Posted on 06/22/2002 8:16:51 AM PDT by Phil V.
Hmmmm . . .
Their leaders wildly exaggerated what had occurred at Deir Yassin hoping that these exaggerations would spur them to violence. Instead, it backfired and caused even more fleeing.
As for your implied allegations about what occurred there, the Arabs were using Deir Yassin to shell Jewish convoys heading into Jerusalem. The Jewish forces invaded as a defensive move to hold the high ground and stop the attacks on their convoys. The Arabs had staged a fake surrender, and then many men, dressed as women, ambushed the Jewish forces with weapons hidden under their garments. Many Jews were killed as well as many Arabs in the battle. I do think some of the Jewish forces lost their cool and shot the place up, but under the pressure of an ambush by trickery they were likely very frightened and pissed off.
And while it was a real tragedy, the Jewish forces still took the time to evacuate hundreds of villagers and left them at least one escape route before mounting the invasion.
Interestingly enough, the study by Bir Zeit University (Palestinian) indicates that the idea of exaggerating the events at Deir Yassin served both sides. One the one hand the Arabs hoped it would inspire hoards of Arabs to rise up on behalf of the Arab armies, while the Jews thought it would help increase morale and show the Arabs that their forces were strong and that they would be hard to defeat.
I don't.
I'm wondering why the Israeli war game included it.
Assuming that it is true that the Palestinians were shelling from the high ground then it is only a matter of personal perspective which activity is "defensive". Were the Palestinians not "defending" Jerusalem? Were the Israelis not seeking to "take" Jerusalem? Did the Palestinians not successfully "defend" Jerusalem until '67?
On Jan. 9, 1991, on the eve of the Gulf War, then Secretary of State James Baker issued a private warning to Iraq. At a meeting in Geneva, Baker told Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz that if Iraq used weapons of mass destruction against U.S. forces, "The American people will demand retribution, and we have the means to exact it." That carefully worded, nonspecific threat was meant to raise the possibility that the United States would use nuclear weapons against Iraq if it used chemical weapons against American troops. Baker has since told acquaintances that he doubts whether then President George Bush would have actually used the nuclear option, but that the threat may have been a deterrent.
In the simulation, how did the Palis in Jordan get several hundred thousand Iraqi flags in five days?
What if we are hit by WMD and the attack cannot be traced to a particular offending country? Or, to take another case, what if it can be traced to a particular country, but the connection is sufficiently murky to be publicly deniable? What does Bush do then?
Probably because they see how Saddam upped the ante in terms of what he is willing to do on the US mainland with the destruction of the WTC and the subsequent anthrax threats. The next phase of our ten-year war with Saddam Hussein isn't going to be a nice, tidy confrontation between B-52s and massed troops. It will involve terrorist proxies using weapons of mass destruction against American and European cities, as Dick Cheney recently explained to Tony Blair.
Yes, Yes and yesmajor conflicts between Israeli and various Arab forces, most notably in 1948–49, 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982.The first war immediately followed the proclamation of the State of Israel, May 14, 1948. Arab forces from Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon occupied the areas in southern and eastern Palestine not apportioned to the Jews, then captured the small Jewish quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. The Israelis, meanwhile, won control of the main road to Jerusalem through the Yehuda Mountains (Judaean Hills) and successfully beat off Arab attacks. By early 1949 the Israelis managed to occupy all of the Negev up to the former Egypt-Palestine frontier, except for the Gaza Strip. Between February and July 1949, as a result of separate armistice agreements between Israel and the Arab states, a temporary frontier was fixed where the line had been at the beginning of the negotiations.
Would the gloves come off if we were nuked? I doubt it. The correct response would be to take control of the entire Middle East. That's the only way to shutdown the terrorist infrastructure. We don't have enough manpower to do it conventionally. How many ICBMs would it take to essentially destroy the militaries of all the ME countries? At 10 warheads per MX, it wouldn't take too many to destroy all the significant military bases in the Arab countries. Those countries would then be wide open to our conventional forces.
But put to logic, what future can there be between the West and Islam? When the US attacks Iraq, will not Iraq attack Israel? And when Iraq attacks Israel, will not the Palestinians join the fray? Israel will surly respond, drawing in Jordan, Syria and Iran. When Iran supports a war against Israel, the US attack on Iraq will widen to include Iran, and it is hard to imagine that at that point any Islamic country will support the United States with the possible exception of Turkey. Meanwhile, the United States will compel its NATO allies to join in the fun, if only to help grab up enough undamaged oil fields to keep the tanks and planes running, and the home economies working.
Now, the question must be asked, what has changed in the world that a centuries old document should suddenly cause the world to be threatened with WWIII? The answer is that the believers in that document, which requires world domination, have possession of weapons of mass destruction. But this is not the first time we have faced an enemy whose ideology called for world domination and who possessed more than a mere few WMD, but a vast array of same. For over forty years during the cold war we faced the Soviet Union which country possessed enough nuclear missiles to destroy the United States many times over. Yet, even though world domination was their aim, we confined our struggles to small parts of the world and conventional weapons. We did this with a doctrine known sardonically enough as MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction. The essence of that doctrine was that America always kept herself in a position that if she were attacked with a WMD, she could assuredly respond and destroy utterly her attacker.
The only differences between now and then are two: (1) first, our government expects us to absorb such an attack and has told us so, even to the extent that it is inevitable, whereas formerly our government did not expect its' citizens to absorb an attack of any kind with a WMD from the Soviet Union, and (2) second, the enemy does not come from a single country but from a religion, which prima fascia makes retaliation seemingly impossible.
As to the first problem, it is up to us to wake up and start screaming to our representatives that we will not absorb an attack with a WMD when such an attack can clearly be averted by closing our borders, checking every shipment of every package that enters our harbors, deporting all non-resident aliens of Islamic origin, and announcing a new form of the MAD doctrine. As to the second problem, even though the enemy is a religion, it is a unique religion because it is a religion with a country and a city as its' capital. In fact, it is a religion that cannot be worshipped as required by its' own mandates without a pilgrimage to the city of Mecca. Therefore, a version of the MAD doctrine can be developed stating that if the United States is attacked with a WMD, then upon thirty days notice, the holy city of Medina will be destroyed with a small nuclear warhead such that no one will be able to inhabit Medina for hundreds of years. Should the United States be attacked a second time with a WMD, the city of Mecca will be destroyed on the same terms. There will be no lose of life due to the notice period, but the religion itself will not be able to be practiced in the manner it heretofore has been practiced for a thousand years.
Many will say that this is a radical idea, but it is no more radical than the idea that the Soviet Union and the United States were going to destroy the entire world over whether Cuba had a few nuclear warheads. It is all a matter of historical perspective. The MAD doctrine as I propose it is far less severe than the MAD doctrine as it was actually practiced in the cold war. Additionally, it would have the added benefit of motivating moderate Muslims to seek out any radicals that might actually try in any event to attack the US with a WMD, and would probably have a calming effect on the radical anti-Western teachings so prevalent in the Islamic schools. In all events, it is certainly preferable to the Bush plan of waiting for the inevitable shoe to drop, walking around with a target on our backs, as if we were some third rate country rather than the United States of America, the most powerful country that ever existed, and one that can destroy an entire city without killing a single person unless that person seeks to die.
A blunt warning like you propose would leave the current situation unchanged. Do you really think it "would probably have a calming effect on the radical anti-Western teachings so prevalent in the Islamic schools"? Not a chance. It would only harden their resistance. We need to destroy the governments over there, not let them continue.
Of course, this will never happen. Our most likely response would be, "thank you sir, may I have another?".
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