First, scattershot, mindless defense of everything everywhere is always a Bad Idea: Friedrich Der Gross, King of Prussia, knew that a quarter of a millennium ago.
“He who defends everything defends nothing.”
The Israelis were insanely stupid to take their regular Gaza Battalion masking force and disperse it to defend the endless ramshackle settlements of lawless mad fanatics on the West Bank.
They assumed Hamas had been “tamed” by Netanyahu’s appeasing and cowardly policies and empty threats rather than feeding on them. Bad idea, Guys.
On the grand scale of course, the United States has been galloping into the same insane abyss on a vastly greater scale by backing Ukraine to the hilt and sending all US and NATO military arsenals to be wasted by Ukrainian “President ” Volodymyr Zelensky and his military morons. Not content with that, US leaders remain obsessed with threatening, lecturing and provoking China at the same time.
Now, the entire Western economic system is collapsing while Russia, sitting on its globally crucial reserves of productive wheatlands, heavy industry, immense oil and natural gas resources and still swelling gold reserves, is economically stronger than ever.
Netanyahu has been the perfect ally and spokesman not just for his old neocon friends and Republican imbeciles of the George W. Bush Generation in Washington: He is a perfect fit for Joe Biden, Antony Blinken, Jakes Sullivan and their Democrat blustering blowhards too.
Now every single one of Netanyahu’s blusters and worthless bluffs are being called. Biden – insofar as he is even still capable of rational thought – and certainly Blinken, Sullivan and their acolytes should look hard for once, understand and fear.
Empty bullying, driving entire nations into destitution and despair and even neglecting one’s on own economic and social bases – allowing the ultra-rich to get obscenely richer while the middle and working classes are driven to poverty, ruin and despair is as catastrophic a policy in North America and Western Europe as it is in Israel and the West Bank alike.
Most of all, Netanyahu was an arrogant, ignorant racist who despised his enemies and catastrophically underestimated them. Compared to him Neville Chamberlain was a towering figure of courage and clarity.
The great Sun Tzu above all teaches the crucial lessons: Know Yourselves and Know Your Enemies and you will never be defeated in a hundred battles.
Hamas has applied this crucial maxim and continues to do so. The beheadings of at least 40 Israeli children were not done out of abstract viciousness or the abstract embrace of terror, though these things were clearly dear to the perpetrators’ hearts too.
They were perpetrated to outrage the Israelis and force a weak, discredited government to go charging madly into the enormous trap set for its army in Gaza.
After which not just Hezbollah but also Syria backed by Iran and the whole Northern Front will open up.
It still is not quite too late for Washington, London and Brussels to learn the awful lessons unfolding from Israel’s looming crisis – which in reality has still hardly begun.
But of course – they won’t.
