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Kindergarten lesson is unlikely to work for Iran, Israel in the long run
[JPost] - The United States learned the "kindergarten lesson" this week, something Israel has sharpened and perfected over the years in the way it formulates policy.It goes something like this: if Hamas fires a rocket but it doesn’t hurt anyone then there is no reason to retaliate aggressively. What’s the "kindergarten lesson?" Since everyone knows that if a rocket were to hit a kindergarten in Sderot, Kfar Aza or somewhere else along the southern border and cause extensive casualties, Israel would have no choice but to launch a large-scale military offensive. As long as that doesn’t happen though, Israel doesn’t have to. The problem is that this is no way to formulate policy. If rocket fire is a threat, then it needs to be dealt with whether the rockets hit and hurt someone or don’t. A government shouldn’t wait for people to be killed before dealing with a threat. That is not a strategy. A variation of this played out on Wednesday morning, when Iran fired more than a dozen ballistic missiles at bases that house US soldiers in Iraq. While satellite footage showed damage at the al-Assad airbase, no US military personnel were injured or killed. Donald Trump made a point of stressing this in his speech at the White House the following afternoon, explaining why he was holding his fire, for now. What that means though, is that if a barracks had been hit, and a number of soldiers had been killed, the response would have had to be different. Is this a way to formulate strategy? Probably not. Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2020-01-10 |
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