Adam Elkus has a piece out entitled The Hezbollah Myth and Asymmetric Warfare, in which he criticises what he sees as a tendency to over-rate the power of guerrillas in the light of the 2006 war. Having read it, I think the real question here is about expectations and goals. Hezbollah didn’t defeat the Israelis…
Read More 2006 again, and a brief history of recent wrongPeter Beaumont goes for a Holt’s battlefield tour of southern Lebanon: Cruising through the serene green wadis that connect south Lebanon to the Litani river to the north, the commander explains what happened at the end of the last war. “We knocked out three of their tanks on the first day, as they tried to…
Read More we flippin’ murdered themMore information is becoming available about the Christopher Hitchens brawl. It appears to have been a telling moment in Decency. The crucial detail is that Hitchens didn’t just deface any old SSNP artefact – he scrawled on the monument to the first shots fired in resistance to the Israeli occupation of 1982. Now, I’m sure…
Read More Hitchens Drinks Scotch in Psychic Counter-InsurgencyThe U.S. Army’s top historian has a paper out on the war between Israel and Hezbollah (and most of Lebanon) in 2006. It was worth reading when I read it before Christmas, and it’s even more so now. Specifically, Dr Biddle’s view of Hezbollah strategy is interesting; in his opinion, they adapted to the fact…
Read More we’re history, there ain’t nothing left to sayWell, I asked for details of that Hezbollah converged telecoms network, and some appeared via the comments at Abu Muqawama. First of all, there’s a map. My first reaction on seeing this was that it looked a lot like a rather underdeveloped, dated official backbone network – there’s not much redundancy anywhere, and there’s only…
Read More I’m in the phone booth, it’s the one across the hallOK, so I was wanting to know about that Hezbollah WiMAX net. The original source of the story appears to be this Time report: Although Hizballah is known for its massive Iran-funded social welfare system that provides everything from soup to education, construction materials and matchmaking services for Lebanon’s Shi’ite underclass, cell-phone service is not…
Read More It’s good to talkSo we had the world’s first military coup motivated by a 3G network licence, in Thailand; we had the shootout between the Chalabi Boys and Orascom security men in Baghdad. Now, there’s the Hezbollah/Amal coup de force (or de folie as Robert Fisk preferred), motivated in part by the Lebanese government’s desire to control their…
Read More scaleydelic!Last week: Two-thirds of Israelis want talks with Hamas. Not just that, but former secret-service chiefs were in the press arguing for it. Here’s Efraim Halevy talking to old-school TYR ally Laura Rozen. And here’s the data: ;not only did 64 per cent of Israelis support direct talks, and a majority of Labour and Kadima…
Read More Send – the envoy!A sinister tale from Iraq. But does anyone else find the scariest bit that the mystery voice who threatened her identified itself as the “Kata’eb al-Jihad”? Yes, that’s Kata’eb as in the Lebanese Phalange’s Arabic name. Not that the originals would have had any truck with jihad, but it strikes me that it’s a great…
Read More We are the goonsquad and we’re coming to townThe new map of the Middle East crazed wingnut Ralph Peters came up with needs a bit more battering, I think. Specifically, as well as the fact that even though in the text of the article he accepts that the Israelis ought to go back to the Green Line, and on the map he blithely…
Read More Ralph Peters: Maniac