Why Israel Is "Losing" In Gaza: Lessons For America

[IndianaGreen]

Why Israel Is "Losing" In Gaza: Lessons For America

GlobalPost.com
Thanassis Cambanis
January 30, 2009 12:48 PM

AYTA AL SHAAB, Lebanon -- The hue and furor over the humanitarian cost of the Gaza conflict have obscured the matter on which Israel's campaign against Hamas ultimately will turn: Can military force really alter the course of a populist Islamist movement?

Long after the terms of a cease-fire are hammered out, the answer to this underlying and persistent question will determine whether the offensive was successful for Israel and fatal for Hamas.

President Obama's foreign policy team is grappling with the same nagging quandary as it shifts the U.S. military's focus from Iraq to Afghanistan: How to wage an effective struggle against groups that often employ terrorist tactics? Obama's White House seems to have abandoned a conventional one-size-fits-all military approach, but it must confront an array of militants that includes Al Qaeda, the Mahdi Army in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/30/why-israel-is-losing-in-g_n_162610.html

[yurbud]

1. the real question is why are we fighting in Afghanistan when 9/11 was sponsored by Saudi &

Pakistan?

If we had hunted down the elements of those governments involved in the attacks, the whole War on Terror would have lasted about a week.

Instead, we have to put up with this interminable bullshit that folds in every other insurgent or militia with al Qaeda.

The Mahdi army, the Taliban, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Hezbollah, and Hamas did not attack us on 9/11.

It is disheartening to hear a Democratic administration parroting this childish propaganda bullshit that the Bushies did. At least be honest enough to say what we are really doing in these various places and who we are doing it for, which doesn't happen to be the American taxpayer.

[DCKit]

2. But they're our allies. So what if they sponsor a little terrorism here and there?

You can bet there's a large contingent of DOJ and FBI agents who weren't too happy when told by the * maladministration not to go down that road.

[IndianaGreen]

3. We had bin Laden surrounded and trapped in Tora Bora

but it wouldn't have been convenient to have him killed or captured because it would have ended the war, and there was Iraq still left to conquer.

[yurbud]

4. yep--Sy Hersh covered that Tora Bora business--Pakistani ISI spirited them out