OPERATION ROLLING BLUNDER
How Israel Lost The War In Gaza
It’s simple: they mistook destroying for winning
I closed my last piece by observing that the Israelis are making the mistake that the Americans made in Vietnam: believing that by destroying villages and killing NVA and VC at a pace greater than the rate of replacement, victory was inevitable: it’s math, after all. The Americans mistook destroying for winning.
The Israelis, too, are bringing destruction on an apocalyptic scale, with no victory in sight and no will to stop. Destroying Gaza is another example of not winning — ostentatiously and at tremendous expense. You’d think people might have learned.
Gaza’s destruction is a terrible truth: the IDF air force has got some serious bandwidth and has therefore been doing most of the heavy lifting. And the power they can unleash on stationary targets is spectacular and horrifying. But they’re only capable of destroying Gaza, which will not suffice to break the will of the Palestinians to resist alien domination.
The Americans learned this the hard way during the Vietnam war, with a memorable, sustained, futile bombing campaign. It was ordered by President Johnson, and it was called Operation Rolling Thunder. Its purpose was to demoralize the NVA, destroy industrial targets and air defenses, and interrupt transportation and supply lines. It lasted more than three years, during which an astonishing 864,000 tons of American bombs would be dropped. It accomplished none of its goals.
We might recall the grotesquely destructive bombings of Dresden, Tokyo, Hamburg, and London — and probably the worst of them all, the siege of Malta (four times the tonnage used against Dresden). No one was broken by these atrocities. No one surrendered because of them. Yet the myth that strategic bombing can bring victory persists. Perhaps because the atomic bombs that the Americans dropped in Japan did compel a surrender, but there we’re talking about another order of magnitude in destructive power. That attack was literally supernatural.
The only way Israel can win in Gaza is by actually fighting, but it doesn’t dare. Instead, the IDF army are running amok in armored vehicles and tanks, shelling and machinegunning their way to eternal infamy. They’re certainly not beating Hamas. IDF troops are poorly trained, poorly led conscripts and reservists, and they do not want to die. So they cower in their vehicles, which they haven’t got the courage to defend with support troops.
Bombing is not a path to victory because destruction is not a strategy. Bibi wants to continue this military farce because it keeps him out of prison, where he no doubt belongs, but it will do Israel no good. The only way Israel could defeat Hamas would be to head into the tunnels and fight. And that would, quite simply, result in an intolerable number of Israeli casualties. So it’s not on the menu. It was never on the menu.
There’s precedence here, too. The Americans steered well clear of the tunnels in Vietnam, although they did bomb them, hoping that they might collapse, but without success. Going in was a rare show of bravado; they contained not only armed fighters, but booby traps. The mortality rate among tunnel rats was notoriously high.
It’s likely the Israelis have been hoping to destroy tunnels in Gaza on the cheap, with their big fat American bombs, but that’s guaranteed to fail. They’re certainly not going to enter the tunnels to fight, which is the only way to achieve their stated goal.
So they do the next best thing; they bomb everything, including residences, refugee camps, hospitals, schools, and mosques. They motor about in their tanks, shelling and shooting women and children at long range, enacting the pretense that they’re professional soldiers and real tough hombres at that.
But it’s really just a performance. Israelis say they’re forced to target civilians because Hamas fighters hide among them, but that’s a lie. They know exactly how to find Qassam volunteers; they’re simply unwilling to meet them face to face in the dark. Going after Hamas is a cover story for the true purpose driving this extravaganza of sadism: ethnic cleansing. What’s happening in Gaza is not a war, a hunt, or a fight; it’s a siege.
But we should understand this: however long this demonic shitshow goes on, it must end at some point, and Hamas will be there to take a bow after the final act, quite undefeated. And Bibi will at last be in handcuffs and on his way to prison. God willing.
