The history of failure in war can be summed up in two words: too late. Too late in comprehending the deadly purpose of a potential enemy; too late in realizing the mortal danger; too late in preparedness; too late in uniting all possible forces for resistance; too late in standing with one’s friends.
—General Douglas MacArthur
To quote Tanner Boyle: Crud!
Nothing really tonight from me. Oh, there was going to be something about the cease-fire in southern Lebanon that I was working on while bouncing back and forth between this and my real job, and I was well on may way to stringing together several different items when my Firefox browser bit the dust. Now I’m just going to see if I can gather up all or some of the pieces I was trying to intricately weave together into a coherent read and, instead, salvage a bit of a link dump.
Krauthammer: A Moment to Be Seized in Lebanon
The charm of any U.N. Security Council resolution lies in the preamble, which invariably begins by “recalling” all previous resolutions on the same subject that have been entirely ignored, therefore necessitating the current resolution. Hence newly minted Resolution 1701: Before mandating the return of south Lebanon to Lebanese government control, it lists the seven Security Council resolutions going back 28 years that have demanded the same thing.
We are to believe, however, that this time the United Nations means it. Yet, the fact that responsibility for implementation is given to Kofi Annan’s office — not known for integrity, competence or neutrality — betrays a certain unseriousness about the enterprise from the very beginning.
Now, it is true that had Israel succeeded militarily in its strategic objectives, there would have been no need for any resolution. Israel would have unilaterally cleaned out south Lebanon and would be dictating terms.
But that did not happen. The first Israel-Hezbollah war ended in a tie, and in this kind of warfare, tie goes to the terrorist.
Read it all.
Under-equipped, under pressure: the Lebanese Army rolls in after an absence of four decades
Nawal hurled a fistful of grains into the air showering a Lebanese Army Jeep with rice, startling the young officer trying to navigate his armoured column through the narrow streets of this southern town.
“We have waited a long, long time for this,†said Nawal, who lined up on her balcony with three generations of her family to wave at the young soldiers below. “Finally we feel we are part of Lebanon once again.â€
The scene was repeated in towns and villages across the south of the country yesterday, when some 2,500 Lebanese soldiers returned to a region from which the Army has been virtually absent for nearly 40 years. In the 1970s the area was largely under the control of Palestinian guerrillas, in the 1980s Israel occupied much of the region and in the 1990s and until yesterday it was governed by Hezbollah, the militant Shia Muslim militia.
Under orders to secure the Lebanese-Israeli border and disarm anyone with an unauthorised weapon, Brigadier General Charles Sheikhani said that his troops were up to the job. The initial force will be strengthened over the coming weeks until 15,000 soldiers are deployed alongside UN peacekeepers.
I’m currently doubtful about this story for three reasons: I don’t think the Lebanese will go to any great length to disarm Hezbollah, I will possibly believe that the Lebanese army and the U.N. peacekeepers have the slightest chance of being even somewhat effective only when I see the actual boots on the ground in the numbers called for, and I’m still bitter that this is the story that killed my browser and my earlier work.
So, the region stands now at a cease-fire and yet another worthless U.N. resolution. Who won? I doubt anybody did … yet. Israel could have, but played their cards too tightly for fear of excessive collateral damage in light of a world that has been historically way too eager to condemn its efforts. Did Hezbollah and its accompanying parental units of Syria and Iran win just by avoiding obliteration? Possibly but, as I said, the big “yet” looms near. Still, that doesn’t mean that Syria will not hesitate to take the wrong lessons from the fight.
Syria has warned Israel that the occupation of the Golan Heights “cannot last forever” and said Syrians will emulate Hizbollah to recover their land.
“We say to the forces occupying our land that our people warn you that they will not allow our land to be occupied forever,” the government’s daily Ath-Thawra said.
“You must understand that our people will fight the way the Lebanese resistance (Hizbollah) fought you,” it added.
“Our people will fight you … on every inch of the Golan,” it said.
However, the newspaper urged decision-makers in Israel “to open up to new perspectives”, noting that some in the Jewish state were in favour of making peace with Syria.
“The leaders of this expansionist entity have a choice: either they heed the voice of reason that prohibits them from violating other people’s rights or they will face action similar to that carried out by the Lebanese resistance.”
Syria has repeatedly demanded the return of the Golan Heights which Israel conquered in the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war and annexed in 1981.
Why stop at just the Golan?
Assad: Future generations will find a way to defeat IDF
Syrian President Bashar Assad congratulated Hezbollah yesterday for what he described as their success in “defeating Israel.” Assad said that the members of the resistance used their “will, determination and faith” to counter Israeli arms, enabling them to defeat Israel.
“The resistance is necessary as much as it is natural and legitimate,” he said. Assad said this war revealed the limitations of Israel’s military power.
[…]
Assad said that the United States’ plan for a “new Middle East” has collapsed after what he described as Hezbollah’s success in fighting against Israel, and warned Israel to seek peace or risk defeat in the future.
“They should know that they are before a historic crossroads. Either they move toward peace and the return of [Arab] rights, or they move in the direction of continued instability until one generation decides the matter,” he said.
Ah, there we have it, threats on the Golan aren’t enough. Now we already have essentially the old threat of Israel’s destruction, of pushing the Jews into the sea. Surely Syria must recognize the difference between engaging a hesitant IDF, assaulting Hezbollah in southern Lebanon but playing on the stage of global public relations, and an IDF that would face Syria on the Golan Heights and certainly on any incursion into Israel.
Yes, this is mere bluster on the part of the Syrians. Still, it is bluster that has shown they have no interest in a lasting peace that includes Israel, and it is bluster that has triggered a somewhat surprising diplomatic rebuke.
Because of the Syrian president’s belligerent rhetoric, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier had no choice but to cancel his visit to Syria, says DW’s Peter Philipp.
At some point, one should be able to say “no.” This happens all too rarely in international diplomacy, because it is simply characteristic of diplomats to stay non-committal even when they disagree and continue as if nothing had happened. That’s a false understanding of international communication, because diplomacy increasingly appears as a business without backbone or conscience.
Frank-Walter Steinmeier’s decision to cancel his visit to the Syrian capital Damascus on short notice is a positive deviation from the above scenario. In his speech before Steinmeier’s arrival, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad made it clear that there was no longer a reason for this visit.
Not because he described Israel as the “enemy.” Israel is that, as long as the two states are officially at war with each other. But Assad went further than that: He rejected the peace efforts in the Middle East. Although the Syrian president spoke about his country’s readiness for peace, he added that this would not apply to Israel. Who does Assad want to make peace with, if not with the enemy of today? One could almost conclude that he doesn’t want peace at all. And that that is why he is disqualifying himself as a constructive partner in the permanent Middle East settlement.
Not that any of those supposed revelations haven’t been obvious for more than half a century, mind you, but at least Germany showed a moment of enlightenment.
Here’s a rather touching video tribute.
Honor them.
For some U.K. families, haunted for decade upon decade, a justice of sort may be pending.
Dozens of Scottish soldiers who were shot for cowardice or desertion during the First World War are finally set to win pardons, it emerged last night. Defence Secretary Des Browne announced that the government is to seek parliamentary approval to pardon more than 300 British soldiers who were executed during the First World War for alleged “military offences”.
The announcement came hours after the family of Private Harry Farr, who was shot for cowardice during the conflict aged just 25, revealed they had been told he was to be pardoned.
Mr Browne said: “Although this is a historical matter, I am conscious of how the families of these men feel today. They have had to endure a stigma for decades.
“That makes this a moral issue too, and having reviewed it, I believe it is appropriate to seek a statutory pardon. I hope we can take the earliest opportunity to achieve this by introducing a suitable amendment to the current Armed Forces Bill.”
More than 300 Commonwealth troops – including 39 Scots – were shot by their fellow soldiers during the Great War. Their alleged crimes included desertion, cowardice, and sleeping at their posts.
But campaigners who have fought for years to have the men’s names cleared believe the majority were young and suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome after months in the trenches and enduring endless artillery bombardment.
Many of them, including some as young as 17, were sentenced to execution after courts martial lasting less than 30 minutes.
Pte Farr’s granddaughter, Janet Booth, said the family’s solicitor had been informed last night that their wish had been granted. “We are over the moon,” she added.
The move will require an amendment to the Armed Forces Bill currently going through Parliament.
John Dickinson, of Irwin Mitchell, said: “This is complete common sense and rightly acknowledges that Pte Farr was not a coward, but an extremely brave man.
“Having fought for two years practically without respite in the trenches, he was very obviously suffering from a condition we now would have no problem in diagnosing as post-traumatic stress disorder or shellshock as it was known in 1916.”
Pte Farr’s daughter Gertrude Harris, 93, added: “I am so relieved that this ordeal is now over. I have always argued that my father’s refusal to rejoin the front line, described in the court martial as resulting from cowardice, was in fact the result of shellshock, and I believe that many other soldiers suffered from this, not just my father. I hope that others who had brave relatives who were shot by their own side will now get the pardons they equally deserve.”
Some of these men may well have been deserters and cowards. That said, I truly believe this would not be the case for a great many who were courageous but worn individuals, burdened by a long, grinding war that gnawed at the soul while many cases of inept leadership cost needless gallon upon gallon of precious blood. For a good look at the years of poor Allied command decisions that almost certainly contributed to many of the involved cases, I again recommend John Mosier’s The Myth of the Great War.
Here’s wishing the pardons come that are deserved, as soldiers today would be granted greater understanding after years in the meatgrinder — if any ever again faced such enduring exposure. Here’s also wishing peace for their families.
On the first day of school in 2004, a Chechen terrorist group struck the Russian town of Beslan. Targeting children, they took more than eleven hundred hostages. The attack represented a horrifying innovation in human brutality. Here, an extraordinary accounting of the experience of terror in the age of terrorism.
It’s quite lengthy, so much so that I haven’t had a chance yet to finish it. Still, I can assure that it is engrossing. Hat tip to LGF.
Theocracy on the 100-Year-Plan
When President Bush said we’re at “war with Islamic fascists,” he was referring to Osama bin Laden and his acolytes in London trying to blow U.S. airliners out of the Atlantic skies.
But America has its own “Islamic fascists” right here at home. Once they amass the numbers, they secretly plan to nullify our Bill of Rights and religious freedoms and create their own Muslim state ruled by Islamic law. They’ve got a 100-year plan, but they’re already making inroads.
Astoundingly, some of them head the allegedly moderate Muslim groups who protested Bush’s use of the phrase “Islamic fascists.”
Unsurprisingly, our enemies, those who hope to doom our society, our civilization, our grandchildren’s freedom, are already amongst us. Most of America hasn’t realized that yet. Hat tip to In the Bullpen.
Ralph Peters looks at Israel’s current campaign in Lebanon against Hezbollah, the most recent engagement against expansionist and radical Islamic terrorists, and his outlook ain’t cheery.
Israel’s war against the Middle East’s first true terrorist army provides tough military and strategic lessons – old, new, and all too often disheartening. Israel’s been winning on the ground. And still losing the war.
This bitter conflict – in which most casualties on both sides of the border are civilians – raises troubling questions, too. Some are identical to those confronting us in Iraq. Many have troubling answers. Others have no real answers at all.
The elementary fact – which far too many in the West deny – is that our civilization has been forced into a defensive war to the death with fanatical strains of Islam – both Shi’a and Sunni. We may be on the offensive militarily, but we did not start this war – and it’s all one war, from 9/11’s Ground Zero, through Lebanon and Iraq, and on to Afghanistan.
Until that ugly fact gains wide acceptance, we’ll continue to make little decisive progress. American or Israeli, our troops are trying. But the truth is that we’re really just holding the line.
We have not yet begun to fight. And many among us still dream of avoiding this war altogether.
It can’t be done.
Mr. Peters goes on to state and expound upon seven lessons to be taken to heart from the current Israeli-Hezbollah affair.
- 1. You can win every tactical engagement and still lose at the strategic level.
- 2. The global media can overturn the verdict of the battlefield.
- 3. If you start off on the wrong foot in war, you may never recover your balance.
- 4. Technology alone can’t win 21st-century wars.
- 5. Never underestimate your enemy.
- 6. In war, take the pain up front, and the overall suffering will be far less.
- 7. Terrorism is no longer a limited, diffuse, disorganized threat.
[hat tip to Chap, who lists the above seven lessons before adding his own thoughts]
Mr. Peters follows these lessons by asking and answering two key questions, the second of which is the one which could devour many depressing hours of meditation — “Can we win “Eastern” wars with Western values?” I must concur with Mr. Peters answer to his own question:
I doubt it.
This question is going to eat at our consciences for years to come – even as we learn to do what must be done.
[…]
The wars of the future will be won by those with the greater strength of will.
The emphasis in the last quote was added by me and I want to expand a little on that quote. This is not only true of the wars of the future but also of wars of the past and present and essentially any war that is fought to be won. At some point in time after World War II, Western Civilization took up the notion that wars can be fought in a civilized manner. Actually, that has been a periodic historic flirtation, with such short-lived traditions in the past as not targeting officers, agreed-upon truces to clear casualties from battlefields, etc. Still, after WWII, when the West last took the gloves off to a large degree, we have yet again to pursue war so fully, even though our advances in technical lethality have repeatedly been faced by uncivilized barbarity, cruelty and bloody sacrifice by our enemies. It should be noted that our enemies have happily utilized advances in technology also, but have shown no restraint in their employment against targets from which the West has refrained. And yet, we continue to find our troops facing such foes on the battlefield, foes that would just as well kill our troops, slaughter our civilians or manipulate our seemingly-willing media.
Western Civilization must stop hitting the snooze button and finally wake up to the threat. It is global. It is primeval. It is not going away via impotent United Nations resolutions and cease-fires.
[Regarding Mr. Peters, as I’ve said before, I’ll always happily link his work, as previously done here, here, here and here. I’ll also happily plug my introduction to Peters, which was his somewhat-prescient novel, The War in 2020. I first cracked that entertaining adventure in the gunner’s seat of an M1 while waiting on a gunnery range at Ft. Hood, travelling in the way-back machine to May of ’93.]
The 25 Greatest PCs of All Time [hat tip to Viking Pundit, whom I agree with about the absence of the TI-99/4A, the first computer that sucked away any of my time. To that I add the Commodore 64 to the notably missing.]
Funny Star Trek motivational posters [hat tip to TexasBestGrok]
While we’re at it, how about some genuine demotivational posters for sale? They’ve been around for awhile, but I’ve always enjoyed the sarcasm available at Despair, Inc.
College football is right around the corner — here’s your chance to grab a Texas A&M Hawaiian shirt or a set of A&M scrubs (for those unfortunate souls with ties elsewhere, feel free to check here and here respectively).
Also around the corner: the best show currently on TV returns for its third season on Oct. 6, less than eight weeks from today.
Speaking of BSG, Noooooo!!! Say it ain’t so, Trapper, say it ain’t so.
Our real problem, then, is not our strength today; it is rather the vital necessity of action today to ensure our strength tomorrow.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower
Interesting, though not exactly cheerful.
Why is America waiting to be attacked by Iran? Why do we sit on the sidelines while Tehran makes war on our ally Israel in order to provoke America to join the fighting, first against Syria and then against Tehran itself? Why do we listen to the European appeasers as they pretend the Lebanon front is a regional conflict, a national liberation contest, when it is demonstrably the prelude to the wider war — the Spain 1936 to the continental war of 1939? What is the explanation for America’s willful fiction that the United Nations Security Council can engineer an accommodation in Lebanon, when it is vivid to every member state that this is a replay of September 1938, when Europe fed Hitler the Sudetenland as the U.N. now wants to feed the jihadists the sovereignty of Israel?
The most threatening answer is that America waits to be bloodied because it has lost its will to defend itself after five years of chasing rogue-state-sponsored gangsters and after three years of occupation in failed-state Iraq against Tehran- and Damascus-backed agents. A grave possibility is that America is now drained, bowed, ready to surrender to the tyrants of Tehran.
Then again, perhaps America has been here before, and it is part of America’s destiny as the New Jerusalem that we rarely start wars but that we are unusually good at finishing them.
There is a strange parallel right now to the first days of December 1941, before the Japanese sneak attack. America was still not in the war in Asia and Europe, but it was busy getting ready for a momentous calamity and was filled with the presentiment of doom.
Go read the whole article, which actually becomes more of a look back at a moment in time when the U.S. stood on the brink of World War II (hat tip to Smash).
Something that adds to the intriguing nature of the column is that it’s the second time this week that I’ve linked to someone comparing current events to the Spanish Civil War with expectations of a wider war to follow. The first was by Grim at Blackfive and was included with a couple of other pieces to chew on just two days ago.
Well, the big story today obviously the uncovering of a plan to bring terror once again to the friendly skies.
British police say they have arrested 21 people in connection with a terrorist plot to blow up aircraft flying from the United Kingdom to the United States.
The plot was “intended to be mass murder on an unimaginable scale,” Metropolitan Police Deputy Commissioner Paul Stephenson said. The UK’s threat warning level has been raised to “critical” — meaning “an attack is expected imminently.”
[…]
The plot involved hiding liquid explosives in carry-on luggage, and six to 10 flights would have been targeted, U.S. officials said.
A senior U.S. congressional source said it is believed the plotters were to carry a “British version of Gatorade” onto the planes and then mix it with a gel-like substance. The explosives were to be triggered by an iPod or a cell phone, the source said.
Some flights would have been heading from the UK to New York, Washington D.C. and California, the officials said.
The plot involved Continental, United, and American Airlines, according to an administration official who noted that the list was not exclusive.
The intelligence that uncovered the plot “makes very strong links to al Qaeda,” a senior U.S. administration official told CNN. The official said it is believed the plot was close to being operational.
Later, CNN updated the number arrested to 24 and credits the information that led to the raids to infiltration by an undercover agent.
British and Pakistani authorities teamed up to thwart the attacks, and 24 men were arrested in overnight raids in Britain, authorities said.
An undercover British agent infiltrated the group, giving the authorities intelligence on the alleged plan, several U.S. government officials said.
The men had not bought plane tickets, the officials said, but they were in the process of perusing the Internet to find flights to various cities that had similar departure times.
If you’re playing catch up this story, I’d recommend starting at Outside the Beltway, where James Joyner has put together a wealth of reports, links, videos and updates.
After that, I’d suggest Texas Rainmaker, where Jason has done some interesting pondering in a one-man attempt to connect some possibly-related dots.