Pondering the Strategic Objectives of Hamas

With the revelations made in this Haaretz article that Israel has been planning for the current conflict for several months, the implication is that the pre-cease fire condition between Hamas and Israel was never an accepted long term condition from the perspective of Israel. The implications of the revelations made in the article are numerous, and interesting from an observers perspective.

We learn that through extended intelligence efforts, lessons learned fighting Hezbollah two years ago, and a disinformation campaign Israel has capitalized on Hamas's decision to break the cease fire agreement by inflecting serious damage through its air campaign against Hamas targets. The high death toll and large number of wounded are expected results. While there are several ways to look at the high number of civilian deaths, I tend to treat these as a trend to be expected set by the conditions these conflicts are now fought under. For example, the Arab media in general but some western media as well, have now accepted the intentional targeting of Israeli civilians has a legitimate tactic by organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah. The further condition that overlooks, thus enables the same organizations to conceal hard military targets in civilian neighborhoods, has enabled a condition for greater civilian causalities to be used for propaganda and sympathy purposes, thus further enabling the organizations to utilize such techniques. Without condemnation, of which very little is evident in early Arab media reporting, this trend can be expected to continue.

This condition that overlooks the war crime aspect of those organizations acts as a buffer at the same time for Israel, who in the spirit of moral equivalence is sheltered politically as they use air forces, both fixed wing and helicopter, combined with land based and naval artillery to shell targets in civilian areas. In the end, both sides point to the other for exploiting tactics that endanger civilians, and a hypocritical western culture and propagandized Arab culture issues proclamations of condemnation against both sides, often dependent solely on ones favoritism either politically, or religious in basis. For the purposes of this analysis, it is accepted that war leads to death and the conditions of this war enable plenty of it in that part of the world, taking a moral or political high ground for either side is best done elsewhere.

With expectations that air strikes alone will not stop rocket attacks into Israel, and will only offer diminishing returns for their cost over time, the questions that need to be raised include what are the objectives of each side, and where is this conflict going? From the perspective of Hamas, it is very difficult to find a reasonable explanation for the strategic goals at work here. A singular military conflict with Israel is hardly going to help Hamas, indeed it has already severely damaged the organization and over time only serves to threaten Hamas's hold on power. Hamas has no offensive capability to speak of, no defense against Israeli air strikes, and even the rockets only serve limited function as a terror weapon that requires the rest of the Arab (and western) media to ignore the reality these weapons are solely used for the purposes of killing innocents. There is no functional military capability for Hamas to prevent Israeli military action, indeed even the limited military systems Hamas may have would be effective in a defensive campaign alone, a campaign sure to cause significantly higher civilian causalities among the Palestinians, not Israeli's. Only by the cover of propaganda against Israel in combination with the sacrifice of hundreds, if not thousands of their own people, can Hamas realistically gain any sort of political victory against Israel, and even then the victory conditions are subject to the guilty conscious of Israel, unlikely given the amount of planning done by Israel in the current operation. The real question is, why in the world is Hamas starting this conflict with so very few individual strategic gains apparent? The answer is, most likely, Hamas is acting on the behalf of Iran.

Through the first three days, the strategic effect is all too predictable. Oil prices up, the US dollar is down. Is oil actually threatened by actions taking place out of Israel? Uhm, no. Is the dollar in danger because Hamas and Israel are in another conflict? Again, no. What has everyone concerned is that the conflict will escalate, and right now with the options on the table, this is the most likely scenario. How far will the conflict escalate? Right now, that is difficult to predict, but following the patterns of history, if indeed Iran is involved, I believe the expectation should be high that Israel is about to find themselves fighting on more than one front as soon as they commit ground troops into Gaza.

The next few days will tell the whole story, but predicting the results is not difficult. When Israel commits ground forces into Gaza to go after Hamas, the expectation should be that Hezbollah will begin a major military attack in northern Israel, likely using unguided rockets striking at civilians. The strategic ramifications will result in even higher gas prices and a further hit to the US dollar, with global outrage from the worlds most vocal actors to quickly condemn Israel. Unlike the Arab countries, Israel will protect their citizens and the death toll of Israeli civilians will not be great, but the retaliation against Hamas and Hezbollah will be, resulting in another mess similar to 2006. The question at that point, particularly if the US economy takes a huge hit from these actions, is what will we do and how will the world react?

I could be wrong, but absent any information that shows a strategic objective for Hamas in starting this conflict, it appears to me this conflict is specific to the strategic objective of weakening the US economy, and thus weakening the economies of nations like Israel. In other words, this may look like a simple Israeli conflict with Hamas, and perhaps Hezbollah in the near future, but the intent is to ultimately harm Americans economically. As that objective becomes more apparent to Americans over time, it will be interesting to see how both the outgoing and incoming administrations manage this emerging problem, and if we do nothing in response as per our historical track record, who we blame for the problem.