Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion
Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute
Condi told by Olmert to Back off?
Steve Clemons reports that the Israelis have told US Secretary of State Condi Rice to back off her calls for Israel to exercise restraint in its responses to Hizbullah.
posted by Juan Cole @ 7/14/2006 11:45:00 AM
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Winner, October 5, 2007, Scott Nearing Award for Courageous Scholarship (Awarded by the Graduate Students of the Political Science Department, University of Pennsylvania).
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8 Comments:
While I am very dubious of Clemmons prediction that there will be a price to pay for slapping the US Secty of State, as I said in response to the main post and if you were listening to Rice on CNN this morning, she's backed off. Today is all Syria and Iran just like good little girl
Isn't this title backwards? Israel told Condi to back off - not vice versa...
Hizballah uses the attack drone
While terrorist nukes, chemical and biological weapons belong to Dan Brown's conspiratorial world, the ME conflict produces something quite real and dangerous. Attack drones are a huge improvement over Katyusha missiles and car bombs. If technology will be reliable and simple enough, they can be highly effective against naval targets such as warships, tankers and passenger ships. So, if attack drones will work better than kamikaze boats, this can be an important improvement of guerilla arsenal.
Following Hizballah's declaration of war on Israel, guerilla drone hit the Saar 5 navy gunship off Lebanon. This caused severe damage and left the ship burning as it turned and cruised homeward. Hizbullah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah was the first to report of the attack on the Israeli warship. "Our homes will not be the only ones to be destroyed, our children will not be the only ones to die," Nasrallah said.
Yes, it is obvious that, in technical terms, the impact on the Israeli navy is negligible, but the symbolic importance of this attack is hard to underestimate. First, it will enrage Israeli and Muslim radicals and further escalate the crisis. Next, this is a very serious warning of what will happen if Iran will be attacked. Then Iranians can retaliate by using such weapons against the tankers in the Strait of Hormuz.
Is it worth mentioning that the precititating event, the capture of two Israeli soldiers at the Shebaa Farms area, was in disputed territory ? News reports saying they were captured in Israel are partly right, partly wrong.
Clemmons thinks Rice will retaliate against Israel. Ha!
Perhaps now the poodles in the White House will begin to understand that Israel runs the show, not them. After all, Bush dutifully parroted the famous line, "Israel has the right to defend itself."
We will see the Bush administration go through periods of denial, anger, frustration, bargaining and finally acceptance leading up to the mid-term elections. After all, Israel is our friend and anyone who questions them loses the election.
Gorbachev is correct; our Congress is composed of cowards.
One last thing. "Collateral damage" is a euphemism for "war crimes."
Update on Hizballah ship attack
According to Ynet, the Israeli ship was hit by C-802 anti-ship missile, not by a drone or kamikaze boat. This is a heavy weapon originally developed in China in the 1980-ies and then imported by Iran. So, if the ship was really hit by the missile (which is very likely), there is little doubt that guerillas got this weapon from Iran. In fact, all this makes lots of sense because there is no known practice of drone attacks against the navy ships.
precititating event, the capture of two Israeli soldiers at the Shebaa Farms area
I'm trying to locate a report saying just where the Israeli soldiers were captured. It's a little difficult.
According to a Wed. AP report appearing in The Guardian, ``Israeli security officials said their troops had crossed into a southwestern sector of Lebanon, near where the soldiers were seized,to keep their captors from moving them deeper into Lebanon.''
But no one is reporting that they were captured at Shebaa Farms, a disputed part of SE Lebanon, near the Golan, right?
How disputed is the territory where this happened, I have no idea. Can some one help?
So who is the superpower and whose the regional client state? Seems backwards to me.
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