By Peter Hermes Furian @ Shutterstock.com
At The Spectator, Daniel McCarthy suggests that it will be as difficult for Israel to tame Gaza as it was for the United States to create permanent change in Afghanistan and Iraq. He writes:
Israel will win its war against Hamas. But can it win the kind of war the United States lost in Afghanistan?
Israel is facing today a dilemma that the West will face tomorrow. For more than sixty years, it has been easy for Western liberals to believe that imperialism is an unnecessary evil. When the US conquers and militarily occupies a foreign country, liberals don’t call it imperialism. It’s merely “regime change,” “nation-building” and “promoting democracy.”
Such Newspeak has been powerless to alter the outcome of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, wars which after successful regime decapitations followed by decades of occupation and trillions of dollars spent on rebuilding failed to establish anything resembling secure liberal democracies in either land.
The problem was not that Saddam Hussein or the Taliban’s Mullah Omar was invincible. Nor was it that Iraqis and Afghans might not ultimately want freedom. But foreign control was no path to a liberal native order, even when the foreign power in control was the richest, strongest and most widely admired democracy on the planet.
Overwhelming military superiority, limitless spending and even America’s unique moral legitimacy — if we may be so bold — could not make democratic imperialism work, for the basic reason that imperialism is not democratic. The administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama put every erg of power that the most powerful nation on earth could spare into making a logical contradiction a reality. And logic beat them.
Yet most of the nation’s policy elite learned nothing from the failure of Bush and Obama to make water not wet because they suffered few consequences from the outcome. In terms of how our policymakers live — the company they keep, the deals they broker, the lectures they give, the op-eds they write, the media environment they inhabit — giving up the dream of good-guy imperialism would be far more costly than ignoring the awful results of the experiment in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Israel does not have the luxury of ignoring the results of what happens in Gaza. Once Hamas is destroyed, the question will be how to prevent anything like it from arising again. Western-style liberalism prescribes either autonomy for the Palestinians or their democratic incorporation into Israel itself. Neither of those options is imaginable either now or in the foreseeable future.
Israel can instead try to rule Gaza directly and undemocratically, at an enormous cost to Israelis and Palestinians alike. The price would be diplomatic as well as military, economic and moral: Arab leaders might want to jettison the Palestinian cause for the sake of more profitable relations with Israel, but the Arab public could make that impossible, while in the West sympathy for the Palestinians has grown as cultural and demographic shifts makes the United States and Europe less Christian and more ethnically diverse.
Read more here.
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