Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

Tom
While Israel of course should defend itself - the 'it's all about the rockets' argument is a a little too simplistic. If you want to use a personal analogy - if you were on the other side of the wall and your family was forced to eat grass to survive, you might equally well want to 'lob' something at the power that was locking you in to express your severe displeasure. The Israel talking points including the 'it's all about the rockets' line is all very well scripted. Israel is running an excellent PR campaign - I talk to it here http://tinyurl.com/97ek2c
Good luck with the book launch!

"If you want to use a personal analogy - if you were on the other side of the wall and your family was forced to eat grass to survive, you might equally well want to 'lob' something at the power that was locking you in to express your severe displeasure."

Do you have any substantiated proof of this?

As far as I can determine the Palestininans have received copious amounts of foreign aid from the West and the Arab countries. Did they use this to build a prosperous, peaceful society living in harmony with Israel? No they use it try to destroy Israel. The Palestinians can have peace and prosperity any time they CHOOSE! They have chosen war instead.

I don't think the real question here is if this is a disproportionate response - of course it's disproportionate, that's the whole point. They want to grind Hamas into the dust, no matter the cost. Is that defensible? Well, I think that depends on what the odds are that this will work.

If it has a real chance of success, then the Israeli government would be able to justify themselves on the grounds that their first responsibility is to their own citizens, and that nothing else (read: less destructive) had worked.

But if this doesn't even have a snowball's chance in hell of eradicating Hamas, or of seriously weakening them for more than 5 minutes, then this is all just a lot of macho posturing at the cost of hundreds of lives. And that would be indefensible.

Stuart:
Do you mean to imply that Hamas is justified in launching rockets at Israel?

I am afraid Israel is running in some classical COIN failures. They are just raising a complete generation of suicide bombers and rocket launchers by this invasion, like happened in the Libanon as well. Creating conditions for prosperity, education, a decent life FOR ALL is the only sensible way ahead.

I too have some trouble with the 'it's all about the rockets' point of view. This means that Hamas can keep yanking its chain to Israel, provoking responses that help keep Gazans poor, isolated and angry. I'd like to see some different thinking on this one. How can Hamas' provocations be contained while making life better (and more connected!) for the people who live in Gaza?

Tom,
I Read your blog often, read all of your books and the one thing that keeps me coming back is that inside your profound ability to dissect the way the world operates on many levels it's that you have a sense of humanity and compassion in dealing within these large frameworks you create. That combined with strategic analysis makes you something different but when I read quotes like this, "You can cite civilian casualties all you want, but when you fire rockets into my cities, then it's merely a matter of whose civilians die and my military's job is to make sure they're yours instead of mine."

I'm sorry but Hamas may be lobbing rockets into Israel daily and they may be cowards hiding among their civilians but the IDF are not merely going after these rockets it seems like a wholesale attack on these people, you make civilian casualties suffered by the residents of Gaza sound so glib. How can you expect long term peace when you traumatize an entire generation of Palestinians like this?
Israel may remove the rockets for now, but this horrid assault only assures worse attacks in the future and I do not know if I could blame them.

I think Lex has hit the nail on the head. My read is that the Israeli moves are politically motivated - for domestic consumption because of the upcoming elections to try to steal Likud's thunder, and to do it now because they aren't sure how Obama would react. Strategically, I see nothing being accomplished. We desperately need the grown-ups to take over our government so that some serious attention can get paid to this situation.