Only God knows what to do with this Mess!
June 10, 2007
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
For a large part of my life I have been plotting and analyzing one form or another of intercept. When I was called into the ministry in my late 30’s, and retired at the National Security Agency in 1971, I thought my days as a synoptic analyst were over.
One of the main tasks the analyst faces is to correctly eliminate the phony baloney from the data. I was thrilled to have a single document, the Bible, to analyze, because it does not contain any phony baloney. So my seminary years and the first few years at Dardanelle were among the happiest in my life. But then along came
the Internet, and before long the intelligence traffic on it was the biggest bunch of garbage I had ever seen.
Eventually, there was such a volume of massive information from multiple sources that I began to take a serious look at it, and eventually was able to assign some sort of a reality check on part of it. After some seven years of riding the bucking mule called the Internet, I have a good feel of what is reliable, and what is in the absolute lie category, with most of it being somewhere from pitiful to halfway descent.
My major purpose in constructing the lengthy paragraph you have just read is to say this – Since the loss of Ariel Sharon, the situation in Israel, and around her borders, is the most confusing mess of political and military mumbo-jumbo-feely-gumbo I have ever encountered, and to attempt to analyze it with any great degree of confidence is enough to drive an analyst into an early grave. The Hizbullah, Hamas, Syria, and Iran do not seen to have any trouble of knowing what to do, or how to go about doing it.
If I did not have the Scriptures to keep my projections within limits, I would long ago
have given up.
Two articles follow, one from DEBKAfile, and the second from the New York Sun. Since the era of Ariel Sharon’s administration it has become so mixed-up in the Knesset that I have reached the same conclusion as Youssef Ibrahim in the second article, namely, “Doing Nothing is the Best Policy.” The “good guys in the white hats” seem to be afraid of doing anything out of fear of making more boo-boo’s like those which occurred in last years war with Hizbullah.
I am afraid that will be our policy toward helping Israel to any great extent in a major Middle East war – “Doing Nothing is the best Policy!”
Begin Article 1 from DEBKAfile
DEBKAfile Exclusive: Syria holds back full-scale war with Israel as last resort while its proxies win low-intensity conflicts in Lebanon and Gaza
June 6, 2007, 3:00 PM (GMT+02:00)
Israeli ministers holding a cabinet session Wednesday, June 6, are divided over the mixed war and peace signals coming from Damascus. DEBKAfile’s military and intelligence sources report that Syrian ruler Bashar Assad’s war intentions and methods are easy enough to read in Lebanon and Gaza, where Damascus launched proxy offensives on the same day, May 15.
The pro-Western Fouad Siniora in Beirut has abruptly called off his army’s efforts to crush Damascus-backed uprisings in the Palestinian refugee camps of Nahar al-Bared in the north and Ain Hilwa in the south.
Lebanese troops failed to break through despite military assistance from the US and friendly Arabs governments.
Therefore, Fatah al-Islam and the pro-Syrian Palestinian Fronts headed by Ahmad Jibril and Naif Hawatme have come out on top.
Assad has pulled off a signal victory in Lebanon.
In Gaza, Israel’s half-hearted aerial strikes did nothing to snuff out the missile offensive Hamas and its Syrian and Iranian patrons launched three weeks ago,
the same day as the Palestinian uprising in Lebanon. The missiles fly at a slower pace but the initiative for resuming them to the 20-per-day level rests with Hamas. Its ceasefire proposal reads like a dictated Israeli capitulation plan. Here, too, the Syrian proxy tactic is working well.
Bashar Assad is likely to maintain this local war pressure while deploying his surrogates in additional targeted zones.
The UN force in southern Lebanon is in his sights. A bomb planted at a beach house resort popular with international peacekeepers near Tyre was safely defused Wednesday, June 6. The next one may strike home.
During the summer months, the Golan can expect to be targeted by “Golan Liberation Fronts” fashioned in Damascus out of Syrian and Palestinian “resistance fighters” (terrorists). They will find succor and sanctuary in the Druze villages of the territory for harassing Israeli civilian locations, military positions and roads.
This will go on until Israel is goaded into striking back against targets inside Syria. At that point, Damascus will fire up Hizballah for action against Israel from the Lebanese border, just as it activates the Palestinians in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.
The Syrian army will meanwhile stand ready for the final confrontation with Israel.
The Assad regime is getting away with this low-intensity combat tactic for waging war through proxies on Israel, the Lebanese government and the Palestinian Authority headed by the Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas, with little risk to itself.
No one is raising a finger to scotch this war of attrition, even though it is building up step by step to the next full-scale Middle East conflict.
Begin Article 2 from the New York Sun
Forty Years Later, Doing Nothing Is the Best Policy
Youssef Ibrahim
In this week’s torrent of 40th anniversary recollections about the Six-Day War, one TV image cut straight to the chase: King Faisal of Saudi Arabia staring into a camera to say, “The essential point remains the total elimination of Israel.” The king’s statement of principles was captured in “Six Days in June,” an impressive two-hour documentary that aired Monday on PBS.
For all the noise about peace in the 40 years since, the Saudi monarch’s silver bullet solution is still the basic Arab mindset.
As do-gooders and militants reflect on what Israel should have done, what Arabs failed to do, what the UN ought to do, I vote for doing nothing. Regardless of the peace treaties with Israel forged by President Sadat of Egypt and King Hussein of Jordan, the overwhelming majority of Arabs need more time to dismantle their war posture. At this point, Israel’s primary antagonists in this conflict, the Palestinian Arabs, are no longer an entity that can be engaged. Having dissolved into a myriad of warring gangs, there is no one to settle with.
And still more time is necessary to contemplate whether what has been achieved can be retained.
Egypt’s 1979 peace accord will not survive a day if the Muslim Brotherhood succeeds in its decades-old effort to topple President Mubarak’s dynastic military reign. The Brotherhood is significantly closer to that goal now. In Jordan, since the peace treaty of 1994, the anti-Semitic discourse has grown thick, leaving little room to imagine that peace with Israel could survive a change in leadership.
It is pointless even to think about structuring new accords with Arab societies that are relentlessly marching toward various stages of radicalism, Islamic or otherwise. It would not help, and it would not hold. As for Israel, going forward with more unilateral evacuations, as in Lebanon and Gaza, has only liberated land for terrorist operations. (New York Sun)
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