SLOW LEARNERS

 The international foreign policy establishment includes a lot of slow learners.

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.

That is a depressing recitation with which it is hard to argue. Some would say that our efforts to implant or restore democracy in Germany and Japan after World War II constituted successful nation-building. But Germany and Japan were actual nations with histories and cultures that didn’t need to be constructed by the victors.

Americans have gotten sick of sending their sons to die for nation building. The term has become so toxic that no one wants to use it anymore. Biden loudly claimed that the withdrawal from Afghanistan marked the end of nation building. And now he’s back to nation building again.

Biden, Secretary of State Blinken and every one of the nearly 80,000 State Department employees are very upset (some have already resigned) that Israel isn’t following the nation building playbook. Some accuse Israel of harboring dire plots to expel all the Muslims from Gaza or to impose their own authority on them, but they’re too blind to see the actual reality.

The Israelis have had friends and family members brutally butchered, burned to death, raped and kidnapped on Oct 7 and they don’t care what exists in Gaza so long as it isn’t the terrorists. They’re being forced to supply food and medical aid to the perpetrators by D.C., which no army was forced to do in the past, but they have no interest beyond that in the enemy population.

It seems to me that the only obligation of Israel’s government is to win the war; to reduce Hamas to relative impotence by killing its fighters; and to destroy Gaza’s ability to make war in the future. That’s it.

from the comments:

"When the war is over and it will be over, I hope that Israel stays strong and refuses to ever, and I mean ever allow any Gazans to work in Israel again or obtain medical care from Israeli hospitals. A lot of the terror was facilitated by Gazans who were allowed to work in Israel and they told Hamas were the security offices were and gave out other important information. As Oscar Wilde said “No good deed goes unpunished” and as a freed female hostage said - “There are no innocent Gazans”."