There are big ideas. There are bad ideas. And then there big, bad ideas ... like inserting American troops into the Palestinians' conflicts. That's a lesson we learned the hard way in Lebanon over 40 years ago.

And yet, now it appears we may go out of our way to learn it again in Gaza. Reuters reports that the US and Israel are discussing an American administration of Gaza after the end of the war as a transition to 'responsible' Palestinian leadership:

The United States and Israel have discussed the possibility of Washington leading a temporary post-war administration of Gaza, according to five people familiar with the matter.

The "high-level" consultations have centered around a transitional government headed by a U.S. official that would oversee Gaza until it had been demilitarized and stabilized, and a viable Palestinian administration had emerged, the sources said.

In other words, it would fall on the US to achieve said demilitarization. That would take a major deployment of armed forces to occupy and administer Gaza, which the Israelis attempted to do between 1967 and 2005 to little success. And in fact it's something we ourselves attempted to do in Iraq to mixed success, and Afghanistan with no success at all.

The Times of Israel even notes that the plans would follow the Iraq model, for some reason:

According to the discussions, which remain preliminary, there would be no fixed timeline for how long such a US-led administration would last, and it would depend on the situation on the ground, the five sources say.

The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to discuss the talks publicly, compare the proposal to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq that Washington established in 2003, shortly after the US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

The authority was perceived by many Iraqis as an occupying force and it transferred power to an interim Iraqi government in 2004 after failing to contain a growing insurgency.

No kidding. We ended up conducting combat operations for years, bugged out early, and then had to return when al-Qaeda in Iraq transformed into ISIS. We're still fighting ISIS in Syria and western Iraq. And that insurgency was the product of conflict between two versions of Islam, both of which have radical Islamist subgroups, and not the more pitched battle between Muslims and Jews. 

Presumably, the idea would be to take over only after Hamas gets driven out of Gaza. At that point, we would come in and stand up a native government oriented toward peaceful coexistence and modern governance. How did that work out in Afghanistan when Joe Biden started cutting support for Afghan security services? Did the Taliban disappear, or did they just bide their time and wait for the US to lose interest in peace?

Perhaps this is just a trial balloon, But it comes at the same time that Steven Witkoff is at the UN pitching an American aid program for Gaza:

Witkoff has become the key U.S. diplomat on the war in Gaza, the nuclear talks with Iran, the truce with the Houthis and the talks with Russia on Ukraine.

• One of the sources said Witkoff was expected to focus primarily on Gaza and on a new aid mechanism proposed by Israel and the U.S. which they claim will allow aid to resume without being controlled by Hamas.

This is an incredibly dangerous game we are playing. The Israelis need to settle their issues with Gaza, not create yet another Western 'mandate' in the Levant, an idea with a longer and equally problematic history. If they want help with that effort, they should talk with their new Sunni allies in the region for an administration of Gaza, or better yet, an end to denying the migration of Palestinian "refugees." Making this our problem will have the same outcomes we have seen for the last four decades, almost all of them bad and most of them deadly.