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**DECEMBER 7, 2023**
On the Prospect website
'I Don't Want to Be George Floyd'
Another African American dies in Mobile, as police shootings multiply in
Alabama. BY GABRIELLE GURLEY
Floating in the Same Direction
New York's success in linking climate goals, industrial policy, and
good-paying union jobs is the emblem of a long-sought political and
policy alliance. BY ROBERT KUTTNER
Wall Street's Favorite Financial Regulator May Be Looking for a New
Job
CFTC Chair Rostin Behnam's term doesn't end until 2026, but there
are rumblings of an early exit to the private sector. Place your bets
where he'll end up next! BY HENRY BURKE & KENNY STANCIL
Meyerson on TAP
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**** Israel's War on Gaza Now Resembles Our
War on Vietnam
Mass bombing didn't destroy the Vietnamese Communists and won't
destroy Hamas, but it sure kills lots of civilians.
In his public remarks about Israel's war in Gaza, President Biden has
urged Israel not to make the same mistakes America made in responding to
the attacks of 9/11: overreacting, which in the case of the United
States consisted of taking the war to a country (Iraq) that wasn't
even involved in the attacks, and to another country (Afghanistan) where
we remained enmeshed for 20 years.
If anything, though, Israel has opted to ape an even greater American
folly. It is waging war on Gaza much as we waged war on Vietnam.
Both the U.S. and Israel insisted they sought to make war only on a
distinct military target. In Vietnam, that was the Viet Cong and
eventually North Vietnamese troops. In Gaza, that's Hamas. The problem
in both cases has been that the American and then the Israeli forces
couldn't really separate out their designated enemies from the general
population. In both cases, they quickly gave up trying, which meant they
ceased to care about the civilian deaths and injuries they caused-if
indeed, they ever cared at all.
In Vietnam, as the VC were indistinguishable from ordinary villagers (in
part because a large number of them
**were**ordinary villagers), it became all-too-ordinary practice to lump
said villagers into the Army's metric for success, the "body count."
It proved both emotionally and operationally easier, though, to destroy
villages and villagers by air. We ordered millions of Vietnamese into
"strategic hamlets" (how many Vietnamese actually received such orders
was never clear), and then designated much of the rest of the country to
be "free-fire zones" where our B-52s could drop bombs if they spied
anything moving, or, alternatively, anything that didn't move. The
figures on the number of Vietnamese killed during the war have ranged
from 1.5 million to as high as four million. Whatever the precise
number, a good share of them were civilians. And yet, the Viet Cong and
North Vietnamese troops were nonetheless able to roll into Saigon and
take over the country in 1975.
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The parallels between these two wars were driven home to me by a story
**The Washington Post**ran earlier this week, in which the Israeli
military claimed to have killed 5,000 Hamas soldiers out of the 30,000
that Israel says comprise Hamas's military forces.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that by now attacking Southern
Gaza, Israel will kill another 5,000, or even another 10,000. A full
half of Hamas's terror legions would still be in existence, though a
greater share of their weapons and provisions will have been destroyed.
And of course, virtually all of Gaza's civilian
infrastructure-homes, schools, shops, you name it-will have been
destroyed as well, and the number of civilian casualties will almost
surely exceed the number of Hamas casualties by a wide margin. As in
Vietnam, most will have been killed, injured, or left homeless by aerial
bombardment.
This isn't a perfect parallel, of course. Hamas is genuinely devoted
to the destruction of Israel, while the Vietnamese Communists never
devoted so much as a nanosecond's worth of thought to destroying or
attacking the United States. That said, indiscriminate wholesale attacks
on civilian populations and civilian infrastructure are a terrible form
of cruelty, particularly since, if they're indiscriminate, they're
also unavoidable for those on the ground. In good part because of the
way we waged it, the war we waged in Vietnam plunged the United States
into international opprobrium, just as the war that Israel is now waging
only deepens its already widespread international opprobrium-including
here in the U.S.
As that opprobrium is now the common reaction of most Democrats, Biden
will have to (and certainly should) go further than he otherwise might
in insisting on a two-state solution to Israel-Palestine, and a number
of Democrats on the Hill will likely seek to condition U.S. aid to
Israel on things like the withdrawal of Israel's settlements from the
heart of the West Bank. (Bernie Sanders voted against the Ukraine/Israel
aid package yesterday because he insisted that U.S. military aid to
Israel be limited to the Iron Dome-that is, to its missile defense
system.)
Israel is now meeting Hamas's retail barbarism with wholesale
barbarism. Barbarism of either variety quite rightly exacts a very high
price.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter
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