The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do About It by Joshua Cooper Ramo

Author:Joshua Cooper Ramo
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 0316118087
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2009-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

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In the old days, many problems in international affairs seemed as if they could be understood from the outside in. If you knew, say, how many tanks Russia had in East Germany, you probably thought you had a pretty good idea of Russia’s intentions. Farkash’s argument was that this way of seeing was usually wrong and often deadly. It caused analysts to focus too much on what they could measure and not enough on what they could not. What he was proposing was a way of seeing that never lingered on a single variable. This week you might look at how many tanks Syria had, next week at the most popular program on Iranian television. The goal was to watch for change, to see how the society was moving and understand that the snap of instant change could come from many surprising places (Gorbachev’s regime-shifting nomenklatura, for instance, or the combination of air-bag technology and games). From time to time this way of looking would yield a crucial insight — like the one about the “evolutionary heart” of terror groups — that you could act on. Then, the next day, you had to go back to this way of seeing all over again, looking for fresh insights. What you could never do was treat what you needed to know as something fixed, something that could be managed the way you would run down a list of things to pack for a vacation: underwear, swim trunks, sunscreen. As the arms inspector David Kay explained to the journalist Bob Woodward about the flaws in America’s hunt for weapons of mass destruction before and after the Iraq war, “You simply cannot find weapons of mass destruction using a list. You have to treat this like an intelligence operation. You go after people. You don’t go after physical assets.” He continued, “You treat it by going after the expertise, the security guards that would have been there, the movers, the generals that would have seen it, the Special Republican Guard.” It was a suggestion right out of the Farkash playbook: look deep, focus on things that move and change, never ask the usual questions.

But if Farkash had mastered this instinct, if his Yoda-like prescriptions to his staff had yielded a relatively successful and surprise-free time in office for him, it remained a highly personal accomplishment. He was unable to inculcate it even into the “small” Israeli defense bureaucracy. Six months after he left office, Israel launched that disastrous 2006 air war against Hizb’allah. The strategy was classically old-school: pound the visible Hizb’allah to kill the invisible. Sure enough, Hizb’allah evolved exactly as Farkash would have predicted; it changed in midwar by finding new ways to communicate that Israel couldn’t penetrate and by developing battlefield tactics the IDF hadn’t trained for or even imagined. It wasn’t that there was some problem with Israeli airpower or with the accurate spy-satellite and drone photos they possessed of every Hizb’allah redoubt and rocket site. Israel had started the war with what its commanders thought was an almost perfect picture of Hizb’allah.

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