WTAF Was Hamas Thinking?

When the shock from the Hamas terror invasion of southern Israel wore off, my first thought was, “WTAF were they thinking?” I did not use an acronym. I was in front of my sink, putting toothpaste on my toothbrush, and I just blurted out all the words.

What we’ve learned since Saturday morning’s bloodfest has only grown worse, including reports of 40 murdered babies — several of whom had been beheaded. There are still too many scenes around the West, like Tuesday night in Georgetown, where student protestors could be heard chanting “From the river to the sea” and “Long live the Intifada.” The latter is a call for the murder of Israeli Jews. The former is a call to wipe Israel off the map. But aside from our moral superiors on the Left and their predilection for genocidal antisemites, the moral condemnation from around the world was swift and it is growing.

How bad is it, really? After Hamas bragged that, yes, of course, we got help from Iran — CDR Salamander detailed on Tuesday how Hamas could never have funded such an operation off the backs of poor and oppressed Gazans — Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei denied giving Hamas any such help in planning Saturday’s invasion.

Hamas went full ISIS. Don’t they remember what happened to ISIS? Khamenei remembers, and it’s safe to assume he doesn’t want his regime to suffer the same fate that now awaits Hamas.

Gaza “will soon be a tent city,” Israeli Defense Force (IDF) spokesman Jonathan Conricus said Tuesday evening. “That is to make sure that Hamas at the end of this war won’t have any military capabilities by which they can threaten or kill Israeli civilians.”

Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant told IDF soldiers that Jerusalem has “removed every restriction” on destroying Hamas in comments that came “as Israeli airstrikes hit the family home of Mohammed Deif — the reclusive leader of Hamas’ military wing.”

Hamas wanted an Old Testament war and now they’re going to get one.

WTAF were they thinking?

The same could be asked of al Qaeda in the days after Sept. 11, 2001, when the United States was filled “with a terrible resolve,” to borrow a quote from a different war. Whatever the long-term frustrations and failures were with our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Bill Whittle reminded me during Tuesday’s Right Angle taping that we killed 80,000 jihadis over there instead of over here.

But the most notorious example of “WTAF were they thinking?” occurred on Dec. 7, 1941.

Imperial Japan was outmatched by the U.S. in every way that could matter in a long war. We had more manpower, far more industrial might, and a wealth of natural resources that Tokyo’s militarists could only dream of stealing from somewhere else. Nevertheless, they wanted war with America as part of their imperial ambition to sweep Western colonialists out of Asia and the Pacific and replace them with their own.

Toyko’s Plan A was for a short war. They believed that we had gone soft and that if they sank our fleet at anchor at Pearl Harbor, we would sue for peace.

What was Plan B, if Plan A failed to force Washington to the negotiating table?

There was no Plan B.

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who planned the devious sneak attack on our forces stationed at Pearl, warned his political masters that the strike would allow him to “run wild considerably for the first six months or a year, but I have utterly no confidence for the second and third years.”

Not much more than three years after Pearl Harbor, Gen. Curtis Lemay’s B-29 bomber fleet darkened Japan’s skies and burned her cities, nearly unopposed. Admiral Nimitz’s rebuilt navy freely roamed Japan’s coast, with carrier aircraft taking out targets on land at will.

“I fear that all we have done,” Yamamoto is supposed to have said after Pearl Harbor, “is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”

Indeed. WTAF was Tokyo thinking? WTAF was Hamas thinking?

Hamas started this war in a way that made Yamamoto’s infamous surprise attack look positively tame. Israel has always enjoyed far more combat power than it had ever dared use against a group like Hamas — the IDF had long been the Levant’s sleeping giant. Hamas’ atrocities last weekend ensure that the Palestinians of Gaza will now feel the full and terrible force of an awakened Israel.

Welcome to the party, Pals.

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P.S. Need a little mirth after all of today’s serious news? Then don’t miss the “Five O’Clock Somewhere” VIP Gold Live Chat with Stephen Kruiser and Yours Truly at 4 p.m. Eastern on Mondays and Fridays. There is sometimes a special guest and almost always day-drinking.