Bolding mine. I would say your statement is true. Unfortunately, those diplomatic/political efforts - some of which have been going on for decades - are not going to accomplish anything soon. And Israel is being bombed now.
Which leads us to your question. What is the alternative? Is it okay to let Hezbollah continue to kill Israeli civilians, but not okay for Israel to kill lebanese civilians to stop Hezbollah? Dream all you want about solving the problem through non-military means, but the reality is that the odds of such a solution being achieved in the near future are essentially nil. Meanwhile, Israel is being bombed, and the military response has reasonable chance of reducing, if not eliminating, the effects of that. How about this question: How do you justify allowing Hezbollah to continue killing civilians unimpeded for the days, weeks, months, years it will take to convince them to stop through non-military means?
The military response is far from perfect, and hardly desirable, but it’s better than nothing, and right now it’s all anyone’s got.
I have been wondering why this thread has not been censured or moved, as handsomeharry reminds us, this is GQ. I’m not going to continue this here, because the responses are becoming emotionally based and that’s why the current mid-east fiasco exists, because of an emotional response. If the mods. choose to move it maybe we can continue elswhere.
Uh, just for the record, you’re the one whose responses expanded on the OP. And now you want to go make yourself invisible. Why don’t you start another thread, as you were interested enough to move this discussion beyond the simple, factual query in the OP?
If you’ll reread the OP you’ll see that the “question” was rather vague and the accompanying comments invited comment. I realize I went past an objective response, but I felt it was necessary to give some perspective. I have incurred the wrath of the mods. twice in the past 8-9 months and I’m trying not to run afoul again. I look forward to continuing the subject, but not in GQ.
If this is read by a moderator, I request that this thread be moved to a more appropriate forum. Thanks.
I did read the OP and have a different estimation of it than you. It seems rather specific to me. But, I’ll accept that you read it differenty. Moving on, I was curious to see your response to Gary T.'s three questions (as well as Grossbottom’s comments, if you are of the mind): (emphasis mine)
While an insurgency doesn’t necessarily imply militant opposition, it often leads to that. When it does the militants are commonly referred to as guerillas. Your description of an insurgency seems a bit biased and naive.
I’m not sure what you mean by:
“In fact, guerilla fighters and insurgents have the same biological needs and vulnerabilities as the rest of us. When those needs are denied and those vulnerabilities are exploited, they die as easily as everyone else”
but certainly guerilla fighters require logistical support to survive and be effective. While some support often comes from outside sources, it’s still essential that they are accepted by the local citizenry. Hezbollah, like Hamas, has been particularly successful in their insugency activity, providing real infrastucture as well as basic, life sustaining, services to the populous.
Third, not once have I heard a person eager to assert that ‘conventional forces don’t work on guerillas’ offer a single workable alternative other than retreat. This does not surprise me.
Sorry, I had other things to attend to. I don’t know how that got posted before I was finished, but to continue:
I’m not a trained stategist, nor even a tactician, but more of an observer. I’d certainly be interested in instances where the U.S., or other forces for that matter, defeated guerilla forces and created long lasting stability without castastrophic harm to the infrastucture and the local population.
“Third, not once have I heard a person eager to assert that ‘conventional forces don’t work on guerillas’ offer a single workable alternative other than retreat. This does not surprise me.”
I can’t imagine that being true, unless, of course, you think that diplomacy, compromise and negotiation are forms of retreat?
“The supposedly logical reasons for the propagation of the “conventional doesn’t work” meme aren’t logical. They are moral. The unwillingness to tolerate the moral cost of such operations is not indicative of their lack of effectiveness. It is instead indicative of a society’s unwillingness to tolerate the loss of the moral highground in exchange for the actual highground, and being so unwilling, the stupidity, cruelty and futility of engaging the enemy in the first place.”
Of course it’s more logical, as well as moral, to seek compromise rather than dominate and supress. That last statement sounds like an excerpt from the Bush doctrine of world dominance. In case you have been paying attention, it ain’t workin’ to good!
So Israel gets a few civilians killed and it gives up land. More civilians killed, more land given up. They run out or OT and more civilians are killed because the extremists think Israel proper is part of “Palestine”. They compromise and disband the state. Then you get the anti-Semites that just want to kill Jews. So the Jews vacate the middle east. Would that make you happy? That is exactly what you call “moral”. I am sure you would probably pooh-pooh and get all high minded every time the terrorists kill civilians, but you know what? They don’t give a fuck. At least Israel cares enough to not target civilians. Those you want to “compromise” with is making no bones that their intent is to target civilians. Yet, Israel is the bad guy? What kind of fucked up world did I wake up in?
A world where Israel is killing far more people than their adversaries. It doesn’t matter that Israel “cares enough to not target civilians”, as you interpret it; what matters is that they are killing them. Not to mention doing what they can to maximize suffering among the survivors by destroying the infrastructure.
Actually this line has pretty much been attributed to Peter Arnett – a Vietnam reporter at the time, though he claimed at the time to quote an unnamed major it now seems most likely he invented the phrase himself, to “sex-up” a reporting from Vietnam a bit. As a propaganda tool, it’s a damn good line though, but today I’d say it’s most relevant in showing how reporters too have political agenda.
No, let’s review again. Guerilla warfare is a strategic and tactical manner of deployment and engagement, and has been for over two thousand years. It is small unit infantry hitting infrastructure and, if necessary, engaging opposition troops under set circumstances. It is nothing more than this. The United States trains and fields its own guerillas, we call some of them Special Forces. Take out a railroad, take out a telecom line, take out a bridge, and so forth. Find and train local friendlies to further support operations. Avoid direct contact with enemy forces in strength whenever possible. For the guerilla, local support is nice but not required unless an extended deployment is contemplated. For best effect, guerillas precede and/or supplement friendly conventional forces. The guerilla is a soldier, sometimes with a political bent, but sometimes not.
An insurgent may conduct guerilla operations, but often does not. An insurgent can be an unarmed woman in a wheelchair printing handbills. An insurgent can be a receptionist feeding intelligence back to the insurgency. The insurgent’s goal is political change, which may not even be much of a military task. Unlike the guerilla, the insurgent absolutely relies on some support from the local populace. The local populace is, after all, ultimately the insurgent’s objective. The insurgent is a political, sometimes with a militant bent, but sometimes not.
If we had a venn diagram, there’d be plenty of overlap, but the insurgents and guerillas would not be the same. Examples:
In fiction, the high school students in the movie Red Dawn are not insurgents, they are guerillas.
An intelligence operative sent to liase with and encourage local disaffected college students in a certain Middle Eastern theocracy is not a guerilla, he is an insurgent.
T.E. Lawrence and Che Guevara were both guerillas and insurgents.
Although the distinction is not in and of itself crucial to your original and incorrect point, the use of the terms interchangeably suggests a woeful misunderstanding of the larger Israel/Hezbollah situation…
…which brings us to the application portion. For Israeli purposes, Hezbollah are not even remotely insurgents. Their insurgency was directed against Lebanon, and has already succeeded. The rest of Lebanon is no longer sovereign over the south, which makes it a de facto breakaway state that has provoked a neighboring country into war. Israel has invaded what is effectively Hezbollahland, and is currently using conventional (and I assume, unconventional) tactics against the guerillas therein. The Hezbollah guerillas will lose, because they cannot do what a guerilla must do to win: avoid enemy forces in strength and cause ongoing damage to the opposition until the opposition capitulates. What’s Hezbollah going to do, blow up its own stuff? For the guerilla, the shit has most definitely hit the fan when you’re forced to be a guerilla in your own country, and the best you can do is ambush trained soldiers that kick your ass and then blow up your house with artillery.
I don’t think they’re relevant to your original points in this thread.
Such logic and morality leaves people dying today in the streets of the Lebanon, as it has for decades. I shall be forever in wonder of persons who seek compromise with fanatics and call it logic.
Don’t be ridiculous, George Bush can’t read a sentence like that.
I will leave it up to you to figure out why people are now passing around this truly absurd “hiding among civilians is a myth” meme, what their agenda is, and why they would deny facts in order to make these patently false claims.
Sounds like a bit of obfuscation – Hezbollah doesn’t hide behind its own civilian members, but rather behind whichever of the Teeming Millions have the misfortune to live in the areas where they muscle in.
As long as I’m at it, some (I hope) fair-use snippets with refutations.
First, note that the word terrorist is put into quotes. Suggesting that an organization whose M.O. includes the deliberate targeting of civilians is not a terrorist organization is a very, very strange claim. Much more strange in that it’s never directly refuted, only insinuated with quotes.
Moving on, we are told that specific instances are “almost always false”… because of a general belief on the part of the reporter? He didn’t actually investigate many (if any) of the actual claims of Hezbollah using civilians as shields, and simply discounted them because he knows, without error I’m sure, that Hezbollah simply doesn’t do that sort of thing.
He also ignores that one does not need to ‘mingle’ with civilians if all one is doing is driving a truck into an area, firing off a few rockets, and then relocating. Who is going to narc you out if you’re in a different village by dusk?
In addition, the author quickly contradicts himself.
So Hezbollah, which doesn’t mingle with civilians, was in Haret Hreik and civilians were also in that area, and they um… weren’t be used as shields. Because Hezbollah never does that. Even though it was doing that in Haret Hreik.
And, of course, another example in the author’s own words demonstrating how Hezbollah, um… doesn’t use civilians as shields?
So the reason that the IDF’s claims are “almost always false” are because Hezbollah simply doesn’t mingle with civilians, except when it does.
Well, with such unrestricted access, how could anybody doubt he got the full story?
Feh. The author has a clear ideological axe to grind, relies on (evidently false) generalities to refute specifics, and thinks that a carefully controlled view of what’s going on has allowed him to speak as an expert.
Meanwhile, there are witnesses who talk about Hezbollah invading their villages, videos of Hezbollah launching rockets from civilian areas, and numerous articles describing exactly that behavior.
And the question remains, what is the alternative? Israel faces the Hobson’s choice of doing little or nothing and being destroyed, or doing enough to have an effect. The latter necessarily involves lots of deaths. There is no way for Israel to pinpoint their response to those attacking them. To suggest that Israel’s response should be “proportionate” to the attacks on them, or that they are worse than Hezbollah because they kill more people than Hezbollah does, is ludicrous. There is no equivalence in the strategic options available to Hezbollah and Israel in this situation, and it’s ridiculous to expect that there should be equivalence in the results of their efforts.
Lebanese civilians are dying because a) Hezbollah is purposely attacking Israeli civilians and b) Hezbollah is doing it amidst Lebanese civilians. If Hezbollah stopped their attacks, civilian deaths on both sides would stop. If Israel stopped their counterattacks, Israeli civilian deaths would continue. To blame Israel for doing the only thing it realistically can do, while not even mentioning that Hezbollah initiated this mess and carefully operates in a manner that is calculated to result in heavy Lebanese civilian casualties, is stupefyingly shortsighted.