Michael Totten has another interesting and well illustrated dispatch from Northern Israel, describing the situation in Kiryat Shmona, which took the brunt of Hezbollah’s Katyusha rocket attacks.
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August 18th, 2006 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Can it be true that UK mobile phone company Orange has suspended an employee, Inigo Wilson, for a non-work related entry on a blog? What seems to have caused offence is him making jokes in his ‘Lefty Lexicon’ such as:
Unless there are other factors at play here (I will be see what I can find out), I am about to become an ex-Orange customer and will start urging others to do likewise. If Orange is concerned about one of their employees ‘upsetting customers’, well I think they need to be told that pursuing this course of action against Inigo Wilson, they are doing precisely that. I do not dispute their right to hire and fire whomsoever they wish, but I intent to try and make them suffer some economic consequences as a result if this is as egregious as it appears. Update: I received an e-mail from Stuart Jackson at Orange telling me:
But as the ‘facts’ are not in dispute, that does not really answer my question, which was:
The ‘facts’ are not the issue. The issue is why Orange feels it has to do anything about them. Frankly even requiring Mr. Wilson to ‘apologise and not do it again’ would be wholly unacceptable given that his off-the-clock non work related remarks should be none of Orange’s business and if they think otherwise, they can do without my business. August 17th, 2006 | 45 comments - (Comments are closed)
Earlier this week I flew into London Heathrow from Athens, having been subjected to a relatively modest amount of incovenience, expense and humiliation as a result of the latest anti-terrorist security measures. Had I been travelling in the opposite direction (i.e. London to Athens), the story would have been altogether different and my trifling miseries compounded by several magnitudes. I truly sympathised with the weary, frustrated wannabe-outbound travellers who were camped on the floor of the terminal going nowhere, thanks to numerous cancelled flights, huge delays and a blanket of zealous security measures aimed at stripping them down to their socks. I wonder if any of those people have been sullied by the experience? I wonder if any of the magic and wonder of modern civilian airline travel has been marred for them? I hope not, but what is certain is that the hidden costs of this latest air-travel crisis, in terms of time, money and lost opportunities, must be huge. Air travel is no longer the preserve of the privileged few; it is a vast mass industry that bestows incalculable economic, social, cultural and even spiritual benefits on us all. And yet, it is all too easily assailable because no amount of security or scrutiny can obviate the basic fact that a pressurised, inescapable metal tube flying some 30,000 feet up in the sky is, and always will be, critically vulnerable to attack from either without or within, the results of which are simply to horrible to be shrugged off. Tougher security measures can make life harder for the Islamists but the fact remains that the security screeners need to be lucky all the time while the jihadis only need to be lucky once. That is why, over a longer time frame, the odds favour the latter. Perhaps that is why the tune has changed. Following the London Undergound bombings in July 2005, there was an instant and comprehensive demand for solidarity. ‘One London’ read the official blazen of the Mayor’s office. ‘We will not allow these terrorists to divide us’ proclaimed HMG. From one end of the country to the other, hands were held, memorials were wept through and communities appealed to for calmness and reason. Everyone who was anyone rushed headlong towards the Totem of Tolerance and hugged it hard enough to squeeze out the sap. In contrast, the airline scares have been just that; scares. Not a single bomb has exploded and (mercifully) not a a soul was taken. Yet the response could not be more different. This time, the message emerging from some official quarters is that it is time for profiling, a measure the mere utterance of which would have been unthinkable a year ago in the wake of 52 dead commuters. Why the difference now? Perhaps it is just the cumulative weariness of one bloody thing following the next and a government that is rapidly running out of other ideas. Or perhaps it is because there is a dawning collective realisation that it will not take too much more of this to bring the whole wonderful, liberating phenomenon of commercial air travel to a juddering and insensible end. It seems that taboos can be easily dispensed with the moment they are no longer affordable. Of course, the threat of profiling has precipitated a chorus of disapproval but, significantly, only from the usual and expected circles. I would wager that those exhausted travellers, stranded in blankets on the unforgiving stone floor of Heathrow’s Terminal 2, would noisily and heartily approve. August 16th, 2006 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
Anyone care to put some their predicted over/under for the Hez/Israeli truce on the record? Personally, I think I will go with six days. Hez has already announced its intention to violate the ceasefire by refusing to disarm. I find it interesting that Hez and the Lebanese government are already conspiring to violate the requirement that Hez disarm, as apparently all Hez will be required to do is refrain from displaying its weapons (with, of course, the knowledge and tacit consent of the French and the UN responsible for policing the cease-fire). The longer this goes on, the more it is apparent that the Lebanese government is the creature of Hez, and the more justified the Israeli attacks on non-Hez assets appear to be. While I was willing to view the Lebanese generally as victims of Hez in July, by mid-August they look a lot more like co-conspirators. With the fundamental condition of the ceasefire – the eviction and disarmament of Hez – already withering on the vine, I would say that Olmert blinked, gave Hez not only the hudna it needed to survive but a strategic victory over Israeli arms, and has guaranteed that the Israeli soldiers who died in this offensive died for nothing. August 15th, 2006 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
The latest bloggage from Michael Totten is something a bit different than his previous two offerings. It is about what it is like to be in a war zone for the first time and it brought back some strangely similar echos for me from when I first visited a war zone in 1991… war does indeed warp the mind a little. Check it out. August 15th, 2006 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
It seems clear that Hezbollah has, through the inexplicable Israeli unwillingness to commit to a robust ground attack, emerged battered but undefeated and thus as defined by Israel’s own stated war aims, the winner. It did this simply by surviving and by not being pushed north of the Litani river. Although not all the detailed reports on the fighting on the ground have yet become public, one thing seems quite clear: the reason Israel did not destroy their enemy was not Hezbollah’s Kornet and Konkurs anti-tank missiles or their RPG-29s, but was due to the fact Israel did not deploy sufficient ground forces and commit to a full scale attack on Hezbollah until two days before the ceasefire. If Israel had been serious about destroying Hezbollah, it would have attacked at corps level by the end of the first week of the campaign, using 30,000 troops to make a tank supported infantry assault with airmobile blocking forces to isolate and exterminate the enemy. Two weeks of that would have been more than enough to have reduced Hezbollah to a small shattered cadre of dazed activists north of the Litani river. But that is not what happened. As far as I can figure all that Israel committed to until the very last spasm of the campaign was a series of armour and artillery heavy limited objective raids which seem to have been mounted to blast settlements used by Hezbollah rather than to actually isolate and then clear them with infantry. I cannot fathom what ‘end state’ the planners envisaged from these attacks, given that it is a military aphorism that rubble is easier to defend than an intact town. It will be more than many will be able to bring themselves to admit but when you get past the spin, Hezbollah won and they did so because Israel fought what was by local standards a long war without any plan I can identify to actually achieve what they said they wanted. So if the IDF bombarded Lebanon not to choke off Hezbollah’s logistics as part of a battle of annihilation, then why was the Lebanese transportation system trashed? Even if some delusional idiot in the IAF thought Hezbollah could be destroyed purely from the air, in that case surely all the IDF would have done was nothing but hammer tactical targets in the south rather than cripple the Lebanese infrastructure and economy to no good purpose. Even the wider pain inflicted on Lebanon might have been worth it if Hezbollah had been so reduced militarily that their ability to poison Lebanese politics was greatly reduced, but quite the contrary has now been achieved. I can only hope I am very wrong but with Hezbollah both largely intact and politically enhanced, the prospect for a secular liberal Lebanon and a Lebanese state with the strength to contain Hezbollah’s militia are now more distant than ever. It seems to me that Israel lost this war because Israel never had a coherent plan and thus I cannot escape the conclusion that the people in charge seem to have forgotten the basic principles of how to fight a war. To be honest I am astounded that I find myself writing these words about Israel of all people. I predict that once Israelis have some time to mull this over, the government will fall and fall hard. August 15th, 2006 | 47 comments - (Comments are closed)
Michael Totten’s latest on-the-spot bloggage from Northern Israel is up and ready to be devoured. August 14th, 2006 | Comments are closed
There is an interesting article on the Social Affairs Unit blog which discusses New Civilisation magazine. The magazine’s opening declaration was:
Which all sounds promising. This publication has also sent me a few e-mails, though I must confess I never took any notice, though that was not because it did not sound interesting but rather due to the e-mail overload that I have to deal with from folks trying to interest Samizdata in new publications. However Shiraz Maher does seem to have taken notice and he did not like what he found after a little digging. To see what he found take a look at his article at the Social Affairs Unit. It seems New Civilisation is a front Hizb ut-Tahrir, an organisation whose objective is a global totalitarian Islamo-fascist Caliphate. August 14th, 2006 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
The indispensible Michael Totten is blogging from Northern Israel and has some great stuff to read. And while you are at it, consider dropping a dime in his tip-jar to support his first class reportage. August 13th, 2006 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
Muslim ‘moderates’ in Britain are calling for changes to British foreign policy as the only way to prevent Muslim ‘extremists’ in Britain from attacking the rest of us. This is of course the same approach used by Sinn Fein and other Republicans in Northern Ireland, who held that only by political engagement and accommodation with ‘moderate’ political figures (i.e. Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness) could the wicked IRA be stopped from blowing people up. Of course the fact Sinn Fein and the IRA were actually inseparable parts of the same movement was something only a reader of the Guardian could have failed to notice. And so a ‘moderate’ Muslim, a member of the Tory Party no less, tell us that ‘Muslim anger’ must be recognised (our old chum root causes). Is that so? Well I think increasingly it is being recognised. It is being recognised as an excuse used for getting a non-democratic Muslim veto over British foreign policies just as a majority of Muslims also appear to want a Muslim veto over freedom of expression in Britain. If the solution to Muslim extremism in Britain being offered by ‘moderate’ Muslims is to give the extremists what they want (i.e. changes in British foreign policy), then the so-called ‘moderates’ are nothing more than the mouthpieces of the extremists they claim to reject. No doubt if given the changes they want, we will be told that only if yet more legal restrictions are placed on what we kuffir can say about Islam will we be able to to placate Muslim ‘anger’ and thereby prevent those wicked extremists from blowing us up. And homosexuals must be legislated against in order to placate those wicked extremists. And alcohol must be banned in order to… I think it is well past time for some British anger and a great deal of it needs to be directed at the British establishment for allowing this to happen via a policy of appeasment towards domestic Islamists. August 13th, 2006 | 45 comments - (Comments are closed)
If Israel really does accept and implement a ceasefire on Monday, it will have accepted the worst of all possible worlds. If it agrees to an end to the fighting which does not disarm Hezbollah, or even push it behind the Litani River, and does not get a third party force capable of fighting Hezbollah into Southern Lebanon, it would be fair to say Israel has achieved none of its war aims whatsoever. In short, Hezbollah will have won and we will soon be seeing celebrations in the streets across the Islamic world to that effect. The primary Israeli method of attack, a series of destructive operational level1 air strikes against Lebanon’s infrastructure, only made sense if it was intended to isolate the enemy and dislocate its logistics as an adjunct to a massive and robust attack on the ground with a significant portion of its formidable army, with the intention at crushing Hezbollah as military force. Otherwise, what was the point of the non-tactical strikes? As Hezbollah already had large numbers of artillery rockets deployed as organic supply with its front line units (demonstrably so), the air interdiction only made sense if Israel was planning an extended campaign for as long as it took to destroy Hezbollah, which means preventing Hezbollah’s resupply. Why else blow power-stations, fuel depots, bridges, roads and runways deep into the country rather than just strike tactical targets where Hezbollah is deployed? Bringing the Lebanese transportation system to a standstill was surely done to stop movement of supply so that as Hezbollah formations expended their munitions (a process that would increase as more units were engaged directly by the Israeli army), they would quickly become much less effective due to logistic dislocation. This is ‘Air Interdiction 101’, the sort of thing military planners have understood since ‘Operation Strangle’ in Italy in 1944. But what Israel has done so far is a robust air offensive in support of little more than a series of limited objective raids with only a small fraction of the army. This has not only failed (unsurprisingly) to destroy Hezbollah, it has failed to even displace them far enough back onto Lebanon to prevent them firing rockets into Haifa on an almost daily basis throughout this campaign. And now, having killed a great many people but still leaving a large number of Hezbollah fighters very much alive and still in possession of both their Katyushas and the positions from which to fire them, the Israeli government plans to stop? Having weathered what Israel threw at them (but not what the Israelis inexplicably failed to throw at them), Hezbollah can, quite justifiably, claim victory and greatly enhance their stature simply by virtue of Israel failed to gain any of its publicly stated war aim. Can anyone tell me what the hell the Israeli government is thinking? 1 = I would argue that the attacks against Lebanon’s infrastructure were ‘operational’ (i.e. above tactical but below strategic). A ‘strategic’ attack would need to be against the supply terminals, which is to say targets in Syria or Iran. I realise this is an arcane issue of military semantics August 13th, 2006 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
Julie Burchill is a person about whom I oscillate between revulsion and admiration but she is in good form at the moment. In an article called Bleeding-heart ignoramuses, she ridicules the British media establishments anti-Jewish diatribes and the plain stupidity of some people’s analysis of the region. In the later category she points at an article by Matthew Parris that could well be the most poorly thought out “what Israel must do” article by someone who presumably does not want the extermination of all Jews in that country. The money quote being where he suggests that in order to be ‘loved’ by international opinion, Israel must return to its pre-1967 borders… and this at a time when the existing borders scant enough protection from long range attack. Parris writes:
So presumably if only Israel would place itself at the mercy of its sworn enemies, that magnificent body of strength and moral rectitude ‘the international community’ would make everything alright… after all, what is the value of mere survival if Kofi Anan, Jacques Chirac and several thousand Guardian readers in Islington think poorly of you? To which Burchill aptly replies:
Indeed. When Burchill is right, damn is she right. August 12th, 2006 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
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