitate the Israelis that got into the
business of assassination ever since they came into existence. Later in life,
the Israelis also got into the business of restoring deterrence –– which they
did thousands of times with enemies that absorbed their blows and kept coming
back at them. In fact, Israel has attained the limit of its deterrence so definitely,
it is the one that's now being deterred by the very tiny but very capable
Hezbollah: Lebanon's Defense Force (LDF).
So then, what is there to learn about the business of
deterrence? It is that if you have the means to inflict severe damage on a
potential foe, and he doesn't know it, you show him what you can do by
conducting military maneuvers or by exploding a super-bomb in the desert, for
example. If the foe is still not convinced, and he conducts an operation
against you, that's when you do to him what the lesson has not taught him.
This is what may be called effective deterrence. But
to do what the Israelis do, which is to assassinate Palestinians they fantasize
are dangerous to Israel, or conduct “thousands” of raids against targets in
Syria, and think of each as having deterred the Syrians or the Iranians and
their proxies, is to engage in self-deception, as well as deceiving the
rank-and-file that's supporting Israel.