Beep, Beep!

Israel’s pager caper is a Wile E. Coyote vs. Road Runner exercise in futility

Israel's exploding pagers operation has been met with two wildly divergent responses, one marveling at the ingenuity and the other labeling it “terrorism,” as former CIA Director Leon Panetta did on Sunday. The mainstream media meanwhile declares that Hezbollah is decimated. In truth, Israel’s operation did nothing to enhance its security.

The reality of the operation’s long-term impact was embodied in a meme depicting the cartoon roadrunner going beep, beep! behind a pair of fleeing Hezbollah members. While meant to revel in the schadenfreude and make fun of spooked Ayatollahs, the meme is unintentionally a perfect encapsulation of the futility of silver-bullet solutions like these.

Road Runner cartoons, for anyone who grew up under a rock, depict a never-ending battle between Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, Coyote using his ever more elaborate and diabolical Acme explosives. Yet for all his wiliness — a word that reasonably describes Israel’s operation — the coyote always fails. No matter how ingenious the Acme product, the Road Runner always eludes, zipping by, around, and under, always with a cheerful, Beep, Beep!

Sound familiar? 

The Coyote in this metaphor isn’t just Israel. It also applies to the United States since 9/11. On the U.S. side, critics used to use the “Whac-A-Mole” image to refer to the war on terror: one al Qaeda “lieutenant” killed while another popped up. And the synergy goes even deeper. The very paradigm of a “war on terrorism” was borrowed from Israel’s security practices. The country’s approach to counter-terrorism was portrayed by Washington as something to be marveled at, with the Dick Cheneys of the world wanting the U.S. to emulate their ruthlessness.

More than two decades later, Washington has shelled out untold billions of dollars and ruined thousands of American lives, god only knows how many foreigner lives, and look where it’s gotten us. Bin Laden is dead, but al Qaeda has proliferated beyond the Middle East, ISIS has re-emerged, Iranian-backed militias persist, Pakistani-based international terrorism flourishes, and the Coyote’s old foes Hamas and Hezbollah are as resilient as ever. That’s a lot of Acme products later.

All the media hyperbole about the exploding pagers obscures the continuity between this latest caper and the never-ending warring we’ve been engaged in since 9/11. There’s no reason to think this latest Israel salvo against Hezbollah will be any different. The Hezbollah leaders who were killed will be replaced by the next generation. These younger Lebanese have spent their entire lives at war with Israel and are likely to be angrier and more hardline. That portends worse security for Israel, not better, especially in the long-term. Acme rakes in the dough, always, but can Israel say that it is any safer than before? Can the Israeli national security luminaries say that it is on a path to enduring security? I highly doubt it.

The commentariat, speaking in the only volume it knows, warns of an operatic showdown that is far less likely than what we already have: a grinding, perpetual tit-for-tat we’ve seen for decades now. This was epitomized by Leon Panetta, the former CIA Director, who told CBS on Sunday that “the forces of war are largely in control right now of what’s going on.” Panetta remarked:

“The ability to be able to place an explosive in technology [pagers, cellphones, etc.] that is very prevalent these days and turn it into a war of terror. This is something new…This has gone right into the supply chain. When you have terror going into the supply chain, it makes people ask the question, ‘What the hell is next?’”

Panetta’s characterization of the attack as invoking “terror” garnered most of the media follow-up. Brian Finucane, a senior advisor at the International Crisis Group and former State Department lawyer, told me that “I generally find the word terrorism to obscure more than it clarifies” (though he did call Panetta’s use of it “notable”).

Panetta’s closing remark in his interview, which received far less attention, was much more insightful (emphasis mine): 

“I think it’s going to be very important for the nations of the world to have a serious discussion about whether or not this is an area that everybody has to focus on because if they don’t try to deal with it now, mark my word, it is the battlefield of the future.” 

This is the less cinematic but no less depressing reality of the pager attack: it is just another version of the latest weapon in the never changing battlefield, one typified by these kinds of tit-for-tat attacks that never bring about a decisive ending or a new beginning.

Before long, other countries and terrorist groups will buy or develop their own Acme Exploding Pagers, as Panetta hinted. The media’s uncritically declaring Israel’s latest caper a success creates an incentive for countries to do just that. Absent an honest assessment, hands will again be wrung, chins scratched, ominous warnings issued, and beep, beep! — perpetual war will zip right on by.

And of course when Hezbollah or some other group attacks our devices, the national security state will happily label it terrorism.

— Edited by William M. Arkin