Give 'em enough rope

Some sort of truce seems imminent in the Gaza situation, for whatever that's worth. Israel has certainly made a mess of anything to do with Hamas they could find, but it's apparent to me that the High-Value Targets are drying up. More importantly for Israel, they have managed to run amok in Gaza for three weeks and take negligible losses.

This will not convince Hamas to give up; only death will do that, but it sends a message that the IDF has come back from the dismal performance it put in against Hezbollah in 2006. The key to this sort of operation is "in and out clever", and the "clever" part at least seems to have happened. The Israeli public has seen what happens when they unilaterally give up control of contentious areas, and they have apparently had enough of being patsies.

Hamas wants this truce to regroup, and normally it would be foolish to give it to them. "Ask me for anything but time" is attributed to Napoleon, and time is indeed the one variable that commanders can't finesse. The following snippet suggests that the Israelis have a tactical reason to allow their mortal enemies to regroup:

The Qassam rockets were fired into Sderot at 9 a.m. -- seven hours after Israel's cease-fire went into effect. The rockets injured one person, and Israeli aircraft destroyed the rocket launcher soon afterward, an Israeli military spokesman said.

An hour or two before the rocket attacks, Palestinian gunmen opened fire on Israeli forces in northern Gaza, the Israeli military said. Troops returned fire.

Hamas was dug in deep, those of their leadership that survived, and letting them come up for air gives them a chance to come up and take a pot at IDF targets. When you have the confidence that you can give better than you take, you can afford the luxury of giving up time and initiative. Even then it's only because you know you can take the latter back whenever you want.

So, the IDF is back in form, and the Israelis know that they can only count on themselves to manage their security. There has been a great deal of anti-Israel/anti-Jew vitriol expressed around the world, so Enemy Situation: no change. Friendly morale is better, and as long as the Americans continue to support Israel there is a secure bulwark against Islamic expansion in the Mid East.

Containment worked passably against Communism during the Cold War, so perhaps it's an option against the currently most menacingly unpleasant ideology. Fight them in Israel and Afghanistan, support the Ethiopians against the Islamist factions in Somalia (I give that six months or less before they take over again), in other words stick with the idea of having a "free fire area" to suck them in and kill them.

This is expensive and not so fun for whoever lives in these areas, but better there than here, right? Well, we'll see what happens in Gaza. There's a good chance that a lot of the citizens of Gaza have had enough of Hamas and would (quietly) welcome the Israelis administering the place for a while. That way the food, fuel, medicine etc. will get in since the IDF will control the borders and not have to cut everything off to keep the weapons out. In any event, I don't see this truce lasting (it's already been broken by Hamas), but this opens the "third phase" of Operation CAST LEAD. It remains to be seen what form it will take.