It's the Ryan Lair show on WNYC. Good morning again everyone. You just heard the basic

Israel Gaza headlines on the news just now. We'll get a more detailed military analysis

now for a few minutes from Fred Kaplan, Military Affairs columnist for Slate. He writes

the column called War Stories and his author of books, including his most recent The Bomb,

President Generals, and the secret history of nuclear war. Fred, thanks for coming on.

Welcome back to WNYC. Why do you think, first of all, that Hamas staged the attacks

that it did on Saturday? What do you think from their perspective they thought they had

to gain? Well, you know, there have been serious negotiations going on between the US

and Saudi Arabia involving a possible security arrangement where Saudi Arabia recognizes

Israel and the United States provides security guarantees to Saudi Arabia. I don't know

whether they really had a chance or not, but it's certainly true that not just Israel,

but the Sunni Arab countries have been under the impression recently that they could ignore

the Palestinians that that's not really vital to their security or their interests, that

are much more interested in forming an alliance against Shiite radicals like Hamas and his

Bala and Iran, mainly. And this is a way of Hamas asserting that, no, we're still here

and we are going to do everything we can to break up this impending alliance, at least that

seems to be the only reasonable or analyzable rationale for something like this.

Is there any early indication that the politics of terror and the way that you just described

it might be successful? That's how the Arabia would slow down whatever movement it was making

toward normalization of relations with Israel? Well, you know, we don't know yet. Hamas

has said, yeah, Iran helped us carry out this attack. Iran has denied that. The State

Department has said, no, there's no evidence of this, although they did provide weapons and so forth.

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