From Robert Kaplan:
How do you fight unconventional, sub-state armies empowered by ideas? You undermine them subtly over time, or you crush them utterly, brutally. Israel, unable to tolerate continued rocket attacks on its people, has decided on the latter course. Our own diplomacy with Iran now rests on whether or not Israel succeeds. We need to create leverage before we can negotiate with the clerical regime, and that leverage can only come from an Israeli moral victory—one that leaves Hamas sufficiently reeling to scare even the pro-Iranian Syrians from coming to its aid. In defense of its own territorial integrity, Israel has, in effect, launched the war on the Iranian empire that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, in particular, can only have contemplated.
This war really started two and a half years ago, in Lebanon, and Israel has been fighting it mostly on its own, but as he points out, the US has to be ready to continue the pressure on Tehran if/when Israel crushes its puppet in Gaza.
I disagree. This is merely the continuation of a long standing proxy fight between Iran and the US. I don’t see how Iran loses much if Hamas is defeated aside from fewer distractions for the US.
Well, not “mostly”… there has been plenty of meaningful cooperation between the US and Israel (250lb SDB, anti-missile defense, intel, money) that is subtle enough to reduce the public awareness of that support.
And if this be a proxy battle between the US and the Persian Empire, I am glad for the proxy we have.
Israel is showing once again that it is ready and willing to fight those that attack it. I don’t see that this has anything to do with the United States though.
To steal the tag line of another blog, this is the latest phase in a very old war. This is not just another stage in the proxy war between Iran and the USA. It is the latest phase of the 1350-year war between civilisation and Dark Ages barbarism, ignorance, intolerance and savagery.
The only reason that I think Israel should not finish the Gaza campaign – and I mean really finish it, as in a radioactive parking lot where Gaza and its denizens used to be – is that the fallout might affect Israel. But in the end, it might be worth it, to get rid of the cesspool that is Gaza.
> Israel has been fighting it mostly on its own, but as he points out, the US has to be ready to continue the pressure on Tehran if/when Israel crushes its puppet in Gaza.
Then Israel is doomed because the US will never be ready to continue meaningful pressure on Iran.
The US has a very short attention span. We’re pretty good in a hot war, as long as it doesn’t take too long, but we don’t do long term things.
And our definition of “long term” gets shorter with every passing year. I can see a day coming when the time it took from the first shots fired until the coalition took Baghdad and Saddam’s regime had effectively collapsed (a matter of weeks) would be considered too long a haul.