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**JANUARY 9, 2024**

On the Prospect website

Boeing 737 MAX Incident a By-Product of Its Financial Mindset

The plug door that ripped off an Alaska Airlines plane only exists
because of cost-cutting production techniques to facilitate cramming
more passengers into the cabin. BY LUKE GOLDSTEIN

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

Mike Johnson got almost precisely the same appropriations deal as Kevin
McCarthy. BY DAVID DAYEN

Remembering Sid Wolfe

A ferocious advocate and a kind friend BY ROBERT KUTTNER

Meyerson on TAP

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**** Bombed Back Into the Stone Age

An American general's prescription for how we should have fought in
Vietnam has been realized in Israel's war on Gaza.

"Israel Beginning to Narrow Focus of Gaza Campaign," read the
above-the-fold headline on the print edition of today's

**New York Times**.

This is not, however, the result of a strategic shift, nor a concession
to world public opinion. It stems from a more elemental reason: Almost
all of Gaza has now been reduced to depopulated rubble
.
And there's no point in bombing depopulated rubble.

The necessarily rough estimates of the percentage of buildings in Gaza
that have been destroyed or damaged come in at about two-thirds, but
that doesn't mean that the unscarred buildings, many of which are
adjacent to rubble, are inhabitable. The less rough estimates of the
percentage of Gazans who've been driven from their homes, or the
rubble that was their homes, is 85 percent, though some estimates have
it higher.

I'm reminded of the decision by the top U.S. military commanders in
the waning months of World War II to leave a few Japanese cities off the
target lists for our B-29 firebombings, which had already reduced most
of Tokyo and other major cities to cinders. Unless there were a few
Japanese cities that had remained intact, there would be no place we
could roll out, with sufficient shock and awe and horror, our atomic
bombs. Initially, Air Force General Curtis LeMay wasn't pleased with
that decision, wanting to make clear that his firebombings would be
sufficient unto themselves to induce a Japanese surrender, but he
eventually came to understand its logic. Reducing depopulated rubble to
more depopulated rubble, after all, is rather pointless.

LeMay's deepest belief was that the only way to wage war seriously was
through aerial bombardment to produce depopulated rubble, which meant he
was later the one member of the Joint Chiefs whom President Kennedy had
particularly to restrain during the Cuban Missile Crisis. LeMay's
later counsel, for waging the Vietnam War, delivered in his 1965
autobiography, was "Bomb them back into the Stone Age."

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We dropped way more tonnage on Vietnam than we had on Germany in World
War II, but the country was simply too big to realize LeMay's hopes
and dreams. Gaza, however, is spatially tiny-about 60 percent the size
of Chicago (not metro Chicago, just the city proper). It can indeed be
bombed, if not literally, into the Stone Age, then to a state where
nearly all its structures have been disaggregated into stones and shards
of glass and steel.

And that's precisely what the Israeli government has done. Facing a
similar strategic conundrum to the one we faced in Vietnam-the
indistinguishable scattering of military targets (Hamas) amid the
general population-Israel has gone one better than we did with our
"free-fire zones" that designated whole swaths of Vietnam as suitable
for bombardment. We were held back, of course, not just by the size of
the country but also by the fact that we were fighting on behalf of some
of the Vietnamese people, with a South Vietnamese army at our side.
Israel has felt, and conducted its war with, no such constraints.

Indeed, the Israeli government's absence of a declared day-after
strategy doesn't mean there hasn't been one. As it's been
articulated in recent days, first by the far-right ministers

in Netanyahu's Cabinet, and then by Bibi himself, it consists of the
"voluntary" migration of Gaza's population to other Arab countries.
With the great majority of that population now crammed into one very
small corner of Gaza that cannot contain them in safety and health for
very long (in fact, it cannot do that now), and with the rest of Gaza
largely turned to dust, such emigration follows logically from the
manner of war that Israel has waged. Moreover, the Hamas murder raid of
October 7 so terrified and enraged the Israeli public-as it would any
nation's public that had something like that befall them-that the
Israeli far right realized that the nation's normally disputatious
public wouldn't object (at least, until after the fact) to waging the
kind of war that Israel has waged. Beyond any doubt, Hamas's barbaric
attack hastened the day of "from the river to the sea," though it
appears to be Israel, not Palestine, that will expand in that manner.

While Israel's justification for attacking Hamas was clear, and ours
for going to war in Vietnam was anything but, the way those two wars
were fought were comparable, and have yielded comparable backlashes.
What turned Americans against our war was its nightly coverage on
network newscasts, where we were treated to scenes of our boys
destroying villages as women and children wept. Israel has kept the news
media out of Gaza, but the social media images of the carnage in Gaza
that Palestinians have recorded, seen all over the world, has produced a
similar revulsion. At some point, Joe Biden must simply say: Stop!

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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