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Sunday,
January 4, 2008 The
Gaza Affair
I am hearing that the IDF has young conscript NCO's, which makes an
enormous difference. And in the Lebanon invasion, soldiers were texting
their friends with things like "never saw one of our tanks burn before" and
"they gave us Michilen maps". This time the officers confiscated all the
cell phones before the IDF went in. The IDF is mostly conscripts, but if
they want to have a real army they need professional sergeants as well as
officers. Apparently they don't have very many. I don't know if that is from
lack of volunteers or some attempt at saving money.
It's pretty clear that the IDF is better organized this time. They have
divided Gaza into two parts, and they are systematically searching much of
the northern part of Gaza. They will search for rockets; we'll probably
begin seeing what they have found -- thousands of rockets -- on
international TV tomorrow morning. That will be the justification for the
incursion, and they'll push hell out of it. Expect to see a lot of captured
weapons being blown up.
A second objective is to restore the shock and awe: restore fear of the
IDF. The Lebanon incident did a lot of damage to that reputation of
invincibility; it needs to be restored. They badly need that. Hamas is
saying that Gaza will be the graveyard of the IDF. This needs to be shown as
false. IDF captains were denouncing the government in 2006, and with good
reason. The government needs to regain the confidence of the officer corps,
just as the IDF has to restore its reputation as the best army in the Middle
East. "In war, the moral is to the material as three is to one," said
Napoleon Bonaparte, who ought to have known. The Israeli government forgot
that in 2006. Now, I think, they remember it.
The third objective, as Joel has observed, is to foment conflict between
Hamas and Fatah. This seems to be working and the more that Israel achieves
its second objective, the more they will achieve this one, so long as the
operation is done with care. Israel needs a reputation of cold calculating
prowess, sheer ability, and determination to achieve its objectives; and it
needs to get that without gaining a reputation for cruelty and brutality.
This is never easy when fighting a barbarous enemy who does not hesitate to
use civilians as shields. The US Army had this problem in Germany in 1945,
and in Korea in 1950. (The Chinese fought under the Laws of War. The North
Koreans did not. Neither did the SS.)
In 2006 Israel showed incompetence and plenty of it, then failure of
will. This time they appear to be doing things right: including having their
own You-Tube channel rather than trusting the western media. Of course the
Israeli channel selects what it shows. So does Al Jazeera. At least we can
now see what each side is saying.
Meanwhile. Joel
Rosenberg continues his observations on the IDF/Hamas conflict.
=============
My iMac 20 this morning had the screen saver frozen; since it shows the
time as part of the saver, it was easy to see that it froze sometime last
night. Nothing I could do with mouse of keyboard would give me any control
of the Mac at all, so I used the power switch. When the Mac came back up all
was well. Not sure what the problem was.
This week I get my Mac Book Pro running properly, both as Mac OS X and
Windows; I have decided that I will cause it to dual boot under Boot Camp,
as well as get Windows under OS X running. Perhaps not: I'll do the Windows
under OS X first and see if I can do all the Windows stuff I need to do that
way. If I can't, and I suspect I cannot, then I'll do the Boot Camp. This
will all take a while, and make up a good part of my upcoming columns. Of
course I ought to have done that last year, but for most of last year I was
on automatic pilot. Getting the iPhone, iMac, and MacBook Air was a life
saver, likely quite literally, as I had things to write about and ways to
stay interested in computers while getting my Lump burned out.
==============
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