Israel Under Siege, Part 2

Yesterday I suggested that the key to understanding the Turkish-led attempt to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza was the foreign policy reset effected by the Obama administration. Now that Israel seems to have lost the support of its most important ally, the situation in the Middle East has changed dramatically. Link here.

Today, I have read two articles that also see the crisis from a similar angle, and I link them for your interest. The first, by Victor Davis Hanson, offers another historical perspective, one that bristles at the irony of the Turks being an arbiter of ethnic violence. But Hanson also makes a telling and salient point that deserves more emphasis: those who are piling on Israel and are defending the rights of terrorists seem themselves to have been affected by terror. They acting out of their own fear, much in the same way that Western media outlets have been cowed into not publishing any offensive cartoons about Islam. The next time you ask yourself why people resort to terrorist tactics, one answer must be that in many instances it works. Link here.

And today Michael Goodwin wrote a column analyzing how the crisis was precipitated by the absence of American leadership. As he puts it, Turkey had been preparing to send the flotilla for weeks; it had announced it clearly to the world. Where was American leadership? Where were our president and secretary of state? Link here.

One moral of the story is that we should never again send a bunch of amateurs to do a job that requires the kind of wisdom you only gain from experience.