Apropos Of Nothing

Well, we’ve lost. A cease-fire will be put in place on Monday that
a) does not get us our kidnapped soldiers back;
b) will give Hezbollah the opportunity to rearm in comfort, thus rendering the losses suffered by the IDF up to this point horribly meaningless;
c) will prevent us from defending ourselves without being heaped with condemnation;
d) formally legitimizes Hezbollah as an actor on the world stage (their responsibility for the mass murder of over 200 US Marines at their barracks in Beirut in 1983 has apparently been forgiven and forgotten); and
e) — and on this one I don’t think I can find words adequate to describe my sense of doom — assigns the responsibility for assessing compliance or noncompliance with the terms of the cease-fire to Kofi Annan. Maybe we should all just march into the sea now and get it over with.

I’m too depressed by this to write a long post at the moment, but I did happen across a wonderful piece by Claudia Rossett at the National Review that I commend to you heartily. In it she first expresses her disgust at the victory just handed to Hezbollah (and therefore to Iran and Syria) at the expense of Israel and the rest of the free world, and then she proposes a new UN resolution. The following are excerpts:

Recalling that all its previous resolutions on the situation in the Middle East have failed to evict terrorists and Syrian toadies from Lebanon, failed to stop Iran’s terror-sponsoring and nuclear-bomb-building projects, failed to protect Israel from unprovoked attack, and failed to bring peace.

Recalling also that Israel in 2000 withdrew entirely from Lebanon to the satisfaction of the U.N., and that Hezbollah deliberately provoked this war by killing and kidnapping Israeli soldiers inside Israel’s borders, and — in some cases using children as human shields — has since fired into Israel with the intent of maximizing destruction and civilian deaths more than 3,300 missiles, from an arsenal at least four times that size brought illicitly into Lebanon under the gaze of U.N. peacekeepers who have been at best passive and at times have been caught actively collaborating with Hezbollah,

…

Urging, lest the message is not already crystal clear, that the Lebanese authorities come clean and officially acknowledge that Hezbollah is an Iranian-Syrian infestation of their country, running not “social services” but protection rackets; broadcasting terrorist propaganda both at home and abroad on its Al-Manar TV station, thus endangering other U.N. member states; and infiltrating its political fronts into the national institutions of Lebanon with the aim of taking over the country and turning it into an Islamic state fronting for Syria and Iran,

Calls for even the worst hypocrites on this same Security Council to stop huffing and puffing their way through resolutions that equate democratic states with totalitarian regimes and their terrorist shock troops, and instead recognize that Iran and Syria today have already declared war not only on Israel, but on the entire Free World…

Read the whole thing. (Via LGF.)

Hello readers! I hope I still have some after this long absence. My lovely twin babies are now three months old. The quiet on the blog reflects mostly lack of time to sit, think and write, but also a reluctance to look too hard at events outside the home just now. I haven’t been able to resist, though, and so I’m popping back into blogworld to toss in my own two cents.

Things certainly look grim, but to my mind, there are also some striking signs of light. Today is a particularly bad day, and it feels a little inappropriate to be talking positive — but perhaps there’s all the more reason today to try to find reasons for hope. Here are a few.

1. The exposure of UNIFIL. A good proportion of the hundreds upon hundreds of rockets Hezbollah has been raining down on us from southern Lebanon are being shot off from relatively small launchers. There’s small and there’s small, though. You can get some of these launchers onto the back of a pickup truck, but you can’t, say, hide them in your breast pocket or under your hat. You can’t, in other words, install hundreds of rocket launchers in civilian backyards without anyone ever seeing any of them.

UNIFIL (UN Interim Force in Lebanon), which has always protested that its only function is to observe (a point it demonstrated by quietly watching the abduction in 2000 of three Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah), has somehow managed to miss a long-term, wide-scale deploying of these weapons all over civilian areas throughout south Lebanon. Even if you absolve UNIFIL of moral bankruptcy and willful blindness here (although I’m hard pressed to imagine why we should, considering the decades of sanctimonious moral grandstanding we’ve had to put up with from the UN), they surely give new dimension to the terms “incompetent”, “inept”, and “useless”. As we have seen, the deployment of huge quantities of weaponry all over Lebanese civilian areas placed those civilians in the ultimate line of fire. We all know the UN is not on the Israeli side in any conflict, but UNIFIL has demonstrated the UN’s inability even to protect those civilian populations it does give a damn about. Israel has agreed that UNIFIL can have a role in maintaining a cease-fire, but only if it is issued a new mandate and is given the power to take action.

2. The exposure of the cracked “united Arab front”. A top-dog Saudi cleric has just issued a fatwa forbidding Muslims from praying for Hezbollah or otherwise supporting them. He has labeled them “the party of the devil”, which sounds about right. Granted, this reflects the Sunni-Shiite divide rather than any sudden recognition of the soundness of Israel’s position in this conflict, but so what? (The Saudi cleric is Wahhabist Sunni; i.e., a spiritual kinsman of Osama bin-Laden; Hezbollah is Shiite.) Hezbollah, for all its big talk about representing the “Muslim nation”, has antagonized a significant portion of that nation and may ultimately receive a good kicking from its own brethren. Extremist Wahhabists are not interested in being dragged into a mess created by Shiite heretics, and moderate Muslims don’t especially want their interests hijacked by Iranian imams and their totalitarian wet dreams. This is far from a united front.

3. The restoration of an Israeli sense of unity and moral imperative. Reacting with force to so unequivocal an attack on Israeli civilians is entirely appropriate. No one seriously disputes the necessity of taking up this fight. We withdrew from Lebanon six years ago. The self-described “resisters” of Israeli “aggression” in Lebanon, flummoxed by the lack of actual Israelis in the neighborhood, got a little ahead of themselves and attacked Israel proper, thereby revealing their true agenda. Obviously Israel had to defend itself — a point that is clear even to Israelis, who are notorious for being their own worst critics.

4. Parts of the Muslim world see the folly of Nasrallah’s actions — and are saying it out loud. The rest of the Muslim world — that is, the non-extreme Muslim world — has expressed disgust and impatience with the Hezbollah “adventure”. Editorials have appeared in news organs across the Arab world, including the London-based, wide-circulation al-Hayat, criticizing Hezbollah’s unprovoked aggression against us. This astonishingly public acknowledgement of an Israeli side of the story has largely dried up, but it is refreshing and encouraging that we saw it at all.

5. Even parts of Europe get it. Notoriously biased European news organs have shown signs of recognizing Israel’s right to defend itself against deadly assaults on its civilian centers. In the first few days of the war, I sat open-mouthed in front of the television while British commentators expressed sympathy with Israel. This was on the BBC, mind you; these weren’t token non-anti-Semitic Brits wheeled in for color on Fox News. They even pinioned a hapless Palestinian roundtable panelist with just the variety of lip-curling borderline contempt they usually reserve for us. The disaster at Qana dented this support, and rightly so; but I was heartened by the speed with which there was talk in Europe about the possibility that much of the carnage was staged. We’ve come a long way from the wide-eyed credulity of the Mohammad al-Dura/Jenin “massacre” age.

6. The exposure of the extent of Syria’s relationship with Iran, and the vocal resistance to the Syrian-Iranian influence over the lives of innocent Lebanese. As Dennis Ross neatly put it, “Iran will fight Israel to the last Lebanese”. The Lebanese, rightly proud of their nascent democracy, are not interested in being pawns of pathetically backward Bashar al-Assad or batshit-crazy Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. And they’re speaking up.

7. The general recognition that Iran is behind this aggression, and the consequent refocusing of attention on Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

8. The exposure of the cynicism of the enemy. Israeli soldiers put children behind them in order to protect them, and Hezbollah puts children in front of them in order to protect themselves. When the IDF harms enemy civilians — even when those civilians have been deliberately placed in harm’s way by their own side — they recognize the horror of what they have done and apologize for it. Hezbollah, by contrast, would consider a Qana-sized strike in Haifa or Hadera or Netanya — a strike, in other words, that killed dozens of Israeli men, women and children, but with the critical difference that their targeting was deliberate — a great success. The resulting death and destruction suffered by those Lebanese unfortunate enough to live beside the launchers from which the rockets were lobbed would, grotesquely, add to Hezbollah’s perception of its success.

I imagine that much of the unprecedentedly public criticism of Hezbollah that we’ve seen within the Muslim world in the past few weeks stems from a reluctance to be associated with such disgusting and transparent contempt for Muslim lives.

9. The honesty of the enemy. I am always enormously reassured when Israel’s enemies call it the way they really see it. None of this Arafat-esque, forked-tongue, EU-salving bullshit for old Nasrallah. The object is to kill all of us in Israel: to aim directly at my living room and take down as many people like me, my husband and my children as possible. Ahmedinejad, too, continues to ratchet up the tough talk, aiming not only at the erasing of Israel from the face of the earth but the destruction of the United States as well. Not even the dimmest bulb at the State Department can ignore that kind of language, and only Mel Gibson would argue that in the face of a clearly expressed threat of total annihiliation we have no right to defend ourselves. Keep talking, fellas!

Israeli military Chief of Staff Dan Halutz was recently asked how far Israel was willing to go to put a stop to Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Answer: “Two thousand kilometers.”

(Courtesy of Damian.)

Countdown to Armageddon?

Iran has once again, and in spectacular fashion, flipped the bird to the UN by breaking the seals on its Natanz nuclear facility and announcing that it is going forward, come what may, with nuclear enrichment research. Notwithstanding their forked-tongue protestations, this will obviously include the production of weapons-grade material.

It’s a little hard to blame them for proceeding merrily according to plan, since the big cheeses of the world can’t seem to do much more than stamp a foot or two and threaten to bring Iran before the UN Security Council. I don’t get the impression that being hauled up before the UN Security Council is anything that will give Supreme Pan-Islamic Honcho and Cheerful Nutcase Ahmadinejad any sleepless nights, and besides, the US and EU3 (Britain, France and Germany) have been uttering the Security Council threat since…2003. Even they know it’s an empty threat. As military historian (and personal hero of mine) John Keegan notes, neither the Security Council nor the IAEA has any power to actually enforce the NPT. This is due primarily to what Keegan describes as a lack of “will” among UN member states to take meaningful action — particularly Russia, whom the other states are loath to offend. (Russia is busy building a reactor for Iran, so other considerations, like a nuclear holocaust initiated by a foam-flecked sociopath, naturally fall by the wayside.)

So what is to be done? Keegan points out that the sanctions option, sure to appeal to the Europeans, will cause the Iranians some “inconvenience” but will not only not in any way hamper their nuclear progress — it will to some degree serve the interests of the ruling theocrats, who would like nothing better than to starve their educated young population of Western contact. He goes on to say:

To stage a second war in the Middle East would not be a desirable initiative at present for America and would certainly be highly unpopular at home and among its allies. Moreover, Iran, as the possessor of the second largest oil reserves in the world and occupier of a strategic position athwart the sea routes delivering oil to most of the consuming world, has its own means of retaliation ready to hand.

Which brings us, as always in the geopolitics of the Middle East, to Israel. Israel makes no attempt to conceal that it has considered and undoubtedly is now considering its ability to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities by military action.

Keegan then makes a point I don’t agree with — that Israel’s current political situation will hamstring decision-making at this level — but does make the practical and indisputable point that logistically, Iran’s nuclear facilities are much harder for us to get at than were Saddam’s in 1981 (please see my October 27 post on Iran for a further discussion of this point).

The Glasgow Herald (via Israellycool) has pounced on the Israeli option: according to them, we are contemplating a preemptive airstrike against Iran’s nuclear facility as early as March. I haven’t seen this anywhere else, and the Glaswegians are depending for their information on an “unnamed Israeli source” (who could, presumably, be my dishwasher repairman), so take this with a grain of salt. Still, I suspect the unspoken hope of many around the globe who are unnerved by Iran’s chest-pounding is that we will get on with it and take care of things — a signal service that will undoubtedly be repaid by heaps of opprobrium, as would an American military strike.

Yesterday, during an anti-Israel rally in Teheran, election-hijacking Grand Panjandrum Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stated baldly that Israel, otherwise known as the “disgraceful blot,” must be summarily “wiped off the face of the earth.” This sentiment, while startling, is hardly unprecedented: five years ago, then-President of Iran Hashemi Rafsanjani implored any Muslim nation with nuclear capability to hurry up and annihilate the Zionist scourge. The difference, of course, is that Iran is now very close to achieving its own nuclear ambitions.

Ahmadinejad claims that my family and I will only be vaporized if Israel has the temerity to preemptively attack Iran’s nuclear targets. He thus introduces a logical inconsistency into his argument. Either we are a vile cancer that must be lanced to reinstate the purity of Islamic lands — a colonialist, imperialist, Crusader-loving, Muslim-bashing tool of the American Satan that must be exterminated for the sake of pan-Islamic honor — or not. It confuses us Israelis, most of whom are pretty thoroughly convinced that Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric about us is entirely honest, to be told that if we just sit quietly and let him get on with enriching all that uranium, we’ll be fine.

Well, it shouldn’t. Does Iran have nuclear weapons aspirations, notwithstanding its signing of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and protestations of peaceable intentions? Of course it does. (You can’t annihilate Zionist Entities with power stations.) Does the current Iranian administration contemplate, with a warm glow of satisfaction, the picture of an Arab world applauding Teheran for finally giving the Jews what they deserve? You bet. Does that administration balk at the thought of the destruction such an attack on Israel would provoke against its own cities?

Ah — now here we get to the interesting part. I believe that they do not. To my mind, the safer assumption is that although the Iranians are Shia and are thus spiritually distant from the Wahhabi, they have internalized a militant Wahhabist (read: Al-Qaedaesque) interpretation of Islam, which helpfully dictates that a Muslim who dies in the crossfire while Jews (or Americans, or infidels of any stripe) are being slaughtered gets right on the fast train to Paradise. They are honorary shaheeds, as it were. Wahhabist Islam — an extremely puritanical offshoot of Sunni tradition — also classifies fellow Muslims who refuse to fall in line with their interpretation of the Koran as non-believers and therefore killable, a distinction that might ultimately prove useful to the emphatically hard-line Iranian leadership. There is mounting evidence that the Iranians have overcome any squeamishness they might have had about cooperating with Sunnis for the sake of a common goal — they are, for example, providing infrared-triggered roadside bombs to Sunni “insurgents” in Iraq that are aimed at killing coalition soldiers. There it is again, that tiresome cliche: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

The image of a black, smoking hole where Teheran used to be does not fill men like Ahmadinejad with trepidation — quite the contrary, I imagine. He will have ushered many thousands of deserving Muslims to their just reward, he will have put an end once and for all to the catastrophic historical mistake that was the State of Israel, and he will have ascended to an unprecedented level of pan-Islamic leadership — a highly pleasing state of affairs he will have ample opportunity to enjoy from his bunker in Mash’had, which, conveniently, is 1,000 kilometers from Teheran. I believe it is entirely specious to count on Muslim discomfort with havoc wreaked on other Muslims as a guard against a potentially catastrophic nuclear provocation. As Professor Salim Mansur puts it in a piece for the Center for Security Policy,

More Muslims have been killed by Muslims, more Muslims continue to be victimized by Muslims, and more Muslims are in danger of dying at the hands of Muslims than non-Muslims…

He cites a long list of examples:

…the actions of the military government of Pakistan against the people of former East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in 1971. This was a politically catastrophic event of genocidal proportions in the modern history of the Muslim world…the execution of an elected president, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in 1979…the killing of Anwar Sadat; the repression of Palestinians inside Jordan in 1970-71; the sectarian strife in Lebanon during the 1970s; the seizure of the holy mosque in Mecca in 1979 and the violence that followed; the violence in Iran since 1979 between followers and opponents of the late Ayatollah Khomeini; the nearly decade-long Iran-Iraq war; the civil war inside Syria culminating in the Hama uprising of 1982 and its severe repression by Hafez Asad; the civil war in Algeria since at least early 1992; the unsettled situation in Afghanistan following the brutal rule of the Talibans. And then there is the case of Iraq.

True, these are primarily cases of active repression of Muslims by other Muslims rather than the creation of Muslim collateral damage by other Muslims, but I consider that a distinction without a difference. As Mansur notes, Muslims have not hesitated to splatter the entrails of Muslim children on the streets of Iraq along with those of American soldiers.

We cannot accuse Iran of concealing its intentions. Ahmadinejad is busy assisting chinless ophthamologist and international pariah Bashar al-Assad in constructing an “innovative” (yikes!) chemical warfare program, obviously intended to be directed at us. Iran is widely known to be a longtime sponsor of Hezbollah as well as a colorful variety of Palestinian terrorist groups. (Recall the Karine A, for example — the ship full of Iranian arms that Arafat, Israel’s late and lamented partner for peace, tried to dock at Gaza in 2002.) Iran also recently unveiled the now-operational Shahab-3 ballistic missile, which is capable of reaching my living room. Chemical weapons, shiploads of rocket launchers and long-range missiles have their charms, certainly, but they are very small potatoes to people who dream of towering over a new Arab world order. An Iranian nuke is only a matter of time.

So what are our options? In 1981, Israel obliterated Saddam Hussein’s French-built Osirak nuclear reactor (in a minute and a half, by the way, after flying 700 miles through Saudi and Jordanian airspace during daylight. Notwithstanding the universal condemnation expressed toward Israel for this disgraceful act, you could hear the sighs of relief echoing across the Arab capitals.) Although I expect all kinds of unlikely people are hoping we’ll take care of the Iranian threat in a similar way, I don’t think we can. For one thing, Iran is thought to have at least a couple of dozen nuclear facilities dotted all over the country. Some of them, reflecting what I believe to be the ruling cabal’s degree of concern for the welfare of the citizenry, are located in major population centers. An Israeli attack simply could not be surgically effective in the way the Osirak attack was, and it would provoke a devastating counterattack for which Saddam, with his single reactor, was not capable at the time.

The only option, unfortunately, is to wait for a provocation from Iran. Should such a provocation materialize, I don’t think Israel would hold back. Needless to say, I’m not in a position to say what Israel would consider to be a sufficient nuclear cassus belli. But I’d pay close attention to that chemical weapons program in Damascus. Iran is doing its best to ensure we all know who is behind it. If sarin gas devastates the population of Tel Aviv, I’d get the hell out of Teheran.