Consequences of the Gaza offensive

Tony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in a piece earlier this week from CSIS asks, The Fighting in Gaza: How Does It End? (And, Will It?) 01/05/09:

The fighting in Gaza is already a major human tragedy for the Palestinians. It compounds the impact of Hamas’s takeover of Gaza, a heritage of terrorism and rocket attacks on Israel, and Palestinian and Israeli internal political tensions that have made the search for peace largely a matter of hollow rhetoric. ...

One thing is certain. The fighting has already become a strategic liability for the US. There is no good answer to what level of force is “proportionate” in this kind of asymmetric warfare. There is no equation that can decide how many rocket firings and acts of terrorism justify a given level of air strikes or use of conventional ground forces. The fact that the weak suffer more than the strong in war is a grim reality, as is the fact that no power is going to accept terrorism because its best military options produce civilian casualties.

Nevertheless, the US has again been pushed into being Israel’s only defender in an international environment where it is far easier (and more lucrative) to take the Arab side than seek any form of balance. Arab and Islamic media and think tanks already portray the fighting as enabled by US support of Israel and actions in the UN, and this is the judgment of most media and think tanks in Europe and outside the US. [my emphasis]

Cordesman is part of the "realist" school of foreign policy, and his absurd rejection of the notion of proportionality in warfare is an example of the downsides sometimes displayed by the Realists.

But he's pointing to a fact that gets too little discussion in the American reporting on the Gaza offensive. The US is not in the position of just cheering from the sidelines like a football game. The world's identification of the US as an unconditional supporter of Israel in this offensive and in much else has a real price. As Juan Cole wrote at his blog yesterday:

Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr called on Iraqis to kill US troops in Iraq in revenge for the Israeli assault on the people of Gaza. "I call upon the honest Iraqi resistance to carry out revenge operations against the great accomplice of the Zionist enemy," [Muqtada said.]

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki from Baghdad attacked the international community for its silence in the face of what he called Israeli brutality, and he put pressure on Jordan, Egypt and Turkey (without naming them) to break off diplomatic relations with Israel.

Cordesman cautions against taking the Israel-Lebanon War of 2006 as a strict parallel. The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) is in a stronger position in Gaza than it was in Lebanon. But he see the larger question as what Israel can reasonably expect to gain in political terms from the Gaza offensive. He writes:

It ... seems difficult to believe than any military outcome that leaves Gaza far more damaged ... is going to have a population that is not more anti-Israeli and whose young men are not even more vulnerable to extremism and terrorism – regardless of the immediate post-fighting impact on Hamas. ...

In short, the most likely answer to the question of how the fighting ends, is that it doesn’t. If so, the risks go beyond Israel. They will further empower Iran and the Hezbollah even if they do not make token or real efforts to actively support Hamas. They will aid Al Qa’ida and its ilk. They will divide moderate Arab regimes from their people, reinforce Arab anger against the US, and make long term and lasting solutions to the broader Arab-Israeli conflict even more difficult.

Obviously, all of this greatly complicates Obama's foreign policy efforts in the Middle East and South Asia. That's why it would be especially interesting to know just how much encouragement the Cheney-Bush administration gave to Israel for going ahead with this military action at this time.

Tags: anthony cordesman, israel, palestinians