Red-Faced IDF Misread the 'Street'

From the Jerusalem Post:

Shocked and embarrassed was the best way to describe the mood at IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv on Thursday after the top brass learned of the final outcome of the Palestinian Authority elections and Hamas's unexpected landslide victory.

But after the shock wore off, senior officers began wondering how the IDF had totally failed to predict what appeared in retrospect to have been clear from the outset - and pointed their fingers in one direction, at Military Intelligence.

In line with the recent Palestinian polls, MI officers, as well as Defense Ministry and Foreign Ministry officials, had for the past month predicted that Hamas would win somewhere between 30 percent to 40% of the vote, but that the ultimate winner would be Fatah....

"What this mistake shows," the official said, "is that the IDF is not on top of things and is out of touch with what is really going on in the PA territories."

The article does not properly explain the reason for the debacle, which occurred immediately after the signing of the Oslo accords. One of Arafat's main priorities in working strategically against Israel was shutting down Israel's human intelligence network among Arabs. This was primarily done through a rash of killings of "collaborators."

If the IDF has no idea about something that people are pretty open about, how can they be so confident about more important concerns, such as the amount and locations of weapons and terrorists smuggled in through the hemmorhaging border? The IDF, which has received its priorities from the Sharon/Olmert government, is not focused on Israel's real enemy. Rather there are enormous distractions, such as the continuing mobilizations to evict overwhelmingly peaceful, law-abiding Jewish residents of Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

The failure is fundamental and conceptual. Israel has ceded strategic assets like land, placed a terrorist enemy at point-blank range, provided it with the freedom to openly recruit and mobilize, focused on distractions such as demonizing whistleblowers and uprooting residents who mean no harm. It is impossible to do such things and then have the hubris that you will still win, reality be damned.

Of course, the mission of IRIS is not defeatism, but rather to educate how fundamental concepts inevitably drive successes and failures. The Ford Motor Company recovered from the Edsel with the wildly successful Mustang by changing its underlying assumptions after an unsuccessful encounter with reality. Israel (and the West) can still do the same if we finally confront the reality that an openly genocidal enemy is obviously at hand.

The politically left is fundamentally wrong. If we lower our strategic defenses in order to accommodate the fundamental demands of Islamists, we will not lessen their emnity. It will only encourage their lust for victory over us. If we turn right to what has always worked, namely, simply resisting aggression on all fronts, it is still not too late.