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"We have proven to Hamas that we have changed the equation ... [Operation Cast Lead] has restored Israel's deterrence ... Israel is not a country upon which you fire missiles and it does not respond. It is a country that when you fire on its citizens it responds by going wild - and this is a good thing." - Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Jan. 12, 2009

"I began to see Gaza as, I suspect, many Gazans do: a floating island, a dystopian Atlantis, drifting farther away from contact with any other society." - Lawrence Wright

I finally got around to reading Wright's big New Yorker take out on the situation in the Gaza Strip and highly recommend it. Though Wright's story is subtitled "What really happened during the Israeli attacks?", the piece is more of a tour de misère of what ails Gaza than an investigation into the veracity of the Goldstone report. The unavoidable conclusion one draws is that Israel is building its own worst enemy.

Thankfully, the New Yorker decided not to put this piece behind a pay wall. In it, writer Bruce McCall pens his conception of the "Official Guardian Council Dining-Out Guide":

Bar of the Sport Martyrs, 9002 Smash the U.S. Devil Mews. Satan nakedly disports here in this unnecessarily festive wormhole of godless international big-screen soccer worship, where recently a male patron was rumored to have publicly attempted the pornographic Heimlich maneuver on an unresisting female patron, who then projectile-vomited her half-digested khoresht-e fesenjan all over a portrait of President Ahmadinejad. No access for armored cars.

Bar of the Sport Martyrs gets three skull and crossbones.

I'm glad Evan flagged Steve Coll's post on al-Qaeda's dwindling popularity, because I think it highlights an important problem with the Western approach to counter-terrorism.

I agree with Evan that Coll's Soviet Union/al-Qaeda comparison is a little imperfect. "Strategic patience" worked in the Cold War in part because both parties were constrained by mutually assured destruction. Neither the U.S. nor the USSR wanted the war to turn hot; they knew the consequence would likely be nuclear war and millions of deaths.

Al-Qaeda, on the other hand, has no such constraints. MAD is physically impossible with a group like al-Qaeda: You can't aim nuclear weapons at a transnational terrorist group. And even if it were possible, it wouldn't be a deterrent. As Evan (and Coll) observe, there's a strong millenarian streak in al-Qaeda's belief system; the prospect of his own immolation wouldn't stop bin Laden from launching a terrorist attack.

Following the Friday bombing in Jakarta, Steve Coll ponders Al-Qaeda over at his New Yorker blog, "Think Tank".

The question: Why do Osama bin Laden and his cohorts continually act in a way that seems to ignore potential political paths to power? And even though Al-Qaeda is weakened year by year, what is the proper U.S. strategy to address their ongoing ability to mount sporadic, chaotic strikes?