zoombwaz
Radical Moderate Populist
What follows is the body of an email from Ray Close, retired CIA spook and a member of VIPS (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity). Ray sends out periodic emails to a circle of friends and associates (which includes my father, who forwards them on to me) with his analysis of events in the Middle East and his predictions of likely outcomes. His web of contacts in that region is more than impressive and includes officials from Mossad as well as from Arab intelligence services. His analyses are always spot on, and the accuracy of his predictions is scary. If he has missed a guess in the whole sordid MCF the Shrub has gotten us into, I haven't seen it.
Following is his take in Israel's actions in Lebanon and Gaza
"Chuck Cogan, former Chief of CIA's Near East Division, writing from Harvard now, has provided a very useful response to the question I posed a few days ago in the context of Rami Khouri's excellent essay on the Israeli attacks on Lebanon. I have condensed Chuck's answer to one strikingly significant observation:
The irony in all this is that Israel has an interest in a
multicultural Lebanon and not an Islamist Lebanon, and the high hopes
for the former are being dashed.
The exquisite simplicity of that one sentence has prompted me to add the following comment of my own:
The value of canvassing opinions from a number of friends is that I pick up many little jewels of logic that may seem obvious at first, but sometimes get overlooked in the whole complex fabric of ideas that makes up comprehensive intelligence analysis.
For example, one former Israeli military intelligence officer mentioned to me the other day the ridiculously simple and logical point that the waging of modern asymetrical warfare (and the development of effective strategies to oppose it) has undergone a sea change recently --- not as a result of the development of great "weapons of mass destruction" by evil states, but because our non-state adversaries have developed ingenious new ways to employ relatively small and cheap tactical weapons of the simplest kind. The perfect example, of course, is the use of IED's and car bombs in Iraq, which are frustrating (and punishing) 130,000 highly-trained, expertly-led, heavily-armed and supurbly-equipped US troops and twice that many Iraqi soldiers. Another appropriate example, of course, is the Hizballah situation in southern Lebanon. Even if the Israelis were again to occupy and hold a 20-mile defensive cordon sanitaire above Israel's northern border, then missiles of 30-mile range (or 40 or 50 or 60, as the need demanded) would render that barrier obsolete and useless --- while Hizballah guerrillas, using the other new set of super-weapons --- the IED and the suicide bomber --- would make Israelis just as vulnerable and just as miserable in that so-called "protective zone" as they were during the 18 long years when they occupied the same swath of Lebaneses teritory the last time around. The same applies to Gaza. In 38 long years (count them, mothers and dads) a large modern Israeli war machine, equipped with every hi-tech weapon that modern military science can devise, has been unable to contain, much less defeat, a virulent and lethal resistance movement in tiny little Gaza. Today, the crude and clumsy and inaccurate little home-made Qassam rocket is driving mighty Israel mad. Asymetry at its classic extreme --- David vs Goliath, deja vu.
The lesson here is that nation states (like Iran and North Korea) that are determined to harm the United States and its allies need not develop intercontinental ballistic missiles that distract and blind us to the realities I'm talking about here. They need only supply simple kitchen-variety missiles, armed with simple garden-variety explosives, to their non-state surrogates like Hizballah and Hamas, and let them do the dirty work. Sending multi-million-dollar B-2 stealth bombers with multi-thousand-ton bunker-buster bombs to destroy multi-billion-dollar industrial installations in Iran (or destroying the entire infrastructure of a helpless little neighbor like Lebanon, or depriving a million Gazans of fresh water and electricity) will not really strengthen the defenses of either Israel (or America) as long as there are these simple weapons and these elusive and determined fighters to torture us with endless, painful, maddening pinpricks. (Somebody explain this to Rumsfeld, please. It's a mind thing, Don, not a gun thing.)
Is the massively destructive Israeli aerial bombardment of Lebanon the right way to ensure that Israel will someday live in a peaceful neighborhood?
Folks who think the answer to that question is yes should read over and over again the simple little truth that Chuck Cogan expressed so well:
The irony in all this is that Israel has an interest in a
multicultural Lebanon and not an Islamist Lebanon, and the high hopes
for the former are being dashed.
And then study again the powerful jewel offered by Rami Khouri:
For decades now Israel has established buffer zones, occupation zones, red lines, blue lines, green lines, interdiction zones, killing fields, surrogate army zones, scorched earth, and every other conceivable kind of zone between it and Arabs who fight its occupation and colonial policies -- all without success. Here is why: Protecting Israelis while leaving Arabs to a fate of humiliation, occupation, degradation and subservient acquiescence to Israeli-American dictates only guarantees that those Arabs will regroup, plan a resistance strategy, and come back one day to fight for their land, their humanity, their dignity and the prospect that their children can have a normal life one day."
Following is his take in Israel's actions in Lebanon and Gaza
"Chuck Cogan, former Chief of CIA's Near East Division, writing from Harvard now, has provided a very useful response to the question I posed a few days ago in the context of Rami Khouri's excellent essay on the Israeli attacks on Lebanon. I have condensed Chuck's answer to one strikingly significant observation:
The irony in all this is that Israel has an interest in a
multicultural Lebanon and not an Islamist Lebanon, and the high hopes
for the former are being dashed.
The exquisite simplicity of that one sentence has prompted me to add the following comment of my own:
The value of canvassing opinions from a number of friends is that I pick up many little jewels of logic that may seem obvious at first, but sometimes get overlooked in the whole complex fabric of ideas that makes up comprehensive intelligence analysis.
For example, one former Israeli military intelligence officer mentioned to me the other day the ridiculously simple and logical point that the waging of modern asymetrical warfare (and the development of effective strategies to oppose it) has undergone a sea change recently --- not as a result of the development of great "weapons of mass destruction" by evil states, but because our non-state adversaries have developed ingenious new ways to employ relatively small and cheap tactical weapons of the simplest kind. The perfect example, of course, is the use of IED's and car bombs in Iraq, which are frustrating (and punishing) 130,000 highly-trained, expertly-led, heavily-armed and supurbly-equipped US troops and twice that many Iraqi soldiers. Another appropriate example, of course, is the Hizballah situation in southern Lebanon. Even if the Israelis were again to occupy and hold a 20-mile defensive cordon sanitaire above Israel's northern border, then missiles of 30-mile range (or 40 or 50 or 60, as the need demanded) would render that barrier obsolete and useless --- while Hizballah guerrillas, using the other new set of super-weapons --- the IED and the suicide bomber --- would make Israelis just as vulnerable and just as miserable in that so-called "protective zone" as they were during the 18 long years when they occupied the same swath of Lebaneses teritory the last time around. The same applies to Gaza. In 38 long years (count them, mothers and dads) a large modern Israeli war machine, equipped with every hi-tech weapon that modern military science can devise, has been unable to contain, much less defeat, a virulent and lethal resistance movement in tiny little Gaza. Today, the crude and clumsy and inaccurate little home-made Qassam rocket is driving mighty Israel mad. Asymetry at its classic extreme --- David vs Goliath, deja vu.
The lesson here is that nation states (like Iran and North Korea) that are determined to harm the United States and its allies need not develop intercontinental ballistic missiles that distract and blind us to the realities I'm talking about here. They need only supply simple kitchen-variety missiles, armed with simple garden-variety explosives, to their non-state surrogates like Hizballah and Hamas, and let them do the dirty work. Sending multi-million-dollar B-2 stealth bombers with multi-thousand-ton bunker-buster bombs to destroy multi-billion-dollar industrial installations in Iran (or destroying the entire infrastructure of a helpless little neighbor like Lebanon, or depriving a million Gazans of fresh water and electricity) will not really strengthen the defenses of either Israel (or America) as long as there are these simple weapons and these elusive and determined fighters to torture us with endless, painful, maddening pinpricks. (Somebody explain this to Rumsfeld, please. It's a mind thing, Don, not a gun thing.)
Is the massively destructive Israeli aerial bombardment of Lebanon the right way to ensure that Israel will someday live in a peaceful neighborhood?
Folks who think the answer to that question is yes should read over and over again the simple little truth that Chuck Cogan expressed so well:
The irony in all this is that Israel has an interest in a
multicultural Lebanon and not an Islamist Lebanon, and the high hopes
for the former are being dashed.
And then study again the powerful jewel offered by Rami Khouri:
For decades now Israel has established buffer zones, occupation zones, red lines, blue lines, green lines, interdiction zones, killing fields, surrogate army zones, scorched earth, and every other conceivable kind of zone between it and Arabs who fight its occupation and colonial policies -- all without success. Here is why: Protecting Israelis while leaving Arabs to a fate of humiliation, occupation, degradation and subservient acquiescence to Israeli-American dictates only guarantees that those Arabs will regroup, plan a resistance strategy, and come back one day to fight for their land, their humanity, their dignity and the prospect that their children can have a normal life one day."
