Posts from — July 2006

Hugo, I like you and really appreciate Citgo as a reliable source of gas in good times and bad. I realize the Shrubbery is on your case and causing trouble for you, but, trust me, you and your country do not need to buy these from Russia.

The Sukhoi-30 [Flanker] is a hot fighter and will look great in Venezuelan colors. The Israelis, French, or Indians will compete to sell you the aftermarket goodies to make them even better, but you don’t need them.

If you want to buy planes, your country could use short-haul prop jobs to move people and products around. Buy some of those and use the money you’ll save on schools and health clinics.

As a service to the Israeli Air Force, the following symbols should not be targeted to avoid appearing in court:

[Click on symbols for more information.]

CBS offers two opinions on the Israeli-Lebanese “problem”:

Why Won’t They Support Their Own? by David Gelernter of The Weekly Standard

Friends Don’t Let Friends Wage Wars by Matthew Yglesias of The American Prospect

Not all Jews are Israelis, and not all Israelis are Jews.

The current government of Israel is not the selection of a majority of Israelis; it is a coalition. No one party commands the respect of a majority of voters.

The Kadima party, which formed the current government, has only 29 of 120 seats in the Knesset [Israeli parliament], so more than three out of four Israeli voters preferred someone else.

I want a supporter of Israel to explain why the objective, physical evidence shows that the two Israelis soldiers captured by Hezbollah were in Lebanon when taken.

I want a supporter of Israel to look at this photograph and explain why it doesn’t prove that the Israeli air force is targeting ambulances.

I want a supporter of Israel to explain why an Israeli bomb kills UN observers.

Hezbollah is not blameless. As Juan Cole has pointed out several times, firing Katyusha rockets is almost by definition a war crime. They are giant “bottle rockets” designed to break up massed formations of troops, and are not as accurate as most artillery. Firing them in the direction of an occupied area is almost a guarantee of civilian casualties. Just because the Israelis started the attacks on civilians doesn’t excuse Hezbollah.

If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles. – Sun Tzu

Karen at Peripetia has a post on the efforts of the military to figure out who they are fighting: It’s the Tribalism…Stupid! (Part 2). After more than three years into the second Gulf War they decide it might be a good idea to find out what motivates the enemy.

You have to wonder if Israel is aware of Hezbollah’s secret weapon, a very shallow overview of the group they are fighting in Lebanon.

Does anyone in charge of anything understand the difference between Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr on Islamic governments? Do they know who these men are as they blithely decide to alienate all of the Shi’ia? Do they know the significance of the color of the turban worn by Shi’ia clerics? Do they know the religious significance of the King of Jordan?

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The Israel Defense Force has discovered that Hezbollah has developed a defense in depth along the Lebanon-Israel border and they are a trained regular army, not a motley collection of guerrillas. They were stunned to discover that Hezbollah wears uniforms and has multiple techniques for taking out tanks.

Expecting the Lebanese army to disarm Hezbollah is absurd. After decades of civil war and the effects of both Israeli and Syrian occupation, the Lebanese army lacks the resources of the average American state police force.

The bulk of the IDF is formed from guys fulfilling their national service obligations while Hezbollah is a veteran infantry force. The Israelis are taking heavy casualties for a minimum gain going against Hezbollah on their home ground.

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Northern California is having a REAL Summer, thanks to the Global Warming [that doesn’t exist] and this is causing power outages [not all of them were created by Enron].

A major NAP [Network Access Point], Google, Blogger, and a number of other “tubes” are in the Bay Area. Expect things to be slow and lethargic until the heat breaks and power normalizes.

Spare some cooling thoughts for the people of St. Louis and NYC who are having their own power problems. Been there, done that, don’t recommend it.

Update: The LA NAP and MySpace also having problems.

Exactly where in the expression, “it’s none of my business”, does anyone see, expressed or implied, that I would be interested in standing outside in a 106° heat index, mere steps from my air-conditioned home, while my neighbor explains the details of his personal relationship with his girlfriend and the “obvious injustice” she perpetrated by throwing all of his belongings on the front lawn.

My sole connection to this relationship was offering the opinion, when asked, that flowers might be better received on Valentine’s Day than a NASCAR video.

This is time that I will never get back and their fights weren’t even amusing.

There are a lot of different groups in the Middle East that come up, but it is not always easy to figure how they relate to each other and how they are perceived in their own country.

Everyone is probably familiar with Yasser Arafat and associated him with the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] for years, but the PLO has evolved into the government of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Groups like the Communist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine are active only in Palestine and only as militias. Death is their only purpose and violence is their only tool. Their main “claim to fame” was their association with the Japanese Red Army, the group that introduced the suicide bomber into the conflict.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad is similar, but they have ties to groups in areas other than Palestine.

While they might serve some purpose during a revolution, if the revolution succeeds, the new government is going to have to deal with them. Many believe the Tet Offensive was designed in part to rid the North Vietnamese of the “problem” of the Viet Cong.

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Florida License Plates

Beneficiary

A weekend feature of Why Now.

The potty-mouthed pervert is hiding at his ranchito for the summer, so you know there’s going to be a major disaster that he will again fail to deal with in his usual incompetent fashion.

Whether it’s the complexity of the competing wars that Billmon talks about in The All Against the All, or Steve Gilliard’s Stupid Festival, James Wolcott’s Moral Savagery or all of them together in James Wolcott’s The Damned, the US could end up being shunned by the world that isn’t attempting to attack us.

I was looking for information about a post I’m going to put together explaining some of the groups involved in the latest crisis and how they are related to each other, when I came across a number of reports about the “raid” in which Hezbollah captured two Israelis. Almost all media reports are saying it occurred near the town of Aita al Shaab, which is 15 kilometers from the Mediterranean Coast.

It took a while to find this map which has enough detail to show the town, called Aaito ech Chaab by the people who created the map at the American University of Beirut.

Having located the area I used the Google satellite photos to get a close look at the terrain and I was puzzled. Did Hezbollah acquire Invisibility Cloaks? This attack took place at 9:00AM local time, which is broad daylight. The ground cover, as befits a border that is tense is cleared away on both sides of a barrier giving clear fields of vision. Another question arose from this question of a local blogger in the area: Why is the Israeli tank destroyed in the original incident sitting in Lebanon near Aita al-Shabb?

I don’t think we can assume that Hezbollah attacked an Israeli patrol in Israel. There are UN people in that area. Has anyone asked them what happened? When a UN outpost was struck the other day, Israel said it was a Hezbollah rocket, but the UN said it was an Israeli artillery round.

If an investigation shows that the initial incident took place in Lebanon, how do you justify the Israeli actions?

So, I was poking around looking for something else and I came across this map of Shi’ia.

Now, why do you suppose the Shi’ia are concentrated on the areas where the oil is located, including in countries like Saudi Arabia, where they are a minority population? What do you think would happen to the price of oil if the Shi’ia decided they had a real reason to be upset with the rest of the world? Even the large fields around Baku in Azerbaijan are Shia. Those were the main source of oil for the Soviet Union.

If you checked earlier in the day the site was down due to a major equipment failure at my host.

Everything seems to be back up and working.