NPR reported that there’s heavy fighting going on in Bint Jbeil again.  I start to wonder if BJ is just being left there, encouraging Hezbollistas to migrate in and then sit there bravely resisting.  As in the “Cauldron Battle Construction Set.”

I knew I could never get a job at the Smithsonian, even in the face of serious family encouragement, when I read the employment package and realized how hopelessly, nauseatingly politically correct the institution is.  As in “I’m neither gay nor a minority, and don’t focus on gender studies and equality issues; therefore, I need not apply” level of PC.

Think I’m exaggerating?  Check it out yourself and see if you can hold your lunch down.

Judging by the uproar posted here at Babalu Blog, Tibbets, who commanded the Enola Gay sixty years ago, was the flavor-of-the-month victim of the PC “all violence is bad and therefore we can never say anything good about anything involved with that w/o lots of “more intellectual and virtuous than thou” caveats and commentary. 

I’ve lived in Japan.  The Japanese can be weird from my perspective, but I like them.  That said, is there any doubt that an Imperial Japan would have hesitated to nuke California and 90% of China as their opening play, rather than just whacking Pearl Harbor, given a chance?  The War is over.  A million on each side got to live to see 1946 because of the Enola Gay.  I got to know my grandfathers because they came home after V-E day rather than being shipped halfway across the globe to fight in D-Day, The Sequel ™.

It is appalling, but unfortunately not surprising, to see that the Smithsonian somehow thinks that’s a bad thing.

It is a crying damned shame that the people who run our institutions of memory feel entitled to shit on those who actually understand the concepts of Loyalty and Duty.  But then again, maybe they’d rather have let a million Japanese mothers’ sons, and a million American, plus all the civilians in the way, convulse and shriek in pain from lead punching holes through their bodies and shrapnel tearing off their limbs, with Stalin looming in the background getting ready to sweep the pieces up into a Communist hell. 

After all, for the Smithsonian, it’s all about ideology and PC, faux-sophisticated “detachment.”  It’s not like they can empathize or relate to these common soldiers on any human level.

It’s been over ten years — think anything’s changed with that exhibit?  If the Smithsonian is the beast I know it as, you’d have to be a fool and a neo-con to hope so.

Ahmed Al-Jarallah 
Editor-in-Chief, the Arab Times

HASSAN Nasrallah is in a quagmire. If, according to his own statements, Nasrallah knew Israel would attack Lebanon between September and November, if he was aware the Zionist enemy was ready for war and if he had received this information, which even the Pentagon and CIA could not receive, why did he give Israel an opportunity to launch the war before time by kidnapping two of its soldiers?

Either he’s an idiot, or else he didn’t.  Another voice questions Nasrallah’s bluster.

I still think it was unauthorized, and some low-level Hezbollista is having his fingernails removed on the hour by his bosses.

Hrm.  Dunno.  I’m definitely anti-Hezbollah.  Because their actions are, quite frankly, as close to “evil” as I can come up with.  They have had total autonomy, and could have spent years rebuilding the devastated infrastructure from the 1980s had they wanted to be anything other than totally focused on beating down the Israelis.  Yeah, they built some schools and hospitals and that sort of thing, but they also spent years and years creating a gigantic freaking maginot line while leaving swaths of territory still in ruins.  Any idea how many apartment complexes you can build with the concrete required for ONE modern bunker’s supply tunnel?  And, I don’t have even the vaguest thing against the Shia in general.

On the other hand, far as I’m concerned, the Israelis may be our allies, but they’re sure as hell not our friends, as evidenced by their habit of selling our military secrets to the Chinese (a point I’ve read recently, and have blogged about before).  If the Israelis don’t care about their policies directly getting my country’s servicemen killed trying to defend 22 million Taiwanese from having their island levelled by the PLA… it’s kind of a borderline call why I should particularly care whether Israel’s neighbors push their 5 million into the sea and back to New York, Russia, and wherever else they came from.  Nothing personal: stop selling our miltech to guys we’re barely figuring out how to avoid fighting in the next fifty years, and we’ll talk.

On the other hand, there’s a principal at stake here.  Actually, several.  And, loosely speaking, they all boil down to “Hezbollah has explored whole new kingdoms of suckage.” First:

• Hezbollah is a bully.  A special kind of bully.  The mean and deranged smaller kid who’s constantly pulling outrageous crap against a bigger kid, precisely because he knows that the playground monitors will always step into keep him from suffering any consequences.  And a couple of the playground monitors are actually encouraging him in the behavior, b/c they don’t like the bigger kid’s hairstyle.
• In this case, HA committed blatant acts of war.  The kind you just can’t roll over and ignore without announcing to the world that you are, to use an ugly phrase, a “prison bitch.”
• Consequently, it follows that every now and then, actual justice involves letting a big guy pummel the dog snot out of a smaller guy who is constantly asking for it.

Second:

• Hezbollah has specialized in trying to make this a Lebanese-at-large fight.  By parking military equipment in civilian neighborhoods (including Christian and Druze neighborhoods), and by not allowing non-combatants to flee a goddamned war zone.  The Geneva Convention specifically forbids the use of civilians as human shields.  (Convention IV, Art. 28 and Protocol I, Art. 51 Sec 7)
• Lebanon’s screwed.  Acts of war were committed from their territory, and the combatant on their soil is doing everything it possibly can in order to guarantee that the fight gets as ugly as humanly possible.  The fact that the Lebanese military supplied telemetry data for the Hezbollah anti-ship rocket attack also means that at least portions of the Lebanese milgov complex can’t simply sit back and say “but why are they bombing us?”
• Israel, otoh, is perfectly justified hitting the airport and other means by which their enemy may be resupplied. I hope that in retrospect it turns out that the number of innocent deaths turned out to be relatively close to military necessity given the shit HA is pulling.
• And Israel really does need to freaking LET UP and let more humanitarian and oil supplies in through the ports.

And a lot of innocent people are getting screwed in the process, because Syria and Iran may be pushing for an immediate cease-fire, but Hezbollah’s having none of it unless Israel agrees to go home and roll over whenever Hezbollah provokes them. So, you have a choice between an ugly kid who’ll screw you in a heartbeat for a buck, but who you’re propping up in the hopes that he might grow up and make something of himself, and a deranged little schoolyard psychopath who likes to play with matches and stab people with forks whenever the teacher’s head is turned. No matter what happens, it’s going to be ugly.  I don’t think I’m pro-Israeli, and I may definitely have gotten callous studying warfare too long, but I do think that letting Israel pound the snot out of the schoolyard psycopath until something decisive happens is the only way that anything resembling a long-term peace is going to come about.

————–

I don’t usually do this, but I am closing comments on this one.  The folks I know could go around on this and be totally reasonable — and the original post that prompted me to write this one made some damned fine points on the “contra” side (you know who you are:  good post, dude).  But threads like this inevitably turn into trollbait, and I just don’t feel like moderating a bunch of moonbats nutriding their personal heroes for the next month and a half.

Ynet reports 6 brigades involved in “bitter battles.”  And yet, they report ONE Israeli KIA, and seven wounded, of whom only one is a serious casualty.

We remain hamstrung by Hezbollah’s… um, messianic… approach to reporting.  As discussed earlier, w/o any Hezbollah casualty figures, we’re stuck, but how do you have half-a-dozen brigades engaged in combat, and lose only two guys?

Meaning either they’re encountering HA’s spear carriers and wiping them away like a coffee stain, or else “bitter battles” is Israeli media’s term for “occasional light skirmishing.”

The usual gasbags are coming out of the woodwork declaring that Israel’s losing the current war because it’s not all over yet.

Read this for a quick clue as to why Israel may indeed be losing…. but why it’s WAYYYYY too early for anybody not getting direct briefings to be stepping out with those assessments. 

This blog has stuck to tactical analysis and regional strategic assessments for precisely those reasons. 

We don’t know whether it’s Hezbollah’s cadre getting stacked up, or whether it’s primairly just guys who’ve gotten a rousing speech, a couple hundred rounds, and a slap on the shoulder on their way to die — an organization that consciously gets its civilians killed would think nothing of swelling the ranks with a few Kitchener Brigades (sp?). 

I don’t know.  And neither do any of the talking heads. 

It’s about time.

Publicly, IDF-Lebanese ministers surprisingly mild-mannered and conciliatory.  Heh.

On a lighter note, in the perennial tradition of talking smack at one’s enemies, I humbly submit to you “yalla ya Nasrallah.”

Catchy.  Not quite In der Fuhrer’s Face, but still, catchy.

HT: Pajamas Media

Okay, so the Iranians will keep Syria in line by moving suicide bombers into Lebanon.

Either they are planning to take on the Israelis:  dumb.  See GWII.

Or they are using Israel as an excuse to blow stuff up all over Lebanon once the purely domestic throat-cutting start: smart.  See… Lebanon.

If it’s the former, then the Iranians play right into the West’s hands with casus belli and by diluting their domestic thug strength.  If the latter, though… bad, bad, bad, and there’s not much that can be done to stop it.  It could easily give HA direct control over Lebanon once the blood dries.

For those of you following the earlier post’s comments, NPR says IDF reports 40 Hizballah killed.

That’s 22 wounded and 9 killed IDF, an unknown number HA wounded and 40 killed.

That’s 4 to 1, when the 4 are already in ambush positions, and one can assume at least 20 shooters in the initial ambush.

Strategically, HA can absorb losses at that level.  It has manpower to burn at this point.

Tactically, 4 to 1 with a three-side city ambush? That’s bad.  In fact, that’s embarrassing.  What this tells me, combined with the relatively high numbers of wounded-but-not-killed, is that Hizballah is falling back on the perennial Military-Arab notion of “front sight?  What’s that?”  Better quality of shooting would have resulted in a much higher IDF fatality rate even with the new medical equipment (don’t know if they have it, but it’s a reasonably safe bet), b/c it’s “known” that there was no meaningful medivac in this furball for a ridiculously long time.

In other words, Hizballah may still be the best Arab army on the block, and have a great combination of equipment and morale… but it’s still an Arab army, and still apparently running on the age-old “we have troops to burn” theory where only the officers count for squat.

–

Interesting counterpoint:  when the guys in Iraq got together to celebrate being in charge of their own province, all the traditional guys came up from the Tribes to celebrate… and the documentary pictures in the NYT showed not ONE AK47 or variant.  Each and every single one of these guys had a Mosin-Nagant or similar type long-barreled bolt-action rifle.  Mentally and culturally, there is a huge difference between the man who carries the former weapon, and the man who carries the latter.