Middle East crisis.

[dean]

ND, I don't think the recovery in Northern Ireland is anywhere near what the "celtic tiger" to the south has gone through. I haven't been to Belfast in two years but I didn't notice then the kind of development that is going on in Dublin (for which i am glad; Dublin has lost most of its charm in the last 10 years). I don't think that housing cost are anywhere near housing cost in the south (those bombed out streets where the catholics and protestants are separated by a wall have houses for sale for as little as 25,000 quid). Donegal is part of Northern ireland geographically and culturally but not politically. I spend a lot of time in Donegal and most of the people complain that its industries are closing and going to E. Europe or Asia. There is no economic boom going on there. I don't think that Northern Ireland is part of the U.K. in the same manner as England, Scotland and Wales. Its always refered to as "The United Kingdom and Northern Ireland".

[dean]

Phil, I don't care one way or the other if Northern Ireland remains a British protedtorate or merges with the South. You are completely right that Irish Americans have no right to support the IRA. They can have their opinions, however. I know when I go to pubs in either England but particularly in Scotland, I'll get into a conversation with a local who offers to buy me a pint. This entitles him to tell me what a crap government the U.S. has and how G.W. Bush is the next Hitler/Stalin. I usually listen for a minute or two and then excuse myself to use the toilet and go out the back way. Finally, you can prove anything with history. There would be a lot fewer Irish Americans if the Britiha government had handled the Irish famine of the 1840's-1850's in a responsible manner instead of letting them starve. I know that you are a big fan of Oliver Cromwell but I know of no Irish that shares your admiration.

[Guest lazyphil]

Do you really think it was only the Irish who were under the cruel treatment of the rich and landowners in days gone by?.... just one example of how the English peasents were treated by the higher echolons of society......

[Nervous_Dog]

LP I am not American, and as you say <> So I assume you get my point then.

 

Dean Re Northern Ireland, family there tell me while last 10 years they got a lot of work in the South, now the North is picking up very nicely and they get a lot more work there now than ever before,

 

DOG

[Fidel]

I just read an interesting article. The jist of it is that Israeli action in Lebanon is part of the preparation for attacks on Iran.

 

One of the fears of the US and the Israelis was that an attack on Iran would lead to retaliation through massive rocket attacks on Israel by Hezbollah. It was believed that thousands of Israelis would die in such an event.

 

The gamble taken by the Israelis has been that if Hezbollah is forced to use it's rockets while under attack from Israel there will be far fewer Israeli casualties, (fuck the Lebanese), and the threat would be removed to clear the way for an attack on Iran.

 

Gentlemen, welcome to World War Three:

 

Was Israel's Aim to Clear Path for US War on Iran?

 

by Gareth Porter

Israel has argued that the war against Hezbollah's rocket arsenal was a defensive response to the Shi'ite organization's threat to Israeli security, but the evidence points to a much more ambitious objective â?? the weakening of Iran's deterrent to an attack on its nuclear sites.

 

In planning for the destruction of most of Hezbollah's arsenal and prevention of any resupply from Iran, Israel appears to have hoped to eliminate a major reason the George W. Bush administration had shelved the military option for dealing with Iran's nuclear program â?? the fear that Israel would suffer massive casualties from Hezbollah's rockets in retaliation for an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.

 

One leading expert on Israeli national defense policy issues believes the aim of the Israeli campaign against Hezbollah was to change the Bush administration's mind about attacking Iran. Edward Luttwak, senior adviser to the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, says Bush administration officials have privately dismissed the option of air strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities in the past, citing estimates that a Hezbollah rocket attack in retaliation would kill thousands of people in northern Israel.

 

But Israeli officials saw a war in Lebanon to destroy Hezbollah's arsenal and prevent further resupply in the future as a way to eliminate that objection to the military option, says Luttwak.

 

The risk to Israel of launching such an offensive was that it would unleash the very rain of Hezbollah rockets on Israel that it sought to avert. But Luttwak believes the Israelis calculated that they could degrade Hezbollah's rocket forces without too many casualties by striking preemptively.

 

"They knew that a carefully prepared and coordinated rocket attack by Hezbollah would be much more catastrophic than one carried out under attack by Israel," he says.

 

Gerald M. Steinberg, an Israeli specialist on security affairs at Bar Ilon University who reflects Israeli government thinking, did not allude to the link between destruction of Hezbollah's rocket arsenal and a possible attack on Iran in an interview with Bernard Gwertzman of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York last week. But he did say there is "some expectation" in Israel that after the U.S. congressional elections, Bush "will decide that he has to do what he has to do."

 

Steinberg said Israel wanted to "get an assessment" of whether the United States would "present a military attack against the Iranian nuclear sites as the only option." If not, he suggested that Israel was still considering its own options.

 

Specialists on Iran and Hezbollah have long believed that the missiles Iran has supplied to Hezbollah were explicitly intended to deter an Israeli attack on Iran. Ephraim Kam, a specialist on Iran at Israel's Jaffe Center for Strategic Studies, wrote in December 2004 that Hezbollah's threat against northern Israel was a key element of Iran's deterrent to a U.S. attack.

 

Ali Ansari, an associate professor at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and author of a new book on the U.S. confrontation with Iran, was quoted in the Toronto Star July 30 as saying, "Hezbollah was always Iran's deterrent force against Israel."

 

Iran has also threatened direct retaliation against Israel with the Shahab-3 missile from Iranian territory. However, Iran may be concerned about the possibility that Israel's Arrow system could intercept most of them, as the Jaffe Center's Kam observed in 2004. That elevates the importance to Iran of Hezbollah's ability to threaten retaliation.

 

Hezbollah received some Soviet-era Katyusha rockets, with a range of only five miles, and a hundreds of longer-range missiles after Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000. But Israel's daily Ha'aretz, citing a report by Israeli military intelligence at the time, has reported that the number of missiles and rockets in Hezbollah hands grew to more 12,000 in 2004.

 

That was when Iranian officials felt that the Bush administration might seriously consider an attack on their nuclear sites, because it knew Iran was poised to begin enrichment of uranium. It was also when Iranian officials began to imply that Hezbollah could retaliate against any attack on Iran, although they have never stated that explicitly.

 

The first hint of Iranian concern about the possible strategic implications of the Israeli campaign to degrade the Hezbollah missile force in southern Lebanon came in a report by Michael Slackman in the New York Times July 25. Slackman quoted an Iranian official with "close ties to the highest levels of government" as saying, "They want to cut off one of Iran's arms."

 

The same story quoted Mohsen Rezai, the former head of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, as saying, "Israel and the U.S. knew that as long as Hamas and Hezbollah were there, confronting Iran would be costly" â?? an obvious reference to the deterrent value of the missiles in Lebanon. "So, to deal with Iran, they first want to eliminate forces close to Iran that are in Lebanon and Palestine."

 

Israel has been planning its campaign against Hezbollah's missile arsenal for many months. As Matthew Kalman reported from Tel Aviv in the San Francisco Chronicle on July 21, "More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to U.S. and other diplomats, journalists, and think tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail."

 

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's main purpose in meeting with Bush on May 25 was clearly to push the United States to agree to use force, if necessary, to stop Iran's uranium enrichment program. Four days before the meeting, Olmert told CNN that Iran's "technological threshold" is "very close." In response to a question about U.S. and European diplomacy on the issue, Olmert replied: "I prefer to take the necessary measures to stop it, rather than find out later that my indifference was so dangerous."

 

At his meeting with Bush, according to Yitzhak Benhorin of Israel's YnetNews, Olmert pressed Bush on Israel's intelligence assessment that Iran would gain the technology necessary to build a bomb within a year and expressed fears that diplomatic efforts were not going to work.

 

It seems likely that Olmert discussed Israel's plans for degrading Hezbollah's missile capabilities as a means of dramatically reducing the risk of an air campaign against Iran's nuclear sites, and that Bush gave his approval. That would account for Olmert's comment to Israeli reporters after the meeting, reported by the Israel's YnetNews, but not by U.S. news media: "I am very, very, very satisfied."

 

Bush's refusal to do anything to curb Israel's freedom to wreak havoc on Lebanon further suggests that he encouraged the Israelis to take advantage of any pretext to launch the offensive. The Israeli plan may have given Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld new ammunition for advocating a strike on Iran's nuclear sites.

 

Rumsfeld was the voice of administration policy toward Iran from 2002 to 2004, and he often appeared to be laying the political groundwork for an eventual military attack on Iran. But he has been silenced on the subject of Iran since Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice took over Iran policy in January 2005.

 

 

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/porter.php?articleid=9505

[MaiLuk]

See this is what I don't like about these discussions. I make a point...'Israel wants peace but on it's own terms. ' which to me seems glaringly obvious and I get accused of being 'a graduate of Arab League propaganda 101'.

 

All I'm trying to do is look at the problem as a whole and think it through to a solution...if there is one.

 

Lets not get too sensitive. Some of what i say should not be taken too seriously.

 

Like you, I also think these debates should be geared toward finding answers. Instead of the usual routine of debating for the sole purpose of winning a debate that sometimes happens on this board.

[MaiLuk]

Snarky eh? :smirk:

 

No doubt that the US is ill equipped to fight the insurgency in iraq.

 

The problem for the third generation israeli military taking on the 4th generation hexbollah military is that israel cannot operate in enemy territory as a 4th generation army. So when trying to disrupt hezbollah military capability it uses 3rd generation tactics. No other choice is there? Diplomacy has reached its limits without result.

 

W@hile your friend is right that hezbollah can therefore bleed the israelis, the israelis are not therefore fools. They know full well what their facing. They would rather bleed in lebanon then sit around while the genocidal monster in their backyard continues to grow and stockpile more and more weapons.

 

 

[..]

Why can't they run their campaign like a 4th generation army? What about the vaunted Mossad and their special ops forces? Accurate clandestine strikes that take out the bad guys without civilian casualties (i.e., assassinations) are viable options, if they chose to do so. But their arrogantly underestimated their opponent and look where it has gotten them.

 

But I disagree that diplomacy was not working. Hezbollah was being marginalized, albeit slowly but that's how diplomacy works. They had a 17% approval rating in Lebannon before this Israeli attack (not something like 90+%), and the Lebanese government was pro-West. They have now erased all that and made Israel less safe.

 

Stupidity kills, as was said before. I just wish more countries had the balls to do as Chavez has done and break diplomatic/economic ties with Israel. They need to learn that they need to play by the rules too.

 

Regards,

SD

[chuckwoww]

More anti-semitism from the BBC....

 

 

Pro-Israel pressure strong in US

By Nick Miles, BBC News, Washington

 

Since the start of the current violence in Lebanon, the United States' position has remained consistent: it is only sensible to have an Israeli ceasefire when it can be a sustainable one.

 

In other words, when Hezbollah has been sufficiently weakened to no longer pose a threat.

 

That is a view that has been at odds with many European nations, who have argued for an immediate Israeli ceasefire.

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5258240.stm

[MaiLuk]

Why can't they run their campaign like a 4th generation army? What about the vaunted Mossad and their special ops forces? Accurate clandestine strikes that take out the bad guys without civilian casualties (i.e., assassinations) are viable options, if they chose to do so.

 

Special ops cannot be used to defeat a standing army (such as hezbollah). The Mossad and/or special ops can only take out specific targets when they have surprise on their side. A couple of strikes by special ops and surprise is history. In wartime, special ops mission is to support the conventional army, not defeat an enemy army.

 

 

 

By the definition supplied by your analyst friend, the israelis cannot fight as a "fourth generation" army in Lebanon:

 

This new brand of warfare is a variant of an old idea -- asymmetrical guerilla warfare pitting guerrillas against a conventional military -- but takes advantages of the revolution in global communications and trade that has happened over the past forty years to operate completely independently of any state in which they happen to be hosted. This 4th generation of warfare pits non-state actors against the militaries of invading states, and thus far has proven immune to anything that a 3rd-generation military can dish out short of genocide.

 

...

 

He [the hezbollah fighter] simply fades into the background and bides his time until the enemy is forced to reduce force levels in some area due to the exorbitant expense of maintaining a 3rd generation military in the field, and then comes back out from hiding and resumes bleeding the 3rd generation military.

 

 

Israel is the invader. Israelis cannot hide amongst the civilians (or anywhere else) and wait for the enemy to expose its weak point. Israelis do not have a conventional enemy they can bleed.

 

Same for the US in Iraq. As soon as the insurgency took hold we should have cut our losses and bailed out. We can't succeeed against local insurgents. But we won't pull out. Doing so would be an admission of failure which might result in the dems taking congress.

 

Also, there is a fixation here on this idea that: "If we exit Iraq our enemies will believe, and have actually stated, that the US does not have the stomach to stay when things get tough."

Don't know what you think but this has to be by far the most monumentally stupid reason to stay in Iraq while our kids take casualties. Who gives a fuck what islamist turds think. Maybe we should just put the islamists in charge of US foreign policy since their thoughts seem to be of paramount importance.