When Theory Diverges from Reality

 

Image courtesy Flikr user Khawaja under a creative commons license

By weakening Hamas through its current offensive, Israel hoped that Fatah would gain a strengthened bargaining position and be able to hash out a power sharing agreement in Gaza. Such a turn of events would be expedited by a multiplier effect of angry Gaza residents turning on Hamas for baiting Israel into war. 

The New York Times reports that the reality unfortunately appears to be anything but:

JERUSALEM — Israel hoped that the war in Gaza would not only cripple Hamas, but eventually strengthen its secular rival, the Palestinian Authority, and even allow it to claw its way back into Gaza.

But with each day, the authority, its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, and its leading party, Fatah, seem increasingly beleaguered and marginalized, even in the Palestinian cities of the West Bank, which they control. Protesters accuse Mr. Abbas of not doing enough to stop the carnage in Gaza — indeed, his own police officers have used clubs and tear gas against those same protesters.

The more bombs in Gaza, the more Hamas’s support seems to be growing at the expense of the Palestinian Authority, already considered corrupt and distant from average Palestinians.

Here’s an interesting question: has a war fought on abstract theoretical grounds EVER achieved its intended result? Think the domino theory and Vietnam, the reverse domino theory (spreading a seed of democracy in the Middle East) and Iraq…

War should never be waged without a direct, tangible benefit that it doesn’t require a Brookings fellow to identify.

Image: The body of 6-month old Palestinian baby Mohamed al-Borai who was killed in an Israeli airstrike last winter.

Open Debate

 

image courtesy flirk user Shabbir Siraj

A popular pastime of Islamic intellectuals is to label Westerners hypocrites for denouncing certain practices condoned in the Muslim world as backwards and repressive towards women. Regarding certain issues like the veil, they have a point (check out this well-reasoned post on an Al Maghrib institute forum for more).

Troublingly, however, this practice conveniently allows truly vile stories like this to be glossed over when they should be debated openly in the Islamic marketplace of ideas:

 

Saudi Arabia’s most senior cleric has told followers it is permissible for ten-year-old girls to marry and anyone who think they are too young are doing the youngsters ‘an injustice’.

Abdul-Azeez ibn Abdullaah Aal ash-Shaikh, the country’s grand mufti, said: ‘It is wrong to say it’s not permitted to marry off girls who are 15 and younger.

 

I Hate, Hate, Hate, Hate

the counterfactual game. It is the crutch of the intellectually lazy pundit–abstract speculation unsupported by factual evidence, thereby allowing any argument to be freely contorted in whichever direction the pundit’s own worldview dictates. 

Ross Douthat is one of the most brilliant young minds out there. He should know better than to let himself be drawn into a three-way blog debate with Megan McArdle and Stephen Walt held entirely in counterfactual land:

I actually think the Irish example tends to weaken Walt’s counterfactual.   The major point of the thought experiment was Walt’s insinuation that a Jewish Hamas wouldn’t be denounced as terrorists in Washington the way the Arab Hamas gets denounced – because of the influence of the Israel Lobby, presumably. And the example of Northern Ireland suggests precisely the opposite. Yes, even a stateless, terrorism-prone Jewish group in the Holy Land would doubtless have sympathizers in the United States, just as the Irish Republican Army did in the 1970s and ’80s. But despite the sympathies of some Irish Americans for the rebels in Northern Ireland, and the dalliances of the occasional American politician with Gerry Adams and Co., the IRA was on the State Department’s list of, yes, terrorist organizations until the Good Friday Accords. And it’s pretty easy to imagine how the American government would have responded if Catholic nationalists had taken power in a swathe of Northern Ireland and started launching missiles across the Irish Sea into Scottish and English townships. (It’s also worth noting, as long as we’re drawing analogies, that the IRA’s charter was just slightly less objectionable than Hamas’s …)

Ross makes an insightful point to be sure. Comparing the IRA to Walt’s hypothetical Jewish Hamas strikes me as sensible. Of course, just attempting to summarize the comparison underscores the absurdity of this exercise. No one wins on points in a counterfactual debate when each opinion posited is an assumption-based house of cards. 

IDF Rebuttal

to my previous post. Obviously the video is one-sided propaganda, but if what the IDF soldier is saying is accurate (and there is no reason to suspect otherwise), it is a truly damning indictment of Hamas’ tactics.

Hat tip: The Corner

Are Hamas’ Tactics Evil?

Image Courtesy Flikr user dearanxiety

The other day I was condemning Hamas’ use of Gazan civilians as human shields when a smart person I know asked me what I expected Hamas militants to do–all gather together in an open field to be blown up by Israeli firepower? An overly simplistic point perhaps, but it got me to thinking…

Interesting Question

In light of the chattering class’ debate over whether Israel’s offensive in Palestine constitutes war crimes, Jeffrey Goldberg asks whether Black Hawk Down too portrays war crimes?

This question is worth unpacking. Superficially, the two operations appear quite similar.

-Roughly 1,000 Somali civilians were killed in the 20 hour battle of Mogadishu. Roughly 900 so far in Palestine.

-Both involved assymetric urban warfare against militants that hid amongst the civilian population.

However, there is a critical difference between these two military actions that makes the comparison untenable–their original objectives.

Smart Power

Is the buzzword of the day. It has been repeated ad nauseaum during the Clinton hearing.

Is there any more vapid foreign policy term in existence?

As far as I can tell, it was coined as a not-so-clever literary device by Suzanne Nossel for a 2004 Foreign Affairs article that lambastes Bush administration foreign policy.

According to Nossel, “smart power” is, in essence, knowing when to use “soft power”, when to use “hard power”, and when to act unilaterally versus when to build alliances.

In other words, she is arguing that the United States’ foreign policy should be “smart.”

I mean no shit! Isn’t this a given? Since when has anyone desired a “stupid” foreign policy.

Isn’t it reassuring that the Obama administration’s foreign policy will be “smart.” Details be damned.

Better than a Bailout

Image Courtesy Flikr user ronnie44052

Could Joe the Plumber’s stint as a war correspondent save journalism from collapse?

Perhaps if he continues to pass off stinking tripe as original reporting:

In his first day as a reporter, Wurzelbacher described the hardships of daily life in the southern Israeli town of Sderot. “I’m sure they’re taking quick showers, I know I would,” Wurzelbacher said. Wurzelbacher said he thought Israel should have attacked Gaza sooner. He told a group of reporters that he was a “peace-loving man,” but that “when someone hits me, I’m going to unload on the boy.”

I mean, there’s only so much one person can take before before he or she returns to reading the professionals.

Self-Aggrandizement Alert

Not to toot my own horn, but an Op-Ed. I wrote last summer on the Israeli-Palestinian truce (that was passed over by a publication which shall remain unnamed) strikes me as both relevant to the current hostilities and prescient. Text below the jump:

Atomized Hamas

Most commentary on the Israeli-Palestine conflict presupposes that Hamas is a homogenous actor with clear, top-down leadership. Take Eric Trager’s ham-handed attempt to burst the meme that Israeli’s aggression is weakening prospects for a two-state solution:

 It’s hard to see how a two-state solution had a better chance of success immediately prior to the current fighting, when–aside from refusing to recognize Israel–Hamas refused to even extend a short-term truce and instead renewed its rocket firings.  

The unfortunate reality is that Hamas is a fragmented, decentralized organization with many different wings. These various wings often have competing agendas. Hamas’ political wing negotiates with Israel, but the political leadership brandishes little more than the power of persuasion to convince militant cells of the Izzidin al-Qassam Brigade to stop lobbing Qassams at Israel. Militant cells nominally associated with other Palestinian organizations have also been known to coordinate with Hamas cells in launching attacks.