If the US loses Iraq and Afghanistan there won’t be peace in Israel or "Palestine"

JoeSettler
The Muqata
03 November '10

Conventional wisdom in the Obama administration is that somehow peace between Israel and local Arabs is the lynchpin for peace and success in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some Obama officials have gone so far as to imply (if not say outright) that US soldiers are dying because of Israel.

The problem is that once again the Obama administration has the situation completely backwards.

Peace in the Holy Land will only be possible once there is peace and democracy in the rest of the Middle East.

The US troubles in Iraq stem from Iran and other Islamic fundamentalists. And Afghanistan? That’s been a problem ever since the Russians got there, if not before.

And let's not get started on Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Lebanon.

And none of them were caused by the problems of the Holy Land. They were caused by fundamentalist Islam and their individual dictatorial forms of government (and the colonial powers that created these artificial Arab states in the Middle East).

And the solution to their problem has nothing to do with Israel (or Jameel trying to expand his house).

But the opposite is true.

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Czech List: Sometimes Even A Conference Can Teach Vivid Political Realities

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
25 August '10

I’m not a big fan of conferences. There’s nothing more repetitive than sitting in a panel where the presentations have interesting titles but are otherwise disappointing. Or listening to a speaker who may be very good but says absolutely nothing you don’t know already.

But sometimes you have fascinating experiences which are not exactly on the agenda. Here are three from a conference I attended in Prague a few years ago, each of which contains its own lessons. Incidentally, nothing about the below was off the record, though the names and some details have been omitted since this is about points, not personalities.

1. The German parliamentarian was well-dressed, angry, and red in the face. He raised his voice in righteous indignation. Why, he complained, were there a number of Israelis at the meeting but no Palestinians. Obviously he thought that he had caught the Czech hosts in some politically incorrect indiscretion.

After he finished his somewhat insulting remarks and sat down, one of the Czechs stood up and explained very politely that plenty of Palestinians had been invited; all expenses paid, and had accepted but had simply not shown up. That’s something I’ve seen plenty of times.

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The Western Way of War

Caroline Glick
carolineglick.com
25 June '10

(While addressing McChrystal's interview and firing, the article returns to what application "The Western Way of War" has had, or should have for Israel today. Y.)

General Stanley McChrystal has paid a huge price for his decision to give Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings free access to himself and his staff. But he performed a great service for the rest of us. US President Barack Obama fired McChrystal -- his hand-picked choice to command NATO forces in Afghanistan -- for the things that he and his aides told Hastings about the problematic nature of the US-led war effort in Afghanistan. But by acting as he did, McChrystal forced the rest of us to contend with the unpleasant truth not only about the US-led campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan. He told us the unpleasant truth about the problematic nature of the Western way of war at the outset of the 21st century.

Hastings' now famous article, "The Runaway General," told the story of an argument. On the one hand, there are people who want to fight to win in Afghanistan. On the other hand, there are people who are not interested in fighting to win in Afghanistan. Obama - and McChrystal as his general - occupy the untenable middle ground. There they try to split the difference between the two irreconcilable camps. The inevitable end is preordained.

The US and its NATO allies first deployed in Afghanistan in October 2001 with the aim of toppling the Taliban regime and destroying Al Qaida's infrastructure in the country. They have remained in the country ever since with the goal of preventing the Taliban from returning to power.

After McChrystal took command a year ago, he conducted a review of the allied strategy. His revised strategy was based on counter-insurgency methods developed in Iraq. It called for a surge of 40,000 US forces in Afghanistan. It also recommended that NATO train 400,000 Afghan forces who, in the long term, would replace NATO forces once the Taliban was defeated.

McChrystal's strategy was greeted with moans by leading members of Obama's leftist base in the administration and outside it. Led by Vice President Joseph Biden, they offered a counter-strategy. As Biden has explained it, the alternative would involve deploying special forces units and airpower to target the Taliban as it becomes necessary, and otherwise disengage from the country at quickly as possible.

McChrystal and his allies dismissed Biden's strategy as a recipe for disaster. Without a sufficient number of forces on the ground, the US would lose its ability to gather intelligence and so know what targets to attack. Recent reports that the US drone attacks in Pakistan are killing civilians rather than al Qaida and Taliban members indicate just how difficult it is to gather credible, actionable intelligence from a distance.

Presented with the two opposing strategies, Obama decided to split the difference. He ordered 30 thousand troops to Afghanistan. He refused to increase the target number of Afghan security forces from its previous 230,000. And he announced that US forces would begin to withdraw from Afghanistan in July 2011.

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Under Obama, Afghanistan Becomes Lebanon

Daled Amos
25 June "10


In The Western Way Of War, Caroline Glick writes about the removal of General Stanley McChrystal by Obama--and about US policy in Afghanistan. Along the way, Glick notes the parallels between Obama's failed policy in Afghanistan and the results of Israel's war with Hezbollah in Lebanon:

Today US forces in Afghanistan are fighting in a manner that is depressingly similar to that forced upon IDF forces in Lebanon in the 1990s. Like the US forces in Afghanistan today, during the 1990s, concerns about civilian casualties caused Israel's political leadership to constrain IDF actions in southern Lebanon in a manner that effectively transformed soldiers into sitting ducks. Israel's finest were reduced to fighting from fortified positions and Hizbullah was given a free hand to intimidate Lebanese civilians, commandeer private homes and schools to use as firing positions and forward bases, and generally maintain the initiative in the fighting.

As he withdrew IDF forces from south Lebanon ten years ago - like Biden today - then prime minister Ehud Barak claimed that Israel didn't need boots on the ground to fight Hizbullah. If we needed to go in to fight, we would send in commando squads or fighter jets to do the job. Of course, as US drone operations in Pakistan again demonstrate, without a presence on the ground, you cannot have any certainty that you are attacking real targets.

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Gaza and Afghanistan: 'War Crimes' versus 'Hearts and Minds'

Just Journalism
26 February '10
Posted before Shabbat

Colonel Richard Kemp, a former British Army commander in Afghanistan, described on Monday what he regarded as the different responses in the international media to the military actions of British and Israeli forces. Speaking at an event in London, and quoted the next day by the BBC, Col Kemp argued that Israel faces greater and more instinctive criticism of its military operations than Britain does.

‘When we go into battle we do not get the same knee-jerk, almost Pavlovian response from many, many elements of the international media and international groups, humanitarian groups and other international groups such as the United Nations which should know better... of utter automatic condemnation. We don't have to put up with that.’

Reports from Afghanistan this week make a good test case for Col Kemp’s assertion. At least 27 civilians were killed in a NATO air strike in the Afghanistan province of Uruzgan on Sunday 21 February. Airborne units opened fire on what was believed to be a group of insurgents, but which was actually a travelling party of civilian ethnic Hazaras, prompting a personal apology from General Stanley McChrystal, Commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan. Separately, 12 civilians and three Taliban were killed in a strike in Marja as part of Operation Moshtarak – NATO’s latest offensive in neighboring Helmand province.

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Where is Goldstone now?

Why is world silent in wake of killing of innocent civilians in Afghanistan?


Eitan Haber
Israel Opinion/Ynet
24 February '10

Here are the dry numbers (after all the tears have dried up): Earlier this week, NATO forces hit several vehicles in Afghanistan and killed 27 innocent Afghanis, including four women and a child.

And a reminder to those who forgot: A short while ago, 13 other innocent Afghanis were killed after a missile mistakenly targeted a residential home instead of a Taliban position.

Let there be no misunderstandings about it: Even though I am writing this thousands of kilometers away from the scene of these incidents, and even though we are talking about anonymous families in a foreign and hostile country, one is pained by the loss of life and by the sudden death of people who wanted to live, love, build a home and plant a tree. In this respect, our tears are real; tears are similar in every corner of the world.

But now, after all of the above had been said, we a have a small question; a tiny question, a minor one, something wholly insignificant: Where are you, Goldstone?

Here is an unintelligent guess: The world that cries out and weeps for every scratch suffered by a Palestinian child (and we are opposed to even such scratch,) the same world that portrays the State of Israel every morning (in newspapers) and every night (on TV) as the killer and butcher of children and as a state that fires into homes only to find bleeding bodies later on, that world will be silent, or at most offer some lip service in respect to the incident described above.

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Top UK military commander says Israeli advice key to British strategy against suicide bombers in Afghanistan, warns of “dark forces” in the BBC

Robin Shepherd
Robin Shepherd Online
22 February '10

A rare voice of sanity in the British establishment, Colonel Richard Kemp, the former commander of UK forces in Afghanistan, has mounted another devastating defence of Israel. In a speech at the annual dinner (which I attended) of the UK’s Zionist Federation in London last night, Kemp even revealed that prior to his deployment in Afghanistan a four hour briefing by a top Israeli general had been instrumental in formulating British tactics and strategy on how to deal with Taliban suicide bombers.

To my knowledge, such an intimate strategic relationship on such a sensitive matter has never before been revealed. If it has, it has certainly not received widespread coverage in the UK press.

Kemp’s counter-orthodoxy views on Israel rose to global prominence in October last year when, against the background of the Goldstone Report, he appeared before the UN Human Rights Council to say of Operation Cast Lead: “..Israeli Defense Forces did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare. Israel did so while facing an enemy that deliberately positioned its military capability behind the human shield of the civilian population.”

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Related: UK Commander Challenges Goldstone Report
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A Question

According to the MEMRI Iranian Media Blog:

"Iranian expatriate human rights activists report that 4,000 students demonstrated in Tehran to mark Students Day today, shouting "Death to (Iranian Supreme Leader Ali) Khamenei " and "Khamenei is a Murderer and His Religious Authority Is Null and Void," as well as "Death to the Government That Deceives the People."

At Amir Kabir University in Tehran, 1,500 students shouted for the "coup government" to step down, and chanted "Death to the Dictator" (referring to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad)." -more

To see a video of this week's Iranian student anti-Ahmadinejad demonstrations click on Tehran Video

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