Month: January 2009

The Incidents Of War

And so the Gaza conflict isolates Israel even more:

The United Nations says it is halting all aid deliveries to the besieged Gaza Strip. It is citing a series of Israeli attacks on U.N. staff and installations. The announcement came shortly after the driver of a U.N. truck was killed by tank fire as he was headed to an Israeli border crossing to pick up an aid shipment.

The U.N. said the delivery had been coordinated with Israel. The Israeli army has not commented.

And the dog that didn’t bark … ? A few rockets fly in from Lebanon, but Hezbollah denies responsibility. Is it a good thing that Hezbollah didn’t fire the rockets? Or that they’re lying about it? Or is this not a good thing at all?

                        

Containment And Islamism

Hitch makes an excellent point in his excellent Gaza column:

Life in Islamic Gaza was not such as to induce ecstatic happiness and prosperity among the populace: In common with many fundamentalist movements, the Muslim Brotherhood in its local Palestinian incarnation had badly overplayed its hand. It seems improbable that we’ll ever know what would have happened in a free vote, but I think it’s safe to say that recent events have further postponed the emergence of a democratic and secular alternative among the Palestinians. I even think it’s possible that some people in Israel and some other people in Gaza do not want to see the emergence of such a force, but let me not be cynical.

The truly good news of the last couple of years has been the decline in support for al Qaeda and other Jihadist elements in Muslim public opinion. What we have learned is that once Islamists actually wield power, their popularity collapses. Religious fanatics do not know how to run countries; their real interests lie elsewhere (you can apply that on a much lesser scale, of course, to the competence of the Bush administration). The place where Shiite Jihadism is least popular? Iran. And remember how al Qaeda managed to turn off the Jordanians after various atrocities; and how they lost the battle for the hearts and minds of Iraqis (with the brilliant and brave help of US troops) – after the Bush administration unwittingly gave them a lease of life in that country?

Now: if you’re a rational kind of person you might deduce from this that containing Islamism and letting it collapse under its own insanity is certainly a viable policy, given the unsavory alternatives. You might at least consider that taking the bait from these guys and reigniting religious wars might actually be giving them the oxygen they need. And yet prudent containment – even after the Iraq debacle – is still equated with surrender on the hard right. This makes no sense if we actually want to win this war. And we will only win this war when Muslims fight the people whose arguments we keep unwittingly legitimizing.

The Times Lives?

Felix Salmon tangles with Michael Hirschorn.

…many smaller newspapers will close their print editions, which have lost the classified-advertising bread-and-butter revenue stream upon which they’ve historically relied.

But the New York Times is not a small newspaper. It has an enormous display-advertisement inventory, and sells most of it at high rates. It’s also incredibly well placed to go national, as smaller papers close, and become a replacement for people who’ve lost their local paper and who shudder at the prospect of ever reading USA Today.

James Surowiecki piles on.

The Best Bad Option?

Ross wades back into the Gaza muck:

In the face of such a calculus, what’s Israel to do? The answer is simultaneously simple and impossible: In the midst of a hotly-contested domestic political scene, they need to balance their short-term security concerns (all those rockets flying out of Gaza, in this case) against a twofold long-term goal – the need to incentivize Palestinians to stay within hailing distance of the negotiating table (which is awfully hard to do when you’re smashing through their cities in pursuit of Hamas rocketeers), and the need to act unilaterally, in the absence of a plausible negotiating partner, to preserve their state’s long-term viability in the face of the looming demographic time bomb (which is awfully hard to do, as Israel has discovered in the wake of the Gaza pull-out, without compromising your short-term security). And it’s the Kobayashi Maru-style impossibility of all this that makes something like the Gaza incursion so hard to analyze: It seems like a bad idea, but within the constraints that Israeli leaders operate under it’s possible that it’s the worst option except for all the others.

Seating Burris

Nate Silver gets it about right:

I think Reid can be criticized for one thing — for failing to advocate for a special election. But even if the Democrats had made a more earnest push to hold a special election, that would still have provided for the possibility that Blagojevich would attempt to nominate someone in the meantime. What were they supposed to have said? "You know Rod, we really have no legal grounds to block your nominee, so please pretty please with a cherry on top don’t do it?"

So does Dave Weigel:

I don’t believe this "Burris will be seated" story. That would involve Harry Reid fumbling and caving. Ridiculous!

Heh. For a legal anaysis of the case see Sandy Levinson. I have to say I remain a skeptic as to whether Fitzgerald really has the goods on the sleazebag Blago, and have no problem with Burris at all.