It doesn’t matter to the media how badly Hamas was smacked in Operation Cast Lead, or how many top officials they lost, or how many bomb-makers were killed, or how many smuggling tunnels were destroyed. Nope. To the Associated Press, Hamas is even stronger now: Hard-liners strengthened by Gaza war.

This is one of those ludicrous media memes that refuses to die: fighting against evil only makes evil stronger. You’ll see it in articles about every conflict; it’s a kind of nihilistic philosophical tic that is nearly universal, a counterintuitive observation that’s supposed to impress you with its depth.

Here’s the dirty little secret: it’s not deep, it’s stupid. The emperor really is naked.

The question they never ask: if fighting terrorists only makes more terrorists, and only makes hard-liners stronger in every case, what’s the alternative? Giving up?

UPDATE at 2/1/09 9:34:19 am:

Some people are actually taking this argument even farther along the road to absurdity, and claiming that Hamas “won.”

There is something perverse in the notion that Hamas “won” by merely surviving. Robert Malley has said that “for Hamas, it was about showing that they could stay in place without giving way, and from this point of view it has achieved its main objective.” This was not its “main objective” by any stretch of the imagination. Rashid Khalidi has written that “like Hizbullah in Lebanon in 2006, all [Hamas] has to do in order to proclaim victory is remain standing.” But Hamas had a specific objective—lifting the “siege”—which was altogether different from the objective of Hezbollah. This objective Hamas manifestly failed to achieve. It also failed to achieve the secondary objective it shared with Hezbollah: inflicting Israeli military casualties. It defies logic to declare the mere survival of Hamas to be a triumph, given that Hamas openly declared a much larger objective, and Israel never made the military destruction of Hamas an objective.

War is only the pursuit of politics by other means, and anything could happen going forward. Israel could forfeit its war gains by inept diplomacy—something for which there is ample Israeli precedent. Hamas could parley its setback into a diplomatic gain—something for which there is ample Arab precedent. But I think there is little doubt that at the end of the war, Israel had achieved many of its stated objectives, and Hamas had not.