Haggai’s views on what to do about the Hamas takeover in Gaza. Bottom line:

As I’ve said, I think the only thing that can sustain a peace process is to have the final status parameters placed on the table up-front. Hence my disagreement with Indyk on provisional statehood. International-boycott-wise, my price for having it lifted would be participation in THAT process, i.e. one that seriously aimed for final status, not one that says “just recognize Israel up front and we’ll go from there.” In effect, this would fall into Indyk’s camp of a separation/”West Bank first” approach (he’s using that term as an ironic twist on the “Gaza first” initial stage of Oslo). And if that kind of comprehensive approach could work in the West Bank, the hope would be that it could either moderate Hamas in Gaza, or moderate Gaza to rid itself of Hamas. Short of participation in that process, I would not lift the boycott on Hamas. I see no other way of achieving real progress. Any short-term attempt to increase contacts on the ground between Israel and Hamas (or, as we’ve just seen, between Fatah and Hamas) is not likely to last long at all before collapsing into more violence.

It’s also true, as Jim Henley says, that one should always hold open the possibility that it may be impossible to resolve the problem in a satisfactory way no matter what the US does. That said, there’s no way for America’s close relationship with Israel to be viable unless we can also be seen as engaged in the Palestinian problem in a somewhat constructive way. The effort to do otherwise during the Bush years has been a disaster.

Somehow this Government Executive article about the Air Force looking to get in on the counterinsurgency game doesn’t leave me feeling any rosier about the Defense Department’s new alleged focus on irregular warfare. The same old bureaucratic imperatives seem to be in play, except now instead of the military focusing on conventional conflicts because that’s what justified expensive hardware, we’re now going to have all the same equipment and inter-service politics, but everyone will just assert that it’s all about the counterinsurgency.

The Air Force, for example, “has taken to touting show of force missions as a vital tool in counterinsurgency.” What does that mean? Well, it involves “low-level fly-overs” that are “intended to intimidate opponents on the ground.” For example, “Jet aircraft fly a few hundred feet above rooftops in downtown Baghdad and drop a string of flares.” Greg Grant, the reporter on the story, nicely deadpans that “it’s difficult to discern how show of force demonstrations compete with an enemy who cuts off its opponents’ heads and leaves the bodies lying in the streets.”

What about the fact that the use of air strikes in counterinsurgency situations creates civilian casualties on a level that makes them massively counterproductive? Well, General. Allen Peck, director of the Air Force Doctrine Center, “agrees that recent air strikes, particularly in Afghanistan, have caused civilian casualties and generated ill will.” Nevertheless, he assures us that “the Air Force follows strict rules before dropping bombs, Peck says, constantly refining the process to minimize possible civilian deaths.” I’ve made this point before, but while I’m sure there’s some truth to this, the basic reality is that the Pentagon doesn’t even count civilian casualties, so they can’t possibly know whether or not they’re minimizing them and, on some level, they’re obviously not taking that mandate very seriously.

Serious leakage in The New York Times where we learn in a more on-the-record sense than before of a split pitting Condoleezza Rice “against the few remaining hawks inside the administration, especially those in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office who, according to some people familiar with the discussions, are pressing for greater consideration of military strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities.” Thus far, Rice continues to have the upper hand, and rightly so.

The one thing I would observe about this is that even if neither President Bush (listening to Rice) nor Supreme Leader Khameini (listening to the Iranian version of Rice) want war, there’s still a very dangerous situation. You have a lack of institutionalized diplomatic relations between the two countries, and almost 200,000 American soldiers and unknown numbers of Iranian personnel of various sorts in countries bordering Iran. There’s a lot of scope there for provocations, incidents, and incidents and other problems of various sorts. Add in to the mix your Cheneys and your Ahmadenijads trying to push everything toward escalation and there’s no telling what could happen.

Photo by Flickr user Koldo used under a Creative Commons license

Martin Indyk, Bill Clinton’s ambassador to Israel, has a plan for Palestine. Roughly speaking, let Hamas run Gaza and then deal with Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank “where he can depend on the Israel Defense Forces to suppress challenges from Hamas, and on Jordan and the United States to help rebuild his security forces.” Abbas will gain control over the West Bank and then “could make a peace deal with Israel that establishes a Palestinian state with provisional borders in the West Bank and the Arab suburbs of East Jerusalem.”

Read more

A new outfit composed, basically, of people from the old outfits. Laura Rozen calls it a “shadow government in waiting” and I think she’s right — these are, at a minimum, people who would very much like to have important jobs in a Democratic administration (I mean, they’d take jobs in a GOP administration, but it doesn’t look like any of the GOP contenders want to even slightly moderate the level of insanity in current US foreign policy).

I’ll note as a first impression that if President X has any sense at all, she won’t put anyone even vaguely associated with this project in charge of naming anything — what they’ve come up with here is just terrible.