Hamas knows that Israel knows that Hamas ain’t a real government, but everyone pretends, for their own reasons.

If you can make an asymmetrical war, symmetrical, you win, if you can match your strengths against their strengths and win that is.

For someone with an ideological bend, there must be some kind of hypocritical quality to advocating staying the course in Iraq while urging Israel to pull out of gaza.

In reality, it’s just good strategy. Israel is not America. Israel is smaller, weaker, less wealthy, and they don’t have the amount of money to wage war as the Arab oil rich conglomerates have. Therefore their reactions are always more violent than ours, because they have more to lose. A man with nothing to lose is more dangerous than a man with everything to lose. There is no leverage. Winston said that he changed his mind when the facts changed. People with an investment in an ideology, like anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism, can’t change their minds. To them, it must remain consistent, America out, Jews out. Any lack of consistency and they might go to hell or something. Bad mojo.

The reason I liked Israel’s pull out from Gaza is because Israel just did not know how to conduct occupation duties. They were not assimilating the local population to Israeli ways, they were not making friends and allies amongst the Palestinians and they were not doing themselves a favor in the propaganda war by appearing as occupiers and only “responding” after a suicide attack. This allowed the media to setup the “Hamas suicides, Israel retaliates” gig.

Israel was not benefiting from occupying Gaza. In Iraq, America is benefiting loads by acquiring combat experience, local language arts, local Iraqi intel networks, and various other things you can’t pick up from an American training base.

For exPreacher, I think the Pentagon might be interfering a bit with the block ; )

The Block quote worked NOT.

I quoted you, “By withdrawing, Israel created a nice, bright line. The Palestinians are now governing themselves and, like any government, must abide by the consequences of their actions.” and agree — yours was a brilliant observation.. and Israel is crazy like a fox..

ExP

You said:

Brilliant deduction… Israel is crazy like a fox…

ExP

As always, BookWorm, you are right on the money. The disengagement removed some of the key excuses that the left had when opposing Israel. Palestinian aggression is much easier to point out …

And ultimately, it doesn’t matter, because the rest of the world will blame Israel for this anyway.