Lasting Peace Between Israel and the Palestinians

THE FOLLOWING is from an article by Victor Sharpe entitled, Mosques of War:

Here one can understand clearly that peace — true and lasting peace — between Islam and nations that adhere still to Judeo-Christian civilization, or to Hinduism, Buddhism, or all other faiths, is a forlorn and baseless hope.

The "peace process" between Israel and the Palestinians, for example, is thus a grand illusion, endlessly fostered by Western politicians and diplomats, along with self-deluded Israeli leaders, who all refuse to see a reality that has existed since Islam's creation in the 7th century.

This reminds me of the article: Let's Give "Giving Up On Peace" a Chance.

On Fourth Generation Warfare

Here is an excerpt from an article by John Thompson, president of the Mackenzie Institute (which studies political instability and terrorism):

First generation warfare concerns the classic notion of war as an attempt to control territory, and the battlefield reflected this. Typically, lines and columns of men sought — with pike and musket — to decide the ownership of a battlefield, and this ownership conveyed victory. This was also an era of highly formulaic and ritualized siege-craft.

In Second Generation Warfare, while terrain remained important for its intrinsic features (as it still does), the real object of warfare generally and in a battle specifically was to inflict undue losses on the enemy. In 1864, Grant wasn't as interested in capturing the Confederate Capital of Richmond as he was in destroying Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. The machineguns and artillery of the First World War were weapons of attrition as million-man armies sought to induce each other's collapse.

The carnage of Second Generation Warfare led to the reliance on maneuver and its effect on morale which characterizes Third Generation Warfare. The blitzkrieg of the Stukas and panzers, the Soviet operational maneuver group, and US air assault troops reflect an idea that precise firepower, operational art, and disruption can yield victory by imposing paralysis and bewilderment on an enemy rather than seeking his absolute physical destruction.

Many critics of the theory of Fourth Generation Warfare allege that it is nothing more than repackaging of the traditional clash between the non-state insurgent and the soldiers of a nation-state. The core idea of 4GW is that politics and warfare become blurred, and what is really being fought for is a grip on the mental state of the consciousness of entire peoples. The North Vietnamese, for example, count the 1968 Tet offensive as a victory — not for any direct battlefield successes (they didn't have any and the US thrashed their forces) — but because it convinced enough of the domestic US population that the war was unwinnable.

Let's apply the theories of Generational Warfare to a wrestling match: In 1st Generational wrestling, victory only comes if one pushes their opponent out of the ring. In 2nd Generation wrestling, the first man to collapse from exhaustion and injuries loses. In the 3rd Generation, one uses superior skill and agility to pin their opponent.

In 4th Generation wrestling, the real prize is the sympathy of the audience - much like it is in what passes for so-called professional wrestling today. In such a conflict, much depends on what segments of the audience one is trying to impress, how you hope to get their attention; and what you hope to achieve with it. The human taste for narrative being what it is, a variation of "small but plucky fighter takes on big brute" can often do quite well.

Read the whole article here: On Fourth Generation Warfare.

How Strong Is The Arab Claim To Palestine?

I thought this little article was pretty good. It certainly puts the issue in perspective:

There is a myth hanging over all discussion of the Palestinian problem: the myth that this land was "Arab" land taken from its native inhabitants by invading Jews. Whatever may be the correct solution to the problems of the Middle East, let's get a few things straight:

§ As a strictly legal matter, the Jews didn't take Palestine from the Arabs; they took it from the British, who exercised sovereign authority in Palestine under a League of Nations mandate for thirty years prior to Israel's declaration of independence in 1948. And the British don't want it back.

§ If you consider the British illegitimate usurpers, fine. In that case, this territory is not Arab land but Turkish land, a province of the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years until the British wrested it from them during the Great War in 1917. And the Turks don't want it back.

§ If you look back earlier in history than the Ottoman Turks, who took over Palestine over in 1517, you find it under the sovereignty of the yet another empire not indigenous to Palestine: the Mamluks, who were Turkish and Circassian slave-soldiers headquartered in Egypt. And the Mamluks don't even exist any more, so they can't want it back.

Read the rest of the article.

Rocket Scientists at Gaza

Mark Steyn wrote an excellent article on events at Gaza. He made some great points. Among them are these:

Christmas Eve, Samuel Huntington died at his home at Martha's Vineyard. A decade and a half ago, in his most famous book "The Clash Of Civilizations," professor Huntington argued that Western elites' view of man as homo economicuswas reductive and misleading – that cultural identity is a more profound behavioral indicator than lazy assumptions about the universal appeal of Western-style economic liberty and the benefits it brings.

Very few of us want to believe this thesis.

"The great majority of Palestinian people," Condi Rice, the secretary of state, said to commentator Cal Thomas a couple of years back, "they just want a better life. This is an educated population. I mean, they have a kind of culture of education and a culture of civil society. I just don't believe mothers want their children to grow up to be suicide bombers. I think the mothers want their children to grow up to go to university. And if you can create the right conditions, that's what people are going to do."

Thomas asked a sharp follow-up: "Do you think this or do you know this?"

"Well, I think I know it," said Secretary Rice.

"You think you know it?"

"I think I know it."

I think she knows she doesn't know it. But in the modern world there is no diplomatic vocabulary for the kind of cultural fault line represented by the Israeli/Palestinian dispute, so even a smart thinker like Dr. Rice can only frame it as an issue of economic and educational opportunity. Of course, there are plenty of Palestinians like the ones the secretary of state described: You meet them living as doctors and lawyers in Los Angeles and Montreal and Geneva … but not, on the whole, in Gaza.

In Gaza, they don't vote for Hamas because they want access to university education. Or, if they do, it's to get Junior into the Saudi-funded, Hamas-run Islamic University of Gaza, where majoring in rocket science involves making one and firing it at the Zionist Entity. In 2007, as part of their attempt to recover Gaza from Hamas, Fatah seized 1,000 Qassam rockets at the university, as well as seven Iranian military trainers.

At a certain unspoken level, we understand that the Huntington thesis is right, and the Rice view is wishful thinking.

....

So when Britain's Channel 4 says that we don't get the chance to see these fellows speak for themselves, it would be more accurate to say that they speak for themselves incessantly but the louder they speak the more we put our hands over our ears and go "Nya nya, can't hear you." We do this in part because, if you're as invested as most Western elites are in the idea that all anyone wants is to go to university, get a steady job and settle down in a nice house in the suburbs, a statement such as "England's demise is on our agenda" becomes almost literally untranslatable. When President Ahmadinejad threatens to wipe Israel off the face of the map, we deplore him as a genocidal fantasist. But maybe he's a genocidal realist, and we're the fantasists.

The civilizational clashes of professor Huntington's book are not inevitable. Culture is not immutable. But changing culture is tough and thankless and something the West no longer has the stomach for. Unfortunately, the Saudis do, and so do the Iranians. And not just in Gaza but elsewhere the trend is away from "moderation" and toward something fiercer and ever more implacable.