Once again, a very good overview of where things stand in the Middle East and the sense or nonsense of the various options that have been implemented. I would like to focus on the closing paragraph, because I think the most immediate catastrophe is about to be unfolded. I can't imagine how 1.5 million people can be re-uprooted and marched out of harm's way so that the IDF will have a civilian-free theater within which to try destroying Hamas. I think, on top of the starvation taking place there, it's total madness and cruelty beyond anything we've seen since WW2, apart from what Pol Pot did to Cambodia back in the 1970s and the Rwanda massacre of 1994. Israel is about to enter into a distinctly inglorious club of regimes committing mass murder on a hideous scale.
Like in those previous cases, it is doubtful the international community can do much to apprehend it. Certainly not a torrent of words, because Israel has demonstrated that it is impervious to words. The US, the UK, etc. have important security interests with Israel that will likely deter them from doing much more than repeating a lot of shallow rhetoric. I can't help thinking, and would really like to be wrong, that it is going to get a whole lot worse in Gaza before it gets better, and you will be writing yet another analysis showing how these so-called terrorist groups live to fight another battle another day.
Another informative read which makes the excellent point that 'decapitation' only seems to work on small immature organizations, suggesting that if an organization is big and long lived enough to get noticed by a foreign state it can probably replace slain leaders making the whole decapitation strategy ineffective.
Lawrence, I would be interested in your opinion on the extent to which popular support, by a clear majority of the population, is a necessary condition for any of the countries in the wider Middle East to act in an aggressive way, whether by open warfare or by "low-intensity" operations.
My reason for asking is that these are all very different countries. There is support within Israel for the operation in Gaza, whether this is majority support I do not know, but if there was no support by the population of Israel then the IDF would not be fighting in Gaza. We cannot know how much support Hamas has from the people of Gaza as a whole, but the current IDF operation will certainly act as a recruiting sergeant for the future Hamas.
The country I find most interesting is Iran, the only country where I have been able to ask ordinary people what they think. It is a very divided country. The theocracy, and a limited group of the political class, are aggressive and strongly anti-Israeli and anti-American. In my limited experience, the man or woman in the street would not support open war with Israel, or any other country. I think it is very unlikely that there is popular support for client organisations like the Houthis or Hezbollah. (Obviously, the circumstances of the Iran-Iraq war were different, the nation was under direct threat from Saddam's Iraq.)
I was told "... the only people we don't like are the Russians and the Arabs: Russians because they stole half of Azerbaijan in the nineteenth century, and Arabs because uninformed people think we are Arabs, and we are not". There are active synagogues in Iran, very different from Arab states.
Would the theocratic and political class in Iran have popular support if they started a war?
It is interesting that the fighter with the RPG to the left of the truck (from viewer's perspective) is not wearing boots. He has his camo trousers bloused over bare legs and feet.
If we are living in a "Clash of Civilizations," British, American, and Israeli power presence in the Middle East is a contradiction. What logic will come from this? During the 1990's and early 2000's Charles Krauthammer spoke loudly about the threat of biological and nuclear weapons threats in the Middle East, and the American Unipolar Moment. Looking back, following this narrative, America experienced a tremendous investment in the Middle East, attempting to create an international political order based on American power prominence. Decades later, power prominence internationalism seems less achievable. Republicanism, and reduced international interdependence, could be the logic coming out of these contradictions. Marginal U.S. energy production has reduced the interdependence and consolidated power intramarginal energy producers held over the international economy, resulting in higher costs to consumers and greater energy security. Next generation technologies that produce and supply domestic energy could greatly reduce energy interdependence and possibly support greater energy security. What will be the logic that is realized?
Below are some links to Charles Krauthammer's writings on the idea of American Uni-polar Moment and a speech he gave to an AEI event following the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Once again, a very good overview of where things stand in the Middle East and the sense or nonsense of the various options that have been implemented. I would like to focus on the closing paragraph, because I think the most immediate catastrophe is about to be unfolded. I can't imagine how 1.5 million people can be re-uprooted and marched out of harm's way so that the IDF will have a civilian-free theater within which to try destroying Hamas. I think, on top of the starvation taking place there, it's total madness and cruelty beyond anything we've seen since WW2, apart from what Pol Pot did to Cambodia back in the 1970s and the Rwanda massacre of 1994. Israel is about to enter into a distinctly inglorious club of regimes committing mass murder on a hideous scale.
Like in those previous cases, it is doubtful the international community can do much to apprehend it. Certainly not a torrent of words, because Israel has demonstrated that it is impervious to words. The US, the UK, etc. have important security interests with Israel that will likely deter them from doing much more than repeating a lot of shallow rhetoric. I can't help thinking, and would really like to be wrong, that it is going to get a whole lot worse in Gaza before it gets better, and you will be writing yet another analysis showing how these so-called terrorist groups live to fight another battle another day.
Another informative read which makes the excellent point that 'decapitation' only seems to work on small immature organizations, suggesting that if an organization is big and long lived enough to get noticed by a foreign state it can probably replace slain leaders making the whole decapitation strategy ineffective.
Lawrence, I would be interested in your opinion on the extent to which popular support, by a clear majority of the population, is a necessary condition for any of the countries in the wider Middle East to act in an aggressive way, whether by open warfare or by "low-intensity" operations.
My reason for asking is that these are all very different countries. There is support within Israel for the operation in Gaza, whether this is majority support I do not know, but if there was no support by the population of Israel then the IDF would not be fighting in Gaza. We cannot know how much support Hamas has from the people of Gaza as a whole, but the current IDF operation will certainly act as a recruiting sergeant for the future Hamas.
The country I find most interesting is Iran, the only country where I have been able to ask ordinary people what they think. It is a very divided country. The theocracy, and a limited group of the political class, are aggressive and strongly anti-Israeli and anti-American. In my limited experience, the man or woman in the street would not support open war with Israel, or any other country. I think it is very unlikely that there is popular support for client organisations like the Houthis or Hezbollah. (Obviously, the circumstances of the Iran-Iraq war were different, the nation was under direct threat from Saddam's Iraq.)
I was told "... the only people we don't like are the Russians and the Arabs: Russians because they stole half of Azerbaijan in the nineteenth century, and Arabs because uninformed people think we are Arabs, and we are not". There are active synagogues in Iran, very different from Arab states.
Would the theocratic and political class in Iran have popular support if they started a war?
It is interesting that the fighter with the RPG to the left of the truck (from viewer's perspective) is not wearing boots. He has his camo trousers bloused over bare legs and feet.
If we are living in a "Clash of Civilizations," British, American, and Israeli power presence in the Middle East is a contradiction. What logic will come from this? During the 1990's and early 2000's Charles Krauthammer spoke loudly about the threat of biological and nuclear weapons threats in the Middle East, and the American Unipolar Moment. Looking back, following this narrative, America experienced a tremendous investment in the Middle East, attempting to create an international political order based on American power prominence. Decades later, power prominence internationalism seems less achievable. Republicanism, and reduced international interdependence, could be the logic coming out of these contradictions. Marginal U.S. energy production has reduced the interdependence and consolidated power intramarginal energy producers held over the international economy, resulting in higher costs to consumers and greater energy security. Next generation technologies that produce and supply domestic energy could greatly reduce energy interdependence and possibly support greater energy security. What will be the logic that is realized?
Below are some links to Charles Krauthammer's writings on the idea of American Uni-polar Moment and a speech he gave to an AEI event following the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1990/07/20/the-unipolar-moment/62867add-2fe9-493f-a0c9-4bfba1ec23bd/
https://www.aei.org/research-products/speech/democratic-realism/
https://www.belfercenter.org/sites/default/files/files/publication/krauthammer.pdf)