Israel's Gaza Delusion

The February 10 Israeli elections had nothing to do with it. Israel contends it attacked and invaded Gaza to stop Hamas from continuing to rain down rocket barrages on Israel. Okay, so how's that going?

Phase One of the campaign, the air assault, went fairly well unless you were an innocent Palestinian who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the rockets kept raining down.

Phase Two, the limited ground assault, has also gone fairly well. Just nine Israeli soldiers killed and, of those, four were killed by friendly fire. Yet the rockets keep raining down.

Next up, Phase Three, the occupation of major urban centres in Gaza. This is where things could get really ugly. The militants have the home field advantage. Stories circulate that the cities are heavily fortified, a spiderweb of back alleys and guerrilla tunnels, festooned with IEDs and other booby traps. Air support and heavy firepower are largely negated in this sort of fighting, particularly as the conventional force, the Israelis, are forced to pursue and hunt down the elusive guerrillas through their own warrens and killing zones.

The risk to this sort of urban warfare for the Israelis is the prospect of getting bogged down, getting mired with no way out save to retreat, to run for cover. It's not so much the military consequences of that as the political consequences. It would create a rallying point for Muslim extremists throughout the Middle East and South Asia regions. It would embolden Islamist movements, attract new recruits, expand support from the civilian side.

Israeli forces would have to achieve a decisive victory fairly quickly or run the risk of renewed conflict elsewhere, from Lebanon or the West Bank. If Israel becomes bogged down in Gaza, it's very bad news for Fatah and moderate Arab states.

There's a debate underway within the Israeli military and government right now about changing the objective from destroying the militants' ability to launch rockets into Israel to destroying the Hamas government itself.

The Americans changed their objectives after they got into Iraq. What began as a 60-90 day war to topple Saddam became a war to crush the "dead ender" Baathists and moved on to a war to defeat the Sunni insurgency and a war to defeat the Shiite militias and a war to defeat al-Qaeda terrorists.

No one can predict where Israel's war in Gaza is headed but once Israel loses sight of the exit door, it might be hard to find again.