So I chanced across Abu Maqawama, a fantastic blog devoted to COIN. One of the articles, from around the inauguration, was on the Israeli overestimation on the willingness of a population (read: citizens of Gaza) to chastise or discipline those "responsible" for their suffering. This has been a fairly persistent trend in Israeli military actions, yet it consistently fails. The basic paradigm of strategic bombing is to inflict enough suffering on a population that they revolt against their masters for bringing them to this, yet from the Blitz to Kosovo, strategic bombing has ended up shoring up support for governments. When the agent responsible was a non-state actor, say, FARC in Columbia or Hizbullah in Lebanon, they've adopted by providing reconstruction services, education or simple solidarity against the people causing the immediate harm.
The thing is, that really isn't all the different from how we act in the barracks. Since the beginning of basic, it's always been an "us against them" mentality against the drill sergeants, the cadre, the anyone-in-our-chain-of-command. They may be people to be respected, learned from, obeyed, but ultimately, they're in a whole 'nother group. They're Other. But inevitably, someone in our group would screw up, maybe they'd develop a pattern of it, and for that, we would be punished. Time and time again, we would be told it was the fault of the delinquint. We were supposed to ostrasize them, blame them, demand their compliance with the laws of the universe. Except we never blamed them; we blamed our TACs. We forget why we were being punished and remember who made us run around the barracks at 3AM. Group punishment doesn't make us cold shoulder fellow soldiers, and it hasn't made the Palestinians evict Hamas.
