Middle East linkage

Steven Erlanger of the New York Times writes dispiritedly about the tragedy unfolding among the Palestinians:

The Palestinian prime minister, Ismail Haniya, called today for an end to the internecine violence in Gaza, a day after members of his own Hamas militia surrounded the house of a Fatah commander, killed the man and his bodyguards and seriously wounded his wife and brother.

Before he died, the commander, Col. Muhammad Gharib, begged for help in a telephone call to Palestinian television that was broadcast live. He said in the call that he was being attacked by the Executive Force, a parallel security force under the command of the Hamas-run Interior Ministry, but Fatah leaders and fighters apparently did not respond to his plea.

“They are killers,” Colonel Gharib said of the gunmen. “They are targeting the house, children are dying, they are bleeding. For God’s sake, send an ambulance, we want an ambulance, somebody move!”

The article is titled “A Hamas Leader Tries to Halt Spiraling Violence,”  and then Erlanger tries to explain why neither Abbas nor Haniyeh might not be able to stop the violence

As in Iraq, the division of power created by democratic elections, in the absence of a traditional powerful state or after the disappearance of one, has meant the continuation of party politics through armed militias that are affiliated with factions but not always obedient to them.

This is the only linkage that exists between Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: “solving” the latter (impossible now, unless Israel makes a separate peace with Fatah) will not cause all the dominoes to fall our democratic way.

Israel is fighting two insurgencies—one against Hezbollah in the north and one against Hamas in the south. America is fighting an insurgency in Iraq. There will be more…who knows where. Wecome to the 21st century.

This is the long war or, as David Kilcullen has called it, the global counterinsurgency. And America and Israel—and, one hopes, its Western allies—will have to learn how to address it. (More on this another time.)