7th Rangers: Why Israel Needs the Bomb - It's the only country whose right to exist is routinely questioned, and its conventional military superiority in the region is being challenged
Fighting Seventh
The Fighting Rangers On War, Politics and Burning Issues
Rudyard Kipling"
“When you're left wounded on Afganistan's plains and
the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle
and blow out your brains,
And go to your God like a soldier”
General Douglas MacArthur"
“We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.”
“It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.” “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.
“The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.”
“May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .” “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
“Nobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
The Soldier stood and faced God
Which must always come to pass
He hoped his shoes were shining
Just as bright as his brass
"Step forward you Soldier,
How shall I deal with you?
Have you always turned the other cheek?
To My Church have you been true?"
"No, Lord, I guess I ain't
Because those of us who carry guns
Can't always be a saint."
I've had to work on Sundays
And at times my talk was tough,
And sometimes I've been violent,
Because the world is awfully rough.
But, I never took a penny
That wasn't mine to keep.
Though I worked a lot of overtime
When the bills got just too steep,
The Soldier squared his shoulders and said
And I never passed a cry for help
Though at times I shook with fear,
And sometimes, God forgive me,
I've wept unmanly tears.
I know I don't deserve a place
Among the people here.
They never wanted me around
Except to calm their fears.
If you've a place for me here,
Lord, It needn't be so grand,
I never expected or had too much,
But if you don't, I'll understand."
There was silence all around the throne
Where the saints had often trod
As the Soldier waited quietly,
For the judgment of his God.
"Step forward now, you Soldier,
You've borne your burden well.
Walk peacefully on Heaven's streets,
You've done your time in Hell."
Why Israel Needs the Bomb - It's the only country whose right to exist is routinely questioned, and its conventional military superiority in the region is being challenged
Wednesday, January 02, 2013
By Mark Helprin Sixty-five years after Germany's campaign to exterminate the Jews, of the many countries in the world Israel is the only one repeatedly subjected to calls for its extinction. Though Pakistan and India, like Israel and the Arabs, have suffered population exchange and territorial wars, neither questions the other's right to exist. So rare and extreme is such a position that one might think the countries of Europe, so many of which cooperated in hunting down their Jews, would do more to recognize its endemic presence in the Middle East.
They don't—their publics having largely accepted that, in regard to
the question of Palestine, Arabs were the victims and Jews the
victimizers and colonialists to boot. Even though, strangely for
colonialists, the Jews had no mother country and it was their armed
struggle that ejected Great Britain from the Levant. Conveniently
forgotten is that the Jews accepted partition and the Arabs did not;
that half the Palestinians who left in 1948 did so of their own
volition; that more Jews left and were expelled from Arab countries than
Arabs left and were expelled from Palestine; that Arabs were able to
remain in Israel whereas the Arab states are effectively Judenrein; that
Israel ceded the Sinai for a paper treaty, and Gaza in return for
nothing but rockets and bombs; that, amidst a sea of Islamic states, it
has accepted a Palestinian state while the Palestinians indignantly
refuse to recognize it as a Jewish state; and that it was ready to
compromise even on Jerusalem had Yasser Arafat been willing to take yes
for an answer.
And conveniently forgotten in
fallacious references to a cycle of violence is that—following from
their oft-stated call for the destruction of Israel— Hamas, Hezbollah
(which is more or less an Iranian expeditionary force), Iran itself, and
the Arab confrontation states are the parties that want to change the
status quo, by violence and by their own flamboyant admission. It exists, they assert that it has no right to exist, they act to
destroy it, and then they claim that they are resisting it. Last week,
the Iranian president traveled 1,000 miles from Tehran to stand on
Israel's border and threaten annihilation. One can only imagine the
hysteria—not only in Iran but in London and Paris—if Israel's prime
minister were to go to the Iranian border and do the same.
In many quarters, such startling asymmetricality in regard to the
question of Palestine, which is also the question of Israel, is made
acceptable by the conviction that as long as the Palestinian refugees
remain unassimilated by their brethren, and as long as their flag
doesn't fly from the Mediterranean to the Jordan, they are the underdog.
Of course, the underdog is not always right, and nor are the
Palestinians, backed by the power of the Arab states and Iran, exactly
the underdog.
The popular view of Israel as a "regional superpower" that at little
cost to itself rolls over its opponents has for decades been sustained
by Arab propaganda, Western anti-Semitism, and Israeli braggadocio. It
exempts those who subscribe to it from the burden of knowing the orders
of battle and the geography and history of the conflict, and—in regard
to Israel's ongoing casualties or in the event of its destruction—serves
as a preset moral salve.
But Israel has seldom gotten off
easily. In the 1948 War of Independence it had 30,000 casualties,
including 6,000 dead, which given its population was proportionally as
if today 2.6 million Americans were killed, more than all the deaths in
all the wars in our history. In the 1967 War, in just six days of battle
that created the legend of its invincibility, the proportional figure
is 118,000—20 times the number of Americans killed in Iraq and
Afghanistan since 2001. The numbers for the subsequent War of Attrition
are much the same, higher for the October War of 1973, and civilian and
military deaths continue even through relatively peaceful interludes.
In 1973, having overwhelmed the
Bar-Lev Line, crossed the Suez Canal, downed a significant portion of
the Israeli Air Force, and penetrated deep into the Sinai, an elated
Egyptian army found itself with virtually nothing between it and
Israel's heartland. The accepted narrative is that the Egyptians could
not conceive of going forward, were frightened, and had insufficient
supply. They could conceive fighting in Israel. They had fought there in
1948, and sat on the border for all but six years since. Having beaten
back the Israelis, they were anything but frightened, and their lines of
supply were adequate. But knowing that had they continued, their
concentrations of armor would have been vulnerable to tactical nuclear
weapons, that if Israel's existence hung in the balance so would Cairo's
and Alexandria's, and that the whole of Egypt could drown in the flood
of a breached Aswan Dam, they went no farther.
Partly as a result of the steady
development of Saudi air power in response to Iraq and Iran, Israel's
potential antagonists are closing the gap in numbers and quality, and
the Israeli Air Force does not offer the same margin of safety that once
it did. With the Arabs' approaching 1.3/1 advantage in first-line
aircraft, 2.9/1 in second-line aircraft, and an enormous 12/1 advantage
in mobile air defense, many new options open if Arab unity coalesces as
it did prior to the three major Arab- Israeli wars, in all of which
Israel's existence was at stake and the result unpredictable. If Turkey
is included, as it might be, Israel's prospects become seriously
darker.
Other than a direct nuclear strike,
what it most has to fear is that a combination of states will throw all
their aircraft against it at once while advancing a
surface-to-air-missile umbrella to threaten Israeli planes and provide
sanctuary for its own. Though the Israeli Air Force is qualitatively
superior and its imaginative responses cannot be counted out, the
steadily improving professionalism of the Arab air forces, their first
rate American and European equipment, their surface-to-air-missile
shield, and most importantly their mass, are potentially a mortal
threat. For if the Israeli Air Force is sufficiently degraded, Israel's
prospects on the ground will follow proportionately.
In light of the fact that the conventional balance can change and is
changing, one of the many purposes of Iran's drive for nuclear weapons
is not merely to wait for a lucky shot at Tel Aviv but to neutralize
Israel's nuclear deterrent so as to allow a series of conventional
battles to advance Israel's downfall incrementally.
The military strategy of Israel's
enemies is now to alter the conventional balance while either equipping
themselves with nuclear weapons or denying them to Israel, or both.
Their calls for equation of the two sides in a nuclear-free Middle East
leave out the lack of equation in aims. Israel cannot dream of
conquering its adversaries and replacing them with a Jewish state. But
from war to war its adversaries have made their intentions clear, and as
their mass and wealth are applied to their militaries over time,
Israel's last line of defense in a continual state of siege is the
nuclear arsenal devoted solely to preserving its existence.
Mr. Helprin, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, is the
author of, among other works, "Winter's Tale" (Harcourt), "A Soldier of
the Great War" (Harcourt) and, most recently, "Digital Barbarism"
(HarperCollins). WSJ
