Reflections on the ‘cult of the offensive’

Reflections on the ‘cult of the offensive’: pre-emptive war, the Israel lobby and US military Doctrine

In our book, Spies, Lies and the War on Terror,(1) a central theme is the ascendancy of pre-emptive war doctrine in US military strategy and its impact on public perceptions and the construction of political narrative. A parallel and closely linked concern is with the overall current of irrationalism which took hold after 9/11, feeding and complementing the growth of pre-emptive doctrines.

In what follows here there are four elements: pre-emption itself as a constant trope in the history of warfare; the radical recrudescence of the concept after the advent of nuclear weapons; the rising influence of Israeli concepts of war on US defence doctrine; and the aggregation of all of these in the combination of political and strategic factors leading the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq war.

The term ‘war on terror’ (WoT) has been widely derided as both epistemologically illiterate and a transparent catchall for demagogy and the pursuit of long-standing agendas for militarism and crackdowns on civil liberties. There is also, however, a sense in which WoT represents a functioning military concept for the US, which can be located in the evolution of US strategic doctrine. In the early 1980s, the first period of neo-conservative dominance in US politics, analysts of international relations were struck by similarities between the ‘new cold war’ prosecuted by the Reagan administration and the great power stand-off before August 1914.(2) In both cases scholars noted the influence of a ‘cult of the offensive’ on military doctrine, and in pushing arguments for pre-emptive war. For WoT, however construed, pre-emption is clearly a sine qua non. But the very abstraction of the concept has helped advance doctrines of pre-emption across the board; and this has been greatly expedited by a renewed period of neo-con politics in the Bush administration and the determined push for the Israeli strategic model. To be sure, pre-emption is far from uncontroversial in Israeli defence doctrine itself, but for the US neo-cons and their avatars on the Israeli hard right, a cult of the offensive has been not only strategic boilerplate but an active moral imperative.

The ghost of Marx: warfare, technology and the paradigm of 1914

For millennia, warfare has been an established – and indeed, celebrated – institution in the conduct of human affairs. As much recent scholarship has shown, conflict has been central to both technological/material advance and social cohesion.(3) Progress was not secured without a price, however. Writing in the 1850s, Karl Marx observed that at certain stages in history, economic and technological factors can outrun the social and political capability to manage and control them. And nowhere was this thesis more tragically vindicated than in the outbreak of World War One, when a combination of ill-understood technological advance and the entirely rational fear of losing the march – in an era where military prowess was a defining feature in national identity – led the European great powers into four years of mass destruction. The dominance, on all sides, of a ‘cult of the offensive’ was a massive contributory factor here and one widely recognised in the aftermath.(4) There was a wholesale commitment to disarmament, new international institutions and a shift to defensive military strategies, such as the (highly successful) UK air defence system and the (less successful) French Maginot line.

The defeat of the second wave of offence cultists – Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan – after World War Two brought a new period of international institution-building. But this was put under immediate threat by nuclear weapons. With the stakes of nuclear war so inconceivably high, the idea that pre-emption was not only the logical, but indeed, the moral choice gained a fresh currency. In the US there was intense debate about the possibility of countering the nuclear threat from the Soviet Union by pre-emptive first strike on Soviet nuclear facilities, before they were fully operational. Although subject to highly detailed planning, however, the protagonists of ‘Operation Dropshot’ were restrained by more rational voices in their aim to ‘reduce the Soviet Union to a smouldering, irradiated ruin.’

The 1962 Cuba missile crisis – during which US president Kennedy’s successful efforts to rein in the pre-emptive arguments of airforce chief (and ‘Dropshot’ author) Curtis LeMay were mirrored in the removal of operational missile control from local field commanders by Soviet leader Khrushchev – inaugurated a new era of nuclear restraint between the superpowers. In some ways technology itself had come to the rescue. The advent of ‘survivable’ nuclear systems, such as the Polaris submarine, underwrote the grim logic of Mutually Assured Destruction. But if possession of an assured ‘second strike’ capability shelved the 1950s dreams of instant success in pre-emptive atomic war, the pre-emptive concept itself was taking on a new life amongst the lesser powers sheltering under the nuclear umbrella.

The Summer of War – the other 1967

The Middle East war of June 1967 is conventionally portrayed as a clear case of justified pre-emption by Israel. The surrounding Arab powers, led by Egyptian president Nasser, had been pounding a drumbeat of aggressive rhetoric and military posturing. In April, Nasser had closed the Straits of Tiran, Israel’s sole access to the Red Sea, and ordered the UN peacekeeping contingent from its buffer position in the Sinai between Egyptian and Israeli forces. However, as Tel Aviv, London and Washington knew, neither Egypt – whose main combat capability was tied down in a losing war in North Yemen – nor the hapless Syrians were in any position to pose a credible threat. Indeed, the UN Sinai force had been installed after an earlier episode of military pre-emption by Israel – the Suez crisis of 1956. Then the move by British, French and Israeli forces to seize the Suez canal, occupy the Sinai and ‘knock Nasser off his perch’ had led to the threat of US economic sanctions by an exasperated President Eisenhower, with the full support of the United Nations. The aborted Suez operation, however, which had seen Israel’s army gaining easy dominance over the poorly-equipped Egyptians, was launched under the governing strategic orthodoxy of Israeli military doctrine – pre-emptive war.

As veteran Israeli politician and diplomat, Shlomo Ben-Ami explains:

‘Israel’s military doctrine, as it was established by David Ben-Gurion, has been based on the principle of offensive defence….“security” was elevated to the status of a sacred cow, and the concept of pre-emptive war and the nation in arms to that of a vital existential philosophy.’ (5)

Moreover, as Ben-Ami further points out, many in the Israeli security establishment believed in actively fostering a state of ‘armed peace’, wherein

‘The new nation made up of immigrants from all corners of the world had to be galvanised as a people in uniform, a fully mobilised society…. the notion of a nation living on a razor’s edge between war and a precarious truce became a collective state of mind.’(6)

And no-one held this belief more strongly held than the principal architect of the 1967 war, Defence Minister Moshe Dayan, who, as Ben-Ami observes, ‘believed in resistance and permanent war, not in peace.’(7)

The fullest expression of Dayan’s ‘existentialist’ approach to international relations came with the Israeli Blitzkrieg of June, 5 1967. While the opening phase – involving the simultaneous destruction of Egyptian/Syrian air and armoured capability – had been meticulously planned in advance, with what Ben-Ami admits as ‘Israel’s assertion of her military deterrence [and] frequently disproportionate policy of retaliation’ stoking the crisis atmosphere,(8) the pattern of conquest on the ground evolved more experimentally, with even Moshe Dayan initially opposed to occupying the Golan Heights. In the event, however, the need for unity amongst the always fractious Israeli ruling coalition and ‘an irresistible bacchanalia of passions’(9) ensured the triumph of the maximalist option – and one underpinned yet more strongly by the doctrine of pre-emptive war.

The USS Liberty

The utter single-mindedness of this doctrine was illustrated by the 9 June Israeli attack on a NSA/US Navy sigint ship, the USS Liberty. A prominently-flagged, 455-foot vessel, festooned with radar and listening antennae, the Liberty was sailing slowly off the Gaza coast, some twelve miles outside Israeli territorial waters. The two hour-long Israeli assault, involving torpedo craft and Mirage fighter-bombers, took place after numerous reconnaissance over-flights, on a clear day and with no prior warning. Although official enquiries in Israel and the US were quick to class the incident as ‘friendly fire,’ the sheer scale of the Israeli action, leading to 206 casualties (34 fatal) and the ship’s total immobilisation, suggests a wider agenda.(10)

Although even Ben-Ami, a constant critic of Israeli security policies and pre-emption in particular, condemned Egyptian claims of US/UK collaboration in the Israeli war effort as, ‘the Big Lie’,(11) much evidence suggests extensive and active cooperation on the logistics and intelligence sides; and encouragement of the Israeli pre-emptive programme. Like Nasser in the North, the UK was also fighting a losing guerrilla war, in South Yemen. As in 1956, Nasser’s revolutionary leadership was viewed as the root cause of British travails in the Middle East, and there could be no more satisfactory outcome for London than his defeat or removal. For embattled US President Lyndon Johnson, a strongly-held Zionism was coupled with the more expedient consideration that an Israeli defeat of Nasser – viewed as a straightforward Soviet client – could pave the way to his re-election. If emerging evidence suggests that Israeli heavy-handedness and genuine battle-field confusion had overcome initial instructions for a light strafing attack by ‘unmarked aircraft’ (with hopefully minimal casualties), and led to the recall of US strikes on Egypt and the plan’s swift abortion, the die was clearly cast for future US-Israel strategic intimacy.

The doctrine takes hold

For Israeli strategists, a declared policy of pre-emptive strike – backed up by regular exemplar – was a central component for grounding the vital currency of deterrence: ‘credibility’. In the nuclear realm, credibility was viewed by strategic theory, held by such as influential Chicago analyst Albert Wohlstetter, as critical to setting ‘escalation dominance’ in episodes of threat-bargaining. The pre-emptive doctrine, however, has a further utility for policy makers in alliance management. For a great power it offers the possibility of avoiding entangling and expensive force deployments by simply issuing a pre-emptive guarantee. But for an influential ally, there are also wide ‘wag the dog’ possibilities – with nuclear weapons as the ultimate tail.

In US-Israel relations, the issue came to a head during the Yom Kippur war of October 1973. As Pulitzer-winning New Yorker columnist and author, Seymour Hersh has established:

‘Sometime in this period, the American Intelligence community got what apparently was its first look, via the KH-11 [surveillance satellite], at the completed and operational [Israeli nuclear] missile launchers hidden in the side of a hill…. The launchers were left in the open, perhaps deliberately, making it much easier for American photo-interpreters to spot them.’(12)

This took place under heavy US pressure on Israel to accept a US-Egyptian sponsored ceasefire and halt plans to destroy the Egyptian army completely.

Beleaguered US President Nixon and Secretary Kissinger’s response was to order a US nuclear alert (DEFCON 3), aimed ostensibly at the Soviets (and as many alleged, at Nixon’s congressional critics) but accepted by Soviet leader Brezhnev without demur, as a useful escape clause from an ungrateful client and a losing Middle East war. For Nixon’s mounting domestic opposition, however, the coded signal to Israel – along with more straightforward logistics arm-twisting by Henry Kissinger – cemented a powerful emerging coalition in US politics. For what were beginning to be termed the ‘neo-conservatives’, it had been precisely Israel’s repeated disavowal of pre-emption – at US insistence – during the build-up to Yom Kippur that had caused the initial Arab victories. Determined to reverse both the pressure on Israel and the multilateral diplomacy of Kissinger seen as the main cause, the neo-cons sought to shelve the existing and proposed arms treaties with the Soviet Union (the SALT process) and reconfigure US military doctrine toward pre-emptive war.

There was, to be sure, much opposition here. US/Soviet détente had become fairly institutional by this stage, both in the politico-military establishment and with public opinion in general. However, by 1975 hardline US Defense Secretary (and Kissinger opponent) James Schlesinger had succeeded in promoting ‘counterforce’ as the new US nuclear targeting doctrine. Counter-force involves the precision targeting of enemy weapons systems, as opposed to cities (‘counter-value’) and was made possible by advances in US warhead technology. To maintain credibility, though, pre-emptive options have to be present at every step on the escalation ladder. Moreover Secretary Schlesinger made it plain that pre-emption in the conventional realm was still on the table. Following the ‘oil shock’ of October 1973, and continued Arab pressure on the Western powers, Schlesinger hinted at a possible US take-over of the oil fields in the Gulf, declaring that, ‘it is indeed feasible to conduct military operations [in the oil fields] if the necessity should arise’ – a stance enthusiastically applauded by right-wing commentators, the fast-rising neo-con caucus in Congress and at grassroots level at the US petrol pump.

If Jimmy Carter’s Democratic presidency of November 1976 had succeeded in seeing off the incumbent Republican Gerald Ford and the conservative bandwagon of Ronald Reagan, the debate on counterforce and pre-emption took on increasing momentum, via the mushrooming network of neo-con lobby groups such as the Committee on the Present Danger. While many differences existed in this milieu – notably between traditional conservatives and neo-cons on blanket support for Israel – there was clear agreement on ditching the SALT treaties and developing ballistic missile defence (BMD), which Nixon had bargained away in the ABM treaty of 1972. Not widely noticed outside the specialist literature, the preferred location for a pre-emptive US missile launch capable of overwhelming Russian ABM systems (due to various technical considerations concerning the angle of re-entry) was the Arabian sea.

Access to the Arabian Sea required secure facilities, preferably not tied to the vagaries of a local host government. This had been long planned for, with a lease taken on the British-owned island of Diego Garcia from 1964. During the numerous Senate and Congressional hearings on developing Diego Garcia, much DoD disavowal of leaked plans for Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile (SLBM) support and B 52 basing had failed to convince strong Senate opposition from such as Gary Hart and Edward Kennedy. It had also signally failed to convince the Russians. A little publicised but highly significant factor in drawing Soviet agreement on SALT 1 had been a de facto moratorium on both expanding the ‘austere’ island facilities and regular SLBM deployment in the Indian Ocean.(13) Many in the US arms control community had hoped to formalise these understandings with a treaty for mutual restraint, if not complete demilitarisation for the Indian Ocean as a whole, and saw an opening in Carter’s first year. The US/Soviet talks had reached a final stage by 1978, but faced mounting opposition from the ‘new cold war’ bandwagon in Washington. Finally, congressional hearings in 1979 shelved the putative Naval Arms Limitation Treaty (NALT) on the grounds of Soviet actions in Ethiopia, but mainly on the basis that ‘restricting our ability to deploy Polaris missiles is not in the strategic interest of the United States.’ In Soviet eyes, however, the US move into the Indian Ocean represented one more stage on the road to pre-emption.

The New Cold War

Russian involvement in the 1978-9 Ethiopia/Somalia conflicts had been a gift to Washington hard-liners, notably National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was seeking ways to further entangle the bankrupt Soviet empire in protracted regional wars, notably the gathering Islamist insurgency in Afghanistan. Afghanistan became the testbed for the ‘Reagan Doctrine’ of aggressively attacking the Soviet Union’s third world allies and grew into the CIA’s biggest operation. But in parallel with guerrilla assaults on pro-communist regimes, the doctrine of pre-emptive nuclear war was also a gathering force. Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ announcement of 1983, although presented as a defensive measure, was clearly a statement of intent, even if the actual technology was (and remains) highly fallible. The alliance between pro-Israel neo-cons and more conventional cold warriors found expression in the 1982 ‘strategic understanding’ between Israel and the US. And if hopes for a formal, NATO-style alliance were stymied by the disastrous Israeli invasion of Lebanon of that year – a move explicitly defended by Prime Minister Begin as ‘a war of choice’(14) – pre-emption, nuclear and conventional, was becoming mainstream.

As Albert Wohlstetter – academic tutor to leading neo-cons Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and overall movement guru – was fond of pointing out, a pre-emptive option is the only rational response to an overall assumption of adversary irrationalism. However, a stance predicated on deterrent irrationalism elides, necessarily, into irrationalism per se – a point recognised by Henry Kissinger in his famous (or infamous) advocacy of ‘mad-man theory’ concerning the supposed utility of disproportionate military threats.

‘Remoralising US foreign policy’: irrationalism and the rise of political religion

The power base of the Reagan Republicans(15) had been increasingly drawing on Christian fundamentalists, whose grassroots mobilising skills were rivalling those of AIPAC, and where a close alliance of ‘Christian Zionism’ was being forged. The price of this support was the fundamentalists’ agenda of ‘remoralising’ US foreign policy – that is a stance of black-and white, zero-sum policy choices, whose expression was found in Reagan’s own frequent recourse to Manichaeanism. Thus, at the close of the Reagan presidency, we can consider the rise of three sources of politico/religious-inspired irrationalism in the world system: Christian fundamentalists in the US; Zionist fundamentalist in Israel and the US; and Islamist fundamentalists in Afghanistan and the Middle East, armed and bankrolled by the US to attack the ‘evil empire’.

There was also a fourth and more profound, if routinised, irrationalist wellspring – market fundamentalism. This was the moment of the ‘End of History’, wherein the workings of the market were viewed as a source of moral value rather than as merely an historically contingent means of organising aspects of collective social needs. But when combined with the developing doctrine and technology for pre-emptive war, capitalism’s drive for ‘creative destruction’, eulogised by such as Michael Ledeen and earlier detailed in classic sociological analysis by Max Webber and Thorsten Veblen, was to ground an altogether novel and unpredictable phase in post-cold war politics.

Reagan’s administration, as we have discussed in our book, made extensive preparations for nuclear war-fighting (Star Wars, Pershing 2, etc) and on several occasions in 1983-4, nearly triggered a Soviet nuclear response. With the former Soviet Union itself embracing capitalist ‘shock therapy’ in the early 1990s, the ‘moral imperative’ prop for nuclear pre-emption had dropped away. Left flourishing, however, was the conception that US cold war triumph was part of a natural order – or at least, should be made so. Hence, as we have also discussed, the efforts of Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney at the Pentagon to establish the pre-emptive principle as a part of the US strategic furniture.

Despite mounting near-unilateral military efforts in Iraq and the Balkans, the doctrinal case for pre-emption found few takers in a decidedly risk-averse Clinton administration. Steeped in the ‘institutionalist’ tradition in US foreign policy, Clinton/Gore were uninterested in missile defence and had little rapport with a Pentagon still firmly wedded to the ‘Powell Doctrine’ of either overwhelming military force in extremis or, in practice, doing nothing. The neo-cons, however, were marshalling their forces. A Republican Congress, returned in 1996, had reinstated calls for BMD and had their demands partially conceded by a now increasingly distracted White House.

History will judge harshly?

Throughout the Clinton administration the neo-cons had been constructing a broad-based alliance, drawing on the grassroots structures of Christian fundamentalism, the lobby skills of pro-(greater) Israel organisations such as AIPAC and JINSA, massive corporate finance and media hegemons such as Rupert Murdoch. The two-term Bush administration and the embrace of pre-emptive war doctrine as US strategic mainstream was the result.

George W. Bush’s National Security Strategy of the United States, of September, 2002 presented an unvarnished picture of the now ascendant world-view:

‘Our enemies have openly declared that they are seeking weapons of mass destruction, and evidence indicates that they are doing so with determination. The United States will not allow these efforts to succeed…. History will judge harshly those who saw this coming danger but failed to act. In the new world we have entered, the only path to peace and security is the path of action.’

These perspectives were forcefully restated in 2006:

‘If necessary, however, under long-standing principles of self defense, we do not rule out the use of force before attacks occur, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. When the consequences of an attack with WMD are potentially so devastating, we cannot afford to stand idly by as grave dangers materialize. This is the principle and logic of pre-emption. The place of pre-emption in our national security strategy remains the same.[emphasis added]’

And thus, as many in the conventional ‘realist’ US policy establishment were to deplore, the Iraq war of March 2003 became America’s own ‘war of choice’, with fabricated WMD claims as the ostensible causus belli.

Reality though, returned to haunt the crippled Bush administration with a vengeance. And if Bush and Cheney (and Tony Blair) had remained true to the last in cheerleading Israel’s chaotic reinvasion of Lebanon of August 2006, plans for the most ambitious Israeli pre-emption yet – the mooted air assault on Iran of June 2008 (16) – were quashed as being ‘extremely stressful’ for US forces.(17) But it may have been a close-run thing. In December 2005 US Strategic Command (STRATCOM) announced that a new Joint Functional Component Command for Space and Global Strike met requirements necessary to declare an initial operational capability. ‘Global Strike’ assumes the capability to launch over 10,000 precision warheads on a given target set simultaneously. The requirements were met, it said, ‘following a rigorous test of integrated planning and operational execution capabilities during Exercise Global Lightning.’ As was widely reported,(18) a succession of US military build-ups took place over this period, against a background of Israeli manoeuvres in the Eastern Mediterranean.

If, in September 2008, the all-too-visible hand of market realism has apparently put paid to the years of magical thinking that so transfixed post-9/11 debates on national security, the dance is clearly not over yet. Ballistic missile defence sites are springing up in former Warsaw Pact facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic, transparently aimed at Moscow. Coup-mongering continues against US opponents in Latin America. And perhaps most blinkered of all, attempts continue to absorb former Soviet territories Georgia and Ukraine into the NATO structure, after the US-aided ‘colour revolutions’ replaced corrupt ex-communists with corrupt pro-western operators. Ukraine, it should be noted, is a leading player in no-questions-asked arms dealing – one S. Hussein was a leading customer – and in Georgia, Harvard-educated President Shackashvili sprung a no-brainer, predictable Russian response by launching a large-scale pre-emptive bombardment of breakaway South Ossetia, apparently in the belief that he was already in the club.

We can perhaps leave the last word to London University analyst Dan Plesch, who has done much to shed light on the strategic undergrowth here:

‘A “successful” US attack [on Iran], without UN authorisation, would return the world to the state that existed in the period before the war of 1914-18, but with nuclear weapons.’(19)

Notes

1. Reviewed below.
2. For a wide-ranging discussion of these themes see Steven E. Miller, Sean M. Lynn-Jones and Stephen Van Evra, Military Strategy and the Origins of the First World War (Princeton: PUP, 1991.)
3. See, for example, Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: CUP, 1981)
4. See, in particular, Steven Van Evra, ‘The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the First World War’ in, Miller/Lynn-Jones/Van Evra (see note 2) Ibid, pp. 59-109.
5. See Shlomo Ben-Ami, Scars of war, wounds of peace – the Israeli-Arab tragedy (London: Phoenix, 2006), pp. 362-3.
6. Ibid. p. 72.
7. Ibid. p. 142
8. Ibid. pp. 95-7.
9. Ibid. p. 118.
10. See Peter Hounam, Operation Cyanide: Why the bombing of the USS Liberty nearly caused World War 3 (London: Vision, 2003) pp. 18-42; and also Paul Todd, ‘Robert Kennedy and the Middle East Connection’ in Lobster 51 (Summer 2006).
11. Hounam ibid. p. 114.
12. See Seymour Hersh, The Samson Option – Israel, America and the bomb (London: Faber, 1991) pp. 226-40 [p. 231].
13. Author interview with Ambassador Paul C. Warnke, Washington, DC, May, 1991. Warnke was head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and led for the US in talks of 1977-8.
14. See Ben-Ami, (see note 5), p. 76.
15. Well captured by US writer Craig Ungar in his The Fall of the House of Bush (London: Vista, 2008).
16. See Jonathan Steele, ‘Israel asked US for green light to bomb nuclear sites in Iran’, The Guardian, 25 September 2008.
17. Chairman of Joint Chiefs Admiral Mullen, quoted in Dana Milbank, ‘Not So Quiet on the Third Front’ The Washington Post, 3 July 2008.
18. See Dan Plesch, ‘Considering a War with Iran: A discussion paper on WMD in the Middle East’ (School of Oriental and African Studies, 28 August 2007)
19. Plesch, ibid, p. 70