March 04, 2008

A Martingale in Gaza

Do you guys know what a Martingale is? Here's a definition from wikipedia:

Originally, martingale referred to a class of betting strategies popular in 18th century France. The simplest of these strategies was designed for a game in which the gambler wins his stake if a coin comes up heads and loses it if the coin comes up tails. The strategy had the gambler double his bet after every loss, so that the first win would recover all previous losses plus win a profit equal to the original stake. Since a gambler with infinite wealth will with probability 1 eventually flip heads, the Martingale betting strategy was seen as a sure thing by those who practised it. Unfortunately, none of these practitioners in fact possessed infinite wealth, and the exponential growth of the bets would eventually bankrupt those foolish enough to use the Martingale.

Abu Muqawama had the Martingale in mind when he read this article in Vanity Fair on the U.S. and its disastrous response to the Hamas electoral victories of early 2006. We don't usually post on the Israel-Palestine conflict because it tends to inflame strong opinions that mask any good points to be made about tactics and strategy, but this well-researched article is a pretty damning indictment of U.S. bungling and certainly supports the claim that the Bush Administration has never, really, recovered from the elections which gave Hamas control of the Palestinian parliament.