At a moment when clarity is necessary in condemning the Israeli attack, when the entire world is looking to see if Washington is indeed a paper tiger when it comes to Israel, Obama caved to the Israelis in negotiating the UN Resolution. The rationale according to Tapper:
I’m told there won’t be any daylight between the US and Israel in the aftermath of the incident on the flotilla yesterday, which resulted in the deaths of 10 activists.
Regardless of the details of the flotilla incident, sources say President Obama is focused on what he sees as the longer term issue here: a successful Mideast peace process. “The president has always said that it will be much easier for Israel to make peace if it feels secure,” a senior administration official tells ABC News. The suggestion is that US condemnation of Israel would further isolate that country, and make further peace negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians even more difficult.
But if the US bars an independent study of the incident for Israel's own inquiry, he will bury the peace process as well. The Arab and Muslim world will see another Cheney in the White House, decorated with empty rhetoric about change.
Time after time, Netanyahu just pwns Obama; and the US president just lets it happen. Muddying a clear contravention of international law with weasel words about the self-defense of the flotilla is not good enough. And if Obama thinks he will somehow placate the pro-Israel lobby by this, he is surely mistaken. They want to destroy Obama's presidency just as much as Netanyahu does.
Kudos to Michael Rubin for conceding that the Cheney-Netanyahu approach to terrorism is exactly a question of deliberate disproportion:
When attacked, why should not a stronger nation or its representatives try to both protects its own personnel at all costs and, in the wider scheme of things, defeat its adversaries? Likewise, when terrorists seek to strike at the United States, why should we find ourselves constrained by an artificial notion of proportionality when responding to those terrorists or their state sponsors?
Ah, yes. Why not torture, mass murder, and an abandonment of basic principles of the rules of law? But this is too amazing to omit:
Fifteen “peace” activists dead is a tragedy, but they represent only one one-thousandth of the death toll of a French heatwave.
SATC2 takes everything that I hold dear as a woman and as a human—working hard, contributing to society, not being an entitled c**t like it's my job—and rapes it to death with a stiletto that costs more than my car. It is 146 minutes long, which means that I entered the theater in the bloom of youth and emerged with a family of field mice living in my long, white mustache. This is an entirely inappropriate length for what is essentially a home video of gay men playing with giant Barbie dolls.
I once watched Béla Tarr's Sátántangó, the legendary, gloomy black-and-white Hungarian film that lasts for seven and a half hours. Compared to the Abu Dhabi section of Sex And The City 2, Sátántangó zips past like an episode of Spongebob Squarepants.
I haven't seen it after being forced to watch the first one. I hadn't seen any of them until Aaron made me watch them as I was immobile from a hernia operation a few years' back. The series had its moments. The movies? I'd rather have pins stuck in my eyeballs.
“This irresponsible, heedless, unlawful attitude that defies any human virtue should definitely, but definitely, be punished. No one should dare to challenge Turkey or test her patience for the strength of Turkey’s animosity is as strong as the value of its friendship,” – Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in his regular weekly address to his party in the capital, Ankara.
Video above from Enduring America, which has several other videos of yesterday's events. Marc Lynch:
This crisis — and it is a crisis — is the fairly predictable outcome of the years of neglect of the Gaza situation by the Bush and Obama administrations. Bush turned a blind eye during the Israeli attack on Gaza in December 2008, and then the Obama team chose to focus on renewing peace talks between the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority while continuing to boycott Hamas. The U.S. only sporadically and weakly paid attention to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the strategic absurdity and moral obtuseness of the Israeli blockade, or the political implications of the ongoing Hamas-Fatah divide. Now, on the eve of Obama's scheduled meetings with Netanyahu and Abbas — the fruits of the "honey offensive" towards Israel — can they be surprised that Gaza is blowing up in their face?
The Israeli assault on the flotilla has galvanized Arab and international media attention (to say nothing of my Twitter feed). Arab and Turkish publics appear to be truly outraged, as do the Turkish, Arab and many European governments.
In reality, what happened today is the Israelis got their butts handed to them. The Israeli response to this aid flotilla was a fabulous gift to Hamas and Iran. (Try to imagine, if you will, the Israelis trying to go before the U.N. Security Council to gather support for sanctions on the Iranian regime right now. They would be more likely to leave New York with sanctions on their own regime!)
Again, I really have little interest in Israel and Palestine given the way in which people on both sides tend to fling accusations of anti-Semitism, war crimes, terrorist-sympathizing, fascism, etc. But as a student of low-intensity conflict and information operations, one really does have to marvel at the incredible own goal the Israelis have just scored. The fact that Hamas and its allies didn't even have to do a thing to earn it is what I find to be most remarkable. Not that they care what I think, but the Israelis should not be talking about the people on the aid flotilla right now. They should be examining themselves and their response and asking how they hell they fumbled this so badly.
It looks like Ynet’s account, which Ed linked earlier but which you should absolutely read in full, was spot on: The IDF really thought they were facing off with “peace activists” here and didn’t realize their miscalculation until they were on the boat. (See the third clip below for just how badly they misjudged.) The argument from the left is that the raid was illegal because it happened in international waters, but evidently that’s not true either: If a neutral ship is intent on running a blockade after being warned to turn back, the fact that it’s on the high seas isn’t a defense. Apparently Israel was either supposed to let the ships run the blockade, not knowing for sure who or what was on board, or instruct their troops to let the passengers crack their skulls open with lead pipes once they were on the deck in the interests of “dialogue” or something.
Juan Cole suggests that the shooting may have come when Israeli soldiers overreacted, but frankly any time you set up this sort of military encounter you have to expect the possibility for fatalities caused by the side with all the weapons. This was a brutal attempt to enforce a brutal and inhumane siege of one of the world’s most impoverished patches of land.
Gaza doesn’t contain nearly enough arable land to support the Strip’s population as subsistence farmers. Which of course is true of many other places on earth. But the effect of the embargo is to make meaningful commercial activity in Gaza nearly impossible, pushing living standards down to what would be a below-subsistence level were it not for the trickle of aid that flows in. The Hamas authorities exercise some fairly rough justice over the area, extremist groups burn down summer camps and Israel launches airstrikes periodically sometimes injuring dozens sometimes hurting no one. The overall situation is incredibly bleak. Construction supplies aren’t allowed into the area, so it’s been impossible to rebuild since the war there from a couple of years back, and all the physical infrastructure is just degrading over time. Israel is attempting to defend itself from the sporadic rocket fire that’s emanated from the area since the IDF abandoned trying to directly administer it during Ariel Sharon’s administration, but the level of human suffering—we’re talking about a place where 1.5 million people live—being inflicted is just staggering.
I have my doubts about the wisdom of Israel’s blockade of Gaza, and there was obviously an operational/intelligence failure that led to Israel’s naval commandos having to open fire to defend themselves, giving the other side a propaganda victory. But it does appear that the physical violence started from the other side, which to begin with had the rather unhumanitarian mission of aiding Hamas, and, to the extent there were sincere humanitarian/peace activists involved, allowed themselves to get hijacked by violent Islamic extremists who manned one of the ships.
Net result of the “peace/humanitarian” mission: dead activists, wounded Israeli soldiers, no more humanitarian aid to Gaza than if Israel’s offer to transfer the aid to Gaza from Ashdod had been accepted, and a likely breakdown in the Palestinian-Israeli peace talks that were about to start. Congratulations.
Responding to claims that the aid flotilla itself represented a “provocation,” Hussein Ibish of the American Task Force on Palestine writes, well, yeah: “The whole point of the ‘Gaza flotilla’ was to get a reaction out of Israel and call international attention to the problem of the blockade of Gaza…like all other acts of civil disobedience it was designed to provoke a response.”
Writing that the attack “is likely to create sustained international attention to the way Israel has treated the Gaza Strip in a way that nothing else has since the Gaza war and possibly since the beginning of the blockade,” Ibish suggests we compare the flotilla “to the ‘Mississippi Freedom Summer’ in which young white Americans from around the country went to the bastion of Jim Crow in order to organize local African-Americans, register them to vote, educate them and confront segregation”
First reaction: This is an insane use of disproportionate force. It is a product of the right-wing radicalization of the Israeli government, an extremism that Peter Beinart wrote about in his recent, much debated New York Review of Books article. And it will further isolate Israel from the rest of the world. The US will be asked to condemn this behavior in the inevitable Security Council resolution–if Obama doesn't veto the resolution, there will be hell to pay among the Israelophilic leaders of the American Jewish Community. If he does veto the resolution, his outreach to the Islamic world is kaput. If he abstains, everyone is offended.
This is what happens when you have a blockade. If you allow ships to sail past without boarding them, it isn't a blockade. So if the blockade is legitimate, then Israel's action in boarding the ships was legitimate. And the blockade is certainly legitimate, since terrorist supporters shipped rockets and other armaments into Gaza which were used to attack Israel.
The flotilla has nothing to do with "humanitarian" purposes, as humanitarian supplies are routinely shipped into Gaza by land. It has everything to do with Israel's enemies trying to bring the blockade to an end so they can resume shipping weapons into Gaza.
It hardly seemed possible for Israel — after its brutal devastation of Gaza and its ongoing blockade — to engage in more heinous and repugnant crimes. But by attacking a flotilla in international waters carrying humanitarian aid, and slaughtering at least 10 people, Israel has managed to do exactly that. If Israel's goal were to provoke as much disgust and contempt for it as possible, it's hard to imagine how it could be doing a better job.
Despite the drumbeat of condemnations against Israel that will be heard in the coming days over this event, the fact is the Gaza flotilla was inspired and supported by Hamas as the presence of several Hamas leaders at its launch in Turkey revealed. The convoy’s supposed goal of bringing succor to starving Palestinians in Gaza is a lie. The Israeli and Egyptian blockade of Hamasistan has not halted the flow of food and medicine to the region. The blockade is aimed at preventing “construction” materials from flowing into Gaza, since Hamas uses these materials to strengthen its military defenses as well as its homegrown arms industry. Talk about aid to suffering Palestinians is nothing but a cover for efforts to aid the Islamists of Hamas, whose ruthless hold on the district was achieved by a bloody coup.
Overall, the RAND report thinks that the center will hold in Iraq as the U.S. withdraws its forces beginning this year. The major groups in the country are committed to politics now, and the main short-term threat to stability, Nouri al-Maliki, may not even return as prime minister. The Arab-Kurd divide is still a long-term problem that the country needs to overcome. If that comes to a head however, it will be long after U.S. combat forces have exited the country. In the end, RAND believes that Iraqis will determine their own future, and that U.S. power has already reached its apex, and is in fact declining with each day. This has caused fits for some such as outgoing commander of U.S. forces General Ray Oderino and a slew of American think tankers that want to preserve U.S. influence by keeping U.S. troops in Iraq for as long as possible.
For them, Iraq is like a prodigal son that they can’t let go of. The RAND report is also a rebuff to those that constantly fret that Iraq is about to return to major fighting over a never ending list of issues that have come and passed, and others on the horizon. As the study points out, the militants lack the means, internal support, and foreign backing to change the status quo in Iraq, despite their daily acts of violence. The next large bombing will kill many and garner international headlines, but it will not change the status quo within Iraq. While Iraq’s politicians will take their time to put together a new government that doesn’t mean the country is falling apart either, because the major players are all involved in the same process now. Iraq will move ahead on its own clock from now on, and its up to the world to adjust to this new reality.
I hope they’re right. But I doubt this will last for long.
The parallels between Israel and — gulp — North Korea are becoming pretty eerie. True, Israel's economy is thriving and North Korea's is not. That said, both countries are diplomatically isolated except for their ties to a great power benefactor. Both countries are pursuing autarkic policies that immiserate millions of people. The majority of the population in both countries seem blithely unaware of what the rest of the world thinks. Both countries face hostile regional environments. Both countries keep getting referred to the United Nations. And, in the past month, the great power benefactor is finding it more and more difficult to defend their behavior to the rest of the world.
Even after just a few hours, it was clear that this was a gift to Israel's worst enemies. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president said: "The inhuman action of the Zionist regime against the Palestinian people and preventing the humanitarian aid from reaching Gazans does not show this regime's strength, but is a sign of its weakness, and all this brings this sinister and fake regime closer than ever to its end."
"In the war of images, in the war of pictures and propaganda, it seems to me that the Israeli government that you represent is just losing this war. They are destructive not only for the image of the government of Israel – this is of no importance; when democratic governments fail, they are replaced. The damage that concerns me is to the country to which I'm bound unconditionally. This seems more dangerous than a military failure," – Bernard Henri-Levy, to Israeli sports minister, Limor Livnat.
Robert Mackey looks at a poignant historical parallel to the assault on the flotilla attempting to break the blockade of Gaza:
Large protests erupted on both sides of the Atlantic. The ensuing public embarrassment for Britain played a significant role in the diplomatic swing of sympathy toward the Jews and the eventual recognition of a Jewish state in 1948.
The Dish 