Earlier I wrote about Thomas Friedman’s column, It’s all about leverage. In retrospect the construction of that post was awkward and needs a real makeover.

Friedman, is capable of astute observations. In his op-ed today he argue that Iran, Syria and their proxies have gained leverage in the Middle East in a number of ways:

Principle No. 1: Always seek “control without responsibility.” In Lebanon, Gaza and Iraq, Iran & Friends have veto power over the politics, without being held fully responsible for the electricity. America’s allies, by contrast, tend to have “responsibility without control.”Principle No. 2: Always insist on being able to both run for political office and bear arms. In Lebanon, Gaza and Iraq, America’s opponents are both in the government and have their own militias.

Principle No. 3: Use suicide bombing and targeted assassinations against any opponents who get in your way. In Lebanon, Syria is widely suspected to have been behind the spate of killings of anti-Syrian journalists and parliamentarians. One suicide attack on a major official in Iraq can neutralize superior U.S. power.

Principle No. 4: Use the Internet as a free command and control system for raising money, recruiting and operations.

Principle No. 5: Cast yourself as the “resistance” to Israel and America, so any opposition to you is equal to support for Israel and America and so no matter how badly you are defeated the mere fact that you “resisted” means you didn’t really lose.

These are all good descriptions of the way the extremists in the Middle East have managed to achieve power and control. However, one question he doesn’t address is how it was possible for Iran, Syria and proxies to achieve all this.

The reason he doesn’t go too far back, is because policies that he advocated have served to empower Hezbollah and Hamas and teach Syria and Iran that they will not suffer for their mischief making.

In a hypothetical column written in 1999, Thomas Friedman described how PM Binyamin Netanyahu would be re-elected.

Now that Israeli troops are out of Lebanon, noted Mr. Netanyahu, everything is reversed: Politically, if the Iranian-directed Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas try to come across the border, they will be invading Israel, and Israel will be justified in massively retaliating against Lebanese, Syrian and Iranian troops that abet such an invasion. And if Israel does retaliate, it won’t be with guerrilla warfare, but with the Israeli Air Force massively striking Lebanese, Iranian and Syrian military targets in Lebanon, and maybe inside Syria.The Israeli move has totally unnerved the Syrians, the Hezbollah guerrillas and Iran. ”They are all now in a quandary,” said the Middle East expert Stephen P. Cohen. ”The Hezbollah guerrillas are saying to themselves: ‘Now that we have liberated Lebanon, do we want to use that as leverage to rule Lebanon? Or do we want to use that as a springboard to move on to Jerusalem?’ If they want to do the latter, now they’re really going to have to pay for it.”

When it became clear that Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon hadn’t defanged Hezbollah and that Syria did not pay for continuing to sponsor Hezbollah, Friedman still declared the withdrawal a success and recommended that it serves as the model for withdrawing from Gaza.

Hezbollah knows it can’t launch any serious attack on Israel from Lebanon now without triggering a massive retaliation in which Israel’s air force would destroy all the power plants of Beirut. This would bring down the wrath of all of Lebanon on Hezbollah — because the Lebanese public would not consider an unprovoked Hezbollah attack on Israel as legitimate, or worth sacrificing for, now that Israel is out of Lebanon and Lebanon’s sovereignty is restored.”In every conflict, the extent to which a party can muster domestic support and international support, and the extent to which its public will withstand higher thresholds of pain, is very much a function of the degree of international legitimacy for that cause,” argues Shibley Telhami, Middle East studies professor at the University of Maryland. ”As soon as Israel withdrew from Lebanon to the internationally recognized border, the legitimacy factor shifted from Hezbollah to Israel. This may seem abstract, but it’s not.”

This was written some two years before the Israel/Hezbollah war, so as you can see Hezbollah was not deterred and given the complaints about Israel’s attacks in Lebanon, Israel acquired little if any goodwill for its withdrawal. In the meantime Friedman reduced the benefits Israel received to “…few Israelis have been killed there in four years.” He said nothing of the efforts Hezbollah was making to re-arm and fortify its positions. Either he didn’t know about them, in which case he isn’t nearly as well informed about the Middle East as he would pretend, or he didn’t wish to divulge that information because it contradicted his thesis.

So he recommended:

The lesson for Israel is clear: If you are going to get out of Gaza unilaterally, get out all the way to the U.N.-blessed international border. Do not do it halfway; otherwise you end up with the worst of all worlds: still embroiled in a guerrilla war, still taking casualties, unable to use your superior firepower and getting blamed for everything. Gaza may be easier than Lebanon, too, because unlike Syria and Hezbollah, the Palestinian Authority and Egypt would not have an interest — after an Israeli pullout — in keeping Gaza boiling. Because that would empower Hamas.

Israel pulled out of Gaza, it still took casualties and got blamed for everything. (How many times has the UN taken a vote that concluded that Israel’s treatment of Gaza is understandable given the terror emanating for that territory?) Egypt hasn’t behaved as Friedman predicted allowing Hamas to smuggle rockets and other munitions into Gaza.

In short, Israel did in Gaza exactly as Friedman suggested and the results contradicted his rosy vision of the future. Of course, he based his “prediction” on the faulty assumption that Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon had shifted the onus of “occupation” from Israel to Hezbollah. In fact it had shown Hezbollah that it could get away with ignoring the international consensus with no adverse effects. Resolution 425 wasn’t just about Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon, it also stipulated that the government of Lebanon was to extend its presence and authority there. Of course the Lebanese government never fulfilled its obligation and took on Hezbollah, allowing the terrorist organization to build its infrastructure in preparation for an eventual war with Israel.

In fact Friedman would demonstrate that he really didn’t care whether or not Hezbollah abided by the terms of 425. During the Israel-Hezbollah war he wrote:

Israeli soldiers were napping when this war started — that’s why they got ambushed — for the very best reasons: They have so much more to do with their lives, and they live in a society that empowers and enables them to do it. (Unfortunately, the Buffett company is in northern Israel and had to be temporarily closed because of rocket attacks.)Young Israelis dream of being inventors, and their role models are the Israeli innovators who made it to the Nasdaq. Hezbollah youth dream of being martyrs, and their role models are Islamic militants who made it to the Next World. Israel spent the last six years preparing for Warren Buffett, while Hezbollah spent the last six years preparing for this war.

If you’re “caught napping” when an enemy is preparing for war against you, that’s not the “best reasons,” it’s a sign that the Israeli government wasn’t taking threats against it seriously. Neither did Friedman much care.

In fact, later in the essay he wrote:

Israel mustn’t get sucked into that same grave. Israel needs to get a cease-fire and an international force into south Lebanon — and get out. Israel can’t defeat Hezbollah, it can only hurt it enough to make it think twice about ever doing this again — and it has pretty much done that. It must not destroy any more of Lebanon, which is going to still be its neighbor when the guns fall silent.

And of course destroying significant amount of Hezbollah’s infrastructure and hundreds of its fighter combined with the watchful eye of the UN would ensure that Hezbollah would never be able to rebuild. Did Friedman really believe that?

Iran and Syria have restocked Hezbollah’s arsenal. The UN has done nothing and now Hezbollah has effectively managed veto power of Lebanon’s government. This is what’s happened as Israel has (unwittingly) followed every bit of advice Middle East sage, Thomas Friedman has had to offer.

Israel could have destroyed Hezbollah but chose not to determining that the collateral damage and the likely international disappoval were not worth it. Hezbollah boasted that it won the war and, thus emboldened, acted accordingly. For Friedman to lament now that the good guys have no leverage is to ignore that they’ve been following every bit of advice he’s offered. If Hezbollah had to fear destruction, not a setback, then the West would have some leverage. But it doesn’t.

Friedman is either exceedingly naive or he’s an absolute fool.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

An op-ed in the NYT today asks What Do You Call a Terror(Jihad)ist?

The word “jihad” means to “strive” or “struggle,” and in the Muslim world it has traditionally been used in tandem with “fi sabilillah” (“in the path of God”). The term has long been taken to mean either a quest to find one’s faith or an external fight for justice. It makes sense, then, for terrorists to associate themselves with a term that has positive connotations. For the United States to support them in that effort, however, is a fundamental strategic mistake.First, to call a terrorist a “jihadist” or “jihadi” effectively puts any campaign against terrorism into the framework of an existential battle between the West and Islam. This feeds into the worldview propagated by Al Qaeda. It also serves to isolate the tens of millions of Muslims who condemn the violence that has been perpetrated in the name of Islam.

Second, these words locate the ideological battle exactly where the extremists want it to be. The terms of discussion are no longer about the murder of innocents in terrorist acts; they are about theology.

Third, when American leaders use this language it sends a confusing message to the Muslim world, showing ignorance on basic issues and possibly even raising doubts about American motives. Why, after all, would we call our enemy a “holy warrior”?

However Daniel Pipes writes:

As this suggests, jihad is “holy war.” Or, more precisely: It means the legal, compulsory, communal effort to expand the territories ruled by Muslims at the expense of territories ruled by non-Muslims.The purpose of jihad, in other words, is not directly to spread the Islamic faith but to extend sovereign Muslim power (faith, of course, often follows the flag). Jihad is thus unabashedly offensive in nature, with the eventual goal of achieving Muslim dominion over the entire globe.

Jihad did have two variant meanings through the centuries, one more radical, one less so. The first holds that Muslims who interpret their faith differently are infidels and therefore legitimate targets of jihad. (This is why Algerians, Egyptians and Afghans have found themselves, like Americans and Israelis, so often the victims of jihadist aggression.) The second meaning, associated with mystics, rejects the legal definition of jihad as armed conflict and tells Muslims to withdraw from the worldly concerns to achieve spiritual depth.

Pipes has shown elsewhere that the principal meaning of Jihad is not the spiritual one that the authors of today’s op-ed claim. To be sure there has been an effort to emphasize the spiritual aspect of jihad by apologists for Islamic extremism. But I think we all know that Jihad’s main meaning is “holy war.”

I wonder if Clark Hoyt will say that today’s authors are not entitled to their own facts?

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

The other day it was reported that the State Department was canceling 7 Fulbright scholarship to students in Gaza. Given the way the story was reported, it looked like a pretty obvious attempt of the State Department to embarrass Israel into letting the students leave via Israel.

Now Ethan Bronner reports, that Israel will allow the students to leave and the State Department will reinstate the scholarships. This could have been quietly, but the State Department chose to embarrass Israel with the help of a compliant reporter.

Israel Matzav points out that the students could just as well have left via Egypt. He also refers to the failure of the PA to apprehend the killers of the Americans who went to help give the Fulbright scholarships.

And second, from the standpoint of pure American interests, why is the United States granting Fulbright scholarships to Gazans, while the murderers who killed three of its own personnel who were on their way to interview potential Gazan Fulbright scholars remain at large? That question already has two answers. The US could care less about its own personnel. And the murderers of the US personnel were ‘good terrorists’ from Fatah and not ‘bad’ ones from Hamas.

(Has the United States been sending diplomats into Gaza since 2003 to interview candidates?)

via memeorandum

Thoughts last week on the Fulbright story by Meryl and Jammie Wearing Fool.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Two versions of the same story went out about the Hizbullah/Israel trade of remains for a prisoner. In the earlier version, the background on the Samir Kuntar story went like this:

A larger swap is extremely emotional for Israelis because it would likely involve Samir Kantar, the longest-serving Lebanese prisoner.

Kantar is serving multiple life sentences for infiltrating northern Israel in 1979 and killing four Israelis, including a 28-year-old man, the man’s 4-year-old daughter and two Israeli policemen.

He was convicted of killing the girl by smashing her head against rocks and then with a rifle butt. During the incident, the girl’s mother smothered a 2-year-old daughter to death while hiding from Kantar.

There’s no context. Someone at the AP made it look like Smadar Haran just killed her baby. Two of the early versions went out with the above misinformation. But then, someone noticed. The updated story:

The release of Kantar would be particularly difficult for Israelis to accept.

He is serving multiple life sentences for infiltrating northern Israel in 1979 and killing four Israelis - a 28-year-old man, the man’s 4-year-old daughter and two Israeli policemen.

Kantar repeatedly smashed the young girl’s head against a rock and crushed her skull with a rifle butt. Her mother, while trying to silence the cries of her other daughter, accidentally smothered the 2-year-old.

There’s still not enough context—but let Smadar Haran tell you what happened.

They held Danny and Einat while they searched for me and Yael, knowing there were more people in the apartment. I will never forget the joy and the hatred in their voices as they swaggered about hunting for us, firing their guns and throwing grenades. I knew that if Yael cried out, the terrorists would toss a grenade into the crawl space and we would be killed. So I kept my hand over her mouth, hoping she could breathe. As I lay there, I remembered my mother telling me how she had hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust. “This is just like what happened to my mother,” I thought.

The AP couldn’t get the details of the attack right. They implied that the mother was a murderer. And they felt it was not important enough to name the victims. Bad enough that Israeli victims of terror are almost never named, while the terrorists have their names plastered all over the news. But for the AP to misinform the world on the reason Yael Haran died—that’s inexcusable.