John Oliver’s monologue about the US drone policy notes that US drone policies are like, “Harvey Keitel’s balls,” because, “From a distance you think, ‘Well, I understand the contours of those.’ But if you were to really examine them, you’d discover that they’re actually lost in a haze of fuzziness and gray areas. Much like the rules for our drone strikes.”
Barack Obama is giving Henry Kissinger some serious competition for “Worst American recipient of the Nobel Prize ever.”
The inimitable Charlie Pierce pulls some quotes from the early 1960s:
My Esky colleague John H. Richardson whiles away the slow days by immersing himself in recently declassified CIA documents. (Buy his book to find out why, dammit.) This is a very valuable habit he has, at least to those of John’s friends who write political blogs for a living. So, the other day, he hipped me to some recently declassified CIA material, specifically National Intelligence Estimates dated April 17, 1963 and titled “Prospects In South Vietnam.” These concerned, among other things, the CIA’s assessment of the relative strength of the Viet Cong in our adopted Indochinese client state. There’s some material that seems almost unbearably sad in retrospect:
We believe that Communist progress has been blunted and that the situation is improving. Strengthened South Vietnamese capabilities and effectiveness, and particularly US involvement, are causing the Viet Cong great difficulty, although there are as yet no persuasive indications that the Communists have been grievously hurt.
………
For weapons, ammunition, and related supplies, the Viet Cong rely primarily upon capture from government forces.
………
Nevertheless, the heavy US involvement and close working relationships between US and Vietnamese personnel have fundamentally altered the outlook…Developments in the past year or two have gone some distance in establishing a basis for winning over the peasantry and in improving the efficiency and the civilian bureaucracy…
………
Developments during the last year or two also show some promise of resolving the political weaknesses, particularly that of insecurity in the countryside, upon which the insurgency has fed. However, the government’s capacity to embark on the broader measures required to translate military success into lasting political stability is questionable.
History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes.
We are so f%$#ed.
We are now bombing ISIS targets in Syria:
The United States stepped up its war against the Islamic State militant group, launching air strikes on targets in Syria for the first time.
The Pentagon press secretary, rear admiral John Kirby, confirmed that the US and allied nations sent fighter jets, bomber aircraft and Tomahawk missiles in an operation against Isis that he described as “ongoing”.
A US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, indicated that Raqqa, a Syrian stronghold of Isis, was among the targets of the operation, which began in the early hours of Tuesday morning local time.
The first wave of strikes finished about 90 minutes later at around 10pm EDT (2am GMT), but the operation was expected to continue for several more hours,
Airstrikes against Isis targets in Iraq, which began on 7 August, now occur daily. Of Syria, the official said: “If we need to go daily, we will.”
The US was joined in the Syria operation by Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, an official said.
This will be going on for months before we see any meaningful impact in Iraq.
(Update)
It appears that F-22s were used in a combat role for the first time, which means one or two things:
I’m pretty certain about the first point, and less so about the second. Basic physics would have the F-22 more vulnerable to longer wave (VHF) radars than the B-2, which does not appear to have flown sortees, and the Syrians do have VHF radars.
Also, despite the USAF trying to kill the aircraft for the past 30+ years, A-10s Warthog close support aircraft are being deployed to the Middle East. (So not a surprise)
With both the House and Senate approving funds to train “moderates” in Syria:
President Obama’s plan to train and equip moderate Syrian rebels exposed a deep rift Thursday among Democrats over waging war, with a large bloc of liberals staunchly opposed to the modest mission, fearing another long-term engagement in Iraq.
While the Senate sent the measure Thursday to the White House for Obama’s signature, votes this week demonstrated the tenuous support he has from his own party in carrying out the mission to “degrade and destroy” Islamic State forces. Several of the party’s rising stars, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, rejected the proposal, while in the House, Obama’s proposal won approval only because a vast majority of Republicans backed him.
Many rank-and-file Democrats who did support Obama said they expect a broad debate in November and December, after the midterm elections, so that legislation can be approved to place broad constraints on the U.S. military’s ability to carry out the operation and set a specific deadline for the mission’s end.
After the votes, Obama thanked Congress “for the speed and seriousness with which they approached this issue” and noted that “a majority of Democrats and Republicans in the House and the Senate” had voted to train and equip the rebels.
Note that 10 Democrats, and 12 Republicans voted against, and most of them did because they do not think that arming the rebels will work.
The history of the Syrian civil wars that you can characterize the participants as follows:
The union of “moderate” and “functional military force” is a null set.
The New York Times editorial board feels the same way, calling this strategy a “risky bet“.
But we will train them, because Obama has strenuously insisted that there will be no boots on the ground.
Of course, LBJ said something very similar on October 21, 1964, “We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.”
The historical echos are not reassuring.
I would bet dollars to Navy beans that we will have troops on the ground and in combat in Iraq by the end of the Obama administration.
Guess what, our pet rebels in Syria have made a non-aggression pact with ISIS:
Syrian rebels and jihadists from the Islamic State have agreed a non-aggression pact for the first time in a suburb of the capital Damascus, a monitoring group said on Friday.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the ceasefire deal was agreed between IS and moderate and Islamist rebels in Hajar al-Aswad, south of the capital.
Under the deal, “the two parties will respect a truce until a final solution is found and they promise not to attack each other because they consider the principal enemy to be the Nussayri regime.”
Nussayri is a pejorative term for the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam to which President Bashar al-Assad belongs.
Obama’s war just lost one of its cornerstones.
There is no credible moderate rebel force in Syria, and Obama’s truly Kafkaesque suggestion that Syrians firing at planes bombing them would be considered a hostile act, he has, “Vowed to retaliate against President Bashar al-Assad if Syrian forces shot at American planes,” won’t solve that.
ISIS beheaded the journalists and that aid worker because they want to entangle the United States in yet another war in the hope of bleeding us dry, and Obama, and the “bomb everything” caucus, have proved remarkably accommodating to their plans.
What a shocker.
Obama wants the folks who have supported Jihadis in Syria to take a lead roll in fighting the Jihadi group that has gotten out of hand, ISIS/ISIL/IS, and rather unsurprisingly, their response is f%$3 you white man:
Many Arab governments grumbled quietly in 2011 as the United States left Iraq, fearful it might fall deeper into chaos or Iranian influence. Now, the United States is back and getting a less than enthusiastic welcome, with leading allies like Egypt, Jordan and Turkey all finding ways on Thursday to avoid specific commitments to President Obama’s expanded military campaign against Sunni extremists.
As the prospect of the first American strikes inside Syria crackled through the region, the mixed reactions underscored the challenges of a new military intervention in the Middle East, where 13 years of chaos, from Sept. 11 through the Arab Spring revolts, have deepened political and sectarian divisions and increased mistrust of the United States on all sides.
“As a student of terrorism for the last 30 years, I am afraid of that formula of ‘supporting the American effort,’ ” said Diaa Rashwan, a scholar at the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, a government-funded policy organization in Cairo. “It is very dangerous.”
The tepid support could further complicate the already complex task Mr. Obama has laid out for himself in fighting the extremist Islamic State in Iraq and Syria: He must try to confront the group without aiding Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, or appearing to side with Mr. Assad’s Shiite allies, Iran and the militant group Hezbollah, against discontented Sunnis across the Arab world.
While Arab nations allied with the United States vowed on Thursday to “do their share” to fight ISIS and issued a joint communiqué supporting a broad strategy, the underlying tone was one of reluctance. The government perhaps most eager to join a coalition against ISIS was that of Syria, which Mr. Obama had already ruled out as a partner for what he described as terrorizing its citizens.
You can have a successful war, or you can continue to overthrow the Assad regime.
I don’t think that you can have both.
Assad, Hezbollah, and Iran, are about the only participants in this little adventure who are truly enthusiastic about helping to put ISIS down.
You fight the war with the allies you have, not the allies you want.
My son turned 15, and we took him out to dinner last night, so I did not watch Obama’s speech last night.
Reading the transcript has lead me to agree with Dan Froomkin, who described his stated strategy as a, “Hot Mess.”
The New York Times rather pithily observes, “American intelligence agencies have concluded that it poses no immediate threat to the United States. Some officials and terrorism experts believe that the actual danger posed by ISIS has been distorted in hours of television punditry and alarmist statements by politicians.”
That’s my analysis in a nutshell: Obama is a prisoner of “inside the Beltway” conventional wisdom, which is, “Something is wrong with the world, we must bomb it.”
I would note that, rather unsurprisingly, the Saudi offer of “support” is to set up training camps for “moderate” rebels, where the US military will train them to “fight ISIS”.
Considering the fact that it was Gulf state support for the rebels in the first place that turned a brutal crackdown on protests into a civil war, and Saudi Prince Bandar bin al Sultan was ISIS’s primary patron, and we’re going to help them to continue the Sunni-Shia “great game” there.
I also think that the course of action proposed by Obama is far more optimistic about the facts on the ground than is justified, and as blogger Pat Lang observes, the strategy that Obama is promulgating has, “Too many moving parts.”
He notes that Obama is assuming that the Gulf states and Turkey will blithely work with the Shia government in Iraq, that the new government in Baghdad will be inclusive enough to bring Iraq’s Sunnis back into government, that we can fight ISIS in Iraq while supporting the “right” rebels in Syria, and rebuild the Iraqi army, and continuing to show implacable hostility to Iran, all while not putting any American “feet” on the ground.
Also remember that we are not targeting isolated cells of insurgents, ISIS is effectively a government in the areas that it controls.
It won’t be driven out by airstrikes.
We are back in Iraq, and we will have troops in combat situations on the ground before Obama leaves office.
So much for Obama’s opposition to “Stupid Wars.”
Yes, his motives are suspect, but when he calls for Congressional approval for the new war in Iraq, he’s right:
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters on Tuesday that President Barack Obama should seek congressional approval for the U.S. strategy on ISIS.
“The view of myself and most of my members is the president should be seeking congressional approval, period, for whatever he decides to do because that’s the way you hear from those of us who represent everyone in the country,” the Kentucky Republican said.
McConnell stressed that Obama must come up with a plan and present it to Congress. He signaled “broad support” for U.S. action against the group.
“That’s the way you get congressional support. I’ve said — when Elizabeth Warren begins to sound like Dick Cheney, you know that there’s pretty broad bipartisan support here for dealing with this group of terrorists.”
He’s right.
I would actually go further, and say that a formal War Powers Act resolution.
This may be simple political posturing on the part of the Senate Minority Leader, but the ability to declare war was vested in the legislative branch for a reason.
He asks the obvious question, why when we are looking at going back to war in Iraq, why have all of the discussions about this been about the politics, and not the merit, of the decision:
President Obama has started describing his new strategy to confront the Islamic State, and despite it being a mishmash of wishful thinking and perpetual militarism, the focus of the Washington elites in the press and elsewhere has been almost entirely on the optics: Is he overcoming the perception that he wasn’t doing enough? What will the political reaction be?
The question we should be asking, as I noted on Friday, is: Why the hell does he think it has any chance of working?
………
His plan calls for stepped-up airstrikes, inevitably leading to civilian casualties; for the kind of Middle-Eastern diplomatic needle-threading that has consistently eluded him in the past; for a political miracle in Iraq; and, despite all the precedent to the contrary, for American-trained indigenous military forces that actually fight.
Despite all the cause for skepticism, however, the press coverage of his remarks was largely stenographic — with the aforementioned overlay of politics and optics.
This is the discussions that we get when Obama is talking about involving us in a war that will last at least 3 years.
Seriously.
We’re going to war again, for an extended period, and all that anyone appears to be concerned about is the f%$#ing optics:
All that leaves me pondering this question: Is Obama’s new plan something he genuinely believes in? Or does he recognize it’s stupid, and is just doing it for the optics?
There’s a dismal precedent for the latter option: His decision to extend what he knew was a dead-end war in Afghanistan for two years because of the bellicose promises he’d made in order to look tough during his first political campaign. That time, he traded about 1,300 American lives for optics.
Who knows what the trade might be this time?
You know, Obama’s sated foreign policy philosophy, “Don’t do stupid sh%$,” appears to be in abeyance, and this is not a good thing.
Robert Kagan’s latest screed is reactionary, shows no learning curve, and treats brown people as objects, so it was published on the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
Short version is, “Yadda Yadda, Munich, Nazis, appeasement, Neville Chamberlain.”
Normally, I would say, who cares what he thinks, but his wife, Victoria “F%$# the EU” Nuland, is the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, so one might surmise that he has more influence over our foreign policy than your average Wall Street Journal nutjob.
I really don’t think that this can be cast as anything but a setback for both NATO and the Ukraine, but if this deal holds the shooting should stop, which is a good thing:
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday announced a plan to end the conflict in eastern Ukraine that would entrench rebel gains there and hand a significant defeat to Ukrainian leaders who have sought to regain full control of the territory of their nation.
Putin said that he and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko had agreed on the broad outlines of a seven-point peace settlement that would at least temporarily freeze the conflict on the ground. He specified no major concessions for the rebels and instead insisted on a large-scale Ukrainian military pullback and the introduction of international monitors to ensure that fighting does not resume.
Poroshenko did not specifically address the “Putin plan,” as it was dubbed by the Kremlin, but he said that the time had come to end the conflict.
“The first task is peace,” Poroshenko said in a statement. “Today at 5 a.m. I spoke to President Putin about how we can stop this horrible process. There is no denying that people must stop dying.”
Both leaders said that they hoped peace talks could start Friday.
The apparent concessions to Russia dealt a further blow to Ukrainian aspirations to escape the orbit of the nation to which they were once joined as part of the Soviet Union. Months of pro-European protests in Kiev ended in February with the ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych. Russia quickly moved to annex the Crimean Peninsula in response. The Europe-friendly Poroshenko was elected in a landslide victory in May, but his popularity has been damaged by the grueling conflict in the east, where Russian-backed rebels have claimed important swaths of territory.
Just weeks ago, Ukrainian forces appeared close to defeating the rebels. But since early last week, the rebels have made rapid, renewed strides against the Ukrainian military after Kiev reported a large-scale Russian incursion into southeastern Ukraine. The Kremlin denies aiding the rebels, although rebel leaders have said that Russian soldiers were using vacation time to fight on their side.
That last bit, the whole, “I’m a soldier, so I’m, going to war on vacation,” is the very epitome of a “Busman’s Holiday.”
Victoria Nuland’s Neocon folly is just the gift that keeps on giving.
Rather unsurprising, the source of the stupid is the ultimate neocon legacy hire, William Kristol:
Bill Kristol wants to bomb first and figure it out later. News at ten.
During a Monday interview with Laura Ingraham on the ongoing situation in Iraq, the Weekly Standard founder discussed his desire to forgo national debates and simply bomb ISIS forces immediately.
………
After mimicking his fellow talking heads who suggest that perhaps it’s best to have a national debate before using military force, Kristol then said: “What’s the harm of bombing [ISIS] at least for a few weeks and seeing what happens? I don’t think there’s much in the way of unanticipated side effects that could be bad there. We could kill a lot of very bad guys.”
Why is this guy not flipping burgers for a living?
He just accused Hillary Clinton of being ridiculously bellicose:
Sen. Rand Paul is redoubling his efforts to paint Hillary Clinton as a hawk whose policies are dangerous for the United States.
The Kentucky Republican and 2016 hopeful took to the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal to launch his latest broadside against the former secretary of state, saying her proposed foreign policy of arming the Syrian rebels would have emboldened Islamic militant group ISIS.
“To interventionists like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, we would caution that arming the Islamic rebels in Syria created a haven for the Islamic State. We are lucky Mrs. Clinton didn’t get her way and the Obama administration did not bring about regime change in Syria. That new regime might well be ISIS,” he wrote in a piece published online Wednesday.
Paul added: “Those who say we should have done more to arm the Syrian rebel groups have it backward. Mrs. Clinton was also eager to shoot first in Syria before asking some important questions. Her successor John Kerry was no better, calling the failure to strike Syria a ‘Munich moment.'”
And let us not forget our little adventure in Nulandistan (the Ukraine) that seems to be blowing up right now.
He’s right. The only difference between the Neocons, like Richard Pearle and Paul Wolfowitz, and the Liberal Interventionists, like Hillary Clinton and Samantha Powers, is purely one of their vocabulary, their policy prescriptions are similarly short-sighted, and the results are similarly catastrophic.
So Hamas picks up some more anti-Israel political cred, and Israel mows the lawn, and nothing really changes:
After 50 days of fighting that took some 2,200 lives, leveled large areas of the Gaza Strip and paralyzed Israel’s south for the summer, Israeli and Palestinian leaders reached an open-ended cease-fire agreement on Tuesday that promised only limited change to conditions in Gaza and left unresolved the broader issues underpinning the conflict.
Hamas, the militant Islamist faction that dominates Gaza, declared victory even though it had abandoned most of its demands, ultimately accepting an Egyptian-brokered deal that differs little from one proffered on the battle’s seventh day. In effect, the deal put both sides back where they were at the end of eight days of fighting in 2012, with terms that called for easing but not lifting Israeli restrictions on travel, trade and fishing in Gaza.
It’s the world’s most depressing remake of Groundhog Day.
It’s not been a good few days for Hamas.
Over the past few days, the Israelis have manage to kill 3 Hamas military leaders, and they almost took out Mohammed Deif, the head out of their military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades.
In response, Hamas has start executing people accused as collaborators on an industrial scale:
One day after three top Hamas commanders were killed in an Israeli airstrike, at least 18 Palestinians were executed Friday by firing squads in Gaza City, sentenced to death by a “resistance court” for collaborating with Israel during a time of war.
………
A group calling itself the Palestinian Resistance announced on Hamas-affiliated Web sites that 11 alleged collaborators — nine men and two women — were executed by firing squad Friday morning in the courtyard of an abandoned police headquarters.
Witnesses said seven more men were placed against walls with bags over their heads and shot by men in black Hamas uniforms in front of the Al-Umari mosque, according to local news media reports.
Neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Resistance named the alleged collaborators or offered details of the charges against them. They said they were withholding the names to spare their families shame.
The Palestinian Maan news agency reported that some of the bodies were later dumped at al-Azhar University and the Shifa hospital.
Palestinian militants said the informers were found guilty by local courts, supported by religious clerics, of providing information to Israel that led to the destruction of “resistance houses,” as well as revealing the location of tunnels and rocket launchers.
The executions came a day after Israeli aircraft targeted and killed three senior Hamas commanders who had gathered in a building in Rafah in south Gaza.
The targeted killings were celebrated as a major success in Israel and taken as a punishing blow in Gaza, where the Hamas commanders were well known.
Two days earlier, Israel targeted a house where it believed Mohammed Deif, the top commander of the Hamas military wing, was staying. The Israeli bombardment killed Deif’s wife and two of his children. It is still unclear whether Deif survived the strike.
Meanwhile, in Turkey, one of the founders of the al-Qassam Brigade is now claiming that Hamas was responsible for the kidnapping and murder of 3 Israeli teens. Note that he did this from the relative safety of Turkey, where is in exile, and I would take this with a grain of salt:
A veteran Hamas official has said that the Islamist group was behind the kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank – an incident that was a major trigger for the current brutal war in Gaza.
Saleh al-Arouri, one of the founders of Hamas’s military wing, made his comments at a conference in Istanbul, where he lives in exile. A tape of his comments was posted online by conference organisers.
“There was much speculation about this operation; some said it was a conspiracy,” al-Arouri said at a meeting of the International Union of Islamic Scholars on Wednesday.
“The popular will was exercised throughout our occupied land, and culminated in the heroic operation by [Hamas’s armed wing] the Qassam Brigades in imprisoning the three settlers in Hebron.”
His claim has not been supported by any other member of Hamas.
………
Hugh Lovatt, Israel and Palestine coordinator at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said that while al-Arouri was a significant Hamas figure – serving as the group’s most prominent representative in Turkey – the former militant could have an ulterior motive for making his claim.
“Given the timing I would be very suspicious about his claim. I still don’t believe Hamas as an organisation and its upper echelons sanctioned the kidnappings – something that Israeli intelligence also believes,” he said.
I think that both of these actions are tied together by the recent reverses suffered by Hamas leadership.
Under such situations, there is an organizational imperative to show agency, and both the executions, and the claim or responsibility, are an attempt to demonstrate that Hamas is in control of the situation.
Both of the acts are counterproductive to Hamas’s goals, hence my comment on their losing their sh%$.
In the long run, I do not think that this make a difference though.
The Middle East: SSDD.
If reports from the Ukrainian government are true, and I’m not big on the idea of trusting them, then they just shelled a Russian aid convoy:
Ukraine claims it has destroyed Russian military vehicles in the country’s east, a day after a column was spotted moving across the border.
Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, told David Cameron by phone that his country’s armed forces had destroyed part of an armed convoy that the Guardian saw moving through a gap in a border fence on Thursday night.
There was no immediate proof, and it was impossible to establish if the Ukrainians had targeted the same convoy seen by the Guardian. The Russians categorically denied that any of their troops were even in Ukraine. But the claim marks a new escalation in the six-month confrontation over Ukraine and if verified would amount to the first confirmed military engagement between the two adversaries since the crisis began in the spring.
“The president informed [Cameron] that the information was trustworthy because the majority of those machines [Russian military vehicles] had been eliminated by the Ukrainian artillery at night,” a statement from Poroshenko’s office read.
Russia is denying this, but if this is true, or worse, they shelled an aid convoy in the dead of night, the Russians have arranged one with the Red Cross, things are going to go pear shaped quickly.
Hillary Clinton was interviewed by noted “liberal hawk”, Iraq war booster, and blithering idiot, Jeffrey Goldberg, and she went full Dick Cheney:
President Obama has long ridiculed the idea that the U.S., early in the Syrian civil war, could have shaped the forces fighting the Assad regime, thereby stopping al Qaeda-inspired groups—like the one rampaging across Syria and Iraq today—from seizing control of the rebellion. In an interview in February, the president told me that “when you have a professional army … fighting against a farmer, a carpenter, an engineer who started out as protesters and suddenly now see themselves in the midst of a civil conflict—the notion that we could have, in a clean way that didn’t commit U.S. military forces, changed the equation on the ground there was never true.”
Well, his former secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, isn’t buying it. In an interview with me earlier this week, she used her sharpest language yet to describe the “failure” that resulted from the decision to keep the U.S. on the sidelines during the first phase of the Syrian uprising.
“The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad—there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle—the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,” Clinton said.
Let’s be clear. Before Syria turned into a full up civil war, largely at the instigation of the House of Saud, the behavior of the Assad regime was awful, but better than that of Bahrain, whose atrocious behavior was in large part instigated by the House of Saud.
If the Gulf states, particularly the Saudis, had not aggressively shipped weapons and Jihadis to Syria, Syria would pretty much look like Bahrain, a brutal ruthless dictatorship, except that it would not be religiously based.
She continues:
During a discussion about the dangers of jihadism (a topic that has her “hepped-up,” she told me moments after she greeted me at her office in New York) and of the sort of resurgent nationalism seen in Russia today, I noted that Americans are quite wary right now of international commitment-making. She responded by arguing that there is a happy medium between bellicose posturing (of the sort she associated with the George W. Bush administration) and its opposite, a focus on withdrawal.
Because doubling down on a failed strategy, is such a good idea.
Then she doubles down on the whole Clash of Civilizations crap:
“One of the reasons why I worry about what’s happening in the Middle East right now is because of the breakout capacity of jihadist groups that can affect Europe, can affect the United States,” she said. “Jihadist groups are governing territory. They will never stay there, though. They are driven to expand. Their raison d’etre is to be against the West, against the Crusaders, against the fill-in-the-blank—and we all fit into one of these categories. How do we try to contain that? I’m thinking a lot about containment, deterrence, and defeat.”
Of course, Osama bin Laden’s justifications for his actions largely was that we were making war on Arabs and Islam: (H/t Naked Capitalism for the Link)
As for the first question: Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple:
(1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.
And Hillary’s solution is to bomb more Muslims and more Arabs.
It should also be noted that she was a big supporter of another Saudi supported bit of failed adventurism, the cluster F%$# that was the nation state of Libya.
Over at Salon, Joan Walsh wonders if the faction of the Democratic party that doesn’t need settle their manhood issues with bombs might be an impediment to her coronation as the Democratic Nominee in 2016. (She actually hopes that it won’t, because ……… I dunno. She makes no coherent case at all for voting Hillary.)
As an aside, I am so glad that I live in Maryland. My vote for president does not matter, so I feel no compulsion to cast a vote for the Democratic nominee, no matter how retrograde.
First comes the Yorkshire Ranter, who looks at the conflict, and draws some conclusions and their effects.
First is the explanation of why Hamas is using such an ineffective weapon system in their rockets, which cause damage only by happenstance.
The Ranter (IMNSHO correctly) explains that the rocket fire is suppressive fire, not firing for effect:
You could imagine that this is the physical expression of a sort of generalised venting of rage – randomly tossing ineffective bangs over the wall. But you’d be wrong both in the sense that it trivialises the rocketry’s effect on Israelis, and that it denies Palestinians’ agency and competence.
It’s too easy to point to the fact that they very, very rarely kill anyone and argue that in fact they are a bit puny and the Israelis should just man up and show some stiff upper lip rather than calling in artillery on the nearest school for the disabled. I have myself given in to the temptation before. The point isn’t destruction so much as suppression, the effect created by the fact of being under fire. And what they want to suppress is essentially the Israeli economy.
Remember that GDP is a flow concept – loaves out of a bakery, cars off a production line – not a stock concept like Scrooge McDuck’s treasure. Israeli GDP in 2013 was $286.8bn at purchasing power parity. We can usefully think of this as $32.6 million GDP per hour. While an air warning RED is in force, it is a good guess that economic activity is basically zero. Not quite, of course, the electricity is on, the phone network is up, and the government sector is more than busy. But as a rule, if you’re in an air raid shelter you’re not at work or doing much else than worrying. The Iron Dome close-in weapons system is a major commitment of complicated technology, a diversion of social resources, so the cost of air defence has to be offset against that. And the warning system, which MIT’s Ted Postol credits with protecting the population much more than Iron Dome, does so at the cost of putting more people under warning for longer.
So, you can see why they would go for range first. During this wave of conflict, the percentage of Israeli territory under warning has been as high as 75%, or $24.6m of foregone GDP per hour. A tiny commitment of additional materials per rocket provides a much bigger effect. Also, range requires “bigger” but not “better”, at least until the structural integrity constraints of the rocket are reached. A rocket is a container of propellant, so increasing its volume doesn’t require a proportionately greater quantity of materials. Another important reason to go bigger first is that it makes it possible to launch from anywhere in the Gaza Strip.
It should be noted in war, much of the weapons firing is suppressive fire, and as a suppressive weapon, the rockets are very effective, particularly since they are so cheap.
Rather than being an incoherent expression of rage, it is actually a relatively sophisticated, and rather effective, tactic.
His second, and far more troubling observation has to do with the rather non controversial conclusion that conflict and violence has the effect of radicalizing both societies.
My concern primarily has to do with the effect on Israeli society:
Here’s the point on the Israeli side. Palestinian rocket range and the vote for the Israeli extreme-right are strongly correlated; each ward to come under threat reports an increase of between 2 and 6 percentage points in the extreme-right vote (being the 95% confidence intervals).
Something that has occurred during this conflict, which I have not observed before, is the hightened level of violence by Israeli Jews against Israeli Arab violence, including the lynching of Mohammed Abu Khdeir (burnt alive) simply for being Arab.
There is an element in Palestinian society that believes that they can eventually make the Israelis break, and I fear than they can eventually make the Israelis snap, and they go the route of Slobodan Milošević.
This worry leads directly to a commentary by noted Atheist Sam Harris, who maintains that Israel has the moral high ground in this conflict, even while he objects both to a religious based state, and religion in general, as an absurdity.
Basically, he engages in a thought experiment, where he tries to imagine what each side would do should they have the such overwhelming power that there would be no limits to their actions, and then he realizes that Israel is already in this position:
The truth is that there is an obvious, undeniable, and hugely consequential moral difference between Israel and her enemies. The Israelis are surrounded by people who have explicitly genocidal intentions towards them. The charter of Hamas is explicitly genocidal. It looks forward to a time, based on Koranic prophesy, when the earth itself will cry out for Jewish blood, where the trees and the stones will say “O Muslim, there’s a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him.” This is a political document. We are talking about a government that was voted into power by a majority of the Palestinians. [Note: Yes, I know that not every Palestinian supports Hamas, but enough do to have brought them to power. Hamas is not a fringe group.]
The discourse in the Muslim world about Jews is utterly shocking. Not only is there Holocaust denial—there’s Holocaust denial that then asserts that we will do it for real if given the chance. The only thing more obnoxious than denying the Holocaust is to say that it should have happened; it didn’t happen, but if we get the chance, we will accomplish it. There are children’s shows that teach five-year-olds about the glories of martyrdom and about the necessity of killing Jews.
And this gets to the heart of the moral difference between Israel and her enemies. And this is something I discussed in The End of Faith. To see this moral difference, you have to ask what each side would do if they had the power to do it.
What would the Jews do to the Palestinians if they could do anything they wanted? Well, we know the answer to that question, because they can do more or less anything they want. The Israeli army could kill everyone in Gaza tomorrow. So what does that mean? Well, it means that, when they drop a bomb on a beach and kill four Palestinian children, as happened last week, this is almost certainly an accident. They’re not targeting children. They could target as many children as they want. Every time a Palestinian child dies, Israel edges ever closer to becoming an international pariah. So the Israelis take great pains not to kill children and other noncombatants. [Note: The word “so” in the previous sentence was regrettable and misleading. I didn’t mean to suggest that safeguarding its reputation abroad would be the only (or even primary) reason for Israel to avoid killing children. However, the point stands: Even if you want to attribute the basest motives to Israel, it is clearly in her self-interest not to kill Palestinian children.]
Now, is it possible that some Israeli soldiers go berserk under pressure and wind up shooting into crowds of rock-throwing children? Of course. You will always find some soldiers acting this way in the middle of a war. But we know that this isn’t the general intent of Israel. We know the Israelis do not want to kill non-combatants, because they could kill as many as they want, and they’re not doing it.
What do we know of the Palestinians? What would the Palestinians do to the Jews in Israel if the power imbalance were reversed? Well, they have told us what they would do. For some reason, Israel’s critics just don’t want to believe the worst about a group like Hamas, even when it declares the worst of itself. We’ve already had a Holocaust and several other genocides in the 20th century. People are capable of committing genocide. When they tell us they intend to commit genocide, we should listen. There is every reason to believe that the Palestinians would kill all the Jews in Israel if they could. Would every Palestinian support genocide? Of course not. But vast numbers of them—and of Muslims throughout the world—would. Needless to say, the Palestinians in general, not just Hamas, have a history of targeting innocent noncombatants in the most shocking ways possible. They’ve blown themselves up on buses and in restaurants. They’ve massacred teenagers. They’ve murdered Olympic athletes. They now shoot rockets indiscriminately into civilian areas. And again, the charter of their government in Gaza explicitly tells us that they want to annihilate the Jews—not just in Israel but everywhere. [Note: Again, I realize that not all Palestinians support Hamas. Nor am I discounting the degree to which the occupation, along with collateral damage suffered in war, has fueled Palestinian rage. But Palestinian terrorism (and Muslim anti-Semitism) is what has made peaceful coexistence thus far impossible.]
This from a guy who, “I don’t think Israel should exist as a Jewish state. I think it is obscene, irrational and unjustifiable to have a state organized around a religion.”
I do differ with Mr. Harris a bit.
Specifically,. I do not think that it is self evident that the Palestinian leadership sees a Middle East without Jews as their perfect outcome. Populist movements frequently having its leaders paying lip service to ideologies as a matter of convenience. (See Nelson Mandela and his affiliation with the South African Communist Party, and compare it to his behavior when he actually became President of South Africa)
So, the future proclivities of a Palestinian state are to my mind far more unknown than Sam Harris, though I am not hugely optimistic: I believe that under the current environment, the chance that any Palestinian peace maker would suffer the same fate as Michael Collins is pretty high.
The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) is shocked to find 20 rockets in one of their schools in Gaza:
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees is investigating the discovery of 20 rockets hidden in one of its vacant schools in the Gaza Strip. The UNRWA condemned the incident as a “flagrant violation” of international law, adding that the rockets had been removed and that the relevant parties had been informed.
Israel regularly accuses Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza of using civilian installations to store and rockets, including during the current conflict, which began on 8 July.
I find the protestations of UNRWA to ring hollow.
While I understand that the agency needs to maintain good a relationship with the authorities in Gaza in order to effectively provide services, this sort of behavior has been the rule, not the exception, with UNRWA for nearly 70 years.
