Thank you for this....it helps dull the horror I am feeling as Canada falls in line with American warhawks and abstains from voting for a cease fire.....because the resolution won't write in an amendment calling Hamas a 'terrorist organization'.
As if we in Canada know what a terrorist is......never having experienced dispossession ourselves.
Of course, we could ask our indigenous people to help us understand terrorism...but they've lived through it already and are too generous a people to point out to us why for White first worlders, the terrorist is always 'the other'.
You are right of course......there is no way to a lasting solution through war. But if my country stands by tongue tied and dumbfounded while a genocide is committed in Gaza....justified by calling the political leadership of that country terrorists.........I honestly fear I may give up all hope for my grandkids.
So again, thank you for writing so clearly............and for reminding us both of the horror of the Iraq War, and of that earlier atrocity, America's invasion of the Philippines. The American Empire is rarely a liberator of anything but other folks land and wealth......but let's not call them Terrorists.
Thank you for this; I search for words to help with the pain. I’m not Jewish, nor Palestinian, but my heart breaks for such great, great loss. I worry, too, that what lead to where things are now is a blueprint for where we will go in the days and years to come.
It is late afternoon in the mountain time zone. Our granddaughter is preparing to host some friends for a Halloween party. We are in the safety of Canada, and I don't expect the party to be disturbed by bombing. When I read of Palestinian parents writing the names of their children on the children in case they are killed my heart breaks. I weep for the children who have done nothing wrong except for being born Palestinian. I don't understand why the world allows genocide to happen.
This is an excellent history of the US folly in Iraq. It also provides a concise history of the area between 1948 and 2006. However, it is silent on the consequences of the ceasefires with Hamas in 2009, 2012, 2014 and 2021, each of which Hamas used to rearm for subsequent horrors, most recently involving beheadings, rapes, and the mutilation and burning alive of parents, children and the elderly.
There is also no explanation how a negotiated ceasefire for peace can be accomplished with a terrorist dictatorship that has publicly avowed to never recognize Israel's right to exist.
Explained another way, though: Israel has launched military operations to disable and disarm Hamas in 2009, 2012, 2014, 2021, and many times inbetween: They have utterly failed to reduce Hamas' capabilities to launch attacks into Israel. I think this is why the Iraqi example is so instructive. Increasing conventional intensity can't destroy an insurgency that feeds on popular support for independence. In other words: More occupation only worsens a demand for less occupation.
You can't defeat Hamas by killing the current members of Hamas. You defeat Hamas by marginalizing them and giving their prospective recruits a better option.
I agree that a negotiated settlement would be far better than everlasting war. But the extremists in the Israeli government have scuttled Oslo. Everlasting war gives them opportunities to grab more land and enriches their buddies in the arms trade
I'm the product of a culture that teaches pacifism and considers war to be a sin. I dream of the day when the number of conscientious objectors exceeds the number of those willing to go to war. Of course, there little chance of that as long as our culture glorifies war.
Best thing done so far. I admit I skimmed the first half, as I agonized over the failures of Iraq and Afghanistan at the time, read my Andrew Bacevich and Andrew Cockburn, was well aware. But it's necessary for newcomers to the news to go back over it, and how it all is of a piece with the approach to Arabs in Israel.
One of the ignored side-effects of 9/11 was to let Israel have far more free reign over Gaza and the West Bank, partly because westerners were much less likely to have Arab sympathies, partly because Bush could hardly complain about behaviour that his own forces were inflicting on other Arabs.
And now, it's come to this. Inevitably. That's the unacceptable message that's being called "support for terror". It's not "support" to observe that something was inevitable, if people were made to suffer for long enough. And this piece is not supporting Hamas to note that the current Israeli strategy will end in shame and pain.
I suspected that a Gwynne Dyer fan would appreciate this dispatch.
I think it's really only the memetic political debates that we're heaving on Twitter and CNN that requires you to either be anti-Hamas or anti-Israel. Things are complicated: We can hold complicated views!
Nah, it's really not that complicated. Stephen Pinker and Dyer agree on this: humans are the most-social animals on the planet, save for hives; we hate hurting each other, and only do so under stress. Remove the stress, the violence will stop. Pinker also notes that nothing makes a man ready for violence, not hurts or hunger, as humiliation. And humiliation is constant. Glenn Greenwald dug up this factoid early in the Iraq War:
"In 2002, during the second Intifada, Moshe (“Boogie”) Ya’alon, the Israeli Chief of Staff (and [later] the Minister of Defense) declared: “The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.”
Joe Sacco's book, Palestine, tells many stories, not just of violent treatment of Palestinians, but routine, endless little humiliations. It's a recipe for inciting violence. Sacco's book ends with an image of a young boy being forced to stand in front of an IDF soldier for a long time: the soldier under an eave, the boy out in the rain, and Sacco asks, what is that boy thinking?
Read Pinker about humiliation, read Sacco about a clear policy of endless humiliations in the hope of reaching the "deepest recesses of their minds" with defeat, and my word "inevitable" for violence, is like a mathematical proof.
It beggars belief that an entire nation, whose own foundational story is that they clapped back and broke out of bondage, slavery itself, and after 400 years, would imagine that another people could be broken to harness in a few generations, but it appears to be the idea.
There are many places where you can show that people don't need their own nation-state; that's an invented "need". They need to feel secure; modest prosperity; and above all, some respect, a complete lack of humiliation. Then the violence will stop. Maybe you can only get there with the vote - I respected a fine lecture from Ali Abunimah at the U of C about how only a one-state solution will work - or only with a second nation. But if you can give people those three things, they'll stop shooting.
It's relatively easy to outline the downsides of counter-insurgency. But what are the risks of communicating 'you can do whatever you like to us, and there will be no real consequences'? You also adopt the faddish notion of Trump and others of 'forever wars'. For low to mid-intensity conflicts, a war of a few to even twenty years is hardly a 'forever' war. The enemies of democracy and modernity take a much longer-term perspective and this confers a considerable advantage over those in the West raised on video games and the internet with the attention spans of fruit flies. The blithe and faddish thinking in your article that all foreign interventions are doomed to failure was behind the disastrous unforced errors of both the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan and its botched execution. The relative stability in Afghanistan with no U.S. casualties for 18 months was purchased at a meagre ongoing cost of a troop deployment of 2500 with air support. What was needed in those circumstances was a capacity for long-term thinking and the enduring loyalty of a true friend. The Afghans deserved better than to be sent back into the Dark Ages based on the fashionable salon room thinking as reflected in the sweeping and shallow assumptions of your article.
To flip that around: Israel has been communicating for decades that terrorism will be responded to with disproportionate force. That is exactly *why* Hamas launches attacks. So we can't say that Israel's conventional response is a deterrent.
I think the idea that Afghanistan experienced 'relative stability' prior to U.S. withdrawal is revisionism. U.S. forces may have been safe, but 2016-2018 were extremely deadly for Afghan civilians. The political system had no public support: The 2019 election had a turnout of less than 20%. The state was always situated precariously on the back of American occupation.
I agree that the withdrawal was a catastrophic disaster. I agree that long-term thinking is necessary — if the invasion had been managed under the philosophy that Petraeus espouses today, I think it *may* have enabled genuine success.
But what threw Afghanistan into the dark ages was the ruinous invasion that was unleashed on the country in 2001. We provided some of them — mostly those in the cities — some freedom but no security, in the name of pursuing our domestic priorities. We pivoted to a misguided effort to gift them democracy only after the quagmire began.
I think there are situations where foreign intervention are necessary and good. I think there are few, if any, situations where occupation can attain strategic goals or benefit local populations. You certainly seem to disagree.
I was very impressed with your Oct 13 article "Can Terrorism be Resistance?". I understood the conclusion was pretty much a No. If the recent atrocities by Hamas result in a cease-fire and negociation, would you consider then that their terrorism "worked"? As an aside, I agree with you in this article and I also suspect regular Israelis do too, which is one of the reasons they despise Netanyahu.
It's a good question. I think the short answer is that the peace process would happen in this situation despite Hamas, not particularly because of it. And we have to look at it in a long history of Hamas' terrorism: It used suicide bombings and attacks on civilians to properly kill the Oslo process, and to frustrate other peace processes. If this particular attack provoked a ceasefire, it would come after decades of other attacks made peace less and less likely. And, indeed, Hamas doesn't even *want* a peace process.
Thank you for this....it helps dull the horror I am feeling as Canada falls in line with American warhawks and abstains from voting for a cease fire.....because the resolution won't write in an amendment calling Hamas a 'terrorist organization'.
As if we in Canada know what a terrorist is......never having experienced dispossession ourselves.
Of course, we could ask our indigenous people to help us understand terrorism...but they've lived through it already and are too generous a people to point out to us why for White first worlders, the terrorist is always 'the other'.
You are right of course......there is no way to a lasting solution through war. But if my country stands by tongue tied and dumbfounded while a genocide is committed in Gaza....justified by calling the political leadership of that country terrorists.........I honestly fear I may give up all hope for my grandkids.
So again, thank you for writing so clearly............and for reminding us both of the horror of the Iraq War, and of that earlier atrocity, America's invasion of the Philippines. The American Empire is rarely a liberator of anything but other folks land and wealth......but let's not call them Terrorists.
That could be considered dangerous rhetoric!
Thank you for this; I search for words to help with the pain. I’m not Jewish, nor Palestinian, but my heart breaks for such great, great loss. I worry, too, that what lead to where things are now is a blueprint for where we will go in the days and years to come.
It is late afternoon in the mountain time zone. Our granddaughter is preparing to host some friends for a Halloween party. We are in the safety of Canada, and I don't expect the party to be disturbed by bombing. When I read of Palestinian parents writing the names of their children on the children in case they are killed my heart breaks. I weep for the children who have done nothing wrong except for being born Palestinian. I don't understand why the world allows genocide to happen.
This is an excellent history of the US folly in Iraq. It also provides a concise history of the area between 1948 and 2006. However, it is silent on the consequences of the ceasefires with Hamas in 2009, 2012, 2014 and 2021, each of which Hamas used to rearm for subsequent horrors, most recently involving beheadings, rapes, and the mutilation and burning alive of parents, children and the elderly.
There is also no explanation how a negotiated ceasefire for peace can be accomplished with a terrorist dictatorship that has publicly avowed to never recognize Israel's right to exist.
Explained another way, though: Israel has launched military operations to disable and disarm Hamas in 2009, 2012, 2014, 2021, and many times inbetween: They have utterly failed to reduce Hamas' capabilities to launch attacks into Israel. I think this is why the Iraqi example is so instructive. Increasing conventional intensity can't destroy an insurgency that feeds on popular support for independence. In other words: More occupation only worsens a demand for less occupation.
You can't defeat Hamas by killing the current members of Hamas. You defeat Hamas by marginalizing them and giving their prospective recruits a better option.
Can there ever be peace until Palestinians acquiesce to a bunch of people in New York drawing lines on a map to disenfranchise them from their homes?
And thanks for Tom Waits...hadn’t heard that for a long time.
I agree that a negotiated settlement would be far better than everlasting war. But the extremists in the Israeli government have scuttled Oslo. Everlasting war gives them opportunities to grab more land and enriches their buddies in the arms trade
I'm the product of a culture that teaches pacifism and considers war to be a sin. I dream of the day when the number of conscientious objectors exceeds the number of those willing to go to war. Of course, there little chance of that as long as our culture glorifies war.
Best thing done so far. I admit I skimmed the first half, as I agonized over the failures of Iraq and Afghanistan at the time, read my Andrew Bacevich and Andrew Cockburn, was well aware. But it's necessary for newcomers to the news to go back over it, and how it all is of a piece with the approach to Arabs in Israel.
One of the ignored side-effects of 9/11 was to let Israel have far more free reign over Gaza and the West Bank, partly because westerners were much less likely to have Arab sympathies, partly because Bush could hardly complain about behaviour that his own forces were inflicting on other Arabs.
And now, it's come to this. Inevitably. That's the unacceptable message that's being called "support for terror". It's not "support" to observe that something was inevitable, if people were made to suffer for long enough. And this piece is not supporting Hamas to note that the current Israeli strategy will end in shame and pain.
I suspected that a Gwynne Dyer fan would appreciate this dispatch.
I think it's really only the memetic political debates that we're heaving on Twitter and CNN that requires you to either be anti-Hamas or anti-Israel. Things are complicated: We can hold complicated views!
Nah, it's really not that complicated. Stephen Pinker and Dyer agree on this: humans are the most-social animals on the planet, save for hives; we hate hurting each other, and only do so under stress. Remove the stress, the violence will stop. Pinker also notes that nothing makes a man ready for violence, not hurts or hunger, as humiliation. And humiliation is constant. Glenn Greenwald dug up this factoid early in the Iraq War:
"In 2002, during the second Intifada, Moshe (“Boogie”) Ya’alon, the Israeli Chief of Staff (and [later] the Minister of Defense) declared: “The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.”
Joe Sacco's book, Palestine, tells many stories, not just of violent treatment of Palestinians, but routine, endless little humiliations. It's a recipe for inciting violence. Sacco's book ends with an image of a young boy being forced to stand in front of an IDF soldier for a long time: the soldier under an eave, the boy out in the rain, and Sacco asks, what is that boy thinking?
Read Pinker about humiliation, read Sacco about a clear policy of endless humiliations in the hope of reaching the "deepest recesses of their minds" with defeat, and my word "inevitable" for violence, is like a mathematical proof.
It beggars belief that an entire nation, whose own foundational story is that they clapped back and broke out of bondage, slavery itself, and after 400 years, would imagine that another people could be broken to harness in a few generations, but it appears to be the idea.
There are many places where you can show that people don't need their own nation-state; that's an invented "need". They need to feel secure; modest prosperity; and above all, some respect, a complete lack of humiliation. Then the violence will stop. Maybe you can only get there with the vote - I respected a fine lecture from Ali Abunimah at the U of C about how only a one-state solution will work - or only with a second nation. But if you can give people those three things, they'll stop shooting.
It's relatively easy to outline the downsides of counter-insurgency. But what are the risks of communicating 'you can do whatever you like to us, and there will be no real consequences'? You also adopt the faddish notion of Trump and others of 'forever wars'. For low to mid-intensity conflicts, a war of a few to even twenty years is hardly a 'forever' war. The enemies of democracy and modernity take a much longer-term perspective and this confers a considerable advantage over those in the West raised on video games and the internet with the attention spans of fruit flies. The blithe and faddish thinking in your article that all foreign interventions are doomed to failure was behind the disastrous unforced errors of both the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan and its botched execution. The relative stability in Afghanistan with no U.S. casualties for 18 months was purchased at a meagre ongoing cost of a troop deployment of 2500 with air support. What was needed in those circumstances was a capacity for long-term thinking and the enduring loyalty of a true friend. The Afghans deserved better than to be sent back into the Dark Ages based on the fashionable salon room thinking as reflected in the sweeping and shallow assumptions of your article.
To flip that around: Israel has been communicating for decades that terrorism will be responded to with disproportionate force. That is exactly *why* Hamas launches attacks. So we can't say that Israel's conventional response is a deterrent.
I think the idea that Afghanistan experienced 'relative stability' prior to U.S. withdrawal is revisionism. U.S. forces may have been safe, but 2016-2018 were extremely deadly for Afghan civilians. The political system had no public support: The 2019 election had a turnout of less than 20%. The state was always situated precariously on the back of American occupation.
I agree that the withdrawal was a catastrophic disaster. I agree that long-term thinking is necessary — if the invasion had been managed under the philosophy that Petraeus espouses today, I think it *may* have enabled genuine success.
But what threw Afghanistan into the dark ages was the ruinous invasion that was unleashed on the country in 2001. We provided some of them — mostly those in the cities — some freedom but no security, in the name of pursuing our domestic priorities. We pivoted to a misguided effort to gift them democracy only after the quagmire began.
I think there are situations where foreign intervention are necessary and good. I think there are few, if any, situations where occupation can attain strategic goals or benefit local populations. You certainly seem to disagree.
I was very impressed with your Oct 13 article "Can Terrorism be Resistance?". I understood the conclusion was pretty much a No. If the recent atrocities by Hamas result in a cease-fire and negociation, would you consider then that their terrorism "worked"? As an aside, I agree with you in this article and I also suspect regular Israelis do too, which is one of the reasons they despise Netanyahu.
It's a good question. I think the short answer is that the peace process would happen in this situation despite Hamas, not particularly because of it. And we have to look at it in a long history of Hamas' terrorism: It used suicide bombings and attacks on civilians to properly kill the Oslo process, and to frustrate other peace processes. If this particular attack provoked a ceasefire, it would come after decades of other attacks made peace less and less likely. And, indeed, Hamas doesn't even *want* a peace process.
So I think we can still say it doesn't work.