Olmert didn't lie to his people about who the attackers were and what kind of weapons they had. For whatever reason, the Israeli capacity for outrage hasn't yet been overwhelmed. Americans could learn from them.

I think this "incompetence dodge" proves that Hawkishness is an ideology. The Ideology of War.

-- 

-- All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. (John Kenneth Galbraith) --

I did a couple of posts here in my TPM Cafe blog about the former mayor of Jerusalem and president of the New Jerusalem Foundation, Ehud Olmert. A lot of money raised in the US seems not to have been reported on the foundation's 990s.

I had some other questions, too, about the One Jerusalem Foundation, another right wing Israeli not-for-profit organization registered and operating in the US. The foundation's US headquarters are in Ronald Lauder's Estee Lauder offices in NYC.

One of these days, I'm going to get around to writing about how Ronald Lauder laundered money to the Likud Party in the late '90s through RSL Communications. The president of RSL was the former treasurer of the Likud Party and I suspect that sympathetic bankers intentionally loaned $2 billion to RSL, knowing it would go belly up.

I think Olmert is a very corrupt politician and I think the Israelis got just what they deserved for electing him in the first place.

Israel is a cesspool of corruption.

"the basic concept and premises of the (Iraq) war were mistaken."

According to Benjamin B. Ferencz, the lead American prosecutor of the Military Tribunal II-A (later renamed Tribunal II) to try the Einsatzgruppen Case the 'concept' for the war wasn't mistaken, the war itself may have been a crime against humanity. Benjamin B. Ferencz, who prosecuted and convicted 20 Nazi's of crimes against humanity in 1947 at Nuremberg, was quoted in this piece:

"Nuremberg declared that aggressive war is the supreme international crime," the 87-year-old Ferencz told OneWorld from his home in New York. He said the United Nations charter, which was written after the carnage of World War II, contains a provision that no nation can use armed force without the permission of the UN Security Council.

Ferencz said that after Nuremberg the international community realized that every war results in violations by both sides, meaning the primary objective should be preventing any war from occurring in the first place.

He said the atrocities of the Iraq war--from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the massacre of dozens of civilians by U.S. forces in Haditha to the high number of civilian casualties caused by insurgent car bombs--were highly predictable at the start of the war.

Which wars should be prosecuted? "Every war will lead to attacks on civilians," he said. "Crimes against humanity, destruction beyond the needs of military necessity, rape of civilians, plunder--that always happens in wartime. So my answer personally, after working for 60 years on this problem and [as someone] who hates to see all these young people get killed no matter what their nationality, is that you've got to stop using warfare as a means of settling your disputes."

As best I can tell the war in Lebanon did not turn out exactly as the skeptics predicted. Israeil unfortunately did not wipe out Hezbollah completely and given the far left's attitudes such a result would have been held unacceptable.

As for Iraq while the "competence dodge" is cute it is also absurd. There is likely that a campaign in Iraq with adequate troops and a realization of the issues involved, something many uniform military had, but Rumsfeld opposed, would have succeeded. Matt, as best I can tell you are for unilateral surrender against the growing danger of Islamic zealots. It is a totalitarian movement, regardless of whether we limit fascism to Mussolini's Italy. War is not a video game and cannot be done in week or two.

Israel could have obliterated Lebanon. Do you think that would have been more competent? If Schiff is right Israel should get out of the West Bank and retrain its troops to deal with both Hezbollah and Hamas in a more efficient manner. If you think Israel was tough now, wait.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

The best thing about doing what ifs on history is that no one can prove you wrong. If we had only done this in Iraq, or if Israel (or Hezbollah) had only done this in Lebanon then...

If you don't like the way things have turned out then find someone who you think will do better now and in the future and put them in power.

It seems clear from recent statements on both sides of the Lebanon war that what happened was unexpected. Hezbollah didn't expect Israel to respond as hard (and effectively) as they did. Israel didn't expect Hezbollah to have so many missiles or to be able to launch them in the face of an air and ground attack.

Underestimating your enemy is one of the standard mistakes of warfare. WWI was supposed to take six months. What is clear is that the force being put into Lebanon will do nothing to stop a recurrence of a new war in ten years time. No policies have been changed, Hezbollah will be allowed to rearm and the local population will be helped/intimidated the same as before.

The real powers in the region like this state of affairs, it keeps people distracted and thus takes the focus away from the true dicatorships in Saudi Arabia, Syria, and the rest of the Arab states. Even the US and the west is happy with the present arrangement. It is easier to negotiate long term oil contracts with dictators than with democratically elected leaders.

Just look at what is happening in South America. Populist leaders are causing rewriting of existing resource contracts with the US. This never happened when they were banana republics.

--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape

"There is likely that a campaign in Iraq with adequate troops and a realization of the issues involved, something many uniform military had, but Rumsfeld opposed, would have succeeded."

Greenbaum you idiot that is exactly the point. People like me listened to Shinseki in real time and understood that we did not at that point have adequate troops. Given American troop levels at the time Shinseki's testimony that it would require "several hundred thousand" troops was testimony that it could not be done at all. But people like you supported the invasion anyway. You can call my position "cute". I call yours complicit in the deaths of 2600 Americans. This result was predictable because it was predicted by the Chief of Staff of the Army and others, including me. Your claim that it would have worked if only we had sixteen divisions of extra troops from the Planet Optitron ignores the fact that we have effectively the entire combat forces of this country fighting in a small country in the MidEast to the point that they are recalling combat marines who finished their contracted active duty tours back for new rotations.

Isreal not only did not "wipe out Hezbollah completely" it looks like Hezbollah is in a stronger political position than ever.

It is one thing to say that ends justify means. But if the ends turn out to be unachievable and were predicted to be so in advance then persisting in justifying the means is equivalent to criminal complicity. Your comments about a "result" being "unacceptable" given the "far left's attitude" really means "if we had only been indifferent to the deaths of the civilians of Lebanon we could have wiped out Hezbollah". Yes if we had killed every person between the border and the Litani and took out the population of the Bekaa Valley and maybe dropped a nuclear bomb on Damascus we would have gone a long way towards wiping "out Hezbollah completely". Absent genocide this was doomed to failure and smart people understood that.

Utter nonsense.

There is zero evidence that the US could have succeeded in Iraq, even if it had sent there the totality of its armed forces.

In fact it likely would have been worse.

It's got nothing to do with numbers.

(But blaming the numbers is a nice cop-out for the the pro-war type caught with their pants down.)

Along with the incompetence defense is the “devil (U.S.) made us do it” defense. The Iraq and Lebanon wars had different geneses except that both were instigated by Israeli supporters. Now, I know that is a little hyperbolic because Israel did not lead us by the nose into Iraq. But neither did the U.S. compel Israel into bombing Beirut (Sharon and Olmert had demonstrated that they were not Bush’s puppets) as supporters contend.

I think it is correct that both were doomed policies to begin with. Both were immoral and illegal engagements in both their ends and the way they were prosecuted. It may be that in the modern global information era with 4th Gen warfare,might does not make right any longer.

When one country dons the mantle of the “legitimate” democracy and when one country does its killing with their “legitimate” conventional army and when one country labels its enemies as “illegitimate” terrorists, justifying their total destruction for that reason, and when one country uses collective punishment and profiling in the name of a “legitimate” self- defense, who is the totalitarian actor? Who is the terrorist?

The US could have done far better in Iraq if it had had a sensible and practical plan for the immediate aftermath of Hussein's fall. Greater troop strength is only a small part of what was needed. We should have kept the Iraqi army on, allowing conscripts to go home who wanted to while restricting the rest to their bases until Baathist operatives could be weeded out-- but keeping the soldiers' pay coming thus avoiding the "Frei Korps" problem that dismissing them en masse with no means of support created. We should also have secured all their munitions rather than leaving them freely available to anyone who wanted to start a guerilla campaign. And we should have had plenty and enough troops on hand to maintain public order in the fallen cities and adequete supplies to support the civilian populace for as long as necessary. Moving on a bit we absolutely should not have altered any of the Iraqi domestic arrangements apart from getting rid of Saddam's totalitarian laws-- but the Iraqi economy should have been left as it was, which is what international law demands in occupations. And as for Abu Ghraib and the other notorious prisons, after documenting their horrors we should have allowed the Iraqi people to tear them down and sow their foundations with salt-- not one more prisoner should have been held in Saddam's prisons; for our own purposes we could have used Saddam's palaces as jails instead, which would have been quite fitting, and most certainly there should never have been one single incident of torture or quasi-torture.
With these and similar common sense provisons matters in Iraq would not have ended up in thair current dire state.

Good point. Incompetence is not excuse for failure, it is an admission of failure.

That's an American thing. (Maybe Israeli, too?)

To be a total idiot excuses everything in America.

On the other hand, to admit that the US, in all its glorious omnipotence, is congenitally incapable of succeeding in projects like Iraq, now that would inexcusable.

It seems to me that you can win a war only two ways.  One is if the government you are fighting is opposed by almost all of the citizens of the enemy country, so they will not interfere with your deposing that government, and can be trusted to quickly assume some responsibility in governing themselves once the hated governement is gone.   That wasn't the case in Iraq.

The second way is to utterly destroy the enemy nation, such as we did in WWII, so the remaining citizens want peace more than anything else, and will do just about anything to achieve it.  We didn't do that in Iraq, nor could we have done it without becoming even more despised war criminals.  It wasn't a possibility because the world knew that Iraq was not in any way a threat to us.

Therefore, the invasion of Iraq was doomed to fail.  It was the decision to invade that was incompetent, not the execution of the invasion. 

Hoppy in Sacramento

Oh, it's even worse. Even your second option wouldn't have worked because we've managed to ignite war along the Islamic religious fault lines. We've got Sunnis flooding in to help the Sunnis and Shias flooding in to help the Shias. We're at odds with both the Al Qaeda Sunni types and the Shia Iranians. We're equipping an Iraqi army largely segregated by religion custom designed for civil war. Unless our grand design is to get the entire Islamic world fighting a religious war, I don't know what our plan is.

I don't believe it was "doomed to fail" (which by the way is something you simply assert without the slightest proof as well.) It's not as if no one has ever invaded, conquered and pacified this part of the world sucessfully. Indeed, the list of folks who have pulled that off is a fairly long one, including such luminaries as Cyrus the Great, Alexander, Trajan, the first Caliphs of Islam, and the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman.
On the larger question though let me state that I would not have supported the war even with 100% guarantee of success as I believe that is has cost us too much (and a successful war would have cost us far more), in money, in blood, in the world's good opinion, and in lost flexibility in our foreign policy in general.

Oh, "The British tried"! No doubt by that logic we should never have considered going into Afghanistan either. Yet despite the current fuckups in the rebuilding of that nation, it went far better than those who held the British experience demonstrated an iron law of the universe ever allowed it could.

As for the French, please. At what point in history would you suggest that France demonstrated competence as a military or colonial power? Charlemaign doesn't count. Napoleon got a running start and failed miserably. Algeria?

In the scenario of (1) depose Saddam, (2) let Kurdistan be independent, (3) have enough troops immediately to prevent the massive looting and chaos, (4) set up a government fast, (5) leave ... you cannot be sure that wouldn't have worked, and worked brilliantly. Oh, _you_ can be sure it wouldn't. But there is no law tying your personal sureness to any iron laws of history.

North Africa was colonised for 130 years and the French actually built infrastructure and institutions, something the US seems utterly incapable of doing.

Are you ignorant or just trying to pretend you are?

Hmmmm....

Currently in Afghanistan: The Taliban controls somewhere between 1/3 to 1/2 of the countryside. Warlords run the rest. Hamid Karzai is the ruler of certain buildings in Kabul during office hours on weekdays and depends on American bodyguards. Opium production has skyrocketed and Afghanistan is now the worlds number one producer of Heroin and a major Narco-state. Meanwhile, Osama Bin Laden has the run of the place. Foreign aid workers are being killed off once in a while. There's no economy, no infrastructure, and only bribes holding a relative peace together.

Yep. The British lasted longer and did better.

Don't diss the French laddy, the only reason you've got a country at all is that they weighed in on your side.

Finally, figuring out how you would have won Iraq is one of those little pointless exercises that Americans love to indulge in... See: "How the South could have won the civil war" and "How America could have won Vietnam".

I have a learned historical monograph, Why the Confederacy Lost the War. It examines things at the strategic and tactical levels (operational art really wasn't well developed).

Appropriately, the Battle of Gettysburg gets a chapter. Apparently, a contemporary historian was able, after the war, to interview George Pickett about what went wrong. Was it Longstreet's slowness in ordering the charge? The absence of Stuart's cavalry? The odd, early Confederate reluctance to take flanking positions?

Pickett scratched his head a bit, and mused, "You know, I always thought the Yankees had a lot to do with it."
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Re: It may be that in the modern global information era with 4th Gen warfare,might does not make right any longer.

Did it ever? And as for this hypothetical "4th Gen warfare" it's nothing new under the sun. Napoleon had a similar problem in Spain, as did the British in Afghanistan.

Daniel,

given the far left's attitudes

Stopped reading at this point, and troll-rated.

Will anyone ever call the UN on its incompetence?  Or is there a better word to describe a charter no one wants to live up to?

Well, what do we expect out of the UN? It is an organization which has no resources except that which the member states contribute, which has no independent authority to enforce its will (which turns out to be a very good thing for Israel, most of the time) and which explicitly gave a veto to each of the major powers that had come out of WWII.

The flaws that you complain of were imposed deliberately and be design. I don't think you can fault the UN for incompetence, because it is constrained by limits that we all imposed.

You're angry with the UN because it doesn't solve a particular problem the way you want it to be solved.

Well, yes, I agree that perhaps the UN should have this power. Perhaps the UN should have had the power to intervene on its own in Rwanda, rather than relying on member states and particularly the United States. Perhaps there should be no veto.

But then, would you want the UN interfering in the Bush/Gore election of 2000? That's the other side of it.

You are upset that a UN ceasefire is not being implemented in exactly the way that you would like. That's too bad. But at the same time, there are a number of UN resolutions calling for action on Israel's treatment of the Palestinians or previous misconduct in Lebanon. In that case, it was to Israel's apparent benefit.

Ultimately, the UN cannot and will not solve all problems. It wasn't designed to do that. Ultimately, it can't contest or meddle with Superpower business, and that's by design.

On the other hand, it has arguably been a more valid and more hopeful vehicle, and has done a lot more good on more levels than the League of Nations. And frankly, its continuation and use suggests its a valid entity.

Take a look at the results of the recent poll M.J. Rosenberg writes about elsewhere in TPMCafe. A majority (aggregate of strongly and lean-towards) now favor withdrawal to pre-1967 boundaries, ceding the West Bank.

Could you be more specific? I found a post in which M.J. Rosenberg writes about a poll, and it says nothing about the 1967 borders.

It says '9% [for] unilateral evacuation of a majority of settlements.'

That doesn't sound like much support for withdrawal.

Guerrilla fighting is not new, but I think guerrilla fighting with modern techniques and technology have upped its effectiveness exponentially and the Hezbollah just demonstrated that.

The phrase is "might makes right." Of course, I didn’t mean to imply that might was morally right in the past, only that might almost always prevailed. The strongest empires were right because they could annihilate anyone who claimed otherwise. This seems to have changed. The powerful U.S. government and the great U.S. corporate media could not completely propagandize this conflict.

I’m suggesting that when the playing field is truly leveled, then tactics and execution are only excuses, not reasons for losing the war. Israel could not destroy Hezbollah, but I don’t think that was what they lost in this battle (I don’t think that could have been accomplished anyway). They lost because they created a whole new population and future generations of Muslims who oppose their hegemony. Perhaps, ‘right makes might’ will become the new paradigm.

While I recognize the realities of the UN rarely having resources, they had boots on the ground, with a very competent commander, in Rwanda. Gen. Dallaire requested repeatedly, before the mass killing started, to confiscate weapons and to take control of key radio stations. These actions were within his capabilities, although there were objections from assorted local factions when he tried to talk them into the desired action.

New York UN headquarters repeatedly refused him the authority to take these preemptive yet precautionary actions, which had a very low risk of casualties. Once the fighting started, using the weapons he tried to take and being coordinated over the radios he tried to take out of service, it was too late.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

The "Competence Dodge" is indeed a dodge because the false assumption built in is that through competent prosecution of war we could achieve our political ends in Iraq. It was obvious before the first American shock and awe bomb hit a Baghdadi neighborhood that the probability of success in Iraq was hovering around zero. The fools in our government (and their sycophants in the media and elsewhere) are still confused about the appropriate and effective use of their awesome military might, enchanted as they are by the fantasy that their bombs and force can build anything positive. Our overpowering military power can be used successfully against other military forces, armies and such, as in Kosovo or Gulf War I, but will never ever be effective in social and political fights such as we are in the middle of in Iraq, and suffered through in Somalia and Viet Nam.

Our leaders' incompetence is not in failed military tactics, it is in their utter inability to understand the real world limits of their power. Perhaps their most profound blindness is in failing to realize that the enemies they wish to engage, the "terrorists" (not the Iraqi or Lebanese civilians), fervently wish for the US and Israel to launch everything they have, because all the terrorists have to do to win the political battle is be able to stand up after the dust and smoke clears.

The "terrorists" are waging and winning a psychological battle in which any military response may actually help their cause more than it damages it. Americans (and the Bush Administration) are still hypnotized by the false promise of precision munitions and other power-addled fantasies, lost in the dream that by supporting our troops in a futile war we will somehow overcome the overwhelming evidence that what we are doing is not working to our advantage. American strategists seem completely flummoxed by the psychological dimensions of the Middle East struggle, and thus they lose the political battle for the civilian hearts and minds that eventually will determine the outcome there, long after all the soldiers have returned to their bases.

yeah like picking of the fragile organization that is the UN is contributing constructively to the debate. Sounds like a non sequitur to me.

Actually the "skeptics" understood about as much on what Lebanon was about as the "dodger" liberal hawks did on Iraq - very little.

Rather than repeat myself I'll just link to my post in another thread on the actual results of the Lebanon war on its actual target - Israeli public opinion

Probably was "yeah [,] like [as if] picking o[n] the fragile organization that is the UN is contributing constructively to the debate."

Makes me think of the linguistics professor maintaining that some languages use a single negative, some use a double, some use a double negative to mean a positive, but none uses a double positive to mean a negative. At this point he hears "Yeah, right."

Way off topic--I realize--but I did not hear about this before even though it is dated August 11th. Hope I'm not breaching some basic etiquette here. Thought you guys might appreciate it.

A Ruse to Save Blair’s Political Ass?
Wayne Madsen
Report August 11, 2006
According to knowledgeable sources in the UK and other countries, the Tony Blair government, under siege by a Labor Party revolt, cleverly cooked up a new "terror" scare to avert the public’s eyes away from Blair’s increasing political woes. British law enforcement; neo-con and intelligence operatives in the United States, Israel, and Britain; and Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire cooked up the terrorist plot, liberally borrowing from the failed 1995 "Oplan Bojinka" plot by Pakistan- and Philippines-based terrorist Ramzi Ahmad Yousef to crash 11 trans-Pacific airliners bound from Asia to the United States. In the latest plot, it is reported that liquid bombs were to be detonated on 10 trans-Atlantic planes outbound from Britain to the United States.

The London terror plan was "known" last Sunday by British and American authorities, according to the Indian press. American Airlines flight 109 from London Heathrow to Boston boarded a family of five, however, after the plane left Heathrow authorities determined that the father appeared on a British suspect list drawn up after the 7/7 London transit attacks. At first, the pilot was instructed to fly all the way to Boston where U.S. authorities could claim credit for apprehending the suspect. However, the pilot, fearing for the safety of his passengers and crew, refused and quickly returned to Heathrow without informing the passengers. Once on the ground, it was discovered that the male had in his carry-on baggage the type of combination liquid explosive and electronic device now being hyped by the British and American media.

British sources report that the reason for the delay in informing the airlines and traveling public about the liquid bomb on the American flight was to maximize the beneficial political impact for Blair and George W. Bush, both plummeting in the polls from the situations in Iraq and Lebanon.

Earlier this week, two employees of Murdoch’s London tabloid, News of the World, were charged with hacking into the voice and text cell phone messages of three members of the staff of Clarence House, the residence of Princes Charles, William, and Harry. One of those charged with the wiretapping was Clive Goodman, the Royals editor of the News of the World. The same paper earlier tried to politically damage two anti-Iraq war British politicians -- Scottish Socialist Tommy Sheridan and Respect Party MP George Galloway. The paper charges that Sheridan was unfaithful to his wife by going to swinger’s clubs. He won a quarter million dollar lawsuit against the paper. Galloway was confronted by Mazher Mahmood, an individual who uses the moniker "Fake Sheik," who posed as a wealthy Arab businessman and tried unsuccessfully to get Galloway to accept cash and make anti-Semitic remarks. In fact, Mahmood was and continues to be a reporter for News of the World, his continued employment approved by Murdoch. Goodman has merely been suspended by Murdoch but he has not been fired.

However, what prompted Murdoch and Blair to hype a new global "terror" threat was what Murdoch learned from eavesdropping on the phone calls of Prince Charles’ staff at the future king’s office, home, and limousine. The eavesdropping revealed that Charles was working with Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, who is to the left of Blair, to conduct the same type of political maneuver that John Major used to oust Margaret Thatcher from office. London’s left-wing Mayor, Ken Livingston, was also in on the Charles-Brown plan and it was expected that in return for his support, Livingston would get a senior position in a Brown cabinet -- a development that sent shock waves through the neo-con circles in London, Washington, and Jerusalem, including British Home Secretary John Reid and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. The Charles-Brown plan was briefed by Blair to Bush during the former’s recent visit to Washington. However, because the phony terror plot was known to both leaders -- they decided to be away on vacation when the terror plot was "uncovered." Bush is vacationing at his Crawford, Texas "ranch," while Blair is on vacation in Barbados, staying at Sir Cliff Richard’s luxurious villa.

After Blair met with Bush in Washington, he flew to California where on July 30 he attended Murdoch’s News Corporation private corporate executive conference at the posh Inn at Spanish Bay golf resort in Pebble Beach. Blair met with Murdoch, Israeli former Prime Minister Shimon Peres, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Newt Gingrich, and various Fox, Star, and Sky News executives. The final touches were agreed to by Blair and Murdoch on how the fake terror plot would play out in Murdoch’s media empire.

Blair told Bush that a Brown government would move to withdraw British troops from Iraq, break the "special relationship" with the Bush White House, and move closer to the European Union and the United Nations.

The Israeli attack on Lebanon created a rift within Blair’s Cabinet with some former Blair loyalists signaling their support for the political coup against Blair. As a result, a suspect passenger was permitted to board an American aircraft at Heathrow with a liquid bomb to lay the groundwork for the media and travel hysteria five days later.

The wiretapping of Charles’ messages also indicated that he has weighed in with various European royal families to discourage them from inviting Bush on state visits to their nations. This, reportedly upset the Bush and Blair regimes, who were working together to improve Bush’s image in Europe. The White House’s displeasure with the monarchies in Spain, Belgium, Sweden, Luxembourg, and Norway are a direct result of the Murdoch eavesdropping on Charles’ staff.

Not surprisingly, after Galloway tore into a Sky News reporter on a recent televised interview, The Sun, a Murdoch paper, is now reporting that one of the 24 British aircraft liquid bomber suspects now under arrest, Waheed Zaman, met with Galloway "many times." The paper quotes the sister of the suspect. A Galloway spokesman denies that Galloway knows the suspect. What is suspect is the Murdoch media empire that makes up news and commits illegal acts to provide cover for the false flag operations being conducted by Britain, the U.S., and Israel.

Pakistan’s Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) agency has helped provide the cover story for the alleged liquid bombers. Working with British and U.S. intelligence, the ISI says it broke up the plot after arresting terrorist suspects in Lahore and Karachi. However, the ISI claims that the men were affiliated with the Kashmiri terrorist group Lashkar-e-Toiba, a group that is run and funded by the ISI itself.

The disclosure of the Charles-Brown plot has already created a backlash from the neo-cons. The Murdoch media is already floating the rumor that Home Secretary Reid is now Blair’s chosen successor, while there will be an effort to scandalize Charles in an effort to convince the British public that it would be best to skip over him and have Prince William assume the throne upon Queen Elizabeth’s death or abdication.

British commentators are noting that it is Reid, a noted neo-con, who is chairing national security "Cobra" meetings in Blair’s absence. Blair bypassed Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott and many political observers believe that Prescott was passed over because of evidence that he was involved in supporting the Charles-Brown coup. Prescott chaired Cobra meetings in the wake of the July 7, 2005 (7/7) London transit bombings.

Meanwhile, Republican governors Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mitt Romney used the occasion to boost their sagging popularity by placing their states’ National Guardsmen at major airports in their states. www.waynemadsenreport.com/ Last updated 12/08/2006

By : anti guerre
August Saturday 12th 2006

But who is that "UN" that denied the request of General Dallaire? "Headquarters" or important member states like ourselves? It is not like we were begging other members to approve that request.

One can even surmise the reasons why the request was denied. It the optimistic scenation, the genocide would be prevented but UN would be a referee in a bloody central-African civil war. Should UN prevent the invasion of Tutsi exiles and preserve the power of the majority -- a rather genocidal majority -- or acquiesce, and preside over a dictatorship of an ethnic minority.

By all accounts, "Headquarters" as in military officers on the UN staff in New York. Do you have any evidence that it even went to member states?

I certainly hope not, as Dallaire was describing things that had to be done in hours or short days. If that sort of decisionmaking has to form a consensus among members, the UN is utterly useless for peace enforcement. Symbolic peacekeeping, perhaps, but if this was really the case and it wasn't fixed, under no circumstances would I ever support the placing of potentially active operations under UN operational control. The UN, incidentally, did not have operational control (a term of art with specific meaning) of the forces in the Korean war.

Your surmises are relevant only if, indeed, operational decisions were being made on political grounds. If there is anything of substance to them, I become even more convinced that the UN, using "peace enforcement" as a more appropriate term than "referee", is a useless organization for creating peace where the participants haven't already decided they want it.

Your surmise leaves no meaningful role for the UN in Africa. While the humanitarian operations of the UN World Food Programme have been relatively effective in Darfur, I am quite opposed to replacing the African Union with UN forces. The African Union may need support and training.
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Napoleon was ultimately defeated but it took all of Europe working together to do it.

So, Napoleon demonstrated his colonial skills by provoking all of Europe to unite against him.

I think we have our lesson for contemporary policy.

zionista are you totally new to blogtopia? You chose a screen name that is in and of itself a little inflammatory and then set yourself up as the civility police. Anyone who thinks that "idiot" is a violation of Godwin's Law or some other unstated Rule of Decorum had best keep herself to the more sedate sides of the blogosphere.

Daniel's post is dripping with condecension. He uses the word "absurd", he accuses Matt of being "for the unilateral surrender against the growing danger of Islamic zealots" which is just this side of calling Matt a traitor, a line which he and others have had little to no difficulty crossing in the past.

Some of us are just a little sick and tired of the 101st Fighting Keyboardists accusing us of treason and not supporting the troops just because we started pointing out before the war started that the likely result was in fact to get a lot of American kids coming home in boxes (oh sorry 'transfer tubes'). We were right, the Greenbaums of this world were wrong, and they and you are just going to have to get used to it.

Here is a hint. By choosing the screen name "zionista" you have already expressed your position and so have to some degree compromised your right to troll rate anyone on any topic related to Israel. You are free to "stop reading" me at any point you like but for G___'s sake engage on substance and not trivialities like "idiot". Tens of thousands of people are dead and maimed because idiots dragged us into war based on lies and deception. And the intervention required to bring idiots to understand that they were idiots all along is not going to be pain-free for them. Or perhaps you.

Bruce Webb,

You chose a screen name that is in and of itself a little inflammatory....

How so?

If you have to ask, we can't explain.

OK then. 

I will labor under the assumption that you and Bruce Webb cynically employ simplistic miscarachterizations of Zionists the way Republicans and other conservatives cynically employ simplistic mischaracterizations of liberals.

I simply avoid the term Zionism altogether, since it has too many (mostly wrong) connotations. I'm aware that I have inadequate understanding of Zionism and its roots.

Webb is suggesting that you ask for trouble, unnecessarily.

Re: Foreign markets don't look much better.

Nearly 200 years. Until Alexander arrived, and his successors held it until the Parthians took it 200 years later.
One reason that made the Persians successful in their imperial venture (until they overstetched themselves in Greece and Ethiopia) is that they were quite mild as conquerors: no great bloodbaths or genocides, indeed, they often reversed previous conquerors' injustices, as when the Jews were allowed to reurn to Judea. They also provided superior government, a fairly just (for the time) and impartial administration, and until the Great Kings got too greedy, they inaugurated an era of general propserity. Alexander and his successors did much the same, adding a good dose of Hellas' attractive cultural and intellectual gifts as well, and the Parthians continued their policies, giving few people any reason to rebel or even complain. Noteworthy too is that all these conquerors made Mesopotamia the center of their empires, as did the Arabs centuries later. The Turks did not however, and the region was fought over for generations, leading to its present woes, especially the Sunni-Shi'ite-Kurd strife. And George Bush will certainly not move the White House to Baghdad.

And then there was the French Revolutionary War

It's kind of hard for the French to lose a war when every side fighting in the war is French. 

"You say I'm a dreamer.  We're two of a kind.  Looking for some perfect world that we both know that we'll never find." - Thompson Twins, "Hold Me Now"

Tom Wright,

I'm aware that I have inadequate understanding of Zionism and its roots.

And yet, so certain as to the "inflammatory" nature of variations on the word Zionist.

Thank you. Elsewhere in the thread, I've had a dispute about the need to jump to conclusions, generally rated as America's second favorite indoor sport. I truly appreciate your pointing out the need for careful conclusions -- certainly not the sort that led to the particular form of the US invasion of Iraq.

Even within the military context for Lebanon, there are several separable issues, some interrelated. One was how to reduce or stop the artillery rocket bombardment from Hezbollah. Closely related to that was the matter of doing so in a way that balanced military effectiveness with avoiding civilian casualties. Yet another aspect is how to destroy stockpiles and block resupply, the latter often confusing people who seem to think the BM-21 GRAD, which is the most likely rocket being used, is much larger than its actual size. It simply is not that hard to transport, and the launching ramp for a single rocket isn't much more complicated than a simple metal support. The only trick for home-made versions is leaving a slot for the bottom fin to slide out during launch.

A broader but related question is what does "degrade Hezbollah" mean? Is anyone aware of openly available assessments of their order of battle, tables of organization and equipment, C3I, and chain of command? That would seem an important starting point in answering the question.

The IDF complained of certain tactics of Hezbollah, which really puzzles me. Quite a few of these were well-known Chechen techniques, against which one would think an advanced military would plan countermeasures. This didn't seem to happen.
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

What I think people are missing is that those who claim incompetence are using incompetence as a code word for "did not kill enough Arabs."

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Re: I believe what Matt is writing is that this war was a bad idea no matter who was in power.

I read it very differently: that even if the war had been a success the cost (in the larger sense as well as dollars) would not have been worth the gains.

The key question is "What to do now?".

For Israelis, it is probably to replace the Olmert government. Whether you blame their inept execution or their decision to launch air attacks in the first place, he is objectively not competent at his job. If the IDF was not, as some say, in a state of military readiness, then it was not competent to escalate as a response to Hezbollah's Acts of War. One could argue that Israel should simply have taken counter-hostages, as it did with Hamas and the kidnapping of Galid Shalit.

For the Lebanese, the next thing to do is to assure their security by disarming Hezbollah. That is the only way to guarantee there will be no further Israeli military action. Nasrallah's competence should also be called into question and he should be replaced. His decisions brought great pain to Lebanon.

Very considerably. I hope this is a serious question.

It appeared that the Israelis used counterbattery (i.e., shoot back at the guy shooting at you) methods that increased the possibility of civilian casualties. To be correct, of course, they might not be Arab, since Lebanon is multiethnic. Be confident I didn't want to kill civilian and innocent Druze, Maronites, or Arabs.

I have no problem in killing someone that directly tried to kill me. I have a significant problem when, several minutes after the rocket launcher was thrown into the truck and the crew is speeding away, delivering large air-dropped bombs to the former location, if it was in a populated civilian area. If it was in an orchard as some were reported, war is rough on trees, but at least civilians were out of the area.
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

In less technical terms, it is plausible that tactics more narrowly focused on actual military targets would be more effective. IDF was bombing all over the place and than it claimed that it was against Hezbollah rocket launching.

Number one, the claim was considerably weakened by bombing targets that had nothing to do with Hezbollah (fruit packing plant at the opposite end of Lebanon? bridges in Maronite area?) but Hezbollah was perhaps hurt much less as a result.

I have some doubt if howitzer tactic described by Howard would work. It is absolutely correct in a normal military setting. Here the opponent had no intension to mantain fixed positions from which it was firing rockets. Even so, every second is important in the sense that it allows more freedom of action to the opponent. After launching the team was presumably running like hell for cover, but it is very different if you have 5 minutes or 30 seconds.