The bad news is we didn't get Haniyah. The more bad news is that the Palestinians are saying that the airstrikes killed children. Whether the airstrikes actually killed children is not clear, because I know that the Hamas authorities in Gaza want to play up the Palestinian sympathy factor and they never hesitate to use propaganda to do so. However, if children were killed in this raid, then clearly that's a tragedy.
I just don't know if this "whack a mole" method of killing terrorist leaders is going to work in Gaza. It certainly isn't working in Iraq or Afghanistan, and it doesn't seem to be stopping the rocket fire on southern Israel. I once played this video game that was designed to be social commentary. You were presented with a busy cityscape somewhere in the Arab world. Your job was to bomb the terrorists who were identified by the rifles they carried. The problem was that as soon as you bombed one terrorist, several more would be created in the immediate blast area. There was no way to win the game. I think the same thing applies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Gaza. The more our side uses force to quell terrorism, the more terrorists use our own violence against us to recruit more terrorists.
So what's the answer? I don't know. You can't use diplomacy with people like Hamas or Al Qaeda; their ideology is the definition of psychosis. But how do you discredit their ideology when they can "prove" it on a daily basis by pointing to "Zionist aggression" or the "brutality of the American occupation?"
