Firefox officially stamps itself as incompetent.....today they sent us all "fixes" that are supposedly "critical." But guess what? Their supposed new site called Mozilla.com doesn't work so you cannot fix the critical flaws. I just cannot wait for MSIE 7...... BTW, a ton of Firefox users have been complaining on the Mozilla website for an entire day but still no fix....Did Bush appoint the leaders of Mozilla? Details at 11.....
Is is just me or are the commercials featuring whining Katrina "victims" piss poor excuses for grubbing more government handouts... Or are they DNC ads trying to make Bush look even worse? At any rate, when combined with those pissing and moaning assholes from Lebanon demanding (and getting) free handouts for being forced to leave their luxury hotels and be transported out of there on my dime, any beg for handouts looks bad.....
There is a good comment on this post (1) that bears reading, if only because it puts another log on the MidEast fire. I have one serious point to make on the situation. It has been an established fact ever since the London Blitz of WWII that bombing civilians only serves to make the population wildly patriotic and much much tougher. Bombing civilians only prolongs a conflict. My favorite example is from a super great (and mostly unread) book called "Berlin Diaries" wherein we see that people who hated Hitler to the point of conspiring in the attempt to assassinate him, worked in defense plants because their hatred of the Allies became even greater. The Israel bombing has caused a civilian population to rally to the Hizbolla cause.
7/28/2006
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2 comments:
Howie, Here an email I just sent to Steve Sailer at iSteve.com. Please note that I am very much pro-Israeli, in this email I am just making some unpleasant observations:
Steve:
Here's a suggestion for an iSteve piece: New new thing - perception - factoid - and perhaps reality: Israel is militarily weak.
Why? because the much-celebrated Israeli Defense Force, after days of repeated efforts to do so, can't defeat Party of Allah guerrillas fighting with actual sight of the border of Israel.
( Digression: I prefer the translation "Party of Allah" or "Assembly of Allah" or "Allah's Faction" to "Hezbollah." Use of the word "Hezbollah" in the English language media is a mealy-mouthed quasi euphemism, an attempt to hide the "Allah" in "Hezbollah." Furthermore, although I am certainly no scholar of Arabic, some experts claim that "Hizb Allah" would be a better rendering of that Arabic compound word in English. End if digression. )
There is no good strategic military or diplomatic reason for the Israelis' rather diffident efforts to capture Assembly of Allah villages within 155 mm artillery range of Israel. Diplomatically, the Israelis gain almost zero good will by holding off their ground attacks but bombing the bejeebers out of Lebanon.
At the strategic and operational military level, the Israelis would have been smarter to launch a fast moving blitzkrieg ground invasion of southern Lebanon, to first cut off the Assembly of Allah fighters near the border from escape or reinforcement and disrupt rocket launching from deeper within Lebanon. Later, as a second step, the IDF should have taken on the A. of A. defensive strongpoint nearer the border.
And getting the dirty work done as soon as possible in southern Lebanon would have been a smart move both diplomatically and militarily.
At the tactical military level, the Israelis made the mistake of assigning a sufficient quantity of infantry to retake the Arab village where the IF suffered thirty or so killed or wounded. US Army doctrine specifies a least a 3:1 ratio of attackers to defenders if determined defense is expected. The IDF sent in their soi-disant Golani brigade of roughly 2,000 men against approximately the same number of A. of A. fighters. This was a tactical mistake plain and simple. ( On paper, a US Army brigade would have about 4,800 soldiers, btw. )
Also at the tactical level, the IDF may be making the same mistake the Russians tended to make in both Afghanistan and Chechnya: tending to stay inside their armored personnel carriers, instead of getting out and fighting on foot when appropriate. The quip is, instead of "Death Before Dishonor," it's "Death before Dismount"[ from their vehicles]. I dunno about this allegation. The details aren't clear yet.
What's a deeper reason for the Israeli Defense Forces problems? One school of thought is that the IDF has always been overrated because the IDF has always fought patsies in the past. Arabs are incompetent when they try to fight in the highly mechanized Western mode.
Another possible reason for Israel's timorousness is that Israel doesn't have many men of prime military age. They Israelis have been trying to keep their demographic problem hushed up, but it may be that Israel has been experiencing net out-migration during the past six or eight years ... lots of dudes moving back to Brooklyn or to Pasadena. Yes, Israel had a few good recruiting years during the 1990's when a lot of Russians wanted to get out of the disintegrating USSR, but that's in the past. The Jewish Israeli population is now aging and shrinking in absolute size. This would explain why Israel seems to be extremely averse to suffering too many IDF casualties.
Israel's demographic shrinkage might explain its reluctance to launch larger ground war in Lebanon. However, demographic problems do not explain or excuse the IDF's tactical mistake of suffering more casualties during the past week by attacking with an insufficient quantity of infantrymen ... unless the IDF fears that only a small percentage of its ground forces, its elite units, are up to the task of fighting Allah's Faction within plain sight of the border of Israel. This does not bode well for the future of Israel.
Steve, I don't have time to polish this email, but I suggest there's material in there for an iSteve piece, particularly the linkage of tactical military problems with long term demographic trends.
--David Davenport
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Howie, regarding www. browsers, I am having trouble. I have the newest beta version of Firfox and also of Opera, and both lock up entirely from time to time, requiring a reboot of the computer. Cntrl -Alt-Sel and then end application is insufficent to unlock the system.
Furthermore, i have the latest version of IE Explorer 7 Beta 3, and it's got a problem. The problem is that I enable add-ins, then after a while add-ins get disabled for no discernable reason, so I have to restart to -re-enable add-ins. This browser stuff is a mess.
-- david.davenport.1@netzero.com
And hey, those missiles coming FROM Lebanon into Israel, which are aimed at cities, not military, do they also have the effect of strengthening the resolve of the afflicted population?
Presuming you are correct, here is an interesting scenario, expressed more humorously on IMAO.US: The terrorists target Israeli civilians (making them support the Israeli military action even more) but killing only a few hundred per week. The Israelis target terrorists (but kill a few tens of civilians accidentally each week) and the civilians in Lebanon support the terrorists even more.
But wait, who wins in this, if it goes on and on? I think the Lebanese will run out of Hezbollah terrorists before Israel runs out of civilians. And then, unless the Israelis decide to kill Lebanese civilians purposefully, the Lebanese will get over their anger at the Israelis. And the terrorists will be gone.
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