Jets won't do too much good over there; not much in the way of targets. If there was anything to bomb, the Israelis would have already bombed it.
The suggestions I made were exaggerated and tongue-in-cheek, but I do think that more effort needs to be made to bypass the "leaders" and introduce jobs, schools, and other things that will appeal to the followers. It seems to me that the key element in this one is starting a wedge between the followers and the militant leaders, which means giving the followers a stake in peace. Not easy, I know, but the hardest part of splitting anything with a wedge is finding the place to start. It won't happen if it isn't tried.
It's also totally pointless to try to introduce solutions during a flareup of violence. That's a classic mideast problem. The violence is cyclical; when it cycles up, everyone scrambles to come up with a plan, at a time when no plan would work. When the violence cycles down, the time when it would really help to have a plan in place, everybody forgets about it.
The Israeli response - the same response they've always used - will work in the short run, then the troops will pull out and it will start all over again. The current Israeli moves will not stop terrorism. All we can do now is hunker down, let it run its cycle, and start woking out a plan to use when things settle a bit.
I don't expect it to be easy, not that we couldn't figure something out with a day or two of effort.... |
