Posted on 05/16/2024 8:04:57 AM PDT by SJackson
Rafah isn’t just the last stand for Hamas, but for an entire foreign policy establishment.
The desperate effort to keep Israeli soldiers from going into the last Gaza stronghold of the Islamic terrorist organization is about more than the sum of the geopolitical parts.
After nation building failed in Afghanistan and Iraq, and everywhere else it’s been tried, the radioactive ‘Palestinian’ nation building experiment from over 30 years ago is its last hope.
Long before George W. Bush tackled nation building after 9/11, his father began the era of turning Muslim terrorist groups into countries with the project to give the PLO a state. Where the first Bush failed, Bill Clinton succeeded with the Oslo accords and a Nobel prize for Arafat.
The PLO state failed long before Iran took over Iraq and the Taliban took over Afghanistan. There had never been anything peaceful, democratic or aspirational about Arafat and the PLO. By the time that Hamas had captured Gaza after winning democratic elections, it had long been clear to everyone outside of D.C. that rather than ending terrorism, statehood had incarnated it.
Any ‘Palestinian’ state was doomed to be a terrorist state. The only question is who would run it. And the answer was that the biggest and deadliest terrorists would command popular support.
When Iraq and Afghanistan went bad, America could just leave, Israelis did not have that luxury. Sharon forcibly expelled the Jews living in Gaza to the other side of a border wall, but despite all the sob stories that the terrorists were living in an “open air concentration camp” with five-star hotels and mansions, walls weren’t that hard to get through even before Oct 7.
Israel has been stuck living next door to a failed thirty year nation-building experiment gone bad. And everyone in the international community is worried that the Oct 7 war will see it taken apart.
Lately the nation building experts have taken to warning that Israel is doing it the wrong way. Former CIA Director David Petraeus who also oversaw American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been arguing that Israel needs to pivot to a “counterinsurgency” model. And then we’re back to “winning hearts and minds” instead of actually trying to win a war.
The Biden administration has never stopped insisting that Israel needs a “day after” plan for rebuilding Gaza under a PLO government and some “moderate” terrorists from Hamas. Three generations after it became the norm, fighting a war without nation building as an endgame is so impossible that warfare experts can’t even understand what they’re seeing in Israel.
But among all the other problems with nation building is that it doesn’t work. And the Israelis who have been living next to the original chernobyl of nation building know it better than anyone.
Nation building has failed in every single Muslim country it’s been tried, not just by the United States after 9/11, but by the British between WWI and WWII. The entire Middle East is one long great nation building disaster shaped by primeval nation building experiments such as the Sykes-Picot agreement, the Hashemite monarchies and finally the recession of colonialism.
But it’s not just Muslim countries where nation building has backfired in familiar patterns.
D.C. elites can look to Haiti where decades of interference led to one disaster after another. The armed gangs overrunning the island nation started life as police forces. Democracy initiatives just worsened tensions and led to murderous outbreaks of political violence.
The same situation abounds across much of Africa, and parts of Latin America and Asia, where no amount of nation building could overcome tribalism, gang violence and political extremists.
Our nation building fails even worse than the British variety because it follows the American model of trying to overcome tribalism, assuming that democracy will empower individuals instead of blocs, and that having elected officials control institutions will lead to good government when in reality the majority seizes power and then viciously suppresses minorities.
American foreign policy believes that no people or group are good or bad, they just lack sufficient representation or the ability to participate in democratic elections. And that any governments that suppress any group, no matter how evil, are inherently illegitimate.
That’s why Truman insisted on ending Chiang Kai-Shek’s repression of Communists in China, why Carter bailed out the Islamists in Iran, and why, based on this stunning track record, we decided that the only way to stop terrorism in Israel was to give the terrorists their own state.
Faced with 30 years of terrorism, the nation builders see no other alternative to a terror state.
But Israelis do. They saw it before Oct 7 and they certainly see it all too clearly now. David, Ben and Ezra aren’t dying in tunnels and bombed buildings to create another terrorist state in Israel.
Americans have gotten sick of sending their sons to die for nation building. The term has become so toxic that no one wants to use it anymore. Biden loudly claimed that the withdrawal from Afghanistan marked the end of nation building. And now he’s back to nation building again.
Biden, Secretary of State Blinken and every one of the nearly 80,000 State Department employees are very upset (some have already resigned) that Israel isn’t following the nation building playbook. Some accuse Israel of harboring dire plots to expel all the Muslims from Gaza or to impose their own authority on them, but they’re too blind to see the actual reality.
The Israelis have had friends and family members brutally butchered, burned to death, raped and kidnapped on Oct 7 and they don’t care what exists in Gaza so long as it isn’t the terrorists. They’re being forced to supply food and medical aid to the perpetrators by D.C., which no army was forced to do in the past, but they have no interest beyond that in the enemy population.
Israelis care as much about Gazans as we cared about Afghans on 9/11. And while the U.S. officials who oversaw over a decade of failed nation building experiments may not understand,. America would have been far better off if we had focused on hunting down the perpetrators, their enablers and then left giant holes in the ground as a warning to any future terrorists.
Our “day after” plans for Afghanistan and Iraq cost us a generation of fighting men for nothing. Even the ‘Surge’, the last stand of the counterinsurgency model, did nothing to stop Iraq from falling into the hands of Iran which is now using it to launch attacks on American bases.
“Truly winning this war would require creating some sort of government in Gaza that could gain the support of the people and prevent Hamas from returning after Israeli soldiers pull out,” ex-neo con Max Boot argues in his Washington Post column.
But what if killing Jews is what the ‘people’ in Gaza really want? Just as what the Shiites in Iraq really wanted was to step on the Sunnis and the Kurds, what the Sunnis in Iraq really wanted was to kill the Shiites and rape the Yazidis, and what the Kurds wanted was their own country. And just as a whole lot of Afghans really wanted to lock up women and mandate beards again.
Nation building’s faulty premise is that people everywhere want what Americans want.
And so we ignore what they say they want. We ignore what they vote for. And then we ignore it when they actually start killing each other as we try to give them what they’re supposed to want.
Nation building was built on denying that tribalism is a fundamental force and that demographics is destiny. We refused to believe that in Afghanistan, we refused to believe it in Iraq and now we still refuse to believe it in Gaza. But the trouble is that the Arab Muslims of Gaza do believe it.
After two decades of failing to win a war (because we didn’t even try) maybe it’s time to let the Israelis give it a shot. What’s the worst that could happen? Gaza will be overrun by Islamic terrorists? Muslims will hate us and try to kill us? There will be op-eds in the New York Times?
The Israelis have grown tired of trying to win the hearts and minds of rapists, kidnappers and killers. They’ve grown tired of giving them what we think they want and are giving them what they deserve. Maybe we could learn something from their experiment in ‘un-nation building’.
ping
What of reports that Israel in general, and Netanyahu in particular, actually supported the rise of Hamas, as a counterweight in Gaza to Arafat and the PLO?
Its good they mentioned Afghanistan, because too-clever-by-half politicians in the USA too helped create the monster it eventually had to face.
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right on
except that it ascribes far too nice of motives for the Snake Dept
Amen. Never ever underestimate the cultural impact of the 1st and 2nd Great Awakenings on the western world. It is the main difference between the U.S. and crap hole countries.
The Haitians need more than aid, they need a spiritual awakening. Mexico needs more than just political reform. They need a spiritual awakening. Afghanistan needs more than just equal rights for women. They need a spiritual awakening. And unfortunately we're getting away from loving God and loving each other like we learned to do in the great awakenings.
Excellent piece.
Nation-building, in the sense that a representative republic modeled on the US Constitution has to be imposed on an otherwise failed state, is itself an empty gesture, and doomed to repeat failure of the state, in an even more calamitous manner. The necessary framework is not there and cannot be imposed.
We equate our quality of life with our form of government.
Other people around the world don’t see it that way.
They want four goats instead of two.
They want a motorcycle instead of a bicycle.
They want a cheap car instead of a motorcycle.
They want…..more.
And they really don’t want to lose what they have.
And they are scared.
They are humans.
100% agree with your comment. Both Israel and the USA are paying for such meddling by our previous generation of politicians.
Here in the USA, we haven't given up on such efforts, indeed, we have doubled-down, all across the world.
Gaza-Israel’s war teaches us what we should have done after September 11
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Nuke Mecca and Medina - the end of Islam worldwide - no one prays to a failed “god” 3 times a day or even once.
Truth is, there was a window of opportunity to solve the Israeli - Palestinian conflict in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union and Communism.
GHW Bush was actually working with the Israeli leadership for building a base to accomplish this.
The PLO had had been thrashed and kicked out of Lebanon and Yasser Arafat and his PLO fighters were falling apart in Tunis.
For once, the Israelis had comparatively rational and reasonable Palestinians to work with.
The Rabin generation of Israeli leaders were largely military officers who had seen the worst of war. They were angered and disgusted by the hot heads and fanatics on both sides.
They wanted peace
Then came Bill and Hilary Clinton -1960s Radicals who were slobbering , star struck Yasser Arafat groupies
The Clinton's froze out any reasonable Palestinians to become Partners for Peace and insisted on their beloved Yasser Arafat
.
Rabin got rolled and signed an agreement formalizing Yasser Arafat as the de facto leadership of the Palestinians and invited the beleaguered PLO fighters into Israel itself.
The PLO came rolling into Israel like a conquering army , shooting AK-47s and began their reign of terror. They established a corrupt, criminal mafia style “government” that exists to this day. They conscripted children just out of grade school and began training them in terrorism and para military operations. They established schools that became indoctrination centers for Jew hatred and the destruction of Israel.
The end result is the insanity in Gaza.
The Israelis complained to the Clintons who only encouraged Yasser Arafat and back stabbed Israel.
The resulting chaos and PLO violence gave rise to Netanyahu who was effective in countering Arafat. Clinton tried to intervene for Shimon Peres in 1996 but failed and Netanyahu became PM.
Clinton then sent Democrat operative Stanley Greenberg to Israel to successfully organize Democrat funded opposition to Netanyhau and interfere with internal Israeli affairs . The Clinton's Greenberg led team succeeded in ousting Netanyahu and replacing him with the disaster that was Ehud Barak. Barak was a Clinton aligned Leftist who was willing to sell out Israel to the PLO. But George Bush beat Al Gore and Barak lost influence so Arafat started the Second Intifada.
After Arafat finally died of AIDs and Ariel Sharon handed the Gaza over to the PLO, Hamas seized power in Gaza because the PLO was too moderate.
It all comes back to Bill and Hillary Clinton, two of the most profoundly malignant and destructive politicians in American history.
The mid 1990s were a historic chance for peace in the Middle East and Bill and Hillary Clinton ruined that chance by insisting their hero Yasser Arafat be the one put in power which directly led to the Hamas disaster we see today.
It didn't have to be this way and we have the Clintons to blame.
Great article, thanks for posting.
And Americans don't even want "what Americans want" anymore, since the nation that existed in 1945 has been dissolved and replaced with the largest, greatest nation building exercise in the history of mankind - turning a continent populated by whoever into a better "nation" than the European settler nation that was called "America" and that existed, essentially, from 1775-1965.
We should have exterminated the Saudi bloodline like roaches once we found out they were funding the terrorists.
BTTT
Nation-building, in the sense that a representative republic modeled on the US Constitution has to be imposed on an otherwise failed state, is itself an empty gesture, and doomed to repeat failure of the state, in an even more calamitous manner. The necessary framework is not there and cannot be imposed.
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I wish more people understood this.
“Islam is a religion of peace” - both GW Bush and Obama
Perhaps. However the PLO left about a quarter of their forces behind in Lebanon, civilians. Can't imagine we didn't know. And the US refused to allow Israel to kill Arafat. Somewhere on the web, if I can find it I'll send a link, you can find an interview with an Israeli sniper who as late as boarding the ship for Libya had Arafat in his sights, awaiting US authorization to pull the trigger. Later when the peace loving Arafat returned the rear of his car was said to be nearly touching the pavement, suspected arms filling the trunk. We're making the same mistake today pushing Israel to leave Hamas leadership intact along with an unknown number of troops who will become civilians again. For awhile. History may not repeat itself, but sometimes it does.
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