ANALYSIS-Gaza offers tough lessons for Mideast proxy wars

[maddezmom]

ANALYSIS-Gaza offers tough lessons for Mideast proxy wars
By Dan Williams

JERUSALEM, June 20 (Reuters) - They handily outnumbered their isolated Islamist rivals, had pledges of Western cash as well as military training and the endorsement of Arab powers.

Yet Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's forces still lost to Hamas in Gaza, a rout that has rattled the region and thrown into doubt the Western doctrine of cultivating local assets against the perceived spread of anti-Western influences.

Stunned officials from Abbas's Fatah faction, as well as their foreign advisers, have given various tactical reasons -- withheld equipment, absent commanders, ignored intelligence -- for the defeat during six days of Gaza street fighting.

But many experts believe that the pro-Fatah campaign also suffered from inflated expectations of a once dominant national movement now in political entropy and, after years of failed peace talks with Israel, bereft of Hamas's ideological focus.

"You cannot fight a religious force with military power," Abbas's national security adviser, Mohammed Dahlan, told Reuters. "Hamas had a goal. The security services did not -- just self-preservation."

more:http://wap.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L19705912.htm

[Igel]

1. You can fight a religious group with military power when the

religious group is waging war. You shoot them and take away their guns. They didn't start building their militia the second they got power for nothing.

The problem is that you have to believe in something, and have loyalty to that cause, if you're going to risk your life for it. If the basic unit of loyalty is to the clan rather than to the state, then a clan fighting against a ragtag group of people will probably win, all things being equal. The problem is that people don't consider religious groups on par with clans or tribes. They are, whatever their status in the US and Europe usually is.

A nation can function as a clan or tribe, if enough of its members believe in the unity of the state sufficiently. Fatah doesn't believe in Palestine enough to die for their faith.

Hamas fought as zealots and believers. Fatah fought as opportunists and agnostics.