Cast Lead in the Foundry
31 December 2008
MERIP: From the Editors
Operation Cast Lead is intended as a hammer blow, but one with the comparatively modest ambition (for now) to “shape a different and new security situation” in the Gaza Strip. In the estimation of the aforementioned senior Bush administration official, “the Israeli goal now is to damage Hamas enough so that Hamas will accept a real truce.”
Electioneering, setting the tone in DC, pacifying Hamas…
Why not laying the rubble and psychological framework for an attack on Iran? Airstrikes begin after a PR campaign laments the breakdown of peace talks with [fill in the blank].
Is it true that “change is coming” when Obama enters the White House? We hope so. Yet the conventional pro-Israel tilt of his campaign indicates otherwise, as does the composition of his foreign policy crew. Obama appears poised to content himself with more energetic US engagement in the sort of flawed negotiations of the Clinton years, the sort that put ending the occupation last, as if the developments of the Bush years had not rendered that approach utterly untenable.
Clinton laid the groundwork for Bush and Sharon’s formaldehyde victims. Obama is coming with a shovel.