Monday, July 31, 2006

The "let's hide behind our women and babies war plan"

A week ago I wrote the post They Will All Go To Hell. In it I criticized Hezbollah for their unprovoked attack on Israel, and Israel for their military response.

Then I suggested in The Dead Baby that once the New York Times started featuring dead Lebanese babies on their front cover, the world opinion was about to change.

I know, based on the fifty or so comments that this post really touched home. I also know that my readers are divided in several camps, for and against Israel, for and against this war.

Which makes me the lonely guy in the middle. And I'm not taking this position because of my readers. Quite frankly, I've been a strong supporter of Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East during most of my life.

But as I have started to reevaluate much of what I've supported in my life, and as I've traveled to Israel and seen both the situation from the Israeli point of view, as well as the Arab point of view, I came to the conclusion that my world view had been too simplistic.

Unfortunately, when you start studying any issue, this is often the conclusion you come to. You realize that what is right and wrong isn't really that easy. I realize Israel has been under attack for most of its existence and most of its neighbors want to finish what others started in the 30s. But I also realize that we have an unresolved situation with Arabs living in poverty and squalor, displaced by the new state. And I realize there is no perfect solution.

And absent a perfect solution, I don't think killing off each others babies is a good one. It's as simple as that.

And as I predicted world opinion has now changed.

The death of over fifty civilians, most of them women and children, in one building in Lebanon attacked by Israel has now led to Israel agreeing to halt bombings for 48 hours.

Only that promise didn't last long. The New York Times wrote an hour ago, "Israel continued to attack targets in Lebanon even after agreeing to a 48-hour halt to its broad bombing campaign in the face of an outcry over the air raid on Sunday that left dozens of Lebanese civilians dead."

But let's stop discussing the blame game.

And let's start discussing what's really going on here.

Hezbollah kidnapped Israeli soldiers using the excuse of a prison exchange. They knew Israel would refuse and that Israel was likely to attack.

This is what Hezbollah had planned for during the past twenty years, when they built bunkers, tunnels, and got tens of thousands of rockets and other goodies from Iran and Syria.

So now the stage was set.

Israel jumped up and down and took the bait. It was almost as easy as provoking a certain French football captain in the World Cup by insulting his mother.

The fight started.

And of course, with bunkers and rockets hidden in residential areas, the Lebanese death toll increased, until the number of dead children and babies made things unbearable for the international community.

That's exactly what Hezbollah had counted on. Meanwhile sympathy for Hezbollah, which has been somewhat of a fringe movement in the Arab world, exploded. That's also what Hezbollah hoped for.

As far as I can tell, Israel has played right into Hezbollah's hands.

It wouldn't be the first time in history a nation has fallen into that trap.

After all, that's how the expression a "Pyrrhic victory" was once coined. The phrase is more often reported as "Another such victory over the Romans and we are undone".

For the first time the Arab world has come up with a warfare model that Israel can't crush in six days using their tanks and airplanes.

It's a simple plan.

The plan is called the "let's hide behind our women and babies war plan."

missile babies

And Israel just made that plan work, by blowing up all those babies, some of whom ended up on the first page of New York Times

Nice job, Israel and Condi.

Neither Condi nor Israel is a in a rush to stop the mayhem. After, all, Hezbollah are "terrorists" and this is the time to exterminate them. As if bombing a country back into the middle ages would accomplish that.

Truth is that the Jewish people survived one of the worst atrocities in recorded history, even though most of them didn't have a single gun to defend themselves against state orchestrated terror. Israel is going to be even less likely to exterminate the "terrorists" equipped with rockets and other modern warfare materiel. After all, even if they dumped atomic bombs onto every surrounding country they wouldn’t achieve that goal.

And that leaves only one workable solution. Make up and live in peace.

But something tells me neither Hezbollah nor Israel is willing to listen to that advice.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Similarly, the US Government has played into Bin Laden's hands.

Anonymous said...

Peter, I think the scheming goes very deep. I think this has been planned by the United States and Israel. It will be the runup that the U.S needs to justify the bombing of Iran; thereby, taking out a source of funding and weapons for Hezbullah, and setback of the Iranian nuclear program.

I know you get interested in diverse topics, so look up war games, year 2002, and department of defense (DOD) on Google to see what happened in a DOD simulation of a mythical middle eastern country defending itself as the blue team (that is us) tried to bomb it into submission from a certain very large lake (Persian Gulf?). Von (or was it Van) Ripper was the head of the red team defending the country. You are going to be for a surprise.

Kansas said...

I think Anonymous #2 is probably on to something.

**sigh**

Anonymous said...

Well you know my position on this. Hezbollah is nothing but terrorists.

I read how they spend money in their neigborhoods and the people generally get along with them.

BUT the same was said about the Mafia at one time. They took care of their neigborhoods. Didn't make them any less criminal.

I feel the same way about Hamas and Hezbollah. They are a criminal organization who deliberately started this fight.

It is their intention and always has been along with the Muslim world to try and find some way to kill all the Jews.

The cartoon says it all.

Should we abandon Israel? Should we tell them that when invaded and troops murdered and kidnapped not to worry about it?

Let their people be slaughtered because goodness knows we don't want them to have any bad press.

Sorry but Hezbollah is wrong and Israel has every right to go after them.

Sorry I haven't been posting much. My mother's surgery went well but at 80 it takes her longer to recover and I have been spending a lot of time taking care of her and it is difficult to get too much time to come here.

So be patient, if anyone cares, but I'll be bahk as often as I can.

Huffpoo is getting tiresome. I still read the headlines and occasionally post, but there is no civil discourse there and the trollz are still running the place into the ground.

Anonymous said...

"I don't think your readership is divided. It is united against the Arab world and united behind Israel" beeta

Speak for yourself :) ! You do not know this. You cannot know this. I do know people who regularly read Dr. Rost and do not post re Israel for reasons I don't want to posts. It's sad.

And beeta, please keep posting.

Kansas said...

Beeta,

You said:

“I don't think your readership is divided. It is united against the Arab world and united behind Israel. Americans are uneducated and ignorant about much of the world.”

So I put down my banjo and stopped having sex with my cousin long enough to get me one of them there education thingies.

Main Entry: ter·ror·ism
Pronunciation: 'ter-&r-"i-z&m
Function: noun

1: the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion

2: violent or destructive acts (as bombing) committed by groups in order to intimidate a population or government into granting their demands. An insurrection and revolutionary terror.

Hezbollah = Terrorists

Hamas = Terrorists

Al Qeuda = Terrorists

Bush
Cheney
Rumsfeld
Libby = All Terrorists

The majority of the comments have come out against Hezbollah and the fact that they use women and children as human shields. We’re not lumping every Arab nation in with Hezbollah.

It is you who seems to think all Arab people are alike.

Kansas said...

I’ll see your “force of barbarism”, and raise you an atrocity.

On October 23, 1983, around 6:20 am, two truck bombs struck buildings in Beirut housing U.S. and French members of the Multinational Force in Lebanon, killing hundreds of American troops, the majority being Marines.

One truck turned onto an access road leading to the Marines' compound and circled a parking lot. The driver then accelerated and crashed through a barbed wire fence around the parking lot, passed between two sentry posts, crashed through a gate and barreled into the lobby of the Marine headquarters. The Marine sentries at the gate were forbidden from using live ammuntion, for fear that a discharge might kill a civilian, so they were powerless to stop him. According to one Marine survivor, the driver was smiling as he sped past him.

The suicide bomber detonated his explosives, which were equivalent to 12,000 pounds (about 5,400kg) of TNT. The force of the explosion collapsed the four-story cinder-block building into rubble, crushing many inside.

About 20 seconds later, an identical attack occurred against the barracks of the French Third Company of the Sixth French Parachute Infantry Regiment. Another suicide bomber drove his truck down a ramp into the building's underground parking garage and detonated his bomb, leveling the headquarters. Rescue efforts continued for days. While the rescuers were at times hindered by sniper fire, some survivors were pulled from the rubble.

The death toll was 241 American servicemen: 220 Marines, 18 Navy personnel and 3 Army soldiers. Sixty Americans were injured. In the attack on the French barracks, 58 paratroopers were killed and 15 injured. In addition, the elderly Lebanese custodian of the Marines' building was killed in the first blast. The wife and four children of a Lebanese janitor at the French building also were killed.

This was the deadliest single-day death toll for the United States Marine Corps since the Battle of Iwo Jima (2,500 in one day) of World War II. The attack remains the deadliest post-World War II attack on Americans overseas.

In retaliation for the attacks, France launched an air strike in the Beqaa Valley against Iranian Revolutionary Guard positions. President Reagan assembled his national security team and planned to target the Sheik Abdullah barracks in Baalbek, Lebanon (Israel just entered Baalbek today), which housed Iranian Revolutionary Guards believed to be training Hezbollah fighters. But Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger aborted the mission because of his concerns that it would harm U.S. relations with other Arab nations.

Besides a few shellings, there was no serious retaliation for the Beirut bombing from the Americans. And you wonder why America is supporting Israel in her effort to defend herself against these beasts?

Hezbollah, the unprovoked killers of 241 American soldiers. How
anyone can continue to defend these animals is beyond me.

You must be wearing your fact-deflecting armor again.

Kansas said...

As this is not a debate, let me just say, I respect your right to your opinion. This is why I do not call people who disagree with me uneducated or ignorant. Everyone here is armed with his or her unique point of view.

Responding to these different points of view is what the comments area is all about and what keeps the conversations going.

If you choose not to respond to my comments, that is certainly your choice. And if I choose to respond to yours, that is my choice.

But, as the lone voice of support for Hezbollah, you really have to expect others to passionately defend their defense of Israel, and America's right to support them.

This is one area where we will have to agree to disagree. I'm sure there will be many other subjects in the future where we will sing the same song.

Best wishes to you also.

shooter said...

.Sonofabitch, just when I was kick'n back, hang'n up my 44 magnum talk'n pointers, and getting ready to enjoy my old age, BAM! a freak'n voice appears, stranger than anything that came before. I figures this has got to be one smart fella, and when I get to the punchline I'll bust out laugh'n at the great spoof. Damn! I ain't laugh'n. Yo Zap, you made one bad mistake when you mentioned my RosieBabe. My words and heart went out to her way back when Mom first went into the hospital. You know, when they were still
seeing if you could use crayons without hurting yourself. Well, congratulations, you made it. My stetson's off to you, you made it all the way to a keyboard. And I'm behind you, pal. We can work on putting all those big wordies together in a way that the big people will be able to understand. I don't want to hurt your feelings, but you said some truly stupid things, and with the situation as deadly serious as it is,
we don't need stupid right now.

Don't yell at me Beeta. I couldn't help myself. Sista-Moo-Chick, gimme a pass on this one, o.k?, Rosie, My friend, you're doin what you gotta do. But you know that. It's late,....... and I'm old.

O.K., O.K. hey Zap, you're welcome here anytime. And you know, read'n you a second time, you're starting to grow on me.

Kansas said...

Wow Zap, if this is you trying real hard for solutions, then we are truly screwed.

We've been discussing this for days (weeks?). Where YOU been?

And Shooter-dude, you have a green light any time. You are the King of Snark and you crack me up!

And Beeta, sometimes 4:00am rants are the most entertaining rants of all! Rant on girlfriend!