WHEN will the Muslims of Britain stand up to be counted?
When will they declare, loud and clear, with no qualifications or quibbles about Britain’s foreign policy, that Islamic terrorism is WRONG?
Most of all, when will the Muslim community in this country accept an absolute, undeniable, total truth: that Islamic terrorism is THEIR problem? THEY own it. And it is THEIR duty to face it and eradicate it.
To stop the denial, endless fudging and constant wailing that somehow it is everyone else’s problem and, if Islamic terrorism exists at all, they are somehow the main victims.
Because until that happens the problem will never be resolved. And there will be more 7/7s and, sometime in the future, another airplane plot will succeed with horrific loss of innocent life. news of the world
Lord Stevens, ex Commissioner of Scotland Yard, knows his counter terror policing stuff. And he knows where the problem is and exactly how it can end:
In all my years at the front line of fighting terrorism, one truth was always clear — communities beat terrorists, not governments or security forces. But communities can’t beat terrorism unless they have the will to do so. My heart sank this week as I saw and read the knee-jerk reaction of friends and neighbours of those arrested in this latest incident, insisting it was all a mistake and the anti-terrorist squad had the wrong people.
Indeed. And it is a about time to put aside the politically correct view that any airline passenger is a potential terrorist and begin to seriously profile for the people who have carried out the vast majority of terrorist acts in the last ten years. USS neverdock agrees
The Lebanese Cabinet was supposed to meet to ratify the terms of the UN Ceasefire and get on with the task of assembling and dispatching 15,000 Lebanese Army men to get on with the job of disarming Hezbollah. This meeting has been postponed apparently because Hezbollah’s political wing is not happy with the dispatch of troops or the requirement to disarm.
Captain Ed points out that if the plan were to be implemented Hezbollah would be transformed from a “reistance” organization to just another “terrorist militia”.
Reasonable people have been sceptical from the go as to the likely effectiveness of a UN led force disarming anyone; but the problem for Hezbollah is that with a real force in place and the Israelis out of Lebanon there is really nothing left for them to do. So now they are blocking the Lebanese implementation of the ceasefire.
With a little luck Hezbollah may be able to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. At this point, the world at large and Israel have all signed on to the imperfect UN ceasefire resolution. Hezbollah’s leader had indicated a willingness to comply. But the postponement of the Lebanese Cabinet meeting puts the entire process back in play.
This is a pure gift to the IDF which had surged into Lebanon in anticipation of the ceasefire. If the battlefield tempo is maintained the Israelis should be able to secure most of Lebanon south of the Litani River. Plus, Israel has finally started to run airborne assualts up the Bekka Valley. A few days of this and Hezbollah should be significantly degraded. (Finally.)
Better still, the strategic genius running Hezbollah has decided to mark the start of the ceasefire with a 250 rocket barrage. Israel needs no further pretext to take out the Hez positions.
Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah was tettering on the brink of bragging rights to having defeated the IDF. (He hadn’t but that doesn’t matter in the perception wars in the Middle East.) Now, unless he can bring his people to the table and stop the rockets, he may have handed the Israelis the right to systematically demolish his militia. Better still, Israel will be in full compliance with its obligations under the UN resolution - that is she will be ready and able to cease hostilities whenever a) Lebanon can come up with its 15,000 men, b) Hezbollah stops firing rockets. Both of these conditions are in the control of Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah and he seems to be dithering.
It is an unexpected gift to an Israel whose politicians may just have the wit to exploit it.
My friend Kevin Grace posts his excellent review of James Kunstner’s The Long Emergency which he wrote but had rejected by a magazine beginning with “American”. Kevin was kind enough to lend me his review copy of The Long Emergency and I wrote a rather shorter review for Victoria’s own Monday Magazine. It too was rejected. I suspect that had Kevin and I the collective wit to swap reviews we would have been quids in: horses for courses and all that. Here’s mine, but read Kevins.
The Long Emergency: Surviving The End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century, James Howard Kunstler, Atlantic Monthly Press, 320 pages
Oil hit $60.00 to celebrate the 4th of July (2005) and the start of the summer motoring season. Triple the $20.00 a barrel Saudi Arabia had maintained for years by opening its tap a bit wider to accommodate the world’s growing demand for oil.
Saudi Arabia ceased to have the pricing power of the big tap about the time Saudi’s other notable export, jhadis, hit the Twin Towers. Somewhere between 2000 and 2003 it is very likely Saudi Arabia passed its own peak production. From there on oil prices have been driven by the market and as there is no “extra” new supply and lots of new demand – prices are going up. Welcome to peak oil.
Peak oil is the base note for James Kunstler’s most recent excursion into apocalypse porn, The Long Emergency. Like Ron Popeil selling rotisseries, he can’t resist, “But, wait, there’s more.”: Islamo fanaticism, AIDS, climate change, water scarcity, bird flu pandemics, resource wars and the wily Chinese. Like any good pornster Kunstler hits the money shots: Wall-Mart destroyed, rusting hulks of SUV’s, soccer moms hoeing potatoes in suburban backyards, perhaps, for added excitement, at gunpoint.
Porn is all about editing. Kunstler’s most skillful edit is ignoring the long tail of the oil age. Peak oil means the end of new oil production. With no new supply, price will go way up if there is a continued increase in demand; but how quickly that happens is another question.
Kunstler palms a card: as price rises, demand falls and previously uneconomic supply comes onstream (such as several hundred billion barrels of oil in Alberta’s oil sands.). Indeed demand may vanish altogether because the rise in price creates huge incentives for consumers to radically change their habits and their technology. At $9.99 a liter the Colwood crawl looks even less attractive. At least in a gas powered SUV. A hybrid, a little Smart Car or an electric scooter might make sense. What makes more sense is to live within walking distance of your job.
Suburban sprawl, long Kunster’s real enemy, takes a huge hit when the price of oil goes to truly painful levels. So will carbon emissions. While Kyoto’s bogus targets and Rick Mercer’s silly ads aren’t working - if it costs you $600.00 to fill up the Navigator you’ll park it.
Kunster won’t spoil his story with anything as mundane as supply and demand or a hundred year oil wind down. A slow transition away from fossil fuels and towards technological, and more importantly, cultural, alternatives driven by nothing scarier than the marketplace might leave Wal-Mart standing and soccer moms running errands in electric cars.
Kunstler’s sensationalist edits are sad because the end of cheap oil is radically altering Western life. That needs to be explored with less hype and a greater sense of the ingenuity people display in the face of change. A good place to start that exploration is www.worldchanging.com
The Great and the Good, with the blessings of Uncle Kofi, have agreed to a ceasefire in Lebanon. At the moment the Israelis are rushing troops in to consolidate the gains they have made in the last few days and extend their line as close to the Litani River as possible. No doubt their sappers will be in place blowing up whatever they can find of the Hezbollah fortifications and tunnel systems.
Hezbollah chief Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah has accepted, with reservations, the ceasefire:
The Lebanese leader said that Hizbullah would not cease its actions against “the Zionist enemy.” We will continue to “fulfill our national and jihadic obligations.” He promised that his organization would continue to fight until the Israeli troops left Israel. the jerusalem post
And he is none too pleased with the arms embargo which the ceasefire resolution calls for and which the UN force is supposed to enforce.
Three weeks ago I posted on the question, Can Israel Lose? and said,
for Israel to win it needs to demonstrate once and for all that it is the toughest dog in the junkyard; but she must also demonstrate she’s the smartest as well. So far Israel has not fought tough or smart. Here’s hoping that changes….and fast.
The IDF understood this and fought as hard and well as it was allowed to. But it was not enough and last minute line straightening will do little to change that fact.
Unfortunately the Israeli political leadership was simply not up to the task of decisively beating Hezbollah and, unbeaten, Hezbollah is now treated as a legitimate actor referenced directly in the UN resolution.
What I suspect we are seeing is a version of hudna; a pause to allow Hezbollah to regroup. The rockets will stop for a while. The UN will take up their positions alongside the Lebanese army and Hezbollah will dig in nearby. Israel will pull back to its borders and an uneasy quiet will decend for a few months or, perhaps, a few years. Iran will have had its distraction and will be further along with its nuclear ambitions. More and better rockets will pour over the Syrian border. Hexbollah will crow about its success against the Israeli Army.
Which means Israel will have lost. Fortunately, the Israelis are political realists and will take the lessons of this botched war to heart. Israeli PM Ehud Olmert is likely toast. The Israelis are not going to support a man who gets into a fight he does not have the guts to finish and finish well. More importantly, the Israelis will spend some time considering their own military doctrine and how it could have strayed so far from the tactical brilliance which had characterized Israeli military history to date.
Here is a hint: occupations are bad for armies. Truly great armies are all about war not peace or a semblance of peace. The long Israeli occupation of Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank trained the IDF to act as heavily armed policemen rather than a strike force.
Here is another hint: Israel’s intelligence capacity has been severly degraded. At the outset of the war it was quite clear that the Israelis had next to no detailed intelligence as to the Hezbollah order of battle. Apparently they were surprised at the fortifications and the battle strategy of Hezbollah.
For Israel the hudna is an opportunity to rethink strategy and to create the tactical capacity to crush Hezbollah when the time comes. And there is little doubt the time is going to come:
Hizbullah’s Al-Manar TV, which continues to broadcast despite repeated Israeli air raids on its studios and transmitters, declared over the weekend “victory” against Israel, noting that the IDF had failed to score military achievements during the fighting.
The broadcasts are being launched under the banner of “We won!”, “We have defeated the invincible army” and “July-August 2006 - the shattering of the myth [of the might Israeli army].” jerusalem post
Israel’s political class is going to be hearing the echos for years.
Israel, which has postponed plans to push deeper into Lebanon to give diplomacy a chance, has insisted that it would turn over its positions in south Lebanon only to a tough multinational force that could prevent Hezbollah guerrillas returning.
But the Lebanese Government, which includes two Hezbollah Cabinet members, said that it would accept only a traditional UN peacekeeping force of the type that has been in southern Lebanon for 28 years.
The breakdown showed that the basic issue of the war — the disarming of Hezbollah — had not yet been resolved. the times of london
The question of a ceasefire was always going to hang up on the fact that Hezbollah has no intention of disarming or accepting an international force with the mandate and power to disarm it. This fact is well known to the parties and the month long song and dance which pretended that Hezbollah would somehow accept disarmament was a farce from beginning to end.
To their credit, either the Israelis nor the Americans have been willing to participate in the farce in the that they have continued to insist that any settlement has to reflect the conditions in UN Resolution 1559, namely that Hezbollah disarm.
Now that the Lebanese government has pretty much declared the provisions of 1559 a dead letter the Israelis have no reason not to continue their campaign to destroy Hezbollah’s military capacity.
The problem here goes back to the ongoing non-enforcement of 1559 by Lebanon. By allowing Hezbollah to create an area where Lebanese soverignty simply did not exist the Lebanese government pretty much ensured that the Israelis would eventually have to deal with the problem. And, with today’s rejection of the more robust force to help disarm Hezbollah and the Lebanese demand that the entirely ineffective UN force which has been in Lebanon for 28 years to no apprciable effect, it is clear that Lebanon is not willing to confront its terrorist enclave.
So the war will go on.
Update: Or not. There is a draft resolution which seems to have gained US, French and Israeli support. This resolution would have UNFIL strengthened by 15,000 international troops and the Lebanese Army and would call on Lebanon to secure its borders aginst arms shipments not authorized by that government. 1559 would be implemented by this force.
Could work but I can’t see Hezbollah agreeing to it unless it is really on the ropes as Israel begins to gain traction in its offensive.
Update#2: Captain Ed sees the resolution as a bit of curates egg: good in parts. But his take away is interesting:
Lastly, by agreeing to this cease-fire, Olmert puts pressure on Siniora to do the same and to put Hezbollah in a box. If Siniora refuses, then Olmert orders the incursion. If Nasrallah refuses to accede to Siniora’s demand to disarm and withdraw as required by this proposal, Olmert can claim that the Lebanese government is hostage to Nasrallah and act to liberate it. Olmert will have worked the appeasers into a position where they will have endorsed further military action by the collapse of their own peace plan.
Everything hinges on Nasrallah. If he accepts the terms and allows Siniora to dislodge them from southern Lebanon, Hezbollah is finished regardless of their public claims. Their raison d’etre is the defense of the southern border against Israel — and if the Lebanese Army takes that responsibility, then their militia serves no purpose in the middle of Lebanon. If Nasrallah balks, then Israel will have a green light and a wide window to finish the job, and they will have lost very little in the hours it will take for the gambit to play to its conclusion. captain’s quarters
The critical question being whether the combination of a UN lead international force plus the Lebanese army will do anything other than watch the Hezbollah rockets fly over. If they are willing to assert Lebanese soverignty then this would have a chance of working; if, as seems more likely, they will simply take up assorted positions and act as a garrision to prevent Israel from re-invading Lebanon then Hexbollah will use the force as a screen behind which it will rebuild and begin preparations for ongoing attacks on Israel.
I would feel a lot more confident in this if the international force had a UN mandate but was not actually commanded by the UN. The UN’s track record in situations where peace keepers are actually supposed to do something other than act as hostages is not at all good.
Citing a possibility that he will spy on the Liberals for the Conservative government, at least three Liberal MPs say Wajid Khan should resign from his new advisory post to Prime Minister Stephen Harper or quit caucus temporarily.
“Wajid’s appointment is a slick, sick, calculated move on Harper’s part,” MP Maria Minna said in a letter to Liberal caucus colleagues yesterday. “Liberals shouldn’t touch this thing with a 10-foot pole.” the national post
Nice to see a display of national unity from our National Unity ‘r Us party. Idiots.
Update: Greg Staples Damain Brooks puts it more eloquently and politely:
Members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard have been found among Hizbollah guerrillas slain by Israeli forces in southern Lebanon, Israel’s Channel 10 television reported on Wednesday citing diplomatic sources.
It said the Iranians were identified by documents found on their bodies, but gave no further details on how many were discovered or when. Neither the Israeli military nor Hizbollah representatives in Beirut had immediate comment on the report. ironicallyReuters
As ever there needs to be serious confirmation of this. The rumours of direct Iranian involvement have been flying since the beginning of this war. If this is confirmed then the direct fingerprints of Iran are all over Hezbollahland. Which makes this a much bigger war.
Captain Ed, who is rapidly becoming Steve denBeste 2.0, sums up:
This will complicate the global communiy’s efforts to appease Teheran on the various peace proposals. It will make clear that the war in southern Lebanon is not a heroic native resistance but a cowardly proxy attack on Israel ordered by the Iranians. France will once again have to eat Foreign Minister Phillipe Douste-Blazy’s description of Iran as a “stabilizing force” in the region.captain’s quarters
If nothing else this should give the Israelis another few weeks of diplomatically unfettered operations and will underline the need for a real international force to patrol Hezbollahland when the Israelis leave. The Lebanese Army, at least 1/3 Shi’ite, is simply too conflicted to do it on its own and the UN has proven itself a joke in any but the simplest engagements. This is not going to be a joke because, for a real ceasefire to take hold Hezbollah will have to be disarmed and the Iranians sent home. Not an easy task.
For those just joining the Reutergate conversation a Guide for the Perplexed can be found at ZombieTime.com. It is pretty up to date and explains the differences between faked, staged and frankly misleading.
The Zerb devotes her treeware column to Reutersgate today. She seems to have learned a little from the comments on her blog. Baby steps to be sure but she’s beginning to get it.
However, she manages to undermine her own point with this bit of loonieness:
Worse, this all but ensures that any and all images of civilian casualties or the blasting of infrastructure will be called into question - while the actual deaths and destruction won’t. the zerb
The images will of course be questioned. As they should be. Just like the death counts.
What the Zerb neeeds to realize is that information from a warzone is inherently unreliable. So, while it may feel good to emote about a particular image of a poor, dead, baby we have to recognize that that image may or may not have anything to do with reality.
Moreover, devoid of context, it is impossible to know if this or that image has been staged, if the destruction was the direct or the indirect result of enemy action, if the photographer has sexed up the image with rather more able photoshopping, how the image was cropped and so on.
Plus, what the MSM does not report is the circumstance which gives rise to the image. For example: every image of dead Lebanese civilians needs to carry the rider that Hezbollah deliberately sites its rocket batteries in civilian areas in direct contravention of the Geneva Convention. And, each image should also note that the presence of armed Hezbollah is a direct violation of the UN resolution under which Israel left Lebanon. And there should be mention that Iran and Syria’s arming of Hezbollah is in direct breach of that resolution.
But no MSM organization is going to clutter up the emotion with a lot of fine print context. Which means that the public is left with stark, inaccurate, politically spun images and asked to “feel” something about them. Because provocative images, dead babies, are designed to bypass any rational analysis and go right to the heart. Which is what makes them so powerful.
Ultimately, the problem Reutergate exposes is not the fact that photographers and reporters “make stuff up”; rather it is the fact that the home office at Reuters or the New York Times or WaPo or CNN have caved to the culture of emotion rather than reason: they want the strong, hard hitting, image. “If it bleeds it leads.” is simplistic; but we have moved from the cool world of print to the hot world of image. Marshall Mcluhan would be amused and Neil Postman depressed.
I finally have the comments back to working....sort of. Basically I have to wade through the spam to find the nuggets. I do this a couple of times a day. Sometimes comments are lost. I am working on this. What I need is a Capcha like the coolkids have.