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.
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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)
This standup comic nicely sums up what I think of the dip-shit worldview of Islamic homicide bombers. (Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan). August 10th, 2006 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
The German magazine ZAPP has a video of Green Helmet, whose name has been revealed as Salam Daher, taken in Qana when it was bombed ten years ago. He oversees a dead boy being put into an ambulance. The sequence is not good enough. He gives stage directions. The boy is taken out again, transferred pointlessly to another stretcher, put back in the ambulance. Daher makes sure there is a clear field of view for the camera and the blanket over the boy is pulled back so that his face can be seen. The video is on You Tube. EU Referendum promises to provide an analysis soon. This should be worth reading, as it was EU Referendum’s Richard North who first noted Daher’s surprising prominence If you care to you can also read a translation of an article from Stern magazine saying that the whole thing is just a bizarre conspiracy theory. The picture from 1996 briefly shown on the left of the Zapp footage shows Daher holding up a dead baby dressed in blue. The baby’s head is blurred, and that is not surprising. Zapp’s picture was taken within minutes of this one showing that the baby’s head had been blown up. (Needless to say, this is a disturbing image.) That picture is fairly famous – for instance it appears as the fourth picture down in this series of pictures from the “Main Gallery Of Zionist Massacres” of a website called “Resistance.” It was also, I seem to recall, at one time the cover picture for Warblogger Watch (http://warbloggerwatch.blogspot.com, although if you try the link it is immediately covered up by sex adverts.) Daher has had a successful career. The dead children from both 1996 and 2006 were really dead. Almost certainly they were really killed by Israeli munitions – although I have no doubt Hizb’Allah reassigns casualties from “friendly fire” whenever it gets the chance, let us not pretend that in what I take to be a worldwide war our side will not also kill innocents. The much mocked defence that an image is “fake but accurate” does have some validity. However from now on it will be impossible to forget that these famous images tell not one but at least three stories. The dead child. The man holding him. The man behind the camera. August 10th, 2006 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
According to Scotland Yard a plot to blow up planes in flight from the UK to the US and commit “mass murder” on an unimaginable scale has been disrupted.
There are no more details about the plan available at the moment other than it revolved around liquids of some kind and that the explosives would have been sophisticated and extremely effective. Flights from Heathrow Airport and Gatwick are suspended until this afternoon at least. The security measures are pretty drastic:
Another article reports that intelligence is often fragmentary and partial, so the fear perhaps is that there is another, parallel group or other individuals who are also going to carry out similar attacks and that is why such security measures are being taken. This is all very distrurbing, of course, both for the obvious threat to lives as well as the disruption it will bring to our everyday existence. Another disturbing fact is this kind of comments (a reader’s comment next to the BBC article I got the news from):
August 10th, 2006 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
What I am about for argue for may strike long time readers of Samizdata as strange, given that I have written so many articles deploring racism, calling for open borders and taking various pro-immigration positions. None of my views on those things have changed one iota but clearly Britain and the western world generally has a problem with the Muslim communities in their midst. If Muslims really do share a broad consensus of opposition to free speech and the social liberalism that defines us, then Muslims are quite unlike any other community who have demonstrably integrated and assimilated over time, such as the Irish, Poles, Afro-Caribbeans, Sikhs, Hindus, Chinese, etc.. If Britain’s Muslims wish to both be separate but also have a veto over how non-Muslims are permitted to discuss them, then they are a cohesive political and social problem. So how does a tolerant, cosmopolitan, pro-immigration, free market capitalist, social individualist (‘libertarian’ if you insist) react to the threat posed by an intolerant and even barbaric cultural-religious minority in the midst of his society? Here is where I put myself ‘beyond the pale’ with some people. The short answer is… discrimination. I have long argued that intolerant Islamic values are a problem that needs to be opposed, not accommodated. However people in the Muslim community need to be opposed not for being Muslims but for refusing to integrate into British society. As so many ethnic groups have successfully (even if not always effortlessly) integrated and assimilated into tolerant British society, the problem is not mass immigration, the problem is Islam and the antithetical values it brings. In short, the problem is Muslim mass immigration and the refusal to reciprocate tolerance for tolerance. However it is important to keep in mind that Islam is not a race or an ethnicity, it is a religion, and therefore it is a choice. As a result, when the BBC says that the police have arrested a group of “Asian men on suspicion of terrorist offenses”, they are doing everyone a great dis-service by making a remark which is by any reasonable definition racist in the most literal sense. It does not matter that the people in question are ‘Asian’, what matters is that they are Muslim. Race and ethnicity is not the issue and to suggest otherwise is racist: the political consequences of a specific religion and its associated culture, that is the issue. → Continue reading: In praise of discrimination August 10th, 2006 | 62 comments - (Comments are closed)
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