From Rosie DiManno in today's paper. For people who don't want to read the whole thing, she's basically saying that Oct.7 was stupid. But she says it in a much better way.
In June, the terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah announced it was disbanding, laying down arms, renouncing violence and removing extremist teachings from madrassas.
An operationally independent ally of al-Qaida, JI had for decades fought to establish a radically pure Islamic state inside Indonesia, which is 87 per cent Muslim but constitutionally secular. The group also promised to turn over to the government names of its military wing members. It was a full-bore capitulation.
Leaders claimed the abrupt about-face pivoted on an intention to pursue its moderated goals by co-operating with the government and shifting its interpretation of jihad to peaceful proselytization — “jihad through words.’’
But it was fundamentally a pragmatic decision. Indonesia’s aggressive counterterrorism operations over the past five years had largely wiped out JI leadership via arrests and military targeting, leaving them with no room to manoeuvre, recruit and launch attacks.
If Jemaah Islamiyah doesn’t ring a bell, think Bali. JI was responsible for the 2002 terrorist attack on the tourist hotspot island that killed 202 people of 20 nationalities.
Leaving aside the U.S.-led defeat of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in 2014, the most dramatic and life-altering vanquishing of a terrorist entity was the crushing of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which had sought to overthrow the Sri Lankan government and create autonomy in Tamil Areas, were formally defeated in 2009 after a brutal 26-year military campaign that ended in ashes and upwards of 80,000 to 100,000 deaths, as estimated by the UN. By then the LTTE’s top military hierarchy had been decapitated, its founder dead with no successor evident, its theatre of combat reduced to a sliver surrounded by army troops. The entire construct collapsed, as the government rejected an offer to surrender.
It is a fallacy that ideas can’t be defeated. Received wisdom has it that unless root causes are addressed, no conflict can be resolved. The same sophistry which asserts that Israel can’t conquer Hamas even if it annihilates the internationally designated terrorist entity militarily. Of course it can, if its ruthless bombardment continues unchecked in the face of global condemnation, arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court and worldwide protests that have done nothing to advance Palestinian aspirations for a sovereign state.
Hezbollah has just come crawling to a ceasefire agreement with Israel. While still a force that outmuscles the Lebanon state, its ballyhooed status as most powerful non-state actor in the world — a formidable militia — has been stripped away in the aftermath of Israel’s targeted campaign against the leadership, deep intelligence infiltration that resulted in exploding pagers and walkie-talkies which left thousands of Hezbollah members maimed, blinded and killed, assassination taking its top-most leaders off the board, and then their replacements, followed by a full-scale invasion of southern Lebanon.
The myth of Hezbollah dominance has been shattered. It has been, at least in its 13-month war with Israel — in solidarity with Hamas following the Oct. 7, 2023 atrocity — defeated. The regional alliance of militias, funded and buttressed by terrorism-exporting Iran, has been proven a chimera. Iran can’t come to the rescue of any of its proxy states because Iran itself has been having a very bad, horrible year — its barrage of 300 missiles and drones against Israel on Oct. 1 ineffective and humbling, undermining the credibility of Iran’s axis of resistance, and upending regional dynamics.
As of Sept. 23, Israel had unleashed 8,000 separate attacks on Hezbollah in the previous three weeks, as tabulated by the American University in Beirut.
All of it together is what brought Hezbollah to the ceasefire.
Some are lauding the ceasefire as a rare win for diplomacy in the Middle East. But it would never have happened if Hezbollah hadn’t been shaken to its combat boots, just as every overwhelmed and fractured warmongering side has only come to the negotiating table when its very existence came face to face with extinction.
All of which leaves Hamas isolated and clinging by its fingernails — 20 of its 24 battalions dismantled, according to the IDF, an estimated 18,000 of its fighters dead, and much of its vast tunnel network destroyed, Gaza reduced to a lawless, chaotic mess, with 44,000 Palestinians dead (Gaza Health Ministry figures, which don’t distinguish between fighters and civilians), hundreds of thousands displaced and Yahya Sinwar burning in hell.
That war grinds on, Hamas’s violent ideology still intact but its sphere of potency shrunken and its raison d’être delegitimized. A negotiated two-state solution has never felt more distant. The horror unfolded exactly as Sinwar had envisioned.
What a catastrophic misreckoning.
In June, the terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah announced it was disbanding, laying down arms, renouncing violence and removing extremist teachings from madrassas.
An operationally independent ally of al-Qaida, JI had for decades fought to establish a radically pure Islamic state inside Indonesia, which is 87 per cent Muslim but constitutionally secular. The group also promised to turn over to the government names of its military wing members. It was a full-bore capitulation.
Leaders claimed the abrupt about-face pivoted on an intention to pursue its moderated goals by co-operating with the government and shifting its interpretation of jihad to peaceful proselytization — “jihad through words.’’
But it was fundamentally a pragmatic decision. Indonesia’s aggressive counterterrorism operations over the past five years had largely wiped out JI leadership via arrests and military targeting, leaving them with no room to manoeuvre, recruit and launch attacks.
If Jemaah Islamiyah doesn’t ring a bell, think Bali. JI was responsible for the 2002 terrorist attack on the tourist hotspot island that killed 202 people of 20 nationalities.
Leaving aside the U.S.-led defeat of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in 2014, the most dramatic and life-altering vanquishing of a terrorist entity was the crushing of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which had sought to overthrow the Sri Lankan government and create autonomy in Tamil Areas, were formally defeated in 2009 after a brutal 26-year military campaign that ended in ashes and upwards of 80,000 to 100,000 deaths, as estimated by the UN. By then the LTTE’s top military hierarchy had been decapitated, its founder dead with no successor evident, its theatre of combat reduced to a sliver surrounded by army troops. The entire construct collapsed, as the government rejected an offer to surrender.
It is a fallacy that ideas can’t be defeated. Received wisdom has it that unless root causes are addressed, no conflict can be resolved. The same sophistry which asserts that Israel can’t conquer Hamas even if it annihilates the internationally designated terrorist entity militarily. Of course it can, if its ruthless bombardment continues unchecked in the face of global condemnation, arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court and worldwide protests that have done nothing to advance Palestinian aspirations for a sovereign state.
Hezbollah has just come crawling to a ceasefire agreement with Israel. While still a force that outmuscles the Lebanon state, its ballyhooed status as most powerful non-state actor in the world — a formidable militia — has been stripped away in the aftermath of Israel’s targeted campaign against the leadership, deep intelligence infiltration that resulted in exploding pagers and walkie-talkies which left thousands of Hezbollah members maimed, blinded and killed, assassination taking its top-most leaders off the board, and then their replacements, followed by a full-scale invasion of southern Lebanon.
The myth of Hezbollah dominance has been shattered. It has been, at least in its 13-month war with Israel — in solidarity with Hamas following the Oct. 7, 2023 atrocity — defeated. The regional alliance of militias, funded and buttressed by terrorism-exporting Iran, has been proven a chimera. Iran can’t come to the rescue of any of its proxy states because Iran itself has been having a very bad, horrible year — its barrage of 300 missiles and drones against Israel on Oct. 1 ineffective and humbling, undermining the credibility of Iran’s axis of resistance, and upending regional dynamics.
As of Sept. 23, Israel had unleashed 8,000 separate attacks on Hezbollah in the previous three weeks, as tabulated by the American University in Beirut.
All of it together is what brought Hezbollah to the ceasefire.
Some are lauding the ceasefire as a rare win for diplomacy in the Middle East. But it would never have happened if Hezbollah hadn’t been shaken to its combat boots, just as every overwhelmed and fractured warmongering side has only come to the negotiating table when its very existence came face to face with extinction.
All of which leaves Hamas isolated and clinging by its fingernails — 20 of its 24 battalions dismantled, according to the IDF, an estimated 18,000 of its fighters dead, and much of its vast tunnel network destroyed, Gaza reduced to a lawless, chaotic mess, with 44,000 Palestinians dead (Gaza Health Ministry figures, which don’t distinguish between fighters and civilians), hundreds of thousands displaced and Yahya Sinwar burning in hell.
That war grinds on, Hamas’s violent ideology still intact but its sphere of potency shrunken and its raison d’être delegitimized. A negotiated two-state solution has never felt more distant. The horror unfolded exactly as Sinwar had envisioned.
What a catastrophic misreckoning.
it means that hamas and Israelis will live together in peace and happiness
