Latest Parries
December 2012
Some Consumer Affairs
I’ve tried to enjoy schlepping water, thinking that it serves to keep us to some human roots.
April 2012
From Nokia N95 to iPhone 4S
Annoyances and upsets with the iPhone 4S have been more than offset by its screen, the silkiness of its surfaces, the camera, and the third-party market for both software and hardware.
February 2012
2001: A Space Odyssey: Dry, Juicy, Linear, Luminous
After they finished watching the Bond movies, I figured the next series John Gruber and Dan Benjamin would discuss on The Talk Show would be Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre. But Gruber refused — too personal for podcasting, he said. Disappointed, I rewatched 2001.
January 2012
A Scheme of a Number of Friends
Instead of acknowledging the wisdom of leading from behind, the Right jumped on the Obama administration’s handling of Libya as yet another example of at best incompetence. They lost me there.
October 2011
The Mouse and the Cantilever
Steve Jobs we lost at the age of 56; when Frank Lloyd Wright reached that age it was still only 1923, the time of merely his second comeback with Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel.
March 2010
Friendship is for Weenies
It’s amazing, given the adulation he enjoyed elsewhere, that the Israeli public knew from the start not to trust this US President.
Before the Setup
Nobody from usesthis.com has asked me what my setup us, nor is likely to anytime soon. So I’m just going to mouth off here about it. But first, some background.
February 2010
Walter Russell Mead steps gingerly into the Wieseltier/Sullivan imbroglio
On the Leon Wieseltier/Andrew Sullivan spat, Walter Russell Mead seems to want to have his strudel and eat it too.
October 2009
My Hope: Obama’s Change
Defeat in the Olympics bid may focus the mind in the Oval Office where it should be: Afghanistan.
July 2009
At Modi’in Mall
There’s nothing else around here except empty desolate pretty hills. The Israel Trail passes by a bit to the west. It’s a hot July Wednesday morning. Things are reasonably busy. The shops are mostly franchises, almost all homegrown — Super-Pharm, Aroma, Tzomet Sfarim, Cup O’ Joe’s, LaMetayel, Mega, Fox, Castro, H&O.
I srael’s stated goal in the assault on Hamas — to provide peace and quiet for the country’s south — disturbs me because it’s a political not a military goal. How is quiet to be defined? Quiet like Israel’s north, where Hizballah has tens of thousands of little missiles pointing at the country that could be unleashed at any moment? Or quiet like Middlesex, on nobody’s radar screen? That is to say, is the goal of this assault to discourage Hamas from firing rockets, or is it to render Hamas incapable of firing rockets? These are two very different projects, yet we are hearing about both from the government, which suggests that the government isn’t quite sure.
In the more limited scenario, that is, if the military objective is to reinstate deterrence, then Israel could have stopped after the first two shocking days, before the international community had a chance to scramble back to its usual narrative configuration (images of wide-eyed Palestinian rock-throwing schoolchildren juxtaposed with faceless Israeli tanks, etc). The punishment met out would have served as a sufficiently ample invitation to Hamas to reconsider its rocket-firing habit.
If however the objective is to remove the threat, then the only way to do so is to uproot Hamas completely, which seems infeasible. Even if the IDF were to storm Gaza, conquer it, capture and imprison the Hamas leadership and invite the Palestinian Authority back in to govern, there would still be dozens of splinter cells able and willing to fire rockets.
In short, the only feasible military objective, it seems to me, is to inflict some harsher punishment on Hamas for the rocket-firing than merely closing the border (which, to my mind, is not punishment anyway but rather an appropriate situation between hostile parties). Such punishment was achieved in the first two shocking days.
So Israel should already have stopped in order to observe and reassess. There’s no need to discuss a negotiated ceasefire nor wait as the international pressure mounts. Stop yesterday. And if the rockets nonetheless continue, resume tomorrow.
PS – The only way for the larger project to be viable, it seems to me, is if it’s in partnership with Egypt — that is to say, if Israel and Egypt have made a deal that if Israel degrades Hamas sufficiently, Egypt will step in and effectively govern Gaza.
Mubarak has alluded to this, as has been reported extensively, by saying that he’ll only open Egypt’s border with Gaza once the Palestinian Authority is back in power. Such an arrangement seems to me an appropriate long-term strategic political goal, but at this stage it seems merely a fantasy.
Update: Herb Keinon, chief diplomatic correspondent for The Jerusalem Post, argues in “The Gaza operation’s unstated goal: Anarchy” that Israel is pursuing a third way, a middle way: degrade Hamas’s ability to govern sufficiently so that it loses control of Gaza. This seems a very flimsy war aim and ultimately implausible.
Sat 3 Jan ’09 @ 2:08amAdam
In contrast to Glick, Both Bret Stephens and David Horowitz, two sensible more-or-less centrists, believe that Israel’s goal is in fact the maximalist version, to disable rather than to discourage, and that this time she must, can and will be ready to see it through.
Sun 4 Jan ’09 @ 1:38amAdam
Today, as the ground incursion commences, Herb Keinon’s analysis now seems more plausible: If Hamas is taken out, there will be anarchy. Only two powers will be able to fill the vacuum: Israel and Egypt. Israel will already be in there and will be hoping that Egypt will join them and gradually take over.
Sun 4 Jan ’09 @ 1:51amAdam
More corroboration that my point is not so daft: Former national security adviser and former head of the IDF’s Planning and Operation branches Giora Eiland says, “If the idea is to deter attacks, then you don’t need a ground operation. If, however, you want to destroy Hamas’s ability to fire rockets, then you need to invade Gaza. The problem here is that the political establishment has not decided which course it wants to follow.”
Mon 5 Jan ’09 @ 12:31amAdam
Michael B. Oren asks the same question in “Back to the Front”:
“I can still wonder what, exactly, Israeli leaders hope to achieve by this incursion. Is it the uprooting of Hamas and Gaza’s transfer to a third party (Egypt?) pending its return to the Palestinian Authority? Or is it merely an enhanced status quo ante in which Hamas fires no missiles and, in return, receives unfettered supplies?”
Mon 5 Jan ’09 @ 12:51amAdam Khan
Also, Yossi Klein-Halevi
Wed 7 Jan ’09 @ 12:41amAdam
David Brooks weighs in and absolutely gets it. I think he and Spengler are my most valuable columnists.
Sun 20 Sep ’09 @ 1:46pmAdam
Well, some 9 months later I return here to comment because I’ve sometimes idly wondered how successfully I got it, and how successfully others did. What has actually happened in reality is that the war was pretty much a complete success, to the point that it has led people to write that Olmert, despite the scandals, will be remembered as a good prime minister.
it ended up that the goal was indeed some middle ground: not quite to disable but neither to merely discourage but more accurately to severely discourage.
I am impressed. Despite the international diplomatic pressure on Israel not to respond to attacks, respond it does. Just thinking, that is the great advantage of being constantly vilified in world forums. That which does not destroy me makes me stronger. Vilification in polite society does worry Israel but does not stop it from doing what’s necessary, made even easier if you can digest the unappetizing idea that you will be vilified regardless.
Sderot is safe. Sovereignty and integrity is restored. Congratulations. If it was a muddle through, that just demonstrates that muddling through is often the best way to proceed.
Previously
Short-circuiting Place-based Longing
Nextly
Panning for MacBook Pro
Caroline Glick says today more or less the same thing as I did, albeit more caustically and more fleshed out, in “Hamas’s march to victory”.