Are the Israelis better off now than a month ago?

A new report by the IHT has Israel responding to another Hamas rocket attack with airstrikes. The Israeli counterattack comes just hours after PM Ehud Olmert declared a unilateral ceasefire.

Olmert’s comments on the ceasefire are cryptic at best:

After 22 days of war against Hamas, and the deaths of more than 1,200 Palestinians and 13 Israelis, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert insisted that “we have reached all the goals of the war, and beyond.”

Source: http://i2.cdn.turner.com/ cnn/2009/WORLD/ meast/01/07/israel.gaza/ art.night.afp.gi.jpg

A couple things to mention here. First, I don’t believe Israel’s goals were defined explicitly enough. Second, the severity of Israel’s military campaign only made the definition and achievement of these goals more complicated. Third, it’s not actually clear that Israel did in fact reach “all the goals of the war,” whatever those goals may have been in the first place. I’ll take each of these one by one.

DEFINING THE OBJECTIVE

The BBC described Olmert’s objectives as being two-fold:

• “…stop rocket attacks on southern Israel”
• “and to stop Hamas smuggling weapons into Gaza via Egypt…”

Pretty simple, but meanwhile, here’s what the Washington Post said:

But with a little more than a month until Israel holds elections, pressure has been building for the government to use this operation not just to weaken Hamas, but also to try to deal it a death blow.

So, right away, there appeared a distinction between public goals and private goals, stated objectives and unstated objectives. Israel’s massive ground offensive into the Gaza Strip only lent credibility to the notion that the IDF was seeking to destroy Hamas. We’ll obviously never know whether that was Olmert’s intention. But Israel’s overwhelming use of force certainly helps to give that impression.

PURSUING THE OBJECTIVE

Maybe it was just media hype, and collateral damage certainly happens in war, but it sometimes seemed as though Israel did little to limit civilian suffering over the course of the conflict.

• The IDF hit a U.N. school. (WaPo)
• It also struck the U.N. headquarters in Gaza. (AP)
• Israel broke a humanitarian truce just minutes after it went into effect. (CNN)

In most such cases, Israel had a valid military objective to pursue. But I wonder if the IDF’s actions might have been counterproductive. You don’t stop rocket attacks by hitting non-combatants, even accidentally. That’s a sure way to keep the violence going.

ACHIEVING THE OBJECTIVE

In fact, the violence continues today, even after Israel’s unilateral ceasefire. Even following the BBC’s simpler rubric, Israel hasn’t accomplished its mission. Rocket attacks are clearly still happening—so Olmert’s goal of stopping the rocket attacks did not succeed. And smuggling through the tunnels is as big a problem as ever.

The IDF hasn’t destroyed Hamas, nor has it made southern Israel any more secure than it was a month ago. In fact, it’s plausible that the area’s violence has had a destabilizing effect and polarized opinions on both sides of the conflict, making it that much harder to come to a full peace agreement.

The only thing different now is that a lot of people are dead, and the IDF now occupies Gaza. So in short, I’m not sure I buy into Olmert’s declaration of success.

What to do (if anything) with Israel-Palestine?

Source: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/images/mideast/jan-june09/0101_smokegaza.jpg

Andrew Sullivan offers some particularly poignant thoughts on the current spate of violence between Hamas and Israel.

I’m not completely sure what to think about these new developments. Andrew’s post suggests that the U.S. stay as far away as possible from them. Tactically, I think that makes sense. But strategically, there’s probably little to be gained by ignoring the problem. Extremism will continue to flourish. Israeli forces will continue pounding the Palestinians with overwhelming force. And the U.S. will take the blame for not attempting to stem the bloodshed—or worse, will be accused of turning a blind eye to the actions of what many see as its proxy in the Middle East.

So it looks like detachment from the issue isn’t really a long-term option. If involvement is necessary, then the next task is to determine what shape that involvement should take. So far, the U.S. has been fairly open in its support for Israel. That, in turn, has limited the White House’s legitimacy as an honest broker for peace. Logically, it follows that success probably requires a more even-handed approach.

The problem is that so far, nobody’s really been interested in even-handedness.

Mumbai: India’s 9/11? Not so fast

The IHT ran a heartfelt piece today about the recent extremist attacks in Mumbai, India. It’s worth noting because it affects the reader on a number of levels. For one, it gives a certain amount of insight into the collective Indian psyche in the aftermath of the attacks. For another, it tries to categorize the incident, to digest it in terms of the broader strategic realities that now face India’s leadership.

The article hits a lot of nails on the head. It’s passionate in the way it captures the emotion of the attackers, the victims and the onlookers. It asks the right questions, particularly about the Indian government’s response to the attacks and whether it was strong enough. And it was moving, which itself seems to count for a great deal in the wake of an attack like this.

Source: http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2008/11/28/mumbaielite460.jpg

But the article is also in danger of responding to the Mumbai hostage crisis in the wrong way. It risks making the same mistakes the U.S. made on September 12, 2001. By dramatizing the incident, by raising the notion that the crisis somehow ushers in an entirely new age of history (“the uniqueness of now”), the author paves the way for a public response that could spiral out of control, losing all sense of proportion. This is just the response that the U.S. had after the Twin Towers fell. Americans felt insecure, which was natural. But they attributed the 9/11 attacks to, as President George W. Bush said, “enemies of freedom” who were irrational and desired only the destruction of the U.S. and its way of life. It was an explanation that seemed to fit the scale and surprising nature of the act.

This epic vision of terrorism is misguided. Not only does it play to the terrorists’ desires, who would like nothing more than to be recognized as the greatest threat to the world’s only superpower; not only has terrorism been proven, time and again, to be a rational tactic employed by completely ordinary individuals; it also implicitly calls for a massive retaliatory response. If terrorism poses such a grave threat, then resistance is absolutely necessary. And to ensure security, that threat must be wholly destroyed. And that means war.

“War” is exactly how President Bush saw the attacks of 9/11, and it is exactly how the author of this article sees the Mumbai crisis today:

As a surprise attack became a 48-hour struggle, the burden of responding transferred from the police to soldiers. The language was of war: television anchors spoke of buildings “sanitized” and “flushed out,” of “final assaults” and “collateral damage.” Helicopters hovered over Mumbai, and commandos dropped onto roofs. The grainy television imagery suggested not so much a terrorist attack as the shapeless, omnidirectional chaos of Iraq.

The reference to Iraq is intriguing, because although the article draws the right comparison, it comes to the wrong conclusions. If anything, the experience of Iraq should have taught us how inadequate the “war” metaphor is for describing the work of anti-terrorism. As a term, “war” defines a purely military venture. But—and the new American strategy in Iraq backs this up—force is the not the only tool in the toolbox.

Terrorism is perhaps best pursued as a law-enforcement issue rather than a “war” issue. “Law-enforcement” implies extended time horizons and broad-based strategy, whereas “war” connotes a need for the swift destruction of “the enemy”—an artificial concept that assumes a finite number of hostiles. The non-military approach suggests a better capacity to operate patiently and flexibly on a multilateral basis, whereas a military’s ultimate job is simply to shoot things.

Don’t get me wrong. The military can be a very effective tool under a variety of conditions. But let’s not forget the other resources at our disposal. Let’s not forget that the “war” against terrorism is about more than body counts. Let’s not forget that, as tragic as the attack in India was, life will go on. We cannot live under a wartime mentality indefinitely. Just as we can’t allow our lives to be dominated by fear, so must we deny our fear the opportunity to define our responses to terrorism. I would argue that the U.S. failed in this respect, and the Indians are on the verge of making the same mistake, seven years later:

[India's mood was that] of a country that wanted [Mumbai] to be 9/11—if not in the sense of war and conquest, then in the sense of instant clarity, of the simple feeling that an era had ended.

Let’s not kid ourselves. It’s never that simple.