My cousing Vinny hits you cause I love you

By Fester:

The Isreali occupation in Gaza ( it has not risen to the definitional level of war for a couple of reaosns) has a strategic pickle as its objective.  Israel is looking to dislocate and destroy Hamas' credibility and functioning within the Gazan Palestinian population without creating a radicalization vaccuum for Salafists to insert themselves.  This basically means they are trying to do Fatah's dirty work for them.  The problem is that Fatah is being seen as a beneficiary of the Isreali pounding of Gaza and for some odd reason, people are less likely to support a group that benefits from bombing their neighborhoods... SHOCKING!

NY Times:

the authority, its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, and its leading party, Fatah, seem increasingly beleaguered and marginalized, even in the Palestinian cities of the West Bank, which they control. Protesters accuse Mr. Abbas of not doing enough to stop the carnage in Gaza — indeed, his own police officers have used clubs and tear gas against those same protesters.

The more bombs in Gaza, the more Hamas’s support seems to be growing at the expense of the Palestinian Authority, already considered corrupt and distant from average Palestinians....

Even if Israel succeeds in toppling Hamas, nobody here seems to believe that the Abbas-led authority would be in any position to fill the vacuum right now, especially because the authority would be perceived in Gaza as having ridden in on a proverbial Israeli tank.

WOW, being told to "SUCK ON IT" and then not supporting the attacker is such radical behavior.

WHOCODAKNOWN!

It's not like we saw the Chalabi lists go down to defeat in Iraq.  It is not like the minimum requirement for an Iraqi politician to be for removing US troops so that the political dispute is on timetable (now or within a couple of years) and out year residual forces.  It is not like we have seen rally around the flag effects in Serbia, or the entire US Strategic Bombing Survey of WWII, or Vietnam that demonstrates large scale ariel bombardment does not flip civilian sentiment to the side of the bombers. 

WHOCODAKNOWN!

Comments

[Tim F.]

Fester - check email. Sports-related message that may interest you.
-TF

[Peter G.]

A giant prize winning pickle to be sure. It appears regime change is not as easy as some would have us believe. It hasn't been an effective strategy since Shah Reza. It's not like their haven't been any recent teaching examples. (Something tells me you read Budansky's Air Power Fester). Having forced the premature elections that got Hamas elected the Whitehouse (and Israel) will ultimately have to deal with them. To paraphrase a third rate SecDef: You go to diplomacy with the parties you have not with the parties you wish you had.