K-Lo: "Should We Be Reading About This?"

Presumably she means either

1) an American Paper should not be printing information that could damage a foreign government's security interests, OR

2) Israel's security interests are OUR security interests and so an American Paper should not be printing information that could damage OUR security interests, OR

3) There is something about sending materiel to a foreign country that could damage OUR actual security interests. Why would OBL care when/where we send materiel to ahead of schedule? I guess she fears that we are running out of precision munitions ourselves.

Just say no to 0 ratings. Especially from petey, the ratings abuser and spammer.

Well, Israel seems bound and determined to hit a series of civilian targets with its precision guided munitions, including bridges, cardboard box factories, apartment buildings, roads, electrical power stations, private television stations and Canadians.

I'd say that rather than your needle substitution analogy, the more realistic analogy is selling firearms to an armed robber, or giving a drunken redneck a machine gun.

My own advice is to stop selling these weapons altogether. Or at least, don't sell them while they are actively being used against civilian targets.

Maybe the National Review doesn’t want us to know about these new shipments of “precision-guided bombs” for reasons other than their typical knee jerk reaction to the NYT. As we’ve seen, the casualties in Lebanon are almost all civilians. So, either they are being targeted deliberately, or the guidance systems don’t work very well, or some combination of the two. This information doesn’t make the U.S or Israel look good.

Something else to consider: if these damned newspapers keep printing facts, that the President isn’t aware of, it just makes him more vulnerable to criticism based on these politically uncomfortable facts.

He thinks Iraq is a success story. Just a few days ago, he condescendingly chastised Putin for Russia’s lack of freedom of religion and democracy. You know, like the kind he has brought to Iraq. Putin just smacked him down with: “We certainly would not want to have the same kind of democracy that they have in Iraq, quite honestly." It showed how ignorant Bush is about Iraq, of all things! And Putin decided the whole world should see this ignorance up close, and he did a good job of it, too.

According to Abramowitz at WaPo, regarding Israel/Lebanon: “In the administration's view, the new conflict is not just a crisis to be managed. It is also an opportunity to seriously degrade a big threat in the region, just as Bush believes he is doing in Iraq.” Once again, a fact free belief that he is a successful President on a successful path. How does this happen? This complete suspension of reality. Maybe because of things like this:

Ken Silverstein at Harper's blog reports that ever since the last NIE on Iraq was rejected by the Bush administration back in 2004 (for being "too negative") they haven't bothered to write another one.

“What do you call the situation in Iraq right now?” asked one person familiar with the situation. “The analysts know that it's a civil war, but there's a feeling at the top that [using that term] will complicate matters.” Negroponte, said another source regarding the potential impact of a pessimistic assessment, “doesn't want the president to have to deal with that.”

Apparently, facts are inconvenient and uncomfortable things for Bush to deal with, so they keep as many from him as possible – this is the only thing this bunch has been successful doing. Of course, Bush is quite happy in his ignorance and stupidity. And the National Review just wants everyone to quit printing facts – they could fall into the wrong hands, like the President’s. Oh, there are two facts he is allowed to know: “Russia's big and so is China”

Now pass that man a Diet Coke.

In my comment above, the paragraph starting with “Ken Silverstein…” should be attributed to Digby. I apologize for this – I did not mean to pull a paragraph from someone else without the proper cite; otherwise, I could be a famous author like you-know-who.

K-Lo: "Should We Be Reading About This?"

Maybe the this refers to K-Lo. If so, I'll take her advice quite happily, thankee.

Mike

"Just say no to 0 ratings. Especially from petey, the ratings abuser and spammer."

I'm now in your signature?

Keep claiming it, and it'll come true...

Israel would have no interest in attacking a building if there were no Hizballah members there or if such building was not otherwise used by the Hizballah. It should also be noted that there is no differntiation on the Lebanese side of civillian deaths and Hizballah deaths - they are all considered civillians by the Lebanese.

Israel did not bomb a christian owned television station - they bombed transmission centers used for cell phones and TV stations (specifically also used by the Al Manar station) - this is done to interrupt the communications between Hizballah command and the fighters in the south. The LBC TV station was indeed affetced by this attack but it was according to Israeli officials not the target.

Civilians die in war. It sucks. There has never been and will never be a war in which innocent lives are not lost. Even in the most legitimate war (if there is one) innocent lives are lost.

I actually was watching the BBC the other night and they had an amazing video of a precision strike by Israel- that unfortunately has not made any rounds within the media - basically they had cameras overlooking the city of Tyre in the south of Lebanon. Suddenly, the cameras catch a Katyusha rocket being fired within the city. Within minutes you see Israeli warplanes striking at the precise location in which the Katyusha was launched. It could very well be that civilians died in Israels precision strike at the Katyusha launchers from within Tyre. A church mosque or other civilian building could have also been damaged in such precision strike but can such deaths and damage be blamed on Israel?
The video was quite telling on how HIzballah disgustingly uses the civilian population as a human shield. Why are people silent about such things and only denounce Israel i do not understand.

About bridges, roads etc. that are destroyed this is obviously to disrupt the movement and the ability to resupply the militia groups and is used by every army in every war - this is not attack on civillians although tragically they are also affetced by this.

Sure, that house and that rocket, and those who are around it, become legitimate military targets.

But there's no evidence that Israel is confining itself to legitimate military targets. Its aim seems to be to destroy lebanese infrastructure, targeting civilian populations. That's a war crime, and you can argue until you are blue in the face, but it doesn't change the fact that it is a war crime.

The most unfiltered news comes from the novices who don't second guess their own common sense reactions to the carnage. CNN has this Dr. Sanjay Gupta fellow who normally drives me nuts but put him in a Beirut hospital that is unusable because of the Israeli bombing damage and you get a nice feeling for how "precision" the Israeli bombing is.

No I wouldn't even go that far.

Put this is a different context, say Chicago in the 1930's. You have a retail shop with a good size warehouse and a couple of apartments up above. The Mob comes by and tells you that they are taking over half of your warehouse and one of the apartments and the less questions you ask the better. And since to the best of your knowledge both the cop on the beat and the local alderman are on the take you really don't have a lot of choice and it really doesn't matter if your acceptance comes with or without some folding money.

Does this mean that Elliot Ness and the Untouchables are fully justified in blowing up the whole building with you and your family inside? Or clearing the building room by room using grenades that miraculously leave a single bullet wound in the head of your four year old?

Apply the Waco test to this one. Were you outraged by the raid on the Branch Davidian compound or not? If so why, there were criminals in there. If not why, there were innocent children in there.

I had no sympathy then or now for David Koresh or Randy Weaver or for that matter the leadership of MOVE in Philly in 1965. Which doesn't mean condoning burning children to death or shooting a mother holding a baby through the head.

My God imagine if the headline was "Known terrorist spotted in Downtown MacDonalds, Police take out building with precision guided 500 lb bomb" with the lead 'Civilian casualties limited to a busload of kids from a Christian Day Camp'. Is this okay in Beirut but an outrageous case of overreaction in Palm Springs?

The "GWOT" is worldwide, it is going on right here. On what grounds would you outlaw these tactics here but justify them over there? If you are okay with the feds leveling your whole block and killing your whole family because known gang members have been seen in the area then fine, go ahead and justify these attacks on civilians. If you would not be okay with that then take a hard look in the mirror and ask yourself why.

You may not like the answer. Because while nits do make lice, children are children and we don't just get to burn them to death no matter how convenient it might be in pursuing other ends.

When over 500 civilians were killed by NATO forces in Kosovo, it was regrettable and tragic but it was understood that NATO was not targetting civilians. But when it comes to Israel when 300 civilians are killed during a war against a terror group that openly uses civilian populations as cover (now the videos showing Hizballah shooting katyushas from within the towns are being shown through some media channels) it becomes natural for you to say and believe that Israel is after civilians.

This is a difficult war and civillians will die. Isarel has the responsibility to take as much care as possible to avoid civillian deaths. I belive they are doing so. You dont.
I will certainly not convince you or anyone else here, since you seem to be so sure of Israels evilness and you will certainly not convince me of Israels evilness. So i will not try any longer.

Just curious can you morally justify the launching of rockets into civillians towns?

Can you morally justify launching rockets from within civilain population centers?

My guess is that you may not be able to convince "anyone else here" because you don't have much of a case.  I've read a tremendous amount of the comments on this issue over the past few days, and I haven't read one word that supports Hezbollah's actions.  I haven't read anything eitier that would indicate that anyone supports human shields/Hezbollah either.  So why ask your debate opponents questions about positions they obviously don't have?

Condeming Hezbollah for firing rockets from populated areas is certainly spot-on.  But you are using one example regardless of the fact that your debate opponents have pointed out several other incidents, perhaps a majority of incidents, that do not relate to the human shield argument.

Of course Israel is justified in reacting to threats on its security.   The anti-israel demonstrations in Amsterdam and London are directed to the idea of "over-reaction" You've got to explain to everyone why it is justified that Israel continues to destroy the civil infrastructure of the Palestinians, and now the Lebanese.  Look at the map - do you actually think that destroying bridges will curtail the movement of illegal arms into Lebanon? 

Neoboho

One disturbing aspect of this war is that Israeli citizens are seeing very little about what their military is doing in and to Lebanon. Their TV simply isn't showing them the results of their government's actions. As the world reacts to the humanitarian disasters as is to be expected, can the deliberately-kept-ignorant Israeli public be expected to ascribe any resulting outrage to anything other than anti-semitism?

In an article about conflicted refusniks, one has the following to say:

"I don't believe a single word of the reports that are coming from the IDF via the media," he says angrily. "Soon we will start to hear what we have really done in Lebanon. In criminal terms, I already have a suspicion, but I don't have enough evidence to file an indictment. Therefore I am finding myself on the borderline. I don't know what I would do if there were an entry by land into Lebanon. I'm from the old school, which still distinguishes between the morality of the war and the morality of the warfare. I refuse immoral warfare, I fight an unjust war on the public level. In this case, there has been a crude violation of all the rules of war by the Hezbollah, and Israel has the moral and legal right to respond - I just don't know what kind of warfare is being waged there. After all, the chief of staff, as the commander of the air force, told me explicitly what he thinks about killing civilians: He just feels a slight tremor on the wing."
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/741112.html

....and PM Olmert complains that the international media is falsely portraying the victim as the aggressor.

In this context, C3I systems engineer, with networking background. Academic training as strategic intelligence analyst. During Viet Nam, was in various research activities supporting operations.

Growing up with my mother as an Army officer, I simply made a practice of staying current with the appropriate documents and trade press. Especially with the Internet, it doesn't take that long to do if you have the appropriate framework.
Politically, I don't always agree with defense policy, but one is a lot more credible when one can get very specific.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

My problem with your specificity, and this may truly be due to my ignorance, is that yes, these systems are available, but have they made it all the way out to the field yet in all units yet?

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

AFAIK, the only Israeli F-4's are recon and Wild Weasel defense suppression, if they have any left. In 1981, the force that hit the Iraqi reactor at Osirak were all F-16 attackers with F-15 top cover.

If that's your bandwidth limitation, then going to COTS doesn't sound unreasonable. Newer JTIDS, and for that matter 3rd generation cellular (UMTS) would be more like 115 Kbps, with time division. You'll need all of that for reasonable quality compressed video, but, 8 Kbps should be adequate for military-grade voice. It's not a simple bandwidth expression since you have to consider delay, but that's well within the capability of a G.729A codec with silence detection.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Ramesh Ponuru is very bright and is able to discuss issues rationally and concede a point.

What's most intriguing about the magazine is the variety of atrociousness there-- K'Lo's clueless, knee-jerk comments, J-Pod's smug, 7th-grade-level tantrums, and then the odd nonsensical evil blustery jeremiad from Michael Ledeen (when did he get out of jail?). I've long held out hope for Jonah Goldberg, as he can be pretty clever, but he seems to approach every single issue with a view towards bashing straw-man liberals. I'm not sure he's ever actually analyzed an issue.