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This from one of my closest friends and fellow memo reader:
"YOU REALLY DO DO GOOD 'WORK'- ALTHOUGH FOR YOU, I HONESTLY DON'T THINK IT'S 'WORK'."
My response: "Thanks, I have lots of helpers in that I mostly post what others write. Me"
Another old and dear friend and fellow memo reader said the previous posting regarding Marine Col.Ollie North has been debunked. North warned about " Abud Nidal" not Osama bin Laden.
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Will we ever figure it out???
“The Budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed, lest Rome will become bankrupt. People must again learn to work instead of living on public assistance."
- Cicero, 55 BC
So, evidently we've learned NOTHING over the past 2,071 years!
Guess it just takes a long time for discipline to sink into thick skulls!
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Will the FBI do what their Brazilian equivalent is doing regarding corruption?
Shakespeare was right when he said something was rotten but not only in Denmark. It is throughout the entire world. (See 1,1a and 1b below.)
Thursday night's debate showed, once again, Kasich is the adult but he lacks personality. He is accomplished and has a record of achievement but he is dull. Were it not for his facial tick and for television he would be electable. Sad!
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Well women have finally broken through the glass ceiling but many seemed to have ended up in the basement, unmarried and growing in numbers. (See 2 below.)
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Everyone seems fixated on the possible nomination of Trump. Is it because they are trying to avoid having to defend their love affair with Hillarious?
Meanwhile why is Israel waiting to fight Hamas? (See 3 below.)
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500 high school choir students sing the U.S. National anthem in a high-rise hotel. Each night before curfew, they gather on their balconies to sing the Star-Spangled Banner from the balconies of the 18-story atrium at Louisville's downtown Hyatt Regency as part of the Kentucky Music Educatorsconvention.
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1) Brazil set to rally further as police detain Lula
Speculation is flying that President Rousseff will resign as early as this weekend after Brazilian police detained former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva at his home.
This new phase of the Petrobas (NYSE:PBR) corruption probe is being dubbed "Aletheia" - meaning "real search" - by the police.
1a)
The State of Our Union Is Bleak
While all eyes are (understandably) focused on the GOP’s spectacular presidential meltdown, the Democratic Party’s problems are quietly mounting.
Consider two stories from yesterday’s papers. The first, in the New York Times, on plummeting turnout in the Democratic primaries:
Democratic turnout has fallen drastically since 2008, the last time the party had a contested primary, with roughly three million fewer Democrats voting in the 15 states that have held caucuses or primaries through Tuesday, according to unofficial election results tallied through Wednesday afternoon.
… Some Democrats now worry that Mrs. Clinton will have difficulty matching the surge in new black, Hispanic and young voters who came to the polls for President Obama in 2008 and 2012.And the second, in the Washington Post on the latest turn in the ongoing investigation into possible misconduct by the presumptive Democratic nominee:The Justice Department has granted immunity to a former State Department staffer, who worked on Hillary Clinton’s private email server, as part of a criminal investigation into the possible mishandling of classified information, according to a senior law enforcement official.These stories should remind us that the weakness in our key political institutions is bipartisan. The Republicans are suffering from an establishment power vacuum that has allowed a demagogue to very nearly take control of the party; and the Democratic establishment, constantly trailed by an air of scandal and suspicion, is unable to engender much enthusiasm from its base. It’s still not clear which of the two parties will win the demolition derby that the 2016 election has become. But it’s looking more and more that no matter which party ‘wins’ this bizarre election contest, the clear loser is the United States.
Our political system is in deep trouble, and while one can think of some procedural fixes that could help (superdelegates on the Republican side, stronger and more impartial enforcement of government rules on information security and conflict of interest in the case of the Clinton machine) the real problems are more dangerous and harder to treat: A moral and spiritual collapse that has frayed the bonds between the country’s ordinary people and those who seek to lead them, a hollowing out of institutions from Congress and political parties to local churches and civic life, and the disintegration of a shared national intellectual and cultural framework for discussing the issues that confront us. As we approach a critical presidential election at a time of global turmoil and disorder, the state of our union is not strong.
Right Message. Wrong Messenger.
Everything Mitt Romney said today about Donald Trump was right.Trump is a fraud, a blowhard, and his positions on most of the issues are inconsistent with those of conservative principles. Trump’s promises are “as phony as a degree from Trump University.” Trump is also the easiest of the remaining Republican candidates for Hillary Clinton to defeat in November. But the dramatic speech from Romney that got the kind of coverage from the media that any of Trump’s rivals would have loved for their own appearances isn’t going to change the dynamic of the Republican race. To the contrary, while Romney’s message was the right one, he was exactly the wrong messenger if the intention was to convince the type of GOP voter that has been backing Trump to abandon him.
Romney was smart to anticipate the kind of abuse that Trump would hurl back at him after the speech. Indeed, Trump had already begun insulting Romney after the text of his speech leaked. Romney’s right that Trump’s taunts won’t answer the important questions that have been raised about his fitness for the presidency. But Romney also should have acknowledged that he sought and received Trump’s endorsement when he was running for president four years ago. Romney’s gushing statement embracing Trump then will be thrown in his face and rightly so. If Trump is the scoundrel that Romney says he is — and he is that — then Romney was wrong to seek and welcome his support even if that happened at a moment when he was locked in a tough fight for the GOP nomination with Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum and needed all the help he could get. Romney should have said as much.
Romney is also the wrong person to deliver this message for two other reasons.
One is that he is the embodiment of the party establishment that so many Republicans have come to despise. This animus for anybody that has been part of the party leadership in the past isn’t terribly logical or fair. But a lot of Republican voters are angry at the failure of their party to halt President Obama’s liberal agenda and dissatisfied with government in general. The affable Romney embodies both of these concerns because of his defeat at the hands of President Obama and his characteristic moderation. Having been around for two presidential election cycles and with a past as a liberal Republican governor of a blue state during which he laid the foundations for ObamaCare, the party base was never happy with him and likes him even less today.
Worse than that is the fact that Romney’s flirtation with another presidential run a year ago raises suspicions that he wants to step in and be a compromise candidate imposed on Republicans by party operatives during a deadlocked convention. Romney made little secret about the fact that he wanted to run in 2016 and only held off because Jeb Bush’s massive fundraising blitz in early 2015 convinced him the establishment lane would be controlled by the former Florida governor. Given Bush’s terrible performance as a presidential candidate, that calculation sounds pretty silly. But even if he knows it probably can’t happen, few doubt that Mitt still has the presidential bug in his system.
The majority of Republicans are not voting for Trump, but it’s not likely that even many of them — let alone those joining a Trump coalition that consists of evangelicals, working class voters and even some crossover Democrats that are attracted to his populist and nationalist message — want to see Romney parachuting into the nomination. If Trump is to be beaten — and that is something that is still a possibility though the chances of it happening get smaller with each of his primary victories — it will have to be by one of the existing candidates or by all of them gaining enough votes to deny the frontrunner the majority of delegates he needs to win.
We haven’t had a major party national convention that took more than one ballot to determine a nominee since Dwight Eisenhower won the GOP nod in 1952. But there hasn’t been a candidate picked by party bosses in a proverbial smoke-filled room since 1924 when a Democratic Party that had been deadlocked for more than 100 ballots chose an obscure Wall Street lawyer named John Davis, who led them to a landslide defeat at the hands of Calvin Coolidge. The age of successful “dark horse” candidates is over and any such attempt this year will result in a walkout by Trump delegates and certain defeat at the hands of Clinton.
Only a candidate that has been chosen by the voters — or at least some of them — will be palatable to the party. And even the least suspicion that Romney is aiming at bypassing the primaries on his way to the presidency taints anything he says about Trump, no matter how right he may be. If Romney wanted to influence this race he should have endorsed one of the candidates that are still running early enough for it to have made a difference.
That the full court press by responsible Republicans to stop Trump that Romney’s speech represents is too little and probably too late almost goes without saying. As far back as last August, I was writing that it wasn’t too early to start planning a “stop Trump” movement.But there were too many candidates with too much false hope for those wishing to save the GOP from the reality star to choose from at the time. Many also kept underestimating Trump’s appeal and the level of voter anger until now.
That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try. All Republican elder statesmen should be saying the same thing as Romney. So, too, should members of the Senate and House who know their majorities are put into peril by a Trump nomination.
But let’s not kid ourselves about their chances for success. Ted Cruz doesn’t appear to have much hope outside of states where evangelicals and Tea Partiers dominate and he’s losing a lot of those voters to Trump anyway. If Marco Rubio doesn’t defeat Trump in Florida on March 15, he will be finished. If he does win there, he will have a chance to beat Trump in the primaries that follow. Yet that assumption is based on the idea that the grassroots voters that are flocking to Trump are going to start listening to reason and thinking seriously about his record. And there’s no evidence that enough of them are interested in doing so. But if Trump is to be stopped, it will only be because Rubio or Cruz are able to win these voters over. The expiration date on Mitt Romney’s presidential hopes has passed. The same is true of his ability to influence Republican primary voters.
1b) A Great Political Realignment is Underway
The Super Tuesday results confirm it. A revolution is underway in the Republican Party. It promises to shakeup politics in the nation come November. It may realign the parties longer term and chart a new course for the nation for a generation.
1b) A Great Political Realignment is Underway
The Super Tuesday results confirm it. A revolution is underway in the Republican Party. It promises to shakeup politics in the nation come November. It may realign the parties longer term and chart a new course for the nation for a generation.
The overthrow of the GOP establishment is in full swing. It’s an insurgency, with GOP primaries and caucuses setting records for turnout. Part of that turnout is new voters. Democrats, for example, are switching to the GOP in Massachusetts; that’s Trump-driven, and a bad omen for Democrats in November. Democrats’ turnout is depressed.
The Republican Party’s trials are, in no small measure, thanks to energized conservatives. It’s about two candidates, Trump and Cruz, who though battling each other for the nomination, have galvanized conservative voters, thereby isolating the establishment, something outsider candidates failed to accomplish in 2012.
Consider these Super Tuesday numbers. In 11 states, Trump, Cruz, and Carson – the outsiders – combined for 67% of the vote. Rubio and Kasich took only 32%. But there’s a big caveat.
Though Trump and Cruz garnered two-thirds the votes in Super Tuesday contests, they split roughly 28% of the bound delegates needed to win the nomination (that’s 1,237 for a majority). In all races, Trump has collected 26% of the delegates toward being nominated. Cruz has totaled 18%. (Rubio is limping along with a meager 9% of the delegates needed.)
There’s a way to go before either Trump or Cruz can sew up the nomination. The March 15th contests, with winner-take-all trials in Florida and Ohio, could decide things. Florida currently favors Trump, so the 15th could be the day Trump triumphs. But…
The possibility remains that neither Trump nor Cruz hits the magic number. Rubio could comeback in Florida and Kasich could grab his home state of Ohio. That means a deadlocked convention is in play.
Of course, much can happen in subsequent days to shift the dynamic of the race, tipping the scales for Trump or Cruz. Scale-tipping favors Trump, however, because he’s demonstrating appeal not only in states Cruz should be winning (the Deep South) but in “blue” states like Massachusetts, where Cruz mustered only 10% of the vote.
Marco Rubio has no clear route to the nomination short of a deadlocked convention. A deadlocked or “contested” convention is the establishment’s last, best hope. It’s more like a Hail Mary pass. National Review, among other establishment outlets, is frank about the alternatives.
Writes Tim Alberta for NRO:
It’s either Donald Trump or a contested convention. Such is the reality facing the Republican party today. Its leaders are now staring down two scenarios they long dismissed as fantasy, after a slew of Super Tuesday contests demonstrated once again both the breadth of Trump’s support and the difficulty in unifying his opposition.
Though history instructs that deadlocked conventions nominate “centrists” – and typically dark horses – the gathering of Republicans at Cleveland isn’t likely to yield that result.
If Trump and Cruz go to Cleveland with the bulk of the delegates, they probably cut a deal. Despite the current strife and rancor, there’s significant overlap among their voters. Moreover, Trump’s now demonstrated ability to attract working class voters and some disaffected Democrats promises an electoral map breakout. Such a prospect has to be alluring to Cruz and his backers.
Trump and Cruz are smart, calculating men. Both are very self-interested and ambitious. If either thought that the path to the nomination meant hammering out a deal with Rubio, they’d do so. In politics, like life, the perfect is the enemy of the good, and accommodating Rubio and the establishment to win the nomination might be a price either man is willing to pay. But the natural convergence is between Trump and Cruz. It coalesces two-thirds of the GOP base in a way more sensible to both men’s supporters. Consolation prizes can be given to Rubio and the establishment.
If the establishment used a contested convention to somehow slip Rubio into the nomination – or Jeb or Mitt, as incredible as that seems – then the GOP would fracture. Trump’s and Cruz’s voters are in no mood to hand the nomination over to the establishment again. A GOP rupture could take years to mend. The very flawed and corrupt Hillary Clinton would win a victory she doesn’t merit.
The bigger story is that the roiling of the Republican Party, far from being a harbinger of catastrophe, is actually a sign of vitality. Or, as Trump might say, “Yuuuge vitality.” The clashes and debates, full of vituperative exchanges and body blows, are indicators of something dying and something being born. The GOP has more than a pulse; it’s got a big, powerful, life-pumping heart.
Conservatism is resurgent, and combined with a new nationalism and a feel for popular sentiment, has the chance to emerge as the nation’s governing worldview for a generation. That’s reformist conservatism, which is critical to an overhaul of failing government, in Washington and the states. Forging a new combined worldview is what’s happening now. It’s been, and will continue to be, a bruising affair. But that’s the way of politics.
It’s worth adding that Democrats are undergoing a rebirth, too, though on a diminished scale. The Democratic establishment (the senior partner in the “Washington Cartel”) is getting a last hurrah with Hillary Clinton. After all, there are careers, status, and paychecks at stake. But the party’s future is socialism (or a corporatist facsimile).
A greater commitment to statism and some greater degree of collectivism is being embraced by younger Democrats. Destiny is demographics for the party that once proudly proclaimed its loyalty to Jefferson and Jackson. Shortly, Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas Days will replace Jefferson-Jackson celebrations. A new GOP should welcome Jefferson and Jackson with open arms.
The Democrats journey to socialism is a logical progression. It’s a journey begun with Woodrow Wilson and the progressives a century or more ago. But after eight years of Barack Obama’s presidency and a preview of what a “redder” America is like, voters are saying, “No way!”
Nothing is carved in stone. There are perils and pitfalls aplenty. Much is to be hammered out, not only at Cleveland and in November, but in subsequent years. Yet Republican prospects haven’t looked this bright in a long time.
================================================================
2) The Hubby State Welcomes You
In 1877, nearly half a century before American women were granted the right to vote, Susan B. Anthony predicted a coming “epoch of single women.” That epoch has finally arrived. For the first time in American history, the majority of the female electorate is now composed of single women.
That’s the upshot of Rebecca Traister’s “All the Single Ladies.” The book is both a sweeping history of the “invention of female adulthood” and a polemical defense of this “new category of citizen,” whose “expanded power,” she claims, “signals a social and political rupture as profound as the invention of birth control, as the sexual revolution, as the abolition of slavery, as women’s suffrage and the feminist, civil rights, gay rights, and labor movements.”
Through a mixture of reportage, research, personal anecdote and policy prescriptions, Ms. Traister argues that single women—by which she means women who are unmarried, widowed or divorced—are poised to force government to “remake conditions in a way that will be more hospitable to female independence.” American men, she argues, have enjoyed the benefits of a “wifey state,” through grants, loans, incentives and tax breaks that support their ownership of homes and businesses. Perhaps the time has come for a “hubby state,” in the form of stronger equal-pay protections, a higher minimum wage, more subsidized housing for singles, increased welfare, paid family leave and other big-government policy ideas.
If your idea of a pioneering American single lady begins with Gloria Steinem, Ms. Traister will make you think again. Her argument is that radically minded unmarried women—even in periods when such women were derided as spinsters or seductresses—have long wielded “nation-shaping power.” But single women like writer Louisa May Alcott (“liberty is a better husband than love to many of us,” she said in 1868) and Settlement House founders Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr were always exceptional. Today, writes Ms. Traister, singlehood is the norm.
The author, a columnist at New York magazine, was single until she was 35; she draws on her 14 “independent years,” along with interviews with more than 100 women, to offer up a group portrait of single women today. Some are having one-night stands. Some are saving themselves for marriage. Some are freezing their eggs. Some are adopting. Others say they never want kids. Some are on welfare; some are dominating their offices. The point of all these voices is to make it clear that there is no one stereotypical experience of being on your own.
“The vast increase in the number of single women is to be celebrated not because singleness is in and of itself a better or more desirable state than coupledom,” Ms. Traister writes. “The revolution is in the expansion of options.” And yet it often feels as if she is straining hard to find the celebratory in every aspect of single life—even the obviously painful phenomena, like loneliness.
Take her chapter on the sex lives of single women. The basic argument is that casual sex among unmarried young adults is nothing new and that “so-called hook-up culture” is a conservative bugaboo used to pressure young women into monogamy and early marriage. Drawing heavily on a 2013 New York Times article about campus sex, which itself relied on interviews with just 60 young women at Penn, she concludes that many girls who are hooking up in college are doing so because they’re careerist: They want to spend their free time building their résumés, not romantic relationships.
It is left to the author’s research assistant, a college student, to undercut this all too convenient, all too cheery gloss. Rhaina Cohen, reports the author, “expressed reservations about my putting too positive a spin on a culture of casual sex.” Ms. Cohen points out that her friends have “turned to hooking up” because “they think that’s what’s expected and it’s all men will permit.” Her take will ring far truer than Ms. Traister’s for any co-ed who has swiped right in the past few years.
The author’s contortions are also apparent in her attempt to yoke the experiences of poor, minority women with the choices of upper-middle-class ones. “Struggling single women with children,” she writes, “are often operating based on the same impulses that guide the sushi-gobbling grad students who stand for a new kind of unmarried autonomy: a desire to fill their lives with meaning and direction, to live independently.” Maybe. But then she introduces us to Pamela, who held things together heroically when she got pregnant at 17: She went to college, and her boyfriend picked up a second job to help support their child. But Pamela’s assessment of the males in the South Bronx neighborhood where she grew up is blunt. “I don’t feel like those men are somebody that I would like to marry or that I would like to raise a family with.”
Yes, Pamela is opting out of marriage. But she and other disadvantaged young mothers aren’t forgoing weddings because they have so many options but because they have so few. More than wanting to “live independently,” young mothers may fear giving up welfare, like Emmalee, a 24-year-old the author meets in Brooklyn. If the “sushi-gobbling grad student,” on the other hand, had gotten pregnant at 17, chances are that she would have had an abortion. And her reasons for waiting to marry wouldn’t be that half the men in her community were in jail or unemployed.
Pamela, we learn, recently graduated from New York’s City College and is now working as a legal assistant at the Office of the Bronx District Attorney while she applies to law school. She’s dating the same man; they’re expecting another daughter. Maybe they’ll even marry, just as Ms. Traister did.
Ms. Weiss is an associate book review editor at the Journal.
=======================================================================
3) Why is Israel sitting around waiting for the next war with Hamas?
By Judah Ari Gross
The terror group’s cross-border tunnels represent a grave threat to Gaza-adjacent communities, but for now Israel’s military planners prefer uneasy quiet to war
Unmarried, divorced and widowed women now make up the majority of the female electorate. What will they do with their power?
By Bari Weiss
That’s the upshot of Rebecca Traister’s “All the Single Ladies.” The book is both a sweeping history of the “invention of female adulthood” and a polemical defense of this “new category of citizen,” whose “expanded power,” she claims, “signals a social and political rupture as profound as the invention of birth control, as the sexual revolution, as the abolition of slavery, as women’s suffrage and the feminist, civil rights, gay rights, and labor movements.”
Through a mixture of reportage, research, personal anecdote and policy prescriptions, Ms. Traister argues that single women—by which she means women who are unmarried, widowed or divorced—are poised to force government to “remake conditions in a way that will be more hospitable to female independence.” American men, she argues, have enjoyed the benefits of a “wifey state,” through grants, loans, incentives and tax breaks that support their ownership of homes and businesses. Perhaps the time has come for a “hubby state,” in the form of stronger equal-pay protections, a higher minimum wage, more subsidized housing for singles, increased welfare, paid family leave and other big-government policy ideas.
If your idea of a pioneering American single lady begins with Gloria Steinem, Ms. Traister will make you think again. Her argument is that radically minded unmarried women—even in periods when such women were derided as spinsters or seductresses—have long wielded “nation-shaping power.” But single women like writer Louisa May Alcott (“liberty is a better husband than love to many of us,” she said in 1868) and Settlement House founders Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr were always exceptional. Today, writes Ms. Traister, singlehood is the norm.
The author, a columnist at New York magazine, was single until she was 35; she draws on her 14 “independent years,” along with interviews with more than 100 women, to offer up a group portrait of single women today. Some are having one-night stands. Some are saving themselves for marriage. Some are freezing their eggs. Some are adopting. Others say they never want kids. Some are on welfare; some are dominating their offices. The point of all these voices is to make it clear that there is no one stereotypical experience of being on your own.
“The vast increase in the number of single women is to be celebrated not because singleness is in and of itself a better or more desirable state than coupledom,” Ms. Traister writes. “The revolution is in the expansion of options.” And yet it often feels as if she is straining hard to find the celebratory in every aspect of single life—even the obviously painful phenomena, like loneliness.
Take her chapter on the sex lives of single women. The basic argument is that casual sex among unmarried young adults is nothing new and that “so-called hook-up culture” is a conservative bugaboo used to pressure young women into monogamy and early marriage. Drawing heavily on a 2013 New York Times article about campus sex, which itself relied on interviews with just 60 young women at Penn, she concludes that many girls who are hooking up in college are doing so because they’re careerist: They want to spend their free time building their résumés, not romantic relationships.
It is left to the author’s research assistant, a college student, to undercut this all too convenient, all too cheery gloss. Rhaina Cohen, reports the author, “expressed reservations about my putting too positive a spin on a culture of casual sex.” Ms. Cohen points out that her friends have “turned to hooking up” because “they think that’s what’s expected and it’s all men will permit.” Her take will ring far truer than Ms. Traister’s for any co-ed who has swiped right in the past few years.
The author’s contortions are also apparent in her attempt to yoke the experiences of poor, minority women with the choices of upper-middle-class ones. “Struggling single women with children,” she writes, “are often operating based on the same impulses that guide the sushi-gobbling grad students who stand for a new kind of unmarried autonomy: a desire to fill their lives with meaning and direction, to live independently.” Maybe. But then she introduces us to Pamela, who held things together heroically when she got pregnant at 17: She went to college, and her boyfriend picked up a second job to help support their child. But Pamela’s assessment of the males in the South Bronx neighborhood where she grew up is blunt. “I don’t feel like those men are somebody that I would like to marry or that I would like to raise a family with.”
Yes, Pamela is opting out of marriage. But she and other disadvantaged young mothers aren’t forgoing weddings because they have so many options but because they have so few. More than wanting to “live independently,” young mothers may fear giving up welfare, like Emmalee, a 24-year-old the author meets in Brooklyn. If the “sushi-gobbling grad student,” on the other hand, had gotten pregnant at 17, chances are that she would have had an abortion. And her reasons for waiting to marry wouldn’t be that half the men in her community were in jail or unemployed.
Pamela, we learn, recently graduated from New York’s City College and is now working as a legal assistant at the Office of the Bronx District Attorney while she applies to law school. She’s dating the same man; they’re expecting another daughter. Maybe they’ll even marry, just as Ms. Traister did.
Ms. Weiss is an associate book review editor at the Journal.
=======================================================================
3) Why is Israel sitting around waiting for the next war with Hamas?
By Judah Ari Gross
The terror group’s cross-border tunnels represent a grave threat to Gaza-adjacent communities, but for now Israel’s military planners prefer uneasy quiet to war
Israel’s Defense Ministry and its army recognize that Hamas in Gaza is gearing up for a fight. Since the end of the 2014 conflict, the terror group has been digging tunnels, improving rockets, amassing weapons, training fighters — and yet Israel’s military has been largely quiet.
Last Tuesday, the head of Military Intelligence Maj.-Gen. Hertzi Halevy warned a Knesset committee that the deteriorating humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip could further push the coastal enclave into desperation and war with Israel.
Hamas has set up military outposts right along the border, and last week, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon told reporters that Hamas is building “both defensive and attack tunnels — we’re not kidding ourselves.”
The writing is not just on the wall, it is in the newspaper and the parliamentary record.
Palestinian militants from the Islamic Jihad’s armed wing, the al-Quds Brigades, squat in a tunnel used for ferrying rockets and mortars back and forth in preparation for the next conflict with Israel, as they take part in military training in the south of the Gaza Strip on March 3, 2015.
(AFP/Mahmud Hams)
(AFP/Mahmud Hams)
“There are inevitable threats coming down the pike. And certainly [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and Ya’alon are sure that Israel’s going to be attacked again,” Dr. Natan Sachs, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Middle East Policy, told The Times of Israel.
So if conflict is inevitable, the question becomes: Why is Israel allowing its sworn enemy to rearm and better entrench itself for the next round? Why allow Hamas to dig tunnels, when they constitute a significant potential weapon against Israel?
Strictly from a tactical standpoint, it is always preferable to catch your opponents with their pants down. But the strategic gains of another tunnel-busting operation, Israel’s military planners believe, pale in comparison to the cost — especially because a victory for Israel in such a conflict would not completely eliminate its root cause, Hamas.
Palestinians stand near a road flooded with rainwater following heavy rains, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on January 24, 2016.
(Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)
(Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)
Moreover, that conflict would be detrimental to the people of southern Israel and the State of Israel, the very groups such a war would trying to help.
For what would be the umpteenth time, a military operation in Gaza would disrupt the daily lives and economy of southern Israel, which has scarcely recovered from 2014’s Operation Protective Edge; it would again devastate Gaza, catching the Strip’s civilians between the terrorists who use them as human shields and the IDF; it would again wreak diplomatic havoc on Israel as a country, as photographs and videos of war-torn Gaza would appear in newspapers and computer screens around the world.
Though the murmurs and rumors of a possible normalization of ties with Turkey could change the facts on the ground, most experts agree: War with Hamas is inevitable. “But the timing of it is not at all inevitable,” according to Sachs. “It could be two years, it could be very soon — within the next few months — but it could also be in four or five years.”
Escalating towards war
Hamas appears to be stuck in a state of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand it denies intentions to escalate violence, while on the other it does everything in its power to provoke the Israeli public.
“We’re not interested in war. We’re interested in tahdiya (temporary calm) and quiet,” a senior Hamas officialtold The Times of Israel this month.
Hamas has professed its lack of interest in renewed conflict not only to Israeli news outlets but also, reportedly, to its allies.
“There have been communications from Hamas via Qatar and Turkey that they are not looking for a confrontation,” Mark Heller, a senior analyst at the Institute for National Security Studies, told the Canadian Globe and Mail newspaper in an interview earlier this month.
“There are no overt indications that Hamas is intending to start a new confrontation,” Heller said.
That matches the consensus among the country’s defense officials, including the head of IDF operations, Maj. Gen. Nitzan Alon, who told reporters earlier this month that Hamas is not yet prepared to start a conflict with Israel.
The threat is coming and the threat is real, but Hamas is not interested in war today, Alon said.
But at the same time, the terror group is actively antagonizing Jewish communities surrounding the Gaza Strip.
Palestinian militants of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, the armed wing of Hamas, burn a fake Israeli bus during an anti-Israel rally in the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah, February 26, 2016.
(Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)
(Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)
Residents claim they can actually hear Hamas digging tunnels. This is unlikely, as the soil and rocks in the area are not capable of transmitting sound well enough. More likely, the industrial and military sounds coming out of the Gaza Strip, which have been recorded within Israel, are a misinformation effort by Hamas designed to terrorize and disturb the population of southern Israel. And it is working.
“For 15 minutes we heard detonations and explosions. Afterwards there was total silence — and then calls in Arabic, that sounded like the war cries of fighters,” a resident of one of the Jewish communities outside the Gaza Strip told the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper last week. “It is terrifying.”
Those residents, who have been living under the threat of Hamas attacks — previously in the form of Qassam rockets and now in the form of tunnels — are pushing for the government to act before a terror cell enters a Jewish community and carries out an attack.
‘Advanced capabilities’
Under the actual threat of Hamas and the panicked pressure from citizens who read reports of Hamas bragging about its tunnel infrastructure and see photographs of military outposts near the border with Israel, the government has made a variety of statements to reassure the public that it is taking the threat seriously.
Last week, Netanyahu promised local government officials that the army was “likely to find an imminent solution to the problem of tunnels from Gaza.”
Still from an August 2015 Hamas video purporting to show a Gaza tunnel dug under the Israeli border
(Ynet screenshot)
(Ynet screenshot)
Earlier this month, IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot hinted at technological developments to detect and eliminate these tunnels, citing “advanced capabilities” and presumably referring to the rumored tunnel detection system that Israel has been developing in response to the underground threat from Gaza.
Perhaps most overtly, Maj. Gen. Yoav Mordechai intimated to Palestinian media about surreptitious efforts by Israel to destroy the tunnels.
When asked if Israel was responsible for the recent rash of tunnel collapses, Mordechai, who serves as Israel’s coordinator of government activities in the territories, responded: “God knows. I would suggest the residents of the Gaza Strip not occupy themselves with the tunnels and get away from them, especially after seeing the results in recent days.”
Eisenkot, during the same speech in which he pointed to “advanced capabilities,” also pointed to the possibility of a preemptive strike, saying the option was “being discussed in the places where it needs to be discussed.”
Hitting them first
Israel has carried out preemptive strikes in the past. By far the clearest example is Israel’s bombing runs against Egyptian planes that helped kick off the Six Day War in 1967, which crippled the Egyptian Air Force and gave Israel near total air superiority throughout the conflict. More recently, when Syria began developing a nuclear reactor, Israeli jets bombed the facility in 2007.
“Preemptive action makes sense if your adversary is getting stronger and you have a certainty — or very high likelihood — that there’s going to be a conflict,” Sachs said over the phone.
Dr. Natan Sachs (Courtesy)
On the latter there seems to be widespread agreement. The former point, however, is not so clear.
“The question with Hamas is that though they are building their arsenal, are they getting substantially stronger such that a war now would be better for us than a war later?” Sachs asked.
And his answer is no.
Israel is technologically and militarily leaps and bounds beyond a Hamas at full capacity. The terror group is no pushover; another round of conflict will lead to Israeli civilian and military casualties, but regardless of any gains made by Hamas with its tunnels and weaponry, Israel’s advantage over Hamas will remain “overwhelming,” Sachs said.
In an article, “Past Lessons and Future Objectives: A Preemptive Strike on Hamas Tunnels,” Amos Yadlin, director of the Institute for National Security Studies and former head of Military Intelligence, argues in favor of a preemptive strike on Hamas’s tunnels, saying that option is second only to a technological solution to counteract the tunnels that is not yet “ripe for use.”
However, Yadlin said, that strike will only be effective if it has a “a clear strategic objective that, unlike all previous military encounters, has the potential to effect a fundamental change in the balance of power and the dynamics between the sides.”
The problem, however, is that Israel lacks that clear objective, since for Netanyahu and Ya’alon “potential losses loom far larger than potential gains,” Sachs argued.
At this point another conflict would not oust Hamas. It would just be another case of Israel pulling up weeds, knowing they will simply grow back in another few years.
And the cost for a preemptive strike would be dear. In exchange for the comparative benefits of fighting a less prepared Hamas, Israel would have to give up something precious: its quiet.
Not peace, but quiet
The current “quiet” in southern Israel is tense, strained and threatened by the possibility of terrorists infiltrating Jewish communities through underground tunnels and killing the inhabitants. But albeit flawed, the quiet is crucial, and the more of it the better.
Though they may be afraid, the residents of Jewish communities surrounding the Gaza Strip are still working in the fields along the border — producing food and making money.
A few years of respite can allow the south to rebound and rebuild. The difference between a war with Hamas in Gaza today versus one tomorrow is “huge,” Sachs said.
Illustration. Children in the southern Israeli city of Kiryat Malachi run toward a bomb shelter during Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012.
(Yuval Haker/IDF Spokesperson)
(Yuval Haker/IDF Spokesperson)
“If you have to hide every day in a bomb shelter, you can’t have a normal life or much of an economic life,” Sachs said. “Ariel Sharon, who was not a big peacenik, extolled the virtues of just some quiet.”
Sharon was specifically referring to northern Israel, which in the mid-2000s was at risk of rocket fire from Hezbollah in Lebanon, but the same logic applies to the residents of southern Israel.
“That extra amount of time of quiet would be enormous for the people in the south of Israel, and it would be enormous for Israel diplomatically,” Sachs said.
In addition, a preemptive attack or large-scale operation in the vein of 2014’s Protective Edge, 2012’s Operation Pillar of Defense or 2008-2009’s Operation Cast Lead would not actually solve anything.
Israeli army troops operating in Gaza during Operation Protective Edge
(IDF Spokesperson’s Unit)
(IDF Spokesperson’s Unit)
“Another round, fought by the same rules, is not recommended; it will only exact high costs from both sides while producing no positive results for Israel’s long-term security,” Yadlin wrote in his article for the think tank earlier this month.
“If you’re going to bring down Hamas, if you have a plan for what happens afterward, if you reasonably think you’d be better off, then there would be a logic for going to war. You could end this cycle of recurring conflicts, and then you wouldn’t have another 2,000 dead in two years,” Sachs said.
“But the assessment of Netanyahu and Ya’alon is that they don’t want to bring down Hamas because they don’t see a viable alternative. Therefore, biding their time and postponing the conflict, from their perspective, is the goal,” he said.
Turkey, Egypt and unintended escalation
The nature of Israel’s standoff with Hamas leaves it highly vulnerable to rapid and unwanted escalation, according to Sachs, who is currently writing a book on Israel’s grand strategy and worldview.
“There’s this unofficial tit for tat, this macabre menu of what the price for each thing is,” Sachs said.
A rocket launched from the Gaza Strip that lands in an open field, for instance, “costs” Hamas an Israeli airstrike on one of its unmanned training facilities.
Illustrative. A man holds part of a rocket that exploded and fell inside the Israeli border with the Gaza Strip on August 20, 2014.
(Edi Israel/Flash90)
(Edi Israel/Flash90)
A more serious assault on Israel would result in a more serious response against Hamas, which can quickly escalate into all-out war.
That has been the pattern of the ongoing conflict with Hamas, and it will likely remain the modus operandi until something dramatic happens, like an overthrow of Hamas — which is something no one in the Israeli government is seriously considering, Sachs said.
But a possible game-changer in this dynamic could be in the works.
“A lot of these rumblings about changing things in Gaza — which have not been changed in 10 years — have to do with a deal with Turkey,” Sachs said.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan addresses a joint press conference with Yemen’s president at the presidential complex in Ankara on February 16, 2016.
(AFP/Adem Altan)
(AFP/Adem Altan)
The ongoing talks with the Turks, who hold some sway over Hamas, and the potential for an export-only seaport for Gaza, which would grant the coastal enclave some economic relief, could alter the nature of the conflict and may be closer than expected.
Ankara and Jerusalem may release a joint statement “in the coming days,” the Turkish Hurriyet Daily Newsquotes the country’s Foreign Minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, as saying.
Israel has been largely quiet on the negotiations with Turkey, save for Defense Minister Ya’alon who has displayed a healthy amount of skepticism at the prospect and expressed a generous dose of criticism toward Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
“I am not sure that it will be possible to reach an arrangement of relations with Turkey. Perhaps we’ll succeed, but they will have to address our conditions in order to overcome existing obstacles,” Moshe Ya’alon told a press conference in Bern, Switzerland, earlier this month during an official visit.
“Turkey is hosting in Istanbul the terror command post of Hamas abroad. We cannot accept this,” he said, as an example.
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, right, shakes hands with Hamas leader Khaled Mashal, left, prior to their meeting at the presidential palace in Ankara, Turkey, August 12, 2015
(AP/Press Presidency Press Service)
(AP/Press Presidency Press Service)
And Ya’alon is not alone in his criticism and general wariness of an agreement with Turkey. Both Russia and Egypt, two crucial allies for Israel, have expressed concerns over the move.
“It is going to annoy the Egyptians tremendously. They have already signaled that they don’t like this because Egypt has very strained relations with Turkey and Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood,” Sachs said.
Normalized ties would also mean “giving Turkey a role in Gaza, even an unofficial role in Gaza, which might tie Israel’s hands if and when Hamas violates agreements,” Sachs said.
But there are benefits to normalizing ties with Turkey. Clout with the NATO member-state can help Israel diplomatically around the world and strategically in Syria. Ankara could also become a buyer for Israel’s natural gas fields as they come online, an issue that is of the utmost importance to Netanyahu, Sachs said.
But until some long-term resolution for Gaza can be found, the best Israel can hope for is just some more time until the next conflict.
Judah Ari Gross is The Times of Israel's military correspondent
Judah Ari Gross is The Times of Israel's military correspondent
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