Substack
“When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.”
-Jeff Bezos
"You know, Iraqis don’t really seem good at fighting, but then they never really completely surrender either.”
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One can see this blindness expressed clearly in Israeli hasbara, propaganda directed at the outside world. Looking at this material, you can see that it is directed at a moral, reasonable and rational audience which simply does not exist. Messages such as “our enemies are cruel,” “they’re shooting missiles at us indiscriminately,” “we are reasonable and restrained,” “we are targeting our enemies’ leadership, not their civilians,” “we’re the good guys here” are inherently insane. The people who are receptive to these messages simply do not need them. The rest perceive them as cynical lying or an admission of weakness to be exploited.
Our actions reveal this same obtuseness. Killing our enemies’ leaders doesn’t work-they have an endless supply of biomass with which to replace them. Wrecking their infrastructure doesn’t work-they wreck it themselves on a daily basis. As long as there are a few hours of electricity every day and water to drink, we can’t offer a meaningful degradation to their quality of life.
A great illustration for this is Hezbollah. After the pager operation and its walkie-talkie follow-up killed and crippled thousands of its operatives, after Israel invaded South Lebanon and caused its Shia population to flee last year, the IDF withdrew from most of the terrain it had captured, allowing the Shia to return. It now holds only tens of square kilometers along the border as buffer zones and occasionally kills a Hezbollah operative or two. The result is that with the opening of the war with Iran, Hezbollah has once again began firing rockets into Israel. For now, the volume of rocket fire is low, but given a few years, Hezbollah will rebuild its stockpiles and we’ll be more or less back where we started.
Therefore, all our enemies have to do to win is not to lose all the way. A defeat one doesn’t perceive as such is not a defeat. Even if we kill tens of thousands of them while losing a handful of our own soldiers, their mentality is such that they do not feel any empathy for each other, and thus no sorrow for their own losses, but only joy at ours. The second that there is a ceasefire, they reframe it as a tremendous victory, and begin to rebuild and rearm for the next war, aided by our intellectual elites, who will reframe their own traitorous behavior as the reasonable thing to do in the pursuit of a lasting peace. We can win the next round, and the one after that, and the one after that, but eventually we will drop the ball.
In the event that we do recover from our social insanity and begin to perceive our enemies as they are, we should rethink our entire approach. To demoralize our dumb enemies and get them to abandon the hope of victory driving their attacks, we need to stop defeating ourselves by overintellectualizing. We need to model our enemies accurately, as the idiots they are, and tailor our actions to create the desired impression on them based on their actual capacities, not based on how we ourselves would react in their place.
The main change we need to make is to abandon the concept of temporary advances. These do not make any real moral impact. What does: conquering land and keeping it permanently, settling it with Jews, using it as a foundation for controlling surrounding areas. This is why the rate of terror attacks on the roads of Judea and Samaria has collapsed with the explosion of hilltops in the last two years; small groups of Jewish civilians living in tents and shacks easily achieved what tens of thousands of IDF soldiers in watchtowers and guard compounds failed to do over decades. When I ask the Hilltop Youth why the Arabs have stopped attacking traffic, they tell me that it’s for two reasons: “first, they’ve lost hope. Second, when you cause problems for somebody, they don’t cause problems for you.”
Specifically with regards to Iran, the idea that the Iranian people are wonderful, put-upon heroes, oppressed by a foreign body of mullahs and IRGC terrorists strikes me as self-defeating baloney. If the Iranian people were as dedicated to the overthrow of the current regime as they had been to the overthrow of the Shah, the Iranian army would long ago have joined forces with the Iranian protesters to take power, and we wouldn’t have had to go to war. I assume that the regime has many supporters, and that without American boots on the ground or a serious Israel/US-managed insurgency, it will sign some sort of ceasefire, reimagine the war as a heroic victory spoiled by a stab in the back (“the Zionists were on their last breath!”) and gradually begin to rebuild and rearm. If so, our goal in the remaining portion of the war should be to weaken the regime long-term, destroying its revenue-producing infrastructure and demoralizing it with spectacular and humiliating decapitation strikes which will be difficult to explain away.
An auxiliary, supporting goal is to rework the concept of hasbara. The very word, which means “explaining”, or apologetics, is a misnomer. We do not want to explain or justify our actions to our enemies, to explain to the world that the war will end when they love their own children more than they hate ours. Decades of this cringe have borne no fruit. Millenia of it could bear no fruit. We want to explain to our enemies that we are nuts, unpredictable, that demoralizing us is a hopeless task, that we enjoy all of this and think it’s funny. If there’s one talent the Zoomers have, it’s making memes. We should leverage this ability and use it to the fullest against our enemies.
