Proper response
Today a 21 year old suicide bomber blew himself up in Tel Aviv, killing, at last count nine people. Question: When the government of a neighboring country sends a suicide bomber into your country as part of its foreign policy, what is the proper response when the bomber is successful?
This is an act of war. It seems to me that Israel is morally justified retaliating ferociously. I simply cannot see why it is either morally wrong or strategically unwise for Israel to simply start shelling the "territories", especially the neighborhood where this man was from. They need to set up an incentive mechanism. You send a suicide bomber, we shell where he came from for 24 hours. If artillery can't reach that area, we send in the jets and helicopters.
This is an act of war. It seems to me that Israel is morally justified retaliating ferociously. I simply cannot see why it is either morally wrong or strategically unwise for Israel to simply start shelling the "territories", especially the neighborhood where this man was from. They need to set up an incentive mechanism. You send a suicide bomber, we shell where he came from for 24 hours. If artillery can't reach that area, we send in the jets and helicopters.
posted by Harsh Pencil | 4/17/2006 04:52:00 PM
Israel needs to allow Hamas to fail on its own. The more Hamas begins to fail at governing, the more they will step up the attacks hoping that Israel will attack them to mask these failings. If Hamas goes down on its own, that will be a great ictory.
I agree, Israel should retaliate. However, unless they are willing to go all the way (put the Palestiniant population to the sword), a better strategic decision may be to allow Hamas to become unpopular.
If the radicals are able to get away with killing Israelis without big time retaliation, then Hamas has not failed at governing. They have achieved what the average Palestinian wants, regardless of whether the trash gets picked up. The Palestinian people have chosen. To paraphrase Golda Mier, they hate Israeli children more than they love their own.
One of the few good things Jimmy Carter did was implement a simple incentive scheme for authoritarian governments we supported. His adminstration simply estimated every year the number of political executions and subtracted $100,000 per killing from our aid to that country. This drove the generals in those countries nuts, but it worked. They saw a price for each killing, and they greatly reduced them.
So Israel does not need to limit its choices to annihilating the Palestinians and doing nothing. It simply needs to give them a choice.
Like I said, each suicide bombing is returned with X number of shells.
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