The tragedy in the Middle East is that what Hamas Sinwar was to bin Laden, Israel is to America.

Reading various accounts of Yahya Sinwars political thinking, its extraordinary how much the slain Hamas leader thought like Osama bin Laden. Likewise, there are the terrifying parallels between the response of the Israeli state and that of the United States after 9/11. The tit-for-tat you kill one of mine, I kill 10 of yours has rearranged political orders, globally in the US case, regionally in Israels. It has also resulted in the global discrediting of the moral standing of both countries outside the West.

And in both cases, China has been the unintended beneficiary of all the horrific upheaval. All Beijing has to do is sit back and watch and occasionally make a few anodyne declarations about the need for peace.

You might think Sinwar had plenty of time to study and learn from bin Ladens deeply flawed strategic thinking behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and their fatal consequences for his own organisation in the past two decades.

The fact that before Israels own September 11 on October 7 last year, Saudi Arabia was close to a historic Anwar Sadat-like diplomatic breakthrough with the Jewish state, one to be brokered by Washington and which Sinwar no doubt wanted to disrupt, may have reminded him of bin Ladens singular failure. If 9/11 had worked out as bin Laden thought it would, the Americans would have been out of his home country a long time ago, if not the entire Middle East.

At least Sinwars followers, or whats left of them, could take comfort that October 7 stopped the Saudi-US-Israel deal in its tracks. But it was at most a minor goal in his grand strategic plan.

Beijing, by the way, successfully brokered a rapprochement between Tehran and Riyadh while the West was asleep.

In the following, I borrow quite a bit from Steven Simon, a former official in both the Clinton and Obama White Houses and the author of a new book,Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East.

His latest piece in Responsible Statecraft, which analyses Sinwars strategic thinking and its fundamental flaws, is insightful and well-worth reading.

In it, he argues that the Hamas leaders big project the terror attack on October 7 was to exploit civil discord in Israel over the increasingly unpopular Benjamin Netanyahu, especially over his attempt to cripple the countrys Supreme Court.

Such cracks within Israeli society would be widened by a devastating and unprecedented attack, leading to the collapse of his fragile but extremist right-wing coalition government, thus further fracturing the country.

As it was, Sinwar united a factionalised society The result was an all-out war on Hamas, Simon wrote. What was worse is that he failed to understand not only his adversary, but also his friends.

He thought the Axis of Resistance would coordinate serious attacks against Israel with his own, Simon wrote. Instead, Iran and Hezbollah offered only limited attacks, which didnt help the Hamas struggle in Gaza at all, but provided enough of an excuse for the Netanyahu regime to extend its scorched-earth war in Gaza into Lebanon and threatened to drag the US into an all-out war with Iran, one that the Israeli far-right has long wanted.

Doesnt it all sound like 9/11 redux?

Before bin Ladens attacks, George W. Bush, having taken over the presidency essentially by waging ruthless lawfare all the way up to the US Supreme Court, was at a record low in the polls for a new president, in an administration that was seen as meandering.

The 9/11 attacks gave Bush, the self-confessed C student, a moral mission as a wartime leader and unified a divided country behind him. And his neoconservative strategists got the war on Iraq they had always wanted.

Far from withdrawing from the Middle East, Bushs war on terror was designed to intimidate everyone around the world, but especially the Arab states.

Now, consider, quite literally, its contemporary parallels: Afghanistan/Lebanon, al-Qaeda/Hamas, Iraq/Iran, the Taliban/Hezbollah, and finally the US/Israel. They look like pretty exact pairings?

The US war on terror killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions. Israels now-expanding war has already killed tens of thousands and could cause many more, and also displaced millions.

I am quite curious, though, why Simon cited as a reference for Sinwar the legendary North Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap, rather than bin Laden who was not mentioned even once.

Sinwar understood well enough that many ordinary Gazans would die in furtherance of his vision of victory, Simon wrote. In this, he evidently confused himself with Vo Nguyen Giap, who likewise understood that many Vietnamese would die, particularly in vast US air raids on the North, but was correct in assessing that this would weaken the US internationally, legitimise his campaign to destroy South Vietnam, and unify the country under Hanois rule.

Somehow, I think Sinwar had bin Laden in mind rather than Giap.

After the Tet Offensive of 1968, Giap fought the Americans with the regular North Vietnamese army. Hamas is no more than an irregular guerilla force.

Perhaps Simon does raise an important point, one that was only hinted at in mentioning Giap.

Both the Vietnamese general and his boss Ho Chi Minh were deep strategic thinkers having studied their countrys millennial struggle against incursions and invasions by imperial-dynastic China as well as Mao Zedongs teachings on protracted war of liberation against both the Kuomintang and imperialist Japan.

A sad fact about the Palestinian cause is that it has never managed to produce a leader with comparable strategic competence.

In the end, though, Sinwar did manage to provoke a genocidal response from Israel did he anticipate it? that has isolated the country around the world. Even some smaller European countries are turning their backs on the Jewish state because of the endless and horrific suffering of the Palestinians. He has revived the Palestinian dream for independent statehood and the global realisation that its denial has been a deep stain on the conscience of the world.

Unconditional US support for Israel has also brought the Americans into disrepute with the rest of the world.

When everyone is repeating the same mistakes, all China has to do is to sit and watch, and decline to be dragged into the quagmire. The US is so distracted in Europe as in the Middle East it cannot properly pivot in Asia and focus on its fight with China. In place of a well-conceived strategy, there have been constant, ad hoc and machine gun-like provocations at Beijing, especially over Taiwan, hoping the Chinese will take the bait.

But the Chinese understand the American game is one born out of weakness, not strength. It may test Chinas patience, but patience is one thing the Chinese can do much better than Americans.

It is just unfortunate that China has had to enjoy a serious geopolitical advantage on the back of Palestinian suffering.

Republished from South China Morning Post, October 21, 2024