Walter Russell Mead: Hamas' Passionate Campus Supporters' Incoherent and Unrealistic View of the World
Secretary of State Antony Blinken is barnstorming the Middle East to develop plans for a ceasefire and for postwar reconstruction in Gaza. American national interests demand that the U.S. resist Iran's drive to disrupt what is left of the post-Cold War order in the Middle East. Failure to stabilize the region could lead in the short term to inflationary gasoline price spikes, and in the longer term could seriously weaken Washington's position in the contest with the revisionist powers seeking to overturn the American order worldwide.Victor Davis Hanson: Iran just pulled its own nuclear teeth
Many of Hamas' most passionate campus supporters believe that the organization wants to establish a secular Palestinian state. They also believe that Israeli Jews are European immigrants displacing an indigenous population - white settlers who should go home to Poland. They think that Israel survives only because America supports it and that an American president who "gets serious" with Israel can make it do almost anything he wants.
They see Hamas as part of a global coalition of "progressive" movements advancing causes such as climate change, democracy and LGBTQ rights against global capitalism. But the wisest heads in the world all working together couldn't craft a feasible diplomatic strategy based on such an incoherent and unrealistic view of the world.
Now that the soil of both Iran and Israel is no longer sacred and immune from attack, the mystique of the Iranian nuclear threat has dissipated.This Is No Genocide
It should be harder for the theocracy to shake down Western governments for hostage bribes, sanctions relief and Iran-deal giveaways on the implied threat of Iran successfully nuking the Jewish state.
The new reality is that Iran has goaded an Israel that has numerous nuclear weapons and dozens of nuclear-tipped missiles in hardened silos and on submarines.
Tehran has zero ability to stop any of these missiles or sophisticated fifth-generation Israeli aircraft armed with nuclear bombs and missiles.
Iran must now fear that if it launched two or three nuclear missiles, there would be overwhelming odds that they would either fail at launch, go awry in the air, implode inside Iran, be taken down over Arab territory by Israel’s allies or be knocked down by the tripartite Israel anti-missile defense system.
Add it all up, and the Iranian attack on Israel seems a historic blunder.
It showed the world the impotence of an Iranian aerial assault at the very time it threatens to go nuclear.
It revealed that an incompetent Iran may be as much a threat to itself as to its enemies.
It opened up a new chapter in which its own soil, thanks to its attack on Israel, is no longer off limits to any Western power.
Its failure to stop a much smaller Israel response, coupled with the overwhelming success of Israel and its allies in stopping a much larger Iranian attack, reminds the Iranian autocracy that its shrill rhetoric is designed to mask its impotence and to hide its own vulnerabilities from its enemies.
And the long-suffering Iranian people?
The truth will come out that its own theocracy hit the Israeli homeland with negligible results and earned a successful, though merely demonstrative, Israeli response in return.
As I write, students in universities across the U.S. are occupying their campuses in protest at what they consider to be Israel’s genocide against the Gazan people. Unlike the Met Police who freeze at the prospect of arresting pro-Palestine demonstrators guilty of breaching the peace, the American police have no such hang ups and are arresting protestors in large numbers for their illegal encampments. So far, around 120 students have been arrested at Columbia University alone.
What makes these illegal occupations particularly contemptible is the antisemitism of some of those taking part. Jewish students and university staff have been harassed with taunts of “Go back to Poland” and “October 7th is about to be every day for you”.
These barbs are not only revolting, they also display the monumental moral stupidity of those conducting this harassment. How can a person demonstrate against what they think is a genocide in Gaza whilst calling for the genocide of Jews? But what did we expect – irrationality is integral to extremism.
But there is also the empirical question of whether Israel’s actions in Gaza actually are a genocide. It is time to listen to an expert rather than students who mentally and emotionally are still in nappies. Enter John Spencer, the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute (MWI) at West Point and a former infantry soldier of 25 years’ service.
In an article for Newsweek, Spencer, who studies and advises the American military on the kind of warfare in which Israel is currently engaged, namely urban warfare, argues that no other nation in history has shown as much concern to protect civilians as the Israeli Defence Force has done in Gaza. If the IDF were carrying out a genocide, civilians would be targeted too, but they are not. Yet still the international community does not acknowledge Israel’s concern for non-combatants and continues to scold it for failing to protect them. So exemplary has the IDF been in minimising civilian casualties, it is Spencer’s opinion that the U.S. ought to learn the IDF’s methods.
What is more remarkable according to Spencer is that Israel’s concern for Gazan civilians defies military orthodoxy regarding offensives. According to the theory and praxis of manoeuvre warfare, the attacker must smash an enemy morally and physically with surprise, overwhelming force and speed, and destroy political and military centres. Warning civilians to evacuate is forbidden as enemy forces would learn of the coming attack.