Kevin Drum's Forbearance

Over at Political Animal Kevin Drum writes this:

FORBEARANCE....Over at bloggingheads.tv, Robert Wright mentions something that's been on my mind for a while. He's talking with Ann Althouse about the war in Lebanon and makes the following observation:

What I think is actually sometimes the smartest thing to do in response to terrorist provocation, which is forbearance, is very hard to counsel. [But] if you ask what kind of shape would Israel be in if they had done a day's worth of retaliation, and since then just endured any missiles, and said, "OK, look, at this point there's no excuse for what they're doing, we're not even fighting them," I think Israel as a nation would be more secure than they are.

But it's very hard to convince people of that, and I admit that rhetorically it's hard to make that a winning strategy.

...It's human nature to demand action following an attack. Any action. Counseling restraint in the hope that it will pay off in the long run is politically ruinous.

But our lives may depend on figuring out how to make this case. If it wasn't obvious before, it should be obvious by now that conventional military assaults are usually counterproductive against a guerrilla enemy like the ones we're fighting now. We can't kill off the fanatics fast enough to win, and in the meantime the war machine simply inspires more recruits, more allies, and more sympathy for the terrorists. It's not the case that conventional military force is always useless in these cases — the Afghanistan war still holds out hope of success — but as Praktike says, it usually results in a terrorism own goal.

This is an argument I'm pretty sympathetic to. It lies close to my argument for why the Iraq War was a bad idea. But I see some problems.

First, an immediate unilateral retreat might have been perceived as a defeat for Israel. That would havbolstereded Hezbollah and been bad for Olmert domestically. Of course, this might not be true. Israel certainly diminished their reputation for ass-kicking anbolstereded Hezbollah by fighting for several weeks with no clear victory in sight.

Second, and more importantly: Hasn't Israel been restrained about attacks from Hezbollah for several years now? It was my understanding that Hezbollah has been tossing a few rockets into northern Israel for years prior to the recent war. How much sympathy did noretaliatingng for so long win them?

This is not my endorsement of military occupation in response to terrorism. I still don't believe that is effective, but I don't think Israel would have come out ahead in this case by doing nothing.