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January 03, 2009

Godspeed the IDF

Respect to Hot Air, etc. but Allahpundit's analysis of Israeli war aims is ridiculous. Absurd. According to this line of thought, Hamas does not need to survive to win, they win no matter what Israel does or does not do. Such is the intellectual poison of pacifism and cultural Marxism that such drivel can now pass for conservatism.

Welcome to the 1930s.

I’m actually surprised they went in: They can’t stop the rockets and they surely don’t want to reoccupy, so the only goal realistically is to bloody Hamas’s nose. But they’ve already done that with the airstrikes. Upping the ante by sending in infantry only leaves them vulnerable to a 2006 scenario where Hamas “wins” by surviving. According to Haaretz, Arab leaders told Olmert, “Go in if you must, but don’t dare fail.” What will “failure” look like? What, specifically, are they after? Hamas leaders or Qassam caches, or something else?

What, like WMDs? This must be the nadir of the West's loss of confidence in itself; casting about for false flags and conspiracies when the blindingly obvious is no longer intellectually calculable. When the Allies landed at Normandy they were not trying to give Hitler a bloody nose and they were not preempting Germany's atomic weapons program. Their aims were to defeat the German military, destroy the Nazi party and along with it their doctrine of German racial supremacy and to remake German culture into something that could live with itself and its neighbours.

So, yes, the IDF can decisively, permanently stop the rockets if Israelis have the inclination to let the IDF do so.

Whether the Israeli government shares this entirely sensible ambition is beyond me but not beyond the realm of possibility. Hamas is a nothing, capable of terrorizing its subject population (i.e. everyone who voted for Hamas and everybody else too) thanks to arms from Iran and funding from - amongst many others - the Canadian taxpayer. But militarily they can be squashed flat, killed to a man and replaced by the Fatah government in waiting. It is a no brainer. Though living as we do in an age of no brains this is by no means necessarily the Israeli war plan. But to assume the IDF is bound to repeat Lebanon rather than learn from it is to underestimate a people perhaps grown sufficiently tired of living with the consequences of their misplaced mercy.

For rather more cogent updates and analysis I refer you to Mere Rhetoric, added to my blogroll effective immediately.

Related: Mark Steyn and those thoughts a Western mind can no longer compute.

...when Britain's Channel 4 says that we don't get the chance to see these fellows speak for themselves, it would be more accurate to say that they speak for themselves incessantly but the louder they speak the more we put our hands over our ears and go "Nya nya, can't hear you." We do this in part because, if you're as invested as most Western elites are in the idea that all anyone wants is to go to university, get a steady job and settle down in a nice house in the suburbs, a statement such as "England's demise is on our agenda" becomes almost literally untranslatable. When President Ahmadinejad threatens to wipe Israel off the face of the map, we deplore him as a genocidal fantasist. But maybe he's a genocidal realist, and we're the fantasists.

The civilizational clashes of professor Huntington's book are not inevitable. Culture is not immutable. But changing culture is tough and thankless and something the West no longer has the stomach for. Unfortunately, the Saudis do, and so do the Iranians. And not just in Gaza but elsewhere the trend is away from "moderation" and toward something fiercer and ever more implacable.

More updates: Also following Israellycool and The Muqata.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at January 3, 2009 02:47 PM

Comments

A nice public display of a few thousand rockets, mortar bombs and other Hamas weaponry would be a great moral victory for the IDF over Hamas.

Visual proof to play the propaganda game.

Posted by: Vices are just Bad Habits [TypeKey Profile Page] at January 3, 2009 05:31 PM

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