Plus, this from a captured terrorist: “Hamas took a gamble. We thought, at worst Israel will come and do something from the air - something superficial. They’ll come in and go out. We never thought that we would reach the point where fear will swallow the heart and the feet will want to flee. You [Israel] are fighting like you fought in ‘48. What got into you all of a sudden?”
Like I always say, only ineffective military force is counter-productive.
Saddam and Osama assumed similar lackluster American aerial responses and they're either dead underground or alive underground. To be fair to Hamas, Hezbollah made the same gamble in 2006 and won.
This time, Israel is ripping apart Hamas. I have no way of knowing when a point of diminishing returns or even counter-productive force kicks in, but so far it seems like Israel has more room to gut Hamas. They should exploit this opportunity. Hamas--the new hand puppet of Iran--has few friends in the Arab world. So what if the streets in the Moslem world and Europe erupt in protests against Israel? Those seem to have been fairly weak, actually.
Remember, effective military force doesn't encourage terrorist recruiting--it kills lots of terrorists, which is always a good thing.
