Category ►►► Israel Matters

February 25, 2010

Why the Rush to Blame Mossad - Other Than Anti-Israel Paranoia?

The world still roils over the assassination of Hamas senior commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai; perhaps a better word would be "hyperventilates":

Last week, Israel's ambassador to Britain was called in for an official reprimand by the Foreign Office. In Dubai, Lt. Gen. Dahi Khalfan Tamim, the chief of police for the emirate, has said he is "99 percent" sure that operatives of the Israeli spy agency, Mossad, killed Mr. al-Mabhouh.

But I still haven't seen a single shred of evidence that Mossad, Israel's premier agency for intelligence, covert ops, and counter-terrorism, was behind the bizarre scheme... and several tantalizing bits indicating that they weren't:

• In general, the hit job was too elaborate, too complex, too Byzantine. Gas? Guns? Electrocutions? This is silly.
• The 26-member hit squad was far too large for the job; that scrum was almost guaranteed to be found out!
• The killers were clumsy enough to be caught on surveillance video, which seems very unlike the highly professional Mossad.
• They stole the identities of real Israeli citizens. Far from pointing the finger at Mossad, I believe this curious fact points firmly away from that agency; why would they intentionally implicate their own citizens?

• And a new piece of intel I'd not seen until today: According to Dubai intelligence, one of the best in the Middle East, two of the assassins chose a peculiar refuge to flee after the hit:

  Nonetheless, some details have emerged that do not track with traditional Israeli intelligence tradecraft. The Dubai authorities this week said two of the operatives fled to Iran.

Let's do a little detecting. We need a suspect group that (a) kills Hamas members; (b) doesn't mind implicating Israel; and (c) has some sort of affinity with Iran. Hm... that's a toughie; unless, just possibly, the hit was actually carried out by Hezbollah.

1. Hezbollah is fighting Hamas for control of Gaza and the West Bank; they have ample reason to want to assassinate al-Mabhouh.
2. Hezbollah takes its cue from Iran, and no country on Earth hates Israel more than Iran. Killing al-Mabhouh -- and ensuring that Israel would get the blame in the international community, which is always eager to blame the Jews for everything bad in the world, anyway -- would send a tingle down Hassan Nasrallah's leg.
3. Hezbollah is Iran's private terrorist group, which they send out to other countries and regions, notably Syria and the Palestinian Authority, to enforce Iran's will. It makes perfect sense for Hezbollah assassins to flee to Iran for sanctuary.

To my thoughts, all signs point to Hezbollah, not Mossad, as the author of this plot. It seems that even the Devil can do a good deed now and again, albeit for his own nefarious reasons.

Cross-posted on Hot Air's rogues' gallery...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 25, 2010, at the time of 2:42 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 17, 2009

General Jones Flipped Here

Consider this post an addendum to our last, Gen. Jones Scoffs at Afghanistan "Surge" - Just Like Failed Iraq "Surge!".

Scott Johnson at Power Line points us to a Michael Goldfarb post on the Weekly Standard blog revealing an astonishing decision by our ancient enemy, President Barack H. Obama's National Security Advisor, Gen. Jim Jones.

As a tiny handful of you may recall, towards the end of our previous post, we noted a disturbing tendency of the top brass in all branches of the military; this trend may become determinative in Jones' final decision whether to support or oppose the recommendation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal that we switch to a counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy in Afghanistan, which would require adding 40,000 troops. We wrote:

It's not clear whether Jones is himself an anti-war leftist, but it's not uncommon for top generals to drift left as they progress up the heirarchy. It often seems that the bigger the command, the more the commandant "grows in office;" cf. Eric Shinseki, Anthony Zinni, and of course the ultimate recent example, Colin Powell. It's not hard to explain; at the highest levels of command, a general or admiral is less like a military leader and more like a cabinet secretary. Those who head up gargantuan bureaucracies tend to believe in big-bureaucracy solutions to all problems... witness Powell insisting that we could not depose Saddam Hussein without a buildup of half a million troops.

Powell must have known that was impossible; thus, had his advice been accepted, we could not have invaded Iraq at all -- which would have suited Powell (and Shinseki and Zinni, and probably Jones) just fine.

Then we asked and partially answered the critical question:

Does that make such a general a leftist? In the limited sense of having a more Eurocentric (or even more European) viewpoint, yes it does. The reason that European armies typically refuse to fight is that they can't risk their soldiers' lives on anything smaller than the tank battles of the North-Africa campaign. This fits well with the so-called Powell Doctrine: Never send troops unless it's worth refighting World War II... which of course it never seems to be.

In addition to the other strands of evidence we presented, we now have a new piece of the puzzle, via the Weekly Standard blogpost linked above.

There exists a group that calls itself "J Street;" J Street claims to be pro-peace and pro-Israel but is easily demonstrated to be just the opposite: It's pro-Palestinian and very, very anti-Israel, to the point of being antisemitic, in my opinion -- notwithstanding the fact that most members are ethnically Jewish and many are religious Jews as well.

(How can that be? In my worldview, one kind of antisemitism is to insist that of all the peoples in the world, only the Jews have no right to a homeland and must remain nervous, barely tolerated guests in other people's countries. This definition holds no matter the cultural or religious affiliation of the bigot doing the insisting. There are self-hating Jews, just as there are self-hating blacks, gays, and conservatives.)

As Power Line reported, J Street is holding its first annual feast and gabfest soon, and a great many Democratic senators and representatives have signed aboard as "hosts." Alas, so did a couple of Republicans; but it was clear from the outset that many of these sponsors, even many of the Democrats, were fooled by the seemingly pro-Israel rhetoric of J Street: These hosts weren't Israel or Jew haters; they were just useful idiots.

In the last few days, as word hit the street about J Street, their "Gala Dinner" has been shedding sponsors like my old Alaskan Husky used to shed fleas. From the Weekly Standard blogpost:

The anti-Israel organization J Street has been hemorraghing sponsors for its conference as Senators and Congressmen learned of its true agenda. Just in the last few hours, Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) and Reps. Michael McCaul (R-TX) and Leonard Boswell (D-IA), have asked to have their names removed from the host committee. [Sen. Thad Cochran, R-MS, 68%, demanded yesterday that J Street withdraw his name as well. -- DaH]

And then comes the kicker, which is the point of this post that you are reading now...

So J Street has played its hole card: Obama national security advisor Jim Jones has accepted an invitation to participate.

And we now have not just a squabble over J Street. We now have a "teachable moment" about the Obama White House.

To tote up some of the positions of J Street, I must combine information dug up by Michael Goldfarb, Paul Mirengoff, and Scott Johnson:

• Avrum Burg, former speaker of Israel's Knesset (parliament), is closely associated with J Street; he declared that "to define the State of Israel as a Jewish state is the key to its end," then went on to compare Israel to "pre-Nazi Germany."
• Prominent J Street member Henry Siegman compared Israel to South Africa under apartheid; he also appears to support the Walt and Mearsheimer conspiracy theory about a "Jewish lobby" that controls the American government (search on Power Line for many posts about this offensive and antisemitic absurdity -- enthusiastically and monetarily endorsed by Israel's great friend, former President Jimmy Carter);
• J Street receives much of its funding from Arab-American and Moslem-American organizations, as well as from Palestinian and Iranian lobbying groups;
• J Street is "bitterly hostile to the democratically-elected government of Israel" (especially now, under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu);
• Another luminary invited to speak at the Gala Dinner is "poet" Josh Healey, who suggests that Israel is at least metaphorically "writing numbers on the wrists of babies born in the ghetto called Gaza," yet another equation of Israel to the Nazis; Healy extols a march he joined for "Palestinian solidarity."

With the notable exception of the Obamacle's high priest, Chief of Staff Rahm Israel Emanuel (yes that's his full name), the most consistently leftist members of Obama's cabinet and administration have adopted anti-Israelism as a core element of their leftist foreign policy: That is, they blame Israel, not Iran, for nearly all the violence in the Middle East and demand "concessions" that would, in fact, be an Israeli suicide pact.

Gen. Jones eagerness to participate in the Gala Dinner of such a group as J Street is a very strong indicator that, at least with regard to foreign policy, he is indeed a leftist, aligning himself much more with antisemites Samantha Power, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Jimmy Carter than with Israel supporters like Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT, 85% liberal) or Charles "Chuck" Schumer (D-NY, 100%).

Is it too hard to believe that if Jones is in bed with Power -- policywise, I mean; get your rmind out of the gutter! -- on the demonization of Israel, that he's likely to agree with her position, and that of the others in Obama's leftist bloc (including the One Himself), on Afghanistan?

Asked and answered.

Cross-posted on Hot Air's rogues' gallery...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 17, 2009, at the time of 2:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 14, 2009

Su Gaza es Mi Gaza

In a new wrinkle -- at least, I haven't heard of it before -- several European and Moslem countries are attempting to use the "universal jurisdiction" clause of so-called international law to arrest top Israeli government officials who unwisely travel in Europe or the Middle East.

On what charge? Why, for "targeting civilians" in the Gaza war of last December and January -- as claimed in the thoroughly biased (to the point of being antisemitic) Goldstone Report, commissioned by the U.N. Human Rights Council:

One of the report's recommendations is that countries that have signed the Geneva Conventions "start criminal investigations in national courts, using universal jurisdiction, where there is sufficient evidence of the commission of grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949. Where so warranted following investigation, alleged perpetrators should be arrested and prosecuted in accordance with internationally recognized standards of justice."

This concept was tested last month when 16 Palestinians in Britain asked a London court to issue an arrest warrant for Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister who also served in that position during the Gaza war in December and January. Deputy District Judge Daphne Wickham ruled that Mr. Barak had diplomatic immunity.

Nevertheless, Mr. Ya'alon last month "decided not to go to Britain because he learned that there was an attempt in the United Kingdom to try to press charges against him for war crimes following the attempt with Defense Minister Ehud Barak a week earlier," Mr. Peled said.

The practical upshot of such prosecutions is to criminalize self-defense -- but only when practiced by Israel, not when practiced by any other country, no matter how brutal, how violent, or how steeped in depraved indifference to human life (or death). The members of the United Nations Human Rights Council can be found here; not a single friend of Israel in the bunch but more than a few vicious enemies -- including Jordan, Saudi Arabia, China, and Russia -- along with several rogue states, including Chile, Cuba, Nicaragua, Angola, and Pakistan.

If the only Jewish state in the world is singled out for a special denial of the right of self-defense, this is antisemitic by definition... no matter what the religion of Richard Goldstone.

This is the sort of nuttery that arises from the grotesque concept of "universal jurisdiction," by which an ordinary person can simply walk into court in Spain or the United Kingdome or many other venues -- and charge some other person halfway 'round the globe with "human-rights" violations committed against someone else!

That's like a court in Vermont issuing an arrest warrant for some guy in California, charging him with turning back the odometer on a car he sold to some other California resident. The insanity boggles the mind.

According to the Washington Times story linked above, the U.N. Security Council is supposed to meet Wednesday to "discuss the [Goldstone] report." If President Barack H. Obama does not instruct our ambassador to the U.N. to firmly and unequivocally support Israel's right to self defense, then that will be the clearest signal yet that the One plots to throw the entire nation of Israel under the bullet-riddled Obamnibus.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 14, 2009, at the time of 2:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 8, 2009

His Master's Voice

When speaketh the man to whom Barack H. Obama prostrated himself the first time they met, does the president listen? Worse -- does he obey?

In the most recent demonstration of the respect and deference the rest of the world displays for the One They Have Been Laughing At, the King of Saudi Arabia has laid down the law to BO:

King Abdullah told Obama during his visit to Riyadh last week that Arab patience was wearing thin and that a solution of the Arab-Israeli conflict would be the "magic key" to all issues in the region, al-Hayat said, quoting what it called informed sources.

"We want from you a serious participation to solve the Palestinian issue and impose the solution if necessary," the Saudi monarch told Obama, according to the paper, which is owned by a nephew of the monarch. It did not elaborate.

It didn't need to; it's patently obvious that Abdullah refers to the "peace plan" enunciated by Saudi Arabia seven years ago, when Fahd bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud was king, and half-brother Abdullah (bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud) a mere princeling.

The plan is brutally simple: The Palestinians get everything they (and the Arab states) want -- a return to the pre-1967 border, full recognition of a contiguous Palestinian state comprising the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (necessitating cutting Israel in twain, of course), complete control of East Jerusalem (including the Temple Mount), the retreat of Israel's capital from Jerusalem back to Tel Aviv, and of course the right of "return" for millions of radicalized Moslems -- who have lived their entire lives in so-called "refugee" camps outside Israel, as did their fathers and grandfathers before them.

In fair exchange, Israel gets grudging recognition as a state, though not a Jewish state -- for ten full years, if Fatah can be believed. Which they can't.

King Abdullah explained exactly why Obama should stick a shiv into our most reliable ally in the Middle East, one of only two democracies in the region (the other is the one we created in Iraq): "We (Arabs) want to devote our time... to build a generation capable of confronting the future with science and work."

Well! Who can argue with that? Clearly, Israel deleda est.

This is yet another test for a president who hasn't a very good track record on such examinations: After Abdullah witnessed -- to his evident startlement -- Barack Obama bowing deeply at the waist upon meeting the real-sounding but fabricated monarch of a manufactured country of nomadic goat herders, whose chief export after petroleum products is probably animal hides, the king could be excused for thinking we had a patsy for president. The question is whether Mr. Abdullah is right.

So far there has been no response from the White House to the abrupt order issued to our president by the "king" of Saudi Arabia. If the administration means to snub the man (and they should), it needs to do so explicitly, publicly -- and posthaste. The longer it and Obama himself hesitate, the more uncertain, nervous, rattled, and agitated they appear... so much the worse for the country.

Well?

Tick tick tick tick...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 8, 2009, at the time of 12:23 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

May 7, 2009

Jew Hatred and Other EuroLeft In-Jokes

I cannot more strongly urge everyone to read Mark Steyn's piece Israel Today, the West Tomorrow. A few snippets:

"Israel is unfashionable," a Continental foreign minister said to me a decade back. "But maybe Israel will change, and then fashions will change." Fashions do change. But however Israel changes, this fashion won’t. The shift of most (non-American) Western opinion against the Jewish state that began in the 1970s was, as my Continental politician had it, simply a reflection of casting: Israel was no longer the underdog but the overdog, and why would that appeal to a post-war polytechnic Euro Left unburdened by Holocaust guilt?

Fair enough. Fashions change. But the new Judenhass is not a fashion, simply a stark reality that will metastasize in the years ahead and leave Israel isolated in the international "community" in ways that will make the first decade of this century seem like the good old days.

The problem is not simply European boredom with Holocaust haranguing but a combination of three trends:

1. The demographic expansion of the Arab and Moslem populations, coupled with the decline of the population of (Old World) Christendom. (Christendom is expanding in Latin America, Asia, and Africa; but so far, they have not entered the lists in the battle of civilizations.)
2. The aggressive expansion of radical, militant Islamism -- whether of the Salafist, Wahhabist Sunni variety or the Iranian-controlled Qom Shia flavor: Recently, both strains of terrorism-wielding militancy have allied in a war against the "Dar al-Harb," or "House of War" (also called Dar al-Garb, House of the West)... meaning any country that is not run as a sharia state; Shiite Iran now controls Sunni Hamas, for an example of such ecumenicalism.
3. The recent suicidal alliance between the atheist, intellectual Left and radical Islamism: The former seem to believe that they can temporarily team up with the Moslem militants to overthrow democracy, Capitalism, and Christendom (and Judaism); then they'll quickly brush the mullahs and caliphs aside, so that the New Marxism -- that is, liberal fascism -- can reign supreme.

The reality of point 3 above, of course, is that the opposite will happen: It is the Islamists who will fall upon their secularist "allies" and rend them to pieces, leaving only the former to reign over the ruins. The Left, especially the EuroLeft, whose "intellectual" ideology still rules the roost over Chinese and Latin American strains, is in fact intellectually bankrupt and enervated. All the passion, energy, and revolutionary fervor comes from the Moslem militants (hence the name).

Back to Steyn... who is, in case you've forgotten in all the excitement, the actual subject of this post...

Brussels has a Socialist mayor, which isn’t that surprising, but he presides over a caucus a majority of whose members are Muslim, which might yet surprise those who think we’re dealing with some slow, gradual, way-off-in-the-future process here. But so goes Christendom at the dawn of the third millennium: the ruling party of the capital city of the European Union is mostly Muslim.

I find this astonishing; not because I was unaware of the trend, but just as Steyn anticipates, because I had no idea we were so far along the trendline. This goes beyond "disturbing" to "time to push the Panic Button." But there's more to come:

One Saturday afternoon a few weeks ago, a group wearing "BOYCOTT ISRAEL" T-shirts entered a French branch of Carrefour, the world’s largest supermarket chain, and announced themselves. They then systematically advanced down every aisle examining every product, seizing all the items made in Israel and piling them into carts to take away and destroy. Judging from the video they made, the protesters were mostly Muslim immigrants and a few French leftists. But more relevant was the passivity of everyone else in the store, both staff and shoppers, all of whom stood idly by as private property was ransacked and smashed, and many of whom when invited to comment expressed support for the destruction. "South Africa started to shake once all countries started to boycott their products," one elderly lady customer said. "So what you’re doing, I find it good."

Others may find Germany in the ‘30s the more instructive comparison. "It isn’t silent majorities that drive things, but vocal minorities," the Canadian public intellectual George Jonas recently wrote. "Don’t count heads; count decibels. All entities -- the United States, the Western world, the Arab street -- have prevailing moods, and it’s prevailing moods that define aggregates at any given time." Last December, in a well-planned attack on iconic Bombay landmarks symbolizing power and wealth, Pakistani terrorists nevertheless found time to divert one-fifth of their manpower to torturing and killing a handful of obscure Jews helping the city’s poor in a nondescript building. If this was a territorial dispute over Kashmir, why kill the only rabbi in Bombay? Because Pakistani Islam has been in effect Arabized. Demographically, in Europe and elsewhere, Islam has the numbers. But ideologically, radical Islam has the decibels -- in Turkey, in the Balkans, in Western Europe.

How long before Europe's liberal-fascist rulers seize upon such "boycotts" as government policy, to placate (appease) the rampaging "Asian youths" in their cities -- and to distract the rest of their population away from the EuroLeft's own abysmal economic, social, and police failures? How long before the "boycott" extends from Israel to "unregistered Israeli agents"... that is, Jews? Please pardon me if I don't have much faith in the ability (or willingness) of leftist intellectuals to take the high road, and not blame some convenient minority group for all of the Left's incompetencies.

(Note the sarcasm-quotes around boycott. A real boycott is voluntary: Charles Parnell did not force anyone to shun landlord Charles C. Boycott. But these Carrefour rioters, which is what they actually are, prevent other people from buying Israeli products.)

I think I can only quote one more passage and remain within the "fair use" exemption to copyright infringement, so I shall choose carefully. Consider this; Steyn postulates :

So it will go. British, European, and even American troops will withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, and a bomb will go off in Madrid or Hamburg or Manchester, and there will be nothing left to blame except Israeli "disproportion." For the remnants of European Jewry, the already discernible migration of French Jews to Quebec, Florida, and elsewhere will accelerate. There are about 150,000 Jews in London today -- it’s the thirteenth biggest Jewish city in the world. But there are approximately one million Muslims. The highest number of Jews is found in the 50-54 age group; the highest number of Muslims are found in the four-years-and-under category. By 2025, there will be Jews in Israel, and Jews in America, but not in many other places. Even as the legitimacy of a Jewish state is rejected, the Jewish diaspora -- the Jewish presence in the wider world -- will shrivel.

And then, to modify Richard Ingrams, who will dare not to damn Israel? There’ll still be a Holocaust Memorial Day, mainly for the pleasures it affords to chastise the new Nazis. As Anthony Lipmann, the Anglican son of an Auschwitz survivor, wrote in 2005: “When on 27 January I take my mother’s arm -- tattoo number A-25466 -- I will think not just of the crematoria and the cattle trucks but of Darfur, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Jenin, Fallujah.” Jenin?

Jenin, you will all recall, is the fake massacre that many accused Israeli forces (without a shred of evidence) of committing in April 2002, during an incursion into the West Bank called Operation Defensive Shield. Despite wild allegations that Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers wantonly slaughtered civilians and machine-gunned prisoners, bulldozed houses and entire apartment buildings with families inside, and tied Palestinians to the front of Israeli tanks as human shields (!), subsequent investigations by the United Nations and even Israel-hating Amnesty International debunked all the claims except two:

• There was indeed a battle in Jenin; but it was between the IDF on the one hand and Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Yassir Arafat's Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades on the other. Nearly everyone killed on both sides during the Battle of Jenin (and in the larger operation) was an armed soldier or militant.
• When Israel took control of Jenin, they followed their longstanding and pretty effective policy of bulldozing houses of the families of suicide bombers -- but specifically, only those houses that had been granted to those families by the PLO or Fatah or Hamas (depending on the era) as a reward for the suicide bombing (eras may go and come, but Jew hatred abides).

Palestinian "leaders" hope to encourage even more suicide bombings, as sons kill themselves so that their fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters can live in a nice house that otherwise the bomber could never afford. By bulldozing such houses, Israel removes that incentive. Amnesty International, however, considers any bulldozing of "civilian" housing to be a "war crime," no matter the provenance of said house.

War crime it may be, in the technical sense. But to lump Jenin in with the real genocides in Darfur and Rwanda is utter madness, especially for a man whose mother is a Jewish Holocaust survivor. Perhaps when the sharia court comes to hang Mr. Lippman, he will lend them the rope, in an effort to show his "interfaith multiculturalism."

Israel is vitally important to the West not only because it's the Jewish homeland, not only because it's one of only two democracies in the Middle East (the other being the rather recently democratized nation of Iraq), but because Israel is a bellwether, the "canary in a coal mine" that previews what is to come for the rest of the non-Moslem world. As Israel goes, so goeth Dar al-Harb.

Israel is going -- going under for the second time, though not yet the third. An increasing portion of the world sees Israel as the greatest threat to world peace... not because anyone expects Israel to attack Antwerp or Brussels, but rather because the very existence of Israel so enrages Dar al-Islam (the "House of Peace") that they can think of nothing but war and bloody human sacrifice.

The non-American world (plus the Barack H. Obama administration) thinks of Israel as a threat to world peace because of how Moslems insist upon reacting to Israel: "Look what you made me do!"

And they see world peace arising from Israel's suicide as an act of spiritual propitiation, rendering it consistent for militant Moslems to allow everyone else to live in relative peace, as dhimmi, second-class citizens in a sharia state. Thus, secular leftists around the globe argue, we bring about world peace by joining in violent attacks upon the only peaceful culture in the most violent part of the world.

Welcome to the monkey house.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 7, 2009, at the time of 5:59 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 4, 2009

Sacrificial Lamb: Obamacle Sets Up Israel as Fall Guy

This was so unexpected, so out of the blue, that when I read it, you could have knocked me over with a 2,000-lb anvil:

Israel is concerned about remarks White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel made during a closed-door meeting Sunday with 300 major donors of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the powerful pro-Israel lobby in Washington.

While expressing unwavering U.S. support for Israel, Israeli media reported that Emanuel also said confronting Iran depends on making progress in negotiations seeking to create a Palestinian state.

Does Emanuel believe that such an implied threat will actually cause Israel to reverse course, with newly elected (for the second time) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu abruptly transmaugrifying into former Prime Minister Ehud Barak? No; say what you will about Rahm Emanuel, he is not one of the pie-eyed fantasists with which the president has surrounded himself.

Nor does anyone else expect such a result... not even CBS:

Israel's hawkish new government flatly rejects that linkage. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sees the possibility of a nuclear-armed Iran as a threat to the existence of the State of Israel -- a separate and far more pressing threat than that of the Palestinians. Netanyahu will make that clear when he meets President Obama in two weeks at the White House....

Netanyahu has also said "Israel will not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons -- with all the implications." In other words, Israel would consider a unilateral, preemptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities as a last resort.

And the citizens of the state of Israel would never permit Netanyahu to go "wobbly" on them; they elected Likud over Kadima's Tzipi Livni for precisely that reason:

The Israeli public at large is also skeptical about U.S. talks with Iran. A poll by Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv shows that, while 60 percent of Israelis have a favorable opinion of President Obama, only 32 percent approve of his policy regarding Israel.

So what on earth is going on here? Why does the Chief of Staff to President Barack H. Obama make such a point of publicly linking the two issues? I can think of only one reason: Emanuel believes that his boss' attempt to bully Israel into caving to Palestinian demands (pushed not only by Obama but also the raft of brazenly anti-Israel and antisemitic members of his administration) is doomed to failure... so Rahm Emanuel is already setting Israel up as the scapegoat.

When talks to create a "two-state solution" collapse again -- as they invariably do, given that only one side has any interest at all in there being two sovereign states west of the Jordan River -- the administration plans to blame Israel for Barack Obama's failure. The One the Palestinians and Eurolefties Have Been Waiting For may even lead a crusade against Israel in the court of world opinion, perhaps even refusing to veto some of the continuous anti-Israel resolutions that splash into the U.N. like sewage into a septic-tank.

That will serve three purposes:

• It will overjoy the Jew-hating Left in both the United States and in Europe, leading to an outpouring of money and electoral support for B.O.;
• It will make it easier for Obama to hold his unconditional-appeasement talks with Iran, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda;
• And it will give the president someone to point his finger at in respose to all the bloody horrors that will befall the Middle East (and the rest of the world) when Iran tests its first working nuclear missile.

With one cold-blooded, narcissistic set up, Emanuel could bring about a Middle-East war the likes of which the world has never seen before, possibly resulting in the complete destruction of Israel and the energy and economic collapse of the rest of us. Interesting, considering the Chief of Staff's last name.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 4, 2009, at the time of 7:21 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

April 6, 2009

Obamunism - Through the Eyes of a Child

Well, I think we all knew, somewhere in the back of our collective minds, that Barack H. Obama was planning it; most of us just thought it was so ludicrous, so retro, that he would never really propose it.

But now he has. Great leaping horny toads, it's Dr. Helen Caldicott's unilateral nuclear disarmament all over again:

Just hours after North Korea launched a long-range rocket, President Barack Obama called for "a world without nuclear weapons" and said the United States has a “moral responsibility ” to lead the way, as the only nation ever to use them....

The president directly addressed the Cold War history of this former Soviet bloc city, calling the remaining nuclear weapons “the most dangerous legacy” of that era.
He again pointed to history to say that America must lead. “As a nuclear power -- as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon -- the United States has a moral responsibility to act,” he said.

Obama proposed doing so by reducing America’s arsenal, if not altogether eliminating it; hosting a summit on nuclear security; seeking ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; strengthening the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; and pursuing a new agreement aimed at stopping the production of fissile materials.

Also, he proposes gathering up all vulnerable nuclear material -- or “loose nukes” -- within four years. That’s an issue Obama also worked on in the Senate, with Sen. Dick Lugar (R-Ind.).

As we all know, the only reason that Russia, Red China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and soon to be North Korea and Iran have nuclear weapons is self defense against the United States... and if only we would unilaterally eliminate our nuclear arsenal -- ¡ Si, su puede! -- these other countries would no longer fear us -- and they will surely follow suit. As the New York Times succinctly sums up the theory:

Mr. Obama said that his administration would “reduce the role of nuclear weapons” in its national security strategy, and would urge other countries to do the same. He pointed to the agreement he reached last week with President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia to begin negotiations on reducing warheads and stockpiles, and said the two countries would try to reach an agreement by the end of the year. He also promised to aggressively pursue American ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which in the past has faced strong opposition in Congress.

It is a strategy based on the idea that if the United States shows it is willing to greatly shrink the size of its atomic arsenal, ban nuclear testing and cut off the worldwide production of bomb material, reluctant allies and partners around the world will be more likely to rewrite nuclear treaties and enforce sanctions against North Korea and Iran.

That is, if America weakens itself by unilaterally dumping its nuclear weapons, then other nations will feel more empowered to aggressively enforce already existing sanctions against rogue nations. But why? By definition, "already existing sanctions" already exist; if our allies are not willing to enforce them now, why would they be more willing if we become weaker? Does Obama truly believe that the world defies us because we're too powerful? Does he believe that we're evil, imperialist warmongers oppressing the world, causing them to resist us the way that the Jedi knights resisted the imperial storm troopers of Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader?

This is magical thinking at its most emblematic: There is no obvious connection between the United States eliminating its nuclear arsenal and Pakistan following suit -- the latter is far more concerned about India (and vice versa) than about us -- or North Korea and Iran abandoning their own nuke hunt; they see nuclear weapons as their route to power in their own regions or protection against their own enemies. It's silly storytelling, jaw-dropping narcissism, and childish "wishing on a star" to imagine that every other country in the world that has or wants nuclear weapons is only driven by fear of America's nuclear arsenal.

But if there is any other reason why they want to be members of the nuclear club, then our reduction or even complete nuclear disarmament will have no effect upon them at all... except perhaps to encourage them tenfold: It's easy for third-world countries to believe that if they have nukes and we don't, they will no longer be third world -- they will be the first world; they will be the masters!

The childishness of this Obamic policy betokens an equally childish worldview, full of good guys (who are always good) and bad guys (eternally bad), superficial understandings, a view of history based more upon melodrama than reality, and magical thinking.

Heroes and villains as world actors

The One is the Lightbringer, whose devoted acolytes are trying to spread the "good news" around the globe (America alone is too small a stage). There is no "in-between," only a vast sea of unenlightened souls awaiting but a touch, a glance from the Obamacle to fall into the rapture.

The Bad Guy in Chief is George W. Bush, of course; and all Republicans are his henchmen. We are consciously evil, in that we sit around and cackle about our latest evil plans, perhaps chewing on the odd pinky or two. (Note that there is another shadowy group of conspirators who may be the real villains in this piece, "working the machinations behind the scenes," as Louis Farrakhan put it; we'll get to them in a moment.)

The great advantage of such hero-villain thinking is that it forces an automatic devaluing of opposing viewpoints: Of course you don't think government should take over the economy... you're a Republican! You want to kill and eat the poor anyway.

Superficiality as a guiding principle

Obamunism is centrally focused on a series of superficial and (upon analysis) meaningless catch phrases, slogans, and jingoisms: hope, change, the One we have been waiting for, audacity, coming together, post-partisan, post-racial, diplomacy, an end to torture, and so forth. While each of these words or phrases could impart meaning in other contexts, as Barack Obama and his apostles use them, we have no earthly idea what he means. Hope for what? Change from what to what? The One we have been waiting for -- to do what?

Even "diplomacy" is an empty concept by itself: Gandhi practiced diplomacy; so did Hitler.

Bear in mind, the more superficial a policy, the more ill-defined and vague, the less able critics are to attack it. It assumes radically different dimensions in the mind of each person who hears about it... and each tends to envision it in a way that resonates with him, personally, satisfying that specific individual's wish-fulfillment fantasies. It's very, very tough to tell someone that his dreams are unrealistic and unattainable; he tends to react emotionally -- and sometimes violently.

The heroic epic as public policy

When Obama and his fellow Democrats recount history (particularly the economic history of the United States and the history of the conflict in the Middle East), it's clear their "understanding" is based not upon what actually happened but upon what should have happened to make things more coherent and plot-driven, like a novel.

We didn't have a financial crash because of foolhardy (and bipartisan) government policy to encourage poor people to buy houses they couldn't afford, regulation and oversight that was badly written by Congress and poorly implemented by several administrations, and increasingly complex financial instruments that few people understand, including those who invented them. No, it's much more gripping if there is a vast banking conspiracy -- or as a disturbingly large number of Obama appointees would see it, a vast Jew-banker conspiracy). The conspiracy (or "lobby") controls everything behind the scenes, like a bad John Grisham melodrama (sorry for the redundancy).

This reductionism is signalled by the use of capitalized terms beginning with "Big," personalizing the enemy without actually naming them: Big Tobacco, Big Carbon, Big Business, Big Money.

And the continual conflict among Arab countries is not driven by a religious interpretation of Islam that demands constant "jihad;" that's boring... and it smacks of racism, too. But if everything bad in the entire region is driven by a single rogue villain (Israel) which causes all the problems for the sole purpose of "taking over" -- an alien presence that exploits the traditional peoples of the region -- well then we have an enemy we can focus upon, a much tighter plot to follow, somebody we can actually defeat!

Conspiracy mongering is always based, at core, on a sense that the universe should really be more coherent, more linear, and more dramatic than it actually is. It should follow literary rules of plot development, causality, a climax, and a satisfying denoument. Here is where Obama's man-crush on Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers becomes the synecdoche of his worldview. It's not very satisfying if blacks are doing badly because they have a lousy culture, or if kids aren't being educated because they have egregious work habits and have never enjoyed thinking. It's much more thrilling if Republican big business has busily been suppressing children's education because they need more worker-drones for capitalist imperialism -- and Whitey has been holding down "people of color" for a thousand years.

(By a curious coincidence, among much of Obama's inner circle, it appears that both plots have the same conspirators, the same villains: Jews. As antisemitism rises across the rest of the globe, it now finds a sympathetic ear at the highest levels of the American government.)

The Childe Left hate and fear complexity and constructive chaos more than anything in the world (just as literal children do); they also project this fear onto the Right, pretending that it is conservatives who embody "black and white" thinking, and liberals are the ones who understand shades of gray... but the Left's actions and policies belie the proclamations of maturity and wisdom.

Waiting for a miracle as grand strategy

Obamunism, and its larger parent New Leftism, deeply believe in the "magic bullet" theory of governance: For every intractable problem, there is a single, simple solution that will solve everything -- which has been missed by generations of previous, unenlightened souls, leaving its discovery to the hero of the saga. Some hitherto unsuspected connection exists between (seemingly unrelated) events A and B; Doing A will, as if by miracle, bring about B:

• Many times in our past, and currently in the rest of the world, governments tightly control the economy via wage and price controls, overtaxation, heavy-handed regulation, union boosterism, and "five-year plans." This has never resulted in an economic renaissance, but generally recession and depression. But wait -- that's because it wasn't done by the One! This time, under the encyclical circulated by Barack Obama, when the government seizes control of the economy, it will cause the greatest economic boom in American, nay world, history... and the world will forever revere Obama as its champion eternal. (Don't ask how; it just will. And of course you're skeptical... you're a capitalist.)
• Unlike all previous diplomatic overtures, when the great man just sits down and talks to his fellow world leaders (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong-Il, Raul Castro, Ayman Zawahiri) -- when he explains to them that, unlike the previous regime, the current administration doesn't want to conquer and annex their lands, kill their children, and violate their women -- then the light from his heart will shine through, and these national leaders will realize that they need fear America no longer. They will all fall into each other's arms (in a manly way, I mean), have a good cry and a wonderful laugh, and all will be well. Nuclear warheads will be beaten into solar-power plants, war will be obsolete, the Jews will be driven into the sea, and all will live happily ever after. "And guns and swords and uniforms lay scattered on the ground." Barack Hussein Obama is, quite simply, the One that Ahmadinejad has been waiting for.
• Due to stubborn resistance and ignorance, generations have closed their ears and stopped their eyes to the deadly, global peril of man-made climate change. But as soon as Congress enacts the divine vision of the Obamacle -- instantly, the world will cool, the seas will subside, the harvest will be bountiful, and disease and famine will be driven into the void. The word of the king is the blood of the land. We won't even have to wait for the policies to take effect... directly the word is uttered, the Earth will shake, the sky will brighten, and peace and plenty will rain upon all -- equally -- like manna from heaven.

Achievement without effort; success without setback or disappointment; like a Michael Jackson video, Captain Eo points his finger and a bolt of lightning obliterates the bad guy in a puff of CGI. It's magic!

Obamunism - through the eyes of a lizard

It took me a while to realize it, but it's the childishness of Obamunism that irritates me more than any other element... its reduction to heroes and villains, its soap-bubble superficiality, its melodramatic story telling, and the magical thinking that underpins all the rest. Our country is ruled by the inmates of an excessively permissive and progressive preschool.

The entire Obama administration needs a long time-out. Alas, what we're more likely to see is a time-out from history for the entire country... followed by a very rude and deadly awakening.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 6, 2009, at the time of 2:24 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

February 27, 2009

Samantha Power, Chas Freeman, and Now - Hillary?

First, Samantha Power -- the anti-Israel, antisemitic Palestinian supporter and former advisor to Barack H. Obama during his campaign (until she was exiled for calling Hillary Clinton a "monster") -- is resurrected from the political graveyard to serve the administration of Barack H. Obama as "senior director for multilateral affairs at the National Security Council."

Then anti-Israel, antisemitic sock puppet of the House of Saud (and apologist for Palestinian terrorism and the Tiananmen Square massacre), Charles "Chas" Freeman, is tapped to be the chairman of the National Intelligence Council, which takes the lead in crafting the National Intelligence Estimates that are presented directly to the President of the United States.

And now Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, previously thought to be a supporter of Israel, is pressuring Israel to allow nearly $1 billion of "humanitarian aid" to flow to Hamas for Gaza "reconstruction."

I wonder what they'll do with their billion bucks? They might:

• Feed the starving refugees in Gaza;
• Eliminate the putative "refugee camps" and settle the residents in permanent locations throughout the PA;
• Open schools to teach literacy to girls;
• Construct courts of genuine justice that would prosecute parents for talking their children into being suicide bombers and fathers for murdering their daughters for being seen talking to a boy;
• Engage the Arab world to help the Palestinian economy enter the 21st century;
• Buy rockets, missiles, suicide belts, and explosively formed projectiles and use them to slaughter innocent Jewish children, women, and old men.

I wonder which choice they will pick?

Clinton has relayed messages to Israel about the aid issue in the past week, and senior aides have made it clear the question would be central to her visit to Israel on Tuesday. [I suppose that means the question of continual Hamas rocket fire into Israel will be peripheral -- if she raises it at all.]

Influential Senator John Kerry last week witnessed first-hand the difficulties involved in delivering key supplies to Gaza, which has been under an Israeli blockade since Hamas seized power in June 2007, and is struggling to recover from Israel's devastating 22-day war. [Recovering from Israel's war? Great leaping horny toads.]

So why are the Israelis being so hard hearted and mean spirited?

Israel insists it will not reopen its crossing points into Gaza until Hamas releases Gilad Shalit, a soldier captured by Palestinian militants in a deadly cross-border raid from Gaza in June 2006.

How petty. What is the value of a single Jew, when weighed against all those Palestinian victims of genocidal Israeli tyranny? Just ask Chas Freeman.

But we needn't worry; this is just another example of "Jewish leaders overreact[ing]," as Atlantic Monthly columnist Jeffrey Goldberg assures us.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 27, 2009, at the time of 2:54 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 28, 2008

Fauxtonement: "Prayergate" Takes a Weird, New Turn

The bizarre "scandal" of Barack H. Obama's "stolen prayer" took a strange twist today, as the Jerusalem Post reported that the "Yeshiva student" (still no sign that there is any independent verification of his status) tearfully apologized on Israel's Channel 2 for "stealing" Obama's prayer from the Wailing Wall and returned it (to the TV station); but the putative thief was still not identified -- Channel 2 coyly revealed only his initial, Aleph, and "obscured" his face. And Mr. Aleph made a statement during his interview which makes it fairly clear that he is an Obama supporter, as Big Lizards predicted yesterday:

"I'm sorry. It was a kind of prank," Aleph said, his hands shaking as he fingered the tightly wadded-up sheet of King David Hotel letterhead. "I hope he wasn't hurt. We all believe he will take the presidency."

So if we can take Mr. Aleph at his word, then instead of a militant, right-wing Jew violating Obama's right to have a "private communication between him and God," we have a still-anonymous person, still with no evidence that he is a yeshiva student, who certainly appears to support Obama for president, and who claims it was all a "prank."

A prank? Let's review the bidding:

• Apparently, Mr. Aleph stole Obama's Wailing Wall prayer -- unprecedented in Israel -- and handed it to at least two media outlets, one of which printed it.
• Our point that the Secret Service guarding Obama did not take Mr. Aleph to have hostile intent, or they wouldn't have allowed him to get close enough to see where Obama tucked the prayer, also appears to have been correct: Mr. Aleph is either a juvenile jokester or else in collaboration with the Obama campaign itself.
• Mr. Aleph hopes this didn't hurt Obama and believes, along with all his friends, that Obama will win the election.
• The media outlet that printed the prayer, Maariv, claims that the Obama campaign itself earlier released the text of the prayer.
• And I still cannot find a single news source who will either confirm or deny that the campaign released the text for publication -- though every reporter traveling with the presumptive nominee would of course know whether he, personally, had been given the text by the campaign.

But we should shortly find out more: Shahar Alon, a Jerusalem attorney, has demanded that the Attorney General of Israel investigate the incident with an eye towards criminal prosecution of Maariv -- and Alon has also initiated a boycott of the newspaper:

Attorney Shahar Alon asked attorney General Menachem Mazuz to launch an investigation against the editor of Israeli daily Ma'ariv, who published the content of the note last week....

"By making the note public," Alon wrote to Mazuz, "the newspaper violated the law protecting holy sites, several clauses in the penal code and also infringed upon the basic rights of a person's honor and freedom."

Alongside his petition, Alon also initiated a boycott of the newspaper. In a letter he published, Alon called on all those who felt that the newspaper offended them by desecrating the holiness of the Western Wall, or felt that Obama had been personally disrespected, to refrain from purchasing the newspaper or cancel their subscriptions.

Maariv will either have to defend itself or else plead guilty. Assuming they do the former, they will of course repeat the defense that the so-called "leak" was authorized even before Obama arrived at the wall.

But this time, as part of a criminal probe, the elite media will not be able to stand silent... at least not without cost, as such a brazen attempt to kill the story they started would severely damage their credibilty and make clear just what I personally believe they are trying to avoid making clear: That this entire event was orchestrated by the Obama campaign.

So let's keep our fingers crossed that Attorney General Mazuz does authorize an investigation; we need to know whether Barack Obama truly was victimized by an angry Jew (or juvenile jokester)... or whether the presumptive Democratic nominee is a cynical, manipulative, Chicago pol who has just done what no other American politician has ever dared do: Thuggishly politicize the holiest and most sacred site of world Jewry, the only surviving wall of the great temple in Jerusalem.

Jews especially, but Christians as well, need to know what Obama truly thinks is the purpose of religion: to make oneself into "an instrument of [God's] will," or to mold into a campaign commercial that plays on victimhood and implies a religiosity that evidence indicates the candidate does not actually attain.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 28, 2008, at the time of 1:07 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

June 29, 2008

Olmert On a Nutshell: Yesterday's Dead Outweigh Tomorrow's Victims

In a "prisoner" swap stunning in its pointlessness and inhumanity, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his cabinet have agreed to release several live terrorists -- including a notorious Lebanese killer of Jews, whose crimes include one of the most horrific murders of the long Palestinian war against Israel -- in exchange for the bodies of two dead Israeli soldiers:

Israel’s government voted on Sunday to trade one of the most notorious convicts in its prisons, a Lebanese murderer, for the bodies of two Israeli soldiers whose cross-border capture led to and partly motivated its month-long war with the Lebanese militia Hezbollah in the summer of 2006.

After a wrenching national debate which served to drive hesitant officials, including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, into accepting the deal, the cabinet voted 22 to 3 to trade the prisoner, Samir Kuntar, along with four other Lebanese, for Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, the two Israeli soldiers....

Mr. Kuntar was part of a cell that in 1979 raided the northern Israeli town of Nahariya, shooting dead Danny Haran while his daughter Einat, 4, watched, then smashing the girl’s head, killing her as well. Mr. Haran’s wife, Smadar, hid with their 2-year-old daughter and accidentally suffocated her to death in an effort to stop her from crying out.

Thus, Olmert signals that he is willing to sacrifice future generations of Israeli Jews in order to comfort the families of the dead.

While I understand the anguish that must enshroud those families, as much as can a person who has not personally experienced such tragedy, I have enough clarity of mind to realize that, as important as it is to retrieve the remains for proper burial, it's far more important to protect future innocent lives.

Goldwasser and Regev were captured alive; the terrorists bestially butchered them, even while they continued negotiating with Israel for their "release." The negotiation by Hezbollah was a farce of utter mendacity, and Olmert now insures that this pattern will happen again and again: Terrorists now have a green light to kill their cake and sell it, too.

This deal is a perscription for disaster; make no mistake, by releasing Kuntar and the other Palestinian terrorists, Olmert has made the world a more dangerous place:

• Olmert and his coalition have condemned an indeterminate number of innocent Israelis to death; Kuntar and his fellow butchers will see their release as a reward from Allah, and they will instantly dive into yet another murderous plot, and another and another.
• The Olmert government has prolonged the war with Iran and its proxies; the release will embolden Hamas and Hezbollah, and through them Iran, giving them heart to redouble their efforts to "cancel" the "Zionist project."
• The deal has handed a huge propaganda and morale coup to Hamas and Hezbollah, while endangering America and the West; the rest of the Moslem world will once again start to see radical Islamic terrorism as the "strong horse;" Israel will be weakened in the eyes of the world; it will be so much harder for the West to sustain the fight, knowing that we no longer have a reliable ally in Israel.
• And Olmert and his cabinet have declared open season on capturing or kidnapping Israeli soldiers and civilians, even making bodysnatching into a viable Palestinian military strategy: The more dead Israelis Iran's puppets hold, the more of their most brutal and effective terrorist serial killers the Israelis will release. Hamas now understand that they can kill their own prisoner, Gilad Shalit, knowing his death will not diminish his value in trade.

Even the Israeli government seems to realize that this deal is a dreadful mistake that they will never be able to justify to Israelis:

“Despite all hesitations, after weighing the pros and the cons, I support the agreement,” Mr. Olmert was quoted by his spokesman as telling his cabinet at the start of the meeting. “Our initial theory was that the soldiers were alive... Now we know with certainty there is no chance that that is the case.” He added, “There will be much sadness in Israel, much humiliation considering the celebrations that will be held on the other side.”

So why did he accept it? Very simply, he hadn't even enough spine to stand up to the families of Goldwasser and Regev.

Olmert hadn't enough courage to look the families in the eye and say, "I feel your loss, as I feel the losses of all the men who died during the war in 2006. But we cannot jeopardize everything that Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev fought and died for. Of all people in the world, those two brave heroes would not have asked what you are asking, and they would never have accepted such a trade. I'm sorry."

The celebrations will be boisterous and sustained in Gaza City... and in Ramallah, Beirut, Damascus, and Tehran. Palestinians and Israelis alike will see this as capitulation by Israel. More attacks will follow, more rockets and greater destruction will rain down upon Sderot and other cities.

It's hard to imagine a stupider and more self-destructive strategy; if Iran threatens to desecrate and cremate the bodies of Israeli soldiers, will Olmert agree not to attack Iran's nuclear facilities? Is that all it takes to ensure a nuclear-armed Iran? If he has insufficient courage to say No to the Goldwasser and Regev families, has he even a prayer of standing up to Hassan Nasrallah, Mahmoud Zahar, Bashar Assad, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

Perhaps Ehud Olmert can make things better by proclaiming that by trading a half-dozen live terrorist murderers, hands still dripping blood, for two dead Israeli soldiers, he has secured "peace in our time." Though I doubt this peace will last as long as did the Munich Agreement of 1938.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 29, 2008, at the time of 4:54 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

May 28, 2008

A Tale of "Two" Parties

One of the reasons I hate Breitbart.com -- the internet "news" website founded by Andrew Brietbart, developer of the Huffington Post -- is that it's more than biased; it's clumsily and stubbornly leftist, often not even pretending that the right might have a point. Or even exist!

In this piece on embattled Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, we learn that Olmert's defense minister -- former Prime Minister Ehud Barak -- has called upon Olmert to resign in the wake of numerous credible allegations of bribery and four separate and ongoing police investigations of the PM. If Olmert refuses to quit, Barak says that he will pull Labor out of the coalition and force early elections.

It's the most serious career crisis Olmert has faced since becoming prime minister, after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon -- founder of the Kadima party, which won a plurality in the last elections -- lapsed into a coma following a stroke.

But one fascinating omission struck me as I read the article: Nowhere in the piece does Brietbart even so much as mention the right-wing Likud party... which is notable because every, single poll in Israel indicates that, in the event of elections anytime soon, Likud will be the new plurality party -- and might even become Israel's first ever majority government.

(The Alignment party, a.k.a. the Labour Alignment, held an absolute majority of seats in the Knesset for a year or so after the 1967 Six Day War. But Alignment was itself a coalition party, formed by the merger of Mapai, Labour Unity, Rafi, and Mapam -- and the majority came from the seats formerly held by the latter two parties. So the claim that Alignment was a "majority party" deserves at least an asterisk: It never actually won a majority of seats in an election as itself.

(If Likud were to win a majority of the Knesset seats, it would be the first time in Israeli history that a single party actually won a majority of seats in an election.)

In fact, it almost appears that Breitbart is unaware that there are three major parties in Israel, not just two: Kadima, Labor, and Likud. (Plus a host of minor parties that come into play whenever one of the majors seeks a ruling coalition, which is after every single election.)

For example, here is Brietbart on the potential effects of the threat:

Labour secretary-general Eitan Cabel said that if Kadima does not oust Olmert and elect a new party leader, Labour would move to set a date for early elections within two months.

Without the support of Labour's 17 MPs, Olmert's coalition government would lose its parliamentary majority in the 120-member Knesset....

Several members of Olmert's Kadima party have already let it be known they would be willing to accept the premier's job, including Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Transport Minister Shaul Mofaz and Internal Security Minister Avi Dichter.

This rather makes it sound as if either another member of Kadima will take Olmert's place -- or else new elections will put Labor firmly in charge!

The odd thing is that, by so studiously ignoring Likud as if they didn't exist, Brietbart manages to avoid telling its readers a critical point that changes everything about this story: Since Barak knows that new elections would mean a Likud government (not Labor) headed by his old archrival, Benjamin Netanyahu, he is extremely unlikely actually to do what he threatens... and since Olmert also knows that, he is equally unlikely to take the threat seriously and resign.

By contrast, here is the AP article on the same threat:

If Labor Party leader Ehud Barak carries out his promise to withdraw from Olmert's fragile coalition, new elections could usher in a government opposed to current peace talks with the Palestinians and Syria....

He promised to consider cooperating with a new leader from Olmert's Kadima Party, but vowed to pull Labor out of the government "soon" if Olmert doesn't step aside. Without Labor, Olmert would lose his parliamentary majority, and new elections would probably be forced two years ahead of schedule.

Polls forecast a poor performance for Labor if elections are held now. Polls have signaled that hard-line opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu, a fierce critic of Olmert's peace overtures, would win. That could deter Barak from following through on his threat to bring down the government.

Before posting this, I gave Breitbart another chance: I went to the main site, found the newest article on this news item, and read it. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that they had actually updated the story to include discussion of other parties. They added these two paragraphs:

The premier also faced pressure from leftist parties even though in the past they have supported governments involved in the peace process.

"I am fully in favour of negotiations with Palestinians and Syria, but Olmert cannot from a moral point of view carry out such discussions following the damaging testimony by Morris Talansky," said Ran Cohen of the Meretz party.

Well, I'm glad we've got that sorted out! So now we know that, in the event of early elections, Ehud Olmert will be followed by Tzipi Livni, Shaul Mofaz, or Avi Dichter of Kadima; Ehud Barak of Labor -- or perhaps Ran Cohen of Meretz-Yachad (or one of the other four Members of the Knesset from that party).

Reason number 523 why we should not treat Breitbart as a real news source.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 28, 2008, at the time of 3:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 25, 2008

Hamas Invades Egypt; Israel Blamed

For what I believe is the third time in as many days, Hamas militants breached the wall separating Egypt from the Gaza Strip, this time using bulldozers in full view of the Egyptian national police:

There were small clashes throughout the day, with short episodes of rock-throwing. Egyptians fired guns into the air and aimed water cannons above the heads of the those in the crowd to keep them back. The new breaches in the wall were large enough for cars and trucks to drive through, and some Egyptian guards then retreated.

But why is this peculiar thing happening at this moment in time? Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has the explanation:

Egypt is under pressure from Israel and the United States to restore the international border and regulate it, but does not want to use excessive force against the Gazans, whom the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, has insisted are starving under the pressure of Israeli restrictions on imports and travel.

Darn those Jews! For no reason at all -- other than a few thousand rockets fired from Gaza into Israeli cities -- the wicked Zionist Entity has ceased donating food, fuel, and medical supplies to the utterly helpless and impoverished Palestinian people who are currently attacking Israeli cities.

Therefore, Hamas has no choice but to bomb, tear down, or drive bulldozers through the border wall... so that the helpless, starving, impoverished Palestinians, with not a pair of shekels to rub together, can race through the gap by the hundreds of thousands... to bazaars in Egypt, where they buy millions of dollars worth of necessities, comforts, and luxuries.

If somebody can offer a better explanation to me than the obvious one -- that Gaza, led by its Hamas government, has noisily invaded Egypt, while the corrupt Egyptian police stood by and did nothing (and Mubarak blamed the Jews) -- I should like to see it.

But such a non-response on Egypt's part is likewise fraught with peril; as the Times asks, at what point does Mubarak worry that...

• Inviting Hamas to visit is altogether a different thing than inviting them to leave;
• Palestinians, around whom human sacrifice flows like water around a fish, are not exactly the most stable group to grant permanent right of access;
• And at what point, by simple custom and propinquity, does the "responsibility" for feeding, fueling, and treating millions of Palestinians -- who cannot ever seem to feed, fuel, or treat themselves -- devolve from Israeli shoulders to Egyptian?

Of course, Israel is no happier about these repeated breachings of the wall than are the Egyptians:

Hamas is trying to push Egypt into an agreement to regulate the border without having it sealed, as it had been from the time Hamas took over Gaza in early June. A Hamas spokesman, Sami Abu Zuhri, said, “The gaps shouldn’t be closed because they provide urgent assistance to the Palestinians.”

Israeli officials have expressed increasing concern to the Egyptian and United States governments that Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups are using the border breach to import military supplies and to send out fighters for training or terrorism.

Israel has raised its security alert for the Sinai and warned its citizens not to travel to the region’s popular beaches, fearing attacks there, and is saying it has credible reports of new efforts to smuggle gunmen and suicide bombers through the Sinai into Israel. The last suicide bombing in Israel, in the southern resort town of Eilat a year ago, was carried out by a militant who had traveled there through the Sinai.

There is, of course, no wall along the border between Egypt and Israel; the two countries have been at peace since the 1978 signing of the Camp David Accords, the only treaty ever signed between Israel and an Arab state that has actually worked... oddly enough, pushed through by President Jimmy Carter, the worst American president of the twentieth century. Thus, if Hamas terrorists can freely travel into Egypt, they can bypass the walls between "Hamastan" (Gaza) and Israel to carry out murderous bombings.

The precarious Israeli government led by Ehud Olmert of the Kadima Party is widely believed to be already fallen in all but name; an election today would very likely bring Likud to power, possibly even in the first majority government in Israel's history. And one major reason for this is the government's relentlessly ham-fisted policy towards the Palestinians; at the moment, for the latest outrageous example, Olmert is toying the with idea of handing over control of the crossings between Israel and Gaza itself -- to Hamas:

Mr. Olmert is expected to discuss the Gaza crisis along with peace talks in his Sunday meeting with Mr. Abbas. Israel is considering the possibility of granting the request of Mr. Abbas and the prime minister based in Ramallah, Salam Fayyad, to let the Palestinian Authority [Hamas] control the crossings between Israel and Gaza, allowing them to reopen. [I suspect that we should read "Olmert and his Kadima-led coalition is considering," not all of Israel.]

Israel had previously rejected the idea, because it would loosen the economic squeeze on Hamas, which intensified last week when Israel decided to cut off shipments into Gaza, including fuel for the local power plant, in response to rocket attacks from Gaza. That move produced international protests and the Hamas decision to breach the border with Egypt.

When Israel says "let the Palestinian Authority" control the crossings, that means Hamas; Fatah has no toehold left in the Gaza government, so any PA soldiers would actually be Hamas militants.

It may be worth noting that Hamas was founded in 1987 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who led the Gaza branch of the Muslim Brotherhood... the parent organization of many other terrorist groups, including not only Hamas but Egyptian Islamic Jihad (whence came Ayman Zawahiri, al-Qaeda number two), al-Qaeda, and many others. It's difficult to determine whether the MB is itself a terrorist organization on the same scale as Hamas or EIJ, or whether it simply serves as a "gateway drug," a way station through which prototerrorists pass en route to forming their own, much more violent terrorist organizations.

However, the spiritual and political center of the Muslim Brotherhood is Egypt... which is yet another reason to be worried at the recent chumminess between that country and Hamas-controlled Gaza.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 25, 2008, at the time of 6:41 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 29, 2007

JoshuaPundit Sounds the Horn...

Wall fails to tumble; film at 11:00.

I can understand JoshuaPundit devoting an entire, long blogpost to arguing with a recent Big Lizards post; the only wonder is that more bloggers don't do it! After all, if our actual impact on the 'sphere matched our colossal ego, why, the whole wide web would be bristling with pro- and con-lizardly bloguations.

What's a bit puzzling is that he would choose to nominate that particular post for the Watcher's Council award. I think it a bit odd, considering how many of his points against us are not simply wrong but so easily proven wrong by past posting. Seems like such a waste.

After all, regardless of my irritation whenever he goes on a tear after George W. Bush and American foreign policy for being insufficiently pro-Israel and anti-Arab, in fact, I am perfectly capable of voting for JoshuaPundit's posts in first place... even when I'm the only one to do so.

Back to the blog-bate. Let's start with JP's basic, flawed premise... that I think Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is morally wrong, and that's why they should give them up. Says he:

If the Arabs made the choice to attack and lost some territory as a result, it's hardly an injustice or an `occupation'.

But I've never said there was anything wrong with Israel occuping those territories. It's perfectly fine with me. "Occupation" is descriptive, not disparaging.

True, Israeli Jews have no "claim on history" for those territories... but neither do Arab Moslems. I don't support the very idea of historical land claims; I believe land ownership is decided by possession, defense, and development.

Israel possesses those territories now; it has successfully defended them from all comers; and it developed them far beyond what the Arabs ever did (which was, as JP points out, virtually nothing). Ergo, those territories belong, morally and politically, to Israel, to do with as they please.

I suggest they let them go -- not because the world, the Arabs, the Arab-Palestinians, or U.N. Secretary General Nanki-Poo have any say in the matter, but because it's in Israel's best interest to rid themselves of such pestiferous hellholes.

In the same piece in which I recommended pulling out of Gaza and the West Bank (this is more than two years ago, back when I was a guest blogger on Captain's Quarters), I also recommended treating any further aggression from either place -- under Arab rule -- as one would treat similar military attack from Syria, Egypt, Iran, or any other country: With overwhelming retaliation.

In fact, I predicted that's what Israel would do after Hamas took over and launched an attack. I was right on 2/3rds of that prediction: Hamas took over; they, in concert with Hezbollah, launched an attack; but Israel fought a lousy, half-hearted war and -- while they didn't lose, exactly, they certainly didn't win, exactly, either. (In my defense, I had no idea Ariel Sharon would go and have a stroke, leaving a buffoon like Ehud Olmert in charge.)

I can only quote Larry Niven again: "Not responsible for advice not taken."

Somehow, this doesn't seem to jibe with JoshuaPundit's analysis of my psyche:

The main premise of people like Big Lizards is that appeasement of the Arabs and enfranchising the Palestinians will lead to peace in the region. The sad reality is that the Arabs are mainly concerned with weakening Israel so as to speed its demise...and what's more, they've never made a secret of it.

I blink and wonder if we have a deranged, blogospheric identity-thief slithering around using the name Bum Gizzards or somesuch.

But no; the most likely explanation is that, like many who take an extreme position, JoshuaPundit simply cannot imagine a person disagreeing with him -- unless that person is a mendacious villain or the dupe of mendacious villains. It never occurs to him that I may have a unique position on the Israeli-"Palestinian" situation, one that doesn't fit into the standard range somewhere between that of Mier Kahane and Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.

Had Israel chosen to formally annex Gaza and the West Bank, then ethnically cleanse all the Arabs out and encourage Israeli Jews to flood the lands... I would have had no problem with that. That, at least, would have been a workable solution. But given the fecklessness of what they have done (or rather, failed to do), it's completely unworkable to maintain an occupation of a hostile population with access to outside agencies who can arm them... as the Brits discovered to their chagrin in India and elsewhere. Since there is now no option of annexation and repopulation, best let them go -- but defend the bloody borders a hell of lot better than we've seen so far.

Another major faux pas was committed by "Freedom Fighter" (aside from his studied refusal to use my name, Dafydd ab Hugh, despite the fact that it's easily discoverable from (a) reading the top and bottom byline on every post, and (b) clicking the "Who are these 'Big Lizards' guys anyway?" link found in the right sidebar of every page on Big Lizards). Steadily, and throughout, FF mistakenly assumes that I also want Israel to give up East Jerusalem:

This blogger [he means us] goes on and makes the point that Israel never annexed Judea, Samaria or East Jerusalem and therefore has no claim. He's incorrect when it comes to East Jerusalem....

Well, that blogger is incorrect when he claims I said Israel has no claim on East Jerusalem. The full annexation of East Jerusalem would not only be the most easily justifiable annexation Israel could make, I actually think it would be a good idea. It would make it clear to the world that Jerusalem would never be divided, nor would ever become the capital of a second Palestinian state.

But he keeps throwing East Jerusalem into the mix, perhaps to make us look like Israel-haters or even worse... Mearsheimerites; e.g.:

He then further states that Jews were never a majority of the population in Judea, Samaria or East Jerusalem and that these areas always had a majority Arab population....

As we never said a word about East Jerusalem (or West, South, or North Jerusalem; read our post), this seems a bit thick. I have no idea where he got such a notion; I certainly never said any such a thing; nor do I believe it. And not only do I think Israel should annex East Jerusalem, I also totally opposed the withdrawal from the Lebanon security zone north of the border... and I still think it was a bad idea. And Israel should hang onto the Golan Heights until the cows come home to roost.

(That grinding noise you hear is the sound of Freedom Fighter's head spinning around like Linda Blair's in the Exorcist, as he tries to squeeze the Lizardly white paper on Israel into the narrow confines of his imaginative suitcase.)

Of course, none of JoshuaPundit's claims about my ignorance of Israel's history are accurate; but that's just my assertion... I can't prove it. Though I'm sure I've made references here and there through the years that would demonstrate at least a grasp of the main points -- for example, that Jews had purchased a lot of land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem prior to the establishment of the modern nation of Israel... which Freedom Fighter seems to believe is news to me.

Then there are some claims of his that are simply tedious in their attempt to divert the debate from what we actually wrote to a cockamamie caricature of what we wrote. For one example (among many), we published the following:

As you may have guessed by now, "Freedom Fighter" at JP is one of those Israel boosters (I don't know where he posts from, here or there) who is so wrought up in the battle that he considers George W. Bush -- the most pro-Israeli president America has ever had -- to be Israel's enemy.

JP seizes upon one line there and twists it to make us sound like Borat-style "throw the Jew down the well" antisemites:

Big Lizards starts out by referring to me as `one of those Israel boosters' and wonders whether I'm posting `from here ( meaning the US) or there'(meaning Israel). I hate to disillusion anyone, but this site does not originate from Mossad headquarters, and there's no `dual loyalty' or question of my patriotism involved here.

Freedom Fighter... just as a frolic, perhaps you could try -- taking me literally? Dude, there is nothing on your blog indicating your nationality or where you post from. Perhaps if I read every post assiduously, I would spot something... but for all I know, you could be the heir to the principality of Monaco and posting from your winter castle in the island of Fernando Póo (now called Bioko Equatorial Guinea). You have a Blogger blog; you don't seem to list your real name anywhere (or perhaps I just haven't found it); I don't recall you mentioning identifying information in any of the posts of yours I've read.

The only clue I see is that your main banner includes an American bald eagle nibbling on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's ear... but that might just be political commentary -- a Swiftian "modest proposal" for simultaneously ridding the world of its number-one terrorist and also providing a meal for an endangered species.

Regardless of one's position on the disposition of the West Bank (of the Jordan River) and the Gaza Strip -- or as Freedom Fighter would say, Judea, Samaria, and, ah, the Gaza Strip, I guess -- the central analogy of the JoshuaPundit post, that Gaza and the West Bank are to Israel as California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas are to the United States, is inappropriate and silly. The distinctions far overwhelm any superficial similarities.

The most basic one is easy to spot: The United States does not rule over any hostile populace. No seething, terrorist populations that hate us with a passion. No territories held by force, when the majority living there would rather die to kill an American than live with the thought that we live as well.

In reality, the Palestinian-flavored Arabs hate Jews and love death more than they love life, even the lives of their children. And that's not my prejudice talking... they proudly announce it themselves.

Americans are sensitive plants. The moment there is any hint of disharmony among even 30% of the population of some territory we frequent, we immediately saddle the campfire, pee on the horses, and up stakes for warmer climes. We know when we're not wanted! The only exceptions I can think of are Afghanistan, Iraq, and of course, the Civil War... though the first two are short-term fights that we'll soon win, ending with far less than the magic 30% figure; and in the last, there was a moral principle involved: abolishing slavery.

One cannot find 30% of the population in the four American border states demanding to be returned to Mexico. One cannot fine 3%. One cannot even find 0.03%. In fact, not even 0.03% of the Hispanic population of those states. The entire membership of MeCHA that really wants those states to be swallowed up by Mexico as the state of "Aztlan" would probably fit into the Whiskey A-Go-Go nightclub.

While in the Israeli-occupied territories, the percent of the population that wants to be free of Israel and judenrein is, oh, about 100%. That's a pretty significant distinction between the analogy and the analogized!

That was the point of our earlier post; I have no idea what was the point of Freedom Fighter's post, other than a cri de cœur arising from generalized angst. But what the heck; read what we wrote, then read the JoshuaPundit post, and form your own opinion which of us is more convincing.

I'm all eyes...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 29, 2007, at the time of 4:04 AM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

November 7, 2007

David Samuels Speaks Out

David Samuels has done us the kindness of responding with a comment to our most recent post on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and what she did or did not say to someone who raced to pass it along to Aluf Benn for condemnation. Our two recent posts on this topic were:

• Time to Fisk - er - Power Line?
• Some Respect for the Lady

Given Mr. Samuels' respected position in the journalistic community -- and the relatively obscure state of things here at Big Lizards -- we are of course rather flattered. Despite my rather colossal ego and preening narcissism, I attribute his response to a desire to set the record straight, as he sees it, about what he said, rather than concluding that he is a regular Big Lizards reader.

But surely his dogged defense of his column deserves an equally thoughtful response; and it's a good excuse for another post, anyway. As Samuels offered his response as a public comment (under the handle "DS"), I feel free to quote big chunks of it in this post, for ready reference. (Throughout, I accept that this is the authentic David Samuels, which I believe because of diverse tests.)

Ergo:

His first point is one that I thought I myself made in the previous post; but Samuels would like to stress it:

In the space alloted me in the article that was republished in FrontPage, I am careful to distinguish between two distinct possibilities:

A. Condoleezza Rice has said things -- either directly to Aluf Benn or to a political source he trusts -- that cite her own personal experience as a black girl in the South as a proof of her empathy for Palestinian suffering in the West Bank and Gaza.

B. Condoleezza Rice means what she says, in a heartfelt, deeply personal way.

I strongly believe that A is true, while I think that B is nonsense. I think the reasons are quite clear from the text of my article, which was intended as a commentary on Rice rather than a close reading of Aluf Benn's column in Haaretz.

I certainly understood that point; Samuels' article is well and clearly written. That is what I sought to convey by dividing my own response into two phases:

1. Phase 1, in which I praised Samuels for his rejection of point (B) above, and especially for his rejection of the standard conservative theme that Rice is freelancing, and that she has somehow bullied or bamboozled President Bush into going along against his better judgment.
2. Phase 2, in which I noted that he nevertheless unreservedly accepts part (A), that she said what Benn claims she said -- comparing PA President Mahmoud Abbas to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, jr. -- despite the fact that neither Benn nor anybody else has presented the least bit of evidence that she did -- other than hearsay evidence from an anonymous source.

I will make one caveat: Unlike David Samuels, I am agnostic about whether she actually said it; but having a scientific frame of mind, I am unwilling to accept claims that have no evidence behind them, requiring me to believe a person I don't know, who says he correctly heard what another person that none of us knows (and who goes nameless, to boot), about what the second chap thinks he heard from Condoleezza Rice.

I can state with some assurance that I have never heard Dr. Rice say what Benn says she said (to someone else, not him); and that it doesn't seem likely that she would say it (she's not an ass). Benn himself says she never says such things in public... so why should we believe she says them in private?

But let us sail on...

1. Aluf Benn is a very reputable Israeli journalist who operates at a very high level in his profession, has interviewed Rice a number of times and has never been accused of fabricating a story before.

Nor has he been now; and I'm perfectly willing to accept that Aluf Benn is very reputable.

But so too was Dan Rather... and yet he broadcast an obvious fabrication. Nevertheless, I don't accuse Rather of fabricating the story: I am utterly certain he believed the "Killian memos" were authentic when he broadcast them. I suggest rather that Rather was fooled by his own biases into believing something silly... and that he dug in his heels when confronted with evidence of his own wild error. And that is also what I suggest may be the case with Aluf Benn (the first part; I have no idea whether he would double down if somehow confronted with evidence that his claim was wrong).

Again, I thought I was fairly clear that I was not claiming that Benn made the whole thing up, as Samuels seems to think I said. (Samuels writes, "From your post, you appear to believe in an entirely different possibility -- Possibility C -- namely, that Aluf Benn made up his entire column and the sources behind it as part of a left-wing plot to make Condoleezza Rice look bad.") In fact, I took no position on that, merely noting the possibilities (in the earlier post, the first one linked above, not the most recent):

Finally, we have convincing evidence that either somebody, God knows who, told Mr. Benn that Rice in private says Abbas is like Dr. King; or else that Benn himself made it up. We certainly have no evidence whatsoever that she actually did say such a thing... and by now, you'd think we would have, wouldn't you?

Again, I did not say he fabricated it; I said that either he fabricated it, or else someone told him that she said that (the latter being Benn's claim). I expressed no opinion on which was the case -- not knowing Aluf from Adam -- but those really are the only two options, aren't they? But in neither case do we have even the remotest evidence of accuracy.

Let's assume that Benn did not fabricate the story:

• His source could have misheard or misunderstood what Rice said (is Benn's source a careful listener?)
• Benn himself could have misheard or misunderstood what his source said (do we know whether his anonymous source is a careful speaker?)

• Condoleezza Rice could have been tired and said something she doesn't believe and didn't mean to say (do we know -- well, yes, we do know she is a human being, for all that).

  My grandmother use to do it all the time. She was the first among her set to buy a couch with a hide-away bed (this was in the 1940s, I think); she brought her club over to see it... and then proudly informed them, "And the nicest thing about this couch is that if you pull off the cushions and tug on this strap, it opens up into a full-course dinner!" Needless to repeat, that was not what Grandma meant to say.

Any one of these three strong possibilities utterly undercuts the claim that she intentionally said what Benn claims she said, and what Samuels ends by accepting uncritically -- after first treating it skeptically.

I think Samuels also shoots a bit wide with this point:

It is not at all clear to me that causing a fuss about Rice among fervent right-wingers would in any way further Benn's own political agenda. I am inclined to believe that the opposite is true. Benn's story is confirmed by the right-wing journalist David Bedein -- which argues against the idea that this story was fabricated to serve a left-wing agenda. Undermining Rice at this moment seems like the agenda of the hard right.

First, it should be fairly clear that "undermining the Bush administration" is rather high on the agenda of all left-wingers, no matter what country they inhabit; they hope it will lead to President Hillary.

That it also happens to play into the hands of the Israeli Right (they malign Bush and especially Rice with great frequency) is unsurprising... because we see that same pseudo-alliance here in America, where the internationalist Left joins with the isolationist Right to attack Bush's foreign policy -- usually dumping on the black chick in the process.

Again, Samuels barks up the wrong tree by believing I'm trying to prove Benn made it all up; I think it far more likely that Benn believed what he was told precisely because it fit his preexisting bias against Condoleezza Rice, and indeed against many "right wingers".

I have noticed that a lot of Israeli lefties still think that conservatives hate Jews and side with the Arabs every chance they get. Thus it would be unsurprising for an Israeli leftist to readily believe it when a source tells him that the "hard right" Condoleezza Rice is an antisemite who sees Israeli Jews as Jim-Crow Klansmen oppressing the innocent-as-a-lamb Palestinian minority.

In the same way, Dan Rather was poised to readily believe it when Mary Mapes told him that light Col. Jerry Killian said he was being "pressured" to give Lt. George Bush better marks than he had earned and to pretend Bush had been present when he was AWOL. Rather didn't set out to lie; he simply accepted a fraudulent set of documents because nothing in them raised alarm bells... they perfectly fit what Rather already believed about Bush.

That is my best guess about Aluf Benn: His source told him something he already believed... and now he had the "proof" of what he'd known all along! So he ran with it.

And even you admit he is reckless -- which rather conflicts with your near-simultaneous claim that he "operates at a very high level in his profession;" I assume you mean more than that Benn is successful... you mean that he's a good and careful reporter, right? Yet you yourself write:

2. Benn himself clearly distinguishes the nugget of reporting that he presents as fact (Rice made a comparison between Palestine and the American South), and his further "guesses" about Rice's "personal feelings" -- which I label as "incendiary," and which are probably unsupported by anything besides Benn's imagination (although its always possible that Rice said those things, too).

While I hate to judge before all the facts are in, I tend to think that a careful reporter operating at a very high level -- one whose very word we should accept, even when his only source is anonymous -- shouldn't be making "incendiary" claims that are "probably unsupported by anything besides [his own] imagination." Call it a quirk of mine.

3. I have interviewed Rice several times and she made a point of discussing the subject of race or the experience of her girlhood in Alabama each time, without my prompting her.

Yes, I've heard her do that, too... but that's not the point, is it? The point is whether she compared Israeli Jews to the Bull Connorses and Sheriff Clarks of her youth... and compared Mahmoud Abbas to Martin Luther King.

And Mr. Samuels still has not responded to my basic point, which I supported with four examples from his FrontPage piece. I quote myself, as I am wont to do at the drop of a hatpin:

This is an old bugaboo of mine: The interlocutor begins with "it mighta happened," soon talks himself into "it prob'ly happened," and ends by working himself into a veritable frenzy of "it rilly did happen!" -- while never presenting a scrap of evidence beyond the sonorous sounds of his own sweet soliloquy.

I still want to know how Samuels gets from noting that Benn "never cited any source" to Samuels' virtual certainly that Benn correctly understood what his source was saying, that Benn's anonymous source was accurate, and that Rice really did say what Benn claimed she said -- that Abbas was like King. Was Samuels truly impressed, as a journalist himself (which I am not), by "I cannot name my sources.... But I rely on firm ground?"

After all, Samuels wrote in his comment:

While I am confident that Rice did say something similar to what Benn suggests that she said [i.e., that Abbas is like Dr. King], I also see no reason to believe that ANYTHING Rice says as Secretary of State... has any necessary relation to how Condoleezza Rice actually feels inside.

All right, I understand he believes she was lying when she "said" that. But again, what makes him think she even said that? Do we even know that Aluf Benn's source wasn't Emily Litella?

I would encourage you to read more carefully in the future, to avoid logic-chopping, and to be more judicious in your citations of other people's work.

If I may speak directly to Mr. Samuels... thank you; I do always strive to rise to the level of the elite media, even if I sometimes fall short. But never for lack of trying! I hope to always read carefully; I would be ashamed of my math background if I caught myself "logic-chopping" (I'm not sure what that means, exactly, but it sounds pretty bad); and I try to exercise judgment whenever I cite other people's work.

I very much appreciate your comment... and I hope you will respond once more to answer the burning question above: What, besides Aluf Benn's say-so, causes you to believe that Condoleezza Rice compared Mahmoud Abbas to the Rev. Martin Luther King, jr.? Have you ever heard her specifically make such a comparison?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 7, 2007, at the time of 3:57 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

November 6, 2007

Some Respect for the Lady

This David Samuels article from FrontPage Magazine takes a couple of small steps forward to rein in the hysterical Condi-bashing by so many conservatives; but it takes one giant leap backwards by perpetuating the most irritating part of the media charade: Accepting as uncontested fact an anti-Condi whispering campaign orchestrated by a "respected left-wing [Israeli] journalist" with a class interest in portraying Condoleezza Rice as biased towards Palestinians.

(Hat tip to Soccer Dad, who e-mailed me the link after reading our last foray into this realm: Time to Fisk - er - Power Line?)

Here is the part that is reasonable and perceptive:

At the same time, it is also important to remember that Condoleezza Rice is not a talk show host but the U.S. secretary of state -- which is not a job that leaves very much room for personal moments. Her private rhetoric (if “off the record” conversations with foreign politicians and journalists can even remotely be considered private) is simply rhetoric -- that is to say, words intended for a purpose. Every word she speaks embodies the political will of the most powerful nation in the history of the planet – a nation currently having a bit of trouble in the Middle East.

Rice is a skilled political tactician who is fantastically loyal to President Bush, who has repeatedly declared his intention to create a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza before he leaves office.

This echoes the point we ourselves made three days earlier:

Honestly, we don't know what Condoleezza Rice thinks about, e.g., the Israeli-Palestinian "roadmap" nonsense, except that clearly it doesn't bother her enough to cause her to resign from the administration. It's possible she's 113% in synch with President George W. Bush's enthusiasm about a Palestinian state living "side by side" with Israel and at peace. But it's likewise possible that she thinks it's doomed to failure... but since that's the foreign policy the president wants, she may believe strongly enough in the unitary executive that she's willing to push hard even for something she opposes.

To put this as bluntly as I can, this is not Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's personal foreign policy. She is not a latter-day Svengali, mesmerizing George Bush (playing Trilby O'Ferrall?) with her eyes; she's not a zuvembie, casting a voodoo spell to suborn the president's will to her own, turning him into the walking dead.

She is ably and honestly representing the foreign policy of President George W. Bush, which is precisely the duty of every cabinet member; if a secretary can no longer represent and further the president's policies, because he (or she) disagrees so strongly on a moral or political level -- then he has the duty to resign.

Those are the only two choices... be the mouthpiece of the president, or go find another job. The only thing we know about Dr. Rice's personal position on the Israeli-Palestinian issue is that she doesn't disagree with Bush so strongly that she feels compelled to resign. Nothing more. As we also said, sometime after January 20th, 2009, we will likely find out her own position on a whole host of issues -- when she runs for office, writes a book, and/or gives post-administration interviews.

But here, illustrated better by this David Samuels article in FrontPage than I've ever before seen, is the essentially absurd dichotomy of all this speculation. How does the vague and unsourced Benn accusation here:

Though Benn never cited any source for his description of Rice’s deep personal identification with the Palestinian national cause, he has interviewed Secretary Rice before and obviously felt his source was good enough for print. He went on to "guess" that Rice’s feelings were based on the similarity between the separation fence and checkpoints in the West Bank and the Jim Crow laws that prohibited blacks from exercising their most basic civil rights. For good measure Benn also threw in the suggestion that Rice often confuses Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas with Martin Luther King...

...And here:

Benn’s off-the-record/on-the-record “hint” that Rice might be personally sympathetic to Palestinians has naturally excited Jewish right-wingers, who fear a sell-out at the upcoming peace conference in Annapolis, just as it pains left-wingers, who worry that she might think that they, too, are racists, the worst sin in the liberal “Al Cheyt...

...Abruptly transmaugrify, without visible evidentiary means of support, into the utter certainty of this:

While the intent of Aluf Benn’s “guesses” about Rice’s innermost feelings about the Palestinian cause is clearly incendiary, I have little doubt the secretary and her aides have whispered sweet nothings into the ears of Israeli and Palestinian politicians and even to Aluf Benn himself, suggesting that she can empathize with the Palestinian sufferings under Israeli occupation by virtue of having been born black in Alabama...

...And this?

At the same time, it seems highly unlikely that Secretary Rice’s sudden empathy for the Palestinian cause is anything more than a tactical maneuver....

The paradox of Rice’s conduct...

Yet there is still something disturbing about the remarks Rice is reported to have made, however direct or vague they might have been, and however tactically clever they might seem to their author. Offhand analogies between Palestinians and Southern blacks or Israelis and Southern whites make a mockery of real pain and suffering by ignoring the specificity of actual historical experience. Comparisons of Palestinian “freedom fighters” with the American civil rights movement would merely seem ridiculous (imagine the membership of Hamas and Fatah joining hands and singing “We Shall Overcome”) if they were not also part of a bullying assault on historical specificity that has come to characterize much recent political discourse in America....

Condoleezza Rice, the political science professor and provost of Stanford University, would likely judge such bullying and divisive rhetoric harshly, as the product of a second-rate mind afraid to engage in reasoned discussion and debate. When she returns to private life, she will feel ashamed of herself.

This is an old bugaboo of mine: The interlocutor begins with "it mighta happened," soon talks himself into "it prob'ly happened," and ends by working himself into a veritable frenzy of "it rilly did happen!" -- while never presenting a scrap of evidence beyond the sonorous sounds of his own sweet soliloquy.

And then to cap off this eye-popping extravaganza of phantasmapalooza, the Samuels piece thuds back to earth with this final and self-referential awakening from the dream:

That said, I don’t see the slightest bit of evidence that the secretary of state actually believes Mahmoud Abbas is Martin Luther King in disguise, or that she has flashbacks to her childhood in Birmingham every time she sees the Separation Fence on her way to Ramallah. But a whisper or two can’t hurt, right?

No, Mr. S., it can't; nor is there any way that a put-upon Secretary of State -- "an accomplished black woman with a Ph.D. in political science, who plays the piano, who grew up as a little girl in the South and lost a friend when the Ku Klux Klan bombed the churches in Birmingham" -- can respond to such churlish insolence and impudence, such an attack on her basic honor, integrity, and decency, without seeming the fool for getting into a literal "he said, she said" back and forth with some lefty reporter about who knows better what is really in Condoleezza Rice's heart.

Good Lord, everyone; get a grip: We do not have any believable evidence that Dr. Rice ever said any such a thing. So let's stop the show trial and confine ourselves to complaining about what we do know... which is that the president's policy (not Condi Rice's policy) on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has shifted from demanding that the Palestinian-Arabs live up to their earlier agreements -- an essential component of Bush's own "Roadmap to Peace" -- to now offering them inducements and enticements, compromises and concessions merely to blight Annapolis with their presence.

But that is Bush's fall from grace, not Condoleezza Rice's.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 6, 2007, at the time of 7:27 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

November 2, 2007

Time to Fisk - er - Power Line?

My favorite blog, Power Line, has spent the last few years firing rockets and mortars at Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, seemingly blaming her for every State Department initiative they dislike -- and by and large dismissing the possibility that Rice might not be a Col. Kurtz-like rogue agent but actually representing the foreign policy of the president. I have said several times that I think they're theorizing beyond the evidence, which Sherlock Holmes dubbed a cardinal sin.

Honestly, we don't know what Condoleezza Rice thinks about, e.g., the Israeli-Palestinian "roadmap" nonsense, except that clearly it doesn't bother her enough to cause her to resign from the administration. It's possible she's 113% in synch with President George W. Bush's enthusiasm about a Palestinian state living "side by side" with Israel and at peace. But it's likewise possible that she thinks it's doomed to failure... but since that's the foreign policy the president wants, she may believe strongly enough in the unitary executive that she's willing to push hard even for something she opposes.

(Such selfless advocacy is hardly unprecedented, even in Foggy Bottom; Colin Powell pushed very hard to bring our allies along for the Iraq ride, even though he personally abhored the policy.)

My point is this: We won't know what Condi Rice thinks until, like John Alden, she can speak for herself. In 2009 and later, when the Bush administration has run its course, Rice may run for public office (perhaps governor of California when Arnold Schwarzenegger's term expires in 2010). Even if she doesn't, she would be a fool not to write a book and cash in on her (relatively) low-paid years in government service and at Stanford (low-paid compared to what she could have earned in private industry).

At that point, we'll finally learn what she really thinks about this; I can't imagine a campaign or memoir that didn't address what has occupied much of the time she has been at State and before that as National Security Advisor. But until then... well, what we have is a lot of rumor and inuendo by people who have a class interest in shiving her, such as the folks at Haaretz and self-proclaimed Zionists such as Boker tov, Boulder! (the clock on the blog shows Jerusalem time, though the blog presumably emanates from Colorado).

Sadly, the lads at Power Line often seize hold of such iffy, flakey "evidence" as more ammunition for their artillery barrage -- as today:

The latest round of diplomatic buffoonery includes a recurrence of Seceretary Rice's characterization of the Palestinian cause as a civil rights issue in the image of the one she grew up with in Birmingham, Alabama. As Joel Fishman recently reported:

Last week in Jerusalem, U.S. Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, articulated some of her personal views which ultimately found their way into the press. For Dr. Rice the struggle of the Palestinians is analogous to that of the Afro-Americans for civil rights and she identifies with the Palestinians. She recalled what it meant to travel in segregated buses as a little girl in Alabama. She also compared the head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, to Reverend Martin Luther King, because, in her mind, both were committed to peace. According to reporter Aluf Benn, Rice views Abbas as committed to the struggle for Palestinian independence and, like Martin Luther King, opposed to terror and violence (Haaretz, October 16, 2007). Independently, David Bedein reported Rice's statements in The Bulletin (Philadelphia, October 17, 2007).

At the end of the post, Scott Johnson notes finally received a link to the Haaretz piece itself from a reader, and he links to it. Let's turn to the original to see what evidence "respected left-wing Israeli reporter" Aluf Benn actually cites:

When Condoleezza Rice talks about the establishment of a Palestinian state next to Israel, she sees in her mind's eye the struggle of African Americans for equal rights, which culminated in the period of her Alabama childhood.

Rice is very aware of political sensitivity, and avoids making such comparisons in public speeches and interviews, where she keeps to the official list of talking points. But in private, she talks about the

[Sic; the paragraph actually ends hanging with this sentence fragment]....

Now, Rice is comparing Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and his prime minister, Salam Fayad, to Martin Luther King. Abbas is committed to the struggle for Palestinian independence, and like Abbas he is opposed to terror and violence. Just as Tony Blair, the Quartet envoy and former British prime minister, compares the Israeli-Palestinian conflict tothe conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, so does Rice recall the struggle for civil rights in the United States when she speaks about the Palestinian boy who needs new hope instead of aspiring to commit a suicide attack. Rice's current visit to the Middle East is one of the most important in her term as secretary of state, perhaps the most important.

Please pardon my bluntness, but what the hell kind of evidence is this? Benn simply asserts, without even hinting at his sources, that Rice equates Abbas with Martin Luther King and the Palestinian conflict with "the struggle for civil rights in the United States" -- and Scott accepts the assertion uncritically. Why? I believe because it fits his preconceived storyline on Condoleezza Rice.

I cannot help but suspect that if Aluf Benn published a piece where he asserted, equally unsourced, that Rice had forcefully demanded that the Palestinians live up to their previous agreements before she would offer a new one, Scott Johnson would be very skeptical and demand to see something more substantive; he is convinced of the opposite. Thus doth conviction make convicts of us all.

At least one anti-Rice blogger, Boker tov, Boulder!, who is favorably linked by the Power Line post, thought the sourcing was thin enough that he (or she) e-mailed Benn to inquire what he actually had. BtB appears to find the following response very reassuring:

UPDATE: I wrote to Aluf Benn and asked for any substantiation of his comments on Secretary Rice. He very kindly responded immediately:

I cannot name my sources, and as I have written, Rice did not speak in public about these matters. But I rely on firm ground.

Well! Who could argue with that? "Firm ground," indeed.

But come now; if a leftist reporter at, say, the New Republic offered his reliance on firm ground as sole authority for the flat claim that Bush told friends "in private" that he wanted to launch a ground invasion of Pakistan -- would Power Line accept it? Would any of us?

Scott uses a rhetorical trick to try to further discredit the Secretary of State:

These themes have become a motif in Secretary Rice's discussion of Palestinian statehood. She articulated them most egregiously last year in an astonishing speech before an American-Palestinian group. In that speech Rice likened the Palestinian struggle to the American struggle for independence and to the American civil rights movement. Rice said:

I know that sometimes a Palestinian state living side by side in peace with Israel must seem like a very distant dream. But I know too, as a student of international history, that there are so many things that once seemed impossible that, after they happened, simply seemed inevitable. I've read over the last summer the biographies of America's Founding Fathers. By all rights, America, the United States of America, should never have come into being. We should never have survived our civil war. I should never have grown up in segregated Birmingham, Alabama to become the Secretary of State of the United States of America.

But what "themes" does Scott mean? The theme in the previous attack was that Rice thinks Mahmoud Abbas is like Martin Luther King; but this theme is that she still has hope that rationality can prevail and a peaceful Palestinian state could eventually emerge.

First, I don't know about you guys, but those seem awfully different "themes" to me. But second, what of Scott's characterization that the passage "likened the Palestinian struggle to the American struggle for independence and to the American civil rights movement"? There is no question she compares them; but "compare" needn't mean "equate." I can compare elections in Iran to elections in the United States without likening them or saying they're the same.

In the sense that, if such a peaceful Palestinian state comes into being, it might be seen as something that "seemed impossible" right up until it "seemed inevitable," such a circumstance would be very much like the United States; but that's a far cry from saying Yassir Arafat was like George Washington or that Mahmoud Abbas is like Martin Luther King. I can say that many people thought it would have been impossible for the United States to lose a war (or a peace) to primitive North Vietnam; but by the time it happened, it sure seemed inevitable to me. Yet surely this doesn't mean I equate Ho Chi Minh to George Washington or even Martin Luther King, jr.

Like Anne Frank in her last days, Condoleezza Rice still has hope in the future and in people. What is Scott Johnson's hope? Does he not hope that the Palestinians can eventually come to their senses?

What are the alternatives? I see only two: that Israel runs the entire Arab population out of Gaza and the West Bank and annexes them as "Judea and Samaria," or that Hamas eventually expunges Israel. I think the first would so enrage the Arab world -- heck, the entire Moslem world -- that the war on global hirabah would become vastly more dangerous to us.

And of course the last is unthinkable. So honestly, I have great sympathy for Dr. Rice's hope that the Palestinians return to the land of sanity sometime, because it's really the only solution.

And for heavens sake, Rice was speaking "at the American Task Force on Palestine Inaugural Gala." She was talking to an audience of Palestinian-Americans! She called upon them to help in the task of liberating the PA from terrorist violence and the "humiliation" of being just a territory or "authority," not quite a state. What is she supposed to do -- tell that audience that Israel should annex the territories and expel all the Arabs?

So which of Power Line's claims have convincing evidence behind them?

• That Condoleezza Rice hopes for Palestinians to reject violence and create a peaceful state;
• That she considers Mahmoud Abbas a "moderate leader" -- which, since moderate is a comparative, means "moderate compared to his rivals in Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade (which appears to despise Abbas, despite being part of Fatah, Abbas's party), Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and al-Qaeda;"
• And that she wants to persuade Palestinian-Americans to join in the effort to nudge the PA in a more democratic and peaceful direction.

Finally, we have convincing evidence that either somebody, God knows who, told Mr. Benn that Rice in private says Abbas is like Dr. King; or else that Benn himself made it up. We certainly have no evidence whatsoever that she actually did say such a thing... and by now, you'd think we would have, wouldn't you?

That gruel of truth seems a bit thin to make the big buffet breakfast of Condoleezza bashing Power Line serves us.

They're still my favorite blog, of course; I will always aspire to their pinnacle of posting (near) perfection. But decades ago, I became pathologically obsessed with truth; and in this case, I must point out a few "inconvenient truths" about the animus that so many conservatives have against Condoleezza Rice.

Besides, she is a true lady (and a hottie), and I must therefore rise in defense of her honor.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 2, 2007, at the time of 6:11 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

September 19, 2007

Israel Finally Listening to Big Lizards' Advice

A long time ago (in blog years -- June 2005), I wrote a piece on Patterico's Pontifications called "Words of Wall," which I later reposted here on Big Lizards. As I wrote in the introduction to the repost:

This is the post where I first laid out the Lizard Doctrine: Israel should withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank, not because it will pacify the Palestinians (which I correctly predicted it would not), but because it would allow Israel at last to "give war a chance."

The Doctrine requires two steps; without both steps being undertaken, it is not the Lizard Doctrine, and I disclaim all accountability for problems that result from implementing only one or the other step: "Not responsible for advice not taken," as Larry Niven likes to say at the drop of a space helmet. The stages are:

1. That Israel fully withdraw all soldiers and settlers from Gaza and the West Bank;
2. That Israel subsequently treat Gaza and the West Bank as if they were separate, independent countries -- and respond accordingly to any future military aggression.

Step 2 is just as important as step 1, and it boils down to this: If Syria fired missiles from Syrian territory at Israel, or even if it allowed Hezbollah or Hamas to shoot missiles from Syrian territory, how would Israel respond? I think it would brush aside any considerations of how thoroughly Bashar Assad controls the Syrian frontier... and it would simply bomb the Baathist state in retaliation. And the bombing would cause far more damage to Syria than Syria had caused to Israel, as a deterrant (which may or may not deter).

Thus, under the Lizard Doctrine step 2, when the government of Gaza or the West Bank fires rockets or missiles or launches any other attack against Israel, or allows any other group to do so, from Gazan or West Bankian territory, Israel must respond by bombing them or taking some equivalently harsh military action against them: tit for tat, with the response being much more severe than the provocation.

Alas, this is the part where Israel, in the person of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his cronies, has fallen asleep at the switch: The only military action they launched in response to literally hundreds of rockets and missiles fired into Israel by Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Fatah-controlled al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigade, and from Palestinian-controlled territory (without the least attempt by the Palestinian Authority to punish the attackers, thus proving complicity), was a feckless and ultimately stalemated invasion that destroyed a lot of the terrorist groups' weaponry -- but ultimately did nothing to punish the PA itself for giving the terrorists safe haven.

And of course, ever since the last elections in the PA, the government itself has been controlled by a known terrorist organization, Hamas. Again, as the rocketry continued during and after the war, Israel has made no move to punish the PA as it would Syria, Egypt, or Jordan, were the shoe on that hand.

Rather, Israel has carried out "airstrike assassinations" only against specific individuals. While I think they're a great idea -- keep it up! -- this, too, fails to punish Gaza and the West Bank as if they were enemy states, which is what the Lizard Doctrine requires.

But today, for the first time, I have hope that Israel is finally getting around to implementing step 2:

Israel declared the Palestinian-controlled Gaza Strip an "enemy entity" on Wednesday and said it would cut utilities to the territory, complicating the U.S. plan to relaunch peace talks aimed at establishing a separate Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank.

Israel made the provocative decision hours before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived for talks setting up what President Bush hopes will be a pivotal international Mideast peace conference this fall. Rice neither endorsed nor criticized Israel's move.

First of all, it's outrageous that evidently, all this time, Israel has been supplying electricity, water, and other utilities to a geographic entity that has been at open war with Israel. What imbecile made that decision? For that matter, even were the PA at peace with Israel, why would it be Israel's duty to give them free electricity and water, build roads for them, give them cash money, or perform any other infrastructure improvements? Do we give free electrical power and drinking water to Mexico and Canada?

But it's absurdity on a bagel that they continue doing so while Gaza busily gnaws away at the hand that's feeding it. It's no wonder that the Olmert government polls about as low as the Democrat-controlled Congress in America!

Still, better late than not at all; and I welcome Israel's sudden awakening to its own idiocy... "light dawns on marblehead," and all that. Thank goodness Ehud Olmert is finally listening to the Lizard's advice:

The Israeli designation covers all of Gaza, not just Hamas militants who took control of the territory in June. The United States and Israel regard Hamas as a terrorist organization and refuse to deal with it.

[Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister Tzipi] Livni said Israel was not obliged to deliver anything to Gaza beyond humanitarian aid.

"When it comes to the humanitarian needs, we have our own responsibilities," Livni said. "All the needs which are more than humanitarian needs will not be supplied by Israel to Gaza Strip."

Perhaps I'm a bit cold-hearted and harsh; I've been called that plenty of times before. But I dispute that Israel has even the most minimal humanitarian obligations to a country or other geopolitical entity with which it is at war. This changes if Israel, or any other nation, occupies a territory; when you take over, you assume certain duties... and this was the major reason the Lizard Doctrine called for Israel to divest itself of the occupied territories: so that any such moral obligation would cease, and the PA could be let alone to sink or swim as it will.

I'm irked and distressed that even this minimal bit of common sense eludes the Israeli leadership. Israel no longer occupies Gaza by even the most expansive definition; and even the West Bank is by and large independent; why was Israel still paying money to keep either entity afloat? Surely that is the responsibility of the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians.

And until they are forced, life or death, to shoulder those responsibilities, they will remain in the infantile stage that allows them to consider the cessation of welfare a violation of their human rights:

Israel did not announce a date for cutoff of services. The decision is likely to reinforce perceptions among Palestinians and their Arab backers that Israel will do as it sees fit regardless of the cost to civilians, and that the U.S. will not block Israel's hand....

Livni said the decision is legal, but international aid groups called it unacceptable to blame civilians for the actions of rogue militants.

Gisha, a human rights group that works for greater freedom of movement in Gaza, called the action "immoral and illegal, constituting prohibited collective punishment of civilians."

Sorry, Gisha; "punishment," as used in the legal phrase "collective punishment," means violent assault or the seizure of property; it does not include the decision not to continue giving gifts to the enemy. See, for example, this vigorously anti-Israel article in Counterpunch, objecting to last year's invasion of Gaza:

Attacks on a civilian population as a form of collective punishment violate article 50 of the Hague Regulations, which provides: "No general penalty, pecuniary or otherwise, shall be inflicted upon the population on account of the acts of individuals for which they cannot be regarded as jointly and severally responsible."

The Fourth Geneva Convention also prohibits collective punishment. Article 33 says: "No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed." The Convention requires all states party to it to search for and ensure the prosecution of perpetrators of the war crime of "causing extensive destruction ... not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly." Amnesty International called the deliberate attacks by Israeli forces against civilian property and infrastructure war crimes.

Collective punishment is likewise forbidden by Article 75 of Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions. As four US Supreme Court justices agreed in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld last week, Article 75 is "indisputably part of the customary international law."

Protocol I (which Israel, the United States, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan have never ratified), Article 75 does not explicitly define "collective punishments;" but the examples it cites of prohibited actions are all obvious violent assaults or the theft of property.

Again, "prohibited collective punishment of civilians" has never, in all of human history, been defined so expansively as to include the refusal to give humanitarian aid to an enemy entity that is attacking you.

My hopes are still low for the current administration, and I hope that some parliamentary maneuver can be carried out to force elections soon. Such elections would certainly spell the doom of the Kadima Party of Olmert and, most likely, the election of Likud (possibly even a pure Likud majority), making Binyamin Netanyahu the prime minister once more.

But until then, at least Ehud Olmert is shaking himself partially awake and beginning, just beginning, to assume the most basic responsibility of any government leader: to preserve, protect, and defend from violent attack the very country he leads, whether from other countries or even external quasi-governmental entities.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 19, 2007, at the time of 2:50 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 21, 2006

Jihadis With Yarmulkes

If this story is true, Israel should strip these males (they're not men) of their Jewish identity and exile them from Israel. The "law of return" does not apply to a herd of swine. Not even swine with yarmulkes:

Miriam Shear says she was traveling to pray at the Western Wall in Jerusalem's Old City early on November 24 when a group of ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) men attacked her for refusing to move to the back of the Egged No. 2 bus....

Shear says that on the bus three weeks ago, she was slapped, kicked, punched and pushed by a group of men who demanded that she sit in the back of the bus with the other women. The bus driver, in response to a media inquiry, denied that violence was used against her, but Shear's account has been substantiated by an unrelated eyewitness on the bus who confirmed that she sustained an unprovoked "severe beating."

If, contrariwise, this didn't really happen, then it's the most despicable libel against Jews yet to bubble out the pens of the drive-by media (in this case, the vaguely left-libertarian Haaretz). But I believe that in this one special case, the elites are blameless, and the real villains are the animals who actually did beat that middle-aged woman, Miriam Shear.

I really like Ms. Shear:

Shear, a 50-year-old religious woman, says that on the morning of the 24th, a man got onto the bus and demanded her seat - even though there were a number of other seats available in the front of the bus.

"I said, I'm not moving and he said, 'I'm not asking you, I'm telling you.' Then he spat in my face and at that point, I was in high adrenaline mode and called him a son-of-a-bitch, which I am not proud of. Then I spat back. At that point, he pushed me down and people on the bus were screaming that I was crazy. Four men surrounded me and slapped my face, punched me in the chest, pulled at my clothes, beat me, kicked me. My snood [hair covering] came off. I was fighting back and kicked one of the men in his privates. I will never forget the look on his face."

Shear says that when she bent down in the aisle to retrieve her hair covering, "one of the men kicked me in the face. Thank God he missed my eye. I got up and punched him. I said, 'I want my hair covering back' but he wouldn't give it to me, so I took his black hat and threw it in the aisle."

Really, what is the difference between these particular Jews and the jihadis and radical Shia in Iraq, Iran, Saudia Arabia -- or Great Britain and France? Israelis must not allow animals like these to become the face of Judaism. These ultra-Orthodox (not all ultra-Orthodox; I refer only to those who commit unprovoked and fathomless acts of violence) are living just as much in a pre-modern world as are the Ayatollahs, the Taliban, and al-Qaeda.

Worse than a crime, such reprehensible behavior is a terrible blunder. It gives jihadis leave to argue, "what is the big deal with the way we treat women? You Jews are just as bad as we!"

It's not strictly true; there is no equivalent to "honor killings" among Jews, not even among the ultra-Orthodox sects. But how long before there is? How long until the transformation of Judaism into a strange sect of Salafism is complete?

To me, these criminals have fallen out of the worship of God and into the worship of graven images: the sterile rituals they practice, devoid of the underlying humanist ethic of Judaism, so lucidly espoused by Moses Maimonides and Rabbi Gershon. In this, they are every inch as apostate as Osama bin Laden or Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

To elevate "righteousness" so far above "the right" that they truly believe God commands them to kick and punch a 50 year old woman for not groveling when they bark brings tears to the eyes of God. What next -- will some ultra-Orthodox Jew on the Egged No. 2 bus throw acid in Miriam Shear's face?

May as well go whole hog: prate on about the Twelfth Imam to their forty wives and sacrifice their middle-school daughter to Moloch for holding hands with a boy. They're on the road to Hell already, so why do things by half measures?

Israelis should rise up and take back their public places and public buses from the jihadis with yarmulkes, before there is no Israel worth defending.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 21, 2006, at the time of 10:49 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack

December 14, 2006

Warty Justice

In a magnanimous gesture sure to send Israelis to their knees in thanksgiving prayers, a three-justice panel of the Israeli Supreme Court has graciously decided to allow the Israeli Defense Force to continue suppressing terrorist attacks on Israel... subject to individual, case-by-case injunctions, of course:

The Israeli Supreme Court decided Thursday not to issue a blanket ban against the targeted killing of Palestinian militants, ruling that some of the killings were legal under international law.

The ruling gave legal legitimacy to a practice Israeli forces have routinely used against militants during the past six years of violence. The Israeli human rights organization B'tselem estimates that 339 Palestinians have been killed in the targeted operations over the past six years. Of those, 210 were the targets and the rest were bystanders. [Or, presumably, byriders in the same car as the targets.]

Thus, even taking the estimate of a "human rights organization," that means that 210 suicide bombers and suicide-bomber recruiters, trainers, and equipers -- enablers, let's call them -- are no longer with us; sadly, their practice of hiding among (relatively) innocent civilians means that 129 of the latter have also died.

Let's assume that a suicide bomber or bomber-enabler would otherwise have taken out an average of, oh, just five innocents: children in preschool, teens in a Sbarro's pizzeria, worshippers at a synogogue, Jew and Moslem, Arab and European -- that lot. That is probably a lowball guess, considering that some of the targets (such as several successive leaders of Hamas) would be responsible, all by themselves, for hundreds of murders.

Even so, that would mean that, due directly to the IDF's "targeted killing of Palestinian militants," over a thousand innocents were not splattered across the sidewalk like Jackson Pollack paintings.

A thousand innocent lives were spared; 129 somewhat innocent lives were taken (many of those non-targets killed by the Hellfire missile were nevertheless terrorists themselves traveling in the same car -- but who had not specifically been targeted; I would be surprised if even as much as 20% of the "collateral damage" comprised actual innocents). In the twisted and grotesque calculus that Islamic jihadism has forced upon the rest of the world... I'd say we got a bargain.

Yet evidently, the Israeli Supreme Court believes that it has the authority, the mandate, and the jurisdiction to decide what measures Israel may take to ensure its own existence, its own survival as a nation. Now, I realize that many "supreme" courts (including our own) like to imagine that they are the absolute final last say in all matters they choose to take up. To put it as gently and politely as I can, this is a load of oysters; oysters I said, and oysters I meant.

Suppose, for supposing's sake, that a United States Supreme Court consisting of nine Dennis Kuciniches were suddenly to rule -- never mind how unlikely this is, it's a hypothetical -- that the United States armed services did not have the authority to kill anyone, even in defense of the nation; and the Court therefore ordered the American military to stand down, disband, and destroy all their weapons of mass and individual destruction.

Would any president of the United States obey this ruling? Should he? Or should he take the Andy Jackson route and say, the Supreme Court has made its decision, now let's see them enforce it? I believe that I am in a solid majority of Americans who believe that, were the Court to descend into such utter madness, it would be the duty of the Commander in Chief to ignore their insane commands (and probably take them into protective custody to stave off a lynching).

We are not in so dire a circumstance and likely never will be; but the Israelis are. They live with exactly such an existential threat every day.

It would have been more fitting and proper for the Israeli Supreme Court to rule instead that they did not have jurisdiction to tell the elected prime minister and his cabinet how to fight a war for Israel's very existence and to stop the mass slaughter of Israeli citizens... which if allowed to continue unchecked would surely lead to mutiny, revolution, and possibly the destruction of Israel by Iran, Syria, Egypt, and even Jordan... nations who have attacked Israel before (the first by proxy) and could easily do so again, were the country to fly apart at the seams.

The arrogance of the judiciary -- we alone shall decide whether the Israeli Defense Force is allowed to defend the country! -- is absolutely breathtaking. Alas, like boiling the frog degree by degree, unnoticed and little remarked, we in the West have allowed courts to assume super powers and supernatural abilities far beyond those of mortal men; and far beyond what any rational constitutionalist would imagine be left to them.

The purpose of the courts is to resolve disputes and enforce criminal justice -- not to run the whole blooming country. They do not sit in loco parentis for the legislature and the commander in chief.

Were I the prime minister of Israel, I would announce coldly that I was glad the Israeli Supreme Court ruled as it did; but had it ruled that Israel could not target terrorists for assassination -- the only offensive tactic that has actually worked to dramatically curtail suicide bombings, even before the wall was built -- I, as chief executive and commander in chief of the IDF, would have told them to go boil an owl: that the survival of the nation would not be held hostage to a sub-panel of three wrinkley, amphibious ancients who believe it's still 1975, out of a pool of fourteen exalted creatures, each of whom believes the sun rises and sets for the sake of Warty Bliggens (each justice is his own toad, of course).

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 14, 2006, at the time of 7:50 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

December 7, 2006

Dear Hugh: ISG Report Doesn't Claim "Right" of Return

Just a quick note responding to something Hugh Hewitt just said on his radio show, during the interview with Sen. and presidential perspirant Sam Brownback (R-KS, 100%).

(But first, a quick note to Sen. Brownback: Sam, "terrorism" is a noun, not a verb.)

Back to Hugh. Hugh Hewitt asked what Brownback thought about the ISG report -- I'm paraphrasing from memory, but this is the gist -- 'claiming a right of return' of Palestinians to Israel.

Fortunately, the ISG report says no such thing.

Here is the relevant section, the only time the term "right of return" is mentioned:

RECOMMENDATION 17: Concerning the Palestinian issue, elements of that negotiated peace should include....

Sustainable negotiations leading to a final peace settlement along the lines of President Bush’s two-state solution, which would address the key final status issues of borders, settlements, Jerusalem, the right of return, and the end of conflict.

Now maybe James Baker had in mind that the Israelis should give the Palestinians that right, so that millions of Arabs calling themselves Palestinians can move "back" to the land they never lived in a day of their lives (nor their fathers or mothers either), become the majority, and vote Israel out of existence.

I don't know. But it's irrelevant, because that is not what he and the other commissioners actually wrote in the document. They say only that the putative "right of return" must be addressed. And of course it must, because it's regularly raised by Arab countries and by Palestinians who hope to win via negotiation everything they've been unable to seize by war.

But the Iraq Study Group's final report says absolutely nothing about how it must be addressed. That question is left up to Israel. And in any event, as I wrote in the Big Lizards analysis of the report:

This entire section is imminently ignorable, as the five recommendations it contains all boil down to nothing beyond "the unconditional calling and holding of meetings."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 7, 2006, at the time of 4:08 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

October 13, 2006

On Provoking Ponderous Ponderings of Pyongyang and Palestine

Paul Mirengoff of Power Line has a great post up, "On Talking With the Enemy." Paul takes up the question of whether "I believe in talking to your enemies," as James A. Baker III, co-chair of the newly formed Iraq Study Group, likes to say, is a workable policy -- or just a mindless liberal slogan. Sorry for the redundancy. Paul's conclusion:

We should, of course, make an effort to find out the real views of our enemies. And if those views indicate the possibility of negotiations that hold a reasonable promise of a beneficial outcome for us, we ordinarily should hold such negotiations. But it's pointless at best, and dangerous at worst, to hold publicized negotiations when we know that the enemy's bottom line is one that we cannot accept. Indeed, while critics of the Bush administration like to remind us that we talked with the "evil empire" Soviet Union, we actually learned through bitter experience to avoid holding major summit-style talks unless there was reason to believe they would succeed in advancing our interests.

Paul considers this point in the context of the bilateral talks with North Korea that many Democrats, including Republican Baker, demand the Bush administration undertake, hoping for the same wonderful outcome we had when the Clinton-Carter team agreed upon the Agreed Framework (hence the name) with Kim Jong-Il in 1994. The net effect of the Agreed Framework, along with South Korea's Sunshine Policy of "engaging" North Korea, was described in the Washington Times by Dr. Yearn Hong Choi (and quoted in yet another Power Line post) thus:

North Korea kidnapped South Korean fishermen from the open sea and Japanese citizens from the seashore of Japan, and bombed a South Korean plane. The DPRK sold opium and produced counterfeit U.S. dollars. It has been starving its own people. But it has produced nuclear bomb(s) and long-distance missiles in order to threaten South Korea, Japan and the United States....

The appeasement policy and Sunshine policy just helped the North Korean dictator sustain his power, rather than have his country go bankrupt.

I really like Paul's criterion: no negotiations with the enemy if his bottom line is utterly unacceptable. It leads to quick resolution of a lot of thorny issues. Here's one:

1. The bottom-line position of both ruling Hamas and opposition Fatah in the Palestinian Authority is the destruction of Israel and expulsion of the Jews;
2. This is clearly unacceptable to Israel and to the United States;
3. Therefore, negotiations between Israel and the PA, or between the United States and the PA, are utterly pointless and should be broken off.

I have long agreed with the Power Line crew that President Bush's "Roadmap to Peace" is a farce, his worst foreign-policy program... and not coincidentally, completely at odds with his stance on all other terrorist organizations, including, oddly enough, Iran's proxy, Hezbollah: Bush does not demand Israel commence negotiations with Hassan Nasrallah on how much of northern Israel should be ceded to Hezbollah.

What could change the climate on negotiations with the PA? Only a change in their bottom line. If something forces the PA to drop the idea that they will ever be able to destroy Israel -- perhaps a horrific war, such as the civil war now looming in Gaza -- and they truly accept the inevitability of a two-state solution, then and only then would negotiations be feasible.

But you cannot negotiate your way to useful negotiations. You cannot negotiate your enemy's unacceptable bottom line into being acceptable, thus permitting negotiations. They have to change the goals first; and they will certainly need an external event to do so.

Until then, let the Palestinians stew in their own juices.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 13, 2006, at the time of 2:29 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

September 14, 2006

The Topology of Lincoln

(Chafee, not Abraham)

Scott Johnson of Power Line posted the letter that Sen. Lincoln "12%" Chafee of Rhode Island sent to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on September 7th. It includes two amusing lines. First, this one:

Chairman Lugar decided to hold the vote over to a later date, and I support that decision.

As Friend Lee pointed out, it's hardly a shock that Chafee supported this delay... since Dick Lugar (R-IN, 88%) was simply acceding to Lincoln Chafee's own request! Thus, this sentence translates to, "Chairman Lugar granted my request to hold the vote over, and I support his decision in my favor."

But the more ominous passage comes two paragraphs later:

One of the key issues with many of our allies is the situation with the Palestinians. I support the creation of a viable, contiguous Palestinian state living side-by-side in peace with its neighbor Israel. I believe progress on this front would be beneficial for the Palestinians, and futher America's, and Israel's security.

With Dr. Rice's PhD, she is probably better able to read a map than is Mr. Phillips Academy. But it's really not hard. Here, take a look-see:

I believe I already explained this in Contiguationness, on Captain's Quarters... but as we can plainly see, there are only two ways to make the Palestinian Authority "contiguous":

• You can create a weird, narrow corridor of land that hugs the southern "V-cut" along the Israeli borders with Egypt and Jordan, connecting Gaza to the West Bank. But this is silly -- how wide should it be, just enough for a north-going Zax and a south-going Zax to pass without having to turn sideways?
• You can create an aggressive spit of land that cuts straight across Israel to connect Gaza and the West Bank. In that case, "Palestine" would be contiguous, but Israel wouldn't be. You would have sliced it neatly in half.

I'm not exactly sure how chopping Israel in half would "further Israel's security," but maybe Chafee can explain it to me someday.

A simple glance at the map shows why a "contiguous" Palestinian authority won't fly. Not to beat a dead hearse, but when Lincoln drives, who is the navigator?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 14, 2006, at the time of 8:51 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Former Top General Demands Resignation...

...Of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Army Chief of Staff Dan Halutz. (Did you think I was talking about Donald Rumsfeld? Tsk-tsk!)

According to an interview in Haaretz, former Army Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon has demanded the resignations because of their scandalous handling of the brief war against Hezbollah:

Does the prime minister have to resign?

"Yes. He can't say he didn't know. He can't say that. Even if he was not an army person in the past and was not prime minister or defense minister, he knows how one goes to war. This is not the way to go to war. And he knows how a war is managed. This is not the way a war is managed.

Going to war was scandalous, and he is directly responsible for that. The war's management was a failure, and he is responsible for that. The final operation was particularly problematic, and he was directly involved in that. He was warned and did not heed the warnings. Therefore, he must resign."

The "bombshell" demand is actually not as momentous as it would ordinarily be; Ya'alon was Chief of Staff from 2002 until June 1st, 2005 -- when Olmert relieved him of command and installed his own man in the job: Dan Halutz.

But until that moment, Halutz had been Ya'alon's Deputy Chief of Staff; and I'm sure Ya'alon feels betrayed, believing, and not without good reason, that Halutz was probably working assiduously that whole time to undermine Ya'alon. Ya'alon has no cause to love either Halutz or Olmert.

In addition, although Lt.Gen. Moshe Ya'alon still (weakly) denies being interested in politics, many Israeli sources have cited him as the likely pick for Defense Minister in a possible second Benjamin Netanyahu government, or any other Likud government. So he does have a political agenda.

But having an agenda doesn't itself make one wrong; Winston Churchill had an agenda for many years to make Britain strong enough to resist the Nazis -- and thank goodness such an agenda-driven man became British prime minister!

Here is Ya'alon's bill of particulars against Halutz:

"The chief of staff failed in the management of the war. He gave the political echelon the feeling that he had the capability, which in practice he did not have, to bring about a political achievement by means of an extremely aggressive military operation.

"He entered the war without defining it as a war, and maybe without understanding that it was a war. He did not understand the implications of the measures he himself adopted. He did not mobilize the reserves in time, and did not open the emergency depots in time, and did not activate the high-command base.

"He managed the war from his office. He imposed missions such as Bint Jbail without any discussion and without consulting with the command about the consequences and implications. He created lack of clarity that rattled the forces in the field, caused a loss of trust and generated chaos. He did not give the commanders in the North backing. He did not build a structure that would help him overcome his weakness in the land sphere. He managed the campaign arrogantly and shallowly."

This doubtless raises a nagging question in your minds. Readers probably recall that I am adamant that Donald Rumsfeld remain as Secretary of Defense, despite the fact that a former Commander in Chief of CENTCOM, Gen. Anthony Zinni, demands his resignation. What's the difference between the two cases?

The difference is that Zinni was wrong and Ya'alon is right. In the actual warfighting, Rumsfeld did fine; we conquered the Taliban and deposed Saddam at astonishing speed and with virtually no casualties. And he is finally undertaking the Herculean labor of reforming our grand military strategy so that we can stop refighting World War II (which we've done five times since 1945) and finally begin confronting 3rd-millennium threats by looking forward, not back over our shoulders.

All the angst of Zinni and his yes-men centers on the post-Saddam insurgency and terrorist war; but in that war, Rumsfeld is trying to do what no one has ever done: impose modern democracy and self-sufficiency upon a tribal people who are, in many ways, still living in the demon-haunted world of the seventh century.

Zinni's pronunciamentos notwithstanding, nobody else has any better ideas than Rumsfeld about how to carry out the Commander in Chief's orders: turn Iraq into a reasonable facsimile of a modern liberal democracy... just enough so that it will not become a safe harbor for al-Qaeda and other terrorists in the forseeable future. Given the breadth and sheer audacity of the task, Donald Rumsfeld is doing extraordinarily well indeed. Anyone who smugly asserts he could do it better than the secretary is just blowing hot air through his hat.

Contrariwise, the war that Israel fought was as conventional as could be: their task was to invade neighboring Lebanon, drive the Hezbollah guerillas across the Litani River (and preferably out of Lebanon entirely), kill as many as they could and disarm the rest, and hunt for the two kidnapped soldiers.

But Halutz, Defense Minister Amir Peretz (who also comes in for some fisticuffs from Lt. Gen. Ya'alon), and Olmert failed at each of these tasks save one (they did kill a lot of terrorists); they were only saved from ruination by the fact that Hezbollah was even more incompetent than Israel.

So I applaud Ya'alon's "j'accuse" in Haaretz, I dismiss as nonsensical Zinni's and other Democrats' foot-stamping demand that Rumsfeld resign, and I here demonstrate that there is absolutely no contradiction between those two positions.

So there.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 14, 2006, at the time of 4:17 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

September 4, 2006

Debunking the Rebunking of the Debunking

UPDATE Sep. 6th, 2006: Just found out (by reading Power Line) that Zombie is a female... so I changed all the "Mr. Zombies" to "Ms. Zombies."

All right, let's see if we can follow the machinations of the Lebanese ambulance attack hoax of 2006...

Bunkum --

On July 23rd, during the late war between Israel and Hezbollah, the latter claimed that the perfidious Jews deliberately shot missiles at two ambulances toting the wounded in Qana, Lebanon -- presumably out of sheer ornery cussedness. You know what Jews are like: when they're not poisoning wells and eating Christian babies at Passover, they can generally be found shooting at hospitals, orphanges, and ambulances.

To prove Hezbollah's claim, they sent a shaky, amateur video of two ambulances to the U.K.'s ITV the next day, the 24th. One had a neat, round hole in the top -- exactly where the crosshairs of the red cross met. This was touted as proof that the attacks were "deliberate;" after all, you couldn't expect such a precise shot by sheer accident, could you?

Of course, this begs the point that you couldn't expect such a precise shot at night from a moving platform, even if the Israelis were deliberately aiming at the red cross, either. But what the hey.

The second ambulance shows some damage in the rear: some of the metal appears to be peeled back a bit.

Here's an International Red Cross press release:

The latest of these incidents occurred on 23 July, at 11.15 pm in Cana, a village in southern Lebanon. According to Lebanese Red Cross reports, two of its ambulances were struck by munitions, although both vehicles were clearly marked by the red cross emblem and flashing lights that were visible at a great distance. The incident happened while first-aid workers were transferring wounded patients from one ambulance to another. As a result, nine people including six Red Cross volunteers were wounded.

Showing their usual flair for independent reporting and expert analysis, AP swiftly followed with a story that was essentially a dramatic rewrite of the press release:

The rocket attack on the two vehicles wounded six ambulance workers and three civilians - an 11-year-old boy, an elderly woman and a man, Deebe said.

"One of the rockets hit right in the middle of the big red cross that was painted on top of the ambulance," he said. "This is a clear violation of humanitarian law, of international law. We are neutral and we should not be targeted."

Kassem Shalan, one of the ambulance workers, told AP Television News that nine people were injured. "We were transferring the wounded into our vehicle and something fell and I dropped to the floor," he said.

Amateur video provided by an ambulance worker confirmed Deebe's account of damage to the vehicles, showing one large hole and several smaller ones in the roof of one ambulance and a large hole in the roof of the second. Both were destroyed.

The only original line of reporting here was the last one, saying that both vehicles "were destroyed." Which was a flat lie, of course, since both vehicles still exist today -- completely intact, exterior and interior. Either an AP reporter saw the extant ambulances and decided to enhance the story by pretending they were obliterated (in which case he's a liar)... or else some AP editor let someone make a fool of him.

An Australian newspaper, the Age of Melbourne (I believe), was the first to report that the ambulance attack was on purpose:

Then the roar and smash of the missiles shattered the night. Both ambulances were hit, directly and systematically, by Israeli bombs, the medics said.

Remember this newspaper; this will be on the test.

DeBunkum --

Enter a blog called Zombietime. Ms. Zombie was the first that I saw who raised serious objections to the "evidence" in a systematic and convincing way. He noted several points:

1. The hole in the roof of ambulance 782 was clearly not made by a missile... not unless we live in a Tex Avery cartoon, where missiles make perfectly circular holes, surrounded by screwholes -- and in the exact spot that such ambulances ordinarily have circular vent covers.

   
   

   
   
   
   Circular hole in ambulance 782
   is most likely from a vent cover
   
   
   

   Zombietime:

   In fact, the hole looks unmistakably like a pre-existing circular hole in the roof, to which some feature -- such as a light or a vent cover -- was attached, and then removed....

   Lo and behold, when we look at other pictures of undamaged Lebanese Red Cross ambulances, we see that many of them just happen to have a ventilation cover of the exact same diameter as the "missile" hole right in the center of the cross on the roof. [Emphasis in original]

2. The holes in the roof of ambulance 782 are heavily rusted... which means they could not possibly have been made on July 23rd, since pictures of the roof (with the rusted holes) appeared as early as August 1st.

   Feeble attempts were made to claim that it was "flash rust" that completely rusted metal in a desert in a few days, but metallurgy experts scoffed at the claim.

3. The damage on display in the photographs of both ambulances is completely inconsistent with a missile attack.
4. There is no sign of a fire inside either ambulance.
5. The supposedly "wounded" ambulance driver, shown in hospital with huge bandages on his chin and right ear, turned up in photographs a few days later with no injuries at all.

In other words, Zombietime (relying upon posts by Reihl World View and Infinitives Unsplit) completely demolished the claim that Israeli missiles struck either ambulance on July 23rd in Qana.

ReBunkum --

Now the Age has come out of its corner swinging (remember I warned you they would pop up in this story again?) They've raised the bet and gone all-in, still gamely insisting that those wicked Jews attack ambulances for the sheer joy of it, once a day and twice on Saturday Sabbath. (Hat tip Riehl World View, via Power Line.) In a story attributed to one "Sarah Smiles," they write:

The attack on two ambulances ferrying mildly injured people from the village of Tibnin to Tyre was widely reported by international media, including The Age.

But [Australian] Foreign Minister Alexander Downer has condemned press coverage of the incident, suggesting it was a hoax. He appears to have drawn his conclusions from right-wing US website zombietime.com that debunks all reporting on the incident using available press photos and television footage as "evidence".

Oh. "Right wing" is evidently Gregg shorthand for "no need to offer counter-evidence to Zombietime's points when an all-purpose sneer will serve nicely." (And note the scare-quotes surrounding the word evidence.) Here is how Ms. Smiles responds to some of Ms. Zombie's strongest evidence:

While some reporters wrote that an Israeli missile ripped a hole in the roof of one ambulance that was directly hit, the zombietime.com site argues a missile would have caused much wider damage. It argues the hole appears to be where there was an existing circular vent, with rust on some of the exposed metal showing that damage to vehicle happened before the reported time of the attack.

However, Red Cross volunteers manning the ambulances and Mr Fawaz insist the hit was caused by small weapons fired from unmanned drones that they heard circling above after the attack.

Well, if you insist! Who can argue with that?

The Age visited the yard where the bombed out ambulances are now parked.

One presumes those would be the two ambulances that "were destroyed," according to AP. Actually, one must presume... because despite sending a reporter to view these ambulances, the Age did not post a single photograph -- pictures that would allow us to see whether they're even the same two vehicles as the shaky, amateurish video footage shot immediately after the supposed incident and broadcast on ITV... let alone whether, even if they are the same ambulances, they're in the same condition now that they were on July 23rd.

In other words, Smiles has failed at the most basic task of any investigator: establishing a "chain of custody" of the evidence. How difficult would it have been to fire an RPG or anti-tank weapon at the stern of the Potempkin ambulance, to be subsequently observed and duly noted by the strangely incurious reporter for the Age?

When Ahmed Fawaz's leg was supposedly blown off by the Israeli missile, why no blood? Ah, the Age can explain that: evidently, the same missile that severed Fawaz's leg also cauterized it! (And how exactly did it do that? By the extreme heat of the explosion? Then why is nothing burnt inside either ambulance?)

Mr. Downer -- remember him? -- says the Israeli-airstrike-on-a-pair-of-ambulances story is a hoax. But it's not a hoax, says the Age, because Fawaz has only one leg.

Yeesh. It's beyond Sarah Smiles' limited visualization abilities to imagine that perhaps, just perhaps, Ahmed Fawaz might have lost his leg by some other means... since we have only his word, and that of the Lebanese drivers, that he was ever in that ambulance in the first place.

Everything in the Age story is "eyewitness" testimony by witnesses Ms. Smiles never bothers to qualify: she makes no attempt, other than asking the witnesses themselves, to verify whether any of them was even present; and if present, in a position to see; and if in a position to see, whether any had an interest in promoting the story that Israel was shooting at ambulances. She never even checked -- or doesn't tell us if she did -- whether any of the "witnesses" is a member of Hezbollah.

The ineptness of the Age's response -- amounting, more or less, to "it did so happen!" -- beggars the imagination. But this particular bit of testimony is priceless:

When [Fawaz] came to after the blast, he remembers reaching for his glasses that were knocked to the back of his head, adjusting them and then feeling a sense of malaise.

So this Hellfire or Viper Strike missile, with 20 lbs of high-explosives, blows Fawaz's leg off... but it doesn't even break his eyeglasses, merely knocking them askew! Yep; that's Tex Avery, all right. All we need is for Fawaz's eyes to telescope out when he sees his leg missing, and his jaw to literally drop all the way down to the floor and bounce.

In Riehl World View's post discussing the newest counteroffensive by the antique media, Dan Riehl incongruously seems taken in, to some extent, by the zeal of the Age:

Images of both ambulances do exist and I've edited a section of video, playing it back below at half speed to show the two ambulances together. In all honesty, I had set out to debunk claims by The Age that the photos we've been looking at were the wrong ones; however, careful analysis appears to depict what looks like a hit from something on a second ambulance and the location of it does line up with other basic elements of the story.

However, Riehl should realize that "a hit from something" is not the same as a missile strike by an Israeli warplane -- or even a drone, which carries a smaller missile: our Predator UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) come equipped with two Hellfire missiles; the same missile is also used on our Cobra, Apache, Commanche, Blackhawk, and Kiowa attack helos.

And the damage depicted in the video that Riehl finds so persuasive is simply nothing like what you would expect from a missile impact... even from a missile with a dummy warhead (as some apologists have suggested). Inside both ambulances, I see undamaged seats and gurneys, intact plastic or thin-metal cans, and door seals hanging loosely instead of being shredded. I see windows more or less intact... and both ambulances shown in the video still have operable rear doors -- both doors are open, held up by their own door piston supports.

Even a small Hellfire missile flies at 950 miles per hour (425 meters per second); with a mass of 46kg, that gives it a kinetic energy of 4.2 million joules; by contrast, even a .50 calliber BMG round fired from an M82 sniper rifle produces only between 13558 and 17625 joules -- less than 1/235th of the energy of the Hellfire. And the Hellfire has a larger cross-section, flying at a similar velocity... so it probably imparts more of its energy to the target than the .50 BMG would. And this is still not considering the warhead.

You would see a gigantic hole in the back, through everything in between, and an even bigger exit hole out the front, probably knocking the entire engine block out through the grillwork. Either that, or else the missile would have remained in the ambulance, absolutely wrecking it but leaving its own deformed body for the drivers to display (assuming they survived by some miracle).

And of course, if you add a 9kg warhead -- all "witnesses" describe explosions -- there would simply be nothing left but a twisted frame and some fire-scorched shards of metal.

Certainly, nobody inside either ambulance would have walked away unscathed from an impact that would be the equivalent of driving the ambulance into a brick wall at over a hundred miles per hour; with a warhead, nobody would even survive.

I'm sorry to contradict Dan Riehl, who seems to have been one of the first people to analyze this claim, but neither of the two ambulances depicted in the original video, which he has posted on his site slowed down for easier viewing, could possibly have been hit even by a smaller Hellfire missile -- let alone a big, huge AGM-65 Maverick, the standard missile found on an F-16 Fighting Falcon or F-15 Strike Eagle (the mainstays of the Israeli Air Force). A Maverick masses more than five times a Hellfire and flies at 2.7 times the velocity, giving it 36 times as much kinetic energy... plus a warhead containing from 6 to 15 times as much explosive power as a Hellfire.

If an ambulance were hit by a Maverick, I doubt anything would be left but a charred impact crater.

Re-DeBunkum --

Three conclusions are immediately clear, despite the Australian newspaper the Age's attempt to resuscitate the story:

• No matter how you slice it, neither ambulance depicted in the video (shot the day after the supposed incident) could possibly have been hit by a missile and still be as intact as it is.
• We have no idea whether the Age reporter, Sarah Smiles, was shown the actual vehicles involved, and neither does she. And there is no chain of custody of the ambulances: we have no idea what was done to them afterward, and the Age gives us no photographs to compare to earlier pictures.
• None of the news reports has even bothered trying to "qualify" the supposed eyewitnesses, meaning their testimony is worthless. How about if an American soldier in Iraq is picked at random, and he testifies that he absolutely saw those ambulances not get hit by any missiles on that day? For all the Age can tell, our random testifier has no less of a chance of being a valid witness than those they actually interviewed!

This puts paid to the claim that the Israelis shot any ambulance at all on July 23rd: if there had actually been such an incident, Hezbollah and the International Red Cross would not have had to stage a fake one. They would have an actual destroyed ambulance to display.

Israel has not "admitted" the charge, contrary to early reports. And it seems most unlikely that they ever will, simply because all of the available evidence indicates it never happened.

The Lebanese ambulance attack hoax of 2006 joins the Jenin "massacre" as Great Fictional Israeli War Crimes of the Twenty-First Century; both stand as stark reminders that many Moslems see nothing at all immoral about lying, so long as the "lie" advances the world caliphate (just as Communists saw lies in the furtherance of world Socialism simply as "higher-level" truth).

Journalists know this; Anderson Cooper himself remarked upon Arabs staging "ambulance runs" for the camera, with journalists eagerly cooperating to get exciting "action" shots that they knew were as fake as a three-dollar bill. But the fakery goes beyond a desire for a cool shot; a close working relationship has developed between terrorists eager to spread their propaganda and reporters desperate to destroy Republicans and George W. Bush in particular.

The latter receive and pass along the propaganda with no trace of skepticism: if Hassan Nasrallah were to announce tomorrow morning that IDF soldiers had been seen poisoning Lebanese wells, the elite media would all report it in their afternoon editions.

Thus doth jihadism and leftism conspire to thwart "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind." I do not question the media's patriotism; I nakedly observe that they have none.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 4, 2006, at the time of 5:25 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

September 3, 2006

Paul Mirengoff Clarifies and Extends His Remarks

Paul over at Power Line has very kindly responded to our earlier post, which accused him of a minor lapse of logic, by clarifying what he actually meant:

Perhaps my lapse (if any) was less in my logic than in the clarity of my writing. I did not mean to suggest that Olmert could not have bungled even if Hezbollah got much the worse of things, but rather that he may not have bungled under that scenario....

In essence, I'm saying that if Hezbollah didn't suffer a defeat, then Olmert clearly bungled, and bungled monumentally. If Hezbollah suffered a defeat to the point that it will not attack Israel again, then the issue with respect to Olmert becomes more complicated, such that one at least "can defend" the approach he took.

I so much appreciate it when a thinker clarifies his remarks, because (like Dennis Prager) I'm much more interested in clarity than agreement. Though in this case, in the clearer version of Paul's argument, I think it's not only logical and accurate but a thought-provoking point: is it possible that Olmert realized that even the seemingly half-hearted version of a war that he conducted was enough to thrash Hezbollah? That he didn't need to do any more, so why risk more Israeli lives?

I don't really think so, because I don't think Olmert is that bright. Intelligent people like Paul Mirengoff sometimes tend to implicitly assume others are as smart as they, attributing deeper thinking to a political gefilte fish like Olmert than Olmert is capable of achieving -- the polar opposite of what Democrats to do George W. Bush.

(In my own case, I'm saved from this sin by regarding most mere mortals with the amused contempt that is a natural byproduct of me having an ego the size of the Greater Magellanic Cloud.)

Paul is unquestionably correct that it could be true, and also that it deserves consideration; I like this version much better than what I mistakenly read into the earlier. But upon reflection, the degree of perspicacity such a balancing act would require of Ehud Olmert is prohibitively high, I think.

I did not, by the way, say that Israel could have "obliterated" Hezbollah, and I don't believe they could have; I said this:

What it really means is that Hezbollah was stronger than we thought but weaker than we feared. It certainly doesn't meant that, with more effort and brainpower on Israel's part, Hezbollah couldn't have been wiped out. In fact, recognition, however delayed, of Hezbollah's true weakness should fuel the idea that, if Israel had just tried a little harder, it could have obliterated that awful terrorist group.

That is, seeing Hezbollah's weakness makes it somewhat more likely in my mind that they could have been wiped out, root and branch; but that's up from a very low percentage to a moderately low percentage.

I think it probable that, with somewhat more effort, Hezbollah could have been driven out of Lebanon and back up into Syria -- which would have been a Godsend to Israel, a far better result than what Olmert at least appears to have achieved.

And one I still think will happen; I'm a "Round Two"-er: I believe the dynamics are such that another go between Israel and Hezbollah is almost inevitable. Note that Olmert still (rightly) refuses to withdraw the IDF, refuses to lift the blockade, refuses to act as if it never happened. He realizes that if he were to acquiesce to allowing Hezbollah to stay in south Lebanon with its weaponry, and to be rearmed by Iran and Syria, he may as well sign the withdrawal orders -- and then resign as prime minister, getting out before folks can find a rail, a goose, and some tar.

So yes, it's an intriguing suggestion -- Ehud Olmert as Cesare Borgia. And I must confess the suggestion must be confronted and seriously considered. But doing so, I think the evidence indicates he was just being feckless -- and that Hezbollah was just weaker than we were afraid it might be.

It's like finding out that David was really aiming at Goliath's gonads, but he missed... and just happened to hit Goliath's head, his Achilles heel. Turns out David was just a lucky putz -- but Goliath is still room temperature.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 3, 2006, at the time of 3:45 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

September 2, 2006

The Slow Motion Collapse Has Begun

Everyone on all sides in Israel now agrees that if new elections are held anytime soon -- as opposed to 2010, the next scheduled date -- Ehud Olmert and his Kadima party will lose big, along with their coalition partner Labor; the big winners will be Likud and other conservative parties. Thus, Olmert will do anything to delay new elections.

Alas for him, new elections can be triggered anytime the Knesset reports a vote of "no confidence" in the current government. As we all learned from Captain Ed's reporting on the equally slow-motion collapse of Canada's Liberal Party and its erstwhile leader, Paul Martin, there are several kinds of bills whose rejection would be considered a vote of no confidence, including the budget. I assume (without really knowing) that the same is true for Israel's Knesset: which means that Olmert must avoid any and all bills that could be considered votes on confidence in the government.

Which means that he can only stay in power if nothing at all happens, nothing important is proposed, and Israel simply drifts along like a log floating in a stream. Which would be fine... except that there are excited Arabs shooting at the log.

In particular, Olmert must avoid at all costs any independent inquiry into Israel's conduct during the recent Lebanon war... lest a serious condemnation lead to the very kind of vote he's desperate to avoid.

That means he can only allow an inquiry into his conduct that he, himself controls -- an utterly corrupt kangaroo court that will rubberstamp any conclusion that comes from Ehud Olmert's office. He has steadfastly refused to allow any independent inquiry for solid political reasons (though it seriously undercuts Israel itself not to let everyone know what went wrong).

Enter Amir Peretz, the minister of defense.

Peretz is the head of Labor; and as Kadima's partner in the current government, Peretz is in the same leaky rowboat with Olmert. However, Peretz has rival Labor leaders nipping at his heels... and were he to be replaced as head of Labor, which would take only an internal vote, he would become the forgotten man of Israel.

Those rivals, as well as the Labor chisel and file, are demanding an independent investigation... probably (I cynically aver) more to embarass and diminish Peretz than because they really want to know what actually happened. But the amazing result is that now, Peretz himself has joined the chorus demanding an independent inquiry:

Bowing to rebels in his own Labor Party, Defense Minister Amir Peretz of Israel called today for a full independent inquiry into the recent war in Lebanon, changing his previous position and putting him publicly at odds with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

Olmert has so far prevented any independent inquiry; but the excuses are wearing thin, as more and more Israelis demand an investigation that is not controlled by the very person being investigated. Peretz is in a far weaker position, as the junior partner of a minority government... and he was unable to get away with the Olmert option:

Mr. Peretz, elected head of the Labor Party not long before the March 28 elections, was considered an unlikely defense minister, and his own performance during the war has been widely criticized, with many calling for his resignation. He himself appointed a panel, headed by an aide and former general, to look into the military’s performance, and was widely criticized again for trying to control the inquiry.

Mr. Peretz then halted the work of his own commission and appeared to back Mr. Olmert. With 19 seats in the 120-seat Parliament, Labor is a junior partner in the government with Kadima, which as 29 seats. But senior members of Labor, some of whom opposed Mr. Peretz, a former trade-union leader, have seen a chance to tame him or even pull him down. They have pressed him to support a full state inquiry, which he has now done.

The political dynamics of this are fascinatingly complex:

• If there is an independent inquiry, it will likely find that both Olmert and Peretz behaved incompetently and insouciantly; this would probably crack the government wide open, forcing new elections that both Kadima and Labor would lose;
• But if Peretz opposes an independent commission to investigate the war, he will be branded cowardly and corrupt (charges of corruption are endemic in Israel and often successful -- because too often accurate); he would likely lose his position as head of Labor even if the Olmert government managed to hang on;
• So the only hope for Peretz is to call for an independent inquiry, but hope to hell that Olmert is able to stop it; that way, Peretz can shrug his shoulders and say, "Oh well, I tried;"
• But this depends upon Olmert being able to hold the line against an independent commission... which is made vastly harder by his own defense minister calling for exactly the sort of inquiry that Olmert is blocking;
• So in essence, Peretz must pray that he is so weak and powerless that Olmert is easily able to overcome Peretz's apostasy; but if this is true, then that makes it ever so much easier for Peretz's political rivals within Labor to oust him -- as a weak, ineffectual leader who cannot even persuade his own coalition partner to launch an independent investigation of their conduct during the war!

Thus, every way Amir Peretz turns, he's up to his yarmulke in alligators. But that's not his only problem; Olmert, unwilling to be Peretz's whipping boy, is fighting back:

Mr. Olmert, needless to say, was reported by Israeli media to be less than happy with Mr. Peretz’s latest change of position. Olmert aides, without being named, were quoted as saying that Mr. Peretz had caved in to political pressure and was again showing his inexperience.

Olmert is also trying to woo Avigdor Liberman, head of the Yisrael Beiteinu ("Our Home Israel") party. Yisrael Beiteinu got 11 seats in the Knesset in the March 2006 elections... so the threat is obvious to Labor (which got 19 seats): if Yisrael Beiteinu were to join the coalition, and if a smaller party were also to join (such as the ultra-orthodox Torah Judaism Party, 6 seats, or Meretz, 5 seats, or Balad or Hadash, 3 seats each -- it's not hard to construct a 61+ seat majority without the Labor Party.

Kadima's current coalition comprises:

Kadima coalition

Political Party	Seats in Knesset
Kadima	29
Labor	19
Shas	12
Pensioners	7
Total seats	67 (61 is a majority)

But the other parties that got seats in the Knesset, and who theoretically could replace Labor, are:

Alternative partners to Labor

Political Party	Seats in Knesset
Likud	12
Yisrael Beytenu	11
National Union National Religious Party	9
United Torah Judaism	6
Meretz-Yachad	5
United Arab List	4
Hadash	3
Balad	3
Total seats	53 (13+ needed to replace Labor)

However, once the shaky Kadima coalition breaks apart, there is no guarantee that Olmert will be able to hold them together long enough to put a new coalition in place; parties might decide to wait for new elections, thinking that with Kadima and Labor diminished, some of the smaller parties might pick up seats and become more important. Thus, Olmert's implicit theat to dump Labor and replace it with some more complicated coalition of other parties is, while not exactly empty, at least problematical.

So any way you slice the kosher bologna, there are interesting times ahead for Israel. But Big Lizards sticks by its prediction that the Olmert government cannot stand long: as Lincoln (Abraham, not Chafee) said, "you can't fool all the people all the time." Or even a majority of them.

Olmert's government will fall because it has proven to be dangerously incompetent in warfare... and war is the natural state of the state of Israel.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 2, 2006, at the time of 4:39 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

September 1, 2006

Rare Logical Lapse From My Favorite Blog

It's well known that Big Lizards strongly disagrees with Power Line about the effect and consequences of the recent Israeli-Lebanese war: Power Line believes it was an unalloyed, ringing victory for Hezbollah and an unparalleled catastrophe for Israel; while Big Lizards believes that it was a lose-lose scenario, where both sides lost -- but Hezbollah lost worse:

This is why I say that overall, neither Hezbollah nor Israel won this war; both lost. Hezbollah lost the actual ground war worse than Israel did; but Israel lost the PR war worse than did Hezbollah. Iran/Syria and the United States both had slight wins; and Europe showed itself to be, once again, feckless and unreliable....

I agree that Israel did not do anywhere near as well as it could have, had it a different government. But it's just plain irresponsible to don sackcloth, roll in ashes, and proclaim a total and complete victory by the forces of darkness. For heaven's sake, results were mixed on all sides.

Now, belatedly, along come some others who now, upon sober reflection, proclaim agreement with the Lizard: notably Charles "the Sauerkraut" Krauthammer and Col. Austin Bay.

The former notes that:

True, under the inept and indecisive leadership of Ehud Olmert, Israel did miss the opportunity to militarily destroy Hezbollah and make it a non-factor in Israel's security, Lebanon's politics and Iran's foreign policy. Nonetheless, Hezbollah was seriously hurt. It lost hundreds of its best fighters. A deeply entrenched infrastructure on Israel's border is in ruins. The great hero has had to go so deep into hiding that Nasrallah has been called "the underground mullah.''

Most importantly, Hezbollah's political gains within Lebanon during the war have proved illusory. As the dust settles, the Lebanese are furious at Hezbollah for provoking a war that brought them nothing but devastation -- and then crowing about victory amid the ruins.

Paul of Power Line finds some logical disconnect between these two sentiments. He believes that if the latter idea is true, that Hezbollah also suffered defeat, then this casts doubt on the idea that Olmert's leadership was "inept":

If Hezbollah has suffered a major defeat and if, as Krauthammer claims, Hezbollah will not attack Israel again, then one can defend Olmert's decision not to sacrifice the lives of hundreds of additional Israeli soldiers in order to accomplish more.

I'm puzzled; typically, Paul Mirengoff is the most logical of the three (John Hinderaker is the passionate Power Liner, especially when it comes to female beauty pageants; while Scott Johnson, with his emphasis on music, is the mystic). But of course, there is no conflict between the following two statements:

• Ehud Olmert is an inept clod who mismanaged the war;
• Nevertheless, Hassan Nasrallah still had his butt handed to him.

What it really means is that Hezbollah was stronger than we thought but weaker than we feared. It certainly doesn't meant that, with more effort and brainpower on Israel's part, Hezbollah couldn't have been wiped out. In fact, recognition, however delayed, of Hezbollah's true weakness should fuel the idea that, if Israel had just tried a little harder, it could have obliterated that awful terrorist group.

No illogicality at all, Paul; the two ideas go together like Michael Moore and a box of jelly donuts.

(By the way, just to sharpen Big Lizards' own nosehorn, here is what Austin Bay said on Strategy Page:

But the emerging "big picture" suggests the War of the Rockets physically punished and politically damaged Hezbollah, despite its media touts of victory.

On the other hand, Israel cannot claim a victory -- at least, not yet.

Heh; Col. Bay could have saved some time by simply reading our previous post!)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 1, 2006, at the time of 3:22 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

August 25, 2006

Run Silent, Run Kosher

MAJOR UPDATE: Commenter Jay Tea of WhizBang notes that the German Dolphin submarines are not boomers at all but fast-attack subs; they can fire torpedo-tube launched Popeye Turbo cruise missiles that can carry nuclear warheads. So ignore all the poetic gunk about boomers (which I don't want to delete, as I kind of like it); but the rest of the post, including the point about nuclear second-strike capability, still stands, I believe!

Israel, alone among all the civilized nations in really taking Iran as seriously as it deserves, has just ordered two more nuclear-capable Dolphin submarines from the Germans.

I do not except even the United States. I believe that George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld truly take Iran as seriously as they ought; but they're not the whole government or even the whole of the Executive. In particular, Congress does not really grasp the enormity of the threat from Iran. And since we are not a dictatorship, the president cannot simply decree an appropriate response.

But Israel lies under such immediate and obvious existential threat, that there is likely not a single member of the Israeli cabinet who does not feel Persian fear in the pit of his stomach. They may disagree over what to do, but that is for the same reason that different bomb-squad members may disagree over which wire to cut: everybody understands how dangerous a bomb is, but nobody wants to snip the wrong wire.

However, there are some things everyone in Israel can agree upon; and one of those is that they desperately need a "second strike" capability. To the extent that the Iranians have any rational survival instinct left, if they believe they would be wiped out by Israeli retaliation, they might think a second time about launching a first nuclear strike, should they manage to obtain (by cyclotron or A.Q. Khan) nuclear weapons.

Hence the Dolphins. You will hear a lot about the "first strike" capability of the German subs; but that's not important. The Israelis already have a first-strike ability via land-based missiles. But under an Iranian nuclear strike, all known or even vaguely suspected Israeli missile silos will be hit many times.

Now the "temple weapons" are buried deep and hard; but it's still possible that several nuclear warheads dropped atop them would crack or seal off the top of the silos, rendering the Israeli weapons completely useless. In fact, it doesn't even need to be true: it's a catastrophe even if the Iranians just falsely think it's true.

But even the most powerful nuclear weapon, hundreds of megatons, has one terrible flaw that spoils everything: you must have at least some idea of where your target is in order to shoot at it! That, of course, is precisely the point of a nuclear submarine.

Subs come in two basic flavors: fast-attack and boomers. The former are tactical weapons: you use them to attack surface shipping, other subs, and maybe even aircraft, depending on their armament. They move quickly, and they spend a lot of time at the surface.

A boomer has but one mission: to get lost. It finds a nice, shady, well-protected spot, then sinks to the ocean floor... and stays there, silent, still, waiting with a terrible patience for the end of the world.

Every so often, it will raise a wire antenna just far enough to be able to communicate in short burst-transmissions with the high command, to find out if they still exist. If they do, off to Davy Jones' locker goes the boomer once more, hibernating until the next contact.

If contact is lost, the captain of the sub has to make a decision that spells life or death not just for the sub (a trivial concern) but for potentially hundreds of thousands or millions of other people.

God forbid a captain guesses wrong -- in either direction.

While the rest of the world plays diplomatic footsie with the mad mullahs, Israel, at least, is trying to drag them forward in time. Not to the present; nobody thinks the Iranians are ready for a twenty-first century world. But at least into the era of modernity... the days of MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction, the geomilitary theory which prevented the West and the Soviet Bloc (and later Red China) from engaging in actual nuclear warfare.

MAD is a deterrant strategy: no bloc can launch a nuclear attack against any of the others, because the attack is certain not to be 100% successful... and the survivors will still have a robust and functional retaliatory capability. Thus, the only certainty is that the attacker will be counterattacked by nukes from a country he just nuked. A country which has already suffered the worst has no reason to shrink from killing tens of millions of the enemy... including as many of the Dear Leaders as they can get.

But MAD is also a quintessentially 20th century strategy; thus, a secondary effect of Israel's move towards a fleet of boomers is that Iran may be dragged, against the will of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his sock puppet, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at least into the last century... which would be a heck of an improvement from its current 7th-century worldview.

(That has always been my biggest objection to the term "Islamofascist": it fools us into believing the jihadis are more sophisticated than they really are, mistaking them for a 20th-century socialist perversion. We mislead ourselves into thinking that they think like we, when in fact they think like bloodthirsty satraps from the Dark Ages.

(The error may be fatal to our civilization. After "know thyself," the second most important dictum in warfare is "know thine enemy like thyself.")

Let's hope the Israelis have the right idea, and that Persia can be delivered, headfirst and screaming, into modernity, like a squawling newborn shoved from the dark womb into the bright light of the outside world. If so, that's more than half the battle -- because we already know how to deal with a modern, totalitarian dictatorship.

Oh, for the good old days of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 25, 2006, at the time of 6:03 AM | Comments (16) | TrackBack

August 22, 2006

The "Curious Omission" Gets Curiouser and Curiouser

Three days ago, we noted a curious omission from the New York Times and the Associated Press stories about Israel's commando raid deep into the Bekaa Valley Saturday: while both of those two media sources, as well as the Reuters account, all found occasion to quote chief U.N. envoy to Beirut Terje Roed-Larsen pronouncing Israel's raid "a clear violation of the ceasefire," only Reuters added a second quotation from Mr. Roed-Larsen: that if it were true, as the evidence clearly demonstrates, that Hezbollah were attempting to rearm in Lebanon... then that too would be a violation:

Israel said the operation, in which commandos were airlifted into the area by helicopter, was defensive and was designed to disrupt weapons supplies to Hizbollah from Syria and Iran.

It denied it had violated the resolution, which allows it to act in self-defense, and accused Hizbollah of doing so by smuggling weapons. Roed-Larsen said that if the guerrilla group was [sic] found to have smuggled weapons, it would indeed be in breach of the truce.

Well, here it is, 72 hours later... and now it appears that even Reuters has forgotten that vital piece of information. In a new article, Reuters -- perhaps having been teased unmercifully by its playmates for its unseemly faux pas -- repeats the point that the UN condemned Israel's raid as a violation... but they make no reference whatsoever to the fact that the same UN representative likewise condemned Hezbollah's provocation. Exhibit A:

"From Israel, we expect a renewed effort, this time truly binding, to respect the ceasefire," [Italian] Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema told La Repubblica newspaper.

"It's fair to expect that Hizbollah put down their weapons, but we cannot send our troops to Lebanon if the (Israeli) army keeps shooting."

The U.N.-backed truce was shaken by an Israeli commando raid in eastern Lebanon's Bekaa Valley on Saturday, which the U.N. deemed a ceasefire violation.

Exhibit B:

Israel says Saturday's raid was a defensive action and, as such, does not constitute a breach of U.N. Security Council resolution 1701, which brought the war to an end.

The Jewish state has accused Hizbollah of violating the resolution by smuggling arms from Syria and has said its jets need to fly over Lebanon to counter such activities.

So on the left hand, we have the fact that "the U.N. deemed" Israel's raid violated the ceasefire; while on the right hand, we are told only that "Israel says" they were responding to an earlier violation by Hezbollah, which is merely an "assus[ation]" by (of course) "the Jewish state." Darn those Jews! Cheating again!

But on the third hand, Reuters itself, in the earlier article, admitted that it was not just Israel that considered rearming a violation; the U.N. itself agreed (conditionally), in the person of the rude Mr. Larsen -- I'm sorry, I meant Mr. Roed-Larsen -- an official U.N. spokesman. (The condition was that if Hezbollah tried to rearm, then that would be a violation; Roed-Larsen had not personally investigated whether that was true or not.)

As Sgt. Garcia says in yet another episode of Zorro -- see what I mean about that television show being the font of all wisdom? -- "have you not heard it said, never let your right hand know what your left hand is doing?"

So the omission just got, to quote Alice in Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland, "curiouser and curiouser."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 22, 2006, at the time of 3:17 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

August 19, 2006

Israeli Commando Raid: the Case of the Curious Omission

It's clear from reading the accounts in various antique-media sources what the Israeli raid into the Bekaa was all about: Iran has been trying to rearm Hezbollah through Syria; the Israeli commando raid sought to disrupt that rearming, and in addition, capture a high-value Hezbollah target.

The raid took place in "the village of Boudai west of Baalbek in eastern Lebanon, about 17 miles from the Syrian border," according to AP. It was disrupted by Hezbollah fighters -- whether before or after it achieved its objectives depends upon whether you believe Israel or Hezbollah -- and a firefight ended up killing one Israeli soldier and three Hezbollah, and wounding a further two Israelis and three Hezbollah soldiers.

Beyond that much, the details are murky. But a couple of interesting tidbits remain. First, for those who insist that George W. Bush, the most pro-Israel president since Lyndon Johnson, threw Israel under the bus, here is an interesting counter-argument: according to every news account, we've still got Israel's back even now. Associated Press:

The White House declined to criticize the raid, noting that Israel said it acted in reaction to arms smuggling into Lebanon and that the U.N. resolution calls for the prevention of resupplying Hezbollah with weapons.

"The incident underscores the importance of quickly deploying the enhanced UNIFIL," White House spokeswoman Jeanie Mamo said.

Reuters:

Washington, Israel's chief ally, said it had noted the Jewish state's position.

"The prevention of the resupply of weapons to Hizbollah by Syria and Iran is a key provision of the U.N. Security Council resolution 1701," a White House official said.

Whether we encouraged Israel until it flaked out on us, or whether we prevented the Jewish state from finally securing its own defense, is actually a very important question. The commentariat, both in the blogosphere and in the news media, divides neatly into two groups:

1. Those who think Israel ran a feckless and infantile "pseudowar," and that the United States salvaged what little it could with UN Security Council Resolution 1701, the ceasefire agreement;
2. Those who think Israel was right on the brink of annihilating Hezbollah, when the US stuck out an invisible foot to trip them up, then dragged them, kicking and screaming, to the ceasefire.

Big Lizards is in Camp 1; the Center for Security Policy is clearly in Camp 2. But groups in the latter camp have never quite explained why, given a month of latitude, Israel itself didn't simply send in a strong enough force to get the job done (Camp-2 spokesfolks tend to mutter darkly about Israel being held back and prevented from fighting by mystery orders from Washington that are, alas, so secret that nobody has seen them).

The fact that we are still, today, championing Israel's right to conduct this commando raid while the ceasefire is in effect, that we refuse to characterize it as a violation, speaks volumes about which camp is correct: it seems rather unlikely to me that we would "force" Israel to stop and force them to agree to a ceasefire that leaves Hezbollah intact -- and then blithely tell them they can go ahead and raid deep into the Bekaa Valley against Hezbollah. Frank Gaffney will have to explain that one to me.

But there is a more interesting (to me, at least) media point: the fact that, while the Bush administration still backs Israel in this war against Hezbollah, some of the elite media definitely seem to have shifted to their more usual support for the terrorists. In discussing the legality of the raid, vis-à-vis the ceasefire agreement that Israel signed, all three stories above quote the senior United Nations envoy in Beirut, Terje Roed-Larsen:

The New York Times:

A high-ranking United Nations official, Terje Roed-Larsen, told Lebanese television that he could not independently confirm the details of the raid. “But if wat has been reported is correct,” he said, “it is of course a clear violation of the ceasefire.”

Associated Press:

Before departing for Israel, Roed-Larsen said if the report about the Israeli commando raid was true, the incident would be "a clear violation" of the U.N.-imposed cease-fire agreement.

"And it is also unhelpful in a very complex and very fragile situation," he said in an interview with the Lebanese Broadcasting Corp.

Reuters:

"We had no independent means to verify...what has happened," envoy Terje Roed-Larsen told Lebanon's LBC television. "But if what has been reported is correct, it is of course a clear violation of the cease-fire."

This makes it quite clear that the United Nations officially considers such raids to violate the ceasefire: Israel is cheating -- again!

But only the last source, Reuters, added a second quotation from Mr. Roed-Larsen, one that responds to the Israeli claim that they were trying to prevent Hezbollah from being rearmed by Iran:

Israel said the operation, in which commandos were airlifted into the area by helicopter, was defensive and was designed to disrupt weapons supplies to Hizbollah from Syria and Iran.

It denied it had violated the resolution, which allows it to act in self-defense, and accused Hizbollah of doing so by smuggling weapons. Roed-Larsen said that if the guerrilla group was [sic] found to have smuggled weapons, it would indeed be in breach of the truce.

Neither AP nor the Times noted that the very same UN envoy they all quoted condemning Israel likewise condemned Hezbollah... incidentally buttressing Israel's position that the raid was not a violation, since Israel was responding to a flagrant violation by Hezbollah.

To show that this is no accident, consider this comic exchange in the New York Times story:

The success of the effort was a matter of dispute. One Israeli special operations officer was killed and two commandos were wounded, one seriously, but an Israeli Army spokesman in Jerusalem said the mission’s “objectives had been attained in full.”

Villagers said otherwise. “They failed completely,” said Sadiq Hamdi, 36, a scrap-iron dealer. “They were still on the road when the Hezbollah came upon them. They did not take 1 percent of what they were trying to do.”

Ah -- so according to the Times, a "scrap-iron dealer" has the same credibility as an Israeli Army spokesman! Actually more; recall what I wrote in The Simple Art of Propaganda (I warned you to take careful notes, as this would be on the test):

I changed the font sizes above to indicate the propagandistic effect of "call and response." This occurs (in both print and broadcast media) when Party A makes a point, and the writer (or host) then allows Party B to have the resounding response.

You see it in operation here... and again, as in the Propaganda post, Israel gets the short end of the horse: the Israelis insist the raid was successful; but our resident expert, a scrap-iron dealer and Hezbollah supporter, puts the lie to that absurd claim!

We do know (via AP) that the Israelis destroyed a bridge; if that were a major bridge on a road used by arms smugglers, then the raid indeed may have been at least partially successful; and if the Israelis seized Sheik Mohammed Yazbeck, who lives in Boudai, then it may have been completely successful.

So don't ever forget and please always remember: the subtext between the lines is often more interesting and informative than the printed words themselves. The United States still backs Israel in its actual warfare against Hezbollah (contrary to those folks in Camp 2, who cannot let go their charming fantasies about almighty Israel) -- and the mainstream media still supports the other side.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 19, 2006, at the time of 3:03 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

August 18, 2006

Threat, or Menace, Part Deux

So Scott Johnson finally dropped the other slipper in his continuing bad analogy comparing the US-brokered, UN-supported ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hezbollah to the 1938 Munich agreement, brokered by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, among others. In our last episode, Scott stated that the Munich agreement resulted in a delay of World War II by about a year -- during which time, Scott asserted, Germany got stronger relative to the UK -- hence, it was a terrible agreement from Britain's perspective:

Like the UN resolution, the Munich Agreement assured that war, when it came, would be on terms more favorable to the fascists than they otherwise would have been.

At the end of the post, he added an update, in which a historian, John Steele Gordon, countered that the RAF had dramatically increased its strength relative to the German Luftwaffe... thus, that there is a good argument, at least, that the Munich agreement was actually good for Britain:

But had the Battle of Britain been fought in the summer of 1939 instead of a year later, those few to whom so much is owed would not have been able to save the many.

(Gordon refers, of course, to Winston Churchill's famous aphorism about the Royal Air Force: "Never have so many owed so much to so few".)

Now, this seemed a rather damning claim; if true, it completely undercuts Scott's analogy. But this was Scott's response to this point:

The first point I leave to pursue another day.

I suggested in my previous post that surely that other day had better be soon; I don't imagine that Scott was responding to me -- I highly doubt he reads Big Lizards! -- but evidently, sundry other readers responded via e-mail, rather than a blog entry, and Scott has realized he needs to address the argument directly.

Well... more or less. He still talks around the core question, which is (if you haven't forgotten in all the excitement) whether the 1938 Munich agreement was good or bad for the civilized world.

"Common sense" says it was bad; but common sense is what tells us that the world is flat, so it doesn't have much of a track record. We need some uncommon sense, which is another word for actual analysis. This he attempts to provide by a series of quotations, largely unanalyzed themselves (except by their selection).

From a biography of Churchill by William Manchester, Scott notes that, while it's true that the RAF increased from five to 47 squadrons during that time, and also dramatically increased its anti-aircraft batteries, the ground and naval forces remained static. In fact, Chamberlain refused to increase the army budget from 1938-1939, nor did he order a military draft; quoting Manchester, Scott writes:

In every other category--artillery, tanks, and equipped divisions--Nazi gains were overwhelming...The number of Nazi divisions jumped from seven to fifty-one...

But of course, as we all know from history, Germany never invaded the British Isles -- precisely because they could never win the air war against the RAF, and likely for that reason, could never win the sea battle against the Royal Navy. A reasonable person might conclude that Chamberlain deliberately chose a strategy of interdicting the Nazis before they landed, rather than a strategy where:

[W]e shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills....

Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, it seems to have worked -- provided Chamberlain was ousted (forced to resign) in May of 1940, on the eve of Germany's Netherlands campaign, to be replaced by Churchill... an almost miraculous turn of events in Great Britain. (Perhaps that was part of Chamberlain's grand strategy!)

Still, many people believe that Hitler might have been more stoppable if the eventual Allies had been able to launch a massive assault in mid-1938 or early-1939; but there's really no way they could have done that. France's army, thought to be the most powerful in Europe, turned out to be made of papier-mâché; had Great Britain relied upon their historical allies, the French, to keep their backs while they charged into the valley of death, the Brits might have found themselves "Paris"-ed.

Scott quotes also from Winston Churchill's own account of that period, the Gathering Storm, in service of the point that Chamberlain should have considered what might happen to France and Czechoslovakia, not merely what happened to Great Britain -- mostly, I think Scott means, because after falling, they could not help fight the Nazis:

The subjugation of Czechosloviakia robbed the Allies of the Czech Army of twenty-one regular divisions, fifteen or sixteen second-line divisions already mobilised, and also their mountain fortress line which, in the days of Munich, had required the deployment of thirty German divisions, or the main strength of the mobile and fully trained German Army.... We certainly suffered a loss through the fall of Czechoslovakia equivalent to some thirty-five divisions. Besides this the Skoda Works, the second most important arsenal in Central Europe, was made to change sides adversely....

Even more disastrous was the alteration in the relative strength of the French and German Armies. With every month that passed, from 1938 onwards the German Army was not only increased in numbers and formations, and in the accumulation of reserves, but in quality and maturity....

Far be it from me to argue with Winston Churchill, my favorite hero of World War II. But -- well, what at the odds that, absent the Munich agreement, the Nazis would have decided not to attack Czechoslovakia? And had they attacked, does any historian argue that they would have lost and been sent reeling backwards by the Czechs and Slovaks?

Clearly, whatever state the Allied armies were in at the time of the Munich agreement, they would have been in the same state during a Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in the alternative history we postulate, since that invasion would probably have happened within weeks of an Allied refusal at Munich. And having watched the reduction of Czechoslovakia -- and the certainty that the Nazis would have treated that country the way Rome treated Carthage -- does anybody believe this would have stiffened the French spines, causing them to have more courage?

In my completely untrained and uninformed opinion, the French collapsed in 44 days not because they didn't have a big enough army, but because they didn't have a big enough will to fight. There is no reason to believe that their already shaky intestinal fortitude would have been increased by watching a horrific, bloody, futile defense of Czechoslovakia.

Finally, Scott quotes from Telford Taylor's Munich: The Price of Peace:

[O]ne can safely say that that the possibility of establishing an allied front in France that would hold would have been far better than it was when the war actually began--both because France and especially Britain would have had more time to strengthen the front, and because Germany could not have denuded her eastern frontiers and concentrated virtually all her forces in the west, as she was able to do after the Nazi-Soviet pact and the destruction of Poland.

But what makes Taylor think that if the war had come a year sooner, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and the accompanying dismemberment of Finland, Poland, Romania, and the Baltics, wouldn't also have come a year sooner? Does he even address that question?

Taylor appears, in this passage, to think of the Pact as if it were an uncontrollable and external force of nature, like a volcanic eruption or a solar flare. But in reality, it was Stalin's attempt to forestall war with the Nazis either forever, if Hitler had kept his part of it, or at least until the Red Army could be strengthened enough to be up to the fight, in Uncle Joe's opinion. If open war with the USSR had loomed earlier than it did, doesn't it make sense that Stalin would have agreed to a Pact then?

It was certainly in Hitler's best interest to secure his eastern border before embarking upon a war in the West; and Stalin surely had no great reason to love the Allies any more than he loved the Nazis... less, in fact, as National Socialism was less intrinsically antithetical to Soviet Communism than was Western capitalism. (Hitler railed against Communism -- but he railed just as much against capitalism. Of course, his hatred of the Jews overmatched both, but that's irrelevant to this specific point.)

Thus, as always happens in alternative history, we're left with a hundred question marks for every exclamation point. Even Scott admits as such:

The variables that must be taken into account of course make it difficult to reach any conclusion with absolute certainty.

Truer words are rarely spoken... and now I find that the analogy between the Munich agreement and United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, the Israeli-Hezbollah ceasefire agreement, is not so "atrocious" afterall, for they share a critical element: in neither case do we have enough information now to say whether it was good or bad for the civilized world.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 18, 2006, at the time of 3:06 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

August 17, 2006

U.N. Ceasefire Agreement - Threat, or Menace?

In a very puzzling passage from yet another Scott Johnson post comparing the Israeli-Hezbollah ceasefire agreement to Neville Chamberlain's Munich Agreement ("Peace in our time!"), we find the following exchange:

Scott Johnson:

Like the UN resolution, the Munich Agreement assured that war, when it came, would be on terms more favorable to the fascists than they otherwise would have been.

Historian John Steele Gordon (who Scott quotes in an update):

First, Munich, signed September 30th, gave Britain eleven months to rearm before war broke out, which it did with increasing vigor, as Chamberlain greatly accelerated rearmament immediately after Munich. The Royal Air Force was relatively stronger vis-a-vis the Luftwaffe in September, 1939, than in September, 1938. It was still miserably weak, to be sure. But had the Battle of Britain been fought in the summer of 1939 instead of a year later, those few to whom so much is owed would not have been able to save the many.

Scott Johnson:

The first point I leave to pursue another day.

But great Scot, Scott, doesn't this completely blow your analogy out of the water? If in fact the Munich Agreement meant that the war, when it came, was actually fought on terms more favorable to the RAF than the Luftwaffe, and if you're correct that Munich is analogous to the current ceasefire agreement, then....

Well, perhaps "another day" should come pretty darned quick, if it's to save your argument from complete collapse!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 17, 2006, at the time of 4:08 PM | Comments (20) | TrackBack

August 15, 2006

Tally Ho

Avoiding the patriotic chest-thumping of the Bush administration; dismissing the self-serving doubletalk of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz; brushing off the triumphalist squawking of Sheikh Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of Hezbollah; and shunning the tantrum of defeatism by Jed Babbin and his ilk, let's take a moment to tally up, in as unbiased a fashion as we can, who won, who lost, and in what ways, in the recent dustup between Israel and Hezbollah.

Alas, much of the result is opaque, depending still on future events. But I'll try my best to make predictions.

Let's go through each player in turn, starting with...

Israel and Hezbollah

The war clearly was not a "win" for Israel; but that does not necessarily mean it was a "loss," either.

The Israeli hostages: Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev remain as hostages in Hezbollah's hands, though securing their release was a major reason that Israel went to war in the first place (not the major reason; that was to decimate -- not obliterate -- the threat posed to Israel by Hezbollah's proximity to the Blue Line border). On this goal, Israel was utterly thwarted.

However, Hezbollah itself was also thwarted on this issue. When Hezbollah sent an 80-man raiding party into Israel to kill some Israeli soldiers and capture hostages, they were slightly successful: they only netted two "bargaining chips," despite a very strong incursion; two, however, is better for Hezbollah than none, so this has to be accounted a minor victory.

However, they didn't seize the hostages simply for fun. They intended to exchange them for duly convicted Hezbollah criminals serving their sentences in Israeli jails for various horrific crimes against Israelis. And on that larger goal, so far Hezbollah appears to have lost, and lost badly.

During the upcoming prisoner exchange, there is every indication that Israel will only offer some of the high muckety-mucks of Hezbollah captured during the war, which isn't at all what Hassan Nasrallah had in mind when he ordered Israeli soldiers grabbed in the first place. In fact, at the end of the war, Israel holds considerably more Hezbollah prisoners of war than Hezbollah holds hostages.

On this issue, far from being a big win for Hezbollah, the terrorists lost big time: they managed to capture two Israeli IDF members, but only at the cost of a much larger number of higher ranking Hezbollah members. I would have to rate this issue either a draw or, if anything, a slight advantage to Israel (I'll discuss the PR damage later).

The Katyusha and other rocket forces: not enough were destroyed, and too many (nearly 4,000) were launched into Israel; Israel did not shoot down any of these missiles; they were never able to stop the launches.

On the other hand, the rockets proved far more effective at scaring Israelis than killing them. On the whole, Hezbollah achieved a minor victory on this issue.

Actual combat at arms: Israel won hands down. At the beginning of the war, there was a boatload of chatter about how much tougher and stronger Hezbollah was than anyone had anticipated. Iran had heavily trained Hezbollah -- the forward-deployed SpecOps branch of the mullah's military -- and they were armed with much more effective anti-personnel, anti-tank, and anti-aircraft weapons. The implication was clear: this time, the Israelis would blunt their swords against the stone wall of Hezbollah resistance.

In reality, Hezbollah was beaten like a bass drum in every face-to-face encounter with Israel. On those few occasions where Olmert actually consented to allow the IDF to fight, they killed the highly trained Hezbollah "soldiers" at a ratio of about 7:1 or 8:1, sometimes much higher. Many of the IDF deaths resulted from sniper fire and rocketry; remove those, and the overall ratio of kills is probably more than 6:1 in Israel's favor.

Hezbollah killed a few Israeli Merkava tanks; but Israel overran numerous Hezbollah "strongholds" and destroyed many rocket launchers (not enough of the latter, however). And Hezbollah, for all its fighting and Israel's hesitation, was nevertheless driven back relentlessly.

Israel gets points for their actual combat victories on the ground.

Hezbollah proximity to the border: prior to the war, Hezbollah enjoyed clear and unchallenged control of all Lebanese territory from somewhat north of the Litani River all the way down to the border, plus the entirety of the Bekaa Valley and large portions of Beirut. To Israel, the most immediately threatening Hezbollah position was that between the Litani and the Blue Line (the internationally accepted border between Israel and Lebanon).

At the moment, Hezbollah no longer controls that portion of Lebanon; but their hold over the rest of their territory further north is undiminished. For Hezbollah to reclaim south Lebanon, the Lebanese Army and the UNIFIL force would both have to abdicate their joint central mission. While that is certainly not outside the realm of possibility, it hasn't happened yet.

And it's unlikely to happen in the next couple of months; as we've said a number of times on Big Lizards, a lot can happen in that time -- including perhaps the collapse of Olmert's Monster and the election of a more stable government with a prime minister and defense minister who will actually fight next time (see infra).

At this point, I must take the data as they currently exist, not a blind guess about what might happen months from now. At the moment, Israel succeeded in pushing Hezbollah back by and large across the Litani. Those ten Katyushas that were fired at Israeli forces last night were fired from central Lebanon -- north of the Litani -- not from the south. This is a major military victory for Israel.

Public relations: this is the point on which Hezbollah achieved its greatest victory, accompanied by Israel's most substantial loss. The world -- not just the Arab world -- is not looking at this war in the nuanced fashion found on this site: they see only that "tiny" Hezbollah stood up to "giant" Israel, toe to toe... and that it was Israel who blinked and begged for a ceasefire.

It's not true' but Hezbollah has been as brilliant at spinning straw into gold as Rumplestiltskin. The world has bought into Nasrallah's fantasy.

Of course, it's the outcome that most of the world (including most of antisemitic Europe) desperately wanted to see; and it's arguable that no matter what happened on the ground, that's the result that Hezbollah would declare and much of the world would believe: Israel could have slaughtered 9,000 Hezbollah fighters and driven the organization all the way back up into Syria, and Nasrallah would still have declared a historic victory while the ummah cheered and shot fireworks.

Nevertheless, Israel badly lost the PR war. The loss was inevitable; but Israel managed to lose it worse than they needed to do.

Political fallout: the stature of Hezbollah has been dramatically enhanced, not only throughout Lebanon but the entire ummah.

But in Lebanon in particular, Hezbollah went from being distrusted invaders from Iran and Syria -- to being national heroes of Lebanese sovereignty and religious heroes of rising Islamic power. If elections are held anytime soon in Lebanon, Hezbollah will surely do much better than they did in the May-June 2005 elections.

In the 2005 race, the Rafik Hariri Martyr List won a clear majority of 72 of the 128 seats in the Lebanese parliament; Hezbollah won 14 seats and were offered two positions in the cabinet. However, if elections were held today, it would not be surprising if Hezbollah nearly reversed that result.

Of course, the Hariri bloc will do everything it can to prevent elections from being held anytime soon; and given a cooling-off period -- and especially if the war resumes later with more positive results for Israel in round two -- it's probable that Hezbollah's actual electoral gains will be kept to a minimum.

Still, I cannot see a situation where they would not pick up seats, no matter how long the ruling bloc manages to delay. Thus, it's a political victory for Hezbollah, but not as much as many might expect.

Contrariwise, the war was little short of electoral disaster for the Olmert government. Already shaky -- a weak coalition between Kadima and Labor with a lot of minor parties needed to make even a bare majority of the Knesset -- the conduct of the war by the two coalition partners, Prime Minister Olmert of Kadima and Defense Minister Peretz, the head of Labor, is widely seen by Israelis across the political spectrum as incompetent to the point of imbecility.

The Israeli Defense Force, the only universally respected institution in Israel, has become open and vocal in their scorn for the political "leadership." I do not see how Olmert's Monster can survive the next few months; a quick vote of no-confidence, followed by general elections 90 days later, will completely change the scene in Israel, one way or another.

Likud is likely the big political winner: they came in only fourth in the last election, running not only behind Kadima and Labor but also the radical Sephardic religious party Shas. Over the next couple of months, I suspect anger at both Kadima and Labor will only deepen, as will the fear of terrorism and Hezbollah on the part of Israeli citizens, no matter what their party. If new elections are held in the next four months, I predict that Likud will win an outright majority, or at least so close to one that they need only ally with other right-leaning parties and can exclude Labor and the Israeli Left altogether.

Kadima will not survive this political catastrophe; I think everyone in Israel now understands that it was a creature entirely of Ariel Sharon, and it should have died with his his permanent incapacitation.

But Likud's victory does not necessarily mean Binyamin Netanyahu's victory. It's hard to tell. Netanyahu may manage to resuscitate a career that many had written off as dead, but it's not certain. I suspect it will definitely lead to the restoration of Shaul Mofaz, demoted to make way for Peretz, to his previous position as Defense Minister (unless he becomes PM).

So the political winners will be Hezbollah in Lebanon and Likud in Israel -- and Israel itself, in my opinion, because I have always hated Labor and I never believed in Kadima's existence for a moment; the losers are the Hariri bloc in Lebanon and Kadima and Labor in Israel.

Iran and Syria

Iran fomented a war between Israel and Hezbollah ("let's you and him fight!"), gained in international prestige as the only Moslem power to successful stand up to Israel, briefly distracted some attention from its own nuclear program, and managed to damage the "Little Satan"... all this while paying only a very small price:

• Iran was not directly attacked;
• Its catspaw Syria was not directly attacked;

• Iran's Hezbollah was cut up some; but the mullahs and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad don't care if Hezbollah members are captured or even killed.

  They're like the cockroach army eternally battling Fat Freddy's Cat in the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers underground comic: break another 1,221,785 soldiers out of egg storage!

The only price they paid was in the poor performance of Hezbollah in the field; this casts much doubt on Hezbollah's ability to serve as a devastating counterattack in the event the United States attacks Iran.

On balance, Iran is a winner in this conflict, as is its sock puppet, Syria, but not huge winners.

The United States

The United States demonstrated that it is willing to give Israel every opportunity to defeat our common enemies; the fact that Israel squandered that opportunity doesn't turn us into losers.

We showed that we could negotiate an agreement through the UN that was considerably more pro-Israel than such agreements usually end up being. UNSCR 1701 clearly ascribed blame for starting the war entirely to Hezbollah, and Hezbollah is held to much harsher terms than is Israel. The agreement is supposed to lock in a number of gains made by Israel -- though whether it will succeed in doing so is doubtful (because of the toothless nature of the United Nations).

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and UN Ambassador John Bolton proved in particular considerably more adroit than previous diplomats (Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright) at eliciting pro-Israeli clauses and killing off anti-Israeli, pro-terrorist clauses; they work very well as a team, and Condi showed that she was neither a lightweight nor an "Arabist."

From what I can tell, Israelis recognize the extraordinary latitude President Bush gave to Olmert, and they are very grateful; their anger seems to be directed entirely at Olmert and Peretz -- and, per Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post, IDF Chief of Staff Lt.Gen. Dan Halutz of the Israeli Air Force -- for not taking advantage of America's defense to press the offensive and really chew up Hezbollah -- Israelis don't blame us for Olmert's ineptness.

On the whole, except insofar as the entire civilized world loses whenever barbarity is not soundly trounced, the United States probably won slightly in this conflict: we proved we had the willingness and the ability to guard the backs of our friends.

The Big Picture

This is why I say that overall, neither Hezbollah nor Israel won this war; both lost. Hezbollah lost the actual ground war worse than Israel did; but Israel lost the PR war worse than did Hezbollah. Iran/Syria and the United States both had slight wins; and Europe showed itself to be, once again, feckless and unreliable.

The result will probably be an emboldened Hezbollah and an increase in morale for radical Islam, but a turn by Israel towards the right and a hardening of attitudes by the Israeli citizenry. Hezbollah's power within the government of Lebanon will probably increase, while Likud will rise quickly within Israel.

Round two of the Clash of the Titans will probably come before the year is out.

I agree that Israel did not do anywhere near as well as it could have, had it a different government. But it's just plain irresponsible to don sackcloth, roll in ashes, and proclaim a total and complete victory by the forces of darkness. For heaven's sake, results were mixed on all sides.

Let's all just get a grip, evaluate all aspects of the war results, and rationally decide on a future course of action.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 15, 2006, at the time of 3:23 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

August 14, 2006

Hezbollah Attacks; "Ceasefire" Crumbling

Tonight, with the ink still drying on the "ceasefire" agreement, Hezbollah fired at least ten Katyusha rockets at Israeli forces in Lebanese territory between the Blue Line and the Litani River. This flagrantly violates clause OP1 of the agreement resolution.

Israel responded with a small amount of artillery fire; no Israelis were injured and none of the rockets landed in Israeli territory.

However, it's quite clear that Hezbollah has no intention of abiding by the agreement. As soon as they become brazen enough, that will free Israel from following their own part of the agreement, and they can resume their advance -- the "Mulligan" I spoke of before.

The typically anemic and antisemitic UN, which still tries to maintain a veneer of justice and decency, will be stymied trying to blame Israel for Hezbollah's continuing rocket fire. Whatever they may want to say, they'll pretty much have to hold their official tongues. And even if they do not, the Bush administration will be quite justified, in the eyes of the American people, to say, "well, it didn't work -- terrorist organizations have no honor or honesty and we cannot make agreements with them."

In addition, Hezbollah has already announced that they refuse to disarm or allow themselves to be disarmed, which violates clauses OP3, OP8, and OP10.

This is precisely as Big Lizards predicted:

Here is my take: there is no way that Hezbollah can hold its water even long enough for Lebanese and UNIFIL forces to take Israel's place. They will either reject the proposal outright, or more likely accept it -- but with no intention of actually obeying it.

[Sheikh Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Secretary General of Hezbollah] will be overconfident that the UN has his back; he will think that he can resume shooting missiles at Israel before the ink even dries on the agreement, and that Israel will be stymied by UNIFIL and prevented from responding in kind....

But [Israeli Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert will want to hang on as long as he can, because he's obviously finished in Likud, even when Kadima evaporates. So he will almost certainly be looking for a solid reason to declare the ceasefire broken and restart the offensive... but this time with the vigor and the ground forces it really needs, rather than trying to do it by airstrikes alone -- which everybody now agrees was a miserable failure.

Well, as to that last part, we'll see; I still believe that Israel will be forced to restart the offensive -- but this time not quite so inoffensively. Here is the "promised land" I predicted in that last post:

So sometime in the next year or so, Israel will be back in Lebanon (possibly under a new prime minister); and this time, there will be no ceasefire. They will finish off Hezbollah as an effective military or terrorist organization in that country. And without either the Syrian Army or Hezbollah, the Syrian intelligence officers will quickly head back home, just ahead of the mobs of angry northern Lebanese with torches and pitchforks.

During that time, Iran will only be able to partially resupply Hezbollah; but when Israel attacks next time, they will no longer rely exclusively on bombs and missiles: next time, the IDF generals get their licks from the git-go. And that is the moment we're waiting for.

I'm not so sanguine about that part... not after watching the fecklessness with which Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz "fought' the war so far. But I have not given up hope (unlike Nancy-boy Jed Babbin), and we'll see how far Hezbollah goes and at what point Israel declares them in violation and repudiates the UN-brokered agreement.

At some point, perhaps Olmert and Peretz will each grow a spine. Stranger things have happened!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 14, 2006, at the time of 11:34 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

Jed Babbin Has Become Nancy Pelosi

Jed Babbin is now guest-hosting on Hugh Hewitt's show -- and he just flatly declared this war a total victory for Hezbollah and a catastrophic defeat for Israel. He pronounced that Lebanon is now "Hezbollahstan," and that there is now no possible way ever to remove them from their complete control of Lebanon. He as much as said that it's all gone, all lost, and we shouldn't bother even fighting anymore.

Babbin said we were back to the "status quo ante," as if Hezbollah were still in their dug-in positions, still had all their missiles, hadn't lost thousands of fighters, and weren't about to have the complication of 30,000 "neutral" troops that they would have to shoot around for their next aggression -- which will still come.

George W. Bush famously said "you're either with us or with the terrorists." Jed Babbin is now with the terrorists.

Oh, I'm sure he would go ballistic if he ever read this post (which he wouldn't, of course; I'm not up there with Instapundit, Power Line, or Hugh Hewitt, and I doubt he drills down any deeper into the blogosphere than sites with that level of popularity). He would insist that no, he's not with the terrorists; he's just being a "realist"... which is why he keeps saying "there are only two winners in this ceasefire: Hezbollah and Iran."

But how does this differ in any way from what John Murtha, John F. Kerry, Harry Reid, and yes, Nancy Pelosi relentlessly intone about Iraq? Don't they say that due to Bush's incompetence, Iraq is completely lost, that it's a total victory for al-Qaeda, that there is nothing we can do now, and that we might as well declare failure and go home?

I see no distinction. In fact, any unbiased analyst -- that is, one who is not such a radical, mindless Likudnik -- would say the results in Lebanon were mixed: Israel certainly did not win; they did not achieve their primary goal, to wipe out Hezbollah, nor their secondary goal of returning the two kidnapped soldiers, though that is still possible; but neither did Hezbollah win: Israel achieved some secondary goals, such as killing a lot of Hezbollah members (several thousand of them) and destroying a large percentage of their missiles, all of which will certainly set Hezbollah back a year or two.

A lot can happen in that time; I sincerely hope that there are new elections quickly, and that this time, Likud wins decisively -- as the polls indicate is likely, though I don't know how long that will last. And I pray that there is another war soon (rather, the continuation of this one)... and that with a more experienced, wartime leadership, including perhaps the restoration of Shaul Mofaz, Israel deals a much more severe and lasting blow to Hezbollah... and also burns Bashar Assad's fingers, making him think twice about toadying up to Iran (and hiding Iraqi WMD and giving sanctuary to high-value Baathist targets).

Hezbollah lost position and operational tempo. They lost their dug-in, heavily tunnelled base in southern Lebanon, and they lost a lot of top leaders to capture and killing. And regardless of how they spin the fight, their Shiite supporters in Lebanon must notice that Israel is still present in south Lebanon, but Hezbollah isn't -- at least in nowhere near the numbers they had.

Too, Israel has shown that in actual ground combat, they can mow down even the New! Improved! Hezbollah fighters, with all their Iranian training and arming. That has to give pause to Hassan Nasrallah, who must have thought that Israel would pay a much higher price for taking as much territory as they did: nearly all the way to the Litani and several ground-forces raids deep into the Bekaa Valley. But Israel lost only about 115 soldiers, while terminating thousands of Hezbollah.

Nasrallah has declared the war a tremendous victory for Hezbollah; but of course, Saddam Hussein declared that Gulf War I was a tremendous victory for Iraq... and as Michael Medved points out, Egypt actually celebrates their "victory" over Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War as a national holiday. In reality, Egypt was crushed, and their entire Third Army was trapped by the Israelis after the ceasefire went into effect (Egypt breached it first).

However, if Nasrallah has any functioning brain cells -- "never attribute to stupidity what can adequately be explained by malice" -- he must realize that on those few occasions when the Israeli government actually allowed the IDF to fight, they rolled through the forward-deployed SpecOps branch of the Iranian military like a scimitar through a casaba melon.

Yet when a caller noted that to Babbin, the guest host literally said that "it doesn't matter how many Hezbollah were killed"... as if it were such a trivial matter that it was absurd even to raise it. I recall the Democrats making similarly dismissive comments when Saddam Hussein was captured and when Musab Zarqawi was killed.

There is another parallel: Babbin is a Likudnik (as am I); but Babbin is so focused on the return of Likud, that he is willing to talk Israel into a massive defeat on the chance that this will bring Bibi Netanyahu back to power.

Every, single guest he has had on so far (half way through his 3-hour stint) has backed him to the hilt, agreeing, following highly leading interrogation, that this is a complete, total, and unalloyed victory for Hezbollah; what an astounding consensus! It reminds me of Saddam Hussein's second election, where he literally got 100% of the vote... isn't that remarkable? Not a single Iraqi but loved the Beloved Leader! Match that, Bush.

(There is, I reckon, the faint possibility that Babbin might have picked his guests using a litmus test. But let's not quibble.)

I cannot get away from the fact that Babbin is now following the Pelosi Playbook down to the last page: if he can make Israelis believe that they have suffered a disasterous defeat, rather than a disappointing draw, then that might boost Likud's chances of new elections -- and who cares whether that also encourages Hezbollah to slaughter more Jews? Can't make an omlet without breaking a few heads.

Does anybody else think we on the Right deserve better analysts than Jed Babbin, with his agenda-driven defeatism? A neoconservative is a person who thinks like a liberal but arrives at conservative conclusions.

There is a reason I am always wary of neoconservatives.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 14, 2006, at the time of 4:27 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack

Paul & Carol & Ed & Alice

Paul Mierengoff of Power Line and Captain Ed Morrissey of gee, guess where, are in the midst of a very polite and deferential public row over the American-brokered ceasefire agreement in Lebanon; and I'm torn. On the one hand, I've made no secret of the fact that Power Line is my all time favorite blog, the one that got me interested in blogging (reading and writing) in the first place. But Captain's Quarters is, along with Patterico's and Belmont Club, my second favorite blog.

And more to the point, Ed is completely right in this ruction and Paul is wrong... though I don't think Ed has deployed his best arguments yet.

But that's why I'm here! (And yes, the entire world does revolve around me, now that you ask....)

And In This Corner...

Here is the crux of Paul's argument (I'm re-paragraphing his points, because it's easier to focus on each component that way):

Without the administration's participation in the formulation and adoption of the U.N. resolution, there would have been more fighting in Lebanon. Thus, it seems indisputable that the administration didn't want more fighting in Lebanon, and Ed does not say otherwise.

The question then becomes why the administration wanted the fighting to end. Was it because more fighting would have been in Hezbollah's interest? Clearly not. With each day, Hezbollah's military capacity was being diminished, and the degradation would likely have accelerated now that Israel finally has boots on the ground in something like the ratio thought to be required to succeed in this type of action.

Had Israel made its way to the Litani River, as it had finally resolved to do, Hezbollah not only would have been further degraded, but would have lost its ability persuasively to claim that it successfully resisted the IDF.

Since we can still assume that administration wants to injure Hezbollah, it must be the case that some interest Bush deemed substantial caused him to take a major role in halting the IDF's drive against that entity. Ed does not identify that interest.

To me, it seems reasonable to believe that the U.S. was bowing to pressure from those who wanted hostilities to stop. It is no secret that Secretary Rice was communicating with the Egytians and the Saudis and that we were working closely with the French. Moreover, domestic critics were warning that with each passing day our status among "friendly" Arab governments and our European allies (including the folks upon whom we'll be relying in our efforts to sanction Iran) was declining.

It's not unfair for me to connect these dots.

Not "unfair" -- but flawed; Paul makes the classic mistake of what Wall Street Journal science writer Sharon Begley calls (in a very, very different context) "the argument from personal incredulity."

Several specific points to note before turning to the general argument:

Had Israel made its way to the Litani River, as it had finally resolved to do, Hezbollah not only would have been further degraded, but would have lost its ability persuasively to claim that it successfully resisted the IDF.

Israel may still do so. They're under no obligation to leave until there is an international force capable of replacing them, which itself will take some time. If Hezbollah breaks the ceasefire during that time (very likely), Israel can resume its march to the Litani, as Ed noted.

Moreover, I think Paul isn't really internalizing how Moslems think: if Israel were to drive Hezbollah back across the Litani, but Hezbollah survived more or less intact (even if severely "degraded"), Hezbollah would still argue victory. And when Israel finally withdrew, as they must eventually (no matter how long that may take), and if Hezbollah were then to reoccupy the same territory Israel had just driven them out of, then the ummah would declare it the greatest victory since Saladin drove the crusaders out of the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem 819 years ago.

It is impossible to win a game of Liar's Poker against Hezbollah.

To me, it seems reasonable to believe that the U.S. was bowing to pressure from those who wanted hostilities to stop. It is no secret that Secretary Rice was communicating with the Egytians and the Saudis and that we were working closely with the French....

Paul, like many other conservatives these days, seems too eager to ascribe the most disreputable motives to everything Bush does; and this tendency now evidently extends to Condoleezza Rice, too. Thus, when Bush nominated Harriet Miers, many conservatives who could not immediately verify her philosophy leapt at the speed of light to the conclusion that she must be a closet liberal. And when the Bush administration approved Dubai Ports World taking over cargo operations at a number of American ports, conservatives equally rapidly concluded that Bush was trying to hand "port security" over to the Arabs.

Each new unsupported accusation becomes "evidence" (smoke and more smoke) supporting the next accusation; and now Paul cannot even imagine any honorable reason for Bush and Rice to support this ceasefire agreement.

Therefore (the argument from personal incredulity), the president -- the most pro-Israeli president we've had since Lyndon Johnson -- must be so anxious to please the Arabs and the French that he's throwing Israel under the tank treads. Why, what other possible conclusion could one draw?

Actually, there are several more reasonable explanations for Bush's and Rice's support for this resolution than a sudden plague of Arabism. Let's find them.

And we can start with the most fitting analogy -- one that explains the administration's thinking and even supplies that mystery "interest" Paul alludes to: the battle of First Fallujah.

The Backward Glance

Remember First Fallujah, Operation Vigilant Resolve? In April of 2004, following the murder and mutilation of the four Blackwater contractors, our Marines were fighting against Zarqawi's Sunni terrorists in that city, and we were winning (even while simultaneously fighting Sadr's Mahdi Militia in Najaf); we were driving them back and back, inflicting huge casualties... and then abruptly we stopped.

We paused for a while, then we pulled back, allowing the terrorists to trickle back into Fallujah and forcing another gigantic fight (Operation Phantom Fury) seven months later in November.

At the time of First Fallujah, Bush took tremendous heat in the press, and also from the Right, especially including the "dextrosphere." I don't offhand recall whether Power Line lambasted him for not pushing on, but it seems likely they did. And he didn't really explain why he called off the fight. (This is the worst element of Bush's otherwise admirable presidency: he is the Great Confusicator, the anti-Reagan in terms of communicating with the American people).

But for me, the reason seemed obvious; after thinking and pondering and mulling it for a couple of months, burning up brain calories like coal in a furnace, I finally concluded that I was right: it was obvious.

To Have and to Hold

The problem lay not in militarily defeating the terrorists; we had it all over them (as the Israelis do over Hezbollah now). The problem was what to do with Fallujah after we had pacified it... and at that time, that problem was insoluble. Our choices were:

1. Invest the city and hold it against all counterattack; but this would require an enormous number of troops, since the population was firmly behind the terrorists (whom they saw as liberators from the infidel crusaders).

Holding the city would have required a permanent garrison of likely tens of thousands of Marines... and we could not spare such a huge chunk of our fighting force. We still needed them for fighting elsewhere. Since America has no specialized "occupation corps," as the British used to have during the days of the Empire -- and indeed, a non-imperial "empire" such as the United States could not have such a combined civilian and military force -- our only choice would be to use men trained for combat as cops, judges, and mediators; hence the large numbers needed and the strong possibility of violence spiraling out of our control.

2. Reduce the city, leaving nothing behind to defend; but this would entail us killing tens of thousands of residents whose only crime was to support local Baathists and foreign Sunni terrorists... and neither the American people nor our allies were prepared to go the Carthage route.

It would have been like the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572, in which probably more than 10,000 Huguenots were butchered throughout France over a three-month period. And we realized that even if we steeled ourselves to do something similar in Fallujah, it would likely have the same effect on the Sunni population of Iraq as the original did on the Huguenot population of France: not pacification but radicalization.

3. Once we defeated the terrorists, have the Iraqi Army occupy the city; but of course, the New Iraqi Army was in no way capable of performing such a task in April of 2004, and not only we but they -- and the terrorists -- knew it.

The Iraqi Army would not be ready for such a task for many months; and indeed, that appears to be what we were waiting for: no Iraqi battalions are listed as having formally participated in First Fallujah (there were some Iraqis present, but they broke and ran); but in Second Fallujah (Phantom Fury), there were two complete battalions, four extra brigades, plus the Iraqi Counterterrorism Force. There was even an "Emergency Reponse Unit" from the Interior Ministry.

And in Second Fallujah, the Iraqi troops more or less held their lines. In the end, the Marines withdrew and left the Iraqi Army and Interior Ministry forces investing the city. This continued occupation was more or less successful; there is still terrorism emanating from Fallujah, but it never regained the intensity and brazenness of 2004.

Ceders of Lebanon

Side excursion over; we're back to Lebanon. The Israelis find themselves in the same position: after driving to the Litani River and "winning the war," what do they do next?

Simply put, the population of southern Lebanon is not a captive one; they strongly support Hezbollah, and not out of fear; I suspect they see themselves as the same "tribe."

This is not just a Shia vs. Sunni distinction; Hezbollah in the South has made itself into "part of the family." Unemployment is rampant, as is true in most socialist states; and the Lebanese government is incapable of financially aiding the poor in the southern area, especially south of the Litani.

And truth be told, Beirut is probably somewhat reluctant to aid them since regaining control of the northern part of Lebanon, following the withdrawal of Syria's military. It's a vicious circle: the Shiite south buddies up with Hezbollah and Iran and Syria, leading the Sunni/Druze north to suspect their loyalty and neglect them; the neglect drives the Shia into tighter reliance upon Hezbollah and Iran/Syria.

So what could Israel do, once it had driven Hezbollah north of the river?

• If the Israelis themselves were to hold that area against Hezbollah reoccupation (once part of the ummah, always part of the ummah), they would need a massive and permanent occupation force -- which they don't have -- and which would be virtually identical to the endgame of the 1982 Lebanese invasion, something the Israeli public is not prepared to accept.
• Contrariwise, if they were simply to depopulate southern Lebanon, with trainloads of ethnic cleansing and the concommitent civilian deaths (that would be depicted as massacres, and not without some justice), the problems they would have with their Arab neighbors, with Iran, the international community -- and even America -- would reduce any previous disagreements to mere squabbles.

• In theory, they could expand the fight -- say by attacking Syria directly, cutting off Iran's conduit of arms, men, and materiel into Lebanon's Hezbollah. But the Israelis (government and citizenry) made it very clear early on and throughout the war that they had absolutely no intention of doing so.

  This closed off the last escape from the box; but it's awfully hard for those of us who don't live there, in the crosshairs, to criticize their decision. It amounts to what my grandfather called playing "let's you and him fight."

• But if the Israelis simply withdrew after the fight, Hezbollah would just flow back... and the whole campaign would end up an exercise in utter futility.

The only solution that I can think of, at least, is some international force... something like UNIFIL with teeth and more of a committment to actually fulfill its duty, rather than being "neutral" between Israel and Hezbollah, or even tacitly supporting the latter.

The UN is very untrustworthy... but for all that, I would trust them more than the Lebanese Army under the control of Fuad Siniora!

Thus, Israel -- and the United States -- are put into the position by the facts on the ground of supporting an international force to stiffen the spine (and fix the moral compass) of the Lebanese Army. If this analysis is accurate, then contrary to Paul's position, we really do need a "ceasefire agreement" of some sort... if for no other reason to establish the size of the force, starting positions of the players, and the rules of engagement.

Vox Populi

One of Donald Rumsfeld's most famous observations, ridiculed by the illiterate Left, was this:

You go to war with the Army you have.

But the phrase is too profound to be stuck in a single subject. How about this: You go to war with the government you have, and you go to war with the people you have.

At the moment, Israel's government is a Frankenstein's monster of bits and pieces of Labor sewn together with bits and pieces of Kadima -- which was itself already a patchwork party that was actually the egoist extension of one man, Ariel Sharon -- who had the bad taste to fall into an irreversible coma shortly before Hezbollah attacked (and in fact, that was surely a major reason they did attack).

Why did Israel escalate the war so slowly? It wasn't because Ehud Olmert is just a dick; it was because the Israeli cabinet kept refusing to vote for a wider war. And why was that? Because the cabinet includes too many Laborites and ex-Laborites, including Defense Minister Amir Peretz.

Peretz seems to have wanted a larger war; but he could hardly argue as forcefully and effectively to other peaceniks in the cabinet as, say, Shaul Mofaz, the former defense minister could have.

Mofaz was the former Chief of Staff of the IDF, and he is an Iranian Jew who lived in Teheran until he was nine. It's hard to think of anyone better qualified to be a wartime defense minister in a proxy war against Iran; but although Sharon appointed him defense minister in 2002, Olmert -- trying to form his government after a very weak showing in the recent elections -- was forced to offer that position to the head of Labor, Peretz. Mofaz was demoted to minister of transport.

Peretz served honorably in the IDF and was wounded in action during the Yom Kippur War; but he never rose beyond the rank of captain. He had no strategic experience, no significant understanding of the nature of Iran, and no ability to argue from experience for a wider war from the start. Nor is it certain that it would have made any difference; the Israeli Left is nearly as bad on security issues as the American Left.

But even this isn't the root of the problem; the problem right now is the Israeli people. H.L. Menken once suggested -- or at least it's attributed to him -- that "If the government doesn't trust the people, why doesn't it dissolve them and elect a new people?" In my darkest days, I wish we could do it; except I wouldn't want to give that much power to Congress.

The reason that the Israeli government is so weak and conflicted is that the Israeli people are weak and conflicted, as evidenced by their last vote:

2006 Israeli Election Results

Party	Vote %	Seats
Kadima	22.0%	29
Labor	15.0%	19
Shas (Sephardic religious party)	9.5%	12
Likud	9.0%	12
Numerous other minor parties	44.4%	48

The Knesset has 120 seats; so the ruling coalition (Kadima and Labor) holds only 40% of the seats. It's a mess right now... but it's an elected mess. If you recall, Olmert had to scramble to find the 61 seats necessary even to form a government in the first place. (What Israel really needs is a new election.)

Why does this matter? Because neither the government nor the people of Israel were prepared for an actual shooting war with Hezbollah (which fact must have entered into Sheikh Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah's calculations). When it was thrust upon them, they dithered and balked: at the moment, the Israeli people have the government they deserve; but the IDF deserves much better leadership than it has.

In particular, the Israeli people are still allergic to occupation, with all the brutality that necessarily entails in the post-1979 world. They are more afraid of the 18-year Lebanese occupation than they are of Hezbollah. Whether or not continued Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon would be the best solution, it's a solution that is unavailable to the government, given the current position of the civitas. It's as tantalizingly close but forever out of reach as would be an attack on Syria.

So it's a UN occupation or nothing.

Foreign Legions

But this is only a stopgap. Throughout history, occupation has always required the consent of the occupied, for the same reason that a government always requires the consent of the governed: it's not just a good idea, it's a law of human nature (see next post). And I think it very clear that the Lebanese, especially the southern Lebanese Shia, will never consent.

In the modern post-1979 revolutionary era, foreign occupation has become possible only for occupiers willing to go the route of, say, the Belgians in the Congo or Spain in the New World: brutal enslavement and mass reprisal executions. For a decent and moral democracy like Israel (or the United States), this is not an option; hence we are not able to carry out an occupation longer than a few weeks or months.

This didn't use to be the case; the conquered generally used to consent to occupation: what difference did it make whether you paid your taxes to a Saxon lord or a Norman lord? But the rules began to change here and there as armed groups discovered the Strategy of Relentless Resistance -- where they never surrender, never relent, and care absolutely nothing about how many of "their own people" die in the struggle; they're always willing to sacrifice martyrs, themselves or others, willingly or un-, to further "the cause;" and the cause never dies.

This strategy became de rigeur among resistance groups following the 1979 Iranian revolution, which for the first time opened up the possibility that a millenarian jihadi terrorist group could seize control of an entire country... and a rich, Westernized one at that. Now, every such group believes that if it struggles long enough, it can do the same; and from that platform, it can lead a holy crusade to destroy the unbelievers and institute a world caliphate (with, naturally, itself at the top).

Thus, even after Zarqawi's death, al-Qaeda In Iraq fights on; the Shiite militias fight on, massacring Sunnis -- and the Sunni militias fight on butchering Shia, world without end, amen. This will never cease; but under a native government with sufficient hegemony, it can be reduced to a manageable level.

Only an Iraqi government, not perceived as a sock puppet for America, would have such hegemony (see the next post for a discussion of hegemony, or "perceived fitness to rule"): hence the Bush Doctrine of destroying the old Baathist regime (done), removing its head (done), setting up an indigenous democracy (done), and giving that democracy the tools to enforce its hegemonic rule (still in progress)... whether instinctually or intellectually, President Bush recognized that only a democratic Iraqi government could eventually contain the extremists: a Hussein-style "strongman" government could not do it for long, and American cannot do it at all.

But by the same lemma, only an indigenous Lebanese government will have sufficient hegemony to hold the territory; but that does not mean that any old indigenous Lebanese government will do; alas, the one there now is not powerful enough.

Know When to Hold, Know When to Fold

It does mean, however, that Israel cannot do it... as they found out from 1982-2000, when the IDF occupied just a strip along the southern border of Lebanon: there were so many terrorist attacks and military assaults, escalating every year, that Israel was either going to have to get out or get extraordinarily brutal. They had not the stomach for the latter, so electoral revolution gave them a government that chose the former.

And now they find themselves in the same bind. If Americans have forgotten recent Israeli history, the leaders of Kadima, from Olmert to Peretz on down, have not. They know that holding southern Lebanon would require a degree of ruthlessness that is beyond the current civitas of Israel.

The only workable solution, per supra, is a Lebanese force; hence the component of the Lebanese Army that will (supposedly) hold that area. But the Lebanese Army is toothless... so another force is required, a force with more hegemony than Israel would have, even if it's less than a really powerful Lebanese force would have: that is where UNIFIL enters the picture.

Clearly, this will not work longterm. It may only last a year or even just a few months (or less -- but then Israel would still be there, poised to continue its offensive). But a lot can happen in a year.

Israel stands in such peril, and her government is so lame, that there is an excellent chance that it will fall and new elections be called. As it stands now, the government and people are out of harmony with each other and with themselves; they cannot sustain the war they should fight (as should be obvious by now).

But a lot can happen in a year. There might be new elections; the people may finally come to understand that peace with Hezbollah is impossible (probably after the terrorists break the ceasefire and start shooting missiles again). Iran might find itself under sanction, and the US may be interdicting arms transshipments across Syria. There might be civil unrest in Iran that distracts the mullahs and Ahmadinejad from Lebanon.

Or Lebanon itself may get a stronger government, one without Hezbollah sitting in the parliament (and the cabinet!), and one with a strong Army that can actually contest for all of Lebanon.

Like First Fallujah, I suspect the Bush Administration has concluded that the current feckless government and conflicted people of Israel cannot hold what they have. But like Second Fallujah, the next government may do considerably better -- at least in annihilating more of Hezbollah's strength; and a later Beirut government may well do a better job of driving Hezbollah out of Lebanon entirely and back into Syria.

Bush is one of the most patient men who ever sat at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. He rarely cares about the polls and he never lunges at the brass ring until he is sure he can grasp it. He awaits his moment, then seizes it. (If only he could stand up and tell us about it, he would be the second-greatest president in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.)

We and the Israelis had a weak hand; it's not unreasonable to fold, minimize the losses, and draw a new one.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 14, 2006, at the time of 4:34 AM | Comments (29) | TrackBack

August 11, 2006

Hey, Mulligan Man!

I was going to blog on the American-French ceasefire agreement offered for the Israel-Hezbollah war, but Captain Ed beat me to it; he is nothing if not prolific! In any event, I would have said more or less what he says here:

Everything hinges on Nasrallah. If he accepts the terms and allows Siniora to dislodge them from southern Lebanon, Hezbollah is finished regardless of their public claims. Their raison d'etre is the defense of the southern border against Israel -- and if the Lebanese Army takes that responsibility, then their militia serves no purpose in the middle of Lebanon. If Nasrallah balks, then Israel will have a green light and a wide window to finish the job, and they will have lost very little in the hours it will take for the gambit to play to its conclusion.

But allow me to go over this a little more thoroughly and show why Ed and I are right, and the boys at Power Line are wrong, wrong, wrong.

First, here is a summary of the main points of the agreement:

• Israel is not required to withdraw immediately; instead, Israel will withdraw "in parallel" with the deployment of the Lebanese Army and UNIFIL (the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon)... which I believe means that as brigades of LANDFILL, er, UNIFIL and the Lebanese deploy, corresponding units of the IDF withdraw.

  That means there will be no moment when Israel is gone and there is no international or Lebanese force present, allowing Hezbollah simply to sneak back to where they were before.

• Israel is not required to cease all military operations, just all offensive military operations; this is in contrast to Hezbollah, which is required to cease "all attacks." That means that if Hezbollah attacks Israel and the latter responds with military force, Hezbollah is in breach of the agreement -- but Israel is not.

  Thus, Israel can legally, under this agreement, remain in situ as the replacement forces deploy, and they can continue attacking rocket launchers and terrorist units that launch attacks either against the IDF invasion force or against Israel itself. Far from protecting Hezbollah from the consequences of its own actions, as Hassan Nasrallah, the jerky-looking head of Hezbollah, demanded and expected, this agreement actually gives legal backing to Israel to defend itself from attack.

• Requires all Hezbollah personnel immediately to move north of the Litani River -- or if they stay, to be disarmed. If they do not, then Lebanon as well as Hezbollah is in breach, and Israel can return to its postponed offensive.

• Requires full eventual implementation of UNSC resolutions, including 1559, requiring complete disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon except for the Lebanese Army and UNIFIL.

  Of course, this was already requred (by UN resolution, duh), and it wasn't happening; so this probably is a pie-crust promise ("easily made, easily broken"). However, this demand now has teeth, because if it's broken, then the cease-fire is rendered null and void; and, as before, Israel can always return -- preferably with a much better managed offensive that time.

• Expands the rules of engagement for UNIFIL to allow it to take aggressive military actions against Hezbollah, if they fail to leave or to disarm:

  Acting in support of a request from the government of Lebanon to deploy an international force to assist it to exercise its authority throughout the territory, authorizes UNIFIL to take all necessary action in areas of deployment of its forces and as it deems within its capabilities, to ensure that its area of operations is not utilized for hostile activities of any kind, to resist attempts by forceful means to prevent it from discharging its duties under the mandate of the Security Council, and to protect United Nations personnel, facilities, installations and equipment, ensure the security and freedom of movement of United Nations personnel, humanitarian workers, and, without prejudice to the responsibility of the government of Lebanon, to protect civilians under imminent threat of physical violence.

This is hardly perfect; but neither has been Israel's "offensive," which so far is about the most inoffensive offensive I think I've ever seen.

Here is my take: there is no way that Hezbollah can hold its water even long enough for Lebanese and UNIFIL forces to take Israel's place. They will either reject the proposal outright, or more likely accept it -- but with no intention of actually obeying it.

Nasrallah will be overconfident that the UN has his back; he will think that he can resume shooting missiles at Israel before the ink even dries on the agreement, and that Israel will be stymied by UNIFIL and prevented from responding in kind. Arabs typically make straight-line projections, and they're utterly asea if anything changes. Recall that Nasrallah himself said he was stunned by Israel's aggressive response to a few murders and kidnappings; the response was all out of character, and he was outraged.

And he would be right, except that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is sitting atop a powderkeg, and he knows it.

Israelis are seething at the government, which they see as having given them the worst of both worlds, Likud and Labor: they swore that they would destroy Hezbollah, riling up the entire world against Israel... and then didn't really even try to do so, thus turning the Israeli Defense Force into a laughingstock.

I predict that the Kadima government under Olmert will collapse within four months of this ceasefire agreement, no matter how it comes out; at least, clear signs will be readily visible that they're on their way out. There will be new elections, and most of Kadima's vote will just split between Likud and Labor, with a strong edge to the party that is serious about national defense. Kadima-niks will drift back to their parties of origin, and Israel's flirtation with a third major party (as opposed to the raft of tiny parties) will be abandoned -- and not a minute too soon.

After all, Kadima was Ariel Sharon, and he was Kadima; it will not survive him.

But Olmert will want to hang on as long as he can, because he's obviously finished in Likud, even when Kadima evaporates. So he will almost certainly be looking for a solid reason to declare the ceasefire broken and restart the offensive... but this time with the vigor and the ground forces it really needs, rather than trying to do it by airstrikes alone -- which everybody now agrees was a miserable failure.

So sometime in the next year or so, Israel will be back in Lebanon (possibly under a new prime minister); and this time, there will be no ceasefire. They will finish off Hezbollah as an effective military or terrorist organization in that country. And without either the Syrian Army or Hezbollah, the Syrian intelligence officers will quickly head back home, just ahead of the mobs of angry northern Lebanese with torches and pitchforks.

During that time, Iran will only be able to partially resupply Hezbollah; but when Israel attacks next time, they will no longer rely exclusively on bombs and missiles: next time, the IDF generals get their licks from the git-go. And that is the moment we're waiting for.

In other words, this ceasefire agreement is a "Mulligan," allowing Israel to restart the war somewhat later, with a still-weakened Hezbollah and with a much better military campaign planned. It's their chance finally to do what they should have done in the first place: treat this war as a real war, not as a spanking.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 11, 2006, at the time of 9:07 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack

August 10, 2006

The Grey Lady Vs. the Stately Lady

In an utterly predictable (and very offensive) news offensive, the New York Times now treats Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as an empty vessel, buffeted by the waves of passion from the right and diplomacy from the left. As the Times puts it:

As Ms. Rice has struggled with the Middle East crisis over the last four weeks, she has found herself trying to be not only a peacemaker abroad but also a mediator among contending parties at home.

Washington’s resistance to an immediate cease-fire and its staunch support of Israel have made it more difficult for Ms. Rice to work with other nations, including some American allies, as they search for a formula that will end the violence and produce a durable cease-fire.

The overall tone of the story paints Condi Rice as having no ideas or principles of her own; she merely tries to balance the traditional State Department's orientation of America as a "neutral broker" between Israel and Hezbollah -- and the tilt of the "neoconservatives" towards Israel:

On her recent trips to the Middle East, Ms. Rice was accompanied by two men with very different outlooks on the conflict: Elliott Abrams, senior director at the National Security Council, and C. David Welch, a career diplomat and former ambassador to Egypt who is assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs.

Mr. Welch represents the traditional State Department view that the United States should serve as a neutral broker in the Middle East. Mr. Abrams, a neoconservative with strong ties to Mr. Cheney, has pushed the administration to throw its support behind Israel. During Ms. Rice’s travels, he kept in direct contact with Mr. Cheney’s office.

One administration official described how during the trip — including a July 29 discussion in Ms. Rice’s Rabin suite at the David Citadel Hotel, with its panoramic view of Jerusalem’s Old City — Mr. Welch and Mr. Abrams served as counterfoils, with Mr. Welch arguing the Arab view and Mr. Abrams articulating the Israeli stance.

But there is no reason to suppose that Condi herself is neutral between these two points of view. As the secretary of state, she clearly must bring Welch along; he is State's number two guy on Middle East issues. Not to bring him would be an absolute scandal, and he would likely resign -- igniting a pointless and damaging war between the secretary and the department.

But since even the Times agrees that Rice's own policy directives far more favor the position of Elliot Abrams -- whom she personally talked into returning to government service on the National Security Council when Condi was the National Security Advisor -- isn't the simplest explanation that she brought Welch by tradition, but she brought Abrams by choice?

As fighting was breaking out last month between Hezbollah and Israel, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice worked through the night at her guest quarters on Russia’s Baltic coast to draft America’s response to the unfolding crisis.

The strategy she outlined that night, the eve of the Group of 8 meeting, dispensed with traditional diplomatic flourishes. It included no call for an immediate cease-fire and expressly stated that Israel had a right to defend itself.

And if so, then it's not unreasonable to infer that Condoleezza Rice is, in fact, in the Abrams camp: that she is not simply being pushed towards Israel by the winds emanating from the White House (or the Naval Observatory), like a kite in a storm -- but that she, herself, favors letting Israel beat down Hezbollah.

I'm not generally one to see "sexism" or "racism" around every bed; but in this case, I cannot help but wonder whether the New York Times would be so quick to assume the secretary of state has no will of her own were she not a beautiful, attractive black woman -- who happens to be a conservative.

If "Madam Madeleine" were issuing the same policies in response to the same crisis, am I alone in thinking that the Times would instead be praising her strength, independence, and control of foreign policy?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 10, 2006, at the time of 11:45 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

August 9, 2006

The Simple Art of Propaganda

Sometimes we get so caught up in the minutiae of this or that battle, engagement, or encounter, that we forget to step back and take in the entire vista. I don't mean the view of the Israeli-Hezbollah war itself, though obviously that's important; in this case, the whole gestalt I want to focus on is the techniques by which the American elite news media has turned news reporting into propaganda.

Worse, not pro-Israeli or pro-Western secular democracy propaganda; that I would understand. But rather, into propaganda for the worst enemies of Western civilization... in fact, the bitterest enemies of the very "free press" that is cravenly crafting the agit-prop.

Here is the required reading for this class: Cabinet OKs Expanding Israeli Offensive, distributed by the Associated Press today, August 9th, 2006. The supposed thrust of the story is that the Israelis have finally decided to dramatically expand their offensive (as Big Lizards knew they eventually would have to do), seizing control of all Lebanese territory up to the Litani River.

But the real point is to subtly (and at times blatantly and overtly) portray the offensive as a failure and quagmire, and to enlist the aid of world opinion and the weariness and wariness of the Israeli public to force Israel to pull out immediately. (Why the antique media would want to do this is irrelevant to this discussion; this is about the actual mechanics.)

Subtext, or Reading Behind the Lines

Let's start right away with the opening pair of grafs:

Israel's Security Cabinet overwhelmingly decided Wednesday to send troops deeper into Lebanon in a major expansion of the ground war - an attempt to further damage Hezbollah before a cease-fire is imposed.

The decision could pressure the United Nations to work faster on a cease-fire deal to try to stop the offensive.

What is AP trying to do in this lead in?

1. On the most obvious level, they are trying to taint the reader against 'unfair Israel,' 'Israel the cheater,' from the very start.

Americans and Westerners believe in fair play and following the rules. Thus, from the very first sentence, AP portrays Israel's expansion as an underhanded trick designed to take unfair advantage before the whistle is blown. Rather than give them the benefit of the doubt -- perhaps they're expanding the offensive to try to stop the missile attacks on Israeli cities? -- AP's Karin Laub delves deep into the psychological motivation of the Israelis: the offensive is just "an attempt to further damage Hezbollah before a cease-fire is imposed."

The bounders! She thus covertly compares them to a boxer who gets his opponent into a clinch... then before the ref can part them, he gets in a few low blows.

2. But at a more subtle level, see how the macrocosmic themes are woven into the microcosm of a single sentence.

Note the phraseology. We all know that a ceasefire is something that two or more combatants agree to, temporarily suspending hostilities while they negotiate a settlement. The phrasing is that "A and B agreed to a ceasefire."

But that's not what Ms. Laub writes; rather, Israel is trying to get in a few more low blows "before a cease-fire is imposed." Imposed by whom? How can a ceasefire be imposed by anybody, apart from the combatants themselves?

This very subtle choice of passive voice in the midst of a pair of paragraphs that are otherwise in active voice is designed to arrest the reader's attention without him even realizing why: the cabinet decided; the cabinet will send troops; they are attempting to damage Hezbollah; the decision will pressure the UN (not "the UN will be pressured"), which may work faster and try to stop the offensive.

But the cease-fire will be imposed.

The shift in voice would be unnoticed on a conscious level by nearly all readers... but it has a subtle effect, putting the Israelis in the position of truculent schoolchildren pitching a tantrum, which will eventually draw the attention of the adults, who will come along and set things aright: if you Israelis can't make peace, then peace will be imposed.

Passive voice allows Ms. Laub to skip entirely over the question of who will do the imposing: there is no "actor" in that clause; the subject is an action (cease-fire), and the verb (imposed) is passive voice. The reader is left vaguely uneasy, wondering who he should envision disposing of the fighting: the United States? the Arab League? the U.N.? God? Graf one yields nothing but a question mark.

3. The question mark of the first graf is answered with a resounding thunderclap of an exclamation mark in the second.

Who will impose the cease-fire? Who must we look to for an end to this terrible conflict? Why, the United Nations, of course!

The decision could pressure the United Nations to work faster on a cease-fire deal to try to stop the offensive.

So in a scant two paragraphs, we already have the image of Israel as a naughty child taking unfair advantage, which will surely provoke the magisterial power of the UN to lay down the law from Mount Sinai. Whew, that's quite an amazing load of subtext to rest on the thin foundation of two simple paragraphs!

So let's move on... and don't worry, we're not going paragraph by paragraph through the entire piece.

Objection Overruled

Now we have the obligatory nod in Israel's direction... followed immediately by what radio talk-show host Larry Elderberry calls "the Big But":

"Israel is still working for a diplomatic solution, preferably in the Security Council," Cabinet Minister Isaac Herzog said, adding that the new offensive would run parallel to the negotiations. "We cannot wait forever. We have a million civilians living in bomb shelters, and we have to protect them."

The decision came as fierce fighting was reported overnight with Hezbollah militants, and Arab broadcaster Al-Jazeera reported 11 Israeli soldiers had been killed in what would be the deadliest day for Israeli troops in Lebanon in four weeks of fighting.

I changed the font sizes above to indicate the propagandistic effect of "call and response." This occurs (in both print and broadcast media) when Party A makes a point, and the writer (or host) then allows Party B to have the resounding response. In this case, Israel says 'hey, we have to protect our citizens,' and al-Jazeera swiftly responds 'but you're not, are you? You're getting cut to pieces!'

The net effect here is one of utter futility. Of course, al-Jazeera is not exactly known as a creditable news source (especially since the actual source for their claim is either the compromised Lebanese government or else Hezbollah itself); but that point is buried by the call and response technique, which backloads a heavy significance upon the final comment.

You may recognize this technique from 60 Minutes, which uses it incessantly -- and clumsily -- when their whistleblower is always allowed the final response to the feeble defense offered by the target:

The technique sets up an artificial closure: the target -- Israel -- is never allowed to have the last word; they're like Hamilton Burger on the old Perry Mason show: whenever Ham Burger objects to one of Perry's unorthodox courtroom antics, the judge's response is invariably a resounding "overruled!"

It'll All End In Tears

1. The Futility Fantasy: AP neglects even to mention any bright side to Israel's expansion, implying there isn't one. We can also call this the Argument from Murphy: anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

When you wanted that BB-gun for Christmas, your mother never suggested you might develop good eye-hand coordination, concentration, the ability to aim patiently, an activity to keep you outside the house but also off the streets, or that you might be prompted to form a club and meet a lot of like-minded people, did she?

I suspect she suggested that you would end up shooting some helpless bird, breaking the neighbor's window -- and of course, that you'd shoot your eye out.

Well, listen to "Mother" Laub:

The Israeli Cabinet decision was risky. Israel could set itself up for new criticism that it is sabotaging diplomatic efforts, particularly after Lebanon offered to deploy its own troops in the border area.

A wider ground offensive also might sharply increase the already-high number of casualties among Israeli troops.

Since the fighting began, at least 700 people have died on the Lebanese side. The Israeli toll stood at 103 killed - including 36 civilians.

In the six-hour meeting, Cabinet officials were told a new offensive could mean 100 to 200 more military deaths, a participant said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief reporters. At least 67 Israeli soldiers have been confirmed killed.

Nice. Of course, it could also:

• Drive Hezbollah back so far that they cannot shoot missiles at Israeli cities;
• Clear the area so that the Lebanese Army could actually take control of their own southern territory;
• Give Syria and especially Iran a bloody nose;
• Cripple Iran's ability to threaten instant retaliation -- via Hezbollah, their forward-deployed SpecOps branch -- against the United States, were we to make a serious push against Iranian-backed Shiite militias in Iraq, such as Muqtada Sadr's al-Mahdi Militia or the Badr Brigades;
• And even bring some peace to the region, by finally persuading the Arabs (and Iran) that the Ehud Barak era of weakness is finally and decisively at an end.

But Ms. Laub doesn't wish to confuse matters by bringing up all these irrelevancies. Suffice to say that it's just as effective to bias reader response by omission as it is by commission.

2. A drawerful of left-handed gloves; well, everything's gone wrong so far, hasn't it?

This method, which I call the "blind in one eye" technique, is actually part of the Argument from Murphy. To reinforce the case that "it'll all end in tears if you don't follow our party," the great geniuses of propaganda would always publish a falsified history that simply leaves out anything that contradicts the party line. (Paul Josef Goebbels is credited with the "big lie" technique: he realized that the more outrageous the lie, the harder it was to refute it.)

If the false, one-sided history is presented authoritatively enough and in the absence of a competing history, even people who don't trust you will still internalize the history you recount, to a greater or lesser degree.

A recent very good example of this was the way the mainstream media was able to take the Bush Administration's response to Hurricane Katrina -- which response was actually significantly faster, more proactive, and more effective at saving lives than any previous response to a natural disaster in my memory -- and turn it into a worse disaster than Katrina itself. And they were so effective at this that not only does the American public now falsely imagine that Katrina was a low point for President Bush (in fact, it was one of his greatest achievements)... even most Republicans have been brainwashed to agree!

It was the elite media's crowning achievement of anti-Bush propaganda, and they are still giddy with glee.

The Democrats and their media succeeded in turning a magnificent success into a dismal failure simply by willfully failing to mention the hundreds of rescues and recovery programs that succeeded, recounting only the small number of things that went wrong -- but recycling them endlessly, to make it appear as if Michael Brown and George W. Bush offered only failure and death. (See 13 Ghosts for the true story of Bush and "Brownie" in their response to Hurricane Katrina.)

The news media use the same technique incessantly:

• In Iraq, where all we ever hear about is the number of American and Iraqi dead;
• In the economy, where job creation is reported as a negative, since it didn't live up to some expert's unrealistic expectation;
• In gun control, where it's front-page news every time a man accidentally shoots his own son sneaking home late after a date... but when a single mom shoots a rapist in her own home, it's reported on page B-24, if at all.

In each case, by telling only one side of the history, the media subtlely imply that there is no other side, that there never has been a benefit. They must be subtle, because the blatant statement would be unsustainable and instantly challenged.

Viz., to the instant; here is Ms. Laub on the People's History of the Israeli-Hezbollah war:

The decision came as fierce fighting was reported overnight with Hezbollah militants, and Arab broadcaster Al-Jazeera reported 11 Israeli soldiers had been killed in what would be the deadliest day for Israeli troops in Lebanon in four weeks of fighting....

Since the fighting began, at least 700 people have died on the Lebanese side. The Israeli toll stood at 103 killed - including 36 civilians....

The decision on the wider offensive came a day after the commander of Israeli forces in Lebanon was sidelined in an unusual midwar shake-up - another sign of the growing dissatisfaction with the military, which has been unable to stop Hezbollah's rocket barrages....

About a mile away, some 400 people marched in a funeral for 30 of the 41 killed in an Israeli airstrike earlier this week. They carried the bodies draped in Lebanon's green, red and white flag and chanted, "Death to America! Death to Israel!"....

Al-Jazeera said 11 Israeli soldiers were killed in heavy fighting with Hezbollah guerrillas near the border. The Israeli army declined to comment on the report but had said earlier that 15 soldiers were wounded in overnight clashes.

A Hezbollah statement said it killed or wounded 10 Israeli soldiers and destroyed a tank as it advanced toward the village of Qantara, north of the border....

Israel also struck Lebanon's largest Palestinian refugee camp, killing two people and wounding five....

Airstrikes also leveled a building in the Bekaa Valley town of Mashghara, trapping seven family members in the rubble. Five bodies were pulled out and the remaining two relatives were feared dead, officials said....

At least 19 Lebanese civilians were killed by airstrikes Tuesday. Rescuers also pulled 28 more bodies from the wreckage, raising the death toll to 77 Lebanese killed Monday, the highest since the war began.

Hezbollah fired more than 160 rockets at Israel on Wednesday. Since the fighting began July 12, a total of 3,333 have been fired, officials said.

In Laub's entire piece, there is not one single positive effect mentioned -- not one! It's as if the Israeli offensive has caused nothing but misery and heartbreak, death and destruction, even for Israel itself. According to the People's History, it has been an act of resounding senselessness that solved nothing and only made a bad situation worse.

Yet by not presenting that assessment openly, merely implying it by ignoring anything good (lying by omission), Karin Laub avoids the necessity of defending her thesis; if asked, she can simply look innocent and say, "but I never wrote that it was a complete fiasco; whatever do you mean?"

Drilling Down: Those Poor Dead "Civilians"

But of course, she does this deliberately. For one example, what is Laub's source for saying the 19 Lebanese killed were all "civilians?" How does she know? Who told her that? Technically, she is likely correct: the dead are all "civilians" in the sense that they were not members of the Lebanese Army. But she has completely left out the number who were members of -- or cheerleaders for -- Hezbollah.

That's a significant point, right? If 14 of the 19 were Hezbollah members, then that is very different than if all 19 were Druze Christians who have fought against Hezbollah and were thus on Israel's side in this war. But Laub simply omits any reference to Hezbollah fighters or supporters being killed and tells us that Israel's airstrikes have only killed good guys... without her actually coming out and saying so directly.

Because of course saying it overtly would be nitwittery: obviously some of the Lebanese killed were actually members of Hezbollah, since Israel is primarily attacking Hezbollah strongholds in southern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and parts of Beirut. And an additional percentage of those killed, probably larger than the fighters themselves, were not actually members of Hezbollah but were part of the "Hezbollah tribe": they support the terrorist organization, which they see as the generous relatives who give them welfare, since the government of Lebanon cannot.

But what is the breakdown? We don't know, because the elite media never really tries to find out. If pressed, they simply take the word of Lebanese government officials... or of Hezbollah.

Israeli estimates of the number of Hezbollah killed are routinely labeled "inflated" by lefties in political debate. These leftists invariably get their "real number" by simply reading news stories and adding up the numbers of Hezbollah dead that the elite media claim.

But this quoted number in the media comes either from Hezbollah itself (which has an obvious interest in undercounting its own dead)... or from the Lebanese government, which is currently in bed with Hezbollah -- and which desperately struggles to persuade Israel to withdraw immediately and the rest of the world to lean on Israel to do so. Again, it's in the interests of Lebanon to portray the Israeli offensive as doing nothing but slaughtering civilians.

And since many reporters and editors in the MSM are people of the Left, they follow the party line, completing the vicious circle: virtually no members of Hezbollah have been killed in this war; the dead are all "civilians," and all the news is bad news.

Multiply by each component of the "bad-news brigade" cited above, and you have the anatomy of a false history.

The Grand View

The essence of propaganda is never to make a logical argument. Arguments can be refuted; evidence can be countered with better evidence.

What distinguishes propaganda from debate is that you never allow "the opposition to confuse matters by participating in the discussion." As I have said many times, it's easy to win a debate if you get to script both sides.

Propaganda succeeds by subtext, subtlety, and subterfuge:

• Approach your subject obliquely;
• Never state openly what you can imply subtly (leaving no opening for rebuttal);
• Allow the opposition to speak, but only when your side gets the final say and controls the terms of debate (this gives the illusion of fairness without actually allowing full participation by your enemies);
• Omit inconvenient facts to seize control of the narrative;
• Predict dire consequences if the opposition is heeded; when calamities fail to materialize, simply act as if they actually did, referring to the (nonexistent) catastrophe as if everyone knows it so well, there is no reason to state it overtly;
• Never, ever, ever, under any circumstances, admit that you have a "side;" you are the impartial observer... whose observations always seem to go one direction. Is it your fault that the entire universe is against the opposition?

If reporters like AP's Karin Laub (or the Washington Post's Tom Ricks, who went out of his skull and gave the Left's talking points in plain speech -- rather than as propaganda in the pages of the Post) were simply making these odd mistakes randomly, just by accident, then we would expect half of them to favor the Israelis, and only half to favor Hezbollah.

But in fact, each and every error, misstatement, omission, or subtextual implication supports the same position: that Israel should immediately withdraw (surrender), handing an unearned victory to Hezbollah and inflicting terrible damage on her own credibility on the world stage, signalling weakness... and rendering her ripe for the plucking by the vultures that surround her.

Never attribute to stupidity what can adequately be explained by malice; or in this case, what can only be explained by malice. Make no mistake. Know thine enemy as thou knowest thyself.

Class dismissed.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 9, 2006, at the time of 4:12 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

August 8, 2006

Newsflash: Israel Commits Near War Crime, Almost, Except They Didn't. Quite.

This is a staggering charge that should, if there is a God, swiftly turn American public opinion against the Israelis, who have shown themselves to be such oppressors and aggressors against peaceful Hezbollah supporters in Lebanon. The headline from AP says it all:

Israeli Strike Kills 13 Near Mourners
by Ahmed Mantash [evidently his usual parther in fair and balanced reporting, Moshe Pippik, was unavailable for this effort]

Mourners in a funeral procession for Israeli airstrike victims scattered in panic Tuesday as warplanes again unleashed missiles that hit buildings and killed 13 people, witnesses and officials said.

The first missile struck a building about five minutes after the march by about 1,500 people had passed by, killing one person and wounding five.

In this almost war crime, which would have been an atrocity if the Israelis had actually struck the funeral procession, and was averted only by their underhanded trick of not actually striking the funeral procession, the Israelis had the temerity to strike a building some time after a funeral procession had passed by, frightening the mourners -- who imagined that they must have been the targets, and the Israelis were simply too dilatory and missed them.

Horrors!

To see how terrified these near-martyrs were, who almost suffered what would have been a crime against humanity (if the Israelis had actually done it, that is), just read their terror-stricken response:

The blast was close enough to send mourners screaming, "Allahu akbar!" or "God is great!" Some broke away from the procession, while others continued on.

I hope we all see how evil and horrific those Israelis are: if they had actually committed the despicable act that they didn't commit, targeting innocent mourners in a funeral procession (whose first reaction to being frightened is to scream "Allahu akbar!"), then they would have been obviously evil and horrific; are we going to let them slide from this just charge, merely on the flimsy excuse that they did not, in fact, do it?

I think not. Let heads roll! Let revulsion sweep the world! The Associated Press is absolutely correct to highlight would could have been a ghastly and brutal attack on unarmed mourners, except that they didn't quite attack them. Their obviously concocted claim should not save them from the world's ignominy and opprobrium:

Witnesses said one of the destroyed houses belonged to Sheik Mustafa Khalifeh, a cleric linked to Hezbollah, but it was unclear if he was among the casualties. Most Hezbollah officials have left their homes and offices since the offensive began nearly a month ago.

Ghaziyeh has been targeted several times, but the attacks Monday and Tuesday were the heaviest. The town was overflowing with displaced people, who have swelled its population to 23,000.

After all, besides having the gall to attack a city that contained some displaced people, Israel is holding up the peace process by not agreeing to withdraw completely and trust the word of the hitherto thoroughly compromised Lebanese government that they will, in fact, take up the slack and prevent Hezbollah from returning. In fact, even Hezbollah itself has embraced this plan... which must prove they want only peace:

Lebanon put its offers on the table: pledging up to 15,000 troops to a possible peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon and saying Hezbollah's days of running a state within a state would end. The military plan had added significance since it was backed by the two Hezbollah members on Lebanon's Cabinet - apparently showing a willingness for a lasting pact by the Islamic militants and their main sponsors, Iran and Syria.

Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora on Tuesday praised Hezbollah's resistance, but said it was time for Lebanon to "impose its full control, authority and presence" over the war-weary country.

"There will be no authority, no one in command, no weapons other than those of the Lebanese state," he said on Al-Arabiya television.

Since it is clear to all with eyes to see that the Lebanese government is not in any way beholden to or even connected with Hezbollah, whose representatives sit not only in parliament but in the cabinet itself, surely such oral assurances should satisfy Israel. What more could they demand?

After all, the world knows that Israel has already been crushed in this war they started; AP has announced ever since Israel rolled into Lebanon that the war was a quagmire and could never be won by the oppressors. I mean, the Israelis. After all, how long can they go on accepting such losses as this?

Some of the fiercest skirmishes broke out around the village of Bint Jbail, a Hezbollah stronghold that Israeli has tried to capture for weeks. An Israeli solider and 25 Hezbollah guerrillas were killed, the Israeli military said.

Hezbollah TV also reported pre-dawn attacks on Israeli forces near the Mediterranean town of Naqoura, about 2 1/2 miles north of the border. The Israeli military said two reserve soldiers were killed in the area.

The latest casualties brought the number of people killed in Lebanon to at least 684, while the Israeli death toll was 100.

And after all, what have the Israelis to fear from this wonderful peace peace proposal, supported unanimously by the foreign ministers of the member states of the Arab League -- a group that is well known to harbor only friendly feelings towards Israel? Lebanon has pledged to ensure their coalition partner Hezbollah has no control over southern Lebanon, which currently dominates the Lebanese Army by superior force of arms, supplied by their patron Iran transshipped through their other patron, Syria (which controlled Lebanon absolutely for 29 years):

Saniora's government voted unanimously to send 15,000 troops to stand between Israel and Hezbollah should a cease-fire take hold and Israeli forces withdraw.

The move was an attempt to show that Lebanon has the will and ability to assert control over its south, where Hezbollah rules with near autonomy bolstered by channels of aid and weapons from Iran and Syria. Lebanon has avoided any attempt to implement a two-year-old U.N. resolution calling for the disarmament of Hezbollah, fearing it could touch off civil unrest....

Qatar Foreign Minister Hamad bin Jassem Al Thani warned of "a civil war in Lebanon" between Hezbollah and government forces if the Security Council does not make changes to the U.S.-French draft resolution [that is, if Hezbollah does not get its way]. "Lebanon won't bear it," he told Al-Jazeera.

With such ironclad assurances, surely even Israel must give way at last to world public opinion! After all, the full weight of international condemnation is about to fall across the Israelis' necks, and it must surely destroy them, the way they nearly tried to almost destroy those innocent pallbearers and mourners in what might have been a crime against humanity, if only Israel had actually done it. For lo! see how the quagmire thickens:

In Geneva, the U.N. Human Rights Council said it plans to convene a special session this week to consider taking action against Israel for its Lebanon offensive.

Against such force and power arrayed, what aggressor dare stand against?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 8, 2006, at the time of 1:34 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

August 6, 2006

Yet Another "18½ Minute Gap"

Way Back on May 30th, 2005, I posted on Patterico's Pontifications an article titled The 18½ Minute Gap, which I subsequently reposted here on Big Lizards a year later as a "Scaley Classic."

This was the central conceit of that post:

It does little good to point out what nobody now denies: that Hussein had many ongoing programs to develop such chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons; they just weren't as advanced as we were afraid they were. Given how little intelligence we had about that secretive country, the choice was to trust in Saddam Hussein's restraint and good judgment, or trust in the United States military. "You should have just waited a few more months," the lib invariably intones; "maybe a year. Then we would have known for sure."

In other words, they wanted us to wait until two minutes to midnight. Then we could have moved... unless it turned out our watch was slow.... [Emphasis added, as the BL style has changed in the last year and a quarter.]

Had we waited just a few more months -- waited until two minutes before midnight -- even more high officials in Security-Council governments would have been corrupted; it's entirely possible that, in the end, even Britain would have bowed to international pressure and pulled out of the Operation Iraqi Freedom. Would we still have gone to war, then? I don't think anyone can really say for sure.

So the Left is actually right, for a change: we miserably failed to wait until two minutes to midnight to strike against the tyrant. We struck at twenty till, instead. Maybe even twenty and a half minutes before the witching hour.

Which would make it the second time in history that an 18½ minute gap saved the presidency... and this time, possibly the entire Global War on Terrorism as well.

The surreal argument advanced by Democrats -- now including nearly all of them, other than the soon to be unemployed Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-CT, 80%) -- is that we should have waited until the last, possible moment before the invasion window closed, just on the off chance that it was all a terrible mistake: that there were no WMD programs, that Saddam Hussein was really a nice guy, and all things black and ugly we thought we knew about him were just lies, spread by his competitors.

And indeed, the Left seized upon as vindication the supposed "failure" to find WMD, which was actually a deliberate decision by the CIA -- which had always opposed the invasion -- to refuse to label as "WMD" any program, device, chemical, or biological sample that had any conceivable non-war purpose, no matter how implausible or even ludicrous.

Thus, 55-gallon drums of Cyclosarin sitting in camouflaged bunkers near empty chemical rocket shells were not chemical-warfare tools; perhaps the Iraqis were simply obsessed with having aphid-free ammo dumps.

And those mobile labs that were described so accurately by Iraqi defectors who had worked on them, and who also described their use in developing chemical and biological munitions, were dismissed by the CIA as "mobile hydrogen-production factilities"... despite the fact that Iraq, being an oil-drililng and refining country, would routinely make tens of thousands of liters of hydrogen commercially and store it in tanks that were a fraction of the weight of those labs -- and of course were already ready for use.

Perhaps, on the very eve of the Coalition invasion, Saddam Hussein was simply focused like a laser beam on protecting Iraq's critical supply of weather balloons.

Rather than acting with alacrity in invading that country when we were pretty sure -- as we are now, especially with the wealth of new finds of the progress of creating WMD and the possible stockpiles moved to Syria -- the Left wanted us to wait until we could prove that Hussein was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. (In fact, it was more like what Patterico wants the standard to be in death-penalty cases: "guilty beyond all possible doubt.")

As this standard would have put the possibility of military action forever out of range under any circumstances, since intelligence gathering is never as certain as all that, accepting it amounts to saying that no matter how serious the threat to the United States, we can never go to war -- even if the bad guys attack us first -- so long as they refuse to admit it was they.

I called that the 18½ Minute Gap; and now we have another example: the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in pursuit of Hezbollah.

As it turns out, Israel (along with most of the rest of us, certainly including myself) thought they dominated that terrorist group so completely that the war would be quick and decisive. And perhaps it would have been, had Israel attacked with the seriousness of purpose of 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982 (their last invasion of Lebanon, against Yassir Arafat's PLO, in which Manachem Begin used nine divisions and 800 tanks)... rather than the limp-wristed response of Ehud Barak in 2000: Barak jerked the troops out of Lebanon in such a panicky way that he simulated a rout following a military defeat, which had never actually happened.

For whatever reason, Israel has now discovered that Hezbollah is far stronger than anyone imagined; and the victories Israel has achieved -- and there are several important ones -- are neither decisive nor persuasive. Contrariwise, Israel is in the process of inadvertently convincing the Arab that Israel is a paper camel who can be defeated.

Democrats are triumphant: the hated Zionist entity is being battered, giving leftists the enormous satisfaction of a great, big, fat, wet I told you so! The Left wags its finger in Israel's face, like Mom after you almost shoot your eye out with that BB-gun you finally got, and says, in essence, see? look at all the trouble you bought for yourself by refusing to listen to us... you should have left well enough alone.

But this argument boils down to the question of what is "well enough." Had Israel simply done nothing -- or worked through the "international diplomatic community," which amounts to the same thing -- would they really have been better off than they are right at this very moment?

I say no, they would have been far worse off... even if they end up losing this war. To imagine they'd have been better off, a Democrat must think that this war was avoidable, that it need never have happened. That if Israel hadn't attacked Hezbollah and just suffered the missiles and kidnappings in stoic silence, they would have so impressed the terrorists with their sang froid that the latter would have written a letter like the one Sean Connery (Mulay Achmed Mohammed el-Raisuli the Magnificent, Lord of the Riff, Sultan to the Berbers, Last of the Barbary Pirates) wrote to Brian Keith (Teddy Roosevelt), telling TR that he was the wind to the Raisuli's lion), then bow out of any future conflict with Israel.

But that is errant nonsense. Hezbollah, the "Party of God," believes it has a holy mission to annihilate the Jews. Hezbollah is not a stand-alone terrorist group; in reality, it is nothing less than the third branch of Iran's armed forces -- their forward-deployed special-operations unit. Both Hezbollah and Iran are singing from the same hymnal (er... perhaps I could have chosen a better expression) anent the obliteration of Israel and driving the Jews into the Mediterranean.

Nor are they slackers or fulyaks about it: Iran's frantic effort to develop nuclear warheads for their intermediate-range ballistic missiles raises at least the strong possibility that the purpose of their soon-to-be nukes is not simply to "extort" the rest of the world, but also to set in motion the holocaust that will bring the advent of the "Twelfth imam," Muhammad al-Mahdi, whom Shi'a believe has been hidden from the world by God and will reappear at the end of the reign of the tyrants (non-Moslems), forcing (Shiite) Islam upon the entire world as the global religion.

And Hezbollah's pace of attack on Israel has grown steadily year after year since the 2000 pullout from Lebanon; there is no reason to believe they would abruptly stop or even level off.

The greatest probability is that this war was actually inevitable, not "evitable;" and that if the Israelis hadn't forced it now, the other side would have forced it later... at a time and place and in a manner of their own choosing, when they were even stronger, relative to Israel, than they are today.

Thank God the Israelis responded to Hezbollah's provocation by launching even the limited war that they did at 20 minutes to midnight; because if they had waited until two minutes to midnight, as the Left demanded they should have -- or even two minutes after midnight, as the Left actually believes -- then as bad as it is right now, it would have been a hundred times worse.

In their hearts, I believe most Democrats, liberals, and lefties know this; which means it's not an argument about the means, when and how Israel should have struck, but rather about the end itself: who wins? The Left collectively wants the jihadist savages to win and hated Western civilization to lose.

As to why they want that... well, that's a psychodrama for another day.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 6, 2006, at the time of 1:50 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

August 2, 2006

Airport Blogging: At Last!

Having missed our plane out of Buffalo to La Guardia (customs, navigational difficulties, don't ask), we've got plenty of time to blog while we wait for the next flight.

At long last, the Israelis have done what they should have done in the first place: a solid invasion force of one full division into Lebanon. (Actually, I'd rather see two divisions; but I never spent even one day in the Army, and my Navy experience is less than nothing in a situation like this... so what do I know?)

Israel pressed the first full day of a massive new ground attack, sending 8,000 troops into southern Lebanon on Wednesday and seizing five people it said were Hezbollah fighters in a dramatic airborne raid on a northeastern town. Hezbollah retaliated with its deepest strikes yet into Israel, firing a record number of more than 160 rockets.

Many moons ago, when I blogged on the Gaza pullout (it was back on Captain's Quarters); a, I supported it... but not on the silly grounds that all the other supporters cited. I never had any illusions about a "peace process." Rather, I saw the pullout as an opportunity to make clear that Gaza -- well, the entire Palestinian Authority (PA) -- was a separate country... and as such would be held to the same standards as any other sovereign nation.

In particular, if they engaged in the "normal" sort of terrorist attacks against Israel, the Jewish state would no longer be constrained by the peculiarity of being an occupier; they could respond with the full force of a nation responding to violent attack by another nation... with a war.

Now I was always opposed to the pullout from Lebanon, since Israel never claimed to be or acted as an occupier; it held only a security zone, and only to prevent Hezbollah from getting close enough to attack Israel. They ignored my advice (oddly enough) and pulled out under Labor Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 2000... worse, Barak kept accelerating the pullout until at the end, it resembled a panicked rout -- despite the fact that Israel never suffered any military defeat.

Ne'ertheless, they departed so precipitously that they left armor behind. They actually had to send Israeli helicopters back into Lebanon to destroy the abandoned Israeli tanks, so as not to hand them over to the Party of God (Hezbollah).

It was the most inexplicable rout in military history, and it set the stage for the current conflict: Hezbollah, not being very bright, concluded from the panicky withdrawal that they must somehow have "defeated the Zionist entity"... and that primed them to attack again, while Israel's attention (they thought) was occupied by Hamas, which had kidnapped an Israeli soldier.

Whew! Thus endeth the history lesson.

The point of this dreary recounting is that, even though I opposed the Lebanon pullout, the same logic that applies in Gaza applies in Lebanon: since Israel departed six years ago, they should have no hesitation treating an attack from Hezbollah (in Lebanon) as an attack from a separate, sovereign country (which technically Lebanon was even before the pullout)... and they can respond with a full-scale invasion.

It took them a long time dithering. Paul Mirengoff over at Power Line basically predicted that the Israelis would not so respond; and for a while, I began to fear he was right. Ehud Olmert, despite being a former Likudnik before helping Ariel Sharon found Kadima, engaged his country in a perfect Kabuki dance of what I would call "pussyfooting": he accepted the advice of the Israeli Air Force (IAF) over that of the Israeli Army (IDF) that Israel could achieve its aim against Hezbollah merely by bombing them sufficiently.

(Yoni the Blogger believes that Olmert is escalating as fast as he thinks the Israeli public will accept... though Yoni wishes it were faster, as do I.)

But Olmert appears, at long last, to have realized that only boots on the ground -- and enough of them -- will be able to "disarm" (that is, kill, mutilate, and destroy) Hezbollah fighters, annihilate the rocket launchers, and drive any survivors across into Syria, where they can fester until such time as that slithery nation becomes enough of a problem that either Israel from the west or American forces from the East makes Syria an offer it cannot refuse.

In addition to simply sending in a division of the IDF, Israel has also sent a commando raid into the Bekaa Valley, Hezbollah's main stronghold in Lebanon, into the town of Baalbek, and seized five specific Hezbollah commanders they wanted:

Israeli commandos flew in by helicopter before dawn into the northern town of Baalbek, on the border with Syria, capturing five Hezbollah guerrillas and killing at least 10, said Israel's army chief, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz.

Witnesses said Israeli forces partially destroyed the Dar al-Hikma hospital in Baalbek, where chief Hezbollah spokesman Hussein Rahal said fierce fighting raged for more than one hour.

Israel has not yet released the identity of those captured. When asked by The Associated Press whether any were "big fish," Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said: "They are tasty fishes...."

Olmert said that, although the scene of the fighting is called a hospital, "there are no patients there and there is no hospital, this is a base of the Hezbollah in disguise."

Interestingly, Hezbollah admits that last fact -- albeit between the lines:

A Hezbollah official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to give official statements to the media, said that Israeli troops captured "four or five" people, but not at the hospital.

He denied they were Hezbollah fighters, saying one was a 60-year-old grocery store owner and two relatives who work in construction.

The hospital, which residents said is financed by an Iranian charity that is close to Hezbollah, was empty of patients at the time of the raid, the guerrilla group said.

AP reports 540 "Lebanese" killed since all the fighting began; but they don't break this down into Hezbollah fighters, Hezbollah supporters (a huge number of Lebanese Shia in southern Lebanon actively support Hezbollah, which they see as their "tribe"), and ordinary Lebanese patriots, whether Moslem or Christian, who oppose Hezbollah (and still continue to give the Israelis intelligence information); the latter constitute a majority in that country, and they were the impetus behind the "Cedar Revolution" that drove Syrian troops out of Lebanon. As usual, the antique media is less than useless: they're actively helping the terrorists by reprinting their propaganda as if it were verified news.

According to Haaretz, at least nine Hezbollah fighters have been killed Wednesday alone (what a wonderful world we live in, where a war that kills a few hundred people is treated as a "massive" conflict!)

Keep watching the skies; I suspect that this latest escalation to a division is just the first. We shall see...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 2, 2006, at the time of 11:15 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

July 28, 2006

Putting On My "Robert Novak" Hat

We've never seen Big Lizards as a primary news source, or a newspaper, or anything of that ilk. We're not journalists, and we don't engage in reporting. Rather, we like to analyze news and current events, trends and motives, often days after the fact. (Our egocentric motto: "Never first, always final!")

But occasionally I like to put two and two together in a sort of predictive way. Mind, this is all wild speculation, and a substantial part of it comes from a somewhat untrustworthy source, NewsMax.com.

First, we have this:

Hizbullah steps up attacks: Hizbullah steps up attacks: For the first time since the fighting in the north began 17 days ago, Hizbullah launched five Fajr-5 missiles at Israel Friday afternoon. Police officials said that long-range missiles of this type can carry a larger amount of explosives than the rockets that had been fired at Israel so far. A short while later, the IDF reported it had destroyed the rocket launcher used for firing the missiles.

The missiles landed in open areas between Afula and the Beit Shean Valley, causing no injuries.

Wikipedia says that the Fajr-5 missile has a range "75 kilometers, or 50 miles," but this is probably an overestimate (especially as 75 km is actually 46.6 miles, not 50). GlobalSecurity.org gives it a range of only 45 miles (72 km). Still, this is a substantial jump over the 10,000 Soviet/Iranian Katyusha rockets (13 mile range) and the handful of Fajr-3s (25 miles) that Hezbollah has been using; they nearly double their range with the Fajr-5s.

(Additionally, Breitbart reports that Hezbollah has fired a rocket they call a Khaibar-1 -- a made-up name taken from a famous battle at an oasis where Mohammed attacked a settlement of Jews and enslaved them. I can't find out anything about the "Khaibar-1," but it may just be Hezbollah's name for the Fajr-5; the range seems to match up, more or less.)

The point is that Hezbollah is increasing the range and payload of their rockets and missiles. Clearly, their aim is to bring all of Israel into missile range -- especially Tel Aviv, the second largest city in Israel, with a population of 380,000 (Jerusalem's population is 725,000; Haifa has only 278,000).

I'm not sure what range Hezbollah would need to target Tel Aviv, because it depends where they're firing from. According to this distance-calculating website, the distance from Beirut to Tel Aviv is 134 miles (215 km)... so they still need a substantial increase in range, between two and three times what they have now, in order to seriously threaten that city.

But clearly, the Iranians are upping Hezbollah's arsenal; and Iran has many missiles that have a longer range than 150 miles: the oldest Shahab-3, for example, has a range that exceeds 1,300 km (808 miles), and that dates back to 2003; newer models have much longer ranges. It also packs a warhead that masses over 1,000 kg. (The Shahab-3 is derived from the North Korean NoDong-1.)

I suspect it's not a question of "if" but "when" will Hezbollah be able to directly attack Tel Aviv... and it's hard to imagine them having that capability and deciding not to use it. Which brings up the third point. From NewsMax.com (which I again caution is not exactly reliable; but I do believe this piece):

Additionally, Israeli sources say a line in the sand has been drawn: If Hezbollah is "stupid" enough to attack Tel Aviv or its suburbs, "then all bets are off."

While refusing to provide more details, the Israeli warned that if Hezbollah attacked Tel Aviv then the IDF will no longer have any restraints on prospective responses.

While recent Hezbollah attacks have rocketed cities south of the port of Haifa, all have fallen far short of Tel Aviv and its environs ... for now.

U.S. diplomats had no comment.

I do not have a window into the minds of the members of Israel's security cabinet, of course; but I suspect that "all bets are off" and no "restraint on prospective responses" means that if Tel Aviv is struck, the Israeli security cabinet would vote to extend the war directly to Syria, which they just refused to do yesterday. They would also likely vote to authorize close-air support, which they've been reluctant to do due to the probability of large numbers of "civilian" casualties and the PR-hit Israel would take.

This is pure speculation on my part; but I strongly believe that if Hezbollah missiles or rockets struck Tel Aviv, the Israeli people would absolutely demand a direct attack on Syria, which is allowing such trans-shipments from Iran to Hezbollah. If the Olmert government refused, the Olmert government would likely be history, and new snap-elections would put a Likud-centered coalition back in power.

Rather than risk that, I suspect Olmert -- a former Likudnik before helping Ariel Sharon to form Kadima -- would push such an expansion through the security cabinet.

So, to recap (oops, I sound just like a Glenn Greenwald sock puppet!):

• Hezbollah is improving its arsenal, nearly doubling the range of its missiles within the last two weeks;
• The new missiles come from Iran, most likely trans-shipped through Syria;
• They may soon get missiles from their patron, Iran, that have sufficient range to strike Tel Aviv;
• If they get such missiles, Tel Aviv's safety will rely only upon the forbearance and restraint of Sheikh Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah (thought to be currently hiding in the Iranian embassy in Damascus, according to the Jerusalem Post). If such forbearance and restraint is as noticibly lacking as it has been since 1992, Tel Aviv will be struck;
• If Tel Aviv is struck, the security cabinet is likely to vote to expand the war directly to Syria (the sourcing for this is iffy, but it's certainly not an extraordinary claim).

Thus, I would expect the expansion of the war to include Syria will occur if and only if Syria (or anyone else) allows Hezbollah to receive missiles with ranges sufficient to attack Tel Aviv. This could, of course, occur at any time, since Iran does indeed have such missiles and has shown no reluctance in the past to supply Hezbollah with weaponry to attack Israel -- a country that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmaninejad has said must be "wiped off the map," which is also a long-term policy of the ruling mullahs.

As I said, I think the expansion is a question of when, not if. The only worry is that Israel may come to its senses too late, for Syria is already preparing itself for a likely war.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 28, 2006, at the time of 3:19 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

July 27, 2006

Der Spiegel Und der Baradei

RealClearPolitics pointed to an interview in the German magazine Der Spiegel of Mohammed ElBaradei, head of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Tom Bevan at RCP Blog noted rather cryptically that it was "a rather frightening interview."

Reading the interview itself removed all mystery. Here are some of the lowlights:

SPIEGEL: Are you in favor of an immediate deployment of United Nations peacekeeping troops with a "robust" mandate in southern Lebanon?

ElBaradei: That is the only solution. The bloodbath must be stopped quickly and a cease-fire must be brought about without delay. But what's even more important is a comprehensive solution to the underlying problem. The Palestinian question is the elephant in the room. One cannot constantly treat only the symptoms. The Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank have been living under an occupying regime for 39 years now. We should not be satisfied with drafting one road map after the next and merely looking on as they fail.

[You would think that even as insular an organization as the UN would have heard something about the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza!]

~

SPIEGEL: A stabilization force would have to create a buffer zone, which would mean disarming Hezbollah. Is the UN capable of doing this?

ElBaradei: Lebanon will inevitably descend into civil war as long there is no cease-fire. That's why the most important thing is for open combat to stop. And then the force would need a robust mandate. The UN can disarm militias and reduce tensions. The long-term solution, however, is political and not military.

[If the UN can "disarm militias," why haven't they? What are they waiting for?]

~

SPIEGEL: The Israelis have a legitimate need for security. They see their massive attacks as a way to destroy Hezbollah once and for all.

ElBaradei: The more violence they commit, the more they radicalize their enemies..

[Note that he never answers the question. Or even responds to the cockamamie idea that "Israel has a legitimate need for security."]

~

SPIEGEL: But it was the Iranian regime that clearly lied and deceived the West in recent years when it came to its nuclear program. Doesn't Tehran have to accept the offer without conditions and stop its uranium enrichment activities?

ElBaradei: There is no other choice. To our knowledge, however, the Iranians have not accelerated their nuclear research program, which would be a sign of their developing a nuclear program for military use. There are apparently competing political directions in Tehran. And there are many shades of gray....

[About Iran, yes; about Israel, El Baradei doesn't appear to see greyscale.]

There was, however, one highlight at the end of the tunnel. I did like this exchange, right at the end:

SPIEGEL: You have just come from the G-8 summit, where, in addition to the Middle East, energy issues were the main topic of discussion. With the exception of Germany, everyone seems to be betting on new nuclear power plants. Is this the right approach?

ElBaradei: Every state has the right to choose its own approach, just as Germany is doing. In your country, a few nuclear power plants will be in operation for another 20 years, at least according to current plans. Perhaps the Germans will change their views within this period of time, and perhaps they'll decide to extend it. Nuclear energy is undoubtedly experiencing a renaissance. Environmentally friendly nuclear power will play a role in energy policy worldwide. 1.6 billion people, or a quarter of the world's population, have no access to electricity. They'll have no future without affordable energy.

That statement, at least, cannot be logically disputed. Perhaps Mohammed ElBaradei should ceasing heading up the IAEA and instead be offered a new position as United Nations Secretary of Energy.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 27, 2006, at the time of 8:06 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

More Proportionalities Than You Can Shake a Snake At

The Democrats' argument that Israel's response is "disproportionate" can mean one of only two things:

• That it's disproportionate to the attack;
• Or that it's disproportionate to the attacker.

The first possibility is easily rebutted: Israel has been attacked by Hezbollah for years and years and years, losing hundreds of citizens to an insane terrorist campaign, Hezbollah's holy pledge to "drive the Jews into the sea."

Arguably, since it was Hezbollah who pioneered (in the Middle East) the tactic of suicide bombings, a tactic later aped by Palestinian groups, the thousands of deaths of innocent Israelis by Hamas, et al, can also be laid to Hezbollah's doorstop.

So the only real chance for the Democrats to make stick a "disproportionality" argument against Israel's assault is to complain that it's just not fair for that big bully to beat up on that little bully. Is that a valid complaint, that Israel's assault is like a trained heavyweight boxer beating up a schoolgirl? If so, that would certainly be a gross disproportionality.

To the extent that liberals make this argument, in their relentless quest to find moral equivalence between Israeli Jews and Hezbollah terrorists (or even to assign the bulk of the guilt to the former), they either foolishly or mendaciously ignore a glaring point: Hezbollah does not act alone or on its own volition.

The organization was created in 1982, by and large by Iran, and they have been a creature of that theocracy ever since. Iran finances and controls Hezbollah in Lebanon through Iran's cat's-paw, Syria -- which comprises an Alawite-Shiite elite class, the Baath Party, ruling over an oppressed Sunni majority.

Thus, in comparing the relative sizes of the dogs in the fight, the real comparison is not Israel to Hezbollah... it's Israel vs. Iran and Syria in a proxy war that happens to be taking place in Lebanon. It's not just that Hezbollah receives its weapons from Iran; Iran also finances it, trains it, directs it, and indeed, Iranian Revolutionary Guards have been found throughout Hezbollah forces, firing missiles and directing the action.

Hezbollah is not Israel's real enemy: it's nothing more than the Iranian and Syrian "Foreign Legion."

So let's take a look at Iran and Syria compared to Israel; I rely upon the CIA World Factbook for these simple statistics:

Iran and Syria vs. Israel

Resource	Iran	Syria	Israel
Population (millions)	69	19	6
Economy (billions purchasing power)	562	72	155
Economy (official exchange rate)	181	26	114
Available military manpower (millions)	15.7	3.5	1.3

As clearly seen, Israel certainly does not overmatch her two real opponents in this war; in fact, it's the other way around: even just Iran alone is larger, richer, and has a much greater available manpower. While Israel has nuclear weapons that still elude Iran (we hope!), Iran boasts a much more robust military than any country or combination of countries Israel has ever faced before.

Hezbollah is just the tip of the oilberg... make no mistake, Israel faces her deadliest test ever. And if there is any "disproportionality," it's much more accurate to say Israeli forces are disproportionately small compared to the enemies they face.

Israel is the "David" facing the "Goliath" of the Ayatollahs, and no amount of Democratic rewrite can obscure that fact.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 27, 2006, at the time of 5:36 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

July 25, 2006

The "Proportionality" Fallacy

I've been pondering and mulling for many days now the charge, absurd on its face, that Israel's response to the attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah is "disproportionate." What has puzzled me all this time is where the silly meme of "proportionality" came from in the first place.

I understand proportionality in, say, criminal sentencing: if a person stole some cash from the church poorbox, it's grossly disproportionate to punish him by cutting off his hand; the severity of the punishment vastly exceeds the mendacity of the crime.

And I understand proportionality in civil lawsuits: if a company produced a dangerously defective product, then tried to cover it up, and if a victim of that product is injured thereby... then it makes perfect sense for that victim not only to receive compensatory damages in the lawsuit (damages to make him whole again, or as much so as possible), but also punitive damages.

Even so, if the company has an annual income of $10 million, it's grossly disproportionate for a jury to award the victim $60 billion in punitive damages.

But how does any of this relate to warfare? The question has baffled me for a long time now, from even before the present ruckus in Lebanon and Gaza. How did a theory of criminal punishment get tacked onto the "law of war?"

And just now, the answer I'd been seeking struck me like a load of hay: those critics squealing about Israel's "disproportionate" response think war is how Israel "punishes" the Arabs.

All of a sudden, other paralogical incongruities fell into place: the Left believes war is not waged in order to gain national-security advantages for one's country; they see it entirely as an extension of the criminal justice system... a tit-for-tat revenge taken against countries that have criminally assaulted one's own. Thus, the Left cannot even understand the conservative argument that terrorism "cannot be defeated by a criminal-justice response but must be treated as an act of war."

To them, all war is a criminal-justice program. Why should the war on jihadi terrorism be any different?

And because they think war in general is a punitive action designed to punish transgressors, they also believe:

• It's wrong to punish countries disproportionately to their "crimes," such as killing more of their soldiers than they killed of yours... it's too much "tat" in the tit-for-tat equation;
• It's wrong to "collectively punish" the people living in the enemy nation by, e.g., dropping bombs;
• In fact, killing enemy combatants is wrong in general, because we're against capital punishment;
• It's wrong to "punish" a country for the actions of a terrorist group within that country;
• It's horrifically wrong to "punish" a country before it has actually committed the crime or even taken steps to commit the crime (pre-emption); that would be the same as putting someone in prison because you thought he might commit a crime in the future;
• It's wrong to go to war without first holding a criminal investigation and finding the enemy country guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of the transgression;
• Captured unlawful enemy combatants must be tried in civilian courts (presumably for "conspiracy") with all the protections afforded ordinary criminal defendants;
• Captured unlawful enemy combatants may not be interrogated unless they have a lawyer present, and they cannot be interrogated at all if they "take the Fifth;"
• Once combatants have "served their sentences," which must be "proportionate to the crime they committed," they must be released, even if there is a chance they will return to the front lines and "commit more crimes;" after all, they've paid their debt to society.

As suspicious as I am of any general "Theory of Everything," this revelation (well, to me, anyway) does seem to explain an awful lot about liberal squeamishness anent the Israeli war on Hezbollah, the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and other attempts by the civilized world to defend itself against the forces of Islamist barbarity.

(It doesn't explain why liberals supported the carpet bombing of Serbs in Kosovo; but then, they also gave Bill Clinton a pass on a lot of other actual criminal behavior, too. To explain this, we must invoke a different thesis: the Theory of the Charmed Charmer, the lovable rogue who can do no wrong.)

It also explains why the American Left is increasingly bitter and hateful towards Israel: they look at Israel and they see a country that persistently violates the "liberal law of war" by treating warfare as if it were some means of defending the country from attack, instead of a police action.

Thus, to the liberal mind, Israel is like a "rogue cop" who commits serial acts of "police brutality." The Left's reflexive hatred of "the pigs" or "the Man" kicks in, and Ehud Olmert morphs into Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, with Lebanon as the new Democratic National Convention of 1968. "Israel is not there to cause disorder... Israel is there to preserve disorder!"

Arabs (and Persians, to the extent that liberals even know there is a difference) are the long-suffering poor who are always getting shafted by the Man; we need a healthy dose of "social justice," man, to redress the historical imbalances. Power to the people, man! Off the pigs! Free Mumia!

(In fact, wouldn't Arab suicide bombers be seen as heroic followers of Mumia Abu Jamal, giving their lives -- well, the real Mumia hasn't given it yet, alas -- to fight the inherent injustice of the Israeli neocon lobby establishment? Right on, man!)

I believe every Democratic candidate in 2006 and 2008 should be given a hot seat (I don't mean Old Sparky) and asked this question: if terrorists kill 3,000 Americans, how many terrorists will you allow us to kill before you decide our response is "disproportionate?"

Watch 'em squirm.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 25, 2006, at the time of 2:28 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

July 24, 2006

Resupply Is a Two-Way Street

It's been plastered all over the news recently that Israel has caught Syria resupplying Hezbollah missiles (or trying to, at any rate); see the previous post for our reaction to that news on the Syrian front. But as Gary Larson used to say in the Far Side, "two can play at that game, Hoskins!"

Word has now been leaked (by anonymous "American officials") that we've sent an emergency shipment of precision-guided bombs to Israel in order to allow them to continue the campaign:

The munitions that the United States is sending to Israel are part of a multimillion-dollar arms sale package approved last year that Israel is able to draw on as needed, the officials said. But Israel’s request for expedited delivery of the satellite and laser-guided bombs was described as unusual by some military officers, and as an indication that Israel still had a long list of targets in Lebanon to strike.

(A Reader's Digest condensed version of the Times article can be found on Reuters, just in case the Times link stops working.)

This is for those readers here who have been led to believe (by the antique media) that Bush isn't doing anything to help Israel other than chatting them up. We're doing the best things of all: leaning heavily on Syria -- and making sure that Israel has all the precision munitions they need to really grind Hezbollah's face into the offal.

So keep it up, Israel; with the weapons we're supplying you, taking out the entire top Hezbollah leadership should be as easy as shooting drunks in a barrel.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 24, 2006, at the time of 5:17 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

July 22, 2006

Everyone Must Read This Story

Hugh Hewitt read this post by David Bogner on the air Thursday, and I thought it was one of the best parables I've heard in years. I urgently urge y'all to read the whole thing; it's not that long, but it will stay with you for the rest of your life.

It's from a blog called Treppenwitz, which I think I should start reading regularly now. Here's the opening:

When I was in the Navy, I once witnessed a bar fight in downtown Olongapo (Philippines) that still haunts my dreams. The fight was between a big oafish Marine and a rather soft-spoken, medium sized Latino sailor from my ship.

All evening the Marine had been trying to pick a fight with one of us and had finally set his sights on this diminutive shipmate of mine... figuring him for a safe target. When my friend refused to be goaded into a fight the Marine sucker punched him from behind on the side of the head so hard that blood instantly started to pour from this poor man's mutilated ear.

Everyone present was horrified and was prepared to absolutely murder this Marine, but my shipmate quickly turned on him and began to single-handedly back him towards a corner with a series of stinging jabs and upper cuts that gave more than a hint to a youth spent boxing in a small gym in the Bronx.

Each punch opened a cut on the Marine's startled face and by the time he had been backed completely into the corner he was blubbering for someone to stop the fight. He invoked his split lips and chipped teeth as reasons to stop the fight. He begged us to stop the fight because he could barely see through the river of blood that was pouring out of his split and swollen brows.

Nobody moved. Not one person....

...But you'll have to click the link and read the original to find out what happened, what was really going on, and how it relates to the Global War on Jihadism.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 22, 2006, at the time of 4:17 AM | Comments (16) | TrackBack

July 21, 2006

A Tale of Two Madams and One Mister

No, not that kind of madam! I mean a pair of "Madam Secretaries of State," Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice.

The first Madam Secretary, appointed by Bill Clinton for no reason other than to be the first president to appoint a woman as secretary of state, was an unmitigated disaster. Albright embraced Yassir Arafat, was bamboozled by Kim Jong-Il, tricked by Iran, cozened by Saddam, and turned a blind eye to Osama bin Laden while he and al-Qaeda prepared the most massive terrorist attack ever to occur on American soil. A magnificent and enviable record of failure and disachievement!

But let's contrast "Madam," as she insisted upon being called, with the other Madam Secretary, Condoleezza Rice. Here is Secretary Rice today, discussing her upcoming trip to the Middle East:

In her briefing for reporters on her trip, Rice said the United States was committed to ending the bloodshed, but didn't want to do it before certain conditions were met.

The United States has said all along that Hezbollah must first turn over the two Israeli soldiers and stop firing missiles into Israel.

"We do seek an end to the current violence, we seek it urgently. We also seek to address the root causes of that violence," she said. "A cease-fire would be a false promise if it simply returns us to the status quo."

Rice said that it was important to deal with the "root cause" of the violence, echoing what has been the U.S. position since last week.

And what is that "root cause?" Everybody uses the phrase, but each means a different thing. Most people in Europe and most Democrats in D.C., when they say "root cause of Mid-East violence," mean the presence of Jews in the ummah... which could easily be corrected.

If Israel would just do the manly thing and commit national suicide, then the world would think well of the Jews... briefly. But what does Condi mean by "root cause?"

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ruled out a quick "false promise" cease-fire in the Middle East Friday and defended her decision not to meet with either Syrian or Hezbollah leaders in her upcoming visit to the region.

"Syria knows what it needs to do and Hezbollah is the source of the problem," Rice said at the State Department as she previewed her trip, which begins on Sunday with a first stop in Israel.

What a rare moment of truth and candor from the Department of State! Of course, with John Bolton at the U.N., such moments are starting to come as thick and as fast as oysters. How I'm going to miss this president when his term expires.

(Oh, and notice where her Mid-East trip begins: Israel. In the previous administration, it would have begun with a quick obeisance in Ramallah, some backhanding in Damascus, and an apology-trip to Sabra and Shatila, where Madam would have laid a wreath and danced a foxtrot with Sheikh Nasrallah.)

But here is my favorite statement, and why I still hope that someday, Dr. Condoleezza Rice changes her mind and decides to run for public office:

Resisting calls from the United Nations, Europe and the Arab world, she said an immediate ceasefire would produce a "false promise" that would allow Hizbollah to re-emerge in the future to attack Israel, the top U.S. ally in the region.

"An immediate ceasefire without political conditions does not make sense," she said.

"If you simply look for a ceasefire... we will be back here in six months again," she added. "What I won't do is go to some place and try to get a ceasefire that I know isn't going to last."

I've been scratching my brains for days now, wondering exactly what a "ceasefire" means when one party is a terrorist group. And for more clarity on that point, listen to Ambassador Bolton (it's from an press conference outside the UN Security Council in Foggy Bottom, New York City; I have paragraphed it, so I can refer to Bolton's specific points; via Power Line):

Well look, I think we could have a cessation of hostilities immediately if Hezbollah would stop terrorizing innocent civilians and give up the kidnapped Israeli soldiers. So that to the extent this crisis continues, the cause is Hezbollah.

How you get a ceasefire between one entity, which is a government of a democratically elected state on the one hand, and another entity on the other which is a terrorist gang, no one has yet explained.

The government of Israel, everybody says, has the right to exercise the right of self-defense, which even if there are criticisms of Israeli actions by some, they recognize the fundamental right to self-defense. That’s a legitimate right.

Are there any activities that Hezbollah engages in, militarily that are legitimate? I don’t think so. All of its activities are terrorist and all of them are illegitimate, so I don’t see the balance or the parallelism between the two sides and therefore I think it’s a very fundamental question: how a terrorist group agrees to a ceasefire.

This is like demanding a "ceasefire" between the United States government on the one hand -- and the Salvadoran drug gang Mara Salvatrucha. What the heck is that supposed to mean? Do they negotiate exactly how many kilos of cocaine MS-13 is allowed to smuggle into the country?

You know in a democratically elected government, the theory is that the people ultimately can hold the government accountable when it [agrees to] something and doesn’t live up to it.

How do you hold a terrorist group accountable? Who runs the terrorist group? Who makes the commitment that a terrorist group will abide by a ceasefire?

Say, that is a good question, isn't it? So how come nobody else seems to be asking it besides John and Condi? And here's another good question:

What does a terrorist group think a "ceasefire" is?

Does it really understand a ceasefire as a cessation of hostilities, to be followed by honest negotiation to settle the differences that led to the war in the first place? I think it more likely Hezbollah's understanding of ceasefire is "a pause to reload;" and the ceasefire will last as long as it takes for them to obtain replacements from Iran, through Syria, for all the missiles that Israel destroyed... maybe "six months," as Secretary Rice suggested.

Finally, Bolton finishes his answer with a nice summation of the main point:

These are - you can use the words “cessation of hostilities” or “truce” or "ceasefire.” Nobody has yet explained how a terrorist group and a democratic state come to a mutual ceasefire.

Those are all good questions, and here's another: if Israel were to ink such a ceasefire with Hezbollah... wouldn't that elevate the terrorist group to the level of a sovereign nation? What would be the next demand -- that Israel negotiate a trade agreement with Hezbollah? Perhaps an agreed-upon procedure for releasing Hezbollah killers promptly upon the kidnapping of future IDF soldiers, to avoid all the brouhaha in the future?

Or would Hezbollah be admitted to the United Nations (and probably invited to join the new UN Human Rights Council)?

Israelis should get on their knees and thank the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that at this critical turning point in their existence, their greatest ally has such clear-sighted and morally decent appointees running the United States Department of State. And Americans should thank whatever God we hold dear that we have an Israel that is finally willing to stand up to Hezbollah and Hamas: maybe President Bush can start listening to Israel, Condi, and John; then he himself can begin treating those Iranian-controlled terrorists the way he treats terrorists in al-Qaeda.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 21, 2006, at the time of 1:45 PM | Comments (18) | TrackBack

July 20, 2006

Who Pays For That Ticket to Ride Out of Lebanon?

After twenty-two years absence, the U.S. Marines have landed in Beirut to help evacuate American citizens who are stuck in the war zone. Not surprisingly, many evacuees are tired, shaken and angry... but rather than being angry at Hezbollah for starting a war of aggression along a peaceful border, many Americans in Lebanon seem angry at the United States for not dropping everything to mount a massive mission to rescue them.

I sympathize with all the innocent people being hurt or threatened in Lebanon; that's why we say "war is hell." But if foreigners decide to live or visit an unstable country like Lebanon -- especially south Lebanon, which has been under total Hezbollah control since the year 2000 -- and despite their own country’s warnings, then those people must bear primary responsibilities for their own lives.

But that's not how a bunch of very demanding Americans and other foreign civilians see it:

Shebbo, now in Cyprus, said she and her husband had struggled to get information from the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, and had found out about the boat from people in the United States. For four days, they inhaled the fumes from a bombed power plant two miles from where they had been staying.

Others echoed her complaints about the embassy.

"The guard was so rude and said there was no evacuation plan," said Michael Russo, 23, of Tucson, Ariz., of his visit to the embassy. "On Wednesday and Thursday, I asked them if there was a plan, and they looked at me like I was crazy."

They were probably wondering why on earth somebody would travel to southern Lebanon without having his own escape plan.

For many decades, Americans have been taught by the elite media that the federal government is responsible for everything that happens in America. Remember Hurricane Katrina and all the people that blamed President Bush and former FEMA Director Michael Brown -- but who gave a complete pass to Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray "the Grand Nagus" Nagin?

Responsibility is always pushed upwards: it's not the state's job, call the feds; it's not the city's job, call the governor; don't protect yourself... call the city police to come protect you! But the farther removed "help" is from that individual in that place at that moment, the less helpful it will be. Reagan always got a big laugh out of his line, "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you."

Having dealt with the American Embassy in Japan and the Japanese Consulate in the U.S., none of this surprises me. This is a screaming, hair-on-fire emergency... which means the embassy is even more overwhelmed than the Americans demanding evacuation. If embassy personnel act worse than usual, that may be unacceptable -- but it's comletely understandable. And it's not just our embassy:

Many Canadians in Larnaca and Beirut also expressed anger at their government's evacuation effort, either because of the long wait at the port or the lack of planning. About 1,600 were waiting in the hot sun at the Beirut port.

This has all happened before. Twenty years ago, around the time 241 U.S. Marines and 58 French paratroopers were killed by Hezbollah terrorists, the U.S. Government strongly urged all non-essential U.S. Citizens to get out of Lebanon and to call off any planned visit.

A number of westerners had already been kidnapped there; but despite all the dire warnings, a bunch more Americans (mostly journalists) rushed to Lebanon and immediately commenced being kidnapped themselves. Naturally, each and every one of them insisted that we lay aside all the more urgent business we had and send the entire Sixth Fleet to pluck away some guy from CBS... so he could wander straight back into Beirut again (it's Freedom of the Press!)

Obviously, if it's possible and not too damaging to our national goals, there is nothing wrong with the government helping Americans who find themselves in need of evacuation. But strangers in a strange land have no right to demand that this will always happen: when you travel to foreign countries, you assume the risk that something might happen to you.

You're not in the United States; you're in a separate sovereign nation. It's just like going to Singapore, committing a crime under Singaporese law -- and then demanding they not prosecute you because whatever you did isn't against the law in America (or maybe it is, but you don't get "caned" for it here).

Any traveler, regardless of where he is going, must have an emergency Get the Heck Out plan. The government is not always there to help, just like the cops can't always be there the moment you need them. Each individual must be resourceful, because he may be thrust upon his own resources.

A few years ago, I watched a documentary on TV about people who refused to be victims: they successfully escaped from dangerous situations, such as natural disasters and military coups in foreign countries. These people were mostly volunteer workers for non-governmental organizations -- the Peace Corps, religous missionary groups, Doctors Without Borders, and so forth.

They all came hoping for the best but prepared for the worst. None of them waited for somebody else to risk his own life to run help them, nor did they sit around in the dark, waiting for instructions. They individually found a way out for themselves and their companions.

What they had in common was that each had an escape plan going in. They had thought about the dangers and planned for them; when the worst happened, they followed their plans as best they could -- and they made it out alive when others dithered, waited for rescue -- and died.

So always bear it in mind: if you are unfortunate enough to get stuck, then unless the government sent you there in the first place, don't demand that somebody else save your bacon: you and only you are the one who assumed that risk... so pay for your own ticket, please.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, July 20, 2006, at the time of 5:01 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

July 19, 2006

One Out of One Newspaper Agrees - With Big Lizards!

It's nice to see the antique media finally catching up to the dextrosphere:

Israel is in the best position militarily in its history to mount air strikes against Iran, after a decade of buying U.S.-produced long-range aircraft, penetrating bombs and aerial refueling tankers.

We're a bit late to the table on this one, which should hardly be a surprise. (Our new motto, as soon as I get industrious enough to add it to the logo -- probably later rather than sooner -- is "Never first, always final!") Power Line has already mentioned it briefly, though for some odd reason, they missed the most critically important point: that the Washington Times agrees with Big Lizards.

So let's delve a bit deeper. Here is what Israel has recently purchased:

• 25 F-15I (the I stands for Israel) "Ra'am" attack jets, the Israeli version of the American long-range attack jet, the F-15E "Strike Eagle":

  The F-15E Strike Eagle is a modern United States all-weather strike fighter, designed for long-range interdiction of enemy ground targets deep behind enemy lines....

  The only significant difference remaining between the F-15I and the F-15E is that the F-15Is were delivered without Radar Warning Receivers. Israel installed its own electronic warfare equipment in its F-15s. The F-15Is' missing electronics have been replaced by the Israeli Elisra SPS-2110 Integrated Electronic Warfare System. A central computer and embedded GPS/INS system have also been fitted. All of the aircraft's sensors can be slaved to a helmet-mounted sight, giving both crew members an efficient targeting mechanism that the F-15E does not possess.

  The Ra'am's advanced systems include an APG-70 radar with terrain mapping capability. The sharp picture that the APG-70 provides, regardless of weather conditions and light, makes it possible to locate targets that are otherwise very hard to find - i.e. missile batteries, tanks and structures - even under such adverse conditions as complete fog cover, heavy rain or moonless nights.

• 102 F-16I "Sufa" fighter/attack jets (60 in hand), a modified F-16 "Fighting Falcon", a.k.a. Viper:

  The F-16 Fighting Falcon is a modern multi-role jet fighter aircraft designed in the United States. Designed as a lightweight fighter, it evolved into a successful multi-role aircraft....

  Block 50/52 Plus for Israeli Defense Force - Air Force, with significant Israeli avionics replacing that of American firms (Such as Israeli Aerial Towed Decoy replacing the ALE-50). The addition of Israeli built autonomous aerial combat maneuvering instrumentation systems enables the training exercises to be conducted without the dependence on the ground instrumentation systems, and the helmet mounted sight is also a standard equipment. The F-16I also has the Israeli built removable conformal fuel tanks added.

• 500 U.S. BLU-109 "bunker buster" bombs:

  The BLU-109/B is a hardened penetration bomb used by United States military aircraft. (BLU is an acronym for Bomb Live Unit.) It is intended to smash through concrete shelters and other hardened structures before exploding.

  The Washington Times notes that a BLU-109 "could penetrate the concrete protection around some of Iran's underground facilities, such as the uranium enrichment site at Natanz."

• A fleet of Boeing 707 in-flight "boom and receptacle" refuelers.

The Washington Times interviews Air Force Lt.Gen. Thomas McInerney, who is also a frequent Fox News Channel military analyst (it's fair to call Gen. McInerney "conservative leaning"):

"They have the capability to strike Iran," said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas G. McInerney, a former fighter pilot who has trained with Israelis. "It would be limited, though. They could do 30 to 40 'aim points' in the array. I'm not worried about them hitting the targets. They will suffer losses, but they are capable of doing it."

He said Israeli fighter pilots are "the best in the world. I've flown against them. They train better. They get more flying time."

But here is where the Washington Times falls short of the imagination mark. They (and Gen. McInerney) all assume the planes must launch from Israel, then return there when they finish their bombing runs. This misses the possibility of TDYing the Israeli jets to Iraq for long enough to really do a good job -- possibly fighting alongside American jets, but perhaps doing it entirely on their own as well (though I don't know what would be the advantage to the United States of being passive here; our enemies won't be fooled and our friends will be disappointed).

It would be very tricky diplomatically -- assuming Iran had not done something in the meanwhile to make itself even more a pariah than it is now. But I think it very likely they will: they seem quite determined to escalate all the conflicts they've started recently into apocalyptic, existential confrontations. As I said before, they will surely attack Iraq directly before they'll attack Israel directly.

By that point, depending what Iran has done, the Iraqis may be overjoyed to let Israelis use their land to crush the mullahs.

The "peace process" has had plenty of innings, and it hasn't gotten a single run on the board. All I am saying is give war a chance.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 19, 2006, at the time of 4:17 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

July 18, 2006

Arabs Abandoning "Party of God"

In any discussion about Moslem terrorists, many people -- both defenders of Islam and also those urging military response against the terrorists -- often object to extremists like Tom "Bomb Mecca" Tancredo by saying, "not all Moselems are like that, those are just extremists." But then the question becomes, where are these "non-extremist," moderate moslems? Or as Dafydd put it, where are all the Moslem Methodists?

Well, New York Sun columnist Youssef Ibrahim has found them. And the silent majority is finally speaking out. (Hat tip M. Simon)

Rarely have I seen such an uprising, indeed an intifada, against those little turbaned, bearded men across the Muslim landscape as the one that took place last week. The leader of Hezbollah, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, received a resounding "no" to pulling 350 million Arabs into a war with Israel on his clerical coattails.

The collective "nyet" was spoken by presidents, emirs, and kings at the highest level of government in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan, Morocco, and at the Arab League's meeting of 22 foreign ministers in Cairo on Saturday. But it was even louder from pundits and ordinary people.

Perhaps the most remarkable and unexpected reaction came from Saudi Arabia, whose foreign minister, Prince Saud Al-Faisal, said bluntly and publicly that Hezbollah's decision to cross the Lebanese border, attack Israel, and kidnap its soldiers has left the Shiite group on its own to face Israel. The unspoken message here was, "We hope they blow you away."

The Arab League put it succinctly in its final communique in Cairo, declaring that "behavior undertaken by some groups [read: Hezbollah and Hamas] in apparent safeguarding of Arab interests does in fact harm those interests, allowing Israel and other parties from outside the Arab world [read: Iran] to wreck havoc with the security and safety of all Arab countries."

There are more remarkable statements from Abdul Rahman al-Rashed, the general manager of Al-Arabiya --

"We have lost most of our causes and the largest portions of our lands following fiery speeches and empty promises of struggle coupled with hallucinating, drug-induced political fantasies."

-- and from Tariq Alhomayed:

Tariq Alhomayed, editor in chief of the Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat, stuck the dagger in deeper: "Mr. Nasrallah bombastically announced he consulted no one when he decided to attack Israel, nor did he measure Lebanon's need for security, prosperity, and the safety of its people. He said he needs no one's help but God's to fight the fight." Mr. Alhomayed's punch line was, in so many words: Go with God, Sheik Nasrallah, but count the rest of us out.

Ibrahim does acknowledge that much of the refusal to take the part of Hezbollah (despite it being the "Party of God") is Sunni fear of "an ascendant Shiite 'arc of menace' rising out of Iran and peddled in the Sunni world by Syria." But no Moslem nation is jumping to defend Sunni Hamas in the Gaza strip, either.

I don't believe there has been any sea-change in Moslem attitudes towards Jews. This is just belated recognition that the Arab nations (even with Iran added) cannot defeat Israel or even prevent it from scoring military victory wherever it wants in the Middle East.

I guess there's a limit to how many times Arabs must get slashed by the claws of the lion before they finally decide to stop poking it with a stick.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, July 18, 2006, at the time of 2:46 PM | Comments (25) | TrackBack

July 17, 2006

The Word On the "Street"

From Dafydd: N.Z. Bear, he of the Truth-Laid Bear fame, has a marvelous aggregator page of bloggers from all across the Middle East, plus some important and powerful bloggers right here in the United States -- movers and shakers, opinion-mongers, and "pundants" (such as Big Lizards): Crisis In the Middle East. This page is a must-view.

For many years now, Moslem dictators have used the same old trick: whenever their domestic policies hit a wall, they turn around and point a finger at the nearest Jew.

"It is not the time to squabble amongst Moslems. We need to unite against the Israeli aggression. We need to mobilize for freedom. We need to focus on defense." Never mind the economy is in a shambles due to the corruption, incompetence, and stupid policies of the Arab leadership. A quarter of their citizens unemployed and starving, bandits and police working hand in hand intimidating citizens to extort money and favors. That's not the issue; that’s not important. The urgent task is to defeat the Zionist Jews.

The tactic has worked for decades; it still does, to a certain degree. But, more and more Moslems across the world are getting weary of this same old excuse.

They hardly ever see any Jews; how could the Jews be responsible for their misery? They don’t even know what Israelis do, except fight against Palestinians, which concerns nobody. Nobody likes, respects, or cares about the Palestinians as anything other than a political stick to bash the "Zionist entity."

But even the Moslems who are critical of the Israeli “occupation” have strong words for the Palestinians. After all, Israel had, until quite recently, already left Gaza. The most obvious and immediate effect of the twin attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah was to bring the Jews back!

Saudi columnist Yusuf Nasir Al-Suweidan made a prediction on June 25, 2006. At that time, Israelis had not yet invaded Gaza; but he correctly prophecied that Hamas' attack on Israeli would bring about a far worse situation for Palestinians than the status quo... because, he said, this time Israel would not “react like 'harmless lambs.'”

[T]his time, a new reality will be created in the Gaza Strip in which all talk about 'back to square one' will be nothing but wild optimism -- since the [situation] will regress [far beyond that], to a level where it is possible to talk of a plan of deportation [of Palestinians] and demographic change in Gaza, and this [plan] might even be implemented soon. This will turn the Palestinian dream of an independent state into a thing of the past....

The main mistake lies in the fact that the Palestinian organizations did not respond correctly to the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza... and its consequences. Instead of beating their swords into plowshares, pens, and other things that are needed for the development of Palestinian society -- in terms of the economy, society, culture, and so on -- most of them read the developments incorrectly and immaturely. This was exploited by the terrorist networks, that are funded and run by the regimes of the ayatollahs in Tehran and the Ba'th [party] in Syria, and [people] have been taken in by delusions and empty slogans like 'liberation from the river to the sea' [that are heard] among the poor, hungry, and desperate Palestinian masses. At present, what [these masses] need most is food, medicines, clothing, and other essentials _ not explosive belts, car bombs, and the slogan, "Congratulations, oh Martyr, the black-eyed virgin awaits you."

Attacks from Hamas against Israel are nothing new. However illogical, we cannot expect too much from Hamas. But what about the attack from Hezbollah? Israel left Lebanon in the year 2000. Since then, all has been quiet on the northern front. Why should Hezbollah arouse Israel now?

In Lebanon, after Syrian forces left, the power of Hezbollah began to weaken. The pressure to disarm the Hezbollah military wing gets stronger every day. Hezbollah was desperate to do something; they needed to divert the Lebanese citizens attention to somewhere else. But where? Why, the Jews, of course. They had to show the Lebanese that they still "needed" Syrian troops to protect from "Israeli aggression."

But, for some odd reason, this time, the Lebanese are not buying it. As their houses are being bombed, they are not necessarily blaming Israel; as Dafydd said, the public opinion of the Arab and Persian Moslems is up for grabs.

A Lebanese blogger, Fouad, has this to say.

We are ALL guilty. ALL OF US. Emergency hiwar watani session??? I am not sure if I should laugh or puke my guts out on the table. Let it be known to all. We are scared, our lives are on the line, our country is history, but it's all our fault. Each and every one of us. These are the people we elected, these are the people we let freely thrive in their little haven of hatred and murderous ideals, and this is us, scared and incapacitated, failing but to point fingers and complain. Well let me tell you this folks, we pulled our pants down and stuck our naked asses out, and now that we're ******, we really don't have jack **** to complain about.

Now, don’t get me wrong; as Fouad says, "there is no love lost between the lebanese people and the israeli leadership." Fouad and others have plenty to say about Israel’s aggression.

Under the circumstance, I cannot blame them. However, a blogger like Fouad correctly realizes it's Hezbollah who brought this to Lebanon. Israel is simply reacting to terrorist incursion.

Another Lebanese blogger Bob says:

And tomorrow when I will see the destroyed bridge linking my home town of Saida to Beirut, I will only say from the bottom of my heart: Enough! Enough wars, death and destruction! Curse you Hezbollah to hell and back! For all this destruction, for all this death! No it is not Israel fault; it is your own. Curse you!

Even though Hezbollah is hiding among the Lebanese, it is Iran -- and it's client state Syria -- which is behind the attacks. I wish Israel could bypass Lebanon and attack Syria directly. What do Syrian bloggers think of this?

Ammar Abdulhamid, who is Syrian but now lives in Maryland with his wife, has this to say:

[T]he national discourse and the constant calls for mobilization against a declared enemy were at best a diversionary measure meant to postpone any serious consideration of our developmental problems and our ruling regimes’ corruption and inherent authoritarian predilections.

For this reason, I never really believed in the conflict against Israel….

[T]he issue ahead of us if that of Hezbollah and Hamas being wielded as instruments of provocation by Syria and Iran to stir up another national liberation conflict and mobilize us all for the march to hell, with many of us applauding all the way.

All wishful thinking aside, I just don’t think that Israel is going to lose this round, and I think that the going-ons in Lebanon are only a prelude for the eventual and now inevitable confrontation with Syria, with all sorts of disastrous implications and consequences for our people.

I don't think Hamas or Hezbollah -- let alone Syria and Iran -- ever considered the "disastrous implications and consequences" of their acts of war against Israel. They only wanted to remind people of the Jewish threat and convince them they still needed the terrorist armies to protect them from Israel.

Instead, they brought the fury of Israel down upon them like fiery manna from Sheol. This was not in their plan; in fact, they are stunned by Israeli's reaction:

Hezbollah was surprised by Israel's response.

When they dreamed up this plan in January, they thought the Israelis would respond as usual: bomb a few Hezbollah positions on the border, and perhaps attack Palestinian militant camps. They were not expecting the attack to occur at this fragile time with the Palestinians.

Instead, the Israelis massively destroyed Lebanese infrastructure. Bridges throughout South Lebanon have been destroyed. Almost the entire South is without power.

If Hezbollah looked at reality instead of believing their own propaganda, they could have guessed this was going to happen... especialy after they saw what was already going on in Gaza at the precise moment they attacked Israel and kidnapped two soldiers.

True story: when Dafydd and I hiked in Yosemite, we were told not to cook near the camp ground. The smell, the rangers said, will attract bears. Despite all the warnings, some retardo decided to cook a whole mess of sausages on a grill he set up -- right next to his tent, right near our own tent (in Camp Curry).

That night, two black bears came roaring down to the camp ground and scared the heck out of the campers (we were already leaving that night for the Wawona Lodge). Fortunately no human was hurt; but one bear had to be shot by the "danger rangers."

Sure, the bears were the critters directly threatening our lives. But ultimately, the guy who cooked food and drew them down from the mountains should be held more responsible than the bears. The bears were just being bears; this dull-witted chef was being a dangerous fool.

Will the people in the Middle East ever hold their leadership responsible? Will they ever understand who lured the bears into camp? The jury is still out. But at least this time, the opinion of the infamous "Arab street" is up for grabs.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, July 17, 2006, at the time of 4:17 AM | Comments (15) | TrackBack

July 16, 2006

Can Israel Strike Iran? Answer: Yup.

Over on Power Line, my favorite blog, Steven den Beste holds forth on the logistical and military nightmare of Israel trying to launch a direct attack on Iran. While den Beste is certainly accurate as far as he goes, his analysis is limited by the fact that he didn't "think outside the box."

...Which happens to be a Big Lizards specialty: so here is how Israel can, indeed, bomb the bejesus out of Iran.

Ground Rules

First, we have to set the stage. Israel isn't going to directly strike Iran just for the heck of it; they would only be driven to that extreme by a massive attack by Iran against Israel. We don't mean just a little plinking with Katyushas or even those C-802 cruise missiles; not just a few casualties in Haifa or even a good hit on an Israeli naval vessel in the Med, even with video footage of Iranian Revolutionary Guards firing the missile.

The only thing that would provoke Israel into making a direct attack on Iran is a massive "Oh My God" strike by Iran directly on Israel -- let's say a missile fired from offshore or the West Bank into Tel Aviv that somehow manages to collapse an office building and kill 10,000 Israelis... something on that order.

Now, such a massive attack would mean all the normal "rules and limits" are off, and the U.S. is willing to help Israel out as much as necessary. Up to but not including (we assume for this exercise) making the attack ourselves. But we'll do anything short of that.

Why would Iran launch such a terrible attack on Israel? Let's take them at their word: Israel is still likely to attack Syria, as that is the nearest nexus from which Hezbollah and Hamas are controlled; and Iranian President Ahmadinejad has threatened that if Israel attacks Syria, Iran will attack Israel. Thus, we take as our working assumption that Iran is retaliating for a major Israeli attack on Syria.

Get Outside the Box

Steven den Beste is utterly correct that Israel isn't likely to order attack jets to take off from Tel Nof, fly to Iran, drop their payloads, fly back, and taxi to the line. They must start from somewhere much closer.

Looking at a map, we notice two countries that directly abut Iran that stand out for some reason: Iraq and Afghanistan. It would actually be much easier to bomb Iran starting from either of these two venues than from Israel.

Most of the WMD research sites in Iran, at least those we know of, are in the west; that is fortunate, because to get to Afghanistan, Israel would have to fly over Iran itself -- which is suboptimal. Thus, we have our first two steps:

1. Get a large number of Israeli attack jets to Baghdad.
2. Disperse them north and south, to Mosul and to Basra.

This does require overflying Syria; but recall that Israel will have already attacked Syria. As part of that attack, the very first thing any respectable air force would do is take out the air defenses. This means that by the time Israel is gearing up to attack Iran, Syria will be blind and deaf as far as tracking aircraft overflying its airspace.

(If they're not already, the Israel should attack them just for that purpose.)

Staying entirely over Syria and then Iraq, the flight distance from the Israeli north to Baghdad appears to be somewhere around 750 miles or less... well within the single-tank range of an F-16I Sufa, the backbone of the Israeli Air Force. Thus, it is possible for Israel to transfer a large number of F-16s to Baghdad -- thence to Mosul and Basra -- without being particularly noticible and without having to use in-flight refueling.

3. Disguise the Israeli planes to look like American planes, just to confuse any watchers.

I suggest they would temporarily paint American markings over the Israeli ones; and once approaching Iraq, the Israeli planes would squawk American IFF frequencies.

A Hop, Skip, and a Jump

Now that the main problem is solved, there are a myriad of excellent targets within range of Israeli F-16s flying out of Mosul in the north, Baghdad in the center, and Basra down south. In-flight refuel would not be necessary, as planes would return to Iraq after each sortie.

The Israelis would remove the temporary US marking from their planes and make no bones about where they're from.

4. Bomb the targets in Iran; the Israelis can take as long as they wish... no hurry to return to Israel.
5. Use targeting downlinks from American AWACs and American and Israeli intelligence on WMD sites in Iran: take those puppies out.

The only serious problem is political: certainly, Iraq is going to be very, very unhappy about Israeli warplanes flying out of Iraq to attack Iran. But again, we're assuming a hugely aggressive Iran that is actually willing to openly attack Israel... which means they're almost certainly launching huge terrorist and military assaults on Coalit