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.)

I just caught this on An Unsealed Room and it made me smile.

Cox & Forkum’s cartoon sending up the Reuters photo-doctoring scandal is making the rounds in the blogosphere. I thought I’d link to a different recent cartoon of theirs that is (as always) right on the mark:

By the way, Scribbling Monk has suggested that the exposure of “the media’s fakery and use of stringers who favor and lie for the terrorists” is a tenth reason to be relatively optimistic about the war. I agree. For those interested in a close fisking of Reuters’ coverage of the war, have a look at Michelle Malkin and especially Charles Johnson, who first broke the story of the doctored Reuters photo of an Israeli strike in Lebanon.

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!

This one stings.

Israel has been condemned by FIFA, the organization that governs international soccer. Now, we’re pretty used to condemnations around these parts, both just and (usually) otherwise. But this is ridiculous.

FIFA claims to be entirely nonpolitical — or such has been its excuse over the years on the many occasions when it has pointedly ignored extreme human rights violations, going back generations, that have involved soccer stadiums and players. Consider, for example, the following cases (all taken from a recent National Review article by Tom Gross), none of which elicited a response of any kind from FIFA:

1. Saddam Hussein’s son Uday had Iraqi soccer players tortured in 1997 after they failed to qualify for the 1998 FIFA World Cup Finals in France.

2. Uday, who was chairman of the Iraqi soccer association, had star players tortured again in 1998.

3. In 2000, following a quarterfinal defeat in the Asia Cup, three Iraqi players were whipped and beaten for three days by Uday’s bodyguards. The torture took place at the Iraqi Olympic Committee headquarters.

4. The Taliban used U.N.-funded soccer fields to slaughter and flog hundreds of innocent people who had supposedly violated sharia law in front of crowds of thousands chanting “God is great.” (Afghan soccer coach Habib Ullahniazi said that as many as 30 people were executed in the middle of the field during the intermissions of a single soccer match at Kabul’s Ghazi Stadium.)

5. Soccer stadiums in Argentina were turned into jails.

6. According to the International Red Cross, about 7,000 prisoners were detained (and some tortured) in Chile’s national soccer stadium after Augusto Pinochet seized power in 1973.

7. Chechen president Akhmad Kadyrov was murdered by a bomb explosion at Grozny’s Dynamo soccer stadium.

8. FIFA refused to criticize the decision to name a Palestinian soccer tournament after a suicide terrorist who murdered 31 people at a Passover celebration at the Park Hotel in Netanya in 2002. (At the tournament, organized under Yasser Arafat’s auspices in 2003, the brother of the suicide bomber was given the honorary role of distributing the trophies to the winning team.)

9. FIFA failed to condemn the suicide bomb at the Maxim restaurant in Haifa in October 2003 which injured three officials from the leading Israeli soccer team Maccabi Haifa.

But last week, as Gross puts it, “FIFA finally found a target worthy of its outrage, and leapt into action.” That target was us.

What could we possibly have done to stir FIFA out of its torpor? Hold onto your hats, people. We conducted an airstrike on an empty Gazan soccer field. Why? Because it has been appropriated for training exercises by Islamic Jihad and the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, who have been sending Qassam missiles into Israel with the express intent of killing and injuring civilians since the withdrawal from Gaza.

In fact, the Israeli strike took place two days after the Palestinians sent a Qassam missile barrage into Karmiya, an Israeli kibbutz. With a certain poetic irony, the missiles landed in the kibbutz’s soccer field.

Needless to say, that attack was A-OK as far as FIFA is concerned.

The deputy general secretary of FIFA, Jerome Champagne, has publicly condemned us — an unprecedented act — for hitting the Gazan field, and flatly refuses to issue a similar condemnation against the Palestinians for their prior missile attack on the kibbutz. More than that, he has consulted with FIFA president Sepp Blatter on the “appropriate action” that should be taken against us. (Champagne has defended himself from charges of discrimination with the following incisive argument: his wife is Jewish, so he can’t possibly be biased against Israel. Glad we cleared that up.)

Naturally, Israeli soccer fans (and Israel is every bit as soccer crazy as every other country in the world, save the US) are appalled over this condemnation. As Gross points out, they have several excellent questions for FIFA:

Where is FIFA when anti-Semitic banners go up in European soccer stadiums, and there are chants from spectators about sending Jews to the gas? …Where…are the FIFA sanctions against the Arab or Asian countries that refuse to allow Israel to compete in Asia? …why has FIFA moved games from Israel because guest teams were afraid to come to Israel, but has never banned any other national teams from playing home games on account of local Islamic violence? Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey were allowed to continue playing matches at home.

Furthermore, FIFA has a long history of placidly ignoring the boycotting of Israeli athletes:

In February, Tal Ben Haim — the Israeli national soccer team captain, who plays his club soccer for the English Premiership team Bolton Wanderers — was banned from joining his Bolton teammates for their training matches in Dubai. FIFA pointedly ignored this…last week, another English club, West Ham, left their two Israeli players, Yossi Benayoun and Yaniv Katan, at home when they went to Dubai. FIFA naturally had nothing to say.

No one is expecting satisfactory explanations for any of this. FIFA is otherwise occupied right now encouraging psychotic Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to attend the opening of the World Cup in Germany in a few weeks despite his history of Holocaust denial (a crime in Germany) and openly expressed desire to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. Blatter’s response to questioning on the Ahmadinejad question: “”We’re not going to enter into any political declarations. We in football, if we entered into such discussions, then it would be against our statutes. We are not in politics.”

Still, as Gross notes,

Not all is rotten in world soccer…Last week, Ronaldinho, the Brazilian superstar widely regarded as the best current player in the world, donated signed footballs and shirts to Israeli child suicide bomb survivors, saying he hoped his gifts would “warm the hearts of the children who have suffered so much.”

Thank you, Ronaldinho. We appreciate it more than you know.

Palestinians took a few moments during Israel’s election day yesterday to launch three Katyusha rockets from the Gaza Strip into Israel. One of them landed south of Ashkelon but fortunately did not explode.

This event is significant because it is the first time they have launched Katyushas rather than Qassams. Katyushas have a much longer range than Qassams and put many more Israelis within striking distance. The incident seems to be a dare of sorts. Palestinians have been trying and failing for years to get Katyushas into the Strip (Arafat tried to bring in a huge stash on the Karine A). They have now obviously succeeded. The rocket south of Ashkelon might as well have had a message painted on it in neon: “Mazeltov on the win, Olmert. What are you going to do about this?”

The army is now trying to determine whether the rocket came from Iran (a near certainty). This event represents a serious escalation of the Palestinian war on Israel and will have to be dealt with hard and fast. This is a good moment for Olmert to earn some Sharon-esque credibility, if he can pull it off. The Jericho prison operation went smoothly; let’s hope he can take similarly effective and swift action in this case.

This incident bolsters those on the right who warned that disengagement from Gaza would result in an escalation of Palestinian firepower from the area. It also, however, bolsters those who support the principle of unilateral disengagement (and thus a further disengagement from the West Bank): pull out on our own terms, let the Palestinians do what they’re going to do, and then respond to their aggression with greater legitimacy. It remains to be seen whether Kadima’s relatively unimpressive showing in the election, and its consequent lack of much room for maneuver, will prevent it from reacting appropriately. If this attack is permitted to evaporate into the next news cycle without a response, we should expect a lot more of the same, and soon.

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.)

Last week, the Lebanese army caught a boat loaded with weapons and long-range missiles headed for Israel (shades of the Karine A). The weapons were apparently intended for the use of either Hamas or the Islamic Jihad in Gaza. The boat departed Lebanon from Naher Al Bard, a Palestinian refugee camp near the southern port of Tripoli. There were four people on the boat as well, and they were detained by the Lebanese.

This action by the Lebanese is quite encouraging. It indicates an independence on the part of the Lebanese army from the desires of Hezbollah, and more speculatively, it might suggest an inclination among the Lebanese to take advantage of the Syrian collapse to reach out to Israel. That’s an extremely hopeful scenario, but not at all an impossible one.

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.

It’s a handicapper’s dream.

Untold gallons of ink (and virtual ink) are being expended, both here and abroad, on the odds of Sharon’s newly minted party, Kadima, surviving the loss of its creator less than two months after its birth. The candidates across the parties are being held up and checked out — Olmert (Kadima) looks better than anyone expected, Livni (Kadima) is considered an unlikely pick for leader but a near shoo-in for No. 2, Netanyahu (Likud) will undoubtedly gain traction but probably not enough to take the premiership from Kadima, and Peretz (Labor) will be unable to overcome the double whammy of a membership in Peace Now and a lack of defense or foreign policy experience. There is also Shimon Peres (Kadima) to be considered, whose support for Olmert after Sharon’s stroke went far toward solidifying Olmert’s position even as his presence in the party constitutes a challenge to Olmert (polling indicates that Peres would win more Knesset seats than Olmert — 42 to Olmert’s 40). Peres has taken some criticism in recent days for attempting to leverage his position after Sharon’s incapacitation (though I’ve seen more accusations than actual evidence of this), and the bad press might be the explanation for his endorsement of Olmert. Whatever his motivation, it puts paid to the hope in the Labor camp that Peres would return to the fold and leave an imploding Kadima behind him.

The poll cited above looks good for both Olmert and Peres, but the bloom can — and, I think, will — come off both their roses in the three months before elections. Three months is an eternity in Israeli politics. It gives the public plenty of time to remember that Peres was an architect of Olso and is still an enthusiastic pursuer of peace with the Palestinians — a fine and honorable thing, but with Hamas on the brink of gaining either full control over the disintegrating Palestinian Authority or a sizable minority position within their parliament, many might see an Israeli eagerness to keep “the process” on track both misguided and dangerous right now. (Sharon advisor Ra’anan Gissin put it well: when asked whether a Sharon administration would hold talks with a Hamas-led Palestinian Authority, he replied, “What should we talk about, the stages of our destruction?”)

Hamas is the other factor to consider when making these speculations. Palestinian terrorists did their best to ensure that Israel would swing hard to the right after the asssassination of Rabin, and they succeeded. Nothing will cook Peres’s (or Peretz’s) goose quicker than a bout of murder and mayhem in Israeli streets. This may not be enough to bring Hamas’s preferred opponent, Netanyahu, back to power, but it would certainly give him a running chance. One thing, I suspect, is certain: it would significantly boost the odds in favor of defense minister Shaul Mofaz, who is the only guy in the Kadima neighborhood with unimpeachable security credibility. Granted, he made a bit of an ass of himself when he defected from Likud to Kadima (Likudniks received a letter from him avowing his devotion to the party 24 hours before he ran to Sharon), but he’s the kind of guy Israelis tend to look for when civilian blood starts flowing in Tel Aviv and Hadera.

Olmert is cresting right now on public approval: the transition following the loss of Sharon has been impressively smooth, and the surprisingly tactful solidarity being shown towards him by his Kadima colleagues/opponents reflects well on him. But again, three months gives the public plenty of time to remember that he does not have Sharon’s defense credibility — and that he is not a particularly well-liked or well-trusted politician. He may well pull statesmanship out of a hat (c.f. Golda Meir, who was thrust into leadership by circumstance and then outperformed expectations). It’s perfectly possible that Olmert will respond well to the challenges Palestinian extremists throw at him, and he will also have the considerable advantage of an American administration behind him (similarly to Netanyahu, Olmert plays much better abroad than he does at home, and he has some big fans in the West Wing).

But Palestinian violence isn’t the only thing Olmert will have to deal with. As Haaretz’s Ze’ev Schiff makes clear, Olmert will be faced in the coming weeks and months with Qassams from Gaza (c.f. the Palestinians’ threat to “celebrate” the death of Sharon by raining Qassams down on Israeli heads), renewed efforts by Al Qaeda to attack Israel via Lebanon, and Lunatic-in-Chief Ahmadinejad’s ravenous desire to make Iran a nuclear power. Ahmadinejad recently blew off a scheduled meeting in Vienna with the UN’s nuclear monitoring agency without a word of explanation or apology. He also famously called for the total destruction of a fellow member state of the UN not long ago, and was met with no response at all other than “we’re shocked, shocked” sound bytes (just what do you have to do to get thrown out of the UN, anyway?). He is behaving fearlessly, and with good reason — no one is giving him anything to fear. Psychotic he may be, but Ahmadinejad is not stupid, and he is just as aware as anyone else of the instability of Israel’s current political situation. We’re aware of him, too, and any contender for Sharon’s big chair is going to have to have a plan in mind for the growing menace in the east.