Figures
By Mitch Berg
I take some time off from job, blog and radio show, and suddenly the biggest story in the world isn’t our senile president and Trump’s legal woes.
The fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur invasion, no less. Couldn’t see that one coming.
Quietly hoping that this time Israel ignores the international yapping about cease fires and diplomacy, and builds a pyramid of the skulls of HAMAS fighters, and puts it at the approaches to Yad Vashem.
They really need to push the notion that that “never again” thing wasn’t a polite request. It clearly hasn’t sunk in.
One thing that is sinking in: someone missed their cue:
“All of Israel is asking itself: where is the IDF, where are the police, where is the security?” said Eli Maron, a former head of the Israeli navy, on Channel 12. “It’s a colossal failure; the [defence] establishments have simply failed, with vast consequences.”
HAMAS is directly supported by Iran, whose intelligence and special forces are among the craftiest in the world. While Berg’s 18th Law is in full effect, I’m going to go out on a short, sturdy limb and guess that Iran spent years helping HAMAS play intel-fu to conceal the attack plans.
This isn’t without precedent; even though the Yom Kippur War was a huge conventional operation with thousands of tanks and planes and hundreds of thousands of troops, it came as a complete surprise as well.
One thing that doesn’t need any post-attack study: Biden Administraiton policies have directly contributed to the situation. Reports say US weapons left in Afghanistan were used in the attacks; while I’m waiting for better confirmation there, it appears almost certain that US integrity and foreign-policy gravitas left in Afghanistan, or packed into boxes of money sent to Iran, was involved.
And the administration remains an embarassment:
That didn’t sound “unequivocal” at all.
October 12th, 2023 at 10:11 am
It’s interesting to imagine yourself as Supreme Commander responding to this situation. Here’s my first draft of a speech to the nation:
“My fellow Americans, Muslim terrorists have committed atrocities against innocent civilians in Israel. We cannot allow that act of aggression to go unpunished. Therefore, I have ordered B-52s armed and ready to fly, supported by tankers for the long flight, and fighters from the USS Ford, plus drones from our airbases in Saudia Arabia, with AWACS and satellites to coordinate it all, with our full arsenal of nuclear missiles on standby alert in case they’re needed. The objective is to avenge the atrocity by dropping endless numbers of bombs to kill everyone in . . . .”
That’s as far as I got. What are the target coordinates? Gaza? The whole thing? Everybody – women and children, hospitals, schools – kill 2 million people to avenge a few hundred? And what about the leadership of Hamas, which is not in Gaza but is in Qatar? Leave them to plot again, or bomb them, too? And what about the paymasters and planners in Iran who set it up over the last two years? Leave them to plot again, or bomb them, too?
What are the Russians doing while we’re bombing everybody in sight? And the Chinese?
Help me out here, people. What’s the rest of the speech?
October 12th, 2023 at 10:56 am
BB, I can remember, back in the mid 80s, having a conversation with some cousin or other at a family gathering. This guy was in the military (can’t remember which branch) and his job was in intelligence. Turned out he was one of the low level guys who looked at satellite pictures taken over the USSR and analyzed them for economic markers. He told me that Russia was dirt poor, that they had few paved roads outside of cities, and they still used a lot of farm animals to do labor on their farms. He said the population of the USSR was probably half what they claimed it was.
Turned out this low level non-com was right, and the CIA was wrong.
October 12th, 2023 at 2:50 pm
MMP, true, and part of me suspects that it was intentional. I was reading a biography of Julia Child–who was OSS in WW2–and her comments on John Birch (the one after whom the society was named) were very telling; although Birch was obviously Caucasian and thus obviously neither Chinese or Japanese, Child’s perspective was that he had somehow “earned it” when he asked to get through the Communist checkpoint and was shot. It was, IMO, as if there was a quorum of Communists in the OSS who were not going to take note when other Communists committed crimes.
And of course, fast forward to “Tailgunner Joe”, and….we would infer that he was largely right, though of course he was pilloried for raising the flag about the matter.