Publius Endures Applauds Hamas Rationality

Mark at Publius Endures wades into the debate on Israel-Gaza, and comes up badly bruised:

I think Hamas' actions in continuing the rocket attacks are ultimately rational - it allows them to plausibly declare victory almost no matter what Israel does ....

The fact is that Hamas is fully aware it is severely outgunned by Israel both in terms of manpower and in terms of weaponry. Thus, it has no possibility, ultimately, of winning a military victory over Israel - a fact of which they are most certainly aware. However, it can nonetheless legitimately declare victory if the Israelis are unable to achieve that which they nominally set out to achieve - which is in large part the cessation of the rocket attacks. So as long as Israel is unable, by sheer force, to put an end to the rocket attacks, Hamas will appear the victor to its constituents, as well as to its supporters in the rest of the Middle East and South Asia. Meanwhile, the continued rocket attacks don't have too much of an effect on international opinion because they are rather ineffective at actually killing people - this guarantees that the casualty figures for Israeli civilians will continue to dwarf the casualty figures for Palestinian civilians.

Let's hope that Mark's "fully aware" of it, but his commentary could have been copied from any elementary textbook in international terrorism. As Donald Snow, for example, suggests:

Generally, groups choose terrorism to achieve their ends because they are unable to achieve them in any other way. Most of the time, the reason is that the terrorist objective has little, if any, appeal in the target population. Thus, the population will not embrace the terrorist political demands voluntarily, and the unpopularity of the demand means that it will not be achieved through normal political channels. When the group seeking change also lacks the conventional military power to impose its will symmetrically, asymmetrical acts such a terrorism may seem to pose the only possible means of success. Palestinian suicide bombing exemplifies this line of reasoning.

The problem for Mark, and those he cites at his post, is that their discussion really is stale chatter. Strategic rationality is the fundamental characteristic of political terrorism. Even the individual Muslim's pursuit of fanatical martyrdom is "rational" in the sense of an otherwise irrational action of blowing oneself to bits being justified as a piece to the larger assymetric political objective. Being rational, of course, does not make it okay. And that's the problem when blogging from the libertarian/isolationist mindset: Implacably moral problems in the global politics of good and evil get reduced to simplistic agent/actor self-maximizing cost/benefit analysis. It's an exercise in relativism disguised as sophisticated economic problem solving.

The post might have better, to follow the logic, by laying out a decision tree of available Israeli actions that may well have indeed improved national security (at what point, and under what conditions, is a cease-fire in Israel's interest, and how can Tel Aviv turn Hamas' exploitation of civilian deaths to its advantage?). If General David Petraeus had thrown his hands up in 2007, like our friend Mark (who concludes by saying "the decision to escalate the assault on Gaza was harmful to Israeli interests"), we'd still be losing dozens of soldiers a week in endless suicide bombings and IED attacks in Iraq.

At some point the state must act with decisive force to defeat the capabilities - if not the resolve - of an enemy who exploits the weaknesses of the home state's domestic political constituencies. The case of Israel is a classic example of the balance of resolve ultimately prevailing among the domestic population, where the terrorist goals of accession and capitulation by the target victims have yet to be achieved among the people of the Jewish state. The domestic politics of Israel home defense, obviously, is much more complicated than this. But the rehash of "terrorist rationality" at Publius Endures doesn't much advance the larger terrorist problematic that is the fundamental fact of existence for the nation of Israel.