by giving them this blow by blow of how the iron dome works, wasting the gift of that knowledge while they attack an entity that is less dangerous to Israel than radios falling in tubs.
I’m sure Hezbollah members pray in thanksgiving regularly for the continued stupidity and incompetence of their enemies.
This sure as heck ain’t grandpa’s Israel; or Grandpa’s Israeli army.
War criminals, to be sure, but at least they make up for that somewhat by being cretins much of the time.
Next up, a ground invasion, which granted won’t give too much information given Hamas’s capabilities, but will still give useful intelligence to an actual dangerous foe.
(Israel’s “wars” with Hamas remind me of a 220 pound man beating up a 90 lb weakling to show he’s “tough”.)
markfromireland
Like most bullies Nethanyahu and his supporters and allies are cowards. They derive considerable satisfaction from causing as much pain and humiliation to their carefully selected weak victims as possible. It’s their weakness that makes the Palestinians so appetising. The Hizb aren’t weak as they’ve proved repeatedly by defeating the Israelis and forcing the Israelis to repeatedly engage in that military maneuver engaged in exclusively by losers known as “running away”.
I wonder if there’s a causative element between decreasing strategic competence and an increase in general societal viciousness. I suspect there probably is that an increase in the level of desire for the gratification of short-term aims precludes even the consideration of long-term objectives, such as survival.
I think I agree with you about the Hizb being devoutly thankful for the incompetence of the enemy they have on their southern flank. I recently heard somebody whom I have good reason to believe is fairly senior field-level officer describe what they did to last bunch of Israeli invaders as a “training war”. Even allowing for a more than averagely high level of boastfulness there’s a lot truth in that. The Hizb are good at what they do because they do learn and they do adapt. The Israelis don’t learn and have been making only marginal adaptations for quite a long time now. Eventually that’s going to hurt them very badly.
mfi
Cold N. Holefield (Ian overwritten)
I deleted a previous comment purporting to come from Cold in the Abu Bakr thread, but littered, in fact, with Morocco Bama’s issues, like an obsession with Pat Lang.
Going forward, I’m just going to start deleting such comments if I think they don’t particularly contribute. Not sure if Cold was always MB, or if MB hijacked (I know Cold does have a blog with some traffic, so they may be seperate entities), but irrespective, this will be my policy.
Trolls are good for comment volume, but worthless in every other way
— Ian
Celsius 233
@ markfromireland
July 16, 2014
~~~~~~~~~~~
What staggers my mind, almost beyond words, is the wanton slaughter of Palestinian women, children, and families by the Israelis. It’s straight out of the worst of the Old Testament.
It’s only slightly worse than the worlds tolerance of this horror…
Jack Parsons
Knowledge of the Iron Dome is overrated. Hamas already knows everything about it, that they need to know and more. Is there credible evidence that it is at all effective? Past experience with missile defense systems has been that the vendors and purchasers make wild claims.
“Security by obscurity is no security at all.” – motto of any competent computer cracker.
Everythings Jake
It could be that Israel will fall apart from within, the level of economic inequality there among its Jewish residents becoming as great as anywhere else, and with mass protests in response just a few years back. I’m not sure the country is large enough to sustain that, and the Palestinians don’t have quite enough land to give up to address the burgeoning internal crisis. It’s hard to support a resource grab, water, offshore gas and oil deposits, etc. by a small and corrupt elite, from which you derive no real benefit.
guest
Everythings Jake PERMALINK
July 17, 2014
…I’m not sure the country is large enough to sustain that….
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I think America is a pretty big country. We’ve sustained them this long. Maybe we can’t sustain them forever, but at least thru our lifetimes is quite possible.
Everythings Jake
@ guest
I think we agree basically, but I may have stated my original point badly. Israel is too small to sustain its current level of inequality. Geographical restrictions prevent the elite from retreating to communities where they are never forced to interact with the middle class and the poor. Also, while Israel has one of the best (or at least most organized) propaganda brigades ever, its poor do not seem as attracted to right wing conservatism on domestic policy as America’s, particularly those in the American south.
Syd
Parsons is right. Iron Dome is just a PR weapon. The Israelis might as well talk about their secret death ray.
MIT professor Ted Postol explains:
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/528991/an-explanation-of-the-evidence-of-weaknesses-in-the-iron-dome-defense-system/
…During the November 2012 conflict a large number of photographs of Iron Dome interceptor contrails were observed in the sky. These contrails revealed that the Iron Dome interceptor rate was very low—perhaps as low as 5 percent or below…. I will show sample pieces of data indicating that Iron Dome performance was very low in November 2012, and I will show similar data for July 2014, which indicates that Iron Dome performance almost a year and a half later has probably not improved.
Cameron
I don’t know, I consider you and mfi experts, but doesn’t it seem like Hamas learned more from the Israel/Hezbollah war than Israel did? Admittedly I’m talking out of my ass here but it seemed like Hamas showed pretty decent fire discipline during the cease fire which would seem to indicate their control and command structures survived Israeli airstrikes more or less intact. Obviously we still have to see how they withstand Israeli armor but this doesn’t look like it’s going to be any kind of cake walk for Israel.
Formerly T-Bear
Warning! Scathing sarcasm follows:
It is terribly kind of Israel to help their Gaza prisoners clear places for urban renewal, not to mention relieving population pressures, you know how it is with children always underfoot.
How is it that only 80% of those murdered are civilian women and children? Does being male disqualify a body from being civilian? If 2% of a population is actually military, 500 deaths would have an expected 10 or so fatalities, not the 100 produced by the 20% suggested by corporate media reports. Talk about (neo)liberal bias.
(/scathing sarcasm)