Clearing the Jackals From the Middle East

Fire of Liberty

I'd say that this piece by Jed Babbin is an excellent summation of why the IDF is making incursions into Gaza. Here a brief sample:

Last year's Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip was a council of despair. Ungovernable and with a deeply-embedded terrorist infrastructure, Gaza was only a source of casualties for Israel. Withdrawal - accompanied by sealing the borders to prevent terrorist incursions - appeared the last best hope. Maybe Ariel Sharon could have brought off the idea of withdrawing and sealing off Gaza as a terrorist base. But Ehud Olmert is no Sharon, and as Olmert watched Gaza became Hamastan.

Terrorist, anarchic Hamastan proved a jar that couldn't be sealed. This year alone about eight hundred rockets were fired from it into Israel and though dozens of terrorist incursions were foiled, more and more succeeded as the Gaza-based terrorists learned how to penetrate the Israeli barriers. Still, the Olmert government hung back. It lacked the courage and decisiveness needed to re-enter Gaza to stamp out the terrorist enclaves. And, more importantly, it couldn't go back into Gaza without admitting that its withdrawal policy was a failure. Instead, Olmert ineptly struck back at rocket launch points and Israel's ability to defend itself seemed - thanks to Palestinian disinformation campaigns directed at sympathetic media -- to produce innocent civilian casualties among the Palestinians.

Hamastan poses problems both too large and too small for Israel to solve. The small problems, such as terrorists excavating the terror tunnel used to surprise Gilad Shalit's unit, can never be entirely prevented. The military strike into Gaza this week won't re-establish Israeli occupation, and it will from time to time be repeated. Bigger problems, such as the Hamas government and the support it gets from Israel's neighbors, won't, say some top Israelis, be solved by topping Hamas because there's no moderate Palestinians to take their place. That is another counsel of despair. Israel is stuck in a military cycle it thinks can't be broken. But it can, and it must, for our benefit as much as Israel's.

Israel can never settle the Palestinian problem by dealing only with the Palestinians just as we cannot ever settle Iraq's problems by dealing only with Iraqis. Because Israel's neighbors, and Iraq's, are the sources of their problems, so they must be the focus of the solutions. They are regional problems. If they are not solved throughout the region, they will not be solved at all.

I couldn't have said it any better. For more on the recent events in the Middle East go to the homepage of WABC 77's radio host John Batchelor and click on Radio Show Archives to get some informative reporting from the Middle East.