Middle East Continued Again...

[snoopy369]

Originally posted by Ramo


You're a dirt poor Shia farmer who just lost family members and maybe a limb in a brutal civil war that lasted decades. One of said members was killed by Ariel Sharon. The parties in Beirut don't give a **** about you or your village because the system is rigged against people like you. But even though Hezbollah fires some rockets off to Israel every once and a while giving you something of a headache to liberate land that you see as occupied (the Shebaa Farms), it actually does care, providing you and yours with vital social services.

No, there's a relatively rational choice here.

Ramo is absolutely correct. Anyone who expects the majority of Lebanese civilians to not support Hezbollah is living in a fantasy world.

They have been raised in a country that was occupied by Israel for nearly thirty years, and now are being bombed by ... Israel! Hezbollah is getting what they hoped for. They're ensuring that the entire country will support them in their armed resistance to Israel, so long as Israel doesn't go so far as to militarily invade and eliminate Hezbollah completely. (Not that that would work, either, but they could try..)

If there were a french militant group pestering Germany, and then Germany started bombing France, wouldn't you expect the French to support that militant group, if the French military sat back and proved it couldn't do anything, but the militant group actually did something?

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Ramo


You're a dirt poor Shia farmer who just lost family members and maybe a limb in a brutal civil war that lasted decades. One of said members was killed by Ariel Sharon. The parties in Beirut don't give a **** about you or your village because the system is rigged against people like you. But even though Hezbollah fires some rockets off to Israel every once and a while giving you something of a headache to liberate land that you see as occupied (the Shebaa Farms), it actually does care, providing you and yours with vital social services.

No, there's a relatively rational choice here.

as long as there are no consequences to you, and the consequences of letting Hezb pile up missiles and build up a military force is to Israel, and to the Leb state.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Ramo
If Lebanon were to forcefully take control of the South, there would be a huge bloodbath lasting for years. I suppose that it's pretty easy to take responsibility for that when it's not your blood being spilled.

There isnt going to peace until Hezb no longer has military control of the South.

What it takes for Leb to take control of the South, will depend on A. How strong Hezbollah is militarily B. How much support Leb gets and C. How much support Hezb gets.

In the last 6 years Hezb has been strong and gotten stronger, has gotten support from Syria and Iran, and no one has offered real material support to the Leb govt (beyond some training of the army) to oppose Hezb.

Hezb is now being materially weakened. The next steps are to prevent new support from reaching them, and to create an international force to assist the Lebs in taking control of South Lebanon.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by snoopy369


Ramo is absolutely correct. Anyone who expects the majority of Lebanese civilians to not support Hezbollah is living in a fantasy world.

They have been raised in a country that was occupied by Israel for nearly thirty years, and now are being bombed by ... Israel! Hezbollah is getting what they hoped for. They're ensuring that the entire country will support them in their armed resistance to Israel, so long as Israel doesn't go so far as to militarily invade and eliminate Hezbollah completely. (Not that that would work, either, but they could try..)

If there were a french militant group pestering Germany, and then Germany started bombing France, wouldn't you expect the French to support that militant group, if the French military sat back and proved it couldn't do anything, but the militant group actually did something?

I think you misinterpret Ramo, as well as getting some facts wrong.

Most Shia support Hezbollah. But Shia are only about 35% of the Leb population. AFAICT most Maronites, Druze, and others oppose Hezbollah, or at least did before this war. From what I can gather from the press, most non-Shia Lebanese blame the destruction on both Hezb and Israel.

Second, Israel did not occupy Lebanon for 30 years. The northern, primarily Maronite part of Lebanon, was never occupied by Israel. Israel withdrew from most of what they did occupy in 1984, two years after entering Lebanon. The area that they principally occupied, the area south of the Litani, they occupied from 1982 to 1999, or 17 years.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Spiffor

Nope, because it was sarcasm.

I oppose innocent Israelis getting killed, even though their elected government has started a war that killed hundreds of innocents.

That's because I think that when democracies are involved in war, the moral choice is to either support the murder of any civilian, or oppose the murder of any civilian.

I oppose the murder of any civilian. I see that NYE's logic has nothing against Israeli civilians getting murdered by Hezbollah.

I too oppose the murder of any civilian.

If you keep a katyusha in your living room, are you a civilian?

[lord of the mark]

David Horovitz, Jer Post

"Immediately after the soldiers were abducted, grabbed from their vehicle as they patrolled the northern border inside Israel, the IDF used tank and artillery fire to try and thwart the kidnappers' escape and sent assault helicopters and fighter planes up into the skies over Lebanon. The prime minister, furious, declared that he held Hizbullah, the Lebanese government and the Syrians to blame, and vowed that Israel would not rest until the boys were safely home. Within hours of the attack, the Israeli army had massed a vast array of forces at the northern border, poised to strike.

And then?

And then nothing.

And that was the original sin.

Omar Sawayid, Benny Avraham and Adi Avitan were seized by Hizbullah gunmen on October 7, 2000, and the IDF did not go heavily in after them. The IAF did not pulverize Hizbullah targets in southern Lebanon, or bomb the roads used by the convoys bringing vast quantities of Iranian and Syrian weaponry into Lebanon for Hizbullah's arsenal.

It had been only five months since the government of Ehud Barak, elected in large part because of a pledge to bring the army back from south Lebanon, had made good on that promise. The last thing it wanted was to embroil itself again in the Lebanese quagmire. So it trumpeted its anger. It issued threats. But it held its fire.

And a little over two years later, the bodies of the three soldiers, who had evidently died in the course of the original attack or soon after, were returned to Israel for burial, along with captured "businessman" Elhanan Tennenbaum, in what had become one of Israel's trademark asymmetrical exchanges, the latest evidence of its readiness to do anything to get its soldiers back, dead or alive. The country that would not meet then-Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas's entreaties to release prisoners into his hands, and thus strengthen his professed anti-terror position, instead released 400 Palestinian prisoners into the hands of the proudly terrorizing Islamic extremists of Hizbullah.

Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbullah leader who was responsible for both the October 2000 attack and last week's very similar incursion at Moshav Zar'it, which saw eight soldiers killed and Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser whisked off into Lebanon, might reasonably have believed that a similar scenario would play out this time - Israel huffing, puffing and, ultimately, bluffing. He might never have dreamed that Israel's peacenik defense minister, Amir Peretz, would unshackle the IAF and permit it to fire into the homes in south Lebanon where locals had Nasrallah's missiles stored, and into the Dahiya neighborhood in southern Beirut where Hizbullah had built up a vast command and control center. "

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by lord of the mark
If you keep a katyusha in your living room, are you a civilian?

1. If I stored it there on my own accord, then I'm semi-guerilla, and should face consequences for my actions.
2. If a local militia threatened me in order to storage it in my home, then yes, I'm a civilian
3. In any case, my children are civilians. It's not like they had any choice in the matter.

[lord of the mark]

"Emboldened by Israel's inactivity, Nasrallah's men settled in on their side instead, building ever-more permanent positions right up against the fence year by year, under the unthreatening eye of UNIFIL and the constrained gaze of IDF soldiers spitting distance away. Colossal explosive devices - hundreds upon hundreds of kilos - were planted to deter IDF incursions that never came; one of them, detonated 70 meters inside Lebanese territory when an Israeli tank ploughed across the border in pursuit of last week's kidnappers, ripped the tank to shreds, spreading debris over hundreds of meters, killing the four-man tank crew instantly.

If Halutz, promoted to chief of staff in June of last year, ever toyed with the idea of initiating the kind of onslaught necessary to destroy those border emplacements and much more of Hizbullah besides, he would have told himself that he would be wasting his time in even suggesting it. Attack Hizbullah out of the clear blue sky? The world would never stand for it, every politician would have told him. He'd have been laughed out of the cabinet room.

But Halutz evidently did seriously prepare for the day when Nasrallah would provide, not the pretext, but the trigger for action. The battle plan the IDF has been following for the past nine days was finalized four or five months ago, around the time the new government was taking shape.

And when Nasrallah murderously provided that trigger last Wednesday morning, Halutz found in Peretz an improbable ally. Told that the IAF would be largely incapable of tackling Hizbullah's short-range missile capability in south Lebanon unless it fired into the residential areas where the missiles and launchers were stored, but also told that the IAF had other, less sensitive targets in its plans that could be hit first, Peretz responded that while every effort should be made to limit civilian casualties, people who had rockets in their living rooms could not be considered non-combatants, and that the short-range missiles should be an early and prime focus.

The war Israel is fighting in the North is the consequence of a fundamental change in mind-set, both at the top of the army, and at the top of government, in the six years since Souad, Avraham and Avitan were abducted - a newly aggressive approach to fighting terrorism born of the bitter realization that Israel's enemies were laughing at an army perceived as impotent, not because it lacked strength but because its leaders were incapable of unleashing it. Its commitment to its soldiers, regarded in Israel as so central a component of the national ethos, was derided as weakness, as evidence of a nation gone soft. Grab a few soldiers, ran the thinking, and Israel, even under the loathed Ariel Sharon, would capitulate to any demand for their return.

In the Nasrallah conception, Israel was a spider's web, to be brushed away. Hit us hard enough and we'd break. The theory had worked in southern Lebanon. It emboldened Palestinian terrorists in the second intifada. It helped prompt the pullout from Gaza. So enthralled was Nasrallah himself by the notion that he may have missed the fact of the Israeli public's remarkable resilience in the ongoing second intifada/terror war. The population was weak, he believed. Fire missiles into the cities and the Israelis would be crying out for relief.

After Gilad Shalit was kidnapped on June 25, Arab cartoonists were drawing Israeli soldiers not as butchers but as geeks. The army's much-vaunted deterrent capability was diluting by the day.

The IDF and the government saw the critical imperative to change those perceptions. The approach is playing out not only in Lebanon but also in Gaza. What is still uncertain is quite how far the politicians, and the army, are prepared to go, and how much long-term significance they will achieve. "

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Spiffor

1. If I stored it there on my own accord, then I'm semi-guerilla, and should face consequences for my actions.
2. If a local militia threatened me in order to storage it in my home, then yes, I'm a civilian
3. In any case, my children are civilians. It's not like they had any choice in the matter.

In case 1 the death of the children, if it occurs is on your head. In case 2 its on the militias head (and that of your neighbors who support such a militia).

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by lord of the mark
In case 1 the death of the children, if it occurs is on your head. In case 2 its on the militias head (and that of your neighbors who support such a militia).

Nope, it's also on the heads of those who won't flicker at the idea of killing a family to get rid of a rocket.

Most notably if these people attack my van as me and my family try to escape all this.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Spiffor

Nope, it's also on the heads of those who won't flicker at the idea of killing a family to get rid of a rocket.

Fllicker? They waited years. They watched while Hezb built up its forces. Had they "not flickered" they would have gone in earlier. There is a limit. At some point you cant sit and let an unlimited force be built up against you. What you are asking for, for Israel to give Hezb a free pass to keep as many rockets as it wants, as long as they do so amidst civilians, is unreasonable, and that is why Israel is so united on this.

[dannubis]

Originally posted by lord of the mark


In case 1 the death of the children, if it occurs is on your head. In case 2 its on the militias head (and that of your neighbors who support such a militia).

Thats indeed a way to pass the cup.

A missile falls on an israeli house killing two children.
The house is inhabited by a soldier from the IDF, thus actively supporting the attack on Lebanon

So it is the IDF s fault ?

???????

I didn't think there were people besides some armchair would-be cowboys who actually think like you. But if there are I can see why the ME is going to be bloody fo a very long time to come.

[SlowwHand]

Welcome to the would-be cowboy club, LOTM.

[Darius871]

Originally posted by dannubis



Thats indeed a way to pass the cup.

A missile falls on an israeli house killing two children.
The house is inhabited by a soldier from the IDF, thus actively supporting the attack on Lebanon

So it is the IDF s fault ?

Assuming it was confirmed beforehand that a valid IDF target was hiding in that house, then yes. Of course, your analogy is a moot point anyway as Hezb. targeting is completely random.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by dannubis



Thats indeed a way to pass the cup.

A missile falls on an israeli house killing two children.
The house is inhabited by a soldier from the IDF, thus actively supporting the attack on Lebanon

Active IDF soldiers are on bases. Reservists are not considered valid targets under international law, but terrorists have claimed the right to target them.

Im not sure about the status of an off duty active soldier, on a visit home to his family, esp if keeping his weapon with him, vis a vis an air attack.

Of couse Hezb doesnt target that precisely. They go for mass death. If it kills arabs (as it often does, given the demographics of northern Israel) well, theyre just "martyrs" for the cause.