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Israel-Palestine-Jordan

Nation Building's Last Stand in Gaza

2024-05-18

[FrontPage] Rafah isn’t just the last stand for Hamas, but for an entire foreign policy establishment.

The desperate effort to keep Israeli soldiers from going into the last Gaza stronghold of the Islamic terrorist organization is about more than the sum of the geopolitical parts. After nation building failed in Afghanistan and Iraq, and everywhere else it’s been tried, the radioactive ’Palestinian’ nation building experiment from over 30 years ago is its last hope.

Long before George W. Bush tackled nation building after 9/11, his father began the era of turning Muslim terrorist groups into countries with the project to give the PLO a state. Where the first Bush failed, Bill Clinton succeeded with the Oslo accords and a Nobel prize for Arafat.

“Succeeded”, anyway. He got the accords signed, and then Arafat promptly ignored the responsibilities he signed off on, while happily skimming billions off the top of the international and Israeli donations.

The PLO state failed long before Iran took over Iraq and the Taliban took over Afghanistan. There had never been anything peaceful, democratic or aspirational about Arafat and the PLO. By the time that Hamas had captured Gaza after winning democratic elections, it had long been clear to everyone outside of D.C. that rather than ending terrorism, statehood had incarnated it.

Any ’Palestinian’ state was doomed to be a terrorist state. The only question is who would run it. And the answer was that the biggest and deadliest terrorists would command popular support.

When Iraq and Afghanistan went bad, America could just leave, Israelis did not have that luxury. Sharon forcibly expelled the Jews living in Gaza to the other side of a border wall, but despite all the sob stories that the terrorists were living in an "open air concentration camp" with five-star hotels and mansions, walls weren’t that hard to get through even before Oct 7.

Israel has been stuck living next door to a failed thirty year nation-building experiment gone bad. And everyone in the international community is worried that the Oct 7 war will see it taken apart.

Lately the nation building experts have taken to warning that Israel is doing it the wrong way. Former CIA Director David Petraeus who also oversaw American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been arguing that Israel needs to pivot to a "counterinsurgency" model. And then we’re back to "winning hearts and minds" instead of actually trying to win a war.

The Biden administration has never stopped insisting that Israel needs a "day after" plan for rebuilding Gaza under a PLO government and some "moderate" terrorists from Hamas. Three generations after it became the norm, fighting a war without nation building as an endgame is so impossible that warfare experts can’t even understand what they’re seeing in Israel.

But among all the other problems with nation building is that it doesn’t work. And the Israelis who have been living next to the original chernobyl of nation building know it better than anyone.

Nation building has failed in every single Muslim country it’s been tried, not just by the United States after 9/11, but by the British between WWI and WWII. The entire Middle East is one long great nation building disaster shaped by primeval nation building experiments such as the Sykes-Picot agreement, the Hashemite monarchies and finally the recession of colonialism.

But it’s not just Muslim countries where nation building has backfired in familiar patterns.

D.C. elites can look to Haiti where decades of interference led to one disaster after another. The armed gangs overrunning the island nation started life as police forces. Democracy initiatives just worsened tensions and led to murderous outbreaks of political violence.

The same situation abounds across much of Africa, and parts of Latin America and Asia, where no amount of nation building could overcome tribalism, gang violence and political extremists.

Our nation building fails even worse than the British variety because it follows the American model of trying to overcome tribalism, assuming that democracy will empower individuals instead of blocs, and that having elected officials control institutions will lead to good government when in reality the majority seizes power and then viciously suppresses minorities.

American foreign policy believes that no people or group are good or bad, they just lack sufficient representation or the ability to participate in democratic elections. And that any governments that suppress any group, no matter how evil, are inherently illegitimate.
Any group but anyone who opposes the Left's most recent craze.
...Our "day after" plans for Afghanistan and Iraq cost us a generation of fighting men for nothing. Even the ’Surge’, the last stand of the counterinsurgency model, did nothing to stop Iraq from falling into the hands of Iran which is now using it to launch attacks on American bases.

"Truly winning this war would require creating some sort of government in Gaza that could gain the support of the people and prevent Hamas from returning after Israeli soldiers pull out," ex-neocon Max Boot argues in his Washington Post column.

But what if killing Jews is what the ’people’ in Gaza really want? Just as what the Shiites in Iraq really wanted was to step on the Sunnis and the Kurds, what the Sunnis in Iraq really wanted was to kill the Shiites and rape the Yazidis, and what the Kurds wanted was their own country. And just as a whole lot of Afghans really wanted to lock up women and mandate beards again.

Nation building’s faulty premise is that people everywhere want what Americans want.
Or used to. Nowadays???

Posted by:Grom the reflective

#6 You mean facial hair?
I expect they already have beards.

Posted by: Skidmark 2024-05-18 13:06

#5 I am wondering when the Afghans go woke and mandate that women grow beards.

Posted by: Elmaper+McGurque1612 2024-05-18 10:57

#4 "...we'll always have Africa."

Posted by: Skidmark 2024-05-18 10:23

#3 Funny the neocons are claiming to be trying to export to the world something they are working overtime to kill here.

Posted by: M. Murcek 2024-05-18 09:56

#2 Boomers envy of their fathers. Forgot several important lessons. First of which is to totally destroy the country you are going to rebuild so the people who brought that upon themselves would remember not to act in a similar manner again.

Posted by: Procopius2k 2024-05-18 09:37

#1 Max Boot is still an idiot. More like Max Headroom.

Posted by: Whiskey Mike 2024-05-18 02:38

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