The U.S. defeat in Vietnam, embarrassing setbacks in Lebanon and Somalia, and continuing political and military difficulties in Afghanistan and especially Iraq underscore the limits of America’s hard-won conventional military supremacy. That supremacy has not delivered decisive success against nonstate enemies practicing protracted irregular warfare; on the contrary, America’s conventional supremacy and approach to war—especially its paramount reliance on firepower and technology—are often counterproductive…..
Continue Reading September 1st, 2006
…..Muslims have stopped fighting on Western terms—and have started winning…..the sun has set on the age of unquestioned Western military dominance. Bluntly, the East has solved the riddle of the Western Way of War. In Baghdad and in Anbar Province as at various points on Israel’s troubled perimeter, the message is clear: methods that once could be counted on to deliver swift decision no longer work…..
Continue Reading September 1st, 2006
Do we negotiate with terrorists?
At Tehran and Yalta, FDR ceded Eastern Europe to the Great Terrorist he called “Uncle Joe.” Truman at Potsdam affirmed the grant to Stalin. Three years after Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian Revolution, Eisenhower invited the “Butcher of Budapest” to Camp David and had him escorted on a 10-day U.S. tour.
In the year the Viet Cong perpetrated the massacre at Hue, going door-to-door with lists and executing 3,000 South Vietnamese, U.S. Ambassador Averell Harriman sat down with the VC and North Vietnamese at Paris.
In 1972, Nixon went to Peking to shake hands with the greatest terrorist of the century, Mao Tse-tung, even as Mao’s Gang of Four, including his wife, carried out the Chinese pogrom known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution…..
Continue Reading August 5th, 2006
Why do they hate us? Qana provides the answers, but it appears few in the West are really listening…..Noticeably, our news anchors were careful to avoid referring to the massacre of Lebanese children at Qana as “an escalation” by Israel. That word, intoned so solemnly when eight Israeli railway workers were killed by a Hezbollah rocket in Haifa a fortnight ago, was not uttered on this occasion. According to our media, when we suffer, it is an escalation demanding retaliation; when they suffer, maybe it is time to begin talks about talks about a cease-fire…..
Continue Reading August 1st, 2006
Since its withdrawal of occupation forces from southern Lebanon in May 2000, Israel has violated the United Nations-monitored “blue line” on an almost daily basis, according to UN reports. Hizbullah’s military doctrine, articulated in the early 1990s, states that it will fire Katyusha rockets into Israel only in response to Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilians or Hizbullah’s leadership; this indeed has been the pattern…..
Continue Reading August 1st, 2006
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