John Spencer

Retired United States Army Officer, researcher, author.

John Spencer is a retired United States Army officer, writer, and urban warfare expert. During his military career, he was an infantry platoon leader and company commander. Across his two combat tours of Iraq, he served during the initial invasion in 2003, and later in 2008 during the Iraq War troop surge and the Battle Of Sadr City.

Why did we invite him on?

We’ve long admired John’s work, but in this case, it wasn’t us who reached out to him. John got in touch after watching our recent interview with Andrew Fox. He explained that he disagreed with Andrew’s assessment of the conflict and expressed an interest in coming on to air the other side.

As you’ll know by now, we appreciate nothing more than hearing opposing sides to a debate, and sometimes that involves hearing different arguments from a shared perspective. Both Andrew and John represent the pro-Israel position, and both have first hand experience of war in the Middle East, but they differ on their assessments of the war itself.

There was only one solution: hear both sides, and come to our own conclusions.

What did we talk about?

Andrew’s position on Israel was nuanced, but if forced to constrict it to a single sentence, it’d be this: the war is just, but it must end. While sympathetic for Israel’s cause, he argued that they should have “stopped fighting months ago”. The gains they’re making, if any, do not outweigh the reputational costs and ethical dilemmas the country now faces. International support for Israel is depleting, and it’s in their best interest to establish a ceasefire.

John disagrees: now would be the worst time for Israel to stop fighting. And if the circumstances of the war were properly understood, we’d recognise that. The trouble is, Israel’s situation is so unique that direct comparisons are impossible. The sort of comparisons that Israel’s critics and the international community draw on, he argues, are so inappropriate that they distort the nature of the argument itself.

So what are we failing to understand? To John, there are several prongs. Firstly, the framing is all wrong. Hamas’ nebulous This isn’t a genocide, or even a battle - it’s a war.

”The world has been applying a counter-terrorism framework to Hamas. That’s not the [right] framework in any way. On October 7th, the terror army that was Hamas’ military (and a load of civilians) invaded southern Israel. Israel waged war in accordance with the framework of nations. You have to frame it as ‘war’.”

To John, the way Israel’s critics look for analogues in the Iraq War or the deconstruction of ISIS - he argues that these are entirely unalike. In fact, there aren’t any comparisons to be drawn; Israel’s war is entirely unique. As someone with experience of urban warfare in the Middle East, John speaks with authority on the subject, and he describes just how distinct this conflict is, and how unlike anything he saw in Iraq it is. The challenge does not compare.