- Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own -

It’s not often that a senior member of Washington’s usually staid and cautious foreign policy establishment likens Israeli political leaders to donkeys and questions their competence. But the fighting in Gaza prompted Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies to do just that.

“Will Israel end in empowering an enemy in political terms that it defeated in tactical terms? Will Israel’s action seriously damage the U.S. position in the region, and hope of peace, as well as moderate Arab regimes and voices in the process? To be blunt, the answer so far seems to be yes.

“To paraphrase a comment about the British government’s management of the British Army in World War I, lions seem to be led by donkeys…The question is not whether the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) learned the tactical lessons of fighting in 2006 (in Lebanon). It is whether Israel’s top political leadership has even minimal competence to lead them,” he writes in an analysis on Gaza.

In Cordesman’s view, the leadership lacks a grand strategic purpose. Are the tactical gains the IDF is making in its assault on Hamas to stop it from firing rockets into Israel worth the political and strategic costs to the Jewish state?

Strong words from a respected authority on the Middle East, a member of an influential network of scholars who migrate from senior government jobs (his included director of intelligence assessment for the Secretary of Defense) to think tanks and from there often move back to government in Washington’s revolving door scene.

With the prospect of fighting in Gaza dragging on past next week’s inauguration of Barack Obama as the next U.S. president, analyses and advice have flowed freely on how the new administration should deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a problem that has plagued a string of presidents and shaped Arab perceptions that the U.S. backs Israel, no matter what.

Will the U.S. shift course under Obama? In her confirmation hearing this week, his nominee for Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, ruled out negotiating with Hamas, the group Israel is fighting in Gaza, unless it renounces violence and recognizes Israel. “That is just for me an absolute,” she said. No change on that front from George W. Bush.

No word either on Israeli settlements on the West Bank. They will remain standing once the guns fall silent in Gaza. Their continued growth - in violation of international law - bodes ill for the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, the so-called two state solution. In the past 15 years, the number of Israelis living on the West Bank rose from 116,000 to almost 300,000. In addition, another 190,000 Israelis live in the formerly Arab part of Jerusalem, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.

END WEST BANK SETTLEMENTS

If Obama is serious about making peace between Israelis and Palestinians, says Aaron David Miller, a scholar at Washington’s Woodrow Wilson Institute, he will need to tackle the settlement question. In the past, U.S. involvement has been largely rhetorical. Miller, a former adviser on Arab-Israeli negotiations to six secretaries of state, said he could not recall one strategic meeting with an Israeli Prime Minister to discuss the damage the settlements did to peace negotiations.

“But it is a fact that settlements are incompatible with creating confidence, let alone creating an atmosphere of serious negotiations.” Why didn’t the U.S. press harder? “For one, we didn’t want a confrontation.”

If future American attempts to help negotiate peace are to be successful, Miller says, the U.S. must be equally firm in dissuading actions on either side that wreck chances of an agreement - rockets fired from Gaza, or Israelis settling on the West Bank. Agreeing to every idea proposed by an Israeli Prime Minister, as happened in the past, is not the right way to go.

The cause of even-handedness would also benefit if American politicians (and pundits) took statements from Israeli leaders with a grain of salt. Such as the analogy Defense Minister Ehud Barak provided to explain why the IDF launched the war on Hamas in Gaza, opening with a bombardment reminiscent of the shock-and-awe assault with which the U.S. tried to decapitate Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003.

“Contemplate what would happen if Kassem rockets were fired for years from Tijuana in Mexico to San Diego.”

There is no excuse for targeting civilians but Barak’s Tijuana-San Diego analogy is severely flawed. Tijuana has not been occupied by a foreign power, its citizens do not belong to families that were dislodged by a war in 1948, and the flow of goods into and out of Tijuana has not been subject to blockades. Unlike Gaza.

You can contact the author at Debusmann@reuters.com. For previous columns, click here.

– Paul Taylor is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

The European Union is entering a lame duck year just as new challenges are mounting from Israel’s assault on Gaza, Russia’s gas cut-off to Ukraine and the impending inauguration of U.S. President Barack Obama.

The EU’s active crisis management in the Georgia war and the global financial meltdown last year under the energetic leadership of French President Nicolas Sarkozy was an exception, not the dawn of a new, more effective Union.

Europe now faces 12 months of stasis with two peripheral small countries - the Czech Republic and Sweden — holding the six-month rotating presidency, EU legislation on hold because of European Parliament elections in June, and the European Commission winding down to the end of its term in November.

Domestic politics in key member states will also constrain EU initiatives. Germany, the biggest member state, has a general election in September in which the two major parties in its ungainly grand coalition will be fighting each other.

That seems to preclude agreement on bold economic stimulus measures or foreign policy risk-taking.
Europe will also be held in check for most of the year by a second Irish referendum, expected in October or November, on the EU’s Lisbon treaty on institutional reform designed to give the bloc stronger leadership and a fairer decision-making system.

EU leaders will be careful not to do or say anything that could jeopardize the chances of reversing last year’s “No” vote.

LACK OF LEVERAGE

The first few days of the year have highlighted the EU’s divisions and lack of leverage in dealing with Israel, the Palestinians, Russia and Ukraine.

The Europeans exposed themselves to ridicule with two separate diplomatic missions touring the Middle East - an official EU delegation led by Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg and a French one led by Sarkozy, behaving as if he were still president of the Union.

The dual missions also reflected policy differences. While France, Britain and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana demanded an immediate ceasefire, the Czechs and Germans blamed the Palestinian militant group Hamas squarely for the fighting and showed more sympathy towards Israel.

The EU has little leverage with either side, since the Israelis consider the United States to be the sole power broker in the region, and the Europeans will not talk officially to Hamas, which they have declared a terrorist organization.

The one card Europe can play is the possibility of deploying European monitors to help secure Gaza’s southern border with Egypt and prevent arms smuggling into the Palestinian area.

The offer of an EU monitoring presence helped achieve a ceasefire between Russia and Georgia last August.

France and Turkey have offered monitors to support an Egyptian ceasefire plan put forward by President Hosni Mubarak after talks with Sarkozy.

But there are snags: Israel does not trust the Europeans to enforce an arms embargo, Egypt does not want European forces on its soil, and Hamas does not want its hands tied by Europe.

If the monitors do go in, they could end up caught in the crossfire between Palestinian militants and Israeli troops.

European forces already run that risk in southern Lebanon, where they deployed in a buffer zone in 2006 to help end a conflict between Hezbollah fighters and the Israeli border.

WRONG-FOOTED

The EU has also been wrong-footed by Russia’s gas cut-off to Ukraine, which has now led to severe reductions in gas supplies to EU member states in central and southeastern Europe.

The European Commission and the Czech presidency have so far scrupulously avoided taking sides in what they describe as a commercial dispute.

But Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek said if supplies to Europe were not restored by Thursday, the talks should be escalated to the top political level and the EU would intervene.

While many European governments, especially in former communist central Europe, suspect Moscow is playing with the gas taps to intimidate Ukraine’s pro-western government and send a message to other European countries dependent on Russian supplies, the EU has no common position.

The German election is a factor here too. Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the Social Democratic candidate for chancellor, is widely seen as sympathetic to Russia, while Christian Democratic Chancellor Angela Merkel is more critical.

The same paralyzing factors may make it difficult for the EU to respond to challenges it is likely to receive from Obama.

Germany seems set to resist joining any massive fiscal stimulus of the kind the U.S. president-elect is planning.

Germany, Italy and Austria, with strong commercial interests in Iran, are unlikely to accept much tougher sanctions against Tehran’s nuclear program, especially without U.N. approval.
Berlin has also made clear it will not send more troops to Afghanistan or commit its forces to frontline combat missions.

The one issue on which a lame-duck Europe will be an eager partner for Obama is in fighting climate change. But EU hopes that the new U.S. leader may join an international agreement on curbing greenhouse gas emissions in Copenhagen at the end of this year may be over-optimistic.

For previous columns by Paul Taylor, click here.

In the big battle scene in the movie Braveheart, terrified whispers ran up and down the ragged ranks of sword-waving Scots that the English were ranged before them with “500 heavy horse” – armoured cavalry of devastating power in those days.

But the wild-haired hero-general William Wallace (actor-director Mel Gibson) rode his pony up and down the front ranks shouting: “We don’t have to beat them. We just have to fight them!”

That was in the 14th century. But 700 years later it seems to be the same cry  from the Gaza Strip, where Palestinian fighters allied to the Islamic fundamentalist cause led by Hamas pursue a lopsided battle against Israel, pitching erratic, homemade rockets into nearby Israeli lands, until they trigger a major offensive and start taking the heaviest casualties in 60 years of conflict, from Israel F-16s and Apache helicopters.

The warplane is today’s ‘heavy horse’, of course, but it can represent a far, far superior advantage. The Israelis fly with virtual impunity over the crowded Gaza enclave, picking out designated targets in their own good time, capable of selecting individual apartments in a block if they need to. Should it come to ground fighting, Israel has equally advanced tanks with state-of-the-art optics and sensors, plus plenty of modern armoured personnel carriers and artillery that the Islamists do not possess.

The score in Gaza, to state the facts in the crudest terms, was 300 to 1 dead in the first 48 hours.

Monday was day three of the air campaign. In 1999 NATO found itself in its first war, against Serbia over the conflict in Kosovo. The air campaign was conducted at the safety altitude of 22,000 feet because the Serbs, unlike Hamas, did indeed possess anti-aircraft missiles and cannon. A committee of 19 states, the 45-year-old alliance was a nervous newcomer to actual fighting. It gambled that air power would inflict just enough pain to persuade the Serbs to capitulate. But when that did not happen in the first five days, NATO was in a panic, and facing the unthinkable – an invasion.

Some generals had warned the allies that, if you start a war, you must be ready to go all the way and ‘put boots on the ground’. But they had preferred wishful thinking.

Israel, of course, is no newcomer to war, does not need lessons in the limits of air power, and knows that a ground offensive in Gaza cannot be ruled out. Even if Gaza’s Islamist militants number 35,000 as estimates say, there is little doubt who would be likely to come out on top. But it would probably be on top of a land of rubble, with a storm of Arab and Muslim defiance gathering above the entire region.

As the smoke rises from Gaza, anger and defiance seems to be spreading across the Arab world, fuelling protests and violence in the occupied West Bank, stoking anti-Israel sentiment in the wider Arab world, where the young, especially, despise seemingly weak, or complacent regimes unwilling or unable to do something. Islam is their “rock n roll” now, as one writer recently put it, and the militants of Islam have no moral problem with “asymmetric warfare” -- the return of the suicide bomber to Israeli cities, the weapon no Apache or F-16 can stop.

If this is what the defiance of Gaza’s puny rockets begets, then Braveheart’s romantic injunction that “you just have to fight them” could prove to be correct.

(Smoke rises after an Israeli air strike in the northern Gaza Strip December 28, 2008. Israel launched air strikes on Gaza for a second day on Sunday, piling pressure on Hamas after killing more than 270 people in one of the bloodiest days in 60 years of conflict between the Palestinians and the Jewish state. REUTERS/Baz Ratner)