On the main blog, Philip Giraldi has asked why, given the likely counterproductive nature of Israel’s strikes in Gaza, Israel’s government would go ahead with the planned campaign to destroy Hamas’ infrastructure. There do not seem to be other objectives or grand plans in motion. This is, let us remember, the Olmert government, which has raised incompetence and poor judgement to new heights. We might speculate that there is some hidden, cunning design in all of this, but there is probably no more forethought and cunning involved here than there was in the failure of the current administration to prepare adequately for Phase IV of the initial Iraq campaign. As it was in Lebanon two yeas ago, the answer is miscalculation. The assumption two years ago was that the air campaign against Hizbullah–another long-planned operation waiting for a pretext or provocation–would be decisive and would destroy a significant part of Hizbullah’s military capacity. This proved to be completely wrong on both counts: the war ended in stalemate, it counterproductively turned almost the entire world against Israel after Israel had won almost universal sympathy and support for a limited retaliatory strike, and Hizbullah grew relatively stronger politically despite sustaining considerable losses in the fighting.

Even a more narrow, partisan electoral calculation (i.e., boosting Kadima before the election) does not seem to make sense in this case, as the Gaza operation will tend to remind the public of the Olmert government’s greatest failure, which was the war in Lebanon. If the idea is to redeem Olmert’s government for its failure in Lebanon, attacking a densely-packed urban area seems a strange way to do it, since this is much the same blunder, both political and moral, that the government made in devastating Beirut. The Gaza operation seems to be all together too similar to the war in Lebanon in its evidently open-ended nature, its consequences and its unobtainable objectives, which will tend to discredit Olmert and Kadima even more than Lebanon already did. If it was Olmert’s desire to sabotage his party and successor in the election, he might very well do something like what he is doing now. Unlike two years ago, Livni will not be able to distance herself from the decisions Olmert has made. Supposing that this is a last-ditch effort to play the security card ahead of next year’s elections is a bit like imagining Mr. Bush launching another preventive, unnecessary war in the hopes of boosting flagging GOP political fortunes. Besides being implausible, the attempt would have the opposite effect.

Update: Here is a smart dissent from my post. Max believes I am misreading the Israeli political scene, which could well be true, and he thinks I am relying too much on the comparison with the 2006 war in Lebanon. Regarding the latter, I think the comparison with the war in Lebanon may not be that helpful with respect to military matters, where the differences are real and significant, but it works best in connection with the Israeli political scene. Then as now the Israeli public at first was united completely behind the government’s actions, but then gradually came to realize that the government could not achieve the objectives it had set out and had mismanaged things rather badly. Watching the Israeli public sour on Olmert’s war two years ago was a bit like watching the gradual American disillusionment with Iraq on fast-forward–most people get behind a campaign when they think it will be easy and believe it to be going well (it also helps if they are angry), and then a lot of them turn against the government that took the country into the campaign when things become more difficult.

Depending on how long the Gaza operation lasts, I think we are likely to see a similar souring and a similarly strong political backlash against Olmert and Kadima to the one that sent his approval ratings sinking into single digits. Two years ago, there was a similarly broad consensus across the political spectrum in Israel that the war against Hizbullah was righteous; the trouble was that Olmert waged a war against all of Lebanon. Justified as a targeted, limited action in response to provocation, it expanded far beyond that. Olmert will gain politically from this to the extent that most Israelis do not distinguish between Hamas and the Palestinian population of Gaza and to the extent that their attitude toward Palestinians is fundamentally different from their attitude toward their northern neighbors, but to blur this distinction and wage indiscriminate and disproportinate war against the Palestinian population in general as well as Hamas undermines one of the basic reasons why Kadima exists as a separate party. Even if there is some short-term political gain for Kadima out of this, which I doubt, the strikes will ultimately be damaging to Kadima’s political identity.