Daniel Pipes (born September 9, 1949), whose parents escaped German-occupied Poland with their respective families during World War II, is a former professor and commentator on foreign policy and the Middle East. He is the president of the Middle East Forum and the publisher of its Middle East Quarterly journal.
Considered a leading expert on Islamism, Pipes has written 16 books on Islam and related subjects and was the Taube Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

I spoke to him last week about Israel in the aftermath of October 7.

Congratulations on the publication of your latest book, Israel Victory. It’s courageous to release anything about the Middle East when the region is in such flux.
Well, I did write it before October 7. I had to adapt it slightly afterward, but not much.

But hasn’t the world changed so radically since then that you would have to scrap all of it, or are things more or less the same?
I think they’re more or less the same. In the immediate aftermath of October 7, up until the end of October, I thought to myself, Who needs this book? The Israelis had reached the same conclusion that I had on their own. The number of voices and the vociferousness of those voices calling for victory made me feel that the book was superfluous. But by the next month I saw that the Israeli security establishment had gone back to its old ways, something I would describe as brilliant tactically and incompetent strategically. The Israelis can execute an enemy in Tehran. That’s extraordinary. I don’t know of any other military or intelligence that can do such a thing. On the other hand, when it comes to the larger picture, they have it all wrong, and they’ve basically had it wrong ever since the Six-Day War.

You’re saying that the fundamental argument you’re making hasn’t changed. Can you summarize the crux of that thesis?
The crux is that, historically, wars come to an end when one side gives up. This notion has been generally abandoned in the West in the aftermath of the atomic weapons that were used in 1945, and also in Israel. Instead of winning, the goal has become management and controlling the situation.

People say that Israel isn’t allowed to win any of its wars. You seem to believe that this applies to any Western nation.
I do. Look at the United States. It basically won all of its wars up until 1945, and it lost all of its wars afterward, meaning in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. All of the major undertakings were failures because the general sense was that you have to manage the situation. Iran, China and Russia don’t take that approach.

Can you describe what you would consider a victory?
It’s convincing your opponent that he cannot attain his war goals.

Meaning that it shouldn’t just be another war of attrition or a cold war; it has to be definitive.
Yes. I don’t know how old you are, but I’m old enough to remember the Vietnam War. In May of 1975, the Americans gave up. We were far more powerful than Vietnam in every way—money, arsenal, population—but we gave up, and no one has ever raised the possibility of going back. It was over; we lost. That made a big impression on me. It’s pretty extreme when a small country like Vietnam can defeat a great power like the United States. It’s a matter of losing faith in your war goals.

Do the goals always remain the same, or can they shift?
War goals can certainly change and the situation can become very complex. As one analyst pointed out, if you compare Great Britain’s war goals in 1939 and look at what it achieved in 1945, it did not attain those goals. Nonetheless, it was a victory. I would also like to point out that Israel did attain its war goals in defeating the Arab states between 1948 and 1973, something that often goes unnoted. The Arab states were the major enemies of Israel for 25 years.

Source: Ami Magazine