Your War is Ready Sir
War by proxy has been raging since the Korean Conflict whose convoluted multinational array of armies disguised a conventional fight between the US and China. The Fifties were a decade of modern marvels in the kitchen and bloody fights with Communist insurgents in the Phillipines, Malaysia and what was then French Indochina. While Vietnam raged in the Sixties the PKI revolt in Indonesia took a staggering toll in the final days of Sukarno a man who ignited the rebellion while ruling the country. Never mind China’s Cultural Revolution wherein Chairman Mao sought to purify the ideological base of his power; that was an internal struggle.
Israel knocked Egypt, Syria, and Jordan to the canvas in June 1967. Egypt was ruled by Gamel Nasser a client of the Soviet Union bloated with tanks from the USSR. The Yom Kippur War in 1973 was a carryover from the 67 war: Syria wanted the Golan Heights back, Egypt, the Sinai. If the UN hadn’t intervened the map of Israeli controlled territory might have stretched from the Saudi border west to Tunisia.
Now Israel is fighting a proxy opponent in Hezbollah. The guerillas are standing in for Iran. In Lebanon the average person is suffering through a battle they didn’t start because Lebanon doesn’t have a government. Instead it has a fractured coalition of politicians all whom represent something other than Lebanon. Israel’s fight with Iran is so different than the previous wars that it clouds the possibility of an outcome that’s anything more than a prologue to the next one.