Tuesday, August 01, 2006

The IDF question...

I don't understand the IDF. Their strategy makes no sense to me. It seems that they are only making military decisions, purely decisions of what to blow up that might have some military value, as if this were some abstract war game exercise. They don't seem to have the slightest damn clue about the political aspect of what they're doing. Targets are struck that only anger all the Lebanese, hurt all the Lebanese, without much consideration of who is Hezbollah and who is not. And those strikes have a minimal damage to Hezbollah.

I would have drawn a line on the map and said, this is Hezbollahstan, this is Lebanon. Lebanon won't be harmed, but Hebollahstan we're going to destroy. Everyone would have known what the political stakes are. I wouldn't have struck anywhere in Beirut...it only enrages Israel's possible allies. Plus, this 'airstrikes and artillery' strategy stinks. I know they want to keep the casualties among the IDF to a minimum, and they're afraid of a reprise of 1982. But this just makes no sense, because it doesn't do much hurt to Nasrallah, gives him major propaganda victories, and screws Israel's diplomatic options.

Why not wait a week before striking, to try to engage the Lebanese government and any available opponent of HA? Let them know, either you send the soldiers back, or help us fight HA, or else. I think alliances could have been formed, and if the Lebanese refused to help fight HA, then they would have been culpable and Israel would have had political cover to strike anywhere they wanted.

There is such tremendous hypocrisy amongst all the critics of the IDF, though. Words get thrown around, like genocide and war crimes, and ruthlessness and savagery, that are just so much bullshit. People who hardly blink at the crimes of the Janjaweed, who hardly make room on their newspapers for the crimes of the Sudanese, can't stop yowling when Israel kills a few hundred Lebanese in a war they didn't start. HA is a civilian army, with no clear distinction between civilian militia, soldiers, and citizens. They use civilian towns to launch attacks deliberately in order to create dead children, which they use as propaganda. Dead children are part of the HA war plan. They want their own kids to die to use as weapons against the Israelis. You can see this in Nasrallah's attitude towards the Arab kids he murdered in Nazareth. They're martyrs, so it's no trouble that they're dead. Don't worry about it. HA is a death cult.

Ask yourself this question: If we let Saddam out of his cell and gave him control of the IDF, and told him 'Destroy Hezbollah' then how long would HA last? A month? So let's stop the B.S. about how Israel can't defeat them. They could do it easily, but they're restrained by moral considerations.

Answer this question. An army is coming to town. You can't fight them, can't defeat them. But you get to choose who they are. Would you choose:

A) The Janjaweed
B) The old Iraqi Republican Guard
C) The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps
D) The Taliban
E) The IDF

If you would choose any other than the IDF, you're insane and irrationally filled with hatred of Jews. If you would choose the IDF, and you're making all sorts of crazy accusations about how the IDF is totally immoral, ruthless, heartless, beastly, Nazi-like, and so forth, then shut the fuck up.

2 comments:

Doubting Thomas 65 said...

i mostly agree with you, but I wish they had launched the ground operation weeks earlier. They should have promised to continue until the soldiers were released.

Thanks for reading my blog, I wasn't aware anyone was reading it, I mostly write it to let off steam.

Anonymous said...

Doubting Thomas, I agree with you. However, IDF are just out to kill as many Muslims as possible. They get this eye for an eye from their bible. Any nation which can bomb refugee camps has not moral ground to stand on.