Re: NBC - This Guy Gets It - 1
- From: "angelagrace" <cryinthesun@xxxxxxxx>
- Date: 4 Aug 2006 21:35:29 -0700
gumboman wrote:
I found a couple of columns this guy wrote on a link from a different
website. I have no idea who he is but he's funny and obviously has a
technical background (which may be why we think alike). As I was reading
this I remember asking myself some of the same questions and this column,
along with another I'll post, goes a long way towards explaining why I feel
no matter how bad the threat we in the West may face, we aren't prepared for
battle due to the failure of our leaders and their shortsighted approach to
warfare and technology. As it stands now we're better off doing nothing
until we get better leaders.
The guy brings up some interesting points, but deals a little bit too
much in stereotypes for me. You bring up a good point about the lack of
leadership. Although, there are some amazing parallels between us and
Israel, a key difference is the pervasive militarization of Israel. We
have civilian leadership of our military, such as it is in its
incompetence, while Israel has the military running the government and
the entire society. The military only has naked force as a tool and
like the lone hammer, everything looks like a nail. The problems there
have no military solution, so as long as Israel has no real civilian
leadership, continuing abject failure will result.
Like I said in that column, we're not dealing with a few bad apples or bad
luck. We're dealing with demographics, and demographics has no more mercy
than a glacier. For a hundred years Lebanon has been shifting from a
Maronite-Christian country with a bunch of non-Christian minorities (the
Druze -- my personal favorites, the Sunni, the Shia) to a Muslim country
with a Christian minority that's trying to emigrate as fast as it can fake
up its resume for Uncle Sam's Migras. That part of the war is over, and
Islam won.
I think the demographics thing is key, but not exactly in the way he
states. Israel cannot hope to win the demographics it's up against,
they simply haven't got the birth rate internally to stem the tide
against them that's willing to strap on bombs. Apaches and F-16s are no
use against hordes willing to strap on bombs. Eventually, I gotta think
there'll come a point where the smart people just decide to get the
hell out if they can't get the government to jettison the highly
repeatable failure of the military sowing seeds of terrorism everywhere
they go.
And Hezbollah has great soldiers. That's one reason I can't help liking
them. They're some of the most underrated soldiers on earth facing what I
consider the most overrated military force on earth, the IDF. The Israelis
have been coasting on their reputation for a long time, but way back in Gulf
War I it was clear they made their record like a Don King fighter, padding
their Win column against a bunch of bums.
I think he's right about the IDF being overrated, but not for the
reasons he states. Again, he's dealing in another stereotype of
feckless Arabs being no match for anybody. The IDF jumped the shark as
soon as they started resorting to collective punishment. They have no
idea who to target, so they target everyone. They further jumped the
shark when they turned the second invasion of Lebanon over to the IAF.
You'd think they might've learned from American failures in this
regard. You cannot win hearts and minds in an air war with no real
military targets that simply generates civilian casualties. The IAF has
no better information about targets than the IDF had and is generating
civilian damage on a greater scale. But then, I don't think they really
care - just like those UN observers that got in the way, all the
innocent people who are dying in Lebanon are just a bug on the
windshield of Israel's military machine.
Here's a piece about the guy in charge of the second Lebanon invasion.
He does sound familiar, but not in a good way.
Angela
http://www.counterpunch.com/cockburn08032006.html
Halutz's Bombing War
Hezbollah's Top Ally in Israel
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
"Israel is doomed," said a friend of mine some months ago, returning to
the U.S. after a trip to Israel. I asked him why, and my friend, who
spent twenty years working at a high level in the Pentagon, answered,
"They've put in an Air Force man as chief of the General Staff."
He was talking about Dan Halutz, appointed chief of the General Staff
of the IDF in February of this year.
My friend began his stint in the Pentagon in the middle Sixties, as one
of Robert McNamara's "whiz kids". He'd spent long years listening to
Air Force generals expounding the virtues of air power, and how their
bombers would wipe out the Viet Cong, without the need for any ground
forces.
Those bombers never did wipe out the Viet Cong, though they destroyed
vast forests while other USAF planes drenched the ground cover with
poisons that plague Vietnamese and Americans to this day.
A generation later the next cohort of US Air Force Generals said that
air power was all that was needed to subdue any resistance in Iraq.
They claimed that the attack in the spring of 2003 would begin with
Operation Shock and Awe, and victory would be swift and total.
Air force generals are like that. The bloodiest battles of their lives
are fought against navy admirals, army generals and marine generals
over money. To persuade the politicians to give them the money requires
incessant boasting about the glories of air power.
The trouble is that history shows air power doesn't win wars, or even
battles. The best known example is the bombing of Germany by the
Americans and the British in World War Two. The plan, as advanced by
Britain's Arthur "Bomber" Harris, was to kill a million Germans and
paralyze industrial production. Harris began his career with the
British bombing campaigns in Mesopotamia in the 1920s, then Palestine,
against the Great Rising, in the 1930s.
The Allies' bombs killed many Germans, though not a million. But as
postwar investigators headed by the late J.K. Galbraith found, war
production actually increased. The bombs stiffened German morale and
loathing of the enemy.
Galbraith's investigations failed to dent the myth of air power.
America's most famous Air force general in the postwar period was Curt
LeMay, headed of America's nuclear air fleet, the Strategic Air
Command. In World War Two he had overseen the firebombing of Tokyo. It
was LeMay who boasted to President John Kennedy that his planes could
"reduce the Soviet Union to a smoldering, irradiated ruin in three
hours."
Dan Halutz is in the LeMay tradition, a brutish lout. He raised a storm
when he was asked what feelings, what moral tremors he might have had
about the dropping of a one-ton bomb in a house in Gaza. Halutz's
jaunty reply was to the effect that all he felt was "a slight tremor in
the wing of the airplane."
Writing about Halutz, and that particular remark, the Israeli columnist
Gideon Levy wrote in Ha'aretz on February 28, "Halutz faithfully
represents the policy in recent years of the air force and the Israel
Defense Forces, which no longer has a place for moral statements in our
war on terror. According to this policy, dropping heavy bombs on a
house is a legitimate and just means, and killing innocent civilians,
including children, does not at all resemble Palestinian terror."
That one-ton bomb killed many civilians. Levy continued, "Anyone who
saw the ruined apartment houses also knew that the IDF and the air
force lied brazenly when they initially tried to publicize the claim
that there were only "huts" on the site of the bombing; that it was
impossible to know that people were living in them. The real moral
image of the air force is reflected from among the ruins in the Daraj
neighborhood more than all the statements of its commander."
So the brazen thug Halutz got the big job, just at the moment the
Israeli high command was firming up plans for its long planned
onslaught on Lebanon. It was Halutz who sold Olmert and Peretz on the
fantasy of swift and devastating air force raids finishing off
Hezbollah.
Since then Halutz has efficiently united all Lebanese in loathing of
Israel, while being an effective propagandist for Hezbollah. What
better recruiter of sympathy for Lebanon than Halutz screaming "we're
going to turn Lebanon back into what it was 20 years ago," and
threatening to blow up a 10-floor building for every missile.
By the second day in August Halutz's bombardment had achieved the
extraordinary feat of prompting the Maronite Catholic patriarch - the
spiritual leader of the most pro-Western populace - to assemble
Lebanon's religious leaders -- Shiite and Sunni Muslims and various
Christian confessions. The group issued a joint statement of
solidarity, condemning the Israeli "aggression" and hailing "the
resistance, mainly led by Hezbollah, which represents one of the
sections of society."
All Halutz knows how to do is to bomb defenseless targets. This ability
does not require brain power or skill in political analysis.
Napoleon said he wanted lucky generals under his command. Hezbollah is
lucky in the Israeli military commander it faces, even though Lebanon
bleeds.
.
- References:
- NBC - This Guy Gets It - 1
- From: gumboman
- NBC - This Guy Gets It - 1
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