Middle East

Quote of the Day

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The IDF has great combat leaders and brave soldiers. But Hezbollah’s boys proved tougher – and we can’t pretty it up. The terrorists were willing – even eager – to die for their cause. Israeli leaders dreaded friendly casualties. And IDF troops – except in elite units – lacked the will to close with the enemy and defeat him at close quarters.

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The IDF needs pervasive reform. Still structured to defeat the conventional militaries of Syria and Egypt, it faced an enemy tailored specifically to take on the IDF. Historical reputation isn’t enough – the IDF must rebuild itself to take on post-modern threats. As one senior American general put it, “The IDF’s been living on fumes since 1967.”

Ralph Peters

RTWT.

Quotes of the Day

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“Hezbollah stuffs all manner of nasty pieces of metal into their rockets so they can maximize the number of civilians they kill.”

Michael Totten

“The [UN ceasefire] resolution represents a near-total victory for Hizbullah and its state sponsors Iran and Syria, and an unprecedented defeat for Israel and its ally the United States.”

Caroline Glick.

“Can anyone tell me what the hell the Israeli government is thinking?”

Perry de Havilland

Interview With Kanan Makiya

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This wide-ranging interview is worth reading for Makiya’s many insights about geopolitics, Islam and the moral failings of the international Left.

Exerpt:

I would say that much of the strength of the hostility of the Jihadi movement, and of the forces that have made life so horrible in Iraq, came from the silence of Europe. Europe has a lot to answer for. It’s not even that it was half-hearted. They fell in completely with the language of the non-democratic Arab regimes. They bought their line and they seemed to stand for the same things. They undermined entirely the values of the operation. Europeans knew that the United States was not going to permanently occupy Iraq. Deep down the smarter Europeans must have known it wasn’t just about oil. It was – rightly or wrongly – a way of changing the traditional western attitude towards the Arab Muslim world. It was an end to the support for autocratic and repressive governments. It was a new view that if we are going to succeed in this war against terror then we are going to have to be viewed by the populations of this part of the world in a totally different way. Now Europe might not have thought it was the right time. Europe might have thought it should be done differently. But Europe should never have been seen to be undermining the argument itself.

(Via neo-neocon, whose post on the Makiya interview is also worth reading.)

A Nuclear Armed Iran; Does it Matter?

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Amidst all the controversy, one needs to ask. Growing up in the Baltimore-Washington metro area, I spent most of my life with thousands of Russian ICBMs pointed at my head. I’m still here. So are you. Anyone who grew up in Moscow had the same, but polar opposite, experience. Because a nation is armed with nukes does not, by definition, mean those weapons will be used, whatever their dislike or distrust of the those people at whom the weapons are targeted. Which leads me to the larger question at hand, does the prospect of a nuclear armed Iran in and of itself justify a war, even a limited war, for their removal?

Let’s look at some possible courses of action.

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