Archive for the ‘opinion/news’ Category

I’m iffy on this

Posted: January 4, 2009 by datechguy in opinion/news, Uncategorized
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The ground war in Gaza is a very risky move for Israel.

Unless Hamas can actually be destroyed on the ground and unless there is intelligence that can allow them to find them I can’t see how a sustained ground war will help.

One might go in and destroy the tunnels and the infrastructure of terror to make things complicated for Hamas and then pull out but I can’t see anything sustained. If the incursion is too brief however then it has the potential to turn into the 7 days when McClellan won 6 of seven battles but treated them as defeats or Tet which was a military disaster for North Vietnam but was portrayed as a defeat for the US.

The wild card here is Fatah. If they are actually giving underground support to Israel in this offensive then Hamas is in trouble. Of course it is not unlikely that if or when Hamas is neutralized Fatah will go back to their normal support of their own terror objectives but we will see.

The north is still the wild card. If we see strikes from Lebanon, and I’m very surprised we haven’t already the whole game will change in a hurry.

It still amazes me

Posted: January 4, 2009 by datechguy in opinion/news
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It was not long ago that Katrina Vanden Heuvel would be too radical for a roundtable seat at a mainstream show like This week. Today I see her with Cokie Roberts and George Will and John Karl. The fact that a person as radical as her has been mainstreamed suggests how far to the left the Democratic Party is or perhaps how significant the radical left side of the Democratic coalition has become.

It’s one of the many reasons why I am no longer a part of it.

UPDATE: When the transcript goes up and listen to her pablum concerning Gaza. It is absolutely astounding.

Big News Dr. Who and Gaza

Posted: January 3, 2009 by datechguy in doctor who, opinion/news
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Well Israellycool and Hotair are reporting Israel has gone in.

If Israel is going in personally they better be willing to finish the job.

Of course the big news today is the selection of the 11th doctor Richard Grant. My wife’s first reaction is he isn’t very cute. More into on that here here here and here.

Interview with the new Doctor here. You will need the Proxy server stuff.

Karuthammer bottom lines it

Posted: January 2, 2009 by datechguy in opinion/news
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Charles Karuthammer states some inconvenient facts, at least inconvenient to some.

For Hamas, the only thing more prized than dead Jews are dead Palestinians. The religion of Jew-murder and self-martyrdom is ubiquitous. And deeply perverse, such as the Hamas TV children’s program in which an adorable live-action Palestinian Mickey Mouse is beaten to death by an Israeli (then replaced by his more militant cousin, Nahoul the Bee, who vows to continue on Mickey’s path to martyrdom).

At war today in Gaza, one combatant is committed to causing the most civilian pain and suffering on both sides. The other combatant is committed to saving as many lives as possible — also on both sides. It’s a recurring theme. Israel gave similar warnings to Southern Lebanese villagers before attacking Hezbollah in the Lebanon war of 2006. The Israelis did this knowing it would lose for them the element of surprise and cost the lives of their own soldiers.

He also mentions something that is very true and ignored by everyone for some reason

That is the asymmetry of means between Hamas and Israel. But there is equal clarity regarding the asymmetry of ends. Israel has but a single objective in Gaza — peace: the calm, open, normal relations it offered Gaza when it withdrew in 2005. Doing something never done by the Turkish, British, Egyptian and Jordanian rulers of Palestine, the Israelis gave the Palestinians their first sovereign territory ever in Gaza.

The Arabs and their supports spend a lot of time beating their breasts over the Palestinians but as a rule they are treated as 2nd class citizens all over the Arab world. The Irony is that they performance the one time that they were given total control of a region may actually justify that decision.

To paraphrase a US congressman from the last century: “The difference between War and what was happening before the attack on Gaza was one side wasn’t shooting back.”

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