If “someone else” is supposed to enforce a cease fire in Gaza then it should be made in their best interests to do so, rather than them making an empty feel-good gesture.

So the “someone else” should have bombs embedded in their capital city, and every time a rocket from Gaza hits Israel, the Israelis can push a button and set off one of the bombs in the Someone Else city.

As I observed some time back, our military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan have no shortage of Audie Murpheys, Alvin Yorks, Dick Bongs, and Butch O’Hares, but the same is not true of the political leadership. And as Wretchard observed in response, that is because the political leadership does not suffer the consequences of their actions but the military does.

And put a few bombs in U.N. HQ, too.

I hear you, but I would like to offer what I think is a more accurate view…

1) Propaganda from extremists would have you believe that a large fraction of every day muslims are eager to die for the cause. The events of the last ten years though have proven that this is false. Only a very *small* number of believers are willing to be a martyr (suicide bomber or fighter). However a very *large* number of believers are happy to support the willing-to-be-martyrs in exchange for avoiding death themselves. The palestinian tribes seem to have a higher number of willing martyrs than anyone else but it is still a relatively small number. So the use of deterrence is possible. Yes, some new recruits will result from accidents (collateral damage) but not as many as are eliminated by direct action (kinetic ops)…especially since the Israelis have become very good at avoiding accidental kills.

2) You seem not to understand the military use of the term “deterrence”. Deterrence is the use of a threat to convince a party to modify their future behavior. For something to be a deterrent it must cause the counterparty to choose to modify their own behavior. Your example (killing a person deters them) is not correct since the person killed has not chosen to modify their future behavior. Deterrence is a precise variation of the broader term “coercion”.

3) Deterrence is not aimed at the committed. The fighters/martyrs generally have to either be ordered to stop (by their own authorities) or killed (by counterterrorist forces; pick your flavor).

4) Deterrence is aimed at the uncommitted: the supporting population (who may be believers) who do not wish to die. The largest deterrence is threat of death but threat of privation can also have a large effect.

5) Deterrence relies on a willingness to actually deliver the threatened force…i.e. there has to be a real threat.

Analysis:
Threat of privation in Gaza would probably be ineffective given that they seem to be willing to put up with quite a bit due to their own efforts let alone external pressures.
Your proposal to warn people in advance of returning fire is not an example of deterrence but of waste…there would be no real threat (due to the warning) and thus no reason for people to modify behavior.
How much retaliatory fire to return 1:1, 1:20, 1:whatever would have to be determined by the Israelis based on observation. Returning one rocket would likely have little impact on behavior since it would represent little real threat (no worse than the odds of being struck by lightning maybe). The right number would likely be something where the perceived threat of counterfire was higher than the perceived threat from the local gangs. Unfortunately in Gaza that would probably take an extreme amount due to the following paragraph…
What makes (IMHO) the West Bank/Gaza problem intractable is that the terror groups are not significantly supported by the population. They are supported emotionally and by direct action of course but the real sources of money, medical care, food, weapons, etc are all outside of the territories. That makes it very difficult for the population to effectively withdraw support. The terror groups get their key supplies from elsewhere so they could continue to coerce/kill/etc internally for an extended period thereby breaking the will of the population and retaining control. It also means that the fighting groups do not actually need local support as much as they need local neutrality. As a palestinian you are basically screwed.
What outside groups maintain this hellhole for the palestinian people? Mainly the EU, with some help from the surrounding Arab nations and Iran.

I doubt the situation can be resolved without classic counterinsurgency tactics. That means that basic society must be supported directly (security, food, medical, etc) by someone so that the population is *able* to effectively withdraw support. Security is the most important (whether they would like to or not the population currently is not *able* to withdraw support from the terror groups). At the same time kinetic action against the terror groups would have to continue and the action (kinetic or other) would have to be carried against their external supporters to coerce them into cutting off that support.

Israel knows this but is unwilling to be that “someone” so they instead try to fight a war of attrition with the actual fighters themselves. This is ultimately at best a stalemate but it appears the Israelis feel the stalemate is less expensive than a full-on counterinsurgency would be.

We (America) learned this in Vietnam negatively (where we failed to either support the population or carry effective action against the supporters), in Iraq negatively (where we started to duplicate the mistakes of Vietnam), and now in Iraq positively (once we switched to securing the population and carried effective action to Iran and Syria…some kinetic some diplomatic).

This would be a good time to solve the problem. The EU is in financial crisis…worse than in America…so they could probably be persuaded to cut support funds to a trickle. Israel could finish their assault with an occupation that provides security to the population while continuing kinetic action on the terror groups. America could carry financial and diplomatic action to the terror group supporters (and probably also kinetic in the case of Iran for a two-fer as it would also help Iraq). The sand in the gears with this scenario is that Israel’s history is so long in Gaza that America would probably have to take over security duties from Israel fairly rapidly after a complete occupation. Even better would be to try this in five years using Iraqi forces with American oversight to run security long enough to exterminate the terror groups. Iraqis would be more easily able to establish a rapport with the people.

Longer than I intended…my $2 instead of $0.02. Sorry.

Reason is that Israel can’t realistically kill *all* male residents of Gaza (and of course does not want to), so at some point, when the Israeli troops eventually withdraw, what are the chances that no young man who has lost a parent or sibling will get it into his head to lob another homemade rocket? You all know the probability is 1.0.

In that event, all the current carnage has accomplished what, exactly? Okay, it’s shown the Gazans that there’s a huge cost to lobbing rockets at Israel. This is certainly something Hamas and company needed to learn. But is there not a more effective, less costly way to make that point?

One of the comments above proposed that in the future, for every rocket fired at Israel, the Israelis should return twenty. But that is overkill. I suspect that all Israel needs to do is return one-for-one, provided it announces this policy publicly. Moreover, Israel can afford to broadcast a warning to all Gaza residents of exactly when and where (within a one-mile square) their counterfire will land. After all, the purpose of shooting back isn’t to kill people, it’s to *deter them*.

Obviously killing someone is the ultimate deterrence to *them*, but unless there’s only one violent actor on the other side, does anyone believe killing one Gazan will deter the *others*? If you believe that, then by what mechanism? Fear of death? Haven’t we heard somewhere that a huge fraction of Muslims are convinced that dying for the cause is the ultimate positive outcome?

So if the current invasion is virtually certain to change *nothing* in the long term, what’s my suggestion instead? As mentioned above, go to a shell-for-shell response. I know this sounds like capitulation, but it’s clearly not that. Instead it would directly link cause-and-effect for Gazans. You don’t shoot, we won’t shoot, and vice-versa.

If bringing in the tanks and killing a thousand or so would make Hamas stop firing rockets at Israeli towns, one could plausibly argue that invading would be worthwhile. But it won’t stop the rockets. Worse yet, the death of even a few innocents can’t help but swell the ranks of young men eager to fight back at any cost.

Let me say that I don’t blame Israel for saying, in effect, enough is enough. I’m simply trying to show that sometimes the reflexive response doesn’t do what you might expect, and that effective solutions are sometimes counterintuitive.

What’s that old saying about doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome?

Even if an argument could have been made that the Jewish migration to the region and the establishment of the State of Israel were unjustified or unwise, arguments that I do not believe in myself, the murderous and deceitful misconduct of the enemies of Israel over the last 60 years have invalidated any claims they ever had. The Arabs are in the moral position of the Germans whose tears for the lost communities that had thrived in Eastern Europe for a thousand years fall on deaf ears. If a historian uncovered startling evidence that in 1939 the Polish government was planning to abuse the civil rights of the ethnic Germans in the Polish Corridor it would give Germany no claim on the last city of Danzig. Their claims were washed away in blood, so to with the people of Arafat.

That is a fair assessment. Basically, it is a con-game being run on Israel.

The con-game is to divert attention from the gross misdeeds of certain Arab nations and entangle Israel and at every opportunity. Israel is a small usefully diversion in a huge Arab ghetto.

Hamas is controlled by Iran and other powerful players. They have every type of taqiyya to attract attention has been push on us. Just as a child proudly displays his injuries (and it has been quite lucrative for Hamas).

Israel and the West must understand they have been played as fool. This must end. Further, facilitators of this confidence game must stopped and the money they have stolen must be returned (looking directly at Iran and Syria).

In Wretchard superseding post about the huge monetary short fall in the US budget one can blame a good portion of it on payments to Hamas controlled perpetrators, ”friendly Arab” nations and the UN who only need a few $100 billion more to put a stop to the “unrest.” The money will go into pockets of con-artists and warlords.

Sooner or later, Israel is going to have to clean up both cesspools – and evict the rats in the process. Sooner or later it will (and it won’t be pretty) or there won’t be an Israel, and the savages will have won.

Olmert’s government may therefore have determined to their satisfaction that Iran is weak, and that it’s time to figure out what to do next. If they completely eliminate Hamas, who will step in to manage the mess that Gaza is and will be for the forseeable future? It’s doubtful whether Fatah can do much more than exact revenge on whatever Hamas gunsels are left. Israel sure doesn’t want clean-up duties, and neither does Egypt.

And I wonder if the ‘what to do next’ will be a strike against the Iranian nuke plants, Iran apparently being weak, Hamas silenced at least for the near term, and Hezbollah apparently weak as well, as anon[13] says?