lebanon

If the United States had the sense that G-d gave a goose, we’d not only just stay out of Israel’s way when the fateful day comes, which it surely will when hundreds of Israeli F-15’s take to the sky on a do or die mission to end Iran’s nuclear weapons aspirations once and for all, we’d saddle up and join em’. This mission is every bit as complicated as can be imagined, with as many as two dozen suspected Iranian nuclear sites of various types. As we used to say in the old west, “It’ll be one hell of a shootin’ match”. Not only that but I suspect that on certain of these facilities special forces ground units may be involved…I don’t pretend to be versed on Israeli tactics…I don’t suspect many people are other than the Israelis. As I’ve stated before, they always seem to have that extra something that no one was expecting. The IDF ( Israeli Defense Forces) began contingency planning for combined strike force attacks back in March of 2005, which even at that early date included elements of the IDF Kingfisher forces or Shaldag. Sort of like US Force Recon Marines or Army Rangers on rocket skates. By all accounts some pretty mean dudes. These guys have been in combat continuously for seven decades. The urgency to do something about  the abiding threat from the Mad Mullahs has doubled down several times since then, as has the complexity of the impending operation. Poor little Israel is like the main feature in a Denver sandwich or one of the characters out of the Land of the Giants. Israel has to contend with possible reactions from Syria,  Iran’s surrogate Hamas in Lebanon and the ever present, but nonetheless deadly, Palestinians much closer to home. That’s aside from the expected counter strike from Iran’s missile forces which probably cannot  be completely destroyed. Iran and her Maniac Mullahs can be counted on to thrash madly about threatening the Strait of Hormuz as well. In saner times the United States could have been counted on to counter this threat out of self-preservation alone if nothing else…but under a President Obama, with a yellow streak up his back the size of Dorothy’s Yellow Brick Road, all bets are off. No one who has had to share a fighting hole with someone wants anything to do with somebody who can’t pull the trigger…and that fits our Barry to a ‘ T ‘. There is an October surprise in the offing according to Russian Intelligence…a massive coordinated strike by the US Military against some 20 Iranian nuclear facilities, Iranian military command and control, anti-aircraft defenses, the Iranian Navy, and possibly part of Iran’s political leadership as well. The attack, according to the Russians, will be called Operation Halloween…something faintly poetic about that. This would sure as heck take the pressure off of the Israelis IF TRUE. It would not stop them however…they’d just go in and make darn sure no one used those sites again for a very long time. Thoroughness is another hallmark of the Israeli Military. In any case I don’t think I’d want to be betting against them…they have a historic way of turning the odds in their favor.

Semper Vigilans, Semper Fidelis

© Skip MacLure 2009

In today's New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman belatedly notices major changes that have been occuring in the Middle East for at least five years:

[S]omething is going on in the Middle East today that is very new. Pull up a chair; this is going to be interesting.

What we saw in the Lebanese elections, where the pro-Western March 14 movement won a surprise victory over the pro-Iranian Hezbollah coalition, what we saw in the ferment for change exposed by the election campaign in Iran, and what we saw in the provincial elections in Iraq, where the big pro-Iranian party got trounced, is the product of four historical forces that have come together to crack open this ossified region.

First is the diffusion of technology. The Internet, blogs, YouTube and text messaging via cellphones, particularly among the young — 70 percent of Iranians are under 30 — is giving Middle Easterners cheap tools to communicate horizontally, to mobilize politically and to criticize their leaders acerbically, outside of state control. It is also enabling them to monitor vote-rigging by posting observers with cellphone cameras.

I knew something had changed when I sat down for coffee on Hamra Street in Beirut last week with my 80-year-old friend and mentor, Kemal Salibi, one of Lebanon’s greatest historians, and he told me about his Facebook group!

The evening of Lebanon’s election, I went to the Beirut home of Saad Hariri, the leader of the March 14 coalition, to interview him. In a big living room, he had a gigantic wall-size television broadcasting the results. And alongside the main TV were 16 smaller flat-screen TVs with electronic maps of Lebanon. Hariri’s own election experts were working on laptops and breaking down every vote from every religious community, village by village, and projecting them on the screens.

Well, Mr. Friedman, it's good of you to notice what's been going on in the region for several years now; it's better late than never.  Where this story gets interesting, however, is to whom Mr. Friedman (unlike Fareed Zakaria) gives credit for this monumental development:

for real politics to happen you need space. There are a million things to hate about President Bush’s costly and wrenching wars. But the fact is, in ousting Saddam in Iraq in 2003 and mobilizing the U.N. to push Syria out of Lebanon in 2005, he opened space for real democratic politics that had not existed in Iraq or Lebanon for decades. “Bush had a simple idea, that the Arabs could be democratic, and at that particular moment simple ideas were what was needed, even if he was disingenuous,” said Michael Young, the opinion editor of The Beirut Daily Star. “It was bolstered by the presence of a U.S. Army in the center of the Middle East. It created a sense that change was possible, that things did not always have to be as they were.”

When I reported from Beirut in the 1970s and 1980s, I covered coups and wars. I never once stayed up late waiting for an election result. Elections in the Arab world were a joke — literally. They used to tell this story about Syria’s president, Hafez al-Assad. After a Syrian election, an aide came in and told Assad: “Mr. President, you won 99.8 percent of the votes. It means that only two-tenths of one percent of Syrians didn’t vote for you. What more could ask for?”

Assad answered: “Their names!”

Lebanese, by contrast, just waited up all night for their election results — no one knew what they’d be.

In other words, President Bush's grand strategy for winning the global war on terror is working, albeit more slowly than anyone predicted.  Of course, as in any war, there have been setbacks along the way:

the Bush team opened a hole in the wall of Arab autocracy but did a poor job following through. In the vacuum, the parties most organized to seize power were the Islamists — Hezbollah in Lebanon; pro-Al Qaeda forces among Iraqi Sunnis, and the pro-Iranian Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and Mahdi Army among Iraqi Shiites; the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan; Hamas in Gaza.

Fortunately, each one of these Islamist groups overplayed their hand by imposing religious lifestyles or by dragging their societies into confrontations the people didn’t want. This alienated and frightened more secular, mainstream Arabs and Muslims and has triggered an “awakening” backlash among moderates from Lebanon to Pakistan to Iran. The Times’s Robert Mackey reported that in Tehran “chants of ‘Death to America’ ” at rallies for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last week were answered by chants of “Death to the Taliban — in Kabul and Tehran” at a rally for his opponent, Mir Hussein Moussavi.

To those of us who were paying attention, of course, this was apparent back in 2007.  Finally, Friedman closes with a mush brained sop to his liberal readers:

along came President Barack Hussein Obama. Arab and Muslim regimes found it very useful to run against George Bush. The Bush team demonized them, and they demonized the Bush team. Autocratic regimes, like Iran’s, drew energy and legitimacy from that confrontation, and it made it very easy for them to discredit anyone associated with America. Mr. Obama’s soft power has defused a lot of that. As result, “pro-American” is not such an insult anymore.

On the other hand, maybe what's going on right now is the result of a process that was set off five years ago that we have become increasingly irrelevant to over time.  FWIW, Bush probably was too hands off in 2005 and 2006, which probably did allow the Islamists more room to make their move than we had to allow them.  At the same time, doubling down in Iraq in 2007 definately convinced the locals we were there to stay.  Now, in 2009, the process seems to have taken on a life of it's own.

Over the next few years, this will be interesting....

I hope this helps.

That is all.Cahnman out.

Reading this stunningly naive column by Glenn Greenwald reminds me of an idea I had during the 2006 Lebanon War.  If they're smart, Republicans will immeadiately circulate the following Congressional Resolution:

The United States Congress offers unreserved, unapologetic, and unconditional support to our friends in Isreal in their hour of need.  We urge them to annhilate Hamas in the Gaza Strip.  The United States Congress recognizes the continuing threat from Islamic Terrorism and stands shoulder to shoulder with Israel as they confront this transcendant evil.

The beauty of this is that it's a perfect mix of good policy and good politics.  Israel is 100% right and Hamas is 100% wrong.  They fact that this will alienate them from a large segment of their kook base is pure bonus.

Remember, Opportunities for the Dark Arts arise from Real Problems....

UPDATE: VDH has an excellent piece on the underlying moral resoning for doing this.  Money Quote:

First is the now-familiar Middle East doctrine of proportionality. Legitimate military action is strangely defined by the relative strength of the combatants. World opinion more vehemently condemns Israel's countermeasures, apparently because its rockets are far more accurate and deadly than previous Hamas barrages that are poorly targeted and thus not so lethal....By now, these Gaza asymmetrical rules are old hat. We know why they persist — worldwide fear of Islamic terrorism, easy anti-Westernism, the old anti-Semitism, and global strategic calculations about Middle East oil — but it still doesn't make them right.

Crossposted at Right Minds