Dreadnought

IMHO, All he did was legitimize a known terrorist organization that will not change no matter the deal. It was foolish to give them any press or air time.

__________________
Fortitude.....The strength to persist...The courage to endure.

astralis

dreadnought,

i'm not sure how he "legitimized" hamas- it's not as if all the governments in the world are flocking to recognize the group.

anyhow, as far as terror groups go, hamas is not in hezbollah or al-qaeda territory- i think these people can to some degree be influenced. as a sign of this, notice how al-qaeda lambasts hamas whenever it gets the chance.

israel has two options at this point. the first is to negotiate with hamas. the second is to destroy hamas altogether. the first is distasteful, yes.

but the second would probably mean a very, very bloody incursion which will probably kill off any chances for a peace deal and be inconclusive. it will probably also mean that the relatively moderate abbas will get kicked out, and fatah either pulling in with hamas or losing all of its already low "street cred".

__________________
Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Stan187

How do you see Hamas as in a better position to be influenced than Hizballah? They used this as a photo op. And they are still asking for the same thing they were asking for 5 years ago, a hudna, a temporary cease-fire that eventually ends, so that they can continue attempting to push the Jews into the sea. There was no fundamental shift in the process of the organization. They want Israel to go back to pre-1967 borders, but they see even that sort of move as temporary. If they can be influenced, they certainly have not been influenced enough to abandon that very core doctrine of theirs. And until such time, saying that negotiating with them is distasteful is the understatement of the decade if there ever was one.

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In Iran people belive pepsi stands for pay each penny save israel. -urmomma158
The Russian Navy is still a threat, but only to those unlucky enough to be Russian sailors.-highsea

astralis

stan,

because israel has more cards to play against hamas than hizballah. hamas isn't as well-armed as hezbollah, and if israel really wanted to, they could make hamas bleed far more heavily in an outright confrontation. also, control of the entrypoints into gaza makes hamas more politically vulnerable.

well, the way i see it, hamas can be influenced in two ways. through negotiation or force. and unless israel is willing to pay the human, economic, and political price of using force- and force massive enough to ensure that they can get what they want- then israel doesn't have much choice in the matter.

yes, hamas is distasteful to say the least, but if the US can negotiate with an enemy power that killed tens of thousands of her boys through suicide bombings, ambushes, execution, and torture (imperial japan)....

in any case, i'm not seeing any tangible harm that may arise from negotiations with hamas. if hamas remains intransigent, israel still has the option of striking. this is how israel got started negotiating with the PLO (another terror organization, after all), no? hell, these days israel actually facilitates giving arms to abbas and fatah.

Stan187

Astralis,

I would have never negotiated with PLO, either. But then again, I am a principled man, and Olmert is an unfortunate parasite.

I have absolutely no qualms about making Hamas bleed.

At least when we were fighting the Japanese, they were not still receiving supplies from us to inch by their meager existance.

astralis

stan,

it's not just making hamas bleed. it's making sure they bleed, and bleed to death. seeing how entrenched they are in gaza, and how hated the israelis already are in the area, i simply don't see how israel can do a viable counterinsurgency strategy centered around "winning hearts and minds." well, the one other option here is the genghis option.

the US was ready to do that to japan during WWII- they were gonna firebomb and kill every last man, woman, and child if they had to. they didn't care two figs for the morality of doing so, or if this was going to cause international outcry, etc etc.

is israel going to do this? perhaps, if hamas uses a WMD on israel. but barring that, i highly doubt it. so....not many other options on the table.

lwarmonger

That negotiation was for their surrender.... a little different than the negotiation between Israel and Hamas that I see described here.

lwarmonger

Since it wasn't (everyone of note who wasn't with us was against us), the whole international aspect wasn't even a consideration. And given what the Japanese had done to both us and all of their neighbors, I don't think too many would question the morality of making sure there was only salted and smoking earth behind when we were done with them.

As I recall, the original plans for Germany and Japan had us forcibly de-industrializing them, and keeping them poor agricultural nations. It was only because of the growing fear of the communist threat that we began building them both up economically.

astralis

lwarmonger,

the point is, it was STILL talking to the enemy. at the time, doing this was a highly unpopular move- the american populace didn't WANT japan to surrender, they wanted japan destroyed. this became even worse as it became clear that the american high command (read MacArthur in this case) tacitly agreed to keeping the Emperor on board.

this isn't quite on-topic, but, those original plans had been considered and then discarded by the time of the surrender, even before the communist threat became apparent. however, the communist threat did speed up impetus for greater economic/industrial aid.

anyways, the point is, not all talking is an evil. there are some groups whom simply cannot be bargained with, because they don't believe in it the first place, and because their demands aren't limited to the physical (al-qaeda). there are some groups whom can. hamas strikes me as the bigger equivalent to some of the religious-nationalist insurgent sunni groups which the US had to deal with to create the Awakening movement.

JAD_333

Why do you interject the morality issue into firebombing Japan? We were at war and anticipating the Japanese were good for their word that they intended to fight to the last man and woman in defense of the homeland.

Firebombing was a tactic we employed but was never expected to be decisive. We had always planned to invade with massive troop landings. Military planners feared losses of US troops in the hundreds of thousands. How impervious were we to moral issues if we were willing to incur losses of that magnitude?

Of course, it was spectre of so many losses that prompted us to use the A-bomb.

__________________
To be Truly ignorant, Man requires an Education. (Plato)

astralis

JAD,

that was my point. IF israel is going to go to war and clean out hamas, that's the very attitude they need to take. the israelis would need the will to kill hamas (and most likely gaza, as well) down to its last man and woman, morality and int'l outcry be damned. they're not willing, nor are they in a position, to do so.

as with my other riff, a bit OT, but...firebombing a la curtis may was considered to be a strategy; US high command was thinking about just putting a blockade on japan and firebombing the hell out of japan until the US could just walk in. it was only after okinawa and the spectre of soviet landings that the US finally ditched that plan and came up with operation olympic.

however, the moral issue here would have been the slaughter of the japanese. for all the israelis have suffered at the hands of palestinian terrorism, they haven't been willing (for both moral, historical, and political reasons) to slaughter the palestinians down to the last man, the way the US was quite willing to do in 1945.

absent this will, the only choice they have is to negotiate, or at least to talk.

JAD_333

Ok. It was just hanging out there.


And right they are, too.

Coming back to precendent, I don't think the US was planning to slaughter the Japanese so it could cakewalk into Japan...maybe some fringe strategists favored it, but I haven't come across any mention of a decision to execute a plan like that.

Hiroshima, which comes closest to that end, was at least defensible. Wholesale slaughter would never have been. I realize you are conjecturing to expose the ludicracy of Israel ending its "suffering" by slaughtering the Palestinians right down to the last baby. Were they to do such a thing, I doubt the state of Israel would survive long.

Israel's policy for dealing with militant Palestinians is to exchange blow for blow. It regards being Mr. Nice Guy as a weakness that can be exploited by Hamas, etal. Israel believes that sooner or later the Palestinian people will realize no openings exist in Israel's determination to protect itself and will take what they can get. IMO, the deal gets worse for Palestinians as time passes. They ought to cut a deal asap.

Stan187

It's not that they don't want to cut a deal. They do. The problem is that they want to cut deal where they get everything they want after always being on the losing side. It's pretty unprecedented. What happened when they Japanese wanted to "surrender on their own terms"? They got bombed to hell.

Imagine Nazi Germany dictating the terms of their surrender.

JAD_333

I agree with you, although there are some significant differences in the orgins of this conflict compared to those with Germany and Japan. I would say the most significant is that Israel was created out of whole cloth in a region heavily populated by Palestinians and which had been in the Islamic sphere of interest for nearly 1,000 yrs. In short the Palestinians did not begin as agressors, but as the disposessed. And one could add that they were not alone in making wars on Israel, but bore the brunt of them. So, from their point of view, they are justified in continuing the struggle, and anyone who claims objectivity would understand.

But history teaches us that civilizations come and go, that land is not bequeathed to any one people by natural right. Strength and purpose are the determiners of who occupies it. There is a progression in these ebbs and flows. First there is the struggle to determine the winners and losers, which
can go on for a long time on the human scale of time--heartbeats in historical scale. Eventually, the losers become resigned and accept the new status quo. To do less is to invite anniliation. I think the Palestinians are coming into the latter stage and perhaps beginning to sense that irrespective of their just claims, they will have to accept a loser's peace, which is IMO is generous from the winner's perspective. The value in a historical perspective is that we can predict the outcome with a fair amount of certainty, but not the events that lead to it. For this reason, Israel's best course is to be patient even as it counters attacks against it.

Stan187

Jad,

They were not Palestinians in the beginning. That identity was formed in 60s. Prior to that, they never thought of themselves as "Palestinians" like they do today. Arabs had come and gone from this territory without particularly identifying with it for centuries. That identity was only formed when their fellow Arabs would not integrate them into their own countries, and through suffering that common hardship of rejection.