All Together Now--Cry For The Poor Palestinians

Way back in the dark ages otherwise known as the Forties, there was a series of affrays in a small portion of the Mideast then called on all the maps as "Palestine" or the "Palestinian Mandated Territory."  The interlocking series of nasty little wars called either the "War of Independence" or "The Catastrophe" was occasioned by a combination of factors.  Some of these factors were indigenous to the region.  Others, far larger in impact on both the people of the region and the world generally, were the result of a specific ideology applied ruthlessly by a particular regime and its allies in other countries.

One result of the affray was the generation of a generation of refugees.  It is critical to understand that the refugees were not simply a mass of ever-so-innocent civilian victims caught between the millstones of events and forces far outside their control.  Nor was there any thought at the time of the affrays and their concomitant refugee streams that the displaced individuals and their descendants would be the pawns of governments and ideological devotees for years, decades, and finally generations.

On occasions, social and political forces have a power which transcends the capacity of any government or group of governments to control.  The months and years immediately following the end of World War II in Europe and the revelations regarding the magnitude of the Nazi campaign of racial extermination now called the "Holocaust" was such an occasion.

The movement to create (or, perhaps more accurately, to recreate) the ancient Jewish homeland in the former territories of the Ottoman Empire known as Palestine had been underway in a series of fits and starts since the late Nineteenth Century.  The confusingly ambiguous bit of British political expediency executed during the worst days of World War I known as the Balfour Declaration provided some seeming basis for the creation of a "Jewish National Homeland" in the Ottoman occupied territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.  A brilliantly worded bit of diplomatic gibberish, the Balfour Declaration appeared to provide either (A) the foundation of a Jewish state or (B) a Jewish homeland inside an Arab state or (C) both.

The Arabs resident in the land more or less affected by the Declaration both cooperated with and bitterly opposed the transfer of land from Arab to Jewish ownership. Some Arabs, primarily absentee landowners, were quite willing to sell their land to Jews.  Other Arabs, primarily lesser landholders and ambitious Muslim clerics, frothed with opposition.  Several times the opposition turned violent particularly when the crowds were lashed by sermons preached by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a man who was so antisemitic as to make Adolph Hitler seem a Hebrewphile in comparison.

The British ran the place as they did the neighboring territory called back then "the Trans-Jordan."  The British government was at best given to vacillation regarding the settlement of Jews in the territory given to their mandate by the League of Nations.  Most of the time both the British Army and Foreign Ministry were dominated by Arabists given to a romantic view of the Arabs.  In practice this meant the relevant officials on the ground in the region as well as back in London tilted British policy to fit the desires, not to say demands, of the Arabs.  Even as the Nurenberg War Crimes Tribunal was hearing the evidence of the mass slaughter of the Jews of Europe as a state policy, the British government and its minions in Palestine consistently favored the Arab position of total opposition to the creation of even a minimalist form of Jewish National Homeland.

The revelations of the Nazi state policy of mass slaughter did have a profound impact on many people both in Europe and the US.  Americans were notably disturbed by the images and testimony of gas chambers and death transports.  While mild and "gentlemanly" antisemitism had been a common currency in the US prior to the end of the war, all such attitudes and behaviors were set aside with rapidity and vigor under the impact of the tales of savage, premeditated murder on a scale previously unthinkable.

The US became a supporter of the more expansive interpretation of the Balfour Declaration.  This support was not highly visible.  It was not one of loud voices in Congress or demonstrations in the street.  This was not the American way in those more innocent days.  Still, the mood of We the People was evident.  There was a sense of collective guilt within much of the American elite.  We had stood silent on the sidelines during the Thirties.  We had refused to believe the first horrifying stories of persecution as they oozed out of Germany and German occupied territory.  During the war, we had done nothing to impede the machinery of slaughter even as our government (like that of the UK) became increasingly aware of its existence.

Guilt required atonement.  The atonement took the form of supporting the creation of a Jewish state in the mandated territory of Palestine.  It can and has been argued that the American guilt feelings had the net result of transferring misery from the Jews of Europe to the Arabs of Palestine.  There may be a shred of truth to this.  But, if so, it is irrelevant.

The US did its dead level best to see the Jewish state brought into existence peacefully with the least possible ill-effects for the already resident Arab population.  We bent much diplomatic influence to this task.  The influence was backed with money.  We invoked the UN.  We tried negotiation.  We urged the Arab governments to step back, work with us in solving a problem which had an impact on the Jews of Europe, the Arab Muslims of the Mideast, and other people and religions far from both the Mideast and Europe.  To us, the problem of the Jewish state was an affair which had meaning and impact for humanity generally.

The crux of the problem, the single reason a diplomatic question became a shooting war rests not with the Jews of Europe seeking a permanent sanctuary nor with the ideology of Zionism.  The responsibility for the wars does not reside with the US or with the European states.  Most assuredly, it does not rest with the pro-Arab men of the British government and military.  No.  None of these can have the tail of fault pinned on their behinds.

All the responsibility for the war and the refugees rests solely with the Arab governments of the day.  Well. to err on the side of accuracy, some of the blame must rest with the Muslim clerics who preached not only holy war against the hated Jews and their infidel supporters but also called upon Arab Muslims to leave their homes, to flee to the protection of the armies of the faithful so as to return in victory behind the conquering tanks of the believers.

Arab tanks were rolling.  Arab artillery was firing.  Arab infantry were shooting.  All even before the new state of Israel proclaimed its existence.  The war was on, declared not by words but by shooting, shelling, and bombing long before any state could recognize the existence of the new state.

The Arab armies moved long before the UN could urge peace.  The Arab armies sought to extinguish the nascent Jewish state before any UN resolution seeking a peaceful ending could be introduced let alone passed and put into effect.  The so-called "Catastrophe" was made by Arabs. Period.  End of discussion.

The same applies in the main to the production of the pitiful columns of refugees and the long, bitter aftermath in the camps.  The important phrase here is, "in the main."  For the Jews do not have clean hands in the matter of forced evacuations.

It is important to remember that to the shame and discredit of Israel then and now, some Jewish militia units, particularly those of the Palmach, engaged in atrocities intended to force Arabs from their ancestral homes, to ethnically cleanse land which would be incorporated in the Jewish state.  Unarmed civilians including old men, women, and children were massacred on a scale not different from that practiced by Serbians against their Muslim fellow citizens.  To the further discredit of the government of Israel, it did its best to cover up the evidence of the atrocities for decades.  It has been only recently that the relevant documents have come to light--due to the efforts of Israeli historians whose dedication to their craft overpowered feelings of patriotism.

However, the primary responsibility resides with Arab governments and Muslim clerics who used all manner of persuasion to convince Arabs to pack up and leave in the full (and false) expectation of a speedy and victorious return.  In the wars of independence, as in the Six Day War nearly twenty years later, the Arab states and Muslim clerics were co-conspirators in crimes against the Arabs of the disputed lands.

However, the Arab states and Muslim cleric were not alone in the commission of the offense.  They were aided and abetted by the UN.  The UN formed an office tasked with the resettlement, relief, and care of the refugees.

Admittedly, the UN sincerely if misguidedly conceived of the operation as short-lived, a temporary humanitarian expedient which would end with the coming of peace.  Unfortunately, the oft-seen process of the temporary becoming permanent worked once again with the UN effort at relief, resettlement, and reintegration of the Palestinian displaced persons.  The ever expanding network of refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, Jordan, and elsewhere took on a life of its own.  A new, always growing bureaucracy of refugee relief workers became a permanent feature of the human terrain of the Mideast.

The reason for this resides not so much with the UN bureaucrats as it does with the Arab states.  To the various governments of the so-called "frontline" states, the refugees and their camps became welcome pawns and tools in the forever war being waged by these states against Israel.  There was no desire on the part of any of these governments to see the Palestinian refugees effectively integrated into their own populations.

At the same time, assorted ambitious political leaders within the refugee population saw their way to power, status, and (dare it be written) wealth rested with keeping the refugees in their degraded and alienated position.  And, in the shadow, there were more than a few clerics of the political Islam tendency who saw advantage in having the rootless refugees available as potential recruits in the overarching holy war against Jews and infidels alike.

An unintended combination of international aid workers, agenda driven clerics, and self-interested states assured the camps and their wretched inhabitants would stay as a major feature of the social and political landscape of the region.  And, so it is today.  And, so it will stay tomorrow absent a severe alteration of the stances of the frontline governments as well as the leadership of the new unity government of Hamas and the Fatah dominated Palestinian Authority.

Arguably, the UN office, now called UNRWA, is the single major player in altering the terrain of camps and refugees.  Considering the existence of the Palestinian Authority, it can be asserted fairly that the camps as well as the UN bureaucracy no longer needs to exist.  Further, it is not inaccurate to argue that the best thing that UNRWA can do on behalf of its wards is to go out of existence.

By ceasing to exist, UNRWA would compel the Palestinian Authority including its Hamas branch to take proper responsibility for the well being of its citizens.  The reality now is that Palestinians are not and should not be wards of a giant and hugely expensive but inefficient welfare bureaucracy.  Rather, they are citizens of a nascent state with a government which exists in all but name.

UNRWA must go.  That is it must go if the UN is serious about being concerned about the best interests of the refugees and their descendants.  The wars which produced the refugees ended more than forty years ago. The youngest of the authentic refugees are in their mid-sixties.  It is long overdue to blow the whistle on UNRWA and tell the refugees and their third generation descendants that they are not going home--that where they live right now is home.

Of course UNRWA will not do the right thing.  The bureaucrats, the international aid workers, are not about to give up their phony jobs.  The chiefs and their chief assistants are not about to say give us no more money, our work here is done.

That is evident in the latest sob story out of UNRWA.  The violins are weeping in the background as the high minded, lofty thinking folks at the agency dry their tears over the very high unemployment in Gaza.  There is no end of gnashing of teeth, beating of breasts, and pulling of hair over the human costs of the unemployment which (stand by to be shocked) is caused solely by the Israeli "blockade" of Gaza.

Of course this interpretation is a mass of pooh-pooh.  The real deal is that Gaza under Hamas has no economic reason to exist.  Beyond that, it has been the policies and actions of Hamas which have made the Israeli "blockade" necessary.  As long as UNRWA exists to take up the slack, to feed, to house, to educate, to medicate, to apologize for, and generally tend to the so-called refugees, there will be no effective pressure on either Hamas or the Palestinian Authority to act like a responsible government and create the conditions and context necessary to assure that Palestine has an economic reason to exist as well as the ability to attract investment capital and create employment.

Down in the religious and political mire of the Arab states, deep under the cover of the "Arab Spring," each and every government continues to cynically exploit the "refugees" as part of their forever war against the Jews and their infidel supporters.  Commensual with the cynics of mosque and chancery are the self-serving and self-preserving international bureaucrats and aid workers of UNRWA.  This unlikely but lethal troika keeps its collective boot firmly on the neck of the Palestinian "refugees."

Pity the poor Palestinians.  Not for their unemployment.  Not for their alleged poverty.  Not for their purported longing for long lost olive groves and stone huts.  Pity them for their delusions.  Pity them for having been manipulated, propagandized, used, and exploited by cynics in the mosque, cynics in the chanceries of all the Arab states, and cynics at Turtle Bay.  Pity the Palestinians most of all for having died in their spirit, for having thrown away their own autonomy in order to become an army of automatons ordered, directed, and controlled by people who have nothing but contempt for them.

Pity the Palestinians, hollow shells of one time humanity, sacrificed on the alters of ambition.  Look at them in their mobs, their multitudes of misery, and remind yourself that once they were human.

Co-opting To The Extreme

Crane Brinton in his classic study of offensive insurgencies Anatomy of Revolution focused on a critical dynamic found in most insurgencies which he called "co-option to the left."  By this he meant the process by which all offensive insurgencies (those which seek a total reconstruction of the political, social, and economic order of a state) move continuously to the Left, a trajectory to the ever more extreme.  The dynamic is reversed with the inevitable reaction.  The reaction sees a continuous move to an ever more extreme Rightest position.

It has been interesting to see a akin process at work in several Muslim venues.  The only difference between that which is seen currently in Muslim locations as diverse as the Gaza Strip and Chechnya and the one described by Brinton is the ideological basis.  In Muslim societies the predicate is religious while the examples employed by Brinton were secular in nature.

Let's take a quick dekko at Gaza.  Hamas shot its way to power as a nationalistic entity with the larger goal of ending Israel as a sovereign state.  The lads of Hamas had far more familiarity with crude rockets, AK-47s, and suicide vests than the Koran or Haddith.  In addition to their long standing and now defeated rival, the Fatah dominated Palestinian Authority, Hamas faced other rivals most notably Islamic Jihad.

Islamic Jihad and other, smaller groups were every bit as dedicated to the dubious proposition of wiping Israel off the map.  Beyond this the rival groups expounded an austere version of Islam based as was that of Taliban on the Wahhibist interpretation favored by Saudi Arabia.  Hamas found itself under challenge not for a deficiency of zeal in seeking to kill Israelis but in its dedication to the One True Faith.

To meet this threat Hamas has moved speedily to the extreme.  It has called and raised its rivals in religious enthusiasm and commitment to the strictures of Islam.  In quick order Hamas moved to force the citizens of Gaza to act like Muslims--or else.  In ways completely devoid of surprise, the weight of the new Hamas Live Up To Mohammad campaign fell on women.

Hamas shoved women back into garbage sacks from which they had long been liberated.

It moved on to suppress women so boldly un-Islamic as to puff water pipes in public.

Then coed beaches were banned.  As was swimming apparel more revealing than the landlocked garbage bags.

A man on a motorbike with a woman riding behind him?  No way!  Mixed sex groups at a cafe?  Forget it!  A public display of the mildest affection?  Call the cops!

If necessary Hamas will emulate Taliban in all respects.  School for girls?  Yer outta your mind.  Women working?  Against the will of Allah.

Badda-bing!  We, the Fearless Warriors of Hamas have proven ourselves far more truly Muslim than the wannabes of Islamic Jihad and the rest.  We can oppress women better!

Lest one think that only thuggish groups comprising pretend governments can enter the Live Pure Or Die! contest, Chechnya is a case study.  In that insurgency wracked backwater of Russia, the insurgency oriented adherents of violent political Islam are in the process of being religiously outpointed by the handpicked local chieftain put in place by Vladimir Putin with the demand that the situation "be clarified and put to order."

While there is a strong odor of violent political Islam in the air of Chechnya, the insurgents are primarily oriented toward gaining independence from Moscow.  The agenda is: Independence first, Shariah later.  For most Chechans, most of the time, the fashion statements and etiquette requirements of Islam are not of great moment.  The insurgent leadership has not wasted time, energy, or legitimacy on insisting that women show no more of themselves than one or two eyes or putting chastity barriers between the sexes.

The Moscow subservient government of Chechnya has taken up the cause of Islamic morality.  Thugs in the employ of the government both uniformed and not have been set out in pursuit of un-garbage bagged women, as well as women in the company of men other than their brothers, fathers, or husbands.  Condign and salutary beatings have been freely and publicly administered to women found not in compliance with the new government standards of appropriate Islamic apparel and conduct.

The government is saying to all Muslim Chechens, "See, we oppress women best.  We are the True Embodiment of the True Faith, you must rally to us--or be branded apostate."

There is a problem here, Moscow.  You see, your local heavyweights have misread the situation.  Chechnya is not Afghanistan of fifteen years ago.  It isn't even Gaza today.  It is not the right place for an imitation Taliban.

In Chechnya, a very traditional society, custom dictates that it is the father, or the husband, who has the sole responsibility and authority to determine what constitutes proper Islamic clothing or behavior for his daughters or wife.  Not the government.  Not even the nationalistic insurgents.  Islam in practice, Islam as it has an effect on daily life, is not even the province of the local cleric.  It is the sole prerogative of the man of the house, archaic as that term may be to Westerners.

Pakistan is balancing precariously on a tipping point between continuing as it has--an Islamic republic with notable secular features--or becoming a quasi-theocracy of the Taliban variety.  In the contest with the Taliban of Pakistan and related groups, the pressure on the government to get out in front of the anti-government forces in applying severe strictures is intense and may prove irresistible.

Much of the population of Pakistan is already far to the religious "right" of the government.  To keep its slim hold on power, the government may see the least-worst option is that of adopting a more-Muslim-than-thou approach.  Proving it can oppress women better may be the course of action most attractive to the men of the current elite and the government it controls.

A lurch to the religious extreme would have severe and immediate repercussions in the already tenuous relation between the US and Pakistan.  A government crackdown on immodest dress or "immoral" behavior on the part of women particularly if combined with a Taliban or al-Shabaab campaign against music, movies, dancing, or anything smacking of fun would not sit well with many in the US government to say nothing of many of We the People.

But, desperate governments undertake desperate actions.  Faced with an imminent loss of power, a seismic shift to Wahhibism on steroids is not only thinkable but the only thinkable proposition.  The potential of American opposition, of a weakening of US support, will be discounted on two predicates: The US needs Pakistan too much and, what the hey, the US can accept the Saudi oppression of women.

Both rationalizations may prove true.  But, before the government of Pakistan considers adopting the out-Taliban-Taliban approach it might recall the joy with which those Pakistanis who had at first welcomed Taliban came to despise and fear the Men of Turban and Koran.  Despise them so much that the incoming Pakistani forces were welcomed literally as liberators.

Having no fun in life wears thin.  Just ask an Iranian.

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A Modest Proposal For Hamas--And Mr Obama

On 20 June 2010 President Obama played the game of Let's Pretend again. This time the Nice Young Man From Chicago decided to pretend that Hamas is a real, honest-to-gosh, all get out, for real, bottle in bond, triple X super-refined, sure enough government.

That's right, bucko, the POTUS has determined from and for reasons explicable only to himself that Hamas is no longer a terrorist entity which shot its way into power in the Gaza Strip whereupon it launched a rocket rain of terror on portions of Israel while entrenching and enriching itself by the open exploitation of those people unfortunate enough to find themselves at the wrong ends of Hamas controlled guns. Having decided that the current situation in Gaza is completely "unsustainable" the president opined, "it demands fundamental change."

The change envisioned by President Obama's "Announcement on Gaza," is not one which sees the overthrow of the Koran-waving, gun-toting, rocket-firing Mighty Warriors of Islam but its transformation via American declaratory policy into a legitimate government. Demonstrating that this "Announcement" was no mere exercise in patented Obama World Vision rhetoric, the Man in the Oval has put four hundred million of our (well, to err on the side of accuracy, borrowed or made-by-the-Feds-computers) dollars into the hands of Hamas and, to show proper balance, the Palestinian Authority.

The effect of the "Announcement" and the largess with other peoples' money serves to put the Palestinian Authority on an equal footing with Hamas. The logic of this defies rational explication considering that the PA at least makes some pretense of acting like a real, responsible government reluctant to fire rockets into Israel and, at least on occasion, showing some semblance of both democracy and a rule of law. The PA, in sharp distinction from Hamas, has even almost, sort-of, provisionally, allowed that Israel has a right to exist within secure borders.

Hamas has offered not even the slightest hint that it is prepared to (a) make peace with the PA, (b) submit its future to an open, transparent vote by the citizens of Gaza, (c) abandon its commitment to drive Israel into the sea, (d) drop its alliance with Iran, (e) stop its strident anti-Americanism, (f) observe even minimal human rights for its citizens, particularly women, (g) halt its antisemitic indoctrination of children, (h) cease all armed attacks on Israel by any person or group resident in the Gaza Strip and (i) commence an open, transparent, and effective program of economic development such as to benefit all residents of Gaza.

Considering that extensive but incomplete list of features, what is the goal of equating Hamas with the PA? What is the goal of the "Announcement?"

Mr Obama apparently believes that he can transform Hamas from its current nasty reality into a mature, responsible, legitimate government with the issuing of an "Announcement" and the provision of money. Of course, this hallucination is on a par with such previous triumphs of self-delusion as his belief that speaking nice, friendly, soft words to the mullahs of Iran would result in an instant abandonment of the quest for the Mahdi Bomb, a total rejection of supporting terrorist and insurgent groups, and the immediate ending of internal repression.

Perhaps Mr Obama would have done better had he thought in a manner less grand. Consider one less sweeping approach. A less grand move, to be sure, but one which would simultaneously test Hamas' will and ability to act the part of a genuine government and improve the lives and economic futures of the residents of Gaza. It would also directly address an ongoing point of friction between the folks of Gaza on the one hand and the PA on the other.

Electrical power is a point of ongoing distress for the people of Gaza. The operation of the one power plant in Gaza is also a subject of intense friction between Hamas and the PA. After the generating station shut down yesterday, Hamas immediately accused PA of causing the outage in order to "punish the people of Gaza." The PA replied that Hamas was seeking to "incite" the residents of the Strip against the PA.

Consider the following: Gaza receives a jilly-poo ergs per square meter from the sun. The number of cloudy days per year approaches zero. Solar panels, even the newer thin film sort, are no longer expensive to fabricate, although the process does include some very real environmental risks. The associated equipment, controllers, inverters, batteries, and so on are also relatively inexpensive to make and operate. The technology is reasonably mature, well understood, and not hard to master.

Solar based systems can be centralized which allows for the use not only of photovoltaic arrays but also solar heated steam turbines. Or the solar generation can be point-of-use based in the most decentralized way. This means the energy can be produced by either some central bureaucracy or by individuals. In short, this dual capacity obviates the he-who-controls-energy-controls-life tendency of Hamas.

On the human factors side of life, surely Hamas numbers among the creative engineering minds usually employed in designing and making rockets, IEDs, and explosives generally some men who can turn to the challenge of designing and fabricating point-of-use solar systems. Certainly, the large number of unemployed people can provide a labor force capable of making and installing solar systems.

All that is needed is (a) political will and (b) money. Mr Obama has made it obvious that money is available. In fact, the Europeans have been standing in line as well, all eager to toss money in the general direction of Hamas without any safeguards as to its usage beyond those of the pious hope variety. Only the political will on the part of Hamas has been lacking.

The will has been lacking because there has been no percentage for Hamas in doing so. Hamas gets money, lots of money, from various and sundry donors ranging from humanitarian NGOs to well-intentioned governments to governments whose intentions are not so benign. Hamas has been in the position of getting the wherewithal to do its terrorist thing and being freed of any responsibility to assure the citizens have more than the barest of bare essentials.

If Mr Obama entertained a serious desire to see Hamas change its nature from killer to governor, from bomb wielder to economic developer, he would have done something akin to linking American aid to a measurable, observable project such as the development, manufacture, and installation of low cost, point-of-use solar generation. This approach would have put a doable task before Hamas, a put-up or shut-up test as well.

If Hamas accepted the money, the conditions, and passed the it's-a-government-after-all test, the result would have been (a) green jobs, (b) ample electrical energy for residential, commercial, and limited industrial or agricultural use, (c) functional legitimacy with the citizens of Gaza and (d) a solid economic accomplishment of pervasive effect which would mean Hamas finally had something to risk if more rockets were fired with more IAF or IDF responses.

The "Sun Power For Gaza" concept is far from being the only option in the think-small-think-effectively category. It is an illustration of what should--and might--be employed if Mr Obama would only bring his ideas and ego down to mere human size. Grandiose pronouncements are fine, wonderful even--if substance and results are not considered.

Smaller ideas, lesser goals, do not sound nearly so magnificent. They do, however, have an advantage over their greater cousins. They lead somewhere. They accomplish something. The ancient Chinese put it succinctly and accurately, "The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step."

And, Mr Obama might be reminded, no journey can be completed with a single step.

Going It Alone

Israel is in the most uncomfortable position it has inhabited since the get-go. No country, certainly not Iran, is nearly as isolated today as the Jewish state.

Even during the Fifties when Eisenhower followed a policy of "even handedness," there was a strong American guarantee that Israel would not be overrun by its perpetually hostile neighbors. The Eisenhower Archives are filled with memos and telexes to this effect--even during the days of the Great Presidential Temper Tantrum also known as the Suez War of 1956.

Thanks to the policies of President Obama (who bodes well to take permanent possession of the Bugs Bunny "What A Maroon!" trophy) it is Israel and not Iran which now stands alone, surrounded by hostiles and facing existential threat. The cringing approach of appeasement has brought, as any realpolitiker would have projected, failure as its reward.

The latest round of UN Security Council sanctions will not convert the mullahs of Tehran to peace, love, and flower power. The sanctions, once promised by SecState Clinton to be "crippling" are hardly an annoyance to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps given that entity's vast experience and skill in avoiding previous sanctions.

As everyone who is oriented in time and place would have known months ago, Iran's protectors, Russia and China, would place their interests ahead of any sort of international consensus. One can be thankful that Iranian Orator-in-Chief, Ahmedinejad, so insulted Moscow that Putin, Medvedev, and company actually put the sale of S-300 air defense missiles on hold. Had it not been for Ahmedinejad's capacious mouth, the sanction regime imposed by the latest Security Council vote would have permitted the sale and delivery to go through.

Iran has allies. This reality was shown in harsh relief as Iran, Turkey, and Russia sat down for a confab regarding regional security just this week.

Such a meeting does little to support President Obama's insistence that Iran is more "isolated" following the sanction vote. Nor does the White House's opposition to efforts in Congress to impose unilateral American sanctions on companies trading in refined petroleum products to Iran support the oft repeated administration notion that the UN sanctions would provide a basis for stronger measures by the US and EU countries.

The reason pumped by the Oval crowd is that Doing Something Real on the part of Congress would carry with it the probability of annoying "allies." Well, fer sure, dude, that is to be expected, France and Germany as well as Russia and China are feathering their own businesses with beaucoup trade with Iran. Both Sarkozy and Merkel are quite willing to talk the talk but refrain from making companies walk the walk. And, golly, these fine folk shouldn't be put in a bind simply because Congress is more worried about an Iranian nuclear capability than is either France or Germany--or Mr Obama.

It is hard to decide whether Mr Obama knows he is lying or is so filled with the miasma of ideology that he really, really believes what he has been saying regarding either Iran or Israel. Suffice it to write that not even the previous Monument to Naivete, peanut farmer turned governor of a small state morphed to the presidency, Jimmy Carter, was as out-to-lunch in Mideast policy than the Nice Young Man From Chicago.

The focus on the artifact of the Great Humanitarian Aid Flotilla To The Starving Millions Of Gaza has become a very dangerous preoccupation not only for the US and other seemingly civilized states but, most of all, for Israel. Thanks to the melding of the utter brainlessness of so many of the "elites" of Europe and the US with the administration's policies of "outreach" to the Muslims of the world, the government of Israel has been forced to divert its efforts from dealing with the existential threat represented by emergent Iran to the sideshow of why IDF commandos were so bold as to kill people who were trying to kill them.

While the government of Israel made a blunder in the precise tactics of interdicting the Great Humanitarian Aid Flotilla, the ground truths remain unchanged. The flotilla was a deliberate provocation orchestrated and conducted with the assistance of the Erdogan regime; the Miza Marmara had on board a number of martyrdom seeking jihadists who offered cold arm resistance to the fast roping commandos. End of story.

Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu and his inner cabinet, the Septet (also either the Seven Samurai or the Seven Dwarfs depending on your point of view and the choices they make) are wrestling with damage control and new means of placating Obama over the Gaza Strip blockade rather than the very important subject of how to deal with Iran before it is an hour too late. Iran along with its allies, Syria and Turkey, and its proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas, seeks the total obliteration of Israel as currently constituted. That is a ground truth impossible to ignore or rebut.

While Mr Obama is apparently quite comfortable with the idea of a Mahdi Bomb, regardless of rhetoric to the contrary, the state and government of Israel cannot afford such a detached, laid back attitude. While it will be quite some time before Iranian technicians can miniaturize a nuclear charge so as to make it deliverable by one of its medium or intermediate range ballistic missiles, it will take very little time to build a bomb which would fit comfortably in a truck.

(Feeling depressed, Ahmad, anxious, tired of this life? Think martyrdom. Particularly if you can drive a truck.)

Think of it this way, Ahmad, you don't even have to cross the Israeli border. Just get to a checkpoint on the Lebanese border--or the Gaza border after our Western tools have opened the Strip to our ships--and let the sucker go. A twenty kiloton ground pounder will kill a whole bunch of Jews--particularly if Allah wills the winds to blow in the correct direction. Come on, Ahmad, that little push of the clicker will make you a hero orders of magnitude greater than the guys who flew into the Twin Towers. Way to go, fellihin!

By the most conservative estimate the Iranians are only a pair of years from having a workable truck transportable nuclear weapon or two. Letting one or both rip on Israel would be a mighty blow against the "Zionist entity" particularly if followed by ground attacks from all those nice neighbors known as "frontline states." The ground attacks won't even have to be conducted by heavy and well coordinated forces if the government and people of Israel are not prepared for the initial shock.

In a world filled with "get-or-get-got" situations, the one faced by Israel is the most compelling. To "get" implies the willingness to be held responsible for starting the equivalent of a full scale war at a time when the global economy would be an inevitable collateral casualty. To wait until being "get-got" and then retaliate means the political will to absorb a large number of Israeli casualties must exist.

The time to make decisions between "getting" and surviving "getting got" is short. The time to make the necessary preparations in both political will and material capacities for either option is not much longer. Every minute wasted on damage control over the flotilla mess is time wasted.

For this the Obama administration must and will take great responsibility when historians of the future consider this period. Cringing, hand-wringing, bowing to Muslims has been bootless. Turning Uncle Sam's back to Israel is much, much worse.

Hamas Goes Islamist

Hamas has always been rhetorically inclined toward the Islamist and Islamist jihadist line. But, until quite recently the Islamism of Hamas has been far more oratorical than practical. That has changed.

Hamas has always been seen (and seen itself) as a primarily nationalistic entity oriented toward seizing power in all the territory currently under Arab control as a preliminary to the destruction of Israel. The violent takeover of the Gaza Strip was merely stage one in the process.

It was not long after the Hamas triumph in Gaza that the organization came under increasing pressure from the more totalistic Islamists in their midst. Over the past eighteen months the challenge from the "left," that is the Salifist rooted, al-Qaeda leaning Islamist jihadists, has grown more rapidly than even the extensive instruments of repression at Hamas' disposal could counter.

Belatedly Hamas attempted to get ahead of the Islamist jihadist curve by moving to impose a more austere Shariah predicated view on the population of Gaza. The first sign of this co-option was the requirement for "modest" dress at the beaches of Gaza. This put-the-women-back-in-garbage-sacks effort was quickly followed by other gambits ranging from the banning of mixed gender social events to the closing of coffee houses and Internet cafes and a prohibition against chewing gum.

The efforts failed. Spectacularly.

The extent of the failure was shown dramatically by the Great Mosque Shoot-Out a few days ago. Abdel-Latif Moussa, the jefe grande of the Salifist based group, Jund Ansar Allah (Warriors of God), preached a sermon of direct defiance to the Hamas regime. Hamas responded literally within minutes with an armed attack on the mosque.

The consequent firefight lasted several hours. More than a few of Allah's Warriors and some Hamas gun slingers were sent to Paradise (or its antipodes.) Abdel-Latif reportedly blew himself up as Hamas' gunsels closed in on his house.

End of firefight. But not end of story.

The Jund Ansar Allah drew its membership from the younger components of the Gaza population. These men are and have been bitterly frustrated by the failure of Hamas to establish a properly Islamist polity and society as well as its apparent lack of a will-to-combat against Israel.

The tipping point came with Operation Cast Lead. The ease with which the IDF penetrated the Hamas "defenses" as well as the utter lack of any response by Hamas in the weeks following the IDF withdrawal moved more and more young (and youngish) men into the ranks of JAA and other, smaller, but no less Islamist jihadist groups in the Strip.

Hamas has no choice now but to move further and faster along the road to the most extreme form of Islamist jihadism. In this, their sponsor, Iran, will no doubt be both supportive and gratified.

The continued refocusing by Hamas on Islamist jihadism has a number of implications. None of them are positive from the perspective of forming a Mideast peace deal.

As Hamas goes so also must Fatah and its larger cousin, the Palestinian Authority. While the West Bank areas under the control of the PA are both tranquil and prosperous in comparison to "Hamastan," the PA must contend with its own growing body of Islamist jihadist leaning young men. As the recently concluded Fatah party congress demonstrated, there is an appreciable generation gap in its ranks. At the moment the old men of Fatah hold power but they have been forced to admit representatives of the younger, more militant, far more Islamist jihadist oriented men into the leadership circle.

As in many, if not most, "revolutionary" dynamics there has been, is, and will be a thrust to the "left," the more extreme, more passionate, more simplistic, more totalistic position. While much of Crane Britton's model of revolution has been disproved, this steady move to the extreme remains unchallenged.

The Islamist jihadist worldview is simple, easy to understand. Its goals are firm, well-defined, utterly totalistic in nature. Its dynamic takes advantage not only of a firm base well established in the Muslim faith and its practice over centuries, it also fully taps into the passions driven by frustration, fear, and bitterness. It, like other ideologies including Marxism-Leninism and National Socialism, promises victory. Unlike these other, purely secular faiths, Islamist jihadism promises a win-win: Victory in death by instant passage to Paradise.

No mistake must be made about it: Islamist jihadism has an appeal and a power almost impossible to underestimate. This is equally true whether one accepts the sociological/economic explanation of jihadism or one which focuses on the linkage between personal identity and personal religious belief.

As Islamist jihadism becomes an every increasing driver of the agendas and actions of Hamas and, inevitably, the PA, the quest for the ever elusive goal of a comprehensive peace in the Mideast will become ever more difficult. Not simply because both Hamas and the PA will be more resistant to any form of compromise. Nor because Arab states generally will back the fulminating irredentism in order to protect themselves from Islamist jihadist attack.

While these two factors in and of themselves would be sufficient to put a speed bump of Mount Everest proportions on the road to peace, they will be joined by a third. Israel will match the Arabs intransigence for intransigence.

This tit-for-tat dynamic will ensue not because the current Israeli government is more obstinate than most (although it sure can seem that way) but because any violent action taken by the Arabs must result eventually in an even more violent Israeli response. The Israeli government is not any more loath to defend its people, territory, and interests than is the government of the US or any other country.

As was demonstrated in the long months of constant Hamas attacks, the government of Israel can be very, very patient. It matters not that the patience is required by purely tactical considerations such as assuring minimal world and, more importantly, US disapproval of the IDF counter blow. The critical fact is that all patience comes to an end. The record shows convincingly that when it does, it is the Arabs who suffer the most death, the greater destruction.

The historical record also demonstrates that every time the Arab "tit" is followed by the Israeli "TAT," peace hopes and plans vanish like a desert mirage. This brutal reality is, of course, central to the Islamist jihadist agenda.

The prohibition of chewing gum may seem humorous. The stick-women-back-in-garbage-sacks regulations may be disgusting. In and of themselves these things don't matter--except to those directly involved. Even though the more revolting (to most Westerners at least) aspects of Shariah may violate human rights, the moves by Hamas are no more repugnant than practices already long established in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan.

What is most important, what must be firmly gripped by policy makers in the US, is that the imposition of Shariah is not the end of the Islamist jihadist agenda. No. It is merely the beginning. The next stage is the ramping up of violence, of terror, of attacks on Israeli (and other) civilians. The real deal, the nitty-gritty of the Islamist jihadist game plan, is the total blockage of any Mideast peace.

The initiative rests not with the diplomats or the Deep Thinkers of the Obama administration. The power of decision and action does not reside with genuflections before the totems of Islam. Nor does it lie with those who posit a sociological or economic or educational response to the power of Islamist jihadism.

No. The initiative, the capacity to control the nature and direction of affairs in the Arab-Israeli conflict rests solely with those willing to kill and die in keeping with their True Belief. It rests with the trigger pullers and suicide bombers. More, it lives with those ambitious, driven men who control the pullers of triggers and pushers of clickers.

Whether anyone likes the idea or not, the ground truth is that the game is being run as it has been for some years now by the Islamists, the jihadists, the men of evil. Get a grip on it.

Hamas (And Iran) Slap Obama Around

It is quite improbable--no--make that impossible that Hamas did not know about and sign off on the horse powered terrorist attack out of Gaza. The raid came not only hot on the heels of the Great Obama Cairo Tour but on the eve of yet one more visit from former senator George Mitchell, now the Great Mideast Diplomatic Hope of the administration.

While there was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack near the Nahel Oz crossing point, the precise identity of the horse-tugging trigger pullers and their purported organisational affiliation is unimportant. What counts is simply that the de facto government of the Gaza Strip, Hamas, must have known about the forthcoming attack. More, it is totally non-credible that the attack took place without Hamas' authorization.

This fact means in turn that the attack originated with the Iranian mullahocracy. Hamas has once more shown its status as a mere puppet of the apocalyptic crew in Tehran, which is no way worthy of its purported status as a government.

Presumably President Obama was aware of the actual nature and character of Hamas before he delivered his soaring oratory in Cairo the other day. Presumably he chose to ignore the realities of Hamas in order to pretend that Hamas would some how, some way fold its violence filled tent and join with the less lethal government-by-pretense, the Palestinian Authority, in a legitimate quest for a settlement with Israel.

Now, let's call it as it is. All together now. "Tehran orders. Hamas delivers." It is that simple. Even a hick historian in the backwoods of the New Mexican mountains can get it.

It is not wide of the mark to presume that the attempt to get bomb toting livestock into Israel into close proximity of an IDF patrol was a partial but indicative reply by Tehran and its clients to the Obama Outreach to Islam Program. It may be the first reply; it most assuredly will not be the last.

Honey flavored demarches will get nowhere with the Iranians. Rosy views of the (hypothetical) potentials of diplomatic exchanges to modify obnoxious behavior on the part of the mullahs do not change the reality.

The Iranian top dogs are engaged in a high stakes, high payoff game. They are employing a shrewd combination of the two primary motivators--Persian pride filled nationalism and Islamist dogma--to gain the goals of regional hegemony and a front rank place on the world's stage. The mullahs and their political frontmen are willing to run fairly large risks, quite ready to further impoverish the Iranian public and employ the ambitions of others to achieve their ends.

The Supreme Ayatollah, his ruling circle of identically minded clerics and the chief frontman, Ahmedinejad (who will in highest probability be re-elected despite the strong challenge provided by Mousavi and his energetic supporters among the Iranian youth and political "elite") have made their policy of "intransigence, more intransigence and even more intransigence" quite apparent. To date this policy coupled with the almost brilliant use of proxies such as Hamas and Hezbollah and the inherently divided nature of the several Great Powers has paid off--and paid off handsomely.

Sure, Ahmedinejad and the clerics above and behind him often talk like a collection of warp minded buffoons. But, that is no reason to assume that they are not capable of profoundly perturbing the current state of global politics. Or, that through a concatenation of mis-calculation and over-reach, plunging all of us in a war we do not want.

There is ample precedent for this cautionary note. A century and more ago the German ruler, Kaiser Wilhelm, often appeared to be a strutting fool, thumping the war drum, waving his saber, posturing and bragging. Statesmen in the US and Europe vacillated between dismissing him as an irritating poseur and waving sabers in return.

Two things are dead certain about Kaiser Bill (as Americans called him during the Great War): He was utterly serious about gaining for Germany what he called, "Its place in the sun." And, through a combination of over-reach and miscalculation, he assured the giant slaughter of World War I (and, indirectly, the second half of the European Civil War between 1939 and 1945.)

The Kaiser was allowed and encouraged to over-reach in his ambitions and mis-read the intention and will of France, Russia and Great Britain because these countries did not draw a firm line in the metaphorical sand and enforce it in a consistent manner. In this historical example resides the most important lesson for today, for the US and all the others members of the P5 +1. A firm policy, consistently imposed and backed by a clear will and ability to resort to force, prevents "accidental" war by miscalculation and over-reach.

The Iranians have stated their intentions both in word and in action with remarkable coherence and constancy over the past twenty-five and more years. The mullahocracy has been far more open in its long term goals and determined in the prosecution of these goals than has the US or the West generally.

That is to their credit. And, to our discredit.

Iran has received a seeming setback. It is, however, a setback which the US should not see as being particularly meaningful or important in the settlement of the Israeli-Arab conflict. The results of the election in Lebanon did see the American backed March 14 coalition soundly and unexpectedly trounce Hezbollah. But, that is not cause for Uncle Sam to give forth a great sigh of relief.

Far more important than the overall election result was the simple fact that Hezbollah and its close ally, Amal, swept the area between the Litani river and the Israeli border. This is the area which most concerns Israel. It is the region where the IDF was very roughly handled by the fighters of Hezbollah in 2006. It is the area where Hezbollah and Amal have stockpiled thousands of rockets capable of reaching to an uncomfortable depth in Israel.

Now, all together now, "Tehran orders. Hezbollah delivers." That's where it's at, Jack.

Whenever the mullahs want to administer another slap to the ever smiling Nice Young Man From Chicago and his quest to lever Israel into making compromises without return, Hezbollah can slap a heck of a lot harder than the Gaza based horse-holding trigger pullers of Hamas. That is not a pleasant possibility to consider.

But, it exists. It is evidence of Tehran's inherent capacity to escalate or de-escalate as is required by the exigencies of Iranian policy.

Recently, words drifting from the general area of the Oval have linked peace between Israel and the Arabs with the success of efforts to preclude Iran from getting the "Mahdi Bomb." This linkage is not correct even when espoused by King Abdullah II of Jordan or King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.

The real deal is far simpler. Tehran is the one and only point of linkage between the Mahdi Bomb and the search for a reasonable facsimile of peace between Israel and its neighbors. The focus of diplomacy, the focus of pressure for both peace and the preclusion of undesired nuclear proliferation is Tehran. And only Tehran.

If President Obama and his crew don't get that right they can expect more slaps in the face. If the slaps don't work, there will be kicks in the butt. Remember the magic words, "Tehran orders. (Fill in the blank) delivers."

Those Darn Pesky Civilians

No matter where you look, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Gaza all you see are those doggone civilians getting in the way of a good, honest war. It's getting so a commander can't order up an air strike or an artillery stonk without some bunch of civvies getting blown up. Heck, darn near any snuffy who wants to bust caps after taking fire is going to find some local yokel standing there, picking his nose and blocking a clear field of fire.

Then there are the other civilians. This bunch wouldn't get caught dead in a combat zone. They value their butts too much for that to happen. No. With exceptional bravery this crew stays far, far away from wherever the bullets fly and bombs blow. This civilian assembly is comprised of the High Minded who worry overtime about the effects of war on civilians.

Not to oversimplfy matters, the Save The Innocent Civilians Coalition is at root the anti-war component of the Society of the Perpetually Indignant and Concerned whose wrinkled foreheads and lips ever pursed in disapproval use the plight of civilians caught in the battle zone as the tool of choice to end all wars now. They make no distinction among wars. From their perspective there is no such thing as a justifiable war, not even one undertaken in national self-defense.

The purported "humanitarian crises" which are an automatic part of all wars, and an important aspect of guerrilla, insurgent and similar conflicts provide a mediagenic cover story for the genuine goal of ending war as a feature of human experience. Ironically, one of the major consequences of the STICC campaign is to prolong war so that more civilians suffer more death, fear and misery.

Going to the videotape we quickly discover that with the possible exception of the 150 years separating the end of the Thirty Years War and the start of the Wars of the French Revolution, civilians in the form of impediments, refugees and corpses in the wake of armies have always been a feature of conflict. Civilians have often been the direct targets of military operations.

Whether Sherman's campaign against civilian morale and political will embodied in both the March to the Sea and the subsequent March Up Country, or the Prussian counter-partisan efforts in the Franco-Prussian War a few years later, the intentional targeting of civilians has been a feature of modern war. The refugee generation effects of the German advance across the Low Countries and France in 1940 and the later British firebomb raids against German civilian residential districts brought the intentional targeting of civilians to a new high (low?) in military strategy.

During World War II the High Minded were conspicuously silent in denouncing the "humanitarian crises" which characterised the war. They were equally speechless in the years immediately following V-E Day. Literal hordes of Displaced Persons (DP's they were termed by lips curled in disdain) thronged through the wreckage of Europe. The diseased and famished in the millions crowded DP camps (many of which were former Nazi KZ Lagers) with nary a whisper of concern.

The lowering of the Iron Curtain announcing the onset of the Cold War changed that. Reasons of state, the need for political stability as seen from Washington brought the plight of the Displaced Persons to the center of the stage. Humanitarian relief efforts culminating in the more or less altruistic capstone of the Marshall Plan sought to bring order, health and eventually even prosperity to the displaced, the war ravaged, the hopeless of Europe.

In a delightful exercise in cynical and self-serving politics, the Soviet Union sponsored front groups which sought to offset not only the effects of the Marshall Plan but also the American nuclear superiority with a "peace offensive" which focused on the effects of war, particularly one in which the US would use its atomic weapons on the civilians of Europe and, by implication, the rest of the world. With remarkable rapidity the High Minded signed on to the Stockholm Peace Appeal and its successors.

The rights and immunities of civilians caught in war became a new and growing focus of those who opposed war, all war under all conditions, against any enemy, even a country given to aggression. Horror stories (some of which were true) abounded as wars proliferated on the margins of the Cold War.

Credence was immediately, seemingly automatically and without question, granted to the claims by North Korea and China that the US was engaging in biological weapons in the Korean War. The patent absurdity of the North Korean and Chinese accusations met no pushback from the High Minded.

New stories of atrocities committed by the Israeli forces during the War of Independence were circulated and believed without investigation. While some of the atrocity tales were absolutely true, no mention was made of the role played by the Arab states in the movement of Arabs from the new state of Israel. Apparently the High Minded of the STICC persuasion never met a negative view of the Americans, or the Israelis which was disbelieved.

Neither did they meet a narrative of atrocious behaviour by Soviet or Soviet leaning states which they found credible. The same might be said of accounts of cruelty or human rights abuses suffered by civilians at the hands of authoritarian regimes in the Arab or Asian or African states.

During the years of American involvement in the Wars in Vietnam the US was recurrently damned for "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity" for its forces' employment of napalm or tear gas. Despite the exceptional care the US exhibited in its conduct of air operations against North Vietnam, the American fliers and those who commanded them were repeatedly accused of causing unnecessary civilian casualties and misery. The STICC camp frothed and spewed over each and every civilian casualty which might have occurred at the hands of American forces.

At the same time silence reigned over the recurrent violations of the laws and customs of land combat committed by the North Vietnamese forces or the Viet Cong guerrillas. Not a single word was made of the civilian slaughters which were repeatedly committed by the anti-Saigon forces.

The Mai Lai massacre was rightly and resoundingly condemned, not only by the High Minded it might be noted, but also by members of the American military. However, the literally dozens of Mai Lai level killings conducted by the Viet Cong or the Peoples Army of North Vietnam went by unnoticed and uncommented upon by the fine folks of STICC.

(Can we say, "Double standard?")

The double standard was at work during the long and bloody years of the Iraq-Iran War. Both the European and American members of STICC seemed to be out to a very long lunch during this exsanguinary and ultimately inconclusive effusion. Long range and highly inaccurate missiles fell on Iranian cities. The mullahs of Tehran rounded up brigades of child-soldiers and sent them into the electrified swamps as human minefield clearing units. The Iraqis used chemical munitions against unprepared Iranian troops--and their own dissident citizens.

The High Minded yawned and looked elsewhere. Only when an American warship caught in a fit of buck fever shot down a civilian Iranian airliner did the Protectors of Human Rights Everywhere sit up, take notice and shout, "War criminal!"

The US inspired coalition which waged the 1991 war to eject the Iraqis from Kuwait was relatively immune to the usual accusations of "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity." There were several reasons for this (temporary) immunity. The first and most basic was that the war was fought in deserted country. The pesky civilians were conspicuous by their absence. Also important was the obnoxious nature of the Iraqi regime. Saddam was such a totally unpleasant person that it was hard to work up sympathy for the Iraqi civilians. Finally, the war was over with quickly.

(Another, perhaps far from unimportant contributory factor was the recently concluded collapse of the Soviet Union and the confusion this engendered in the minds of many High Minded people.)

In the wars of recent years from the First Intifada through to the current affrays in Afghanistan and Pakistan, civilians, civilian corpses and the clamor of "humanitarian crisis," "crimes against humanity" and shrill denunciations of the US or Israel have become the common themes. The TV images of Israeli soldiers shooting at insult, rock and Molotov cocktail throwing Arab teenagers sensitized the eyes and minds of the world's public--particularly the opinion molding elite--to the fundamental asymmetry of the Mideast conflict.

From that beginning the double standard demanded by the High Minded of STICC has grown to monster proportions. The adversaries of the West, particularly those who oppose the US and Israel have become increasingly sophisticated in the use of civilians, their misery, fear and death, as weapons of war. Taliban, al-Qaeda and the rest of the Islamist jihadist horde have discovered and are effectively exploiting the key vulnerability of Western military doctrine--the use of firepower and technology to limit friendly casualties to a politically acceptable level.

In pursuing the exploitation of this vulnerability, the assorted adversaries which includes the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the pioneer of many of the use-civilians-as-weapons tactics, have been powerfully assisted by the High Minded, by the members of STICC. To put the matter simply but not oversimplified, without the force multiplier provided by the anti-war advocates working under the cover of concern for civilians and avoidance of humanitarian crises, the efforts to exploit the critical vulnerability of the Americans (and others) would have gone in vain.

It is of more than passing interest that the High Minded never, but never, demand the trigger pullers and suicide bombers and fighters who hide behind women and children to conform their tactics to the customs and laws of land warfare. There are never any calls that the fighters of LTTE or Taliban or al-Qaeda or Hamas or Hezbollah show even the most rudimentary respect for the presumed immunity of civilians from military operations.

Hamas, which acts under the color of being the de facto government in the Gaza Strip, is never denounced by the High Minded for having taken no effort to separate their fighters from the civilian population. Not even the United Nations has noticed that Hamas both allowed and encouraged the "defense forces" of the Gaza Strip to place their bunkers, fighting positions, munitions dumps, rocket launching facilities in the midst of densely populated residential areas.

Of course, Hamas wanted their trigger pullers intermingled with civilians. Naturally Hamas wanted their rocket launching teams to set off their deadly missiles from the courtyards of mosques, schools or housing complexes.

To do any thing else would be to expose their brave and fearless fighters for Palestine to the overwhelming capacities of the Israeli Defense Forces. By sticking offensive capacities in civilian centers Hamas sought to both neutralise Israeli capabilities and place a (false) onus on the IDF for any and all civilian deaths and injuries.

The High Minded played along with Hamas. This is not to the credit of the anti-war and humanitarian crisis dreading crowd. Regardless of the lofty minded nature of the goals when they climbed into bed with a criminal terrorist group, the High Minded, the STICC members, besmirched themselves and their cause.

By being in large measure responsible for the Israeli government calling off Operation Cast Lead before the military capacities of Hamas had been degraded fatally, the High Minded have assured that more civilians will die, more will live in fear, more will be miserable. They have assured the war will last all the longer. Great job, people!

Taliban and its kindred groups are doing the same in Afghanistan and Pakistan. While decrying the US air strikes in Afghanistan, no one either in Afghanistan or elsewhere in the world has demanded that Taliban stop using civilian residential compounds as bases of fire. Nor has there been any demand that Taliban call for a truce when the American or International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) troops return their fire.

By the customs of land warfare, Taliban should call for a brief truce during which the civilian occupants of the compound can be evacuated to a place of safety. If Taliban had any ethic transcending survival and victory or even the slightest shred of genuine concern for the well-being of their fellow countrymen, they would remove the civilians before the shooting started.

It is Taliban, not the United States and its allies, which violates the doctrine of proportionality in the hills, deserts and villages of Afghanistan. It is Taliban, not the US and its allies, which seeks civilian deaths as a necessary adjunct to combat.

It is Taliban which, like LTTE and Hamas, seeks to blunt the military advantage enjoyed by its enemy though using civilian as shields. Taliban, again like LTTE and Hamas or Hezbollah, seeks victory through the exploitation of civilian corpses and the sympathy of the High Minded, the efforts of the anti-war people hiding behind the tenets of STICC.

Contrary to the innuendo of the High Minded or apologists for the Islamist jihdist groups, American military doctrine and the operations or tactical expressions of doctrine well recognise the immunity of civilians as well as the doctrine of proportionality. It is Taliban, al-Qaeda, LTTE, Hamas and the rest of that monstrous regiment that do not.

The United States must push back against the innuendo and accusations of the adversaries as well as the High Minded tergiversators of STICC in both public and private diplomacy. We must forswear apologies and explanations. Rather the necessary message the US (and others) must deliver repeatedly is this: We take all possible precautions to avoid civilian casualties, misery and fear, but we will neither place our troops at inordinate risk nor unnecessarily prolong the war in order to give our enemies an advantage.

We Americans will not play the game according to the other side's rules. We will not allow their lack of ethics, their intentional use of civilians as weapons of war give them any advantage.

To do so is to surrender to evil.

The High Minded Are Out To Lunch--Again

The recent self-examination of the Israeli Defense Force by the Israeli Defense Force was (hang on to your seat, bucko) self-exculpatory. But, self-exculpatory does not equal either a whitewash or a mass of crass tergiversation.

While stopping short of calling the IDF effort a blatant crock of caca, Amnesty International showing its typical partiality strongly implied that conclusion in its response to the IDF report. The group's press briefing referred to the report as "lacking credibility" and branded it as failing to account for either the totality of all (purported) civilian casualties or the observations made on the spot by Amnesty International sources.

Amnesty International holds the conceit that its observers are so Noble and High Minded that there is no way any of their spot reports could reflect any sort or semblance of agenda beyond a Lofty Thinking concern for the well-being of innocents caught in harm's way. This dubious assumption goes unquestioned by those who rely on the same High Minded notions as the fine folk at Amnesty.

The real problem of Amnesty International's critique is the group's failure to consider the culpability attendant upon Hamas' choice of battlefield. Amnesty must be aware, at least dimly, that Hamas acts under the color of government in the Gaza Strip. After all, they shot their way to power fair and square so the best trigger men won the election of blood. This means that Hamas had the responsibility to act in a way which protected the people living under their sway.

This responsibility was not only abdicated, it was tossed in the trash heap. Hamas made no effort to restrain those of its membership or those aligned with other armed factions to fire rockets against Israeli civilian targets. It did nothing to halt or even slow the flow of munitions and weapons to men dedicated to kill Israelis even if they died in the effort.

Beyond that, Hamas elected to place defensive positions in civilian structures. Hamas made the decision to allow the emplacement of offensive missiles in or near mosques, schools (including those operated by the UN) and residential areas. Hamas allowed, even encouraged the intermixing of civilians and armed personnel so as to assure that the IDF would have no option other than the killing of civilians in the effort to neutralise Hamas gun and bomb slingers.

It is quite true that there is an obligation, a duty, laid upon military forces to restrict to the greatest practical extent the harming of unarmed people including wounded combatants as well as non-combatants. There are those within the Legion of the High Minded who argue that a military must be willing to accept higher levels of casualties in order to assure that not a single civilian hair be harmed.

The duty placed upon military commanders and those under their command to refrain from inflicting harm on civilians is balanced by a long recognised duty that the defending forces and government take all necessary measures to protect their non-combatants. While the IDF may have been less, much less than ideally scrupulous in avoiding unnecessary damage and loss of life to civilians, Hamas was even more guilty of having taken no measures to protect those under their authority and, logically, protection.

The record of history is filled with excesses of civilian death during time of war. The days of Frederick the Great who sought to wage war so that neither the peasant in his field or the merchant in his counting house would notice its presence are long gone. Changes in the technology of war are the minor factor in this death of "civilized" or at least, civilian-free war.

The greater responsibility lies with governments. Governments, whether the offender or the defender, have proven increasingly willing to place civilians at the same or even greater risk as the front line grunt.

Hamas has taken this tendency to its logical (albeit criminal) extreme of actively choosing to fight a war in the most heavily populated portion of its mini-state. Hamas made the cynical and cold-blooded decision to assure maximal civilian loss of life and property in the hopes of winning the battle for international sympathy and support. Hamas knowingly and with calculated aforethought sought to place the IDF in a position where it would either have to bear the international onus of killing civilians or lose an unacceptably high number of its own soldiers.

Hamas well understood, indeed, counted upon the unfortunate democratic weakness which afflicts not only Israel but the US and other countries. The political unacceptability of too many body bags.

The US could not accept the number of bags coming home from Vietnam. This lesson was not lost upon others.

It was not lost on countries and pretenders such as Hamas who seek to wage a war of political will against a democratic adversary. Hamas bet its collective butt on the proposition that the IDF would both kill civilians and end the operation before it became or could become conclusive.

Right now, Amnesty International, whether its leadership knows it or not, is willing to acknowledge it or not, is acting according to the Hamas authored script. It is a propaganda arm of an admitted terrorist organisation pretending to the role but not the responsibilities of a legitimate government: Hamas.

What the IDF did with its report was self-justification. What Hamas did to provoke the necessity of the report was frankly criminal. What Amnesty International and others of the High Minded and Lofty Thinking sort are doing is not criminal, but it is facilitating the success of criminals.

It is regrettable that Amnesty International lacks the intelligence necessary to assure that its sentiments are not perverted by a gang of True Believing thugs.

Gott Mit Uns?

For decades the German Army, the army of World War I, the army of the Nazis a generation later, had the words Gott Mit Uns emblazoned on their belt buckles. While the Americans never went that far, the military chaplains down to the present day have had a propensity of assuring the troops that theirs was a war blessed from somewhere On High.

The world is all too terribly aware of the Islamist jihadist's call, "Allahu akbar" as the clicker is pushed or the airplane flown into the building. The Islamist emphasis on killing for Allah plays a deadly counterpoint to the fear of hell which is a major defining feature of all too many sermons and religious instruction.

Comes now incontrovertible evidence that at least some members of the Israeli Defense Forces have joined the ranks of the world's "Holy Warriors," with the expectable ill-effects upon any civilian so unfortunate as to encounter them. Under the stimulus of religiously reactionary members of the rabbinate, the IDF is no longer a purely secular force pursuing nationally defined goals using an ethical base of operations derived from the general Western notions of war.

While it is possible to accurately criticise the Western ethical schemata of war fighting, there are generally observed limits. The intentional targeting of civilians is prohibited by general usage to say nothing of international conventions. The employment of indiscriminate area weapons in built up areas is frowned upon even if not always possible to prevent.

During the early days of its history, the IDF, despite occasional lapses such as those committed during "counter terror" operations by Detachments 101 and 202, fought clean wars. Now those days seem to be long past.

Testimony by combat troops leaked last week concerning operations in Gaza Strip during the recent incursion demonstrates that IDF members went way over the edge in their treatment of unarmed people. It shows that the IDF's on board rabbis from the Chief Rabbi on down encouraged and used religious justification for outrageous behavior by some of the troops.

By experience as well as study the Geek is sensitive to the extreme difficulties found in fighting guerrillas who fight from the cover of civilian structures and bodies. He knows how easily mistakes can be made--and how lethal the mistakes are.

There is a vast gulf between the normal difficulties and concomitant killing errors which are associated with military operations in urban terrain against guerrillas and the notion apparently promulgated by the right wing rabbinate that in waging war against interlopers on "holy soil" restraint is somehow in violation of divine command and will. The former is a brute fact. The latter is the creation of religious zealotry.

The rabbis who argue for "holy" war against "evil" intruders on "God's" land and counsel that "to be merciful to the cruel is finally to be cruel to the merciful" are morally equivalent to those Islamist clerics who issue fatwas authorising the killing of civilians in the name of Allah, the Merciful and Compassionate. Rabbi and mullah are brothers under the skin.

Brothers in enlisting a personal view of the deity in pursuit of a political goal. Brothers in perverting any reasonable understanding of divine compassion, mercy and justice. Brothers in hatred.

If the rabbis and the assorted mullahs, ayatollahs and sheiks really, really believe that JWH or Allah is willing war to the death, then let them fight it out directly. Cut out the middle men. Let the troops and civilians alike stand on the sidelines while the rival clerical gangs duke it out. Why are these assorted and diametrically opposed "Men of God" so willing and eager to see others die? Watch as the middle men slaughter one another? Invoke the blessings on those of their side who kill? Call on the deity to damn those who kill and die on the other side?

Time after time in the bloody history of humanity there is a propensity for the extremes to grow. To squeeze the middle, those who are not afflicted with True Belief, to the point of oblivion.

But, there is always a Thermidor. There is always a time when the long oppressed members of the middle strike back. Reclaim the field for something less than the ideological zeal of the True Believers.

In Iraq the middle struck back by withdrawing even tacit support from the apostles of sectarian violence. In one Islamic country after another, hesitant voices are being raised in opposition to the totalistic and lethal urgings of the Islamist jihadists. Observant Muslims are slowly recognising that not only can they be truly observant without being Islamists, being observant Muslims requires rejecting the exhortations of the death oriented Islamist jihadists.

Now in Israel the secular voices are being raised and heard. Israel will have to suffer one more round in the sporadic debate over the nature and character of the country and the people. If it is to survive as a viable state with international support and understanding, the Israelis will have to argue it out.

The men and women of Israel generally and the IDF in particular will have to determine which they are: A divine miracle. Or a state with national and strategic interests in which the deity does not have a stake.

Across the Mideast and far beyond, Muslims have to go through the same process. Are they a people destined by faith and those who interpret it to be the people of killing and death? Or, are they a people of a faith which celebrates life and all the potentials that go along with being alive?

As Abe Lincoln observed when both North and South claimed divine approval for their cause, both cannot be right but both can be wrong. As the Geek sees it, leave God to the ageless, the time beyond time. History is for people.

Who Should Protect Civilians?

War used to be a simple business. Armies fought each other. The ideal, as expressed by Frederick the Great, was to fight so that "the merchant in his counting house and the farmer in his field didn't know the war was in progress."

"Them were the Good Old Days," the Geek sighs. The long ago, long gone days of limited war.

The American War Between the States pointed at the future. Specifically, Sherman's March to the Sea targeted the civilian population in order to sap the political will of Confederate forces and government alike to continue the war. While the "atrocities" committed by Billy's Bummers were exaggerated at the time as well as by later generations of historians, the fact remains that his strategic concept worked.

Bill Sherman apparently had, in the words of Lincoln Steffens, "been over to the future--and it works."

Appearances can be quite misleading. Therein lies the rub.

Technological changes made the waging of war directly on civilian populations more attractive. It did not, as the results of the "round-the-clock" and "worker dehousing" efforts of the US and British air forces demonstrated, make civilian targeting more effective.

It can be fairly argued from the experiences of both World Wars that in the case of total war of national survival, attacks on civilian populations do not undercut the political will of the targeted country sufficiently to bring victory in their wake. The best avenue to victory is the progressive reduction of the enemy's material capacity to wage war.

A close examination of inter-state war between opponents of equal levels of military technology and parity in social and economic organisational complexity shows that the way to victory is the combination of destroying the enemy's forces in the field and his infrastructure's capacity to maintain the war. Kill his soldiers and ruin his industry.

Since civilians have the annoying habit of littering the potential battlefield with farms, villages and cities, it is hard to avoid killing them in the process of going after gun toters and the factories which make the guns and bullets. As a result several approaches have been undertaken over the years to limit civilian damage and death.

The most commonly invoked of these is the doctrine of proportionality. Much beloved by the tender-minded adherents of "just war" philosophy, this doctrine requires that the level and scope of violence employed must not be disproportionate to the military advantage sought. Of course, this is an exceptionally subjective matter requiring judgments as to the appropriateness of the violence and the nature and value of the military advantage.

Another, far less commonly employed but far more pragmatic approach is that of placing responsibility for the defense and protection of civilians upon the government and military force of the target country. At the very least this requires that a government or an entity seeking to act as a government not emplace its military forces or equipment in a civilian context.

When the North Vietnamese government placed critical military facilities such as air defense missile batteries next to hospitals or deep in civilian population centers, the US government responded with a self-defeating action. LBJ ordered that US forces not attack these facilities. In short, the US took on the responsibility of protecting the civilian population of an enemy country. This wrong headed move allowed the North Vietnamese government to enjoy a significant military advantage by having willfully and deliberately placed its citizens at risk.

The problems associated with limiting civilian fatalities become even more complex in internal warfare (insurgency and its partner, counterinsurgency,) interventionary operations and the general category "asymmetrical warfare." The complications all arise from the fact that in this type of war the critical terrain is that comprised by the collective mind of the civilian population of the target area.

Internal wars, interventionary operations and asymmetrical conflicts can be distinguished from conventional inter-state wars by one critical factor. While conventional wars can be seen as real-estate deals, the internal war and its close relatives cannot. The internal war type is best understood as being a contest for the support--or at least the passive acceptance--of one contestant but not the other.

The key to success (or victory if you prefer the more robust term)is the attitude of the uncommitted majority of the target area's population. Each contender in the war wants to assure at the least that the uncommitted majority does not migrate to the other side. At the most each side wants to mobilize a greater percentage of the uncommitted majority to his side.

Far more than conventional inter-state wars, the internal war and its relatives constitutes a fight over human terrain. The civilian is the target. Even when one is busy killing enemy trigger pullers, the overarching goal is to rally support to one's side, or, at the necessary very least, prevent the enemy from gaining greater sympathy and active support from the people in the middle.

As a result of this fundamental reality both sides in an internal war will intentionally target civilians with lethal intent. Insurgents use terror. Counterinsurgents use it as well. Interventionary forces may not go after the folks in the middle with intent, but bombs, shells, bullets hit flesh without distinction.

It is (or should be) no big shock that civilians are at great risk. A very close look at civilian deaths resulting as a direct consequence of military actions in World War II shows that somewhat more died than did soldiers.

The disparity between military and civilian deaths resulting from either military actions or the lethal consequences of deliberate policy is orders of magnitude greater in the internal war. The historical record of internal and interventionary warfare in the 20th and (so far) in the 21st centuries demonstrates that one is far safer to be a shooter in the field than a civilian in the local market, a gunship pilot than an elementary school teacher.

In short, the doctrine of proportionality is as dead as Fredrick the Great's formulation.

There are two reasons for this conclusion. The first has already been laid out. The second is just as important and nearly never formally recognised. In every internal war and in many, if not most interventionary operations, the war is existential.

At the end of the war, only one side will still be standing in somewhat recognisable form. Unless and until a climate of pervasive war weariness sets in, the belligerents wil pursue total victory. Insurgent and counterinsurgent are joined at the hip in that each holds the same idea: victory or death. Internal war is total war.

With stakes this high and the collective mind of the uncommitted civilian majority being the crucial battleground, it should be not at all surprising that civilians are killed in job lots. That's the nature of this kind of war whether anyone likes the idea or not.

Here's the wrinkle. It's one which will tickle the innards of anyone who delights in irony.

Civilians do not like to get killed whether its in the crossfire or by deliberate intent. Also, civilians hate (that term is used advisedly) the side which kills them and not the government or governmental wannabe which fails to protect them.

(This not hard to understand dynamic explains why German and Japanese political will and dedication to the government increased as the weight of Allied bombs increased.)

This fact suggests two important strategic and tactical considerations. The first is that one's chances of victory increase if the responsibility for civilian deaths and general misery can be foisted off on the other side. The second is that few, if any, of the many, many belligerents in the many, many internal wars of the past century have recognised this.

Sherman's brilliant (and it was that, brilliant) strategic concept arose organically from the nature and character of social and familial dynamics in the Confederate states. It was brilliant in that time and place. It was not a universally applicable sovereign recipe for victory.

Ironically, the side which kills the fewest is the side which is most likely to gain support from the uncommitted majority. It is the side most likely to win.

This implies two tactical considerations must be observed. The first is to limit the killing be it advertant or accidental of civilians. That is self-evident. The second consideration is less obvious. It is important that the enemy be frustrated to the extent that he starts killing civilians in an attempt to terrorise his way to greater support and therefore victory.

In Iraq the insurgents of all stripes were forced by the results of the American escalation of ground troops to resort to terror tactics with a very large and highly visible body count. The more the insurgents killed the more actual and potential support they lost. Conversely, when the Americans got better at using their overwhelming firepower in a discriminating way, the more the uncommitted drifted to the government side.

The same dynamic has been evident in Afghanistan. A couple of years ago Taliban shifted from failed attacks on hard targets to a series of very high-vis soft target suicide bombings which caused significant civilian casualties. This was a misguided attempt to undercut the perceived legitimacy of the Karzai government.

As a consequence (clearly unintended by Taliban but quite predictable from the historical experience) civilians rushed to the Karzai government and its foreign supporters. Unfortunately, the US ended the campaign by killing its director.

Following this, a series of American airstrikes created a number of civilian corpses. The consequence (unintended by the American commanders but again drearily predictable from the historically informed) was a swell of hostility directed at Karzai and his foreign supporters.

In Sri Lanka the process is again at work. For at least the fifth time the government seems on the verge of victory against the remarkably persistent and come-back-from-the-grave Tamil Tiger insurgency. The Tigers are confined to a very small portion of Sri Lanka. The Tigers have resorted to forcing civilians to stay in harm's way as a species of human shield.

The government has decreed the existence of a "safety zone" in which fugitive Tamils can seek sanctuary. The Tigers have responded by killing civilians who attempt to reach the sanctuary area.

While the Sri Lankan government and its military on a few occasions shelled the "safety zone," the primary onus for responsibility has been correctly placed on the Tigers. The current trajectory bodes well to produce peace in Sri Lanka for the first time in more than twenty years.

Unless...

Unless outsiders huff and puff too much. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay is bloviating at length alleging that the Sri Lankan government as well as the Tigers are possibly guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The government has vigorously denied this accusation. The Tigers remain silent.

Perhaps the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights feels underemployed given that there are so few governments and non-governmental actors currently abusing human rights today. In any event the war in Sri Lanka will come to an end sooner if the government is allowed to continue its (at long last) successful campaign against the Tigers. It will come to an end sooner if the tail of civilian deaths is pinned on the Tiger.

If Ms Pillay doesn't get over her snit with counterinsurgency Sri Lankan style, a bad potential comes into view. The UN and its High Minded Lofty Thinking cohorts may come to believe that it is their exclusive mission to "protect" civilians wherever an internal war exists.

By its very nature internal war requires civilian death and wretchedness. The limiting factor to this unfortunate reality is defined by the ending of the war. Period. The faster the war comes to an end the fewer civilians will die. The quicker the war ends the fewer will be the number of displaced persons, refugees huddling in miserable camps operated and maintained by the High Minded.

An internal war will end most quickly when one side recognises that it is necessary to intentionally limit death and misery. It will end most quickly when one side understands the necessity of maneuvering its opposition into having responsibility for death and displacement among the uncommitted majority.

Outsiders including the UN have a role to play in limiting civilian deaths. It is incumbent upon the international community generally and any intervenors in the war more particularly to insist that the governmental entities have sole responsibility for protecting civilians under its sway.

The test case for this contention is the Gaza Strip. So far the outsiders of the world have failed the test. The responsibility for protecting the civilian population of the Strip resides solely with Hamas.

Hamas is the de facto government of Gaza. It has a minimal obligation to protect its population. At the absolute least Hamas must refrain from co-locating offensive weaponry with mosques, schools and hospitals. As the imagery demonstrates beyond any rational, reasonable doubt, Hamas has failed completely in this duty.

Hamas gun thugs and rocket shooters placed themselves and their lethal equipment in the midst of civilian heavy locations. They employed human shields in the most crass and cynical manner. Hamas was even worse than the Tamil Tigers in that regard.

Now the ever-so-indignant-and-concerned High Commissioner and her human rights coterie seem hell-bent on performing a replay in Sri Lanka. When will the ambitious High Commissioner seek to do the same in Afghanistan? Iraq?

One hopes the answer is "never." The alternative, the involvement, the threats of prosecution in the International Criminal Court will be counterproductive. Ironically, (and the Geek loves the taste of irony almost as much as chocolate) the consequence of any High Minded involvement will be to prolong the war and increase the net amount of human misery and death.

Internal war has its own logic--a grim and terrible logic to be sure--and we must all get a grip on that. That requires that we accept the necessity of civilian death and seek to limit the number of corpses using the logic of internal war itself. That implies we must both recognise and use the right tactics. Not kill civilians. Place the onus for civilian deaths on the opposition. Insist that governments and insurgent entities with de facto control of an area take the sole responsibility for protecting the population.

The logic of internal war correctly fought and not the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights or the International Criminal Court or the High Minded generally are the last, best hope of the people caught in the middle.