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[Order Daniel Greenfield’s new book, Domestic Enemies: HERE.]
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.
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.
That’s why Truman insisted on ending Chiang Kai-Shek’s repression of Communists in China, why Carter bailed out the Islamists in Iran, and why, based on this stunning track record, we decided that the only way to stop terrorism in Israel was to give the terrorists their own state.
Faced with 30 years of terrorism, the nation builders see no other alternative to a terror state.
But Israelis do. They saw it before Oct 7 and they certainly see it all too clearly now. David, Ben and Ezra aren’t dying in tunnels and bombed buildings to create another terrorist state in Israel.
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.
Israelis care as much about Gazans as we cared about Afghans on 9/11. And while the U.S. officials who oversaw over a decade of failed nation building experiments may not understand,. America would have been far better off if we had focused on hunting down the perpetrators, their enablers and then left giant holes in the ground as a warning to any future terrorists.
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-neo con 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.
And so we ignore what they say they want. We ignore what they vote for. And then we ignore it when they actually start killing each other as we try to give them what they’re supposed to want.
Nation building was built on denying that tribalism is a fundamental force and that demographics is destiny. We refused to believe that in Afghanistan, we refused to believe it in Iraq and now we still refuse to believe it in Gaza. But the trouble is that the Arab Muslims of Gaza do believe it.
After two decades of failing to win a war (because we didn’t even try) maybe it’s time to let the Israelis give it a shot. What’s the worst that could happen? Gaza will be overrun by Islamic terrorists? Muslims will hate us and try to kill us? There will be op-eds in the New York Times?
The Israelis have grown tired of trying to win the hearts and minds of rapists, kidnappers and killers. They’ve grown tired of giving them what we think they want and are giving them what they deserve. Maybe we could learn something from their experiment in ‘un-nation building’.
FDR said of the enemy in WW2: “Unconditional surrender or national suicide.” Those were the only options. And they bombed the living daylights out of the enemy’s homeland to get the point across. The Americans invented napalm and used it to firebomb Tokyo in March 1945. (Ten times more people died in one night than have died in seven months of urban warfare in Gaza, btw.)
Winston Churchill said that the way to win a war was by “the proper application of overwhelming force.”
The US has probably threatened to freeze the many assets of the govt traitors if Israel goes scorched earth in Rafah.
Israel needs to go scorched earth on the IRI, repayment to the Iranian people for King Cyrus and the Second. Temple.
I see your point, but will add that there is a huge difference between IDF tactics in Gaza, where the IDF is putting its own soldiers in harms way in order to minimize civilian casualties, and the bombing of Tokyo, which specifically targeted only the residential district because civilian houses were calculated to burn faster than factories in the industrial areas associated with the war effort.
Imperial Japan started the war. It got what it asked for.
After the 9/11 sneak Islamic attack on America, the USA should have given an ultimatum to the Saudi “Royal” family and all the other depraved psychopathic murderous berserk freedom suppressing lying Islamic scum.
The USA should have nuked Mecca and Medina and Riyadh Saudi Arabia. which has been the promoter and financier of the Wahhabi Islamic hatred and terrorism around the world.
Make no mistake about it, The Saudi “Royal” family and all the other treacherous insidious murderous Islamic scum are no friends of America and the West.
We should have gone after the money behind 9/11 in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Pakistan, instead of regime change in Iraq
I wouldn’t be in favor of killing millions of innocent civilians but taking down the royal family would have done the western world a service. Wahhbism and the Muslim Brotherhood are behind all these Islamic wars.
That’s a situation where one should be careful what you ask for. What you’d get without the Saudi royals is much worse…
We eventually got MBS. The way you know he’s who we needed is how much Democrats hate him. He seized most of the assets of the “crazy cousins” who fed tons of money to the Wahabbi terror groups and got everyone in line for modernization, diversification of sovereign wealth, and he’s been supporting the Abraham Accords behind the scenes until enough countries sign that the Kingdom has cover to do so. Now he’s an autocrat, and he damn well put the competing faction out of the way Game of Thrones style with added bone saws, but that’s what passes for good in the Middle East unless you’re talking about Israel which is, of course, a modern Western State…because Jews are essentially the earliest foundation of the West.
This extraordinary insightful thoughtful and historically true article by Daniel Greenfield must be read and understood by everyone … particularly by America and all patriotic US citizens.
The American political and oligarchic ruling class is totally blind to the Truth and absolutely corrupted to the core
Somehow patriotic US citizens must turn this situation around and remove the American traitor leadership class from power.
They are so corrupted now that they would not even defend and protect their own mothers or children from Islamic. hatred depravity psychopathology violence and murder.
Wake up America and US Citizens.
I would add the leftist thinnking is to also nation build in the USA as the USA is as backwards to them as GAZA and needs everything new nothing old (hmmm sounds like MAO also)
Great article, Daniel!
thank you
Time to quit all this politics and liberal stuff and as they say Go for the Jugular no more giving us just like what they did at Tripoli and ended the Scourge of the Barberry Pirates the Marines mopped up and put a end to their Practice of Holding ships crews for Ransome like Hamas is doing today the one way to Fight a Bully is to hit them back and never mind the Liberal Democrats and play games of Kiss and Make-up . Just think how the U.S. the UK gave aid to our Wartime enemies Germany and Japan made friends with two Enemies
Thanks Daniel! Interesting how nation-building enabled the ChiComs. I’m old enough to remember Chiang-Kai-Shek and all the bad publicity the leftists heaped on him.
Quemoy and Matsu. It’s all coming back into memory now 🙂
I’ve been to Chiang-Kai-shek founded Taiwan and the “People’s Republic” of China and can say from personal experience that Taiwan is very pleasant and China sucks.
Money and power only represent what they pay for and make. China reminds me of the usual suspects in the UK who buy royal titles. It’s just perfume on pigs.
The monkey wrench in America’s misguided foreign policy of “nation
building” is Islam. One can look at tribalism, gang violence and
political extremism as to why nation building fails in Haiti, Africa and
some of Latin America – but then one wonders why the British
before Israel became a state, were able to make nation states out of
predominantly tribal and Muslim areas of Syria, Lebanon and Jordan.
But that is for another discussion. Back to Islam. It will forever jam
up any hope for a Palestinian nation state alongside the state of Israel.
The American corruptocrats will not advocate for a two-state
solution because they are global communists who want Western
civilization including Israel destroyed. It is, after all, common sense that
nation building with a Muslim group (Hamas) whose charter calls for
annihilation of the Jews and with ordinary people (Gazans) whose religion
calls for the same thing – could never be achieved. But common sense
and fair play are not American goals in dealing with Israel and therefore
why Israel must utterly destroy Hamas.
Correction: ‘American corruptocrats WILL advocate for a
two-state solution’. . . .
Depraved psychopathic murderous berserk Islam has been a scourge on humanity for 1400 years.
Enough already.
Wake up America and read some history..
America and US Citizens … defend and preserve and protect yourselves from the Islamic scourge.
The Islamic Saudi “Royal” family and all the other so-called Islamic “Royal” families need to be taught a lesson they will never forget..
Just like the German Nazis and the Japanese militarists were taught a lesson they have never forgotten.
Funny how peaceful and tame and pacified Germany and Japan have been since 1945..
This lesson now needs to be applied to the entire lunatic murderous aggressive depraved psychopathic Islamic world.
Israel is undoing ‘Gaza’, which was, is and always will be part of Israel’s eternal homeland.
Similarly, America must undo ‘Islamaphobia’. America has doomed itself with embracing that lie. With that lie, America is becoming an un-nation.
Speaking of ‘un’ing things,
the U.N. should be undone.
Wrong, Gaza wasn’t part of the land of Israel
“Long before George W. Bush tackled nation building after 9/11, his father began the era of turning Muslim terrorist groups into countries“
I believe this started around 1913 (?) when Britain France and the US decided to give legitimacy to an Arab tribe in exchange for access to their oil, and allow them power over large swathes of the Middle East. ( I need to re-read 7 Pillars of Wisdom) The U.K. used their royal family to help cement the relationship by allowing these tribals to call themselves kings and princes.
Another mistake was Turkey as a nation.
They should have never been allowed to have a nation after the genocide.
Or after WWI.
Attaturk was a benevolent aberration in Turkey but he’s long gone.
My ex wife went to Turkey once and told me they were the most hateful people she’d ever met and scared her. She’s from Indonesia and she’s been to Australia and Europe, lived in America and now lives in Sweden. She’s been around but swears Turks are the worst by far.
The THX beer challenge is in effect!! A total of 4 mentions of the dreaded altruism word. We can’t have nations being nice to each other. That might lead to peace and understanding.
Instead lets have everyone constantly attacking, fighting, invading each other. That is the world Objectivists would create.
So 4 beers for me. 4 beers for you. 4 beers each for everyone else. But not for you T. All you get is one flat Bud Light.
God never permits Israel to form alliances with the nations around her for any purpose. Every time she does, the LORD frustrates the intended purpose.
Nation building only works when God is the Builder, ruling with justice, righteousness and truth.
Maybe the Mordechai Kedar approach should be tried in Gaza.
Why be so accommodating?Before October 7th, that plan of accommodating hostile resident aliens, on Israeli land with local, not national ‘sovereignty’ was an academic, historically and socially scholarly, theoretical improbable possibility, and based on people with a non massacre mentality and acceptance of the Jewish State of Israel.
October 7th revealed that that thinking can only be applied to people who don’t live in Gaza, who don’t support terror, who don’t raise children to be savage murderers and don’t teach their children to sing songs of genocide as soon as they learn to talk and can hold a toy gun.
So this ‘accommodating’ plan can never be; it is not a viable option today or ‘the day after’, nor after every hostage, dead and alive, is found and brought home to Israel, nor after Hamas’ surrenders unconditionally in total defeat, nor after Israel destroys every tunnel and every weapon and every arabic copy of Mein Kampf.
Never.
Consider this:
There’s plenty of room in Egypt (95% uninhabited)
and in Jordan (90% uninhabited).
There’s Turkey and Qatar. And Scotland. Fifty plus other Muslim countries. Or, as the late Tom Snider said years ago, “Just give ‘em Guam”.
And let’s not forget that Biden wants some…….
What’s another one and a half million strolling across the border?
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” ― John Adams
Democracy and civil society is a result of culture, not something that can be imposed or sustained from outside.
Democracy is just the vox populi. If the populace like the idea of oppressing all non-Muslims, you get the democracy that briefly existed in Egypt and that now exists in Turkey.
Democracy is just the vox populi. If the populace like the idea of oppressing all Republicans, you get the democracy that we have in the US.
One should be careful of citing, as examples of “failed nation-building”, the Hashemite monarchies in the Middle East installed after WWI. There was exactly zero intent on the part of the British and French of building so much as a single nation — the Hashemite monarchs (and the others) were installed so as to render the region into a series of dutiful, obedient client states that would (most of all) deliver oil on schedule. One could say the same about imperial efforts in Africa and parts of Latin America — there is a reason we refer to the latter as “banana republics”, after all.
To borrow the hoary phrase sometimes used against Christianity, it isn’t so much that nation building has failed as that it has never been tried.
One might argue that the U.S. did build two nations successfully: Germany and Japan, both after WWII. Each of those however utilized a model that few would dare suggest today. For each, we (Americans, British, Soviets, and the occasional Frenchmen) killed enough Nazis, and Imperial Japanese, such that the rest threw down their weapons and did whatever we told them to do. Perhaps that is the intent of Israel in Gaza: first kill Hamas, and then the remaining Gazans will submit to instruction. However repugnant to modern sensibilities, it has the virtue of past success.
Germany and Japan were fairly advanced and had democracies before this.
what we did was bomb them so hard and then give them a choice between us and the USSR that they decided that it was in their best interest to put on a show of reforming
we haven’t tried that really since, but we also haven’t been dealing with countries where there was much of a legitimate culture that had evolved beyond the crudest tribalism to work with
great article. Their hubris knows no bounds
Mr. Greenfield,
Your articles always have way too much common sense in them(which we on the right get and understand)! Leftists do not understand human nature so common sense is lost on them. I have many leftists in my family and telling the truth makes absolutely no sense to them. They’ve been brainwashed in college with relativism so nothing can penetrate their brains. It’s exhausting! Again, another great article!
Thank you. I try to counter it by going back to basic core truths. As I tried to do in this case.
If I’m getting this nation building thing right, when that green headband is worn by enough children in Gaza, a country is supposed to form where there wasn’t one before.. Is that what that headband stands for?
(when I used the phrase “where there wasn’t one before” in my above comment I was referring to the current control of Hamas in Gaza. That was careless wording on my part considering the historic multi-millenial national presence of the Jewish people in area generally. I should have been more precise.)
Savages, read as the terrorists, criminals and their supporters, only understand the language of force. It can’t be said enough times.
The Crusades worked, it showed the muslim invaders their place.
The strategy of tough on crime and criminals is the only proven strategy that works very well.
Destroying an enemy to the point of unconditional surrender works.
To save the free world, there is no option left but the WWIII.
If the free world wants to survive they must fist eliminate the domestic enemies. The criminals and domestic terrorist groups who hate their own nations. No mercy.
And then eliminate all islamists in their own countries. No mercy. It won’t even take much time, the modern warfare will end them in short time when the purpose is just to eliminate them.
It’s either that, or watch all of the free world fall into hands of the terrorists and criminals.
The savages terrorists criminals depraved psychopathic murderous Moo–Slums
must be taught a lesson they will never forget.
Islam itself is the enemy of America and US citizens and the West and humanity.
1400 years of depraved psychopathic murderous Islam is more than enough.
Depraved psychopathic murderous berserk Islam is a scourge on humanity.
The Spanish Inquisitors knew how to deal with Islam.
President Trump knew this as well and would have immediately backed the destruction of Hamas in Gaza.
It is why the worldwide foreign policy uniparty kicked him out of office. They lost money.
“Israel’s war teaches us what we should have done after September 11.”
Exactly…LIGHT, THEM. UP.
The Marshal plan model only works in counties that are actual counties , where the populations believes they are counties. Drawing lines on a map and expecting hostile tribes to come together like the Hobbits in the Shire does not work.
Bravo! Our policy makers just cannot believe that others, including those in Gaza who have been raised with a murderous hatred of Jews since the cradle, are not “just like us”, don’t want the same things we do, and don’t respond in the same way we would. Our policy makers are simply delusional.
Of course, they have the luxury of not being personally at risk. The Muslims will have to kill lots of other people before getting to the Bidens, the Obamas, and their friends.
I salute you Mr. Greenfield for your blunt summation of what lies ahead for continuing attempts by the U. S. leadership class to re-write the definition of insanity.
George W. Bush is at his core a decent man, but wise, he isn’t.
How many Americans have died in the wake of his insistence that, “Islam is the religion of peace”?
And how many more will die if even the most decent and well-meaning of our leadership class continue to delude themselves into thinking that Muslim populations want a nation built on the “City on a Hill” model?
I have said from the beginning that the US should just get out of the way and let Israel solve the problem. Vetoing everything in the UN even if it doesn’t involve Israel and selling munitions should be our sole involvement. Instead we are trying to micro-manage their war, using our failed template.
If I may be so presumptuous as to offer advice to Israel, it would be to start to pull away from dependence on the always unreliable and sometimes malicious US. They may not have a choice in the matter should *Biden steal another election. The obvious choice would be BRICS. The Israeli tech sector would be highly useful to Russia, it would enhance the prospects for the long desired peace with the Saudis for which Russia and China would be far better brokers than the US and revitalize the arms and munitions supply from Russia. Going back to 1948 that was where Israeli weapons came from (via the Czech cutout). Iran would be the fly in this ointment but the Saudis have reasons to try to separate them from Russia and China.
Let’s face it, this war started with Ishmael and Isaac, the son of the promise. The terrorists of the line of Ishmael have a supernatural hatred for Jews. Our government should let the Jews do their business and give them all of the weapons in support. How would Americans respond if after Pearl Harbor some well meaning ally told them to limit the damage to Japan?
Biden does not have one member of his cabinet that is pro Israel, according to Pompeo. What do Americans expect from a totally incompetent leadership? He is ignorant of the motive of the enemies of Israel.
Here is the perfect formula for our relationship with Israel: “I will bless those who bless Israel and curse those who curse Israel”. Genesis 12
In the Civil War and WW2, the goal was to win the war-rebuilding would be accomplished only after the South, Germany, Italy and Japan were reduced to rubble and their respective populations via their commanders were conquered and their political and military leadership vanquished. The IIDF should focus on winning and eradicating the ideology of Hamas -even and especially if it means turning all of Gaza into a parking lot
You cannot make a silk purse (a liberal democracy) out of a sow’s ear (any population that votes to live under Islamic religious law sharia). Iraq and Afghanistan are lessons in futility that cost too much American blood and treasure. The lesson learned by anyone with half a brain is you cannot save Muslims from themselves. Let them stew (and kill each other for not being Muslim enough or the wrong sect) in the 57 backward countries they already run. No more Muslim immigration into the West except for those who abjure sharia law making them non-Muslim in the eyes of the devout majority. Families with veiled women get refused as mummified women are a sure sign of hostility to western ways.
It’s not perfect, but revisiting Sam Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” literature helps explain why nation-building is so difficult.
Personally, I think Israel would be better off to deport every Arab in Gaza across the Egyptian border. Problem is, NONE of the neighboring countries want to absorb the residents of Gaza or the West Bank. Saudi Arabia doesn’t want them. Send them to Iraq? Well, things could hardly get worse there. Those nations which did accept refugees from previous Arab-Israeli conflicts found themselves involved in civil war; or permanently destabilized. In Jordyn King Hussein was nearly dethroned several times. Lebanon was once democratic and flourishing. Egypt is under perpetual threat by the Muslim Brotherhood, the tree which budded Hezbollah, the PLO, and the swine in Gaza. Fact is the Arabs have never, ever abandoned their petty, and frequently deadly, tribal warfare. Family and clan are all. Think Scotland until the English effectively and brutally suppressed the clan warfare at its Hilands root.