(Reuters) - Israel and Hezbollah signaled on Thursday their rare flare-up in fighting across the Israel-Lebanon border was over, after the Lebanese guerrillas killed two Israeli troops in retaliation for a deadly air strike in Syria last week.
Israel said it had received a message from UNIFIL, the U.N. peacekeeping force in Lebanon, that Hezbollah was not interested in further escalation.
In Beirut, a Lebanese source briefed on the situation told Reuters that Israel informed Hezbollah via UNIFIL "that it will make do with what happened yesterday and it does not want the battle to expand". End quote.
It's nice that some people manage to learn some basic lessons. As Israel and Hezb found out in 2006, neither side can secure a decisive victory in an away-match, and there is no percentage playing in War of Attrition. Tit-for-that and live-and-let-live ( aka Lex Talionis )combining to make the Israel-Lebanese border an area which by local standards is a haven of quiet. And both sides have much bigger concerns than making eachother's life miserable -
I did not say I studied GCSE History. As I said, reading is not your skill.
''Instead of imposing massive fines on them as they did in the treaty of Versailles, " AFTER the 20+ million or so Germans had been killed and the rest intimidated... and not before.
"If your stupid idea of mass murder and genocide was actually implemented ( it wont because politicians know different ideas why it wont work) then another group will take ISIS's place." Why, precisely, should we allow a bunch of ultra-reactionaries to continue breathing at all? As for others taking their place, who exactly took up the place of the people that Jingiz Khan genocided?
"Also embedding them within the government forces wont work because do you think the government will allow them to report pro-Assad force's crimes? No"" Since you mention it, I should certainly not be in favour of allowing anyone to report who is not 100% on the pro-Assad side. Syria is part of the Socialist camp, and I waste no tears on the demise of anyone who has the slightest problem with that.
"Thats a dictatorship and Saddam had a strong government, why shouldnt he be in power?" He's dead. Bit of a problem.
"Why does it have to be shites in control?" Why would anyone consider any other solution? I mean, unless you are some kind of sick sunni arab reactionary, why would anyone bother with the sunni-arab reactionaries?
" No your stupid ideas will never work." Proof required.
"Not everyone who with a half a brain agrees with your suggestion of genocide" Awwww. Hizbollah and the Pasdaran will be sooooo dissapointed.
" you want the death and destruction of ISIS" Damn right and no 2 ways about it.
"and people who MIGHT be sympathetic to them. " Syria is part of the Socialist camp, and I waste no tears on the demise of anyone who has a problem with that.
*Worked EXCELLENTLY in WWII* Your response: Of course it didnt work thats why WW2 happened only 30 years after. Thats the reason why Hitler actually rose, you say you studied History in your GCSE's right?
Reading is not your main skill, I suppose. The vermin was eradicated, between the battlefield, the air campaign, ruthless purging by the Soviets, American fragebogen, etc etc etc. Obviously, proven to be effective, and there has not been any Nazi activity on a serious scale, nor any nostalgia of note among the German population. In other words, it works.
"We do not live in Stalin's era thank god but if a civilian shows pro-ISIS leanings I would monitor them, and arrest them not kill them and raise the amount of sympathizers"
As Mao already explained, such persons are fish in a revolutionary sea. The solution is fairly obvious, sterilise the sea. Coincidentally, arresting suspects is a great way to make terrorists. The Daesh leader went radical as a result of his arrest. Obviously, imprisonment is not effective. But purges are - has anyone heard anything of large scale Sunni activity in Iran? The problem we face is in the same category, and the same solutions will be of use.
"Stupid thing to say, cutting off a drug cartels finance supply will make it impossible to function and it will be a more easier target." And after some 30 years of trying that kind of thing, we still got a problem with Cocain out of Columbia. Your preferred solution has been proven not to work.
" Daesh rose because of the instability the US caused when they invaded and put a puppet prime minister in charge" I call bulldust. Daesh rose in no small part because the Americans were silly enough to stop the duly elected Government of Iraq from simply purging its unreliable sunni arab elements. And what are we to say of a policy - US imposed - that allowed Sunnis to retain weapons? I do not recall either the Russians or the Americans allowing Germans to keep weapons.
The essential error was a failure to keep the sunni arab in complete submission, no doubt induced by the same preposterous humanitarian motives that led certain persons we wont mention in Libya...
"Daesh could have been stopped if the Iraqi army was not dissolved and if a strong government was not put back in power" A strong Government is best formed and maintained by running the place by Shi''ites, and for Shi'ites, with absolutely no toleration of minority participation UNLESS said minorities are completely and totally LOYAL to the Government. And obviously, Kurdistan can only be ruled by Kurds, either in an autonomous or in an independent context.
"Eliminating anyone will not work as it did not work with the many examples I showed you previously" BS. It;s a Hoof and Mouth disease problem. The solution is obvious... not many Shiítes or Alawites joining Daesh, wot?
" if you think executing islamists is the answer then you sir are as bad as them. " Spoken like a petit bourgeois liberal. I am not a petit bourgeois liberal and do not share their values, nor do I have the slightest respect for what they say or think. I care as much about your opinion as Felix Dzerzshinsky would care for the opinions of Trotsky.
Why indulge in talking with a unified Hamas-Fatah front at all? Hamas = Islamist. Until Hamas is liquidated, no contact. The survival of an Islamist ( barring Gulenists etc ) is a totally unacceptable outcome.
''e wasnt on a peace mission" So what? Wankers ( Palestinian ones ) said they could not guaranty his safety since he dissented with them.
If the Palestinian is so eager for peace, let him surrender unconditionally.
"didnt work in Germany in WW1 Worked EXCELLENTLY in WWII - as some 20 million dead Nazi soldiers could attest to. Such things tend to work MUCH better once you understand that the civillian population that supports their efforts are also to be targetted and neutralised.
A civilian who supports the Daesh ideology by word or by deed, by financial contribution or by propaganda, is every bit as guilty as one who joins them. So ask yourself, What Would Stalin Do?
Annihilation works very well, priovided you don't have some bedwetting liberal humanist saboteurs interfering with the political operations. No doubt, Galloway thought when he was young that Che was cool. Not blaming him there. But what I certainly have nothing but contempt for is a foolish admiration for a sanitised Che who apparently never ever would stoop to executing political enemies without bothering with such petit bourgeois indulgences as trials.
"Just take a look at ISIS's history and .look at how they were formed"
Funny you should mention Daesh as an example. The emergence of Daesh is of course a fine example of the saying "soft doctors make stinky wounds". The Americans blatantly and stupidly interfered when the Iraqi Government moved to purge Iraq from politically unreliable Sunni Arab elements. Their disloyalty was already proven once before, Daesh was their second attempt to regain political agency. ( Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice.... well, Bush did not figure that one out, if you will recall. )
"That is what Galloway is suggesting, we hit their source of finance ,"
Cutting off the finance supplies to the richest terrorist organisation in history is not likely to be any more effective as cutting off the finance supply of the richest drugs cartel on the planet.
"'and cut off the supply of their recruits"
And the surest way to do the latter is to eliminate anyone, repeat anyone, who smells like a fellow-traveller on their road. Notice also that the Paris attack contained elements that had been to Syria and had returned - ample evidence that the survival of Syria-gaenger is completely unacceptable.
"Of course he did think of the sympathizers they can be stopped before they reach the area "
And the surest way of doing that is to kill them. Better yet, combine this with show trials, that anyone can see that trying to go to Syria WILL lead to the death of the person who tries to do so, and that there is absolutely no way to avoid that outcome.
" Should people be tested on their religion before they have the right to claim they are doing something in the name of it? "
Bollocks.
People act as their drives tell them, not as their brains tell them. And why bother with their claims as to why they did it? Do we believe Bush when he said that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction? Maybe you did, I sure didn't.
Quite correct. The religious sauce of Daesh is little more than a marketing ploy. The perps of the Paris attacks were more known by their own families for being drunks and stoners than for reading the quran.
The recruitment methods of Daesh have very little to do with religious texts, but a great deal with personal opportunities... Yazidi girls to rape, rather than promises of 70 virgins in the afterlife.
Atran is quoted as summarizing his work thus: "When you look at young people like the ones who grew up to blow up trains in Madrid in 2004, carried out the slaughter on the London underground in 2005, hoped to blast airliners out of the sky en route to the United States in 2006 and 2009, and journeyed far to die killing infidels in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia; when you look at whom they idolize, how they organize, what bonds them and what drives them; then you see that what inspires the most lethal terrorists in the world today is not so much the Koran or religious teachings as a thrilling cause and call to action that promises glory and esteem in the eyes of friends, and through friends, eternal respect and remembrance in the wider world that they will never live to enjoy.... Jihad is an egalitarian, equal-opportunity employer: ...fraternal, fast-breaking, thrilling, glorious, and cool."[37]
Not a great deal has changed since Andreas Baader carried out recruitment for the Rote Armee Fraktione by asking people simply if they would like to fight. Which worked pretty well.
And suppose we liquidated those sympathisers too? I'll bet he did not think of that.
Of course, I have already commented in detail about the insufficiency of the bombing campaign, and have posted early in the year about the imperative need for Europe to cut off the export of Jihadis to the Levant.
And really, identifying possible Jihadis is simple enough: whine about Palestine, argue that Shariah is not totally evil, protest that it is wrong for Sunnis to live in abject submission to Shi'ites, Maronites, Jews, or Baathists, and you got your subject right there.
Well, that makes living next to Galloway a bit of a problem.
I hope the Govt does for once do something useful ( unlike taxcutting ) and unleashes the security services to PURGE all suspicious elements who show insufficient ideological commitment to eradicating Islamism.
There is of course no need to respond to the dreck of filthy pro-Hamas swag.
As the visit of Boris Johnson proves there can be no dialogue with the proponents of a Palestinian state. Since peaceful dialogue is out of the question, the obvious solution is to lock them up.
China might be one to watch as well: a Chinese citizen was also killed by Daesh, and the Chinese are rather annoyed with the way in which their local Islamic minorities behave. China, like Russia, India, and a large part of Latin America, considers the survival of the Assad-government a priority in the current crisis.
The UN called for all countries to use all means to deal with this threat. Presumably that even applies to the like of North Korea. Any ideas of bringing freedom or liberal values to Syria must be forgotten - most countries of the world ( or certainly representing the larger part of the human population ) don't go for that kind of thing.
Worse, the bootlickers and the charming, NOT the sons-of-bitches who are DETERMINED to win no-matter-what. Great officers are like Schwarzkopf, Patton, or Monty - all of whom were rather unpleasant as human beings.
I am currently working through Ian Hamilton's bio of Monty, and am in the part about the Interbellum. The pleasant, smooth, charming chaps who sail clear through the downsizings are the kind who will lose the battles. Edmund Ironside, the first wartime British CIS in WWII, stated that his predecessors, especially Field Marshall Massingbird, deserved to be executed for what they had done to the Army.
I certainly agree: stuffing the echelons with charming chaps who know nothing about tanks or artillery shells, but spoke with great animation about their packs of hunting hounds and cases of champagne, is utterly treasonous! An Army is a machine for the application of lethal force, and not a social club for Old Etionians with hyphenated surnames.
Wrong. That merely means that more means must be used. Including, obviously, very severe pressure on Turkey.
* political solution* Warfare is political. False dichtomy. Obviously, warfare alone is not enough. Even extremely ideologically motivated fighters call it quits well before the casualty-rate reaches 50%.
So, by merely using military means we cannot guarantee the total wipe-out of Daesh. Leave the matter to the military, and half of them will survive. That is not an acceptable solution.
Therefore, other political means must be used, including whatever analogy Syria has to the NKVD. ( No doubt it does have an equivalent - it's an authoritarian socialist State. ) The survival of any person involved in Daesh is unacceptable.
For, German, read Islamist.
Krasnaya Zvezda (No173 [5236]) 24 July 1942 - Ilya Ehrenburg
The Germans are not human beings. From now on the word German means to use the most terrible oath. From now on the word German strikes us to the quick.
We shall not speak any more. We shall not get excited. We shall kill.
If you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day If you cannot kill your German with a bullet, kill him with your bayonet. If there is calm on your part of the front, or if you are waiting for the fighting, kill a German in the meantime.
If you leave a German alive, the German will hang a Russian and rape a Russian woman. If you kill one German, kill another there is nothing more amusing for us than a heap of German corpses.
Do not count days, do not count kilometers. Count only the number of Germans killed by you. Kill the German that is your grandmothers request. Kill the German that is your childs prayer. Kill the German that is your motherlands loud request. Do not miss. Do not let through.
So he looked at the situation and does not support cleansing the Earth from the very last jihadi through lethal means? That is a reason to curse his name, and curse anyone who wont curse him.
BTW: he is not Labour, which is all for the good. Unfortunately, Corbyn is.
Why should there be need to argue? To make the self-evident point? What is much more to the point is simply unleashing security forces to deal with anyone who takes the wrong political line.
See, just like WWII in Britain. There was no need to argue with the British Union of Florists. You merely need to lock ém up, without trial of course. Same thing with anyone who has suspicous pro-Hamas leanings. Arrest, throw into hole, toss away the key.
When you start downsizing as the Bundeswehr did, all you keep are the incompetents. Twas the same with the British Army a century ago: nothing but Old Fogeys.
It's quite inevitable, the behaviours that maximise the chance of keeping your job under such circumstances are incompatible with military competence.
Wiki sayeth that the maximum mobilisable strength of the Bundeswehr ( all 3 branches ) currently is about 225.000.
"I dont think they even do many UN peace keeping missions. "
Bundeswehr personnel on active duty are currently deployed on UN and EU peace keeping missions in 7 countries outside of NATO, as well as anti-piracy duties in the Indian Ocean. About 3000 men and women are involved.