Comments on: The quagmire deepens

By: MichaelF

MichaelF — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 04:24:05 +0000

AustinRoth
Quagmire? The bar keeps getting lowered. Soon, any military offensive that does not accomplish all it’s goals within 30 minutes will be labled a quagmire.

What would those calling this a quagmire refer to The Battle of the Bulge ? Just a thought .

Snarky Shark said :

Despite gattsuru’s laminations to the contrary, what the world(france) thinks of Isreal does matter.

The king of malaprop is BACK ! Hehehe

Snarky , look up the word laminations .

By: Jim S

Jim S — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 02:00:22 +0000

SnarkyShark,

We already know France’s opinion of Israel. They couldn’t care less if it was wiped out. Nothing Israel can do will ever change that.

By: Laura

Laura — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 16:59:35 +0000

AustinRoth is right. This is ridiculous. After 3 1/2 years we still haven’t accomplished our goals in Iraq, why is our government judging Israel’s war a quagmire after 3 weeks to justify its caving in to the UN! The Bush administration has condemned those who describe our war in Iraq as a quagmire, and they refuse any timetable. Why do they insist on this timetable for Israel of mere weeks?

By: AustinRoth

AustinRoth — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 15:31:27 +0000

Quagmire? The bar keeps getting lowered. Soon, any military offensive that does not accomplish all it’s goals within 30 minutes will be labled a quagmire.

By: Michael van der Galien

Michael van der Galien — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 11:01:33 +0000

gattsuru, well said.

Elrod: so what would you have suggest that Israel should have done huh? Peace? They tried it. Compromize? They tried it. Diplomacy? They tried it.

You don’t seem to be able to understand this simple truth:
Hizbullah, Hamas et alia, don’t want peace. They don’t want to create any state ‘of their own’, they simply want to destroy Israel. Because they fear they’re not able to do so now, because Israel is stronger now, there supporters (governments and individuals) are now suddenly calling for a cease-fire.
Maybe, just maybe, Hizbullah should have thought of that before killing 8 Israeli soldiers and kidnapping 2 on Israeli soil.

I know it’s hard to accept this truth, because accepting it means recognizing that there is no use in reasoning with certain people (a lot of people even).
Your refusal to accept the obvious, however, isn’t helping the situation either.

By: SnarkyShark

SnarkyShark — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 08:36:31 +0000

gattsuru makes his argument based on ideaology, elrod bases his on the cold hard facts.

My money is on elrod’s version, as the age of faith based worldviews comes to its well deserved end.

Isreal will soon learn how it feels to be left holding the bag by the boy king.

Despite gattsuru’s laminations to the contrary, what the world(france) thinks of Isreal does matter.

We in the USA will learn this as well.

By: gattsuru

gattsuru — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 06:41:56 +0000

This is not Clinton distracting the world from Monica, it’s not the United Nations poking around to justify the 1.3 billion USD they’re charging us yearly to carefully ignore Sudan. This isn’t a ‘police action’, it’s not a tactical raid, it’s not a quick ‘in and out’, it’s not a surgical strike. They’ve tried that for decades at this point, and as you might guess from the fact that we’re still talking about it, the tactic has been about as useful as tits on a chair.

It’s a war. It’s been a war for the last fifty-eight years, with acts of war taking place on a regular basis for the last twenty years.

But, of course, Israel must stop.

Because, we all know how much it would hurt Israel to lose popular support in France, where just yesterday the administration stated support for known terrorists. We all know that the United Nations is an impartial observer Israel can’t afford to lose. Because the Lebanese people just happened to allow known terrorists into their government by accident, Israel should leave immediately, since terrorists groups funded by fascist governments never take over legitimate democracies. Because ensuring that Hezbollan troops have to aim that much faster before firing rockets, or are distracted by the targets of soldiers instead of children, those aren’t worth a war.

pathetic.

By: Elrod

Elrod — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 04:39:32 +0000

Into the quagmire indeed. This was always the risk from the beginning. By going full throttle after Hezbollah and not trying to work out a prisoner exchange (as Israel has done many times in the past), Israel stepped out onto the plank. Everybody agrees that all Hezbollah has to do is survive. But Israel has to do so much more, and an all-air campaign has had the predictable result: failure to hit guerrilla targets, but TONS of innocent deaths. (Morality of hiding Hezbollah military assets in civilian neighborhoods aside, the world just didn’t buy Israel’s argument on Qana, however much merit it had. This is a propaganda war among other things. Israel never wanted to risk its own soldiers so it figured a high-tech air assault would do the trick a la Kosovo in 1999. Like the US in Iraq, going in on the cheap is disastrous.)

Israel now must launch a major ground invasion if it hopes to save face. But that brings with it a host of other risks, not the least of which are the permanent unification of Lebanese factions behind Hezbollah (Remember: Hezbollah started to lose support among the Sunnis, Christians and Druze after Israel left the country. Before that, Hezbollah was seen by many Lebanese as the only outfit fighting for national sovereignty). So, can Israel occupy all of Lebanon and destroy Hezbollah itself? Failure to do that would be perceived as a disastrous loss for Israel. They’ve stepped into the breach, and now they must go all out or end up with a much stronger Hezbollah – and Iran.