Why aggressor states fail in wars of occupation

‘Gaza City will be razed to the -ground’ if Hamas does not agree to Israel's terms to end the Gaza conflict, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz was quoted saying recently on hearing Hamas' terms to bring the war to an end. He was speaking against the backdrop of an apparent diplomatic failure to see an end to the ongoing bloodletting in the Strip.

- BY LYNN OCKERSZ

The Israeli Defense Minister's comment ought to have brought to the minds of more experienced commentators the US military failure in Vietnam in the decades of the sixties and early seventies. As is known, US efforts to militarily neutralize the Vietcong guerrillas in its did to halt what was seen as the spread of communism in Vietnam and South East Asia ended in abject failure.

It was a war of occupation and attrition in which the US armed forces did not hesitate from using some of the most brutal military tactics, such as the destruction of entire Vietnamese civilian centres, which were seen as being in league with the guerrillas. On the subject of the US military strategy in civilian populated areas in Vietnam, such as townships, a US Air Force officer is quoted by well-known Western journalist, Robert Taber, in his classic on guerrilla warfare titled, 'The War of the Flea - Guerilla Warfare Theory and Practice' (Paladin Frogmore publishers 1970), as saying, 'We had to destroy the town in order to save it.'

That is, the US preoccupation at the time with halting the spread of communism in the Asian theatre and outside did not prevent it from subjecting civilians to some of the worst cruelties and excesses witnessed in modern warfare. The means was seen as justifying the end, regardless of their brutal nature, by the occupier.