Soccer Dad

Anti-terror success

Last week Elder of Ziyon celebrated A great anniversary. It was the retirement, by hellfire missile of Sheih Yassin three years ago. After noting a number of critics of the Israeli action, Elder of Ziyon observes:

In the three years prior to Yassin's death, approximately 800 Israelis were killed in terror actions. In the three years since, that number has plummeted to about 110.

At the time there weren't just the political and diplomatic types saying that the killing was unjustified, there were a number of "experts" who proclaimed with great seriousness that the killing of Yassin would encourage more violence. I wrote at the time that they were getting it backwards. When the early results of killing Yassin (and his successor Dr. Rantisi) showed a lessening of terror, I offered myself as an expert.

The mistake that the "experts" make in terms of counterinsurgency is that they assume that there is only a motivation that causes terror. They consider neither means nor opportunity. When Israel killed those who had special organizational (and motivational) skills Hamas couldn't operate with the same effectiveness as it had before.

(The surge in terror against Israel in early 1996 shouldn't have been a surpise. Israel had just ceded 6 cities to the PA and, in doing so, had outsourced their security to Arafat who had no interest in doing the job. Hamas wasn't so much trying to "kill the peace process" as the platitude at the time held, it was taking advantage of a new opportunity - an ability to organize and deploy without hinderance from the IDF.)

Blogdigger tags: Sheikh Yassin, Terror, War on Terror, Israel, Hamas.