It's very weird of you to try to spin Hamas's defeat of Fatah as an Israeli “victory” when Hamas are more hardline dedicated to the destruction of Israel than the PLO were.

If that's victory, then what wouldn't count?

Are Shi'ite death squads going after Sunnis in Baghdad now to be counted as a succesful part of the US take down of Sunni Iraq? Flu epidemic of 1919 as a winning German retaliation for WW1?

What are the criteria of something being legitimately credited to one side or the other? Is mere causal involvement sufficient, or do we have to suppose that Israeli strategists explicitly visualized and took steps intended to bring about that moment of PLO defeat by Hamas? Visualized how clearly?

Perhaps a more important question : is mere “destruction” sufficient to count as “winning”? If breaking stuff is enough to be victory, and there's no commensurate requirement to get the peace working, then we're all in the fast lane to Hell.

Personally, I think that Hezbollah will come out of this far stronger than when they went in. Political process tends to entangle terrorist groups in all sorts of responsibilities and concerns about their image with their home population. Israel just cut them free. Hezbollah can do what they like and the Lebanese will be rooting for them. Even the ones who were out on the streets in the Cedar Revolution last year.

What happened to winning on the moral level? Does severing the mere infrastructural, physical connections outweigh all those new moral connections Hezbollah just gained?

Anyway, rather than pontificate about that, I'd be more interested to see if we can come up with some kind of predictable event which we could both agree would count as evidence either for or against our different views.

Got any suggestions?

Regarding Fatah, remember isolation as the key to forcing defeat.

First, Israel has 2 nationalist-secularist (Egypt and Syria) and 2 more tribal (Jordan and Lebanon) states as neighbors. No states that neighbor Israel are run by the Muslim Brothers or a similar organization. It is better to have isolated enemies than connected enemies, and the replacement of Fatah by Hamas as governing power of Israel's local resistance has made Israeli's enemies more disconnected.

Second, and more importantly, consider Europe. While the Muslim World is composed mostly of powerless has-beens, good at little else than increasing their own brutality, nastiness, and horror, Europe is a formidable force for Israel. Jerusalem recognizes that the Nationalist government of South Africa fell not from a coalition of hostile African states and an internal opposition, but a coalition of hostile developed states and an internal opposition. The ANC was able to triumph because it was vaguely leftist and vaguely intellectual with a vaguely agreeable leader fighting a government that Europe vaguely disliked. The PLO under Arafat was dangerously close to this description. Happily for Israel, Hamas is much more disgusting for Europe than even a Jewish State. It's better to have an popular enemy than a unpopular enemy. Fatah's fall to Hamas has improved situations in this manner for Israel.

“Take down” and “take over” are useful concepts, but rarely should be seen in binary on-off totality. The correlation of forces is important, because rarely can you destroy an enemy but often you can change the environment of an enemy. Thus Shia death squads strongly deterioriate the correlation of forces for Sunni groups in Iraq, but whether this does or does not improve America's correlation of forces is seperate. Likewise, the Spanish flu harmed Germany's correlation of forces — but also hurt those of every country everywhere. It doesn't do you good to hurt an enemy if you are hurt too — especially if you are no longer antagonists!

(This also answers your question, “is mere “destruction” sufficient to count as 'winning”?' Replace “destruction” with “improve your correlation of forces,” and you're probably right.)

Concern about Lebanese “rooting for” Hezbollah is substantively meaningless. It barely matters what Lebanese Christians or Lebanese Sunnis think about Hezbollah v. Israel — is matters a lot what they think of Hezbollah v. Lebanese Catholics or Hezbollah v. Lebanese Sunnis. Tom Barnett wrote of America's public diplomacy: “it’s not about making ourselves seem nicer, but telling a better and far more inclusive story about where we’re trying to move the world” [1] In the same way, Israel's goal isn't to make Israel seem nicer, to be to show the Catholics and Sunnis that they are moving Lebanon away from Syria and towards France. Politics isn't based on niceness. It's based on interest.

If you're interested, check out my series, “Redefining the Gap” [2] and for an example of placing predictions to quantitative analysis. I've already built off it. [3]

[1] http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/archives2/001217.html
[2] http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2006/05/18/redefining-the-gap-11-results.html
[3] http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2006/06/04/synthesizing-the-gap-convergent-thinking-and-mapping-our-wor.html

[quote]France lost 4G Wars in Vietnam and Algeria, while the United States was previously set back in Vietnam, Lebanon, and Somalia.

Yet the Israelis are the exception.[/quote]

The real reason the Israelis are exceptional is that they're right in the middle of it. They can't run away like France or the US. They don't have the option of “not staying the course”. The course runs right around their house.

Israel could run away. Paris abandoned departments of Metropolitan France in losing Algeria. Losing the struggle against the ANC meant soft ethnic cleansing against whites. Fortunately the Israelis haven't sunk to that level of despair.

On your earlier comment

“What are the criteria of something being legitimately credited to one side or the other? Is mere causal involvement sufficient, or do we have to suppose that Israeli strategists explicitly visualized and took steps intended to bring about that moment of PLO defeat by Hamas? Visualized how clearly?”

You're asking how to define social fingertip feeling [1] [2]… Good question…

[1] http://zenpundit.blogspot.com/2005/07/cognition-of-fingerspitzengefuhl-in.html
[2] http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2006/06/04/the-enemy-of-fingertip-feeling-and-resilience.html

Where to?

(See also the removal of whites from Kenya, Indians from Uganda, Russians from Turkmenistan, etc…)

I suspect that if the whites are running away from South Africa this is largely a matter of choice. They don't want to live in a country where they are no longer a dominant elite and have to accept a majority black culture.

But I don't have a lot of evidence here. Do you have any proof that there's something more sinister going on? I'm not hearing that S.A. has become Zimbabwe.

The new, more democratic (and in many ways, more free market) government of South Africa has promulgated a number of laws that have led to “voluntary” white flight from the country: from real estate laws that limit the internal physical mobility of her citizens (mostly affecting whites), to affirmative actions laws that limit the internal economic mobility of her citizens (again, mostly affecting whites).

Crime in South Africa, while high, is not “meaningfully” anti-white in the sense that Zimbabwe's hard ethnic cleansing is.

South Africa is a seam state, and significantly less nice than most members of the Old Care and New Core. Yet it's far and away better than the rest of Africa.

This post is most notable for the depth of projection and revisionism for fit the needs of “4GW”. The patience you attribute to the state of Israel, a highly militarized state that has no concept of civilian control of the military, is overly generous. Looking at the civil-military relationship in Israel and one does not find anything similar in the democratized West. This is a military state more like Sparta than Athens and is not playing the waiting game. It’s not clear how Hamas’ election was actually a victory for Israel (except assuming ‘isolated’ & ‘disconnected’ are the only options in your binary model). Sure its nicer to have a bunch of people who can only prick you with irregular war than a larger enemy with bigger weapons systems. Wait, Hizbollah has bigger and advanced weapons systems (better than Iraq had against the US).
If they (Israel) were playing intelligently, they would have maneuvered another political party to prevent Hamas’ victory (a popular victory largely owed to their ability to clean the streets and actually provide for the people, a direct contrast to the Fatah).

Attacks on bridges portrayed as attacks on “physical connectivity” in the sense of networks is meaningful how against an enemy not based on territory. While you acknowledge infrastructure attacks have little meaning, you are mixing and mashing and fail to consider the complex political landscape of the Israelis pissing off the Christians and everyone else in the area and they charge through like a bull.

The application of 4GW as a “model” here escapes me. But maybe that’s because it is a theory without definition and is constantly changing and changed by whomever decides to wield it.

And France lost 4G wars in Algeria? This is simple colonial and irregular warfare and is nothing new. As Phil said, France had the option of abandoning (despite the tremendous importance of Algeria) but largely they LOST versus Algeria winning. An Israel can’t ‘run away’ for two reasons: geography and socially. In the dash to oversimplify and over-analyze, you forget to look at the construct and nature of the state. Who serves? Who presses for action and how the media enlisted to drum up support?

I do not support Hizbollah, Hamas, PLO, or, for that matter many of the Israeli responses. This 'game' of Israel will only continue to empower radicals. Despite your social theories on the Gap or the Core, extremists in any movement, political or religious, make up a small number. These actions polarize the middle ground and create binary options, destroying the granularity in stakes. I see your rational ending with one result: kill 'em all. This again, is a Clash argument.

For instance away from occupied territory to a place within their orginal borders from 1947?