Israel’s war teaches us what we should have done after September 11.
Rafah isn’t just the last stand for Hamas, but for an entire foreign policy establishment.
This from frontpagemag.com.
Any ‘Palestinian’ state was doomed to be a terrorist state. The only question: ‘Who would run it?’
The desperate effort to keep Israeli soldiers from going into the last Gaza stronghold of the Islamic terrorist organization is about more than the sum of the geopolitical parts.
After nation building failed in Afghanistan and Iraq, and everywhere else it’s been tried, the radioactive ‘Palestinian’ nation building experiment from over 30 years ago is its last hope.
Long before George W. Bush tackled nation building after performing 9/11, his father began the era of turning moslem terrorist groups into countries with the project of giving the PLO a state.
Where the first Bush failed, Bill Clinton succeeded with the Oslo accords and a Nobel prize for Arafat.
The PLO state failed long before Iran took over Iraq and the Taliban took over Afghanistan.
There had never been anything peaceful, democratic or aspirational about Arafat and the PLO. By the time Hamas had captured Gaza after winning democratic elections, it had long been clear to everyone outside of D.C. that rather than ending terrorism, statehood had incarnated it.
When Iraq and Afghanistan each went bad, America could just leave, Israelis did not have that luxury.
Sharon forcibly expelled the Jews living in Gaza to the other side of a border wall, but despite all the sob stories that the terrorists were living in an “open air concentration camp” with five-star hotels and mansions, walls were not hard to get through even before Oct 7.
Israel has been stuck living next door to a failed thirty-year nation-building experiment gone bad. And everyone in the international community is worried that the Oct 7 war will see it taken apart.
Lately the nation building experts have taken to warning that Israel is doing what they’re doing the wrong way.
Former CIA Director David Petraeus who also oversaw American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been arguing that Israel needs to pivot to a ‘counterinsurgency’ model.
But, of course, then we’ll be back to “winning hearts and minds” instead of actually trying to win a war.
Ex: The Obiden Regime has never stopped insisting Israel needs a “day after” plan for rebuilding Gaza under a PLO government and some “moderate” terrorists from Hamas.
Three generations after it became the norm, fighting a war without nation building as an endgame is so impossible that warfare experts can’t even understand what they’re seeing in Israel.
Howsomever—among all the other problems with nation building—it does not work.
And the Israelis who have been living next to the original Chernobyl of nation building know it better than anyone.
The entire Middle East:
[I]s one long great nation building disaster shaped by primeval nation building experiments such as the Sykes-Picot agreement, the Hashemite monarchies, and finally the recession of colonialism.
Nation building has failed
in every single moslem country it has been tried.
And this includes not only the United States after 9/11, but by the British between WWI and WWII.
But failed nation building has not involved only moslem countries:
– D.C. elites can look to Haiti where decades of interference led to one disaster after another. The armed gangs overrunning the island nation started life as police forces. Democracy initiatives just worsened tensions and led to murderous outbreaks of political violence,
– The same situation abounds across much of Africa, and parts of Latin America and Asia, where no amount of nation building could overcome tribalism, gang violence and political extremists,
– Truman insisted on ending Chiang Kai-Shek’s repression of Communists in China,
– Carter bailed out the Islamists in Iran, and
– [The U.S.] decided that the only way to stop terrorism in Israel was to give the terrorists their own state.
Faced with 30 years of terrorism, the nation builders see no other alternative to a terror state. But Israelis do.
They saw it before Oct 7, and they certainly see it all too clearly now. Israeli leadership adamantly refuses to create another terrorist state in Israel.
The term ‘Nation Building’ has become
so toxic that no one wants to use it anymore.
The Regime loudly proclaimed the withdrawal from Afghanistan marked the end of nation building. And now—more nation building. What is the one word defined by repeating actions again and again but expecting different results? Exactly.
The Israelis had friends and family members brutally butchered, burned to death, raped, and kidnapped on Oct 7 and they do not care what exists in Gaza so long as it is not the terrorists.
Israel is being forced to supply food and medical aid to the perpetrators by D.C., which no army was forced to do in the past, but they have no interest beyond that in the enemy population.
And ‘day after’ plans for Gaza best be left up to the Israelis.
Our ‘day after’ plans for Afghanistan and Iraq cost us a generation of fighting men for nothing. Even the ‘Surge’, the last stand of the counterinsurgency model, did nothing to stop Iraq from falling into the hands of Iran which is now using it to launch attacks on American bases.
NOTE: Israelis care as much about Gazans as we cared about Afghans on 9/11.
And while the U.S. officials who “oversaw over a decade of failed nation building experiments may not understand, America would have been far better off if we had focused on hunting down the perpetrators and their enablers and then left giant holes in the ground” as warnings to any terrorist wannabees.
Ex-neo con Max Boot seemed to sum up the Gaza situation best in his Washington Post column:
Truly winning this war would require creating some sort of government in Gaza that could gain the support of the people and prevent Hamas from returning after Israeli soldiers pull out.
Now, let us not forget, nation building’s faulty premise is that people everywhere want what Americans want.
