[robowombat]

Freepers, since my last post from a set of traitors denoucing defensive barriers in both the US SW and Israel seems to have been deemed infra dig in the best Republican style perhaps this sober assessment from one of the foremost military commentators of our time will be more acceptable.

While I personally do not agree with the "withraw behind a defensive barrier to pretty much the pre-1967 frontiers" as a panacea for the Israelis Van Creveld makes a clear and well stated arguement for this option. My guess would be that it would only lead to clamor for Israel to retreat to the UN proposed 1947 borders. This drumbeat would be accompanied by determined terrorist attempts to penetrate the frontier defenses just as the Arabs relentlessly did from 1948 to 1956. However,the Israelis are in the cleft of a delemma. They are beset by a foe using a new wrinkle in the classic guerrilla strategy that the IRA pioneered over 80 years ago of striking the vulnerable with the guerilla having no strategic center of gravity to be struck in return. The Arabomurderers apppear to have an endless supply of homicide bombers to send out and Israel has yet to find a strategem to defeat this process.

[CROSSHIGHWAYMAN]

if you are strong and you are fighting the weak, then anything you do is criminal.

This is the kind of bum who would let chaos rule the world.

The Palestinians are not "weak" because they are backed by the entire rich arab world.

What will happen is that The US, Britain, and Israel will clean the Muslim clock and that is the only way to peace. Total victory and unconditional surrender will at last bring the world some peace, finally.

It's gonna happen sooner or later. The longer we wait, the harder it will be.

Let's get it done now. The enemy of civilization is not very strong. The strength of the Soviet army and the Iraqi army were also grossly overexaggerated by spineless liberals.

[I_Love_My_Husband]

I just google'd Martin Van Crevald and he's been a Palestinian apologist for YEARS! They've been quoting him for years, they love this guy. Some military historian! Harumph!

[Crusader Rabbit]

I am disinclined to take seriously the conclusions of a "historian" whose premises include:

It has not done what for instance the Americans did in Vietnam... it did not use napalm, it did not kill millions of people

This is a patently false statement (and a vicious canard) worthy of Ted Turner or Mrs. Ted Turner. Millions of innocents did die in Viet Nam, but only after the US withdrew and the NVA conquered the South.

If professor Van Creveld's brain is full of such misinformation then it would be best to ignore him.

[LarryM]

Van Creveld is a leftist fool. Nothing he says is worth the paper it is printed on. Why doesn't ABC interview Shaul Mofaz instead of leftist academics?

[onedoug]

If Israel concedes to the islamist presence within it, then yes, it will lose.

[balrog666]

Forget the old borders! Why not build the wall where ever they want and expel the palistinians? Then expand as needed to shelter settlements.

[TexasRepublic]

then if you kill your opponent then you are a scoundrel... if you let him kill you, then you are an idiot.

Conclusion: if you care to live and are going to be branded as a scoundrel anyway, you might as well go for all or nothing -- I would rather be reviled than dead.

[0scill8r]

Easy Solution to this problem: wall off both gaza and west bank. For every israeli jew killed in a suicide attack, 100 or so palestinians should be relocated from the west bank to gaza.

[Restorer]

The same happened to the British when they were here... the same happened to the French in Algeria... the same happened to the Americans in Vietnam... the same happened to the Soviets in Afghanistan... the same happened to so many people that I can’t even count them.

False analogy. All these people got tired of fighting and went home because it was less trouble. The Israelis are home and have nowhere to retreat to.

They are beset by a foe using a new wrinkle in the classic guerrilla strategy that the IRA pioneered over 80 years ago of striking the vulnerable with the guerilla having no strategic center of gravity to be struck in return.

In case you hadn't heard, the IRA lost the Irish Civil War. The British were unwilling to be totally brutal. The new Irish Army had no such inhibitions. This type of guerrilla warfare is only effective as long as the militarily dominant side pulls its punches. The author's unexamined preconception is the idea that the Israelis will continue to pull their punches. This may be true, but it is a political decision, not a military one.

[ArGee]

I think that Martin has forgotten that even the weak can hurt the strong - just not defeat him.

He wants to believe that Israel is being made a goat worldwide, but that is only the case in the European press.

He is right about one thing, though. We were stupid in Vietnam to attempt to slowly increase the level of force we were willing to use until the Vietnamese government went to the bargaining table, then we would pull back again until talks broke down. That's no way to create peace.

The only way to create peace is to beat the agressors so bad that they will eat flaming excrement before they will think of attacking you again.

In other words you have to fight, and win, if you want peace.

Shalom.

[philosofy123]

This van Crevel guy appears to be a deep thinker, and a philosopher. I share some of his views. I guess as a civilized country, and a democracy you are put against a high slandered of conduct. The savages are not expected to behave like human! Therefore, Israel will always have a public relation problem worldwide to deal with. The French are not anti-Semitics; they are simply expecting humanitarian conduct from the IDF against the savages. If you look around there is a considerable sense of uneasiness about a powerful military combating armless people, regardless if they are murderer/ savages!

[Bryan]

Withdrawal to any pre-1967 borders would be suicidal. One day, if you're ever in Israel, hire a guide to take you on a tour of the Golan Heights. This is technically Syrian terrirory, seized by Israel in the 1967 war. It's never been relinquished.

On your tour of the Golan Heights, you'll notice how the whole city of Jerusalem is spread out beneath you, and what a wonderful view you have. Then try imagining that you are a forward observer for a Syrian artillery brigade, ready to train down death and destruction on a million Jewish civilians.

Israel must never give up the Golan Heights and it must never give up the West Bank.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again:

Kill the terrorists' families.

We saw them celebrating, laughing, cheering, rejoicing in their dirt streets, on the day the World Trade Center was destroyed. Let's give them something to cry about.

The firebombing of Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, Kiel, Bremen, Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe and a dozen other German and Japanese cities, gutting them and inflicting 800,000 civilian casualties, was ordered by Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat.

The use of nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, causing 115,000 civilian deaths, was ordered by Harry Truman, a Democrat.

The carpet-bombing of Hanoi, causing over 100,000 civilian casualties, was ordered by Lyndon Baines Johnson, a Democrat. Johnson also gave the orders that started the Phoenix Program, in which Viet Cong sympathizers and thousands of their family members were assassinated.

What I propose is a carefully targeted series of actions against no more than 80 civilians. There were 19 terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. Four members of each family should be sufficient to send a very clear message to those contemplating future attacks against us. Total war, and the killing of innocent civilians, wouldn't be a first for the United States. The Democratic Party led the way in the mass killing of over a million civilians.

Of course, in each of those wars, we were not the first to bomb civilians simply for the sake of bombing civilians. The Germans mercilessly pounded London and Coventry, and the Japanese did the same to Nanking.

But it was Americans, on the orders of Democratic presidents, who turned it into a science.

American meteorologists carefully tracked the weather conditions over central Germany and they successfully predicted an "air inversion" over the city of Dresden. This unique weather system would multiply the effectiveness of fire-bombing exponentially. The results of that bombing were dramatized in Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut.

And then, of course, there was the atomic bomb. And the other atomic bomb.

We have faced suicidal enemies before. I've often drawn a comparison between the Al-Qaeda jihadi and the Japanese kamikaze. They are eager to die for the sake of victory. They are taught that to destroy themselves while killing large numbers of Americans is a guaranteed ticket to paradise.

The Japanese, the Germans and even the Italians sent men on missions during World War II that were, for all practical purposes, suicidal. These were fanatical enemies and the length of time these nations resisted before surrendering was an accurate yardstick of their fanaticism.

The Italians quit early. Germany and especially Japan were more tenacious. We firebombed and gutted their cities. We killed over four million of them, both combatants and civilians. Every factory and shipyard was reduced to rubble. Every ship they had larger than a destroyer was either crippled or sunk.

At the end of it all, Japan stood alone. We had dozens of aircraft carriers cruising up and down the Japanese coast, launching airstrikes and pounding everything that moved. We brought in over 1000 heavy bombers to pound everything that didn't move. Fresh from defeating Germany, the Royal Navy sent a dozen aircraft carriers of its own from the Atlantic to join in.

Still the Japanese refused our constant demands for surrender.

Then we nuked them. And they still didn't surrender.

Then we nuked them again. Then they surrendered.

I'm not advocating nuclear warfare against Muslim nations, or the indiscriminate firebombing of hundreds of thousands of civilians, as three different Democratic presidents ordered in other wars. That would be simply too barbaric.

But today Germany, Italy and Japan are among our most reliable allies. They are rebuilt. They are industrialized and they enjoy high standards of living. In particular, Japan was controlled by suicidal warriors who had sworn to destroy us, who were eager to die for the sake of victory.

But we convinced them to surrender. There were two things that we did to achieve this goal. First, we extracted a price that even a suicidal warrior was unwilling to pay for victory. Second, we made it apparent that even after paying such a dreadful price, victory was impossible for him.

We know who the suicidal terrorists of 9/11 were and we know where they lived. Fourteen of the 19 terrorists came from Saudi Arabia, a nation that is purportedly friendly with us. This is suggested not as punishment for the families of terrorists, even though they may hate America just as much as their sons did on 9/11. This is suggested solely as a deterrent against future terrorism.

We must extract a price that they are unwilling to pay.

NEVER, EVER FORGET

[E Rocc]

While I personally do not agree with the "withraw behind a defensive barrier to pretty much the pre-1967 frontiers" as a panacea for the Israelis Van Creveld makes a clear and well stated arguement for this option. My guess would be that it would only lead to clamor for Israel to retreat to the UN proposed 1947 borders.

No, because there would be a treaty recognizing the 1967 borders that all concerned would sign. Such clamor would be dismissed as inconsequential.

The 1967 borders won't come back anyway. No way does Israel give up the Golan, and giving up more than the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem and the mosques on Mount Moriah is very unlikely.

-Eric

[LivingNet]

Funny...that is not what my Bible says will happen.

[JerseyHighlander]

When I first came across Van Creveld, in 1999, The Rise and Fall of the Nation, I was over enamored with his intellect. After reeading more since, I've come to see him as a man with a Woody Allen complex, extremely intelligent yet a perpetual defeatist. Where does he get off with the millions dead in Viet Nam quip?

This also is interesting:

Byrne: J: What about another scenario, which has been much discussed in recent months – which is one of full military solution? Basically, the Israeli army just goes in... it doesn’t build a wall – it basically blows up the Palestinian home... razes the camps... stops, as it might say, pussyfooting around, and it’s “curtains”?

Van Creveld: Look... a home that has been demolished offers even better shelter than a home that stands intact. The Americans in Vietnam tried it. They killed between two-and-a-half and three million Vietnamese. I don’t see that it helped them much.

Americans didn't have night vision, IR scanners and remote heat and movement detectors in VietNam, neither did the Germans in Warsaw. Theoretically, if the Israelis find forced expulsion as their second to last resort before the Sampson option, running void scans from their new nifty satellite over leveled Palenstinian camps will allow them to find subterranean voids up to a few meters below ground. Eliminate those voids, put up arrays of sensors on high ground, eliminate water sources, and efficiently eliminate the "Ghosts of Tulkarm", or whatever the Arab talking heads call them...

Hopefully this will never happen, this short term victory would mark the end of Free Israel, as world opinion turns rabid against the state.

[quebecois]

I hate to say it, but I agree with this professor. This conflict in Israel is a microcosm of a larger one: Western civilization has been in retreat in the face of expanding third world cultures since the end of WW II. The exploding demographics of the third world, the stagnant populations of the first world, the plentiful decadence of the West, and the Western "guilt complex" vs the third world have all combined to create a situation where we are being rolled back.

It started with decolonization. The West was thrown out of its colonial empires by nationalist insurgents of indigenous peoples (Algeria, India, Vietnam, etc). Then, the West was overthrown in those areas where significant Western minorities had established minority rule (Rhodesia, South Africa, Kosovo). Now, the third world is pushing into areas previously inhabited by Western majorities (Israel, the American Southwest, etc).

Eventually, this will culminate in a struggle for control in the very hearland of the Western World (the rest of America, Europe, Australia, etc). The West is running out of places to hide.

[Quix]

Nevertheless, God has a tenacious tendency to overcome any odds and especially "impossible" or "inevitable" ones against HIS CHOSEN people.

The future will certainly be interesting.

[SunkenCiv]

a retrospective to a topic from 6/21/2002.

[SJackson]

If you'd like to be on this middle east/political ping list, please FR mail me.

High Volume. Articles on Israel can also be found by clicking on the Topic or Keyword Israel.

also Keywords 2006israelwar or WOT [War on Terror]

----------------------------

Interesting article to revisit from pre-ping list days. Note posts 10, 13, 21, 28, 37,44, 45, 53. 56

[Sam Cree]

IMO, if Israel chooses to be decisive, as they have in the past, they will win. The question is how decisive must they be? But for the time being, it's moot, since their prime minister is both indecisive and insisting on calling the military shots. He's fubaring the whole situation.