Lebanon @ MindSay 
israel
Yossi Klein Halevi and Michael B. Oren writing for the Jewish World Review explain Israel’s existential fears. The threat of a nuclear arsenal by a Mohammedan nation in simplest form strategically removes almost all military superiority Israel has accrued over its short modern existence.
Israel is a haven for Jews to live in a freedom from political persecution for the first time since the Maccabees successfully resisted a Hellenic Syria (Seleucid dynasty established in the area after the death of Alexander the Great). The Maccabees successfully retook Jerusalem and purified the Temple in 164 BC. This day is celebrated by Judaism as Hanukah (aka Chanukah).
If the West abandons Israel to face a nuclear armed Mohammedan world, Israel’s military conventional forces will be nearly neutralized. An Iranian nuclear or chemical launched missile will encourage Syria and Hezbollah (and possibly other Mohammedan nations) to launch a conventional military assault on a crippled Israel.
Another scenario is the Israeli realization that the West will conclude to NOT prevent a nuclear Iran. Knowing what the strategical stakes are, Israel launches preemptive air strikes on Iran in the hope of slowing down nuclear armament. If Iran has no nukes it is probable they have chemical weapons. Iran definitely has the missile power to reach Israel. Iran launches missile strikes on Israel followed closely by tactical invasions by Syria, Hezbollah of Lebanon and radical Islamofascist terrorists from the Palestine Authority (or Palestine Liberation Organization), including infamous Hamas.
Keep in mind that the Jewish Homeland is just a little sliver of land that the arrogant Mohammedans begrudge the Jews. Twenty-first century technology and Western appeasement might produce the globes SECOND Holocaust in the deaths of millions of Jews. Over what? A mere parcel of land that was insignificant until Jews turned the land into an agricultural paradise. Before the Jewish arrivals in pre-modern Israel, the land was a waste area that Mohammedan Arabs and Turks had zero interest in.
The Mohammedans cannot stand that the Jews made the Land prosperous again because of their superiority complex. The Jews return to their homeland and Mohammedan Arabs wish to claim the credit for Jewish innovation with propaganda epithets like, “The right of return.”
There were hardly any Arabs in the sliver of Land known as Israel today, until Jewish prosperity provided jobs for Mohammedan Arabs (later created as Palestinian Arabs).
That is the brief scenario. Halevi and Oren go into greater detail of Israeli fears. (READ IT. This link will take you to this introduction. Simply scroll down to the Halevi and Oren assessment.)
The National Review Online conducted a symposium on Iraq Study Group (ISG). The names involved are Peter Brooks, Victor Davis Hanson, Clifford D. May and David Schenker.
The NRO panel of writers is unanimously critical of the ISG report. Some agree about criticizing Iraq for not doing their part to battle sectarianism in Iraq. Agreement ends there.
The NRO panel points out that dealing with Syria and Iran for the sake of ending chaos is ludicrous. Both of those nations thrive on chaos in order to be players in the Middle East. Dealing with Syria and Iran will mean America forcing to give something up that will be unpalatable at best and unenforceable at worst.
Dealing with Syria will sell out Lebanon and Israel. Syria will want to dominate Lebanonese politics and the return of the Golan Heights. The Golan Heights are used as an invasion buffer to continuously belligerent Syria.
Dealing with Iran will cause the West and America to live with a nuclear armed Iran. There are huge hints that America and the West are willing to acquiesce on this issue. I have heard talk from the new Secretary of Defense (designate) Robert Gates understands Iran’s need to go nuclear. Iran is surrounded by potentially nuclear armed enemies: Sunni Pakistan, Russia, Israel and American WMD armed Naval and Military in Iraq and in Afghanistan. That sounds like the go ahead to me.
Read the NRO Symposium written relating to the ISG.
Other posts on the ISG: Here, Here and Here.
The situation in Lebanon mystifies me. Hezbollah and a Christian faction led by the Aoun family have united to bring down the government of Prime Minister Siniora.
Here is the thing. I can understand Hezbollah attempting to bring Siniora. I can also understand Christians wishing the Siniora government’s demise.
Hezbollah Shi’ites is because Siniora has not totally walked the Syrian line. Christians are because of Siniora’s ineptitude in protecting anti-Syrian government PM’s and voices in Lebanon. In fact the last assassination (Pierre Gemayel) in Lebanon was a Christian that was murdered by Syrian agents or Hezbollah or both in collusion.
If Aoun has made some kind of deal with Hezbollah, he must be delusional. Does he not realize that a Hezbollah controlled Lebanon will be disastrous for Christians in Lebanon.
King Abdullah of Jordan is expressing in a public forum that three civil wars could be emerging in the Middle East.
The locations: Iraq, Lebanon and (so-called) Palestine.
King Abdullah senses that internecine strife is spiraling out of control in Iraq. He is correct. Blood feuds, revenge, inter-religion sectarian (Shia VS Sunni) and mutual hatred among radicals of the American presence are all mitigating factors in Iraq. The fledgling elected democratic government of Iraq has failed hugely in addressing much of the mitigating factors while relying on the U.S.A. to keep the seams of unity from tearing completely. Prime Minister Maliki needs to be more far and balanced. Maliki has failed greatly in this prospect.
Lebanon is ruled by a Syrian sympathetic government lead by President Lahoud. The Lebanese Prime Minister has the . . .
Read the full post at Slantright.com.
despite six years of ideologically driven dictates from Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, Army leaders remain usefully focused on the real world, where actual soldiers daily put their lives on the line for their country and where the quality of military planning goes a long way toward determining whether their sacrifices help achieve America’s national purposes.
Achieving ‘America’s national purposes’. Whatever those might be. In any case, at least we know it’s not to defend US citizens from marauding barbarians. But I guess we already knew that. It’s just kind of interesting for one of the premier instruments of propaganda lay it all out in black and white. It’s not entirely obvious what they aim to achieve by placing distance between ‘America’s national purposes’ and what’s ‘ideologically driven’. Are we supposed to be more comfortable that what drives ‘our’ heros to face down bows and slingshots with 500kg bombs, helicopter gunships, and remote controlled drones is naked greed?
But wait, there’s more!
Modern innovations in warfare make it possible for America’s technologically proficient forces to vanquish an opposing army quickly and with relatively few troops. But re-establishing order in a defeated, decapitated society demands a much larger force for a much longer time.
It’s just one astonishing revelation after another. The principal function of the ‘technologically proficient forces’ is to create disorder.
Correcting deficiencies in American military training is also essential, since the biggest reason the United States has not been able to withdraw significant numbers of its own troops over the past three years has been the lack of adequately prepared and reliable Iraqi security forces.
It’s true that it has largely been the peaceloving Democrats who have been braying for more troops, but it’s news to me that the Bush regime has been trying so hard to withdraw significant numbers of its own troops over the past three years. But on reflection, I suppose it’s obvious that it would have been far better if the Iraqi troops had been sufficiently reliable to bomb Fallujah hospitals and snipe at pedestrians from the rooftops.
when a host government lacks the will to rid its security forces of sectarian militia fighters more intent on waging civil war than achieving national stability. That so far has been the biggest obstacle in Iraq.
The ‘host government’, the puppet regime holed up in the Emerald City and owned lock, stock, and barrel by the occupiers – they’re the ones who are responsible. And fancy treating their invited guests this way by not trying to achieve the national stability. It’s all ‘we’ have ever asked for. And what is all this an obstacle to? Why, of course, America’s national purposes!
Also in today’s Times, one Alan Ehrenhalt, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of William H Whyte Jr’s Organization man, writes in his op-ed,
What we can say with confidence half a century later is that Whyte got the future almost entirely wrong. He saw conformity and the social ethic as the values that would shape America — much to its detriment — for the remainder of the century.
But was Whyte really so wrong? In a world where alternative sources of information are so readily available, the vast majority of people seem content with the pablum they get from the educational system and the Times. I read an article by Howard Zinn about American exceptionalism yesterday on ICH (originally from the Boston review), and I couldn’t believe that he still thought he had to say those same old things about the annexation of most of Mexico in the 1840s, about the slaughter in the Philippines after the Spanish American War, about the twenty year military occupation of Hispaniola – both Haiti and the Dominican Republic – from 1915…
On the eve of the war with Mexico in the middle of the 19th century, just after the United States annexed Texas, the editor and writer John O’Sullivan coined the famous phrase “manifest destiny.” He said it was “the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” At the beginning of the 20th century, when the United States invaded the Philippines, President McKinley said that the decision to take the Philippines came to him one night when he got down on his knees and prayed, and God told him to take the Philippines.
It’s as if people live in the world, even in cyberspace, and somehow remain insulated from the history that would let them make sense of what they observe around them? Sure, they don’t teach this stuff in school. But if all you knew was what they told you in school, you’d be pretty bloody ignorant, now wouldn’t you? Worse. You’d be actively disinformed. Are there really still people around who think the US removed Saddam Hussein from power, but didn’t put him there in the first place? Well, it would seem so, judging from the kind of stuff I found on the Dilbert blog yesterday after Scott Adams put in his two bob about why he reckoned ‘we’ should get out of Iraq. So where does this come from? Presumably not from the independent thinking iconoclasm that Ehrenhalt imagines has replaced the organization persons of the mid fifties.
In case you were concerned about the ‘one million cluster bombs dropped by Israeli aircraft during the July-August war against Hizbullah remain unexploded in south Lebanon, where they continue to threaten civilians’, the Jerusalem Post reports that they are not the only little traps the moral Israeli military left behind for Lebanese children.
After ‘two European disposal experts’ lost their feet ‘and a Lebanese medic’ was wounded, the UN Mine Action Coordination Center in south Lebanon divulged that
The detonating object was an Israeli anti-personnel land mine placed in a mine field newly laid during the fighting in July and August… Lebanon's south is riddled with land mines, laid by retreating IDF soldiers who pulled out of the region in 2000…Lebanon has long called for Israel to hand over maps of the minefields.
Now what good would those mines be against unsuspecting terrorists if they had maps showing just where they were? Preposterous!
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