While Israel is preoccupied with Lebanon and Iran, Hamas is rebuilding in Gaza. This exposes a defect in the Western theory of victory. The conquerors leave after their victory, but the tyrants remain behind. Through history, events show that it’s not who wins battles, but who terrorizes the population that remains in control. John Spencer notes on X that Hamas is coming back, not by defeating the IDF on the battlefield but by re-terrorizing the Gazan population:
"Hamas [attempts] to reassert control in Gaza [the 49% they control for now] as Iran war dominates regional attention and global focus."
I believe there is a plan to come for Hamas...but first their directors in Iran.
"They are really making good use of them to establish their power in the public sphere, not just for military rehabilitation," Milshtein said, describing what he said were new recruits, police deployments and even parades in central Gaza. "
He said Gazans have reported that Hamas is also rebuilding the machinery of governance. "Their police are everywhere," he said. "They are also improving their taxation system." During Ramadan, he added, Hamas personnel were checking markets and mosques and "starting to build education systems."
Military victories on the battlefield often prove fleeting if they don't alter the character of the population's will. History is littered with cases where the side that mastered terror—calculated fear, intimidation, and exemplary brutality—held or regained control long after the "winning" armies had left. Weapons, tactics, and logistics determine who can come into a space, but terror (and its costs) determines who stays. Who can forget Colonel Kurtz’s (played by Marlon Brando) monologue in Apocalypse Now explaining why the American "hearts and minds" approach almost always loses to torture and coercion by the NVA?
I’ve seen horrors… horrors that you’ve seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that… but you have no right to judge me. It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face… and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies. I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember… I… I… I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized… like I was shot… like I was shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God… the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we.
Tyranny succeeds because over time some cultures come to accept coercion as the natural state of affairs. They come to expect it. They even come to prefer it. As Hannah Arendt put it: "totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within." She might have added that they achieve this by developing in the conquered a taste for it. For so long as a culture admires the cruel, they will bow to it.
In fact, the chief task of every liberation enterprise should be not just to win battles but to change expectations in the freed country. Yet Western armies are not designed to effect this change. Only time, trade, and culture can alter the condition of the human heart. Post-WWII West Germany and Japan reawakened the desire for democracy among the populace perhaps because the seeds were already there. Even then, it took decades to take root. Yet among cultures imprinted over millennia with the boot of authoritarianism, the task is much harder.
If there is any hope for victory in Iran, it lies not in the respective tally of weapons and guns among the combatants but in the fact that the pre-1979 desire for a better life of freedom seems to have survived. Liberation psychology (as articulated by thinkers like Ignacio Martín-Baró) emphasizes this: true liberation requires an inward change. It's not enough to end overt oppression; you must dismantle the internalized belief that hierarchy and coercion are inevitable. This involves education, narrative control, economic incentives, and time—often generations—to make voluntary cooperation feel more natural than submission.
Cultural critics in the West have often overlooked the fact that militant leftism and radical Islam’s decisive first task is never to impose coercion while they are still too weak, but to infiltrate it into culture by inoculating themselves – and through them wider society – with the hive mentality. By habituating their cadres to ostracization, canceling and ideological uniformity they create the sacraments of belonging which bind their adherents together. Terrorism is the down payment of the world they are trying to build. And they recruit, tirelessly and relentlessly. In the end, the acolytes of tyranny will crave it – and return to it – because slavery is the only place that feels natural to them.
Western armies might seize the land, but enduring conquerors vanquish the mind. Victory, Clausewitz observed, is an affair of the mind, yet we don’t listen to him. For the West the sterile target, the empty installation, the dead building is what should be struck. The enemy’s battlefields on the other hand are places of worship, schools and culture, the dwellings of the mind, terrain the West has deemed too holy to contest. But democracy is not something all men are born with. It is a vision they discover. Men worshiped Baal before they worshiped Yahweh. Until then, the residents of Gaza will admire the whip, the bullet, and knife more than they value persuasion and charity, seeing the former as strength and the latter as weakness.
