Venture capitalist Tom Evslin offers a long piece about the strategic hazards of occupying hostile territory to prevent its being used for attacks on your own country. He proposes an alternative to occupation, namely obliterating the specific site(s) of the threat and immediately leaving. Evslin’s underlying premises are indisputable, but he leaves out some important ones that vitiate his reasoning.
Evslin correctly notes that:
- occupations breed resistance;
- resistance leads to long-term conflict;
- efforts to suppress the resistance will lead to harsh criticism of
the occupier, and to calls for it to withdraw; - suppressing the resistance may require utter ruthlessness, which may be politically unpalatable to the occupier;
- if the occupier does withdraw, it will appear weak;
- the appearance of weakness will lead to future attacks on the occupier.
From these premises, however, Evslin argues, first, that we will have
to destroy Iran’s and North Korea’s nuclear sites; and second, that we
should do so without promising to be responsible for rebuilding or for
any resulting regime change.
While Evslin cites the lessons of Vietnam, I don’t think he
remembers one of the key lessons of that war. Destroying specific threat sites does little good by itself. Its most lasting effect is to motivate the enemy’s people to hate you even more, and to band together to rebuild or replace what you destroyed. We saw this in Vietnam, and before that in Germany and Japan.
To go the route of obliterating specific threat sites, you have to be both able and willing to destroy, not just the sites themselves, but also the enemy state’s capacity to rebuild and replace. That means taking out two more things: The enemy state’s relevant manufacturing base, and its sources of external supply. Doing either one can be a real bitch, especially when a powerful third country is one of the enemy country’s external suppliers.
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