If Israel's intended end is docile submission, why not just dust off whatever means it used to put the sephardim in their place? Seems demonstrably more efficacious than the phosphorous.

Friedman is an idiot. Has he forgotten that Hezbollah did actually drive Israel out of the "buffer zone"

Does he think that Hamas, or any other palestinian independence (and basically, that is what Hamas is, whatever tactics it uses) will give up their fight? Palestinians will stop longing for a homeland?

I think even those in the West Bank who were becoming used to life in their ghettos and bantustans are going to experience a new wave of patriotic fervor.

I think the goals are: (1) Stop the rocket fire into Israel. (2) Stop the flow of weapons to an internationally-recognized terrorist organization. (3) Kill, capture and/or disrupt in every way possible, the leadership of that internationally-recognized terrorist organization.

#1 and #2 are pie-in-the-sky goals that, put bluntly, physically can't be accomplished without Israel building a wall all along its borders, declaring a no-fly-zone over its airspace, and reducing its imports to nothing.

#3 could have been accomplished by SOF and careful intelligence. Instead we've got hundreds dead and thousands wounded, and gods alone know how many new radicals.

You were then asked:

If so, do you think the people they don't kill - many of whom have now lost a family member and all of whom have suffered in this war - will be likely to blame Hamas or the people who are actually shelling, bombing, invading and blockading? And does this make the future likelihood of peace greater or less?

Your answer:

If they were smart, if they were practical and informed, the people of Gaza would recognize that they would be much better off if they expelled Hamas from within.

That presumes that anyone who has lost a family member to Israeli fire is able or willing to view it as dispassionately as you. The only conclusion I can reach is that you yourself have no family, or if you do don't care one bit for them.

Here's a realistic analogy:

The local police department suddenly quarantines the city block you live on. They then storm each and every house, in full tactical gear, and proceed to shoot the place up. Anyone inside is considered fair game and anyone who shows the slightest resistance is considered hostile, and so is terminated with extreme prejudice. Snipers outside wound or eliminate anyone attempting to flee. The quarantine likewise blocks emergency services from entering the area, even though there are clearly injured lying the streets. As a final measure, the police use explosives to destroy every house on the block, not checking if they were empty or not.

The reason for all this? Someone on that block, identity suspected but not confirmed, fired a gun at a police car last year. The police decided to reduce the entire area so the shooter and any who might have harbored him are eliminated.

Now, under those circumstances, do you seriously think the survivors are going to just shrug it off and think the police were just doing their jobs?

If there is a "pathology" to be treated, it is the Arab world's fever-swamp of humiliation and self-victimization with all sources of evil somehow rooted in disputes with Israel.

We'll leave that one aside. You just can't argue with myopia like that.

Until the Palestinians surrender and curb their own terrorists, no progress can be made.

Arbeit macht frei, bitches!

I had forgotten the name of Friedmans book was "The World is Flat"...

There's something hilariously,ironically funny about the snark of the title and karma coming back to expose the true mentality/self huh?

To call oneself any kind of expert on anything after titling a book "The World is Flat" is just my dream of an ironic, karmic, cosmic chocolate brownie sundae with whipped cream and 2 cherries on top!

I'm having trouble not overdoing the indulgence on that one.

Too delish.

I think it's pretty clear that they feel as if they have nothing left to lose. So why would they disown Hamas? If anything, Hamas is the only organization actually fighting for them.

Comparisons with Sherman's March to the Sea are ridiculous. In Gaza there is practically no obvious terrorist infrastructure to destroy; in Georgia the fields and pastures, houses and farming equipment that supported the Confederate war effort were pretty easily identified. Sherman did not target the civilians, he targeted the infrastructure of war. And the March to the Sea did not, on its own, end the rebellion. It went on for months afterwards. In fact the only reason the Confederacy was defeated was that its own citizens were not really invested in the fight. They were unwilling to fight to the last man to protect the southern aristocracy's way of life. I don't think you can equate that to the commitment of Palestinians to their cause.

Shooter has aptly stated the Neocon position: Palestinians should continue to be killed until they quit fighting back. If that means every single Palestinian has to die, so be it. We've got the bullets.

The term "terrorism" means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant (1) targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience. . . .

...can anyone identify any differences between (a) what Friedman approvingly claims was done to the Lebanese and what he advocates be done to Palestinians and (b) what the State Department formally defines as "terrorism"? I doubt anyone can.

If I were a Friedman fan or Israel supporter (I am neither) I would argue that the difference is that Israel is not motivated to make a political point but by self-defense in response to the rocket attacks.

You will not get an answer to that question. One thing that permeates every one of Glenn's pieces and the so-called "discussion" that ensues is that Israel, as an entity is illegitimate per se and that it must engage in moral relativism before responding to provocations that no sovereign nation would endure. You have a fringe of the left which ALWAYS has hated the very idea of Israel shouting down any whiff of reasoned discussion on how we can build a lasting peace in the Middle East because the very notion of a Jewish state offends their sensibility. Of the regular posters to Glenn's blog, I would venture that few of them accept the idea of a Jewish state in the Middle East. This either is based on a misunderstanding of Jewishness as a nationality or a misunderstanding of the history of the late Ottoman period and the vast influx of BOTH Jews and Arabs to Palestine as a result of both the Zionist movement and the British Mandate. There is little to discuss with these people---witnessed by the crude and dismissive attitude towards new posters astonished by the tone of the letters here. They want Israel gone, and Glenn gives them voice without reprimand. That's fine, and everyone deserves to be heard, but it represents a very small minority of those who oppose not only the war in Iraq, but virtually every other aspect of American foreign policy in the Middle East. They are the analytical inheritors of the famous Arab "Three No's."

There is only one solution in the Middle East and everyone knows it---Taba, take or leave a few provisions. It has been accepted by Israel, by Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan....but torpedoed by those who profit from keeping Palestinians in camps and keeping them radicalized. There is a good argument to be made that the current war brings this goal no closer to accomplishment---however, since Hamas will never agree to Taba, Israel really has nothing to lose by mixing it up with them when they will not stop attacks. War is war, as has been pointed out by a few posters here---to impose a scorecard is ridiculous. No one fights a war to keep the score close. We need to end the cycle of wars, not keep the score close in this one.