European Gaza Diplomacy Fails Test of World Power

This piece on the European Union's limited success in bringing about a cease-fire in Gaza opens a window on the realities of world power, which serves as an important corrective to the endless announcements of the decline of the United States.

From the Times' report, "In the Gaza conflict, the European Union's Diplomatic Efforts are Fractured":

With the U.S. caught in limbo between two presidencies, Europe is trying to fill the diplomatic void by assuming a greater role in the international effort to end the bloodshed in the Gaza Strip.

But a series of high-level official forays appears to have achieved little and once again laid the European Union open to criticism that it punches far below its weight in the diplomatic arena, if only because it can't seem to decide who does the punching and how hard.

In the last few days, two separate European delegations descended on the Middle East. One was led by the Czech Republic, which assumed the rotating presidency of the EU last week, and the other by the man who reluctantly gave up that post, French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Both delegations are urging a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, the militant Palestinian group that rules Gaza.

"Pressure should be exerted on all parties involved, including Hamas, in order for the guns to fall silent and peace to return," Sarkozy said Tuesday in Damascus, the Syrian capital, after meeting with President Bashar Assad. "There is no military solution in Gaza."

But European calls for a cease-fire have been rebuffed, reinforcing the impression that the only real power broker in the conflict is still the United States, which has not demanded an immediate truce.

In Washington, President-elect Barack Obama has remained relatively silent on the conflict, deferring to the Bush administration as the government in charge. By contrast, Europe has been beset by a Babel of official voices, which have sown confusion as to what the EU's view is and who speaks for the continent.

An interesting footnote at the story's conclusion is how the radical pro-Palestinian prortests against Israel have paralyzed European governments:

Demonstrations against Israel's Gaza incursion have attracted thousands of protesters throughout Europe.

The anger is feeding concerns about a rise in anti-Semitic violence. On Monday, a synagogue in southern France was attacked by assailants who tried to ram its gates with a car. In London, police are investigating a possible arson attempt at a synagogue, the Associated Press reported.

Related: Stones Cry Out, "The Gaza War and the 'Antiwar' Left."

Depression Fetishism

Here's an excerpt from my latest column at Pajamas Media:

There is no doubt that today’s economic crisis ranks among the most severe we’ve seen in decades, and no one discounts the painful dislocation millions of Americans are feeling amid housing losses and widespread job market instability. But it’s less persuasive that today’s recession equals the fundamental collapse of capitalism of the New Deal era. Indeed, recent public opinion polling suggests that Americans see business journalism as contributing to the economic downturn. As a January 1 Opinion Research Corporation survey reported:

Seventy-seven percent of Americans believe that the U.S. media is making the economic situation worse by projecting fear into people’s minds … The majority of those surveyed feel that the financial press, by focusing on and embellishing negative news, is damaging consumer confidence and damping investment, making a difficult situation much worse.

Careful observers of news and public opinion know that the mass media is consumed by “Depression fetishism.” It’s an affliction of the political left where pundits, liberal economists and far left bloggers endlessly decry “predatory capitalism.” Economic exaggeration and doomsday scenarios proliferate far and wide, with attacks on the Bush administration’s “malign economic neglect” bolstering the case on the Democratic left for a “New, New Deal.” Recall, for example, one of the great national newsweeklies sold magazines with a mock-up of President-elect Barack Obama riding in a vintage open-air sedan, while decked out with a crumpled fedora and an elongated cigarette filter. Can a new National Industrial Recovery Act be far behind?

Blogging, Stephen Walt, and Israel

On Monday I noted that the international affairs journal Foreign Policy has just announced a major relaunch of its website. The magazine has added longtime foreign affairs blogger Daniel Drezner to its blogging masthead, as well as a number of other top scholars, some of whom are just now apparently breaking into the blogosphere.

One of those joining the Foreign Policy stable is Harvard's Stephen Walt.

Walt wasted no time in jumping right into the thick of the flame wars. He wrote a provocative post yesterday using counterfactual analysis, "What if Egypt, Jordan, and Syria had won the Six Day War?" Walt asks us to imagine what it'd be like if Israel walked in Palestinian shoes, that is, what if the Jewish state was defeated in the 1967 Six-Day War - and "a million or so Jews had ended up as stateless refugees" and abandoned to a strip like Gaza - what would American policy look like? Would "the United States be denouncing those Jews in Gaza as "terrorists" and encouraging the Palestinian state to use overwhelming force against them?"

Well, this intellectual exercise generated a little dust-up, of course, with Ross Douthat firing a response at Walt with a direct attack on the "realist" paradigm in international relations, of which Walt is a central contemporary practitioner:

The odd thing is that by Walt's own account, the answer would seem to be "Yes," since presumably the rump Orthodox Gaza - run, perhaps, by Verbover Jews - wouldn't have an all-powerful lobby shaping U.S. policy and public opinion to its specifications. Or am I missing something? ...

... this analogy ... is a reminder of why when I say that the American Right needs a new realism, I really do mean a new realism, because so many of the old realists have failed to distinguish themselves in the debates of the decade just passed. That failure is the subject for an essay, rather than a blog post, but for now let me just say that on the one hand, you had figures in the broad realist firmament (from Henry Kissinger to George Will to Chuck Hagel) lining up to support the invasion of Iraq at a time when the Bush Administration could have used a serious critique from the right (and then acquitting themselves less-than-impressively, in Hagel's case especially, in the debate over what to do with Iraq once things had fallen apart) ... while on the other hand you had figures like Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer deciding that the best way to promote legitimately important "realist" ideas (like, say, that America should be pushing Israel harder to abandon the West Bank settlements, and that American Jews ought to play a more constructive role on this front) was to wrap them up in a farrago of oversimplifications and half-truths, ride the ensuing attention up the bestseller list, and then cry "persecution!" when anyone called them on it.

In turn, Douthat's critique of Walt generated this intellectually dishonest response from L'Hôte:

Douthat is someone who I've admired, but to make a drive-by accusation of anti-Semitism using the stunningly empty "Jewish conspiracy" slander diminishes both him and the Atlantic, and as is always true of frivolous and politicized accusations of anti-Semitism, hinders our ability to fight the real thing. There is a real enemy of anti-Semitism in this world, it is particularly virulent in the Arab world, and those who throw around such accusations withough cause, explicitly or implicitly, do no favors either to the Jewish people or to Israel.

And with that, folks can see how viciously out of control such debates become.

I don't see any "slanders" or allegations of "Jewish conspiracy" mongering in Douthat's post. In fact, Douthat raises one of the most important questions that writers at the nexus of blogging and international relations theory must address: How can a morally competent and responsible theory of American power and foreign policy be developed in post-Bush era? The arguments of Walt and those of the realist paradigm have come to resemble in toto the antiwar left's screaming smears against the "evil BushCo neocons." The key difference is that they ground their attacks on the administration in the scholarly apparatus of "narrow national interests," mounting prestigious yet familiar calls for the "restoration" of constitutional legitimacy and America's "moral standing in the world."

Today's realists, frankly, combine longstanding unhinged leftist attacks with a more surreptitious "traditionalist" idelogical agenda common on the "paleoconservative" right, a paradigm David Frum has identified as comprising "unpatriotic conservatives."

One excellent example of antiwar dogma masquerading as sophisticated scholarhip is Michael Desch's lead article at International Security from Winter 2007/08, "America's Liberal Illiberalism: The Ideological Origins of Overreaction in U.S. Foreign Policy." Desch's piece, not unlike the most vile netroots smears, was egregiously unbalanced (if not blatantly dishonest) in its attacks on the Bush administration. I submitted a detailed research rebuttal to the editors - roughly 3,000 words in length, with full citations - but they declined to publish my response, and did not tender an offer of "revise and resubmit" (copies available by e-mail upon request).

Let me note something about all of this from a professional perspective: My dissertation, completed in 1999, built on some main research findings in the realist balance-of-power paradigm, of which Walt is a leading scholar. His book, The Origins of Alliances (1987), offered one of the most important emendations to the balancing and alliance literature since the work of Kenneth Waltz in the late-1970s. I've loved the realist paradigm - with its grounding in rationalism and the primacy of the national interest - since my days as a political science undergraduate. Walt, as well as his coauthor John Mearsheimer (who I met in 2002 at the APSA annual meeting in Boston), are great political scientists, worthy of emulation.

But I became increasing less enamored of Walt and Mearsheimer in 2003, with the publication of their attack on the Bush administration's build-up in Iraq in 2003, "An Unnecessary War." It became clearer to me over time that realist academic political scientists were basically antiwar peaceniks with mortarboards and tassels.

Walt and Mearsheimer, of course, have become central players in the debates on U.S. foreign policy toward Israel. Most folks are familiar with the huge controversy over their article a few years back at the London Review of Books, "The Israel Lobby." I had just started blogging at that time, and didn't get too wrapped up in the debate. I read some flurries of the controversy in the pages of Foreign Policy, "The War Over Israel’s Influence," and I recommend Michael Massing's powerful essay reviewing the debate at the New York Review, "The Storm over the Israel Lobby." See also, Richard Baehr and Ed Lasky's, "Stephen Walt's War with Israel."

Yesterday afternoon I picked up a copy of Walt and Mearsheimer's book that grew out of that debate, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. I read the preface and introduction last night, and will continue reading this afternoon. I figured I might as well read the whole thing. With Walt now a major blogger at the Foreign Policy website, who will likely provide ample fodder to the nihilist leftists of the online fever swamps, it seemed like now's a good time to consume the full argument in preparation for even more intense debates in the months and years ahead.

Just a look at Walt's page this morning gives one a heads-up on what to expect. In an essay entitled "It's Time to Redefine 'Pro-Israel'," Walt glowingly cites the well-known Bush administration nemisis and eminent sockpuppet Glenn Greenwald:

Over at Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald has posted some typically sharp and forceful comments on the gap between American public opinion on the conflict in Gaza and the public stance taken by our politicians.

I'm telling you, if Stephen Walt - who is the Belfer Professor of International Relations at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government - describes Greenwald, who is perhaps the most loathed hardline leftist blogger among conservatives across the blogosphere, as "typically sharp," then there really is something strange going on in academic political science. To put Walt's blogging endorsements in perspective, see Rick Moran's, "Glenn Greenwald is a Pathological Liar."

It's kind of sad, actually, but this is the postmodern world we live in nowadays. Good thing I became a blogger, I guess.

I'll have more on all of this as things develop. For more on my take on Israel and blogging, click here.

Anti-Semitism Sweeps Europe, Threat is Worldwide

The Daily Mail reports on the wave of anti-Semitic attacks in Britain in response to the fighting in the Middle East. Also, Gateway Pundit links to attacks in Paris and across Europe.

The assualts are more significant than a few isolated pockets of unrest. Benjamin Netanyahu, at the Wall Street Journal, says Israel's campaign in Gaza is measured and just, and success there is vital to the preservation of freedom, for the ideology driving Militant Islam threatens all of us:

We fight to defend ourselves, but in so doing we are also fighting a fanatical ideology that seeks to reverse the course of history and throw the civilized world back into a new dark age. The struggle between militant Islam and modernity -- whether fought in Afghanistan, Iraq, India or Gaza -- will decide our common future. It is a battle we cannot afford to lose.

Hat Tip: Memeorandum.

Publius Endures Applauds Hamas Rationality

Mark at Publius Endures wades into the debate on Israel-Gaza, and comes up badly bruised:

I think Hamas' actions in continuing the rocket attacks are ultimately rational - it allows them to plausibly declare victory almost no matter what Israel does ....

The fact is that Hamas is fully aware it is severely outgunned by Israel both in terms of manpower and in terms of weaponry. Thus, it has no possibility, ultimately, of winning a military victory over Israel - a fact of which they are most certainly aware. However, it can nonetheless legitimately declare victory if the Israelis are unable to achieve that which they nominally set out to achieve - which is in large part the cessation of the rocket attacks. So as long as Israel is unable, by sheer force, to put an end to the rocket attacks, Hamas will appear the victor to its constituents, as well as to its supporters in the rest of the Middle East and South Asia. Meanwhile, the continued rocket attacks don't have too much of an effect on international opinion because they are rather ineffective at actually killing people - this guarantees that the casualty figures for Israeli civilians will continue to dwarf the casualty figures for Palestinian civilians.

Let's hope that Mark's "fully aware" of it, but his commentary could have been copied from any elementary textbook in international terrorism. As Donald Snow, for example, suggests:

Generally, groups choose terrorism to achieve their ends because they are unable to achieve them in any other way. Most of the time, the reason is that the terrorist objective has little, if any, appeal in the target population. Thus, the population will not embrace the terrorist political demands voluntarily, and the unpopularity of the demand means that it will not be achieved through normal political channels. When the group seeking change also lacks the conventional military power to impose its will symmetrically, asymmetrical acts such a terrorism may seem to pose the only possible means of success. Palestinian suicide bombing exemplifies this line of reasoning.

The problem for Mark, and those he cites at his post, is that their discussion really is stale chatter. Strategic rationality is the fundamental characteristic of political terrorism. Even the individual Muslim's pursuit of fanatical martyrdom is "rational" in the sense of an otherwise irrational action of blowing oneself to bits being justified as a piece to the larger assymetric political objective. Being rational, of course, does not make it okay. And that's the problem when blogging from the libertarian/isolationist mindset: Implacably moral problems in the global politics of good and evil get reduced to simplistic agent/actor self-maximizing cost/benefit analysis. It's an exercise in relativism disguised as sophisticated economic problem solving.

The post might have better, to follow the logic, by laying out a decision tree of available Israeli actions that may well have indeed improved national security (at what point, and under what conditions, is a cease-fire in Israel's interest, and how can Tel Aviv turn Hamas' exploitation of civilian deaths to its advantage?). If General David Petraeus had thrown his hands up in 2007, like our friend Mark (who concludes by saying "the decision to escalate the assault on Gaza was harmful to Israeli interests"), we'd still be losing dozens of soldiers a week in endless suicide bombings and IED attacks in Iraq.

At some point the state must act with decisive force to defeat the capabilities - if not the resolve - of an enemy who exploits the weaknesses of the home state's domestic political constituencies. The case of Israel is a classic example of the balance of resolve ultimately prevailing among the domestic population, where the terrorist goals of accession and capitulation by the target victims have yet to be achieved among the people of the Jewish state. The domestic politics of Israel home defense, obviously, is much more complicated than this. But the rehash of "terrorist rationality" at Publius Endures doesn't much advance the larger terrorist problematic that is the fundamental fact of existence for the nation of Israel.

The Necessity of Peace

I was just struck by this photograph at Wordsmith's post at Flopping Aces, "The Burden of Peace is on Hamas and Palestinians":

A girl was among the dead in the air strike. About 30 people were inside the house when it was destroyed, neighbors said. Photo: Mohammed Abed/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images.

No one is unaffected by the civilian casualities. But it's precisely images like these which are used by Hamas for diabolical propaganda puposes. Israel has been extremely judicious in abiding by the laws of war and in conducting its campaign with respect for human rights and the prevention of civilian deaths. As Yaacov Lozowick notes:

Hamas has been stockpiling weapons in civilian homes. This is against international law, but since I'm no great fan of international law I mention it only to note all the media outlets who aren't mentioning it - the folks who cannot formulate a sentence about Israel's policies without telling about whatever Israel is doing which is illegal. Those hypocrites, you know. But I digress.

According to the laws of war, placing military ordinance in civilian settings is forbidden because it erases the line between civilians and soldiers, and since getting at the soldiers so as to kill them is permitted, civilians will inevitably also be killed. Hezbullah, Hamas, and the Fatah-based Palestinian terrorists never put any store in any of that just-war theory or practice, since in their self understanding they are victims, period, and no matter what they do will always be justified. Their useful idiots in the West parrot this alongside them, thus demonstrating their rejection of the noble heritage of the Enlightenment.

The practice has booby-trapped Israel, of course. If we hit the terrorists along with their civilian shields, we're damned for waging war on civilians. If we refrain, so as not to be damned, the terrorists are safe, and sooner or later they'll kill Israelis.

The advance of technology, however, has created new possibilities. In the week of air-attacks, the IDF proved it had excellent intelligence, and in many cases targets hit from the air kept on exploding for a number of minutes after they were hit, as the ordinance stored there exploded. More significant, the IDF has figured out how to separate the civilians from the weapons: call the neighbors and give them ten minutes warning. The numbers prove how efficient this has been: prior to the ground invasion, more than 600 targets had been destroyed, fewer than 500 Palestinians killed, and fewer than 100 of those were civilians even by Palestinian and UN reckoning. Of course, there remain the pictures of civilians surrounded by devastation, but they're alive, and it wasn't Israel that stacked bombs in their cellars.

Apparently, by Friday Israel had made at least 9,000 (nine thousand) such phone calls.Here's an American website touching upon the same story.

Alongside the thousands of civilians whose lives have been spared there are hundreds, at least, of armed Hamas fighters, the people who put the explosives in the cellars in the first place: by warning their neighbors, Israel has warned them, too, thus giving them the chance to escape and fight another day: say, tonight, or tomorrow, when they'll still be alive to fight the IDF troops, instead of lying dead under the rubble, as would have been possible had we hit their explosive stashes without prior warning, as any normal army wold have done.

Humanitarian warfare ... the burden of peace ... and the necessity.

See also, Jeffrey Goldberg, "The World's Pornographic Interest in Jewish Moral Failure" (hat tip: Memeorandum).

**********

UPDATE: From Reliapundit, in the comments:

THIS IS A STAGED PHOTO.

NEED PROOF:

WHY WOULD ANY SANE MORAL HUMAN BEING NOT HAVE ATTEMPTED TO DIG THE CHILD OUT?

BUT THEY JUST STAND THERE, BESIDE THE ARAB/FRENCH PHOTOG.

IS THAT WIRE AN AIR-TUBE?

DUNNO.

ALL I KNOW IS THIS:

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1053225.html

French TV claims photos from 2005 showed damage from Israel's Gaza operation
By Haaretz Service

Tags: France, Gaza, Israel News

French public television network France 2 on Tuesday revealed they had aired photographs that allegedly showed destruction caused by the Israel Air Force during Operation Cast Lead, which were in fact taken during a different incident in 2005, one in which Gaza civilians were killed by an explosion caused by militants in the Strip.

The footage aired on Channel 2 on Tuesday afternoon showed dozens of dead bodies, including Hamas gunmen and citizens, which the channel said were killed by an IAF bombing raid on January 1st. It later came to light that the channel had instead aired footage of the devastation caused after a truck full of explosives blew up in the Jabaliya Refugee Camp.

A news editor at France 2 told Le Figaro Tuesday that they had "made a mistake by airing those pictures, which he said depict events from 2005.

MISTAKE MY ASS.

THIS CRAP IS LIKE JENINGRAD AND AL DURA.

**********

UPDATE II: The photo at top was featured in today's Los Angeles Times hard-copy story, "30 Palestinians Sheltering in Gaza School Killed."

Israeli Settlers and the Gaza Campaign

Some folks, during all the faux debate and recrimination over Israel's Gaza incursion - which has been decried as a "disproportional" response by the world community - might have noticed arguments suggesting Israel's "settlement policy" as the root cause of the conflict.

Gershom Gorenberg, at Foreign Policy, places the blame on Israel and the settlements, in "The Other Housing Crisis":

The settlers’ growing power makes it harder for any Israeli leader to act. The head of the Shin Bet security agency recently described “very high willingness” among settlers “to use violence—not just stones, but live weapons—in order to prevent or halt a diplomatic process.” He was articulating a country’s half-spoken fears: Withdrawal involves more than the social and financial costs of moving hundreds of thousands of people. It poses the danger of civil conflict, of battles pitting Jews against Jews.

The more settlers, the greater the danger. The longer the wait, the more settlers. The more settlers, the more hesitant politicians are to talk about evacuating them, much less do anything else about them. It’s anybody’s guess where the point of no return lies.

There's an eery timing to the publication of Gorenberg's essay, which prompted the editors to publish and update by Gorenberg:

At the moment, the temptation is to look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a zoom lens that shows the battles in Gaza up-close, in detail. But a zoom lens flattens the picture you see, and entirely leaves out the panoramic view.

In the panoramic view, Israel’s strategic problem remains ending its rule over the Palestinians safely, in order to avoid the alternative of an unstable binational state. That means leaving the West Bank, and giving up settlements.

The update is dated January 5, 2009, and thus it's hard to believe that Gorenberg would fail to mention the international condemnation of Israel's right to self-defense, or Hamas' slaughter of civilian "human shields" for diaboloical propaganda purposes.

In a post earlier this week, hardline leftist blogger Matthew Yglesias also attacked Israel's settlement policy, where he extrapolated the case to Gaza, arguing that the strip is functionally equivalent to "an Indian reservation."

With his inimitable flair, Rick Moran smacks down all this talk of "panoramic views" and "Indian reservations":

The illegal outposts set down by radical Israelis who believe the Bible gives them the right to the land (and which George Bush has demanded the Israeli government remove) are not fueling the violence in Gaza. They are an excuse and not the proximate cause of the rocket barrages. It is pure sophistry to infer that anything except a virulent, nauseating strain of anti-Semitism is what keeps the Palestnians at war with Israel. They hate the Jews because they are Jews and any other greivance they have is pure gravy – sauce for the goose. And their single, animating, national ambition is to kill as many as they can while hoping that someone can come along and kick the Jews out of Israel for them.

This appears not to be complicated enough for Israel’s enemies on the left as there just isn’t enough nuance for their tastes. No good international conflict is possible unless there are “root causes” and “underlying dichotomies” to sink one’s teeth into. The idea that they have nothing to do with the matter at hand is of no consequence. When things are too simple, it is best to try to complicate them by raising straw man arguements or, better yet, just make sh*t up as Yglesias does with his “Indian reservation” analogy.

Gorenberg, who lives in Jerusalem, wrote on the prospects of Israel's military end game last week at the Los Angeles Times. His tone of condemnation against Israel in that piece is about the same. Readers can check the link and make what they can of the argument. As an outside observer, not being on the ground in Israel, it's hard for me to identify with an effort to find so much balance and Jewish complicity. That's why I find it valuable to read Israeli bloggers who are unashamed to lay out the stakes for the survival of the Jewish people in Eretz Israel.

See also, Powerline, "Does Anybody Really Know What Time it Is?.

Harry Reid Refuses to Seat Roland Burris

Majority Leader Harry Reid has refused to seat Democratic-appointee Roland Burris to Barack Obama's vacant Senate seat. The Los Angeles Times reports:

President-elect Barack Obama's appointed successor was turned away when he appeared at the U.S. Capitol to take his seat today.

Roland Burris announced the decision to deny him the seat as he stood before a large throng of reporters and cameras in the rain outside the Capitol building.

Speaking just an hour before the convening of the 111th Congress, Burris said he was looking at a host of options for getting the seat.

"I'm presenting myself as the legally appointed senator from the state of Illinois. It is my hope and prayer that they recognize that the appointment is legal," he said earlier in a nationally broadcast interview.

Burris dismissed the Senate Democratic leadership's position that he cannot be seated because he was appointed by a governor accused in a criminal complaint of trying to benefit financially from his authority to fill the seat that Obama vacated after winning the presidential election.

Burriss said his belief is that his appointment is constitutional and that "I have no knowledge of where a secretary of state has veto power over a governor carrying out his constitutional duties."

Burris also maintained on CBS's "The Early Show" that the announcement by Gov. Rod Blagojevich Monday of a date for an election for a successor to Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., proves the governor still has legal authority to carry out his duties. Emanuel will be Obama's White House chief of staff.

"There's nothing wrong with Roland Burris and there's nothing wrong with the appointment," Burris said.

Burris has found little support among fellow Democrats.

The Senate was scheduled to convene at noon Tuesday with its newest members. Yet the controversy over the appointment and the ongoing dispute over election results in Minnesota practically guaranteed that both seats would remain empty by day's end.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Monday that Burris would not be permitted to take his seat because Burris "has not been certified by the state of Illinois," a reference to incomplete paperwork that only touches on the dispute. Senate Democrats maintain that Burris' appointment is tainted because of the charges against Blagojevich.

I'm frankly still trying to figure out the politics of all this. It can't be that Democrats are trying to advance a reformist anti-corruption agenda. On the House side, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is set to roll back the GOP's congressional reforms dating to 1995's "Contract With America" under former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. As Tigerhawk notes:

Nancy Pelosi is amending House rules to revert to the status quo ante 1994, when Newt Gingrich and the Contract Republicans imposed a series of reforms to improve the "fairness" of the "People's House," including term limits for committee chairmen. As outraged Republicans have observed, this is hardly consistent with the spirit of "hope and change."

Check also Flopping Aces, which has photos of Roland Burris literally being shown the door. I don't normally worry about things like this, but there's some troubling racial symbolism in an eminent black man and state leader being ignominiously forced out of the back halls of a majoritarian white-power institution. The Democrats need to think again.

Anti-Abstinence Culture on the Left

William McGurn, at the Wall Street Journal, discusses the left's response to a research report on abstinence-only pledges out last week from John Hopkins University:

The chain reaction was something out of central casting. A medical journal starts it off by announcing a study comparing teens who take a pledge of virginity until marriage with those who don't. Lo and behold, when they crunch the numbers, they find not much difference between pledgers and nonpledgers: most do not make it to the marriage bed as virgins.

Like a pack of randy 15-year-old boys, the press dives right in.

"Virginity Pledges Don't Stop Teen Sex," screams CBS News. "Virginity pledges don't mean much," adds CNN. "Study questions virginity pledges," says the Chicago Tribune. "Premarital Abstinence Pledges Ineffective, Study Finds," heralds the Washington Post. "Virginity Pledges Fail to Trump Teen Lust in Look at Older Data," reports Bloomberg. And on it goes.

In other words, teens will be teens, and moms or dads who believe that concepts such as restraint or morality have any application today are living in a dream world. Typical was the lead for the CBS News story: "Teenagers who take virginity pledges are no less sexually active than other teens, according to a new study."

Here's the rub: It just isn't true.

In fact, the only way the study's author, Janet Elise Rosenbaum of Johns Hopkins University, could reach such results was by comparing teens who take a virginity pledge with a very small subset of other teens: those who are just as religious and conservative as the pledge-takers. The study is called "Patient Teenagers? A Comparison of the Sexual Behavior of Virginity Pledgers and Matched Nonpledgers," and it was published in the Jan. 1 edition of Pediatrics.

The first to notice something lost in the translation was Dr. Bernadine Healy, the former head of both the Red Cross and the National Institutes of Health. Today she serves as health editor for U.S. News & World Report. And in her dispatch on this study, Dr. Healy pointed out that "virginity pledging teens were considerably more conservative in their overall sexual behaviors than teens in general -- a fact that many media reports have missed cold."

What Dr. Healy was getting at is that the pledge itself is not what distinguishes these kids from most other teenagers. The real difference is their more conservative and religious home and social environment. As she notes, when you compare both groups in this study with teens at large, the behavioral differences are striking. Here are just a few:

- These teens generally have less risky sex, i.e., fewer sexual partners.

- These teens are less likely to have a teenage pregnancy, or to have friends who use drugs.

- These teens have less premarital vaginal sex.

- When these teens lose their virginity they tend to do so at age 21 -- compared to 17 for the typical American teen.

- And very much overlooked, one out of four of these teens do in fact keep the pledge to remain chaste -- amid much cheap ridicule and just about zero support outside their homes or churches.

Let's put this another way. The real headline from this study is this: "Religious Teens Differ Little in Sexual Behavior Whether or Not They Take a Pledge."

Or, more to the point, a deeply-flawed study tells us little about the efficacy of abstinence-only pledges. McGurn cites the mass-media frenzy over the results, but I was almost sick to my stomach over the outright cheering for this report on the radical left.

AmericaBlog jumps for joy in "Religious Right "Virginity Pledges" Do Not Work":

I'm sure the lunatic right will do their best to ignore the results. The big question here is whether Obama and the new Congress will put an end to funding this waste of money or if they will buckle under yet again to the anti-science, anti-rational American Taliban.

This is the kind of "smart" discourse we see among those of "the reality based" community. Here's some of the roundup I found last week on Memeorandum (Macmind's and Outside the Beltway are the rational outliers):

* Maria / Jezebel: "No Sh-t: New Study Finds ‘Virginity Pledges’ ..."

* Matt Corley / Think Progress: "Study: Premarital abstinence pledges are ineffective.»"

*Cecile Richards / The Huffington Post: "Can You Hear Me Yet? — Today's Washington Post features yet … "

* Scott Swenson / RHRealityCheck.org blogs: "Virginity Pledges Fail Says Johns Hopkins Study."

* PERRspectives / PERRspectives Blog: "Study Shows Teens Unfaithful to Virginity Pledges."

* Josh Rosenau / Thoughts from Kansas: "Abstinence pledges still don't work, still encourage unprotected anal sex."

* Jeff Fecke / Alas, a blog: "Sun Rises in East, Sets in West."

* Michael J.W. Stickings / The Reaction: "Captain Obvious! Your story is up!"

* Pam Spaulding / Pam's House Blend: "Study: teen virginity pledges don't work."

* Maha / The Mahablog: "Be Prepared — There's another new study out saying … "

* Steve Benen / Washington Monthly: "ABSTINENCE PROGRAMS STILL DON'T WORK.... I don't want to alarm anyone ... "

* Mac Ranger / Macsmind: "Flawed Study on Virginity Pledges."

* James Joyner / Outside The Beltway: "Virginity Pledges Don't Work, Except When They Do."

Gender Difference and Gay Marriage

I thought I'd share an exchange that came at the end of my post, "Kids Need Opposite-Sex Parents."

Conservative Ken Davenport is exasperated:

The left wants to rewrite history, biology and physics to fit their ideological orthodoxies. Unfortunately, it seems to be working. They've been doing it in Europe for generations, and we now see a continent in denial about its past and its present. Now it seems to be coming to America in all its secular revisionist glory.

We have same sex marriage and parenting in the name of tolerance, because the left believes that there is no real difference between boys and girls - only the presence of "love" is needed.

Puhhhhlease.

Anyone who has had kids knows two things: 1) that boys and girls are wired differently from birth and require the influence of both mothers and fathers to develop fully and 2) that moms and dads bring decidedly different (and important) parenting skills to the child's life. Men and women are not interchangeable just because the left wishes it to be so. This isn't an issue of same sex equality - its an issue of what is best for children. And on that score, traditional marriage wins hands down.

We are headed to an America where the minority is in charge, largely because the majority is disorganized and lacks the courage of its convictions. Any reasonably educated person knows that kids belong in a stable family with a mom and a dad. But in the face of the culture wars, where everyone is afraid of being labled "sexist", "racist", "homophobic" or worse, we've been reduced to jelly. Its a shame.

Sadly, common sense is dead. How do I know? Because Al Franken will be the U.S. Senator from Minnesota.

Need I say more?

My occasional lefty commenter, JBW, responds:

Jesus Ken ... Nobody of any psychological or anthropological repute on the left is saying that "there is no real difference between boys and girls" ...

Of course boys and girls are wired differently: it's how we've evolved as a species. And yes, the ideal situation is obviously for every child to have a loving and supportive mother and father. Was your childhood ideal? Because mine wasn't and I would wager that most people can say the same of their own.

If the left's argument was that we should remove children from families with straight parents and force them to be raised by gay parents then I can see why you would get so bent out of shape but no one is suggesting that at all.

What they are suggesting ... is that absent your happy idyllic fantasy world, children having loving parents of the same sex is still preferable to having stupid, racist, abusive, prejudiced or crazy parents of the opposite sex or even worse, no parents at all.

And if you think the minority gay, leftist agenda or even Al Franken are the only things keeping kids out of stable families with a mom and dad then you'd better pull your head out of the sand because the reality is a lot uglier than you can possibly imagine.

All people like you accomplish with your archaic and outmoded views of what constitutes an acceptable society is to destroy dedicated and loving families. I hope your own children have it a lot easier than those of the families you would tear apart in the name of "traditional values"; I truly do.

Shorter JBW: Abuse isn't the problem, gender and hetero stereotypes are...

Now, check out Helen Rittelmeyer's more complex analysis of gender differences and gay marriage, "If She Says She Wants “Equality, Not Sameness,” She’s Lying," especially this part:

A culture that cannot acknowledge gender differences has hobbled itself: it can’t speak the truth and, if we know one thing about truth, it’s that it always comes out one way or another. If we can’t talk about gender, we can’t develop helpful ways to deal with it; if we can’t deal with it, we guarantee that, when gender differences do surface, it will be in unhealthy ways. If gay marriage consigns us to that slow, unpleasant declension—and it does—it’s something to think twice about.

That's snipping out a whole lot of Rittelmeyer's context, but what can you do in a quick link-love post like this.

See also, Robert Stacy McCain and Memeorandum.

Palestinians Suffer Because of Hamas

The New York Daily News features a must-read editorial this morning, "The Fury of a Bereaved Palestinian Mother Captures Evil of Hamas in Gaza":

The collateral damage that has been inflicted on the residents of Gaza is a sorrowful consequence of living under the rule of rocket-firing fanatics. It is because of Hamas, and only Hamas, that Palestinians are suffering.

At least some of them know the identity of their tormentors. A New York Times dispatch captured an excruciating moment that took place in a hospital morgue, where a mother had just found half of the body of her 17-year-old daughter.

"May God exterminate Hamas!" screamed the woman in crystal-clear understanding that the terrorist band's reckless, inhuman actions had brought death to her child.

There will likely be more tragedies as Israel presses an assault on Hamas by air and, now, on the ground. Each will trace to Hamas' refusal to desist, once and for all, from raining rockets onto Israeli soil. And, perversely, each will increase pressure on Israel to stand down prematurely.

There's more at the link.

The New Foreign Policy Online

My January/February issue of Foreign Policy came in the mail over the weekend.

I always get a little rush when my journals arrive, and I feel lucky if I have a few minutes right then to skim over the contents and read an article or two (International Security, which publishes full-blown academic research, requires some set-aside time, however).

Well, as I skimming through Foreign Policy last night I noticed a blurb for the magazine's new website redesign, which included an announcement that Daniel Drezner would be joining Foreign Policy in-house. I started blogging because of Drezner (after reading his page for a year or two), so the announcement caught my attention. Of course, as I've noted recently, academic bloggers rarely put their necks out too far - especially on issues requiring moral clarity - and Drezner's been stupendously wrong on some of the big questions in international relations lately. So, it'll be interesting to read him a little more often in the future.

Still, Foreign Policy's web upgrade is pretty hip. As far as I can tell, the website's abandoned subscription-only access to its current articles (or they need to make free access permanent, as the Atlantic did sometime last year). This will be a boon to bloggers, who will now have a (larger) trove of cool resources for discussion and dissemination

What's particularly interesting is that some major political scientists will be joining Drezner as in-house bloggers. Stephen Walt, one of the top scholars in international security, will be blogging at Foreign Policy. Walt made the "realist" case against the war in Iraq, in "An Unnecessary War." (Note that foreign policy realists of late have been drawn from the liberal and paleoconservative camps, and they are policy nemeses of neoconservatives.) To balance this, Peter Feaver's apparently another of the bevy of political scientists who have signed up. Feaver, who's also a top scholar of international relations, writes periodically at Commentary.

Joshua Keating's got the official scoop at Passport.

(Note to readers: Try not to blow off Foreign Policy as "academic." The fact that the magazine's bringing on so many political scientists as bloggers indicates the influence of regular bloggers like us.)

Hat Tip: Memeorandum.

Sin is Deliberate Treason Against the Creator

Clueless Emma's got a great post up today, "The Power of His Resurrection."

The entry discusses "Paul's prayer for the Ephesian believers," and links to The Berean Call. I like this passage:

At its heart, sin is deliberate treason, open and defiant rebellion against the Creator and Ruler of the universe. We need to remember this fact. Most Christians who, when convicted by conscience, fall on their faces and confess their sins are not really confessing the horror of what they've done. It is not enough to repent of the deed. We must confess also that, no matter how trivial we think the act was, we have repeated Adam and Eve's treason against the Lord God. Without that admission deeply felt as a conviction in our hearts, the confession is incomplete.

Be sure to read the whole thing, here.

Michael Goldfarb Responds

Even more so than usual, there was some serious unhinging on the left this weekend on Israel-Gaza, in this case as it relates to Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard. Goldfarb applauded Israel's targeted assassination of Nizar Rayan last week, which generated an exceptionally despicable (and effusively effluvial) rant from Glenn Greenwald (and RawMuscleGlutes joined in here).

Here's Goldfarb's response:

Glenn Greenwald, as hysterical and long-winded as ever, accuses me of possessing "the very same logic that leads Hamas to send suicide bombers to slaughter Israeli teenagers in pizza parlors and on buses and to shoot rockets into their homes. It's the logic that leads Al Qaeda to fly civilian-filled airplanes into civilian-filled office buildings." Another blogger accuses me of endorsing terrorist ethics, and the Atlantic's in-house gynecologist calls me a thug.

In fact, I was explicitly questioning whether such violence can be effective against a group like Hamas. The target of this strike had already sent one of his own sons into Israel as a suicide bomber. Greenwald presumes that I see Palestinians "as something less than civilized human beings" because I question whether they can be deterred "like us." But I wasn't talking about Palestinians in general, I was talking about the Hamas leadership in particular. If Greenwald believes that Hamas, a terrorist group, is itself the avatar of the Palestinian people, then he is the one who sees the Palestinians as less civilized than the rest of us. If not, then I wonder whether he is illiterate or simply disingenuous. But the Hamas leadership is not like us: Americans may send their sons to war, but they do not send them to certain death for the sake of slaughtering civilians.

It's also striking that Greenwald and his fellow travelers would use words like terrorist and thug to describe me while defending the rights of Hamas, an organization comprised of genuine terrorists and thugs. It's become common for the left to describe its ideological opponents as thugs, and the result, apparently, is the inability to recognize real thuggery when it's staring them in the face.

There is no doubt that Israel has the right to strike Nizar Rayan, even at the cost of killing so many women and children -- these civilians were not intentionally targeted. The question is whether or not this strike, in addition to eliminating a leader of Hamas (and the weapons depot in which he chose to house his family), will also deter Hamas from so brazenly ending the next cease fire. The fact that Greenwald & Co. would react so bizarrely to the mere posing of that question is precisely why their voices are being ignored in this debate. Just the other day Greenwald wrote of how he was perplexed by a poll showing that a majority of Democrats shared his views on Israel's assault, but still the Democratic party was almost uniform in its support for the action. Well, its possible for large numbers of people to hold views that simply aren't serious -- though of course a plurality of Americans still supports Israel's actions in Gaza -- and on this issue, like on telecom immunity and warrantless wiretapping, a large portion of the left simply isn't serious.

Extermination of the Jews, Then and Now

Via Gates of Vienna, a flyer calling for the global extermination of the Jews is being distributed by the mulitcultural left in Denmark:

Recall yesterday that Victor Davis Hanson reported that the worldwide demonstrations in support of Hamas are "nauseating."

It's frankly unbelievable to think that from San Francisco to New York to Copenhagen to Damascus and beyond, we're witnessing the open call on the left for the extermination of Israel and the Jews. It's unreal, but the global situation facing the survival of the Jews is in many respects more terrifying than the European anti-Semitism of the 1930s and 1940s.

Ron Rosenbaum, discussing the program of Hamas, offers a very disturbing historical comparison between the public reactions to the eliminationism of Adolph Hitler and the Palestinian jihad of Hamas:

The people of Germany supported Hitler, yet many still claim the Germans didn’t really know what he was doing to the Jews, gays, gypsies or his plans for other ethnic minorities. Or they say that they suppported Hitler for other reasons. Some believe the German people shouldn’t be held accountable for Hitler’s crimes, some think it’s naive to believe they didn’t know and shouldn’t be held responsible. The people of Gaza voted Hamas in by a larger percentage than Hitler ever got. They knew that the Hamas charter called for genocide and supported Hamas attempts to kill as many Jews as they could.

Should they – and the Americans who believe in “even-handed” treatment of a pro-genocide party be held responsible for Hamas and what Hamas has brought upon the land, the way some believe the German people should be held responsible for the destruction Hitler brought upon Germany? Should the German people who supported Hitler have been treated with the “proportionality” we are supposed to reserve for the Gazan people who support Hamas?

I don’t know the answers to these difficult questions. I just wanted to clarify things so no one was making any false analogies between Hamas and Hitler and ignoring the fact that Hamas was more extreme than the Nazis.

Read the whole thing, here.

Kids Need Opposite-Sex Parents

I've been visiting with in-laws over this New Year's weekend.

A bit of catch-up news finds that a good friend of the family is in the late-second trimester of a surrogate pregnancy. She was hired for $25,000 to bear a baby for a gay couple. One of the men had his sister donate an ovum egg cell, which was then fertilized by his partner (in-vitro) - thus the baby would have the sperm of one of the partners and the family DNA of the other. The total costs for all the fertility medical work was expected to be around $100,000. (I'm hearing this third-hand, so the numbers could be off.) I asked how our family friend is feeling: she's delivered two babies of her own, and the emotions must be intense? Will it be difficult for her to give up the new baby after carrying the little thing for nine months? I didn't even ask about the political morality of all of this: I still think that a child grows up best with a mom and a dad. I'm sure two gay guys can lovingly care for a baby, but it's quite unorthodox, and it just seems kind of wierd, frankly, that the child will have no mother in its life and upbringing.

Anyway, Janice Shaw Crouse has a related piece over at American Thinker, "Girls Need a Dad and Boys Need a Mom":

The latest issue of The Journal of Communication and Religion (November 2008, Volume 31, Number 2) contains an excellent analysis of the importance of opposite-sex parent relationships. The common sense conclusion is backed up with social science data and affirmed by a peer-reviewed scholarly article: girls need a dad, and boys need a mom.

Not surprisingly, the study also found that communication is an essential building block for all family relationships -- family interactions are the crucible for attitudes, values, priorities, and worldviews. Beyond the shaping and modeling of these essential personal characteristics, the family shapes an individual's interpersonal system and self-identity.

Further, stable homes include specific talk about religion and support for children's involvement in religious activities. These families create high-quality relationships by specific communication behaviors, such as openness, assurance, and dependency. Those same characteristics, not incidentally, are powerful predictors for marital success or failure.

The authors, G.L. Forward, Alison Sansom-Livolsi, and Jordanna McGovern, stress the fact that a family is more than merely a group of individuals who live under the same roof. They cite numerous studies indicating that parents play a crucial role in a child's personal and social development. In fact, a child's relationship with his or her parents is the single most important factor in predicting that child's long-term happiness, adjustment, development, educational attainment, and success. Beyond that general information, studies indicate that girls get better support from the family than do boys. Girls feel closer to their parents, perhaps because parents converse with and express emotion more readily with daughters than with sons. In general, mothers spend far more time with daughters than with sons. Likewise, fathers spend more time with sons than with their daughters. Yet, father-daughter and mother-son relationships tend to have greater impact on a child's future intimate relationships than their relationship with the same-sex parent.

There's more at the link.

Related: Michael Medved, "Changing Marriage Itself."

Hamas Helpers: Intifada by the Bay

Zombie has the video from San Francisco's pro-Hamas rally on January 2, 2009:

At 22 seconds, pro-Hamas demonstrators lunge at five pro-Israel protesters standing on the other side of a police barricade. After the cops break it up, one of the pro-Israel activists says, "I'm a little spooked."

I'll say, and checking the comments we see this:

Here’s a big F**K YOU to all the ZIONIST SCUM who think that dropping U.S. BOMBS out of US WARPLANES and KILLING INNOCENTS – mothers, babies, and non-violent GAZA SUFFERERS is a good thing. What if the tables were turned and the ISRAELI COWARDS only had non-guided, big bottle-rockets to fire at their OPPRESSORS?? What then? Would JEWS world-wide be TERRORISTS for FIGHTING FOR THEIR HUMAN RIGHTS?

Actually, Hamas doesn't care about it's own "mothers, babies, and non-violent GAZA SUFFERERS."

As Alan Dershowitz recounted the other day:

In a recent incident related to me by the former head of the Israeli air force, Israeli intelligence learned that a family's house in Gaza was being used to manufacture rockets. The Israeli military gave the residents 30 minutes to leave. Instead, the owner called Hamas, which sent mothers carrying babies to the house.

Hamas knew that Israel would never fire at a home with civilians in it. They also knew that if Israeli authorities did not learn there were civilians in the house and fired on it, Hamas would win a public relations victory by displaying the dead. Israel held its fire. The Hamas rockets that were protected by the human shields were then used against Israeli civilians.

Meanwhile, Victor Davis Hanson says the global reaction is "creepy":

It is now clear that the so-called and much praised "international community," the hallowed U.N., the revered EU, all pretty much are indifferent to the survival of a democratic Israel, or are actively supportive of its terrorist Hamas enemy. Only the U.S. (for now) stands by a constitutional state in its war against a murderous terrorist clique, with annhilation its aim and religous fascism its creed.

Yossi Klein Halevi's Son Goes to War

Yossi Klein Halevi discusses the moral responsibility of being Israeli:

"I just heard on the news that Gavriel's base has been shelled," my wife, Sarah, said to me last Tuesday, referring to our 19-year-old son, a member of an Israeli army tank unit waiting on the Gaza border for the order to enter. And, she added in a deliberately calm tone, "A soldier was killed." We texted Gavriel, and within five minutes he called, safe. How, Sarah asked, did families survive war before cellphones?

For days we waited for a cabinet decision: Will there be a land invasion or a new cease-fire? The politicians began to bicker while our soldiers waited on the border, in the rain and the mud. Anything but this, I said to Sarah. Not another Lebanon War, which, like Gaza, began with an impressive show of Israeli air power but ended with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah predicting the imminent end of "the Zionist entity." If we don't win this time -- deliver an unambiguous blow if not topple Hamas entirely -- our deterrence will further erode, inviting more rocket attacks and encouraging the jihadist momentum throughout the Middle East.

And then I caught myself: How can I be hoping for an outcome that will send my son into battle? This is my first experience as the father of a soldier, and now, after 26 years of living in Israel, I finally understand the terrible responsibility of being an Israeli. I had assumed that I'd become initiated into Israeliness when I myself was drafted into the army as a 34-year-old immigrant in 1989. But perhaps only now have I become fully Israeli. Zionism promised to empower the Jews by making them responsible for their fate; the price for that achievement is to be prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice for one's commitments.

This section is powerful:

For the past eight years, Israel has fought a single war with shifting fronts, moving from suicide bombings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to Katyusha attacks on Israeli towns near the Lebanon border to Qassam missiles on Israeli towns near the Gaza border. That war has targeted civilians, turning the home front into the actual front. And it has transformed the nature of the conflict from a nationalist struggle over Palestinian statehood to a holy war against Jewish statehood. Except for a left-wing fringe, most Israelis recognize the conflict in Gaza as part of a larger war that has been declared against our being and that we must fight.

Overreacting to Hamas Attacks?

Here are some early morning thoughts on Israel-Gaza. First, a "Let's Play Pretend" video exercise via Carl in Jerusalem:

Next, let's go to Noah Pollak's CNN fact-check:

On CNN a few moments ago, Christiane Amanpour, in the midst of an otherwise completely warped report on the Gaza war, said that over the past year only two Israelis were killed by Hamas rocket fire. Her point in the segment was to insinuate that Israel is overreacting to Hamas attacks that have been largely harmless. In order to do that, she had to abstain from mentioning important facts and context, such as that Hamas’ attacks in 2008 more than doubled — to 3,278 — from the 2007 number. And this figures in the six-month “lull” period, during which “only” around 100 rockets were fired. She also did not mention that the range and deadliness of Hamas’ rockets increased as well, putting around 15 percent of the Israeli population under Hamas’ missile umbrella. (The “disproportionality” fetishists also never get around to noting that Israel has conducted less than a thousand air strikes in response to over 7,000 Hamas rocket attacks since 2005.)

Thus is the history of this episode of the conflict re-written almost in real time, from one of a gathering danger to one of a boring nuisance. Oh, and eight Israelis, not two, were killed by Hamas in 2008. Amanpour’s “errors” always seem to work in one direction, don’t they?

Check Astute Bloggers for lots more on "disproportionality" and this "boring nuisance."

Cease-Fire Erodes Israel National Interest

Israel's campaign in Gaza continues with the anticipated ground incursion today. There are some questions, however, as to what the Olmert/Livni/Barak triumvirate hopes to achieve strategically. I doubt we can expect a Sherman march to Egypt, for example, although that's what I'd prefer to see. 

Caroline Glick's got a big essay up on Israel's war aims. It turns out that they're not as unconditional as we might expect given the ferocity of the initial airstrikes:

Since Tuesday it has become clear that the Olmert-Livni-Barak government has decided to end the war with Iran's Hamas proxy army in Gaza as quickly as possible. That is, the government has decided to lose the war.

Most Israelis are unaware of this state of affairs. In an obvious attempt to bolster the popularity of Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak ahead of the February 10 general elections, the local media have spent the six days since the government launched Operation Cast Lead praising the government's competence and wisdom, and declaring victory over Hamas after every IAF sortie in Gaza.

What the media have declined to notice is that the outcome of the war will not be determined by the number of Hamas buildings the IAF destroys. The outcome of this war - like the outcome of all wars - will be determined by one factor only: Which side will achieve the goals it set out for itself at the outset of the conflict and which side will concede its goals?

Depressingly, the current machinations of the Olmert-Livni-Barak government demonstrate that when the fighting is over, Hamas and not Israel will be able to declare that it accomplished its goals.

Israel is entertaining a proposal from the European Union for a cease-fire, and here's Glick's key section:

BEFORE THE Olmert-Livni-Barak government accepts the EU cease-fire, it is worth noting three strategic problems with what they are doing. Taken together and separately, all three will lead Israel to defeat in this confrontation with Hamas.

The first problem with the EU proposal is that it takes for granted that all of Hamas's demands must be met in full. That is, Israel is beginning these negotiations from a point of weakness whereby it has already effectively accepted Hamas's demands and conceded its own.

The second problem with the decision to accept EU mediation is that by doing so, the government is compelled to ignore and indeed justify the EU's underlying and deep-seated hostility toward Israel. The very fact that the EU accepted Hamas's demands from the outset demonstrates clearly that the EU cannot be an honest broker between the warring factions.

Here it is important to recall just what Hamas is. Hamas is an illegal terrorist organization and an Iranian proxy that is conducting an illegal terror war against Israel. The EU is arguably committing a war crime by accepting Hamas as a legitimate side to a dispute. In turn, by accepting the EU as a legitimate interlocutor, Israel itself gives credence to the view that Hamas is a legitimate actor.

On a practical level, by accepting the EU's authority to mediate under these conditions, Israel has effectively foregone from the outset any chance of achieving its own cease-fire demands. After all, to reach a cease-fire with Hamas that includes Israel's demands that Hamas end its weapons smuggling operations, forgo control over international borders and end its missile offensive against Israel, the EU would have to throw out the draft it just voted to accept. And it would have to reverse its political direction and abandon Hamas in favor of Israel. The chance that this will happen is quite close to zero.

The third strategic failure inherent in Israel's decision to negotiate a truce is Israel's demand for an international monitoring force to verify compliance with the cease-fire agreement. This demand is self-defeating because such a force will only harm Israel's national interests. This is the clear lesson of both the EU's past monitoring mission at the Rafah terminal and of UNIFIL forces in southern Lebanon.

In the case of the EU monitors at Rafah, as The Jerusalem Post recalled in an editorial on Wednesday, during the period when they were deployed at the terminal, the EU monitors turned a blind eye to the very terror traffic they were supposed to be preventing. At the same time, they condemned Israel for taking any action to defend itself and downplayed the threat Hamas constitutes for Israel. In short, the EU monitors sided with Hamas against Israel at every turn.

In the case of UNIFIL forces in Lebanon, the situation is little different. UNIFIL routinely condemns the IAF for carrying out reconnaissance flights over Lebanon aimed at keeping tabs on Hizbullah arms smuggling operations that UNIFIL does nothing to prevent. They also demand that Israel surrender the town of Ghajar to Lebanon despite the fact that it is part of sovereign Israel. Beyond that, UNIFIL forces have sat back and allowed Hizbullah to rearm and reassert control over some 130 villages along the Israeli border. Far from enforcing the UN-mediated cease-fire, UNIFIL acts as a shield behind which Hizbullah prepares for its next round of war against Israel.

IN LIGHT of all of this, it is apparent that today the Olmert-Livni-Barak government is conducting cease-fire negotiations from a position of great weakness. It has accepted the mediation of a hostile interlocutor. And its primary demand in those negotiations is antithetical to the national interest.