The Guns Of August: "Two full-blown crises, in Lebanon and Iraq, are merging into a single emergency. A chain reaction could spread quickly almost anywhere between Cairo and Bombay. Turkey is talking openly of invading northern Iraq to deal with Kurdish terrorists based there. Syria could easily get pulled into the war in southern Lebanon. Egypt and Saudi Arabia are under pressure from jihadists to support Hezbollah, even though the governments in Cairo and Riyadh hate that organization. Afghanistan accuses Pakistan of giving shelter to al-Qaeda and the Taliban; there is constant fighting on both sides of that border. NATO's own war in Afghanistan is not going well. India talks of taking punitive action against Pakistan for allegedly being behind the Bombay bombings. Uzbekistan is a repressive dictatorship with a growing Islamic resistance.
The only beneficiaries of this chaos are Iran, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda and the Iraqi Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr, who last week held the largest anti-American, anti-Israel demonstration in the world in the very heart of Baghdad, even as 6,000 additional U.S. troops were rushing into the city to 'prevent' a civil war that has already begun."
2 comments:
Professor Norton,
The following appear to be the strongest defense of the attacks on Lebanon. Would you comment please?
Israel Is Within Its Rights
By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey
Wednesday, July 26, 2006; A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/25/AR2006072501300.html
Israel must win
By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey
August 11, 2006
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/749293.html
"Israel must win" the authors argue, and if Israel does not win the U.S. will have less confidence in its proxy. Moreover, by flying cover for a month of destruction the U.S. has engaged its own prestige.
By the authors' own standard, both the U.S. and Israel have not succeeded.
What they need to address is by what form of empirical analysis they came to the conclusion that Israel could decisively defeat Hizballah without causing extraordinary negative repercussions.
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