Aug 01 2006
Hezbollah Is In Real Trouble
The Qana incident is not playing out as Hezbollah and the leftwing media and anti-US groups had wished. I have been talking to staunch Democrats who never side with the Conservatives without a lot of debate and they all see Hezbollah as the criminal in Qana. As I posted on Saturday, right before the incident (which is more than coincidental in my opinion) it was proven Hezbollah was placing their rocket launchers right next to civilian locations. This by itself is a war crime. The other questions surrounding the incident only add to the impression Hezbollah is enticed attack for PR purposes. So while the media screams massacre no one is buying it. The staging of photos using the corpses of dead babies is universally disgusting. Hezbollah, like the other Jihadists, have overplayed a dumb hand.
What is clear in this morning’s news is Hezbollah is now in trouble and needs help. Qana was probably a desperation move to try and get the UN and EU to call off the fighting so there would be time for resupply. But Israel played that correctly by giving Hezbollah enough breathing room so they would attack Israel and end the suspension of air attacks.
Iran is worried their puppets are being decimated, and they should be. They are calling on the Muslim world to save their puppet forces.
Muslim nations should arm Hizbollah in its fight against Israel, Iran’s influential hardline clerical politician Ahmad Jannati said on Tuesday.
Clearly the supply lines from Syria have been successfully cut off. Hezbollah has been firing rockets for two weeks now and seems to be running low. If Israel does wipe out Hezbollah then one of Iran’s defensive forces they wanted to use to cover for their Nuclear Arms efforts will have been destroyed. That will leave Syria as their only buffer. Remember this is focus of all of this is neutering Iran by ending their nuclear weapons program. Something the high and mighty Mullahs cannot stomach. It would be the ultimate humiliation.
So why would Syria make the idiotic decision to get involved in all this? They are raising their ‘readiness’ supposedly – but to what end? Are they simply panicking expecting Western Coalition response? Syria is now truly isolated. They have Iraq to the West, Saudoi Arabia and Jordan to the south, Lebanon to the east and Turkey to the north. All of those countries have sided with the US and the Western Coalition over the Jihadists. So why up your military’s readiness?
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told the Syrian military on Monday to raise its readiness, pledging not to abandon support for Lebanese resistance against Israel.
“We are facing international circumstances and regional challenges that require caution, alert, readiness and preparedness,” Assad said.
…
Diplomats in Damascus say the Syrian army has been on alert since the Israeli onslaught on Lebanon began on July 12 after Hizbollah fighters captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border operation.
So Syria was on alert and now they are more alert? Israel did alert Damascus that all attempts to supply Hezbollah would be met with destruction. But Syria can avoid conflict by simply not exposing itself. If Iranians or whoever want to die crossing the border to Lebanon Syria could stand back and let it happen. Or maybe not. The Assad regime is shakey and I gather it will not stand if Hezbollah falls and the Iranians pull support away. Assad is a failed servant to Iran if that happens. If Iran dumps Assad to the winds it is possible forces in Syria would tear him apart. Or it may be another bluff to try and halt the destruction of Hezbollah. Right now it is hard to tell. But what is clear is this incident needs to play out and Hezbollah needs to be destroyed.
Then the US will have to assess its role in the world. A world that cried over Lebanese children dying and barely whimpered over Israeli children dying. A world that condemned Israel for a defensive action targetting the launcher of rockets and doing all it could to not kill civilians, even though there is now solid proof Hezbollah places its launchers next to civilians. The war crimes of Hezbollah go unchallenged and that requires the US to re-assess who are its allies. Because we are still at risk of attack. And the same people who wept for Hezbollah’s victims will not understand our use of force when we are attacked. We avoid attack through the clear promise of a swift and overwhelming response. It is our fierce and deadly counter-punch that allows us not to have to be the first to punch or to face others wanting to punch us. Without that every two-bit dictator and self-proclaimed-emmissary-from-God would be taking a swipe at us and killing innocent people. Israel needs to finish its own counter punch. Then we will re-assess.
AJ
I do not remember which place I saw it, but some place I hit on in the blogblur of coverage I have been following, reported that Hez’s biggest problem is that they may have many missles left to launch, but most of their launchers have been taken out.
If they have to resort to improvised launch mechanisms , they will be exposed for a longer period prior to the launch and possibly be taken out before launching.
Or maybe they can try to hand carry them, or see if they can ship em via UPS.
Is this Iran, Syria and Hezbollah’s Vietnam?
One of the biggest mistakes in this whole coverage of the current situation is that the media is trying to portray a lessend capability of the IDF since they haven’t recreated the Six Day War senario.
Excuse me , but they are comparing apples to oranges.
The Six Day War was against national armies, in uniform with clearly identified targets and opposition. To try to compare then to now lacks major credibility.
Israel is being vilified by opportunistic politicians and the international media over the air strike that killed 56 persons early yesterday in the Lebanese village of Qana. In the rush to blame Israel, a number of relevant facts are ignored: 1) the sad fact of the matter is that, no matter how much is done to minimize the risk to civilians, civilians inevitably die in wars; 2) Israel has placed its soldiers at risk in order to minimize civilian casualties in Lebanon, while Hezbollah, in flagrant violation of international law, including the Geneva Conventions, deliberately behaves in ways to maximize harm to Israeli and Lebanese civilians; 3) in Qana there were indisputable military targets, including locations from which Hezbollah has been firing rockets into Israel; 4) pending the outcome of an investigation, there is no way to tell whether all of those killed in the airstrike were “civilians,” as Israel’s critics confidently tell us, or whether the dead were actually a mix of combatants and noncombatants.
Senior Israeli officials said yesterday that Hezbollah rocket launchers were concealed in civilian buildings in the village, from which 150 rockets were fired over the past 20 days. They showed reporters video footage of rocket launchers being driven into Qana, from whence rockets were fired at northern Israeli towns, including Kiryat Shemona, Afula and Ma’alot. Israel targeted the building hit early yesterday because intelligence reports indicated that Hezbollah operatives were inside, along with Katyusha rockets and launchers. Typically Hezbollah fighters fire rockets at Israeli targets and then dart into nearby buildings.
Indeed, as it has repeatedly done in the course of the 19-day-old military campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Israel Defense Forces have relinquished the element of surprise by dropping leaflets on Qana and many other Lebanese towns telling residents that they should leave the area because the IDF is preparing to conduct military operations against Hezbollah. Just as Israel tries to move Lebanese civilians out of the line of fire, Hezbollah does its best to put them in danger and peril. In a dispatch published yesterday in Australia, the Sydney Sunday Herald Sun demonstrates just how Hezbollah wages war.
The photographs, from a Christian area of eastern Beirut called Wadi Chahrour, were smuggled out of Lebanon. One photograph depicts a fighter with an AK-47 rifle guarding “no-go” zones after an Israeli attack, and another with a group of men and youths preparing to fire an anti-aircraft gun in an apartment block, with sheets hanging out to dry on a balcony. Another shows the remnants of a Hezbollah Katyusha rocket in the middle of a residential block destroyed in an Israeli airstrike. An Australian was standing just down the street when the block was obliterated. “Hezbollah came in to launch their rockets, then within minutes the area was blasted by Israeli jets,” he said. “Until the Hezbollah fighters arrived, it had not been touched by the Israelis. Then, it was totally devastated…It was carnage. Two innocent people died in that incident, but it was so lucky it was not more.” (The pictures are posted online at http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun.)
Hezbollah’s treatment of both Israeli and Lebanese civilians violates international law. Article 51 of the Additional Protocol to the Geneva Convention states that: “The civilian population as such, as well as individual civilians, shall not be the subject of attack.” Moreover, by using Lebanese civilians as human shields, Hezbollah appears to be violating Article 58 of Protocol 1, which requires parties to a conflict to “Avoid locating military objectives within or near densely populated areas.” Article 28 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states: “The presence of a protected person may not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations.”
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan falsely accuses Israel of deliberately attacking members of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), even as Hezbollah repeatedly targets U.N. peacekeepers. Last Monday, an Internet site called Little Green Footballs notes that the United Nations issued a press release reporting that an unarmed U.N. observer was critically wounded by small arms fire originating from a position controlled by Hezbollah. He was airlifted to an Israeli hospital for treatment. The following day, Hezbollah opened fire on a U.N. convoy, forcing it to turn back. On Friday, U.N. forces issued a press release reporting that “Hezbollah fired from the vicinity of five U.N. positions” in southern Lebanon, and that the number of troops in a Ghanaian battalion of the U.N. is “somewhat reduced” due to Hezbollah firing from near the U.N. positions, which provokes retaliatory shelling from the Israeli side.
In sum, Hezbollah — along with its enablers in Tehran and Damascus — bears full responsibility for the carnage in both Israel and Lebanon.
Test
M. Simon at the blog listed below has an interesting theory on the Syrian involvement, as well as Israels grand strategy.
http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2006/07/tactics-strategy-grand-strategy.html
Remember that Assad was already sent packing from Lebanon after the Hariri killing. As a dictator, he can’t afford to show weakness, as it leads to inevitable uprisings and a potential coup. He has to maintain a reasonable level of national hatred for “the enemy”, in order to deflect criticism which would otherwise be directed at him. For this reason, he must verbally attack Israel and make all of the obligatory threats. But if Hezballah continues to get smacked militarily while their incredibly sick attempts to influence the media also come up short, Assad will be left holding the bag. Iran will throw him under his own national bus. And of course, the next would-be Syrian despot/Islamofascist will be eagerly waiting in the wings.