How Does This End?

There's a nagging feeling that Israel's assault on Gaza is getting beyond its control. Yes the Israeli military have killed some Gaza militants and have assassinated some Hamas leaders but so what? Israeli forces are going to continue the land war against Islamist militants but defeating them is already looking like an increasingly elusive goal.

Time and again Israel has proven its military supremacy over Arab forces in conventional, army-to-army combat. As America has learned to its surprise in Iraq, conventional military force is largely ineffective against resistance movements or insurgencies. You just don't have much to shoot at and, when you do use your high-tech weaponry, you're likely to take out innocent civilians in the process, turning civilians into brand new enemies.

Look at it this way. In tank warfare, the object is to knock out your enemy's tanks, reduce his force until it can no longer resist. It would be a much different matter if, when you destroyed one enemy tank, two more popped up in its place. The more success you achieved, the greater the loss you sustained.

Like the Americans, the Israeli forces don't seem particularly adept at this type of back-alley warfare. Sure you can kill a handful of insurgents, push them out of a neighbourhood, but that doesn't stop them from reinforcing and regrouping somewhere else. Israel can achieve temporary victories but only permanent victories will do any good.

Another danger posed by Israel's assault on Gaza is the threats of uprisings elsewhere in the region. Mubarak may be Israel's reluctant ally, but it's forced him to be repressive with his own people to thwart their support for the Gazans. In the West Bank, Fatah has also been crushing pro-Hamas demonstrations.

In the "good Arab" nations, compliant governments are often at odds with their peoples. Despots like Mubarak cling to power through brutality and fear. Mubarak and his kind are the force that leads to the creation of resistance groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Heabollah.

In Gaza, Israel is trying to fight a military war. That's fine so long as the other side is willing to give battle in your military war. But that's simply not going to happen when the other side doesn't have the numbers, the technology and the weapons to fight a military war. Hamas and the other militant groups don't have tanks, they don't have artillery, they don't have jet fighters or attack helicopters. Without those things they can't begin to oppose Israeli forces in a conventional warfare mode so they have to fall back on unconventional or asymmetrical warfare, insurgency or guerrilla warfare.

As the militants won't stand up and be slaughtered in Israel's variety of warfare, Israel doesn't have a lot of choice but to try to defeat the militants at their own game. The best way would be to drive a wedge between the militants and the civilian populace. The best way for Israel to screw that up is to bomb the civilian population which serves only to drive them into the arms of the militants.

The Israelis are a heavy-firepower military. It's what they know, it's what they do. America's asymmetrical warfare guru, General David Petraeus, knows that blasting away at civilians is self-defeating. It doesn't subdue them and it certainly doesn't win them over to your side. It makes them angry and leaves them yearning for the moment when they can get their own back. It's just plain stupid.

As Petraeus himself has said repeatedly, in this sort of warfare the best firepower is usually the least firepower, that it's often best not to shoot at all. That's because this is political warfare, something that's utterly lost on the Israelis.

Warfare is simply state violence employed to achieve a political end. It's hard to imagine what political gain can be had by Israel out of this war. The one thing they will achieve is retribution, revenge on the Gazan people for the acts of Hamas and other militant groups.

I'm guessing that Israel's position is going to worsen in the long run. It's widely believed that these attacks were timed with the inauguration of Barack Obama in mind. The new American president will hardly be pleased with this 'fait accompli' inauguration gift from Israel. In his only statement on Gaza to date, Obama came out today and simply said that he's very concerned about the suffering of civilians on both sides of the conflict. Nothing there condemning Hamas, not a peep about Israel having the right to inflict this carnage on Gazans in notional self-defence.

What a mess!