Why does this make me sick to the pit of my stomach?

by on April 6, 2009 9

asks Jeff Blankfort... this being a JTA article saying the Pentagon is studying the 2006 Lebanon war for lessons about how to fight non-state actors...

Posted in Israel/Palestine, US Policy in the Middle East

{ 9 comments... read them below or add one }

  1. Citizen says:
    April 6, 2009 at 5:14 pm

    Oh yeah, the Israel-firsters, and their disloyal USA whores are totally into this fight.

  2. Joshua says:
    April 6, 2009 at 6:56 pm

    I think you're taking the wrong view about this. While the tactics of not dealing with non-state actors may seem self-defeating (and there are many in the State Department who think this way too) this study is a testament to how the world is now changing and how groups like Hamas and Hezbollah could be best countered militarily (but not politically as this study is not meant to deliberate over). If anything this could be the end of silly drone attacks and air sieges that prove so ineffective and so short-sighted since Israel was incapable of doing a thing with their air power against Hezbollah.

  3. Eurosabra says:
    April 6, 2009 at 11:47 pm

    It's rather relevant to study non-state actors who can destroy a train station in your major mixed Arab-Jewish northern industrial city using stand-off weapons, especially when it seems likely to exercise state power as an Iranian proxy very soon.

    Hezbollah made the transition to strategic threat because it is practicing what the Egyptians tried to do as a side-show in 1973 (strategic rocket threat to urban Israel combined with anti-tank missiles to keep the IDF tanks off of the strategic rocket threat) but still wants the "poor little victim" sympathy vote of the vicious anti-Israel EuroLeft for its human shields.

    It would be a great irony if they killed enough Galilee Arabs with indiscriminate rockets that the war became one between Israeli Sunni Muslim Arabs and Lebanese Shia Muslim Arabs. So far Israeli-Palestinians seem to be taking it as fatalistic Oriental shahidin, but perhaps the State of Israel will soon have another minority in its ranks like the Druze and the Circassians, crying for equality and equal protection because they've already paid the "blood tax of belonging."

  4. Rowan says:
    April 7, 2009 at 1:27 am

    Eurosabra, you are one of the great "haters"' of this site, aren't you? Your hatred of, and contempt for Arabs shine through every single word you write, as you trade on your pied noir pseudo-expertise.

  5. Citizen says:
    April 7, 2009 at 12:40 pm

    The redcoats had to deal with guerilla warfare. Why? They were the occupying power, the far richer, more powerful power.

  6. Eurosabra says:
    April 7, 2009 at 12:49 pm

    Not really, Rowan, I consider that both Hezbollah and the Israeli-Palestinians of the Galilee are doing what they're doing for political reasons, and for Hezbollah, mainly reasons of local Lebanese political culture, at least as valid for them as the IDF's continual "The Arabs only understand force." Cross-border solidarity is a factor in the lives of Golani Druze, who identify as Syrian, but not in the lives of Israeli-Palestinians with respect to Lebanon, and enough Bedouin have been kidnapped and returned as corpses that there is some bitterness towards Hezbollah as such. It is conceivable that enough destruction could make Galilee Arabs FIGHT for their homes as the current level of destruction has caused them to make a "you owe us" claim for protection on the state.

    The Ha'aretz interviews with Arab survivors of Hezbollah bombardment, though, are couched in terms of helplessness and apologia for Hezbollah. They're stuck. "Kiss the hand you dare not bite."

  7. Citizen says:
    April 7, 2009 at 2:18 pm

    I put brass knucks inside my glove because I weigh 80 pounds & my opponent weighs 280 pounds–& he has double my arm length, and eats much better. Euro, get back to the point of Phil's article. The theme is: Let's put brass knucks inside our gloves too, weighing 280 pounds and having double the arm's length of our opponent is simply not enough for our humane ideas to take
    hold.

  8. Eurosabra says:
    April 8, 2009 at 2:47 pm

    Non-state actors are a very special problem, because unless you reach the actual men with the rockets, and them alone, their surrounding sympathetic population is likely to blame you for any response to the genocidal efforts of the men with the rockets. They are almost a law enforcement problem, except that every element in Lebanon that is also the "law", the State, the UN, the Lebanese Army, hates Israel and wants to see it disappear (since 1948) and hates the Jews of Eretz Israel and wants to see them disappear (since 1924, because of the Kinneret Border problem between the British and Syrian Mandates).

    I shoot my opponent twice from a distance of 50m and he dies as his suicide vest detonates. We must be "boxing" against different people.

  9. Citizen says:
    April 8, 2009 at 5:41 pm

    One never reaches the state actors under color of law at all. You actually believe state propaganda.
    Goebbels would've loved you.

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