Heck, why can’t Israel get proxies of its own to massacre innocents? It’ll help them fit in with everybody else!
They just wanna be liked…
Yeah, they just wanna be like everyone else in the region…
-XT
Pointing at Egypt as a “success” is a little short-sighted, I think. Egypt is an extremely repressive state that’s basically a ticking time-bomb. Sooner or later it’s going to go off, and all the pent-up resentment is going to come flooding out.
I should point out that I don’t think that Israel should just sit quietly and take every punch thrown their way passively. I don’t see any reason they shouldn’t defend themselves, and do so very aggressively. It’s the details that matter. This campaign in Lebanon, for example, if it were focused extremely tightly on Hizbollah, might actually do some good. Sure, it wouldn’t hurt Hizbollah as much as the blanket attacks on basic infrastructure do, at least, not in conventional terms. But it would do more to isolate them from their base of support. Attacking as indiscriminately as Israel appears to be doing cements their base of support. Expecting this to be a “wakeup call” to the Lebanese govt is just silly. Lebanon could devolve back into civil war at the drop of a hat, and will most certainly do so if the govt acts overly aggressively against Hizbollah. The sad thing is that a very tightly focused campaign might have actually pleased the Leb govt, hurting Hizbollah in a way that the govt dares not attempt. Instead we get a blanket attack on physical infrastructure, which might net a few gains in terms of Hizbollah’s logistics, but won’t hurt them were it really matters, which is their base of support, and alienates any moderates to boot.
Pointing to Israel’s relative success in removing Jordan and Egypt as threats is a bad analogy, though. There you have and have had stable regimes fielding a conventional military threat. Blatant military power is a great way to deal with threats like that. But it doesn’t work so well against enemies engaging in assymetric warfare based on popular insurgencies. The two situations are fundamentally different, and expecting that a strategy that works in one to work in the other as well is missing the point.
And yes, I’d say that slaughtering the most of the population of Jerusalem and burning the city to the ground rises to the level of genocide. The fact that it didn’t wipe out every last Jew doesn’t change that fact any more than it does in the case of the Holocaust.
Israel can live with low level aggravation, it does not like it, but it is used to it.
I know this sounds callous, but having troops patrolling the Lebanon border provides them with good combat experience, also the opportunity to legitimately kill a few people who are trying to kill them.
What Israel cannot tolerate is having real rockets fired at them, the glorified pipe bombs that Hamas were using did little damage, but those Katyushas are nasty.
Yesterday’s 50km effort is intolerable.
I think I have figured out what Israel is up to.
They know the rockets are there, they probably know fairly precisely where they are.
They cut off the airport as a means of re-supply, ditto they have cut off the port, and anyone trying to bring stuff in by land from Syria is in for a hard time.
They also know that every nutter within 1000 miles is streaming towards Lebanon, and my guess is that they are rubbing their hands with glee. They know (as others have pointed out) that they cannot make more enemies, if anything the best bet is to get them in the same place, South Lebanon is ideal.
Using troops on the ground is just insane, except it isn’t, they are decoys, designed to /prolong/ the scrap. Hizbollah are going to run low on all sorts of supplies, they are also going to have yet more mouths to feed. Those bunkers are probably pretty smelly.
By drawing Hizbollah into one defined area, and making it sufficiently dangerous to be out in the open, the Israelis have a very good chance of getting them just where they want them - at which point they start using serious materiel - Bunker Busters.
When Hizbollah realize that they are sitting in their graves, they’ll make a run for the North, at which point South Lebanon gets the Dresden treatment - it is probably already a nicely stacked bonfire just waiting for incendiary carpet bombing.
I’ll bet that they’ve been using explosives deliberately designed to minimize fire.
The ones that are not entombed will be cremated.
The important thing is to draw as many Hizbollah to the South.
- they need to believe that they are ‘winning’.
Once those two phases are completed the Maronites and other sects in the North are going to find themselves with a lot of non-combatent refugees and a relatively small number of Hizbollah. It does not take much imagination to figure out what will happen.
The last time they had a little massacre, the Israelis got blamed, this time the Israelis will be miles away.
Possibly after the inferno has died down, they’ll put in troops with flamethrowers to flush out the last few survivors and make the place safe for television crews.
They need to get maximum publicity for the material carnage, as a warning to others.
Ideally they want as few bodies as possible, especially women and children.
One thing I’ve noticed is that nobody seems to have asked exactly who Hesbollah really are.
Curious because I suspect a lot of them are the descendants of the Palestinian refugees who turned Lebanon into a mess in the first place.
I would expect that to be brought up when the real Lebanese started culling the ‘foreigners’ who have intimidated them for decades.
Israel’s best tactics are to drag this out as long as possible, clear the place of non-combatents, fill it with as many combatents as possible, then go just one step short of nukeing the place.
Right now they are pulling their punches.
In some ways it is irresponsible of me posting this, in some ways not, it is all perfectly obvious stuff, the Bunker Busters going via Scotland was definitely a deliberate leak.
No way would Mrs Beckett utter a squeak without clearing it with Bush’s poodle.
Even if Hezbollah decided to pull out now, they would find North Lebanon extremely unfriendly and if they got into Syria I suspect that Assad would have them over the border in Iraq within days (and probably there would be a conveniently tipped off bunch of Americans waiting for them).
My take is that Hezbollah are dead.
Letting them know, will not help them, if they cut and run to the North, they’ll aggravate the non Hezbollah Lebanese even more than a few stragglers.
Hmm… thinking about it, the Israelis have probably deliberately left them enough rockets to justify stringing things out. Since they have had at least 5 years to plan this, they’ll have figured that one out pretty early on.
As long as Hezbollah are seen as the aggressors, they are fair game.
I wonder how other states are going to take to the idea of having a load of refugees foisted on them - the Russians could offer to airlift them to Iran.
Thinking things over, there are some interesting outcomes from this.
Not exactly on topic, but slightly related.
When Hezbollah are liquidated, their cousins in Hamas are going to find themselves in a difficult situation. Nobody wants to be identified with a bunch of total losers.
Hamas will certainly lose local support on the West Bank and Ghaza.
If they were opportunistic, the Hamas MPs would come to an agreement with Mahmoud Abbas, they would have zero chance of re-election, so jumping ship would make short and long term sense.
That would open floodgates of aid, unemployed males tend to dig tunnels and get up to mischief (as in WWII prison camps) if they are building an infrastructure and buying conveniently subsidized Chinese goods, they would have little time for annoying the Israelis.
Since Abbas is regarded as a ‘thoroughly sound chap’ the transition could be very rapid.
It could be two birds with one stone.
So Israel has cleverly tricked Hezbollah into destroying thier rocket stockpiles by forcing them to fire those rockets at Israeli cities?
I’m not convinced that’s such a great plan 
Well, the hopefully part of that is that the rise in Hezbollah rocket attacks is them using up their stockpile (and hopefully rapidly exhausting it) and not because of increased supply runs from Syria and Iran, with Israel destroying and/or monitoring the various supply routes. Short of a blanket invasion (or something even harsher), there likely wasn’t any way for Israel to knock out all the hidden rockets. The rockets were going to be used in any case, and instead of three a week indefinitely, there might now be a hundred in the first month, and hopefully none afterward.
I know it sucks, but what other choice was there?
I don’t think Hezbollah’s goal is the destruction of Israel. They were born as a resistance group to Israel’s occupation, and I don’t think much has changed from that. My understanding is that their goals are:
[ol]
[li]Act as a resistance to Israel aggression[/li][li]Remove Israel from the Sheeba Farms[/li][li]Free Lebanese prisoners held by Israel[/li][/ol]
From where I stand all three of those are legitimate, believable goals. If those three are met I think the militant wing of Hezbollah will be greatly reduced in power, and the political/social wing will take over.
I can’t seem to locate their manifesto (or whatever) quickly. However, they were formed from a conglomeration of other Shia terror groups IIRC, and I’m fairly confident they have rejected THEIR attitudeds toward Israel. Since you can’t prove a negative I won’t ask you for a cite though…I’ll try and find one myself tomorrow, time permitting.
Thats an interesting ‘goal’…since they sort of, you know, initiated the hostilities. Were they pre-empting Israel’s aggression or something? You’d have a point if Israel decided for no reason to invade Lebanon…but then, I’d think that the actual Lebanese military would be more appropriate in that situation than a bunch of loose cannons…
YMMV
Why do yo consider this legitimate? The UN has declared that Israeli occupation is legitimate, that that area was part of Syria and a prize of war from (IIRC) the '67 conflict. Oh, HB THINKS its Lebanese…but are you saying their convoluted thinking on this over rides a UN resolution? Are you saying gasp that the UN resolutions mean nothing?? :eek:
While this MIGHT be a legitimate goal, I’d think it would be a legitimate goal of the Lebanese GOVERNMENT…not some para-military organization out to ‘free’ these ‘prisoners’ through force of arms. Kind of a slippery slope there IMHO…
I disagree completely that they are legitimate (for a para-military organization), or believable. I also disagree that if Israel met them (not that I think in several of those cases they could or should), that it would necessarily translate to de-fanging HB.
-XT
No idea how legit this cite is, but here HB seems to be saying that the destruction of Israel is one of their core goals:
Of course, they rationalize it, but it seems to be in there. I will note however that this paragraph may NOT be legit…at least there seems to be some question:
-XT
They may have initiated the hostilities in this particular instince, but it’s difficult to see how they initiated the Israeli occupation of Lebanon before they, y’know, existed. Plus it’s meaningless to talk about starting hostilities any more in the Middle East. There has been so much military action from both sides any “new” fighting can simply be said to be an extension of past fighting.
Regardless, it doesn’t matter what causes a foreign power to occupy your land, all that matters is that there is a foreign power on your land and you want them out.
I don’t know why you feel the need for this childishness.
Anyways, people rarely accept that territory lost in war is really lost. Besides, I don’t believe Lebanon ever signed a peace treaty with Israel ceding that particular peace of land.
Maybe it should be, but the fact of the matter is that this particular goal belongs to Hezbollah.
Why not?
At worst you remove the legitimate reasons for Hezbollah’s existence and push it to the fringe as an extremist group.
You are again assuming that Lebanon has a legitimate claim to the land. Where do you get that from? Because THEY think so…or do you have a cite that Lebanon has a legitimate claim that Israel should honor? This Wiki article seems to contridict that:
So…its Syrian land that was officially annexed by Israel. This annexation is confirmed by the UN.
Er…huh? How am I ‘being childish’? I note you didn’t answer the question…and there WAS a question in there, though I was trying to ask it more light heartedly than perhaps I should. But ‘childish’?
Um…why would Lebanon have signed such a treaty? Am I missing something here? Afaict it was SYRIAN land that was captured during a war of aggression…LAUNCHED by Syria btw. They may have a legitimate claim I suppose…though they seem to have conceeded this point (while fighting a proxy war using…yet, Hezbollah).
From the same Wiki article:
My emphasis.
So, their goals are legit, in your mind…because they have them? Or because THEY believe they are? Or something like that? Does this go for any organization or nation?
I did a point by point explaination as to why I felt they weren’t legit. Instead of calling me childish, read what I wrote and then respond to it. If you disagree, fine…tell me where you disagree.
Um…IMHO they ARE a fringe/extremist group. Pretty obviously so, to me at least. The fact that they also have a political wing doesn’t mean that the militant half is somehow legitimate.
-XT
Forgot this part (same cite as above):
My emphasis.
-XT
First off you have repeatedly claimed in various posts in this thread that the annexation of Syrian land as “a prize of war” (your words) has been endorsed by the UN. You are wrong. The annexation has never been accepted by the international community and specifically not by the UN. The UN is not in the business of recognising prizes of war and the Golan Heights are regarded as occupied territory.
Security Council resolution 497 which was voted on unanimously states "the Israeli decision to impose its laws, jurisdiction and administration in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights is null and void and without international legal effect".
Secondly even the Shebaa Farms wikipedia article you are quoting from recognises the status of the area is much more complicated then you believe.
You chose to leave out this bit for instance:
[
](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shebaa_Farms)
From which it is perfectly clear that while Israel captured the region from the state of Syria that there is a longstanding belief by many of the locals that they are in fact Lebanese and the state of Lebanon has a reasonable claim to the area on this basis.
(all the cites I use in here are from the Wiki cite on the Shebaa Farms I posted above)
You are right…I overstated my case with respect to a formal endorsement by the UN. This is about as far as they would go:
I didn’t ‘choose to leave this out’ for some nefarious reason but because I didn’t feel it was important. Land disputes in that region, especially after the Europeans put their oar in the water, are pretty much epidemic. The key, to me, was…who was governing the region, who had control. Answer…Syria. And Lebanon didn’t seem to dispute this…not until decades after Israel had occupied (and annexed) the region.
As for what I left out…the info was there for anyone (you obviously) who wanted to read through the cite to get additional info.
To expand…why didn’t I think it important?
The Lebanese government showed little interest in disputing this with Syria, the Syrian government had control of the region…and most telling of course:
Bit late in the game for them to suddenly decide that, yes indeed this was Lebanese land after all…33 YEARS late in the game in fact.
And yet they made no claim on this land for something like 33 years…until suddenly deciding in 2000 that in fact the land was their’s. :dubious: Prior to that and even before Israel captured it in '67 they made no move to claim the land from Syria, and didn’t seem to even care about it at that time. I agree that the Europeans casually re-writing borders to their whim complicates things…but it doesn’t seem to have been an issue…not until Israel invaded Southern Lebanon at least and was being forced to leave.
YMMV of course, but I think its a major stretch to say that Lebanon has a legitimate claim to that land Even if they DO have a legitimate claim, its an even bigger stretch that HB attempting to recapture it through a continuous low level guerilla campaign is in any way justified or legitimate.
-XT
Well there we will have to agree to disagree. What may be key to the locals isn’t a poorly defined border left over from colonial times or who exercised effective control over the region in 1967 but what they feel their identity to be. No doubt Syria and others have exploited this dispute to keep up hostility along the border but it’s still a real and longstanding dispute to which Lebanon has a reasonable claim.
One that it took them 30 odd years to figure out they had. You are right though…we’ll just have to agree to disagree on this point. Is it your feeling that, even if Lebanon DOES have a legitimate claim to this land that this necessarily legitimizes HB and their actions? That was the root question after all.
-XT
No, that was not the root question.
Israel is unable to defeat Hezbollah for the same reason America was unable to defeat the Viet Cong.
You can’t exterminate termites with a machine gun.
The old Soviet Union is bank rolling them with funds and weapons galore and the Chinese threaten to invade and start a global world war if there is an invasion of the North? Who knew??
-XT