Does anyone else recall a U.S. military intervention launched to feeding starving civilians that ended with dead American soldiers littering the streets of a distant city?  That would be Mogadishu in 1993, where U.S. forces landed to ensure that food reached needy civilians, but withdrew after a calamitoU.S. battle with Somali warlords.  Mission creep is an ever-present hazard to American policy makers.  The deployment of Marines to protect the U.S. airbase in Da Nang grew into over half a million U.S. soldiers fighting in Vietnam three years later. A special forces-led effort to run Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan became a decades-long effort to defend the country from a resurgent Taliban. Now our military will construct a pier to allow the delivery of food to the civilians of Gaza, which will of course require American soldiers to secure the facility and ensure that Hamas operatives do not pilfer aid when it comes ashore for their own purposes.

Has the White HoU.S.e thought this through? Take a moment to game this out from the perspective of Hamas, currently fighting for its life against the IDF from its last enclaves in Rafah.  An American military presence on the ground in Gaza can serve some useful purposes for them.  Food aid must be delivered from this new pier, most likely by Hamas-adjacent operatives who will need U.S. protection and supervision if it is to get where it is needed. Exactly how is the U.S. military going to distinguish between distributions of aid to genuine Palestinian civilians and Hamas fighters? As Israel has learned, this is difficult if not impossible. U.S. forces ostensibly protecting food deliveries could become the ideal human shields against IDF attacks, allowing Hamas to reclaim their role as the intermediary distributing Western aid to Gaza civilians. This role will permit them to reestablish their political legitimacy with Gaza’s needy population, who do know Hamas operatives when they see them. (READ MORE from Karl Pfefferkorn: The Heartbreak of the Brideshead Republicans)

A more malign aim might be to suck the U.S. into the ongoing war.  The U.S. military could become the de facto protector of Gazans from the IDF as the security operations needed to deliver aid from port to civilians spreads like a web to encompass much of the territory. U.S. soldiers accompanying critical aid deliveries will expand the safe zones for Hamas operations across Gaza. Do we wish to midwife a resurrected Hamas in Gaza behind the shield of U.S. troops?  If not, then a U.S. military presence becomes useful to Hamas in more incendiary ways. At a moment of Hamas’ choosing, U.S. forces in Gaza become targets for attack.  The U.S. will be faced with a choice: retaliate and allow Hamas to maneuver U.S. into open cooperation with the IDF against the entire Arab world, or skulk out of the place and abandon Gaza to whatever post-war plans the Netanyahu government imposes on the place. (READ MORE: Israel: Unifying Around the Center)

Hamas could force the U.S. to pick its poison: protect them from the IDF, or face military humiliation in the streets of Gaza. Neither of these are attractive outcomes for the U.S., which is already facing the task of shoring up its credibility in the wake of the disastrous withdrawal from Kabul.  This simple pier constructed for admirable humanitarian reasons could be the first step toward a Hamas revival under de facto U.S. protection, or another Mogadishu-type humiliation for the U.S. Have we considered how we can prevent mission creep after the arrival of U.S. forces in Gaza grants multiple dangerous options to Hamas? Not likely. The Biden White House has made a short-term calculation based on its wavering support in states it needs to win in November. The cost of this calculation could be immense: the revival of Hamas, armed with new powers to divide the U.S. from Israel, or defeat in another gruesome street battle against a well-armed and media-savvy Muslim population. Is this worth Michigan’s 15 electoral votes?