Must have an exit plan before you enter.

In Mahabharata, Arjun's son, Abhimanyu knew how to fight his way into the maze of warriors called Chakravyuh, set up by Dronacharya to capture Yudhishtira, but did not know how to break out of it. He was killed. Today we see countries with powerful armies making the same mistake time and again. The US should have learnt from its abject defeat in Vietnam and the ignominious flight from the embassy in Saigon with heroic marines, in blind panic, hanging from the landing skids of helicopters. That did not stop the US from entering Afghanistan and Iraq and again, despite repeated genocides, it has been forced to run with its tail between its legs. Years after George Bush declared ' Mission Accomplished ' Iraq is on fire. Iraqis who helped the US were discarded behind and are now in grave danger. The judge who sentenced Saddam Hussein to death was badly tortured and executed by the violent jihadi group, the ISIS. The Taliban is salivating at the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, knowing that it will easily win against Afghan forces. Now the Israelis are finding out that it is easy to start a war but you need the cooperation of your opponents to end it. It started when 3 Israeli teenagers, on their way home from school, were kidnapped and killed on 12 June on the West Bank, which is ruled by the Fatah faction, and not Hamas. Hamas leaders denied any involvement in the killings but it is possible that some Hamas members carried out the attack. Instead of treating it like any other heinous crime Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel immediately blamed Hamas and police started to arrest Palestinians who had been released according to an earlier accord. Hamas started firing rockets into Israel, Israel attacked with aerial bombing and, when that did not stop the rockets, sent in ground troops. In Gaza, where 1.8 million people are packed into 360 sq km, there were bound to be lots of civilian casualties. As pictures of little children with horrific injuries were shown on TV screens around the world there was a surge in anti-Jewish sentiment, prompting the Israeli ambassador to Germany to compare today's situation with that in 1938. The only way that Israel could win against Hamas would be by pushing all Palestinians out of Gaza. That is not going to happen, so now Israel is desperate for a face saving ceasefire. But Hamas knows that the longer it goes on the more intolerable the pressure will be on Israel to stop, giving Hamas a victory. The danger to Israel is that the Holocaust generation is dying out. Museums do not have the same impact as a number tattooed on an arm. Very soon it will be accused of the same crimes as those of the Nazis. It should look for a permanent solution. We wish it well.