08:52 pm
Gaza: Israel Invades
So the land attack has begun. I think Spencer Ackerman (as usual) gets it about right:
According to Ha’aretz, a significant portion of Israeli “top commanders” dissented from the decision to invade, arguing that the airstrikes had already dealt Hamas a “heavy blow” and that Israeli casualties could be heavy as well. Clearly they shared the concern that Israel was escalating the war without regard for strategy. How will Israel de-escalate? How can it invade Gaza on the empty goal to engage in an “all-out war” with Hamas and plausibly leave before that unfulfillable end-state is achieved? How can Israeli commanders and politicians who believe a war is going well be persuaded to back down before they commit hubristic blunders that decimate the people of Gaza and make sustainable peace and security less achievable?
. . .[E}very hour Israel is in Gaza pummeling them without destroying them is an hour that Hamas will be able to claim that more plausibly, just like Hezbollah did in 2006. That's how these types of asymmetric wars work; and also why it's better for the larger party not to launch them. Israel may not want to hear this now, but it's playing on Hamas' strategic terms. Stepping back is the truer "success" at this point. . . .
If it's difficult to understand what Israel is doing, I'd submit that that's because Israel doesn't really know what it's doing. All countries blunder. It's up to their foul-weather friends to pull them back from the brink.
What we have here is a civilian leadership uninterested in or unwilling to listen to its senior military commanders. Of course, we've heard this story before, not just in Israel (the 2006 war against Hezbollah) but also in the United States (Iraq).
Somebody needs to smack these guys upside the head. Military action for its own sake isn't strategy, it's masturbation.
This is what I wrote in two separate posts earlier this week:
If either Israel or the Palestinian Authority think that eliminating Hamas as a military threat will move the region toward peace, they’re sadly mistaken. The attack represents a failure of imagination, an inability to understand that it will further radicalize a population already inclined to support Hamas (not only in the Gaza Strip but also in the West Bank).
The conflict may result in fewer rocket attacks, but it’s also likely to increase suicide bombings. It’s as if Olmert doesn’t understand that he’s repeating his own mistakes in Lebanon. That’s why I think this has little to do with the threat posed by Hamas (no matter how real) and more to do with domestic politics. The real targets here are the political fortunes of Bibi Netanyahu and Likud.
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It still isn’t clear to me that [the Israelis] know what they’re doing. . .[or] have any exit strategy.
I’ll repeat what I said earlier: this isn’t about Gaza, it’s about winning the next election. Labor/Kadima is trying to out-Likud Likud.
One more thing: here’s Yglesias earlier today.
So far, though, the fighting has succeeded in boosting the incumbent Labor/Kadima coalition’s poll numbers versus their Likud adversaries. So that’s something, I guess.
That’s something, you guess? So war in the name of politics is okay? I’m shocked (and not in the Casablanca meaning of the word). Yglesias, who wrote a very good book about why Democrats shouldn’t act like Republicans when it comes to foreign policy, can’t see that Labor/Kadima is doing the very thing for which he condemned the pro-Iraq Democrats.
Well, not exactly the same thing — they’re in charge.
I hope the Obama team is paying attention.
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