August 10, 2014

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Before we return to the latest disasters, foreign and domestic, that have overcome our hapless clueless feckless government, we’ll spend time today on the success Israel has had in its campaign against Hamas.

Gabriel Schoenfeld compares Israel’s careful forays into Gaza with the Allied bombing of Germany and Japan.

Condemnation of Israel for its conduct of Operation Protective Edge in Gaza continues unabated. The chief accusation, heard time and again, is that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have either been cavalier about civilian casualties or are intentionally inflicting them. Israel and its defenders, for their part, have been at pains to point out the great lengths the IDF has gone to avoid injuring civilians, while at the same time noting the innumerable ways in which Hamas has violated the laws of war. 

The debate over these matters has been almost as intense as the fighting itself. All too often, historical and moral perspective have been lost in the rhetorical smoke. No nation can survive with hundreds of rockets raining on its cities day after day while its borders are simultaneously penetrated by armed fighters seeking to spirit out hostages via underground tunnels. Once again, Israel has found itself waging a war for its survival. In such a war, the question becomes: What is forbidden and what is permitted? 

As is well known but bears restating, the campaign Israel has been conducting to suppress Hamas rocket fire and destroy its tunnel network employs precision guided munitions. The attacks from land, air, and sea are designed to destroy Hamas’s command and control facilities and those structures in or from which it has been manufacturing, storing, or firing its huge arsenal of rockets. Before the IDF attacks any buildings where civilians are known to be living or congregating, it issues numerous alerts by dropping leaflets, making telephone calls and sending text messages, and firing warning shots.

In a conflict in which its adversary employs innocent women and children as human shields and fires offensive weapons from or near hospitals, schools, and U.N. shelters, Israel’s effort to reduce civilian casualties has clearly not succeeded in every case. But the effort itself, if not unique in the annals of warfare, is certainly far from the norm. Notably, it stands in the starkest possible contrast to the way Great Britain and the United States conducted their own war for survival. …

… This brings us back to Hamas. Its illegal use of Israeli uniforms in combat is but one of many practices that reveal the group to be not a government or a governing party, but a terrorist organization. Indeed, its fighters fall into the same category of “unlawful enemy combatants” that applies to al Qaeda. In fighting such an adversary, one is allowed to take off certain gloves, as the United States has been doing in Afghanistan under both Presidents Bush and Obama. Our forces there have routinely used a variety of tactics to kill our enemies that entail the inadvertent but extensive loss of civilian life.

All this is overlooked by the wolf pack that constitutes Israel’s critics. So too is the ocean of civilian blood flowing in Syria and Iraq at the hands of Islamic butchers of various religio-ideological stripes, about which Israel’s critics are thunderously silent. President Obama fully participates in the hypocrisy by publicly chastising Israel for causing civilian deaths when such deaths have occurred with regularity as a consequence of the drone strikes carried out in Afghanistan and elsewhere at his own orders, and for which the United States has on frequent occasion felt compelled to apologize. …

 

 

Evelyn Gordon reports on just one of the ways Hamas has created a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

There has been a lot of talk lately about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. What has gone curiously unmentioned by all the great humanitarians from the UN and “human rights” groups, however, is the degree to which this crisis was deliberately fomented by Hamas: Aside from starting the war to begin with, Hamas has done its level best to deprive Gazans of everything from food to medical care to housing, despite Israel’s best efforts to provide them.

Take, for instance, the widely reported shortages of medicines and various other essentials. Many of these products are imported, and since Egypt has largely closed its border, Gaza has only one conduit for these vital imports: the Kerem Shalom crossing into Israel. Thus if Gaza’s Hamas government had any concern whatsoever for its citizens, ensuring that this crossing was kept open and could function at maximum efficiency would be a top priority.

Instead, Hamas and other terrorist groups subjected Kerem Shalom to relentless rocket and mortar fire throughout the 29-day conflict, thereby ensuring that the job of getting cargo through was constantly interrupted as crossing workers raced for cover. Hamas also launched at least three tunnel attacks near Kerem Shalom, each of which shut the crossing down for hours. …

 

 

Seth Mandel on what we now know about Hamas’ tactics.

The fog of war often means the first draft of history makes the greatest impact but needs to be corrected by later drafts. After the Cold War was over, historian John Lewis Gaddis called his updated book on the conflict “We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History.” More famous is Kinglsey Amis’s suggestion that Robert Conquest call his new edition of The Great Terror “I Told You So, You F—ing Fools.” Yet now we have a rare opportunity in Gaza to apply what we now know to additional fighting in a war thought to be over.

With no deal reached for a permanent truce between Israel and Hamas, the terrorist organization in Gaza wasted no time in renewing its attacks on Israel today. And it’s worth wondering if the atrocious media coverage of the war, which abided by Hamas’s threats and only showed what Hamas wanted the world to see, will be any different for this round of fighting. After all, as Israeli ground troops left Gaza and journalists went with them, reporters began to admit: we now know.

We now know, that is, that Hamas was firing rockets from civilian areas and among neighborhoods where journalists were staying. That meant they were getting a twofer: reporters wouldn’t expose their war crimes and they would draw return fire from Israel that would endanger foreign journalists and Palestinian civilians. As we know from the Tet Offensive, if you can spook the reporters you can get your sky-is-falling coverage made to order. …

 

 

Victor Davis Hanson makes the case for Israel coming out of this war stronger than before.

In postmodern wars, we are told, there is no victory, no defeat, no aggressors, no defenders, just a tragedy of conflicting agendas. But in such a mindless and amoral landscape, Israel in fact is on its way to emerging in a far better position after the Gaza war than before.

Analysts of the current fighting in Gaza have assured us that even if Israel weakens Hamas, such a short-term victory will hardly lead to long-term strategic success — but they don’t define “long-term.” In this line of thinking, supposedly in a few weeks Israel will only find itself more isolated than ever. It will grow even more unpopular in Europe and will perhaps, for the first time, lose its patron, America — while gaining an enraged host of Arab and Islamic enemies. Meanwhile, Hamas will gain stature, rebuild, and slowly wear Israel down.

But if we compare the Gaza war with Israel’s past wars, that pessimistic scenario hardly rings true. Unlike in the existential wars of 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973, Israel faces no coalition of powerful conventional enemies. Syria’s military is wrecked. Iraq is devouring itself. Egypt is bankrupt and in no mood for war. Its military government is more worried about Hamas than about Israel. Jordan has no wish to attack Israel. The Gulf States are likewise more afraid of the axis of Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood than of Israel — a change of mentality that has no historical precedent. In short, never since the birth of the Jewish state have the traditional enemies surrounding Israel been in such military and political disarray. Never have powerful Arab states quietly hoped that Israel would destroy an Islamist terrorist organization that they fear more than they fear the Jewish state. …

 

 

Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Professor posts on Putin’s pique over the West’s sanctions.  

In retaliation for US and EU sanctions, Russia is banning the importation of large categories of food products from each: food imports from the US are pretty much banned altogether.

These sanctions are aimed at an industry that is politically powerful far beyond its numbers. Chicken farmers in the US will squawk at the loss of about 1 percent of their revenues, and European dairy producers will bellow in anger. But the economic impact on the affected countries will be trivial. The US exports about $300 million in chicken to Russia (down substantially from a few years ago), which is essentially rounding error in US GDP. European net food exports to Russia are about 12 billion euros, or less than .1 percent of the EU’s 13 trillion Euro economy.

The impact on Russia’s people will be substantially greater. Russia imports about 35 percent of its food, about half of that from Europe and the US. Higher value, non-staples are disproportionately affected. This will lead to an appreciable increase in the cost of food, which represents a very large fraction of Russian household budgets. Whereas US consumers spend about 6.5 percent of their total expenditures on food, in Russia the figure is about 32 percent. A rise in food prices hits hard. A 10 percent increase, which is not unrealistic, cuts Russian living standards about 3 percent.

Putin ordered the government to find ways to increase food production, because, you know, that ukases always work as the Tsar intends. Russian food output will no doubt rise in response to higher prices, but in the short run the elasticity of supply is likely to be very low, especially for vegetables and dairy. Anyways, this increased output will only mitigate the price increases. If Russian firms/farms could produce more at current prices, they’d be doing so.

I predict that since increased Russian domestic production will have little effect on prices, Putin will soon resort to the tried-and-false nostrum of price controls, just like Russia did when food price inflation spiked in 2007. This will lead to lines and empty shelves, so Russians can party like it’s 1989: to those nostalgic for the USSR, be careful what you ask for. I note that Russia also adopted price controls, to disastrous effect, in WWI. Putin is idealizing Russia’s role in that war of late, and employs WWI reenactors to lead subversion campaigns in Ukraine, so maybe he’ll think it’s a great idea to reenact the price controls too. …