Gaza Incursion Strengthened Extremists

clipped from uk.reuters.com Israel's invasion of Gaza has strengthened the hand of extremists and only a credible independent investigation into alleged wrongdoing can quieten growing Palestinian anger, a U.N. aid official said on Friday. "My first request to the U.S. administration is talk to the ordinary people in Gaza. Come to Gaza and talk to the ordinary people -- the mothers, fathers, leaders of civil society, the people who are not involved in politics," Ging, speaking from Gaza, told reporters in Geneva. "They are still quite shell-shocked but there is more and more anger growing." "The extremists here -- there are more now at the end of this conflict than there were at the start, that's the product of such conflict -- are very confident in their rhetoric that there should be no expectation that justice will be delivered through the rule of law. Now we must prove that wrong," he said.

Ging is John Ging, head of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza.

This really shouldn't come as any surprise. Just as the invasion of Iraq has actually increased the number of terrorists in the world, so Israel's overreaction has done the same.

So we've got two examples of terrorism being treated as a military problem, with both of them failing spectacularly.