Archive for the 'War & Warfare' Category

From the New York Times (“The Right Way to Help Israel”):

There is a difference between justified and smart. Israel’s airstrikes against Hezbollah targets are legitimate so long as Hezbollah wages war against Israel and operates outside the control of the Lebanese government. But the air campaign is now doing Israel more harm than good.

A better answer to the Hezbollah problem would be an immediate cease-fire, paving the way for an international force to patrol Lebanon’s southern border. That is what Britain’s prime minister, Tony Blair, was pushing for in Washington yesterday, and there were signs that President Bush may be finally coming around.

For more than two weeks, Mr. Bush has been playing for time, declining to join calls for an immediate cease-fire so that Israel can continue its military actions. Israel and the administration are right to argue that a cease-fire alone cannot provide a lasting solution. But if Washington is now prepared to exercise diplomatic leadership on behalf of Israel’s security, rather than simply run interference for Israel’s military operations, a cease-fire now could become the first step to a more lasting solution. 

Of course, it is manifestly preposterous to believe that any country’s armies will patrol the border and actually war with Hezbollah to keep the peace.  Remember that Hezbollah killed more than 200 Marines while sleeping in their barracks at night.  If Marines went back in today, they would kill all Hezbollah.

But this is the point.  No country will allow their soldiers to be terrorized, picked off one-by-one, and blown up by ghosts and fighers who put on civilian clothing.  Any leader with any sense would either war with Hezbollah and destroy them, or refuse to go to southern Lebanon.

Mark my words.  This is exactly what will happen.  If any country actually does send troops there (God help the pathetic French — I have heard that they have shown a wee bit of interest), they will be there for a few troops to get blown in half and then they will leave.

However, it looks as if Israel is running out of time with the world politicians.

From the Jerusalem Post, citing a UN official in southern Lebanon:

“In Bint Jbail it looks like the Israelis have pulled out and are now preparing the ground to come in again,” Morczynski said, after Hizbullah fighters had pushed the limited Israeli ground force to the southern edges of the town.

One still has to wonder exactly what the Israeli strategy is.  It has not become apparent to me even this far into the war.

There is an interesting piece over at the Asia Times, entitled “Nasrallah’s other fight.”  Not only is there a close connection between Nasrallah and Iraqi clerics, but Hezbollah fighters have been in Iraq (and in fact, some 18 have been captured).

Indeed, Iraq in 2006 looks a lot like the Lebanon of 1983. For example, the Iranian man in charge of this whole operation is Hassan Qommi, who had the exact same job … in Beirut in 1982. Qommi helped Hezbollah instructors get to Iraq to train Muqtada’s Mehdi Army, which has staged several high-profile confrontations with US forces, notably at Fallujah.

Starting in 2003, Hezbollah began building up organizational and military apparatuses in Iraq. For instance, that April, Hezbollah opened two offices in the Iraqi cities of Basra and Safwan. The campaign, targeting moderate Iraqi Shi’ite clerics willing to work with the US, was most likely orchestrated by Muqtada and Hezbollah.

Keep in mind that even though Nasrallah greatly respects Sistani, he is totally at odds with him when it comes to fighting the US presence.

Also in 2003-04, Imad Mughniah, the top Hezbollah operative wanted by most Western secret services for his role in most of the attacks perpetrated by Hezbollah, including the bombings of the US Embassy and the US and French barracks in Beirut in 1983, was sighted in Iraq. Syria had most probably facilitated his entry on to Iraqi soil.

Hezbollah also had a specialty in Lebanon in the 1980s, which was kidnapping foreign citizens. Is it a coincidence that it was happening on a daily basis in 2004 in Iraq? 

Given that Nasrallah has sent terror weapons into Israel, and given that he is responsible now for the deaths of innocents in Iraq and is making it more difficult for democracy to get a foothold, and given that his future existence may very well cause the deaths of more U.S. troops, I would like to be the first out of the gate to call for a targeted assassination of Nasrallah.  This would be the action that mose closely comports with the protection of American lives, and is therefore the moral thing to do.

I don’t care how it happens: bomb the Iranian embassy, target him with a .50 caliber rifle round a few weeks from now, or send in Israeli assassins.  It doesn’t much matter to me.  He needs to go.

Once again, Hezbollah’s actions tell us exactly what kind of people they are.  This, from Arutz Sheva:

Hizbullah stored ammunition and weapons in mosques, knowing that the IDF does not attack religious sites. Civilians were not allowed to leave so that Hizbullah could use them as cover. IDF officers said they ordered pilots not to strafe Bint Jbeil in order to spare civilian casualties.

A United Nations peace keeping officer from Canada told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. that Hizbullah used the same tactic to draw fire on the UNIFIL post which resulted in the death of four U.N. observers. “This is their favorite trick,” he said. “They use the U.N. as shields.”

Nice.  They know that Israel is hamstrung by this.  Israel follows rules of war to protect non-combatants, while Hezbollah doesn’t care.  The world imposes an impossible situation on Israel: You have two weeks now, no more.  You hear?  Also, you can’t kill non-combatants or else we will call you savages.  Oh and by the way.  Don’t use force that we might consider to be “disproportionate.”  And all the while, Hezbollah gets a pass from the world leaders while the UN calls for the end of hostilities by politically strong-arming Israel — not Hezbollah or Lebanon.

Ed Peck, Chief of U.S. mission to Iraq under Jimmy Carter, was interviewed on Fox News Channel today, and said some remarkable things (over at HotAir.com).  Here is the conversation I transcribed a few minutes ago.  Ed Peck is EP, and the Fox News Channel commentators are FN.  After being pressed on how to prevent World War III, Ed Peck begins:

EP: Maám, it’s a good question.  I’m a diplomat.  I believe very sincerely on the basis of my experience and whatever knowledge I have of history, that if there’s a problem between two groups, and they sit down to see if they can eliminate or reduce the problem — they talk about it — there’s a chance that they can achieve that objective.  But if they do not talk, there’s no chance.

FN: But Mr. Ambassador, Hezbollah is bent on … you know … sort of wiping Israel off the map.  So what is there more to say?

EP: Well, and Israel is bent on destroying everybody in Hezbollah, so what is there to say?  There is a middle ground, almost always.  But you’ve got to talk, just like we did to the Russians during the cold war, although we knew they could blast us off the face of the earth — at cost.

FN: But Mr. Ambassador, do you believe that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization?

EP: Well, a terrorist organization is in the eye of the beholder.

FN: I’m asking you.

EP: Okay.  You have to understand, now, we parachuted people into Europe in World War II.  You’re too young to remember that.  Their job was to kill Germans.  Now.  Were they terrorists or heros?

FN: Well, let’s go back to Hezbollah.  Do you think its a terrorist organization?

EP: No, I think it has objectives to which we object very strongly, and some of them are bloody, but other people are doing things quite similar to that, and they’re not called terrorists, because they’re on our side.

Permit be a bit of commentary since I went to the trouble of transcribing this juvenile conversation.  Here is a remarkable testimonial to a foreign policy that has been completely unhinged from any value system except, or course, relativism.

The sole criteria that Mr. Peck sees being used to define the word “terrorist” is whether we agree with them or not.  He is incapable of judging any further than that as to means, tactics, purposes or causes.  It represents the impotent Carter administration exactly, and it is again remarkable that Mr. Peck even brought up the examples that he did.  Let’s look at them for a moment.

He brings up the cold war and the talky-talk with Russia.  But Carter accomplished nothing during his administration except the strengthening of communism and terror around the world (well, he did bring us 16% inflation).  It was the Reagan administration that won the cold war, and Peck’s mentioning of it only highlights the abject failure that defined the Carter administration during these years.  That Peck defines this as a success is incredible but informative.

Peck brings up the airborne troops that were dropped into Europe during WWII, asking rhetorically if they were terrorists?  FN failed to give the answer.  Let me supply it.  No.  The U.S. showed incredible restraint in the years leading up to our involvement in WWII.  In the years 1939-1943, German U-Boats sank approximately 4700 U.S. merchant ships, sinking them at a greater rate than the U.S. could manufacture ships.  One merchant ship, in fact, was sunk at the mouth of the Mississippi River on May 12, 1942.

All pathologies bent on world domination (communism, Islamic facism, Nazism, etc.) use times of talking to re-arm, rest, strategize and re-group.  These times of talking have always occurred at strategically beneficial points for those bent on world domination.  Why wouldn’t they?  If all we are willing to do is talk, the enemy waits until he is ready.  We will always be ready.

But this strategic use of timing to re-arm is irrelevant if there is no good and no evil.  If there is no side of right and side of wrong, it really doesn’t matter who is strongest now.  Only under a system that is hopelessly incapable of ascertaining good and evil does one compare the American G.I. in WWII with Hezbollah terrorists who drag non-combatants in front of them to die in their stead — and then celebrate the death of those same non-combatants.

No, the talking that Ed Peck and Jimmy Carter did on their watch caused, at least in part, the situation we now face.

Jimmy and Ed should be ashamed.  But their value system will not allow it.

Over at military.com, there is this interesting piece on battlefield weight:

The Marine Corps is involved in a delicate balancing act. It wants to field the most capable Marines, equipped with the latest gear and protected by the best body armor. However, Marines are saddled with 70-100 pounds of gear — the combat load — and simply adding more equipment and armor can make them tired and less agile, which potentially could cancel out any benefits the new gear may offer.

Read the entire piece here.

I know that my son, Camp Lejeune, 2/6, hates “humps.”  They carry 80+ pound backpacks on humps of 20 miles.  So it isn’t like they don’t train to carry this much weight into battle.  That doesn’t mean, though, that we shouldn’t push for technological development to lighten the burden.

I know this.  When he deploys to Iraq early 2007, the deal I am going to make with him is this.  He doesn’t ever go out into potential combat situations without wearing his body armor.  EVER.  PERIOD.  It was disturbing to read that some Marines are opting to leave their body armor behind.

Amid denials that Iran supports Hezbollah in any way, Nasrallah meets with Iranian Intelligence (from Haaretz):

Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah was to visit Damascus on Thursday to meet with Syrian President Bashar Assad and the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Ali Larijani, the Kuwaiti daily newspaper Al-Seyassah reported.

The report, which quoted Syrian sources, said Nasrallah arrived in dressed in civilian clothes, not his normal clerical garb.

Al-Seyassah, known for its opposition to the Syrian regime, said the meeting was designed to discuss ways to maintain supplies to Hezbollah fighters with “Iranian arms flowing through Syrian territories.”

The paper said it learned of the meeting from “well-informed Syrian sources” it did not identify. According to the newspaper, Nasrallah was moving through Damascus with Syrian guards in an intelligence agency car.

And from the Jerusalem Post:

A top Iranian envoy was in Syria on Thursday for talks on the Israeli-Hizbullah conflict in a meeting that brought together the guerrilla organization’s two key sponsors, according to Iranian news reports. A Kuwaiti newspaper reported that Hizbullah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah was taking part in the session.

Kuwait’s Al-Siyassah newspaper, known for its opposition to the Syrian regime, said the meeting was designed to discuss ways to maintain supplies to Hezbollah fighters with “Iranian arms flowing through Syrian territories.”

Al-Siyassah said it learned of the meeting from “well-informed Syrian sources” it did not identify. According to the newspaper, Nasrallah was moving through Damascus with Syrian guards in an intelligence agency car. He was dressed in civilian clothes, not his normal clerical garb.

The Mehr news agency in Iran said Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, was in Damascus for meetings on the crisis, but gave no other details. Similar reports were carried by the Iranian Labor News Agency and the Fars agency.

From AP:

BAGHDAD, Iraq – A mortar barrage followed minutes later by a car bomb blasted Baghdad’s upscale Karradah district Thursday, killing at least 31 people and wounding 153, police said.

The explosions occurred at midmorning in a religiously mixed neighborhood controlled by a major Shiite party, two days after President Bush approved plans to send more U.S. and Iraqi troops into the capital city to curb rising sectarian violence.

Several mortars landed in the district, some destroying a bank and an apartment building that later collapsed in flames, said Interior Ministry secretary Saadoun Abu al-Ula. The others exploded in the middle of busy streets crowded with traffic. 

Prior:

• Strategy for Badhdad
• US Moving More Troops into Badhdad
• More on the Battle for Baghdad
• Battle for Baghdad Coming

Michelle Malkin has given us a link to a story that we hear all too often about abuse in Islamic societies.  See this for a story on the execution of a teenage girl in Iran, and then this for a barbaric practice that might be coming to an Islamic neighborhood near you.  Oh, by the way, it is not true that this practice is merely societal.  It occurs everywhere there is Islam.  It was prevalent in Afghanistan, for instance, when the U.S. first arrived to clean out the Taliban.  This post is updated to link to and address Malkin’s post.  The abuses described here go hand-in-hand with the abuses described below, and provide further testimony to the nature of radical Islam.

In this time of seeing pictures showing the damage inflicted on sourthern Lebanon by the Israeli military, listening to the media coverage of the daily bombings in Baghdad, and hearing the constant drum beat of the left in the U.S. and abroad, if it is easy to forget who the enemy is and why there is a conflict across the globe, it pays to remember our enemy.

Seeing the tears of the afflicted is personally disturbing to me.  War is an ugly business, and having to engage in it is a last resort.  People die as a result of conducting war, and these deaths will always include innocents.  It is in times like these that we need more than ever to remember who the enemy is and why the innocents are harmed.  In order to remind my readers, I will cite a few instances, from several years ago to more recent.

From Gene Edward Veith:

In Meerwala, Pakistan, an 11-year-old boy walked unchaperoned with a girl. This was a violation of Islam. A tribal council was called.

The boy’s father pleaded that since he was too young to have sex, the girl was safe and no harm was done. The council disagreed. But instead of punishing the boy, it decided to punish his whole family by punishing his 18-year-old sister.

In order to shame the family, the council sentenced the teenage daughter to be gang raped. Four members of the council took turns forcing themselves upon her in a mud hut, as hundreds of villagers laughed and cheered.

“I touched their feet,” said the girl to an Associated Press reporter. “I wept. I cried. I said I taught the holy Qur’an to children in the village, therefore don’t punish me for a crime which was not committed by me. But they tore my clothes and raped me one by one.”

From Newsweek, watching soccer is outlawed as being against the religion of Islam.

The Taliban use women and children and human shields:

TALEBAN fighters used women and children as human shields as they tried to escape into the mountains of Afghanistan, British troops claimed yesterday.

The tactics were revealed in the first account by those who fought in one of the main battles faced by the men of 3 Para and the Royal Gurkha Rifles in Helmand province, where 3,300 British troops are stationed.

The Taleban’s use of human shields happened during a six-hour battle that began when British troops arrived in a remote area to flush out a suspected Taleban hideout.

An Australian Jihadist wanted to kill thousands in the name of Allah:

SUBURBAN Islamic cleric Abdul Nacer Benbrika wanted to kill 1000 Australians to “please Allah” and had the support of a blond recruit who had pledged violent jihad during a meeting with Osama bin Laden. 

A Melbourne court heard yesterday that a witness would reveal that Shane Kent, 29, received weapons and explosives training at the Taliban-run al-Faruq training camp for foreign jihadis in Afghanistan.

And at a meeting with bin Laden in that country, Mr Kent, from Meadow Heights in Melbourne’s north, allegedly committed himself to violent jihad. The alleged Melbourne terror cell’s spiritual leader, Mr Benbrika embraced Mr Kent as part of his clique, the court heard, saying: “He’s good, and he doesn’t talk too much.”

Mr Benbrika encouraged his devotees to plan a large-scale terrorist attack, which police foiled during its “developmental stages”, the court heard during the opening day of the committal hearing of 13 suspects yesterday.

“If you kill, we kill here 1000,” Mr Benbrika allegedly said in a conversation covertly taped by police. “Because if you get large numbers here, the government will listen.”

The court was told that Mr Benbrika encouraged his adherents to follow in the footsteps of one of the masterminds of the 2002 Bali terrorist attack. He allegedly told two of them that when they were captured “they should do like Amrozi (bin Nurhasyim) and tell the judge, ‘You can kill me, but there will be others coming after”‘. 

We learn recently that Hezbollah members have used non-combatants as human shields in the battle for southern Lebanon:

“Hizbullah members don’t discount any means to kill or injure, including the use of civilians as a holy human shields. If there will be no choice, we will hit every place from which they shoot at our forces,” a military source told Ynet.

The woman who was raped by her tribal elders is not our enemy.  The people used as human shields are not our enemy.  The people who were shot because the watched world cup soccer are not our enemies.  Our enemies are the perpetrators of these heinous acts.

The War Tapes.  Coming to a theater, perhaps near you, perhaps not.  I have not seen it, but the clips look good, and it comes highly recommended by Col. David Hunt.  More importantly, it comes highly recommended by Michael Fumento.  I hope it hits DVD soon.

Michael comments on the film:

Critics have described the film as “disturbing,” “humbling,” and “truly a grunt’s eye view of the war.” Believe it or not, that last one was criticism. It came from leftist screenwriter-director Nora Ephron. The views of grunts and embedded reporters are worthless, Ephron says, because they’re “too close” to the war. Better, apparently, to do all the reporting out of Baghdad’s Al-Rashid Hotel or – better still – from ivory towers. (Stunningly, Ephron also thinks embedding was an evil idea dreamed up for this war. Ever hear of Ernie Pyle, Nora?)

But The War Tapes simply shows the war as it is, for better or worse, primarily through the eyes of three apparently quite average National Guard soldiers. (Two are actually pudgy, unlike the lean, mean fighting machines I was surrounded with on my two deployments.) Producer Deborah Scranton gave them, and other soldiers from the New Hampshire National Guard’s 172nd Infantry Regiment deploying for a year to Camp Anaconda in the Sunni Triangle, mini-DV camcorders. With these they show the boredom, the horror – and yes, the humor – of men given the nasty job of accompanying primarily food convoys past IEDS, RPGs, machine-gun ambushes, and worst of all, suicide car bombers.

I don’t know about Nora, but I have certainly heard of Ernie Pyle.  As a child I read and re-read his “Here is Your War.”  I cite Pyle extensively in my July 3rd post “Ernie Pyle Helps us Through July 4th.”  The thing I liked about Pyle’s work is that it wasn’t heady philosophical stuff like politics, just war theory, ethics or even why we are in the war.  Those questions can be contemplated back home.  Pyle wrote about the common man, for the common man, on things that were common and uniquely uncommon.  In Pyle’s writing you visited the men where they were and you almost did the things that they did.  You felt the dirt and grime and were weary along with the men.  You feared along with them, you laughed along with them.  Most of all, you just felt like you knew them.  Pyle didn’t feel as though he had to make political statements about the war, and he didn’t feel that he had to take a “neutral” viewpoint.  Pyle wasn’t neutral.  He was pro-American fighting man, heroism, warts and all, and he made you feel it.

Col. Hunt’s assessment of The War Tapes is on-point:

This film is not for war or against war, it for soldiers and their families: it should be viewed by anyone who thinks they know what being a soldier means, or cares what they do. The War Tapes should be in every home and in every elected official’s office and in every military leaders “must see” file, it is that good and that important.”

So when is it coming out on DVD?