A friend says: What gets me about how the propaganda front is going is that Hamas clearly attacked Israeli with a mind to the second and third order consequences of their actions; and there’s very little discussion of that among the opinion-forming institutions/forums.
As far as I can tell Hamas miscalculated in the following ways. 1st they didn’t expect to penetrate so far so fast and face so little opposition. 2nd they were expecting a much faster and wilder Israeli response, not the unrelenting bombing, and brief land incursions. 3rd they thought their allies in Hezbollah, Iran etc would give them far more support. That largely hasn’t happened, possibly because Hezbollah’s initial attempts were largely disastrous for them. The IDF seems to have adjusted their doctrine significantly and effectively with the Shiite militia.
My friend in government said that we basically sank all of Iran’s surface ships in response to the hostage crisis under Carter, but it wasn’t until after we accidentally shot down one of their civilian airliners (legitimate mistake) that they “respected our resolve.”
They know this about themselves. And they know that this puts us in a catch 22.
The only means we have for addressing them on their own terms is something that our own culture is, in public, almost completely incapable of understanding much less condoning. Any action that would reclaim our dignity in the eyes of the Muslim world degrades and marginalizes us in the West. And visa-versa.
