https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/21/biden-admin-hammering-israel-military-strategy-gaza-00159262Biden administration open criticism of Israel's tactics:
The Biden administration fears Israel is disastrously squandering its opportunity for victory against Hamas, losing its best chance to eliminate the group’s hold on Gaza and threat to the Israeli people.
Top officials are publicly calling Israel’s strategy in Gaza self-defeating and likely to open the door to Hamas’ return — a level of criticism of the Middle East ally not seen since the war began in October.
The officials say Israel’s government has failed to hold parts of Gaza after clearing them, has turned the civilian population and the rest of the world against it with widespread bombing and inadequate humanitarian aid, and enabled Hamas to recruit more fighters.
Highlights:
-there's no connection between military operations and endgame strategy
-estimates Israel has only killed about a third of Hamas' pre-October 7th members, estimates about 2/3rds of Hamas' tunnel network is still intact
-concerns Hamas has recruited new fighters the last 7 months in the thousands
-we have shared lessons learned from Iraq and these are not heeded by Israel
Last week, Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell said Israel’s “total victory” against Hamas was unlikely. Then on Monday, both Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. C.Q. Brown, the Joint Chiefs chair, chided Israel for failing to protect civilians in Gaza and to prevent Hamas from storming back to places it once controlled.
Both Pentagon leaders are well-known as quiet professionals who aren’t prone to airing their grievances.
“Not only do you have to actually go in and clear out whatever adversary you are up against, you have to go in, hold the territory and then you’ve got to stabilize it,” Brown told reporters. If that doesn’t happen, it “allows your adversary then to re-populate in areas if you’re not there, and so that does make it more challenging for them as far as being able to meet their objective of being able to militarily destroy and defeat Hamas.”
Those comments followed others by Secretary of State Antony Blinken who last week predicted the eventual withdrawal of Israeli forces could leave “a vacuum that’s likely to be filled by chaos, by anarchy, and ultimately by Hamas again.”
It’s a sentiment shared by former top officials with deep experience in similar campaigns.
“Everybody gets the fact that you have to destroy Hamas … but then what?” said retired Gen. Joseph Votel, who was the head of U.S. Central Command at the height of the fight against the Islamic State. “What’s the plan to take care of the 2.5 million Palestinians that are left behind? What’s the plan to deal with the remainder of the Hamas fighters? It seems incomplete and I just don’t think that they have communicated or have thought through that as well as I would’ve hoped they would’ve.”
Dana Stroul, a former top Middle East official in the Pentagon who stepped down in January, recently wrote that the U.S. shared lessons of its failures in Iraq with Israel — namely how an insurgency grew out of the botched American occupation — but that Israel has not heeded those warnings.
“Not only has Israel declined to learn from this body of knowledge and experience on the sequencing of activities to prevent worst outcomes for postconflict societies, but it also appears that Israel is on track to repeat the same mistakes,” she lamented in a Foreign Affairs essay published Monday.
