The Israel-Hamas War and the Suicide Strategy: How Arab Forces Expect to Launch Losing Wars and Still Win
One of the most important things to understand about how the Middle East works is what I’ll call the suicide strategy. It can be described as follows:
I will start a war that I cannot win in order to create a situation where the other side wrecks my infrastructure and kills my people. Then I will lose militarily but win the battle. How? By the following means:
– I’ll kill some people on the other side and do some damage to it. Since they are weaker and less brave than I am, they will give up. The longer the war, the more likely they are to look for a way out even if that involves many concessions on their part. Using terrorism against their civilians reinforces this tactic.
– By suffering, and magnifying that suffering using a generally sympathetic Western media, I will make the other side feel sorry for me and oppose their own leaders who will be portrayed as bullying, bloodthirsty, and imperialistic.
– The specter of war, suffering, and especially civilian casualties will drive the “international community” to press my adversaries to give in, stop fighting (even if I continue it on a lower level), let me survive, and even give me benefits.
That’s how you stage a losing war but end up the winner.
This strategy has often worked against a Western adversary or Israel. It won’t work against fellow Arabs or Iran because those forces couldn’t care less how much damage and how many civilian casualties they inflict. Their mass media are under a large element of state control and they are not responsive to public opinion.
Hamas is now using this approach in the current war against Israel, though less effectively than in previous circumstances. True, it is getting some in the West to blast Israel as using excessive force or force at all.
Certainly, it protects Hamas from being overthrown altogether, which is the only real solution to the problem. But as long as Israel doesn’t win too big, the West is ready to tolerate the current level of fighting.
And that’s the signal for Hamas to double down. Israel wants a ceasefire; Hamas doesn’t. Even the New York Times will tell you that:
“Hamas, badly outgunned on the battlefield, appeared to be trying to exploit its increased political clout with its ideological allies in Egypt’s new Islamist-led government. The group’s leaders, rejecting Israel’s call for an immediate end to the rocket attacks, have instead laid down sweeping demands that would put Hamas in a stronger position than when the conflict began: an end to Israel’s five-year-old embargo of the Gaza Strip, a pledge by Israel not to attack again and multinational guarantees that Israel would abide by its commitments.”
In other words, Hamas is demanding that in the future it can import whatever it wants and will have the right to attack Israel without retaliation. Note that the first demand isn’t even necessary for Hamas. After all, it can now get almost everything it wants through the Egyptian-Gaza border. So this list of items is just designed as an excuse to keep the fighting going.
Now it is not usual for the losing side in world history to want the war to end. But in the Middle East, and with the entry of political and diplomatic considerations, plus the factor of public relations, these rules have been changed. The world has taught Hamas—and not just Hamas–that the more aggressive you are, the more terrorism you use, the better you will do, up to a point, internationally and the more antagonism is stirred up against Israel.
Yet as I said above, this tactic is not working so well in this case. There are several reasons why this is so:
– In contrast to some past situations (1982 war in Lebanon) there is a very high level of support in Israel for the current operation and in contrast to others (2006 war in Lebanon) there’s a sense that the army is doing a good job. Incidentally, this war has nothing to do with Israel’s January 22 election and won’t have any major effect on it.
Remember that quaint old Peter Sellers movie “The Mouse that Roared”? Of course the Grand Duchy of Fenwick was just in it for the money; Hamas can hardly be described as quaint.
A classic.
Why shouldn’t Israel simply bomb Gaza’s military into oblivion and actually win the war?
Surely we know the Palastinians will never compromise and negotiations are futile. Heck, we knew that at least a decade ago, if not longer.
The Israelis are hated no matter what they do, why not finish the job?
I know you say world opinion is keeping them from doing it, but I don’t see why. It’s their problem, they surely have the means to solve it. I’d say they should. Being “moderate” is stupid, because all it gets them is attacks.
D
This is Hamas-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=DwtRd3ZCNBs
What a radical idea, actually fighting a war to win!
A lot of what has gone wrong recently with Western foreign policy is that our governments seem to no longer even try to win wars that they start.
How can you win a war when the problem pops up again as soon as you leave? What did the last invasion of Gaza accomplish in real terms? Nothing.
The only way to win is drive the Arabs out of Gaza and the West Bank, killing all who resist. Then annex these lands, and resettle them with Israelis.
The Arabs have proven repeatedly that they will not negotiate in good faith and that they have genocidal intentions. Expulsion is all that remains.
You are correct and I applaud you for your honesty. The real problem is that Israel seeks to neutralize the enemy and you can’t win a war by neutralizing those who seek to kill you.
Operation Cast Lead did not entirely fail. In fact, it put Hamas and its cronies out of commission for about two years. During that time, we were far more secure in the south of the country. Terror attacks, though by no means eradicated, also decreased (significantly). So we did gain something. Furthermore, it allowed us to test out weaponry while learning more about how Hamas’ military worked. You can see, in this latest round of reprisals, how much more sophisticated and powerful we have become. And, not the least of factors, our public relations and diplomatic efforts have succeeded in greatly enhancing our position.
Our leaders are more terrified of Washington and the general international community, than they are of our enemies. This is why the war hasn’t been won.
But make no mistake. They are taking care of business, but mostly because Tel Aviv is in play.
Please see this report for further edification – http://adinakutnicki.com/2012/11/19/hamasnick-terror-chiefs-dropping-like-flies-idfiaf-on-the-hunt-faster-faster-commentary-by-adina-kutnicki/
Because, unlike actual militaries, Hamas’ guys aren’t uniformed, don’t have separate bases, etc.
To do as you suggest would require burning down the entire Gaza Strip. Not that it may not come to that, in the end…
A billion dollars spent on supporting Iranian dissidents might save a billion lives.
“That’s how you stage a losing war but end up the winner.”
Barry, you neglected a major consideration. Irrespective of the damage resulting from the response to their own aggression, after the guns fall silent the “useful idiots” of the West – usually led by the United States – will organize a donors conference to raise money to reconstruct Gaza. The rich Arab countries will make pledges to show “solidarity” with their Arab brethren, but rarely fulfill them. The US and the EU will fill in the gap. So in the end Gaza will be made whole, removing any disincentive to future aggression.
The Saudis and the Gulf states love to pledge billions, but in the end, they rarely deliver more than a fraction of that. What money does get sent to rebuild Gaza flows through the same corrupt hands that rule the territory. The rich and ruthless get richer and more ruthless. The poor and desperate get nothing. That’s how it has worked for 60 years.
You have answered the question that you posed to Rubin, namely how the enemy can win by losing. If the loss does not mean unconditional capituation as in WW II, then military activity (missles) has a demoralizing effect upon the enemy, causes civilian damage to one’s own people–>>sympathy abroad and establishes one’s own control by shutting out any opposition (and silencing Abbas). Already today the “Frankfurter Allgemeine”, an important center-right newspaper here in Germany, is pushing the thesis that Israel needs “a strong Hamas” in order to ensure the peace and that is the “only” means. Beat Hamas is thereby ruled out and Israeli military activities appears to be counterproductive. If Hamas can induce Europe and America to place permanent limits on the use of Israeli military force, then Hamas has, by means of a tear-jerker loss, won the battle, i.e., has blocked the use of military means by Israel in the future.
Is this not the strategy of victimization? “If one can not succeed at success one can always succeed at failure. One does not end up with much, except they can claim victory.’ Romney underestimated the 47%.
Perhaps they need the Prozac bomb. Mental health seems to be in short supply when self-destruction is demanded.
I think Hamas doesn’t need a rational plan to get from fighting to victory any more than the Pope needs a rational plan to get from praying to heaven. The missing steps are required elements of faith, they can not be questioned.
Besides they can redefine victory as “doing God’s will” or even “getting revenge”. Or “promoting jihad”
Convincing Hamas that peace is in their interest would be like convincing the catholic church that it should just let priests have gay sex – even if they’re already doing it, they’re not going to ever say it’s officially acceptable policy.
There will be war as long as Israel allows it. Once Israel has decided not to offer its citizens as human sacrifices to the unappeasable god of world opinion, it will choose the alternative selected by the Allies in World War 2: defeating the enemy; victory in the form of unconditional surrender by the enemy. Anything less will prolong the bloodshed.
Surak, if they haven’t done that by now, they’re not going to.
Israel’s method is to play it soft whether the world appreciates it or not.
Hamas assumed that the U.S. would act. But the Ditherer-in-Chief whipped over to East Asia–as far as he could get from the problem and any demands that he make a decision about the Middle East. So things will continue on in the Gaza Strip, just as they continue on in Syria, with no one, except for Israel, doing anything. In fact, this is the best solution to the Middle East problem. Let the Arabs bicker among themselves and they will be as effective as they usually are–which is not at all. If the Palestinian people suffer enough for long enough under their own leaders, maybe they will get tired of the war rhetoric and missile lobbing and settle back to making a living rather than making war, like other ordinary people around the world. True, Israel will have to stay on alert, but as long as the Israelis are patient and wait the Palestinians out, they will win.
The Assad regime today condemned Israel’s actions today…How’s that for delicious irony. Do Arabs not see the enormous double standard here? Does the Western press not see this? Assad has killed more of his own people in the past year than Israel has killed in decades of conflicts (conflicts that attracted global attention, outrage, UN resolutions, condemnations etc…) It doesn’t bother them that the west expects so little of them. It is expected and accepted that muslims will slaughter their own, blow up mosques and schools, use indescriminate weapons and tactics. Maybe Israel should announce that they will adopt Assad tactics for Gaza since no one in the west seemed to care too much about it in Syria.
It is Bush’s fault. Or perhaps King David and the Philistines. That blood soaked land reeks of slaughter, what is new? Why now? What did some killers see that the world misses?
There are several new developments, which Hamas can exploit. The US lost an Ambassador in Libya to killers, and the only consequence are screaming matches among Americans. One side claimed it was due to an insulting video, instead of a conquest by hundreds of heavily armed warriors. They won an election, with Jewish support. Maybe if you kill a small number of innocents in his ally’s nation, Obama will order Israel to knuckle under to your demands. Down the road, your ally, Iran, is getting near a fission bomb, and they vow to explode it in Israel. When victory looks good, it is best to be active in the fight. Moreover, Hamas’ ally, Syria, falls deeper into civil war. As a classical unifying polity, Syria will attack your enemy Israel from the north. There is no better time for a second front.
It takes two sides, both of which truly want peace to achieve progress. I see no sign that the slaughter will stop. Murder will continue.
I pray for peace in Jerusalem.
Give the arab press a break. They have a tough job. Anyone can see that Israel is pounding the snot out of Hamas while very few of the best weapons that Hamas has to offer are even hitting anything. Israel is walking all over this.
So first you show only civilian casualties and rubble. Never admit to any military targets getting hit except for “assasinations”. If you cant find actual bloody children any photo from the internet such as a Syrian one will do and we saw an example of a BBC reporter doing that today.
Then you make the most outlandish claims possible. The Arab public and lefty west will believe anything. Thus far Hamas claims that Israel is losing badly and suing for peace. They also claim to have shot down an F-16 and that Israeli cities are “in flames”.
Israelis are overly sensitive to world opinion and Hamas knows this so they take advantage knowing that time is on their side in that game. They are doing this now when Israel should have already moved to the next stage.
In the longer run at least some of these guys know that they are lying. They know that Iron Dome has rendered their primary military strategy – missiles targeting Israeli cities – near useless. They can never hope to assemble a credible conventional army the way Mao or Giap did.
FETEKE (find em, torture em, kill em) was an effective Bush era strategy. Things change. Islam is a cancer. To cure a cancer, you must extirperate it by radically cutting it out, poisoning it with noxious chemicals or burning it with high intensity radiation. The world is experiencing the festering malignancy of Islam, Palestinian style.. Time for an an aggressive therapeutic initiative. If a missile launch site is in a mosque, hospital or school……..erase it, condolence card to follow. If they sincerely desire their child become a martyr, accomodate them. Unless the world wishes to regress back into the eigth century, and be subjugated by the cretins espousing the joys of Islam, now is the time to act.
Cancer analogy is helpful in this situation. Every cancer fighting doc, I am one, still knows that our best tools, even the diagnostic ones, carry significant risk to the patient. The analogy breaks down here when you begin to define whom is the Patient and what exactly is the disease. Each situation is individual and relies on an approach tailored to that particular case. Best approaches are multidisciplinary where risks and balances can get to a consensus about what is next.
So from my point of view Israel is the patient and Hamas is the disease. Now what?
It looks like Hamas is not ready to throw in the towel and talk about defeat. They are busy throwing out stories about how Israel is now begging for peace having been shocked by the amazing success of the Hamas defense. It is a total fabrication but will be sucked up by anyone who wants to hear it.
I would not worry so much now about opinion. Get the nidus and disease will dissipate. There is only military approach now. Current pause is a mistake. The few days lost were the most important ones.
The Israelis should just set up conventional artillery, the kind that uses good old fashioned gun powder to lob a several thousand pound shell 20 miles or so. Then every time a rocket flies into their country, fire an artillery shell in the general direction the rocket came from. 1 for 1. The terrorists need to know that every time a rocket goes flying out, a shell comes flying back in. Much cheaper and more effective than stuff like iron dome. After awhile, how many civilians in the Gaza strip are going to tolerate a bunch of militants setting up a launch pad in their neighborhood when they know that the shell sure to come in response may well destroy their house or kill their family? Get the Palestinians to suppress their own Jihadis, and if they don’t at least rest comfortably knowing that a lot more of them are dying than of you.
You know that is not going to happen.
Israel will not do that. Troops now from Israel waiting to fight other troops from Hamas et al. Maybe my prognostic abilities are limited but I think, hamas thinks, send them in…we can play this over next few days and force a settlement to restore a quick ceasefire like you guys did in Jerusalem in ’47. Then rearm and plan.
Hamas owns Gaza and nothing else. They do have that. They overreached this time.
Also, that approach assumes that Hamas, or Islam in general, cares about casualties.
News flash; They don’t. Look up the definition of “martyr” in a dictionary.
You cannot use death as a threat against those who embrace it. I would have thought the West, or at least the United States, would have learned that basic lesson in the Pacific Campaign. (Google “Kamikaze”.)
The only way to beat someone with that mentality at their own game is not “measured escalation” or “one for one” or even “shoot at us and we decimate your cities”. (Meaning “kill one-tenth of the population of”- see “Roman Legion Operating Procedures”.)
The only viable option is Dresden. And Berlin. And Hamburg. And Tokyo. And oh yes, the two whose Names May Not Be Spoken. Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
They will stop when they have no weapons left, no way to make or acquire more, and no one left to pull a trigger, launch a missile, or set off a suicide bomb. It’s that simple.
They are committed to Total War in the name of Jihad. It’s about time we took them seriously.
“Thousand-plane raid”- level seriously, in fact. Or the modern equivalent thereof.
We do have one, don’t we?
clear ether
eon
Thanks for the giggle. The IDF uses the M109 SPA ( Self Propelled Artillery). It is an early cold war design (50+ years) that fires a 155mm (6 inches or so). The shell it fires weighs about 100 pounds, IIRC. I think the Filler is about 28 pounds of a TRX compound. The IDF has several brigades I think. They are being replaced in the US Army. Tube arty is pretty much dead.
You can buy one for around 300K, which is just a tad less then I paid for my LFA. I get slightly better milage.
A thousand pounds is a bomb, dropped by aircraft.
Every muslim woman killed cannot create terrorists of the future, and every child killed is a potential terrorist. If Hamas is so cowardly as to hide behind women and children, se la vi.
I would like Western countries to name a single first world country that would tolerate being targeted with rockets and mortars, month after month, by a neighboring territory and not respond with force and destroy the rockets.
The United States of Obama. See “Benghazi”, “Operation Fast & Furious”, etc.
Our present Fearless Leader would immediately blame us, and ask the attackers what we could to to make amends. It’s as much a reflex as breathing, with him.
And our “enlightened elite’” would be demanding he bow even lower. In the name of “multicultural understanding”.
Reality is not going to set in anytime soon with this lot.
clear ether
eon
The NY TImes is as usual publishing their anti-Israel diet.
The NYT and the UN should actually be forcibly moved to the Gaza strip so they can show their support for the victims of Zionism. And while you’re at it take Jimmah Carah with you too.
What must stop is the Zionazi genocide of the Palestinians. If it does all of the Middle East will be at peace. The West Bank is the Warsaw Ghetto of our time. It’s such a sad irony that the decendants of yesteryear’s victims of corporate genocide are conductiong atraocities that dwarf those suffered by their ancestors. If the the Zionazi “final solution” to the world’s Muslims is stopped peace will blossom.
It’s such a shame too. Israel, once the land of the Kibbutim has succumbed to the temptations of imperialism and corporate greed imported from the great fountainhead of genocide and racism called the United States. All that really needs to happen for peace is that Israel needs to tell Lockheed, General Dynamics and the rest of the American corpoarchy to shove it and embrace the values of the Kibbitzum and all Middle Eastern warfare and terrorism will cease.
First of all, it’s “kibbutzim”.
Secondly, embracing agrarian socialism will do nothing to alleviate the actual problem. That being that Islamic states are based on the “Attack everyone else to avoid admitting how disastrously stupid and primitive our own culture is” and “Everyone not of the Faithful must submit or die” principles.
Islam’s war against everybody else on Earth predates 1948- by several centuries. The argument you put forward is inconsistent with actual history.
“Blaming the victim(s)” is a standard gambit of those unwilling to face facts, or unable to grasp them intellectually.
clear ether
eon
It looked like a parody to me, but I certainly could be wrong since it’s so hard to tell the parody from the real thing these days.
‘Peace of the grave’. Or maybe ‘Make a desert and call it peace’. Arabs could have peace with Israel when ever they want it.
What does it take to get through the thick skulls of bigots like you that What the Arabs want is genocide. Or maybe you already know that. Maybe you share goals with the Arabs?
It ain’t gonna happen. If there is any genocide to be done, the USA will do it. I suspect it will be my grandchildren. They will get tired of being ‘waterboarded’ by terrorism. The constant drip, drip, drip of blood from relentless terrorist attacks will push them to the point where killing them all and letting Allah sort through the bodies is Plan A. When that happens, it will be your fault. By preventing effective responses, you are making genocide inevitable.
“I say we pull out and nuke ‘em from orbit. It’s the only way to make sure.”
- FO Ripley.
That read like a child’s essay from out of Zayzafuna magazine. All that really needs to happen for peace is to advance the Iron Dome system and support home command so they can do their job.
Too bad nobody studies history. This is how Islam has spread since The Prophet was leading them.
Raid your non-believer neighbors. Kill, rape, and enslave some of them and break their stuff. Hunker down and survive their counter-attacks, repeat as necessary until their resolve is weakened. Normal civilized Judeo-Christian nations will fight back but they won’t commit the genocide necessary to make it stop. (Too bad the armies of Islam never met the per-Christian Romans)
Keep it up all the way across North Africa and into Spain. The Spanish finally realized it was “us or them” and set about expelling or killing them all.