"The ineptness of the Israeli Defence Forces against Hezbollah has raised the Iranians' confidence," said a leading defence analyst. - Times UK-
-
Richard Perle, who sold the American people the fantasy that the US could march into Iraq, install corrupt businessman Ahmad Chalabi in power, and would be greeted with garlands of flowers, is disappointed that Israel did not attack Syria during its recent war on Lebanon. Hey, Perle, in case you didn't notice, the Israeli military did not do so great against 5,000 Hizbullah militiamen. - Juan Cole
-
Hezbollah 3, Israel 0 - NY Post
-
But of course the "airpower plan" developed and used by IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz failed miserably at taking down Hizbullah's military capacity-- even while it had the entirely predictable political effect of uniting the Lebanese population more firmly around Hizbullah than it had been for the past three or four years.
Interesting results for the "field-test" of tactics that might be used against Iran, huh? - Just World News
-
Do you agree with the opinion that the war against Hezbollah is not over and that we can expect another round in a few months?
"Absolutely. We must prepare for another war. The IDF must prepare for war against short- and long-range missiles. We were blessed with a miracle in this war. If even 10 percent of the 4,000 missiles fired at Israel had hit citizens, we would have had 400 deaths. The fact that only 39 citizens died proves this was a miracle." - Haaretz
-
"Strategic bombing has been a failed military concept for ninety years, and yet air forces all over the world keep on doing it," John Arquilla, a defense analyst at the Naval Postgraduate School, told me. Arquilla has been campaigning for more than a decade, with growing success, to change the way America fights terrorism. "The warfare of today is not mass on mass," he said. "You have to hunt like a network to defeat a network. Israel focussed on bombing against Hezbollah, and, when that did not work, it became more aggressive on the ground. The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result." - New Yorker
"We must prepare for another war..."
"The definition of insanity..."
So next time it won't be a limited engagement, maybe. Maybe next time the gloves come off. Maybe next time this taste of failure and the perception of it get transmuted into the rage of annihilation. Maybe this is the early foundation of the coming rationalizations for the use of nuclear weapons - against an enemy too cunning for conventional weapons and strategy.
A miracle of annihilation.
A people raised to hate the wilderness, and convinced of their election, their superiority, their inevitable right. And carrying atomic weapons.
The wilderness because it's where the message comes from, from outside, from beyond human control. A God not made in the image of man.
Now we're being raised in rooms, learning the world of artificial scale and total human dominance, worshipping our own creations, that feed that self-love back to us in extrapolated measure.
It's made us crazy, desperately clever, heartlessly selfish, and we've evolved into a species-transitional state, between human and some other thing.
Nostalgia for what was drives some of this thought - but a yearning for health in the sickened isn't nostalgia, and neither is grief to the mourning.
