Reply With Quote
BTW, I agree with Manny. If they want to make this count, they should be bombing Assad into oblivion instead of stirring up the hornet's nest up in Lebanon.
In 67 they were extremely lucky. The Arab armies were also pretty ing stupid and made a ton of tacticle errors that cost them. But thats a whole different thread.
BTW, I agree with Manny. If they want to make this count, they should be bombing Assad into oblivion instead of stirring up the hornet's nest up in Lebanon.
This is no 67. Israel will not find the enemy in columns or companys. This is cat and mouse, and the cat makes for a bigger target. Just ask our troops.
HOLY COW!! I'm in agreement with boutons on this post!
It's being suggested the Beirut airport was bombed to cut off the escape route of those that are trying to get the kidnapped soldiers to Iran.
Hezbullah is in Lebanon. True, they are financed and probaby directed by Syria but, I think you'd of found a lot more Arab outrage if Israel had just started bombing Damascus. Smart thinking there Manny.
Syria will either enter the fray to defend their proxies or cut them loose. Either way -- Hezbullah and Syria lose.
My understanding is that Israel is striking strategic Hezbullah sites in Lebanon. They're not just indiscriminately bombing Lebanon. And, again, it appears that at least some Lebanese are in favor of the action.
There's also speculation that Israel has tacit approval from Fatah, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon to do what they're doing. I don't think Lebanon is going to be worse off after this is over.
I guess we'll see. But, since Hezbullah is entrenched in Lebanon and they are the ones that committed an act of war against Israel, that's where the fighting needs to be done.
They may well do just that...I'm beginning to believe the days of Israeli restraint in dealing with these animals may be at an end. Hamas too.
It makes sense if the terrorists were trying to flee from that airport. eh?
I think you're wrong. Think Chemotherapy. It's not like you can invite the cancer to leave the body so your treatment won't have detrimental affects, now is it?
The fact remains that Hezbullah and Hamas continue to commit acts of terrorism and, then, retreat to cover in civilian neighborhoods and cower among innocents is as atrocious as the acts themselves.
And, how 'bout that, do you feel the same about Hamas? Should the Israelis be allowed to destroy that group as well? If so, you may be making some progress there Manny.
@ Lebanon approving their own airport being bombed.
Holy do you read what you post? Dude, consider this the last time I ever respond to anything you post because you ARE far dumber than I ever gave you credit for.
Yep, that is "off the chart" speculation. Arab nations wanting to cooperate with Israels military mobilizations.
Let that sink in a bit.
Man this is getting absolutely ridiculous i was going to come in and give my two cents, but Manny pretty much hit the nail with what he's been saying.
But wow i dont think they condoned bombing of the airport that is absolutely ridiculous. I hope my family is ok there :|
Of course they're not conding the bombing of anything on their soil. It is mind numbingly stuipd for Yonivore to even suggest that. It just goes to show you what kind of a different world this guy lives in.
Of course, I never said that.
I said there was speculation that some Arab elements may have approved of what Israel was doing -- going after Hezbullah and Hamas. Because, quite frankly, these two terrorist groups are making it impossible for anything to get done in the Middle East.
As for approving of bombing the airport; I doubt Israel is sharing their military strategy with these guys.
It was separate speculation that bombing the Beirut airport was in response to a report that Hezbullah was trying to escape with the Israeli soldiers, to Iran.
What's ridiculous is how everything in this forum gets construed. But, Manny, I hope you stick to your word and never respond to another of my posts. That's a gift too valuable to hope for.
Tell me more of this "speculation".
Is this something you fish out of your dream catcher every morning? Did it suggest you use the term "Arab elements"?
The last time Israel had a military person go missing in Lebanon, he ended up dead, in Iran. I speculate Israel has blockaded Lebanon and destroyed their runways in order to prevent that.
Funny.
You said speculation that arab elements approve of what Israel is doing.
Dodgeball anyone?
I'm listening to the Michael Medved show and he's talking to his brother, who lives in Jerusalem and is active in politics.
This is what he had to say about bombing the Beirut airport - the rockets that Hezbollah is using are coming from Iran. They bombed the airport and blockaded Lebanon to keep Iran from replenishing Hezbollah.
Makes sense to me!
Pretty obvious to me. He bombed their military airport, now has bombed
the civilian airport because that may be all they had left. Israel
has put their Air Force out of business.
I suspect the reason they haven't gone in against Syria is simply because
they really don't want spread the war any further than they must. But
they do want the Hizbullah out of Lebanon.
If they must, they will spread the conflict. Iran could be next, I suspect,
if things get more of out hand. Syria also.
Crookshank talks about the rockets coming from Iran. Iran may be
suppling them, but they are being launched from Lebanon.
explain. i mean Israel doesn't have border with Iran. any attack would have to go through Turkey or Iraq air space. Turkey will not get involved and if "Iraq" (we know they don't make decisions) gets involved America would be in another even less "pleasant" war. I don't see Israel making a move on Iran.
Maybe Iran is attempting to draw Israel into Syria and then, by treaty, enter the conflict. After all, this is a war with Iran by proxy anyway...so, technically, they're already involved.
Iran’s national security adviser Ali Larijani flies to Damascus aboard special military plane Wednesday night as war tension builds up around Hizballah kidnap of 2 Israeli soldiers.
The US could learn a thing or two from Israel. The next time a Mexican drug lord kills a US Border Agent, we should bomb the out of Mexico City. That'll teach em.
This thread is good evidence of the Yonivore Doctorine: If there is a .0000001% chance something might be true and supports a war agenda, then we must assume it is true.
And for those wondering... Lebanon's call for a cease fire is just secret code for "Israel, we approve of you bombing us!"
Dammit, he broke the code.
US vetoes UN resolution urging end to Israeli attacks in Gaza
Jul 13 3:50 PM US/Eastern
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/0....0bs4l5nz.html
The United States vetoed a UN draft resolution that would have called for an end to Israeli attacks and "disproportionate use of force" in the Gaza Strip as well as for the release of a kidnapped Israeli soldier.
The Security Council resolution received 10 votes, one against from the United States with four abstentions, French Ambassador Jean-Marc de la Sabliere, the council president for July, announced.
Thankfully our ambassador, (John "I'm not your punk" Bolton), has the common sense and spine that's missing from the majority of the U.N. members.
They call for and end to the "Israeli" attacks? WTHeck!!! I believe they're responding to aggression on the part of the nutcases that are so prevalant in the Middle East. Disproportionate use of force?!? Nuts to that (and all of the Israel haters), where does it say that when engaging the enemy you may not use greater force than that which they used? That's no deterrent and that's no way to win a war!!!
You idiots in the U.N. may want to condemn and call for an end to the acts of the mindless miscreants that are initiating and instigating the battles in the Middle East, that's not Israel!!
no surprise there.
You are correct in that they have no direct access to Iran. But we (meaning
us on this board) have no idea of what Israel's capabilities really are. Meaning
they may have a missile that could reach Iran and be precisely targeted and
hit what it was aimed at. One thing more, I would hope it wouldn't happen,
but Israel does have nukes. And if they are threatened in such a manner
as they think their existence is threatened, I have no doubt that they will
use them in any manner they see fit.
I really don't know how much naval capability that Israel has, in regards
to their underwater fleet, but they may have subs sitting off the coast
of Iran now just waiting for orders.
Israel has long been noted for pre-planning and they know their enemies
well. I am surprised that Iran is pushing things as far as they have.
Some are speculating that they are because they want to stir up trouble
to get the world interested in other matters other than their (Iran's)
nuke program.
Why, I have no idea. The world will not stop their program. They
will do like they have in every situation in the recent past, talk it to death,
North Korea will continue with their programs, unless Japan does
something. And Japan may very well do something. And China and
Korea both know that Japan is quite capable of being a very offensive
nation when they sit their mind to it. along with us.
Right-wing rabble can skip this message.
I think these three articles give an excellent perspective on the M/E and how dubya/ head/wolfie's Repug Iraq war has every chance worsening the region.
=======================
July 14, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Kidnapping of Democracy
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
When you watch the violence unfolding in the Middle East today it is easy to feel that you’ve been to this movie before and that you know how it ends — badly. But we actually have not seen this movie before. Something new is unfolding, and we’d better understand it.
What we are seeing in Iraq, the Palestinian territories and Lebanon is an effort by Islamist parties to use elections to pursue their long-term aim of Islamizing the Arab-Muslim world. This is not a conflict about Palestinian or Lebanese prisoners in Israel. This is a power struggle within Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq over who will call the shots in their newly elected “democratic’’ governments and whether they will be real democracies.
The tiny militant wing of Hamas today is pulling all the strings of Palestinian politics, the Iranian-backed Hezbollah Shiite Islamic party is doing the same in Lebanon, even though it is a small minority in the cabinet, and so, too, are the Iranian-backed Shiite parties and militias in Iraq. They are not only showing who is boss inside each new democracy, but they are also competing with one another for regional influence.
As a result, the post-9/11 democracy experiment in the Arab-Muslim world is being hijacked. Yes, basically free and fair elections were held in Lebanon, the Palestinian territories and Iraq. Yes, millions turned out to vote because the people of the Arab-Muslim world really do want to shape their own futures.
But the roots of democracy are so shallow in these places and the moderate majorities so weak and intimidated that we are getting the worst of all worlds. We are getting Islamist parties who are elected to power, but who insist on maintaining their own private militias and refuse to assume all the responsibilities of a sovereign government. They refuse to let their governments have control over all weapons. They refuse to be accountable to international law (the Lebanese-Israeli border was ratified by the U.N.), and they refuse to submit to the principle that one party in the cabinet cannot drag a whole country into war.
“Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinians all held democratic elections,’’ said the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi, “and the Western expectation was that these elections would produce legitimate governments that had the power to control violence and would assume the burden of responsibility of governing. ... But what happened in all three places is that we [produced] governments which are sovereign only on paper, but not over a territory.’’
Then why do parties like Hamas and Hezbollah get elected? Often because they effectively run against the corruption of the old secular state-controlled parties, noted Mr. Ezrahi. But once these Islamists are in office they revert to serving their own factional interests, not those of the broad community.
Boutros Harb, a Christian Lebanese parliamentarian, said: “We must decide who has the right to make decisions on war and peace in Lebanon. Is that right reserved for the Lebanese people and its legal ins utions, or is the choice in the hands of a small minority of Lebanese people?”
Ditto in the fledgling democracies of Palestine and Iraq. When cabinet ministers can maintain their own militias and act outside of state authority, said Mr. Ezrahi, you’re left with a “meaningless exercise’’ in democracy/state building.
Why don’t the silent majorities punish these elected Islamist parties for working against the real interests of their people? Because those who speak against Hamas or Hezbollah are either delegitimized as “American lackeys’’ or just murdered, like Rafiq Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister.
The world needs to understand what is going on here: the little flowers of democracy that were planted in Lebanon, Iraq and the Palestinian territories are being crushed by the boots of Syrian-backed Islamist militias who are desperate to keep real democracy from taking hold in this region and Iranian-backed Islamist militias desperate to keep modernism from taking hold.
( does WHIG even care to handle the above situation? Remember, democracy was supposed to spilll over from Iraq to all the other ty regimes in the region. As accurate a WHIG prediction that there would be not insurgency in Iraq. )
It may be the skeptics are right: maybe democracy, while it is the most powerful form of legitimate government, simply can’t be implemented everywhere. It certainly is never going to work in the Arab-Muslim world if the U.S. and Britain are alone in pushing it in Iraq, if Europe dithers on the fence, if the moderate Arabs cannot come together and make a fist, and if Islamist parties are allowed to sit in governments and be treated with respect — while maintaining private armies.
The whole democracy experiment in the Arab-Muslim world is at stake here, and right now it’s going up in smoke.
======================
Behind the Crisis, A Push Toward War
By David Ignatius
Friday, July 14, 2006; A21
After Hezbollah guerrillas captured Israeli soldiers Wednesday, a furious Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz warned that the Israeli army would "turn back the clock in Lebanon by 20 years." Unfortunately, that statement was truer than he may have intended.
By pounding the Beirut airport and other civilian targets yesterday, the Israelis have taken a step back in time -- to tactics that have been tried repeatedly in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories without much success. Many Lebanese will be angry at Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah for provoking the crisis, but that won't translate into new control on the militia's actions. Instead, the outcome is likely to be similar to what has happened in Gaza over the past several weeks: Israeli attacks to free a captured soldier further weakened the Palestinian Authority without much damaging the terrorists.
Watching the events of the past few days, you can't help but feel that this is the rerun of an old movie -- one in which the guerrillas and kidnappers end up as the winners. Israel's fledgling prime minister, Ehud Olmert, wants to emulate the toughness of his predecessor, Ariel Sharon. But that shouldn't include a replay of Sharon's 1982 Lebanon invasion, a strategic mistake that spawned Hezbollah in the first place.
Hezbollah's action in seizing the Israeli soldiers was utterly reckless. That's the new part of this crisis -- that Iranian-backed radicals deliberately opened another front in a war that, in their minds, stretches from Gaza to Iraq. Watching Nasrallah's y performance at a news conference Wednesday, I thought that he seemed almost to be inviting an Israeli counterattack -- knowing that it would destabilize the Lebanese government of Fuad Siniora, which is one of the few solid achievements of U.S. policy in the region.
Israeli and American doctrine is premised on the idea that military force will deter adversaries. But as more force has been used in recent years, the deterrent value has inevitably gone down. That's the inner spring of this crisis: The Iranians (and their clients in Hezbollah and Hamas) watch the American military mired in Iraq and see weakness. They are emboldened rather than intimidated. The same is true for the Israelis in Gaza. Rather than reinforcing the image of strength, the use of force (short of outright, pulverizing invasion and occupation) has encouraged contempt.
The danger of Iranian-backed adventurism is immense right now, but that's all the more reason for America and Israel to avoid past mistakes in countering it. Reliable strategic lessons are hard to come by in that part of the world, but here are a few:
The first is that in countering aggression, international solidarity and legitimacy matter. In responding to the Lebanon crisis, the United States should work closely with its allies at the Group of Eight summit and the United Nations. Iran and its proxies would like nothing more than to isolate America and Israel. They would like nothing less than a strong, international coalition of opposition.
A second point -- obvious from Gaza to Beirut to Baghdad -- is that the power of non-state actors is magnified when there is no strong central government. That may sound like a truism, but responding wisely can require some creative diplomacy. The way to blunt Hamas is to build a strong Palestinian Authority that delivers benefits for the Palestinian people. The way to curb Hezbollah is to build up the Lebanese government and army. One way to boost the Lebanese government (and deflate Hezbollah) would be to negotiate the return of the Israeli-occupied territory known as Shebaa Farms. That chance is lost for now, but the Bush administration should find other ways to enhance Siniora's authority.
A final obvious lesson is that in an open, interconnected world, public opinion matters. This is a tricky battlefield for an unpopular America and Israel, but not an impossible one. To fight the Long War, America and Israel have to get out of the devil suit in global public opinion. For a generation, America maintained a role as honest broker between Israel and the Arabs. The Bush administration should work hard to refurbish that role.
In the Lebanon crisis we have a terrifying glimpse of the future: Iran and its radical allies are pushing toward war. That's the chilling reality behind this week's events. On Tuesday the Iranians spurned an American offer of talks on their nuclear program; on Wednesday their Hezbollah proxy committed what Israel rightly called "an act of war." The radicals want to lure America and Israel deeper into the killing ground, confident that they have the staying power to prevail. We should not play their game.
[email protected]
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
====================
The above 2 articles were fairly non-partisan. The next article is totally justified dubya/ head/Repug bashing.
The 2006 and 2008 elections absolutely MUST be about the Repug Iraq war, and not hijacked by straw issues like gay marriage, flag burning, estate taxes, tax-cuts for rich, etc.
===================
Big Bang Theory In Ruins
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, July 14, 2006; A21
The most intellectually honest case for the war in Iraq was never about Saddam Hussein's alleged stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction. It was the Big Bang Theory.
Not to be confused with theories about the origins of the universe, the Middle East Big Bang idea was simple and seductive. Unlike other arguments for the war, it was based on some facts, though also on some wishful thinking. The point was that the Middle East was a mess. A nest of authoritarian regimes bred opposition movements rebelling against the conditions under which too many people lived and energized by a radical Islamist ideology. Some of them turned to terror. In this bog of failure, moderate Muslims were powerless. They were frequently jailed or killed.
The situation's hopelessness argued for a hard shove from the United States to create a new dynamic. Installing a democratic government in Iraq would force a new dawn. Newly empowered Muslim democrats would reform their societies, negotiate peace with Israel and get on with the business of building prosperous, middle-class societies.
It was a beautiful dream, and even when the administration was asserting things that turned out not to be true, it held the dream out there for all to contemplate.
Consider Vice President Cheney's address before the Veterans of Foreign Wars on Aug. 26, 2002, one of the earliest major public arguments the administration made for war. The lead of the news stories was Cheney's claim that there was "no doubt" that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was prepared to use them. "The risks of inaction are far greater than the risk of action," Cheney declared.
But then there was the delightful promise of what American success in Iraq could achieve. "Extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of jihad," Cheney said. "Moderates throughout the region would take heart, and our ability to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would be enhanced."
Today, with Israeli troops battling on their northern and southern borders, with Iran ignoring calls for negotiations on nuclear weapons, with Baghdad in flames and with many of Iraq's moderates living in fear, those Cheney sentences stand as the most telling indictment of the administration's failures.
If Israelis and Palestinians were closer to peace, if Iraqi democracy showed signs of stability -- these might justify a war fought in part on the basis of false premises.
But when the Big Bang happened, the wreckage left behind took the form of reduced American influence, American armed forces stretched to their limit and a Middle East more dangerously unstable than it was at the beginning of 2003. Whether one ascribes these troubles to the flawed implementation of the Big Bang Theory or to the theory itself, what matters now is how to limit and, if possible, undo some of the damage.
That is what the American debate should be about, but those in charge of Republican campaigns this year have another idea. They have hit upon the brilliant strategy of pushing any serious discussion of the failure of American foreign policy past Election Day. For the next 3 1/2 months, they want the choice before the voters to be binary: staying the course and being "tough," or breaking with President Bush's policy and being "soft." There are just two options on the ballot, they say: firmness or "cut and run."
If I were a Republican strategist, I'd probably do the same thing. But Democrats (and, yes, the media) risk playing into Republican hands if they fail to force a discussion of the administration's larger failures or let the debate focus narrowly on exactly what date we should set for getting out of Iraq.
The case for reducing our commitment to Iraq in the interest of other and larger foreign policy purposes -- has anyone noticed the growing mess in Afghanistan? -- is built on a compelling proposition: that the administration made a huge bet on Iraq and it lost. American voters can decide to keep the gamble going, to risk more lives and money, and hope that something turns up. Or they can decide that this gamble will never deliver the winnings that those who took it on our behalf promised.
By late November of this year, the United States will have been at war in Iraq for as long as we were involved in World War II. Under those cir stances, the burden of proof should not be on those who argue for changing what we're doing. It should be on those who set a failed policy in motion and keep promising, despite the evidence, that it will somehow pay off if only we "stay the course."
[email protected]
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
