Monday, May 08, 2006
Civil War?
The secular Palestinians and the islamist ones are heading for a conflict. Whether it escalates into outright war is difficult to discern, but would I be terribly surprised to see the formation of an independent, Gazan Hamastan alongside a West Bank Palestine? No, not really.
Let's kick back and let Iran and Saudi Arabia fund these guys to the tune of hundreds of millions per year. Yeah. Right. No, only Jimmy Carter-types seem to brazenly want to pour our money down the rathole of irresponsibility and terrorism people call the PA. I suspect I may hear from a few of you in the comments.
8 Comments:
By 
Cardinalpark, at
Mon May 08, 03:17:00 PM:
Well, in Palestine you have the Hamas Prime Minister organizing the assassination of the PA President. You have multiple military groups, not a single PA Army. In Iraq, you have one government and one army. The President isn't trying to kill the PM, or vice versa. The Iraqi Army, supported by the US military and its coalition partners, is actively working to suppress the Sadrist militia (with the aid of Sistani), Al Qaeda, and the remianing Baathist remnants. There is no confusion within Iraq as to which military wing represents the government.
So, yes, SJ, there is a vast difference. When the Iraqi government begins to conusme itself, or the Iraqi Army splits in 2 (sunni versus shiite, for instance), then I will wave the towel and say "Civil War." This is clearly, patently, not IT. Is it violent? Yes. Dangerous? Yes. I characterize what is happening in Iraq as a revolution actually. The unusual bit was that it wasn't homegrown precisely. The US caused the Iraqi revolution. Now the Iraqis are building their country in the revolution's aftermath, with some royalist holdouts and some folks from outside the country making trouble as well, all coupled with the formative political battles ahping Iraq's future.
Palestine faces an outright civil war between those religious extremists who want to impose sharia on all Palestinians and a continuous state of war with Israel (a country they refuse to reocgnize) and those Palestinians who reject sharia and are willing to broker a peace with Israel. It may or may not happen, but for the moment I would say the politics of Hamas and the PA/PLO are not compatible. Hence my observation about the Civil War. The government is in fact at war with itself, and so is the army.
By Lanky_Bastard, at
Mon May 08, 05:39:00 PM:
The reality is we prefer anarchy to Arab democracy.
CP has understated the nature of our resolve. We DON'T let Iran and Saudi Arabia fund the PA workers. We consider Hamas a terrorist group, and that means we sieze funds from organizations that support them. The Arab nations want to transfer funds to the PA workers, but their banks are refusing out of fear we will sieze the funds.
Just remember that they hate us for our freedom (not cause we're cutting them off from being paid for months on end) and everything will be ok. Unless you're Israeli...you guys should expect violent hungry terrorists with nothing left to lose.
By Dawnfire82, at
Mon May 08, 10:18:00 PM:
"Just remember that they hate us for our freedom (not cause we're cutting them off from being paid for months on end) and everything will be ok."
They hated us when we allowed them to receive funding, too. They hated us when WE funded them. They hated us when we twisted Israel's arms behind the scenes to get them to come to an agreement in the 90's. They hated us even when we turned a blind eye to their 'government's' blatant involvement with money laundering, weapons smuggling, and international terrorist ties and acts. They've deliberately killed American citizens and celebrated when others kill us.
So fuck them. Just because they (Hamas) was elected into power doesn't mean we have to like them, or get along with them any more than we have to like or get along with the Russian Duma, British Parliament, or Nazi Reichstag. (sp)
By 
, at
Tue May 09, 02:41:00 AM:
Israel is vastly outnumbered by its enemies who also have nearly limitless oil wealth. But I guess she should just count on the hope that the Arabs and Iran will always be incompetent dunces especially when Iran is 10 (or 8 or 3 or whatever) whole years away from having nukes. And it's so mean of Israel to try to protect her civilians from the retarded teenage kids the Palestinians send out as suicide bombers! As usual, SJ won't let the facts get in the way of a good story.
By Cardinalpark, at
Tue May 09, 08:30:00 AM:
SJ - Lebabon looks pretty goos to me today, now that Syria has been punted out. If you said CP, go pick a few places to visit in the Middle East (excepting Israel), Beirut might be the first place I'd go. So if that's an analogy that makes you happy, fine. I prefer Lebanon's status to that of most of the region frankly. If they could just shut down and disarm Hez, Lebanon would likely soar economically. Ireland wouldn't be a bad comparison really. The minute th eIRA was shut down, and the Irish put in place fantastic tax incentives, Ireland boomed. She went from worst to first in European GDP per capita. If you can keep the expansionist tyrannical dirtbags on their back foot, nations like Lebanon and Iraq could follow and imitate Israel's prosperity. And that, SJ, is how you pacify the Middle East and decimate the appeal of radical islam. Jobs and money. Fair distribution of opportunity. They're no different in that regard than we are.
But if you reward insanity, you get more of it. And that was the point of my original observation about the civil war between Hamas and Fatah. About whihc, for some reason, you prefered to change the subject.
So I am going to observe the conflict as they struglle with isolation and bankruptcy -- which is exactly what murderers like Hamas deserve.
By Cardinalpark, at
Tue May 09, 03:27:00 PM:
SJ -
Israel doesn't face an existential threat? What did that Persian moonbat say to the 12th Imam? Didn't he just call Israel a one bomb country? Isn't he funding Hez and Hamas?
No, I didn't misunderstand at all. The Lebanese have made great progress since they suffered challenging, chaotic times. And now they are emerging, a relatively sane, democratic place. And they did so with far less commitment of effort from the US. If the process we are seeing in Iraq leads to a relatively peaceful democracy 10 years hence, I would be thrilled. Like South Korea too, or Ireland. It would be very good for that neighborhood. You should spend less time bemoaning the decision to go, and quibbling with the semantics of the situation there, and instead be working assiduously to support the effort there and do everything to ensure a stable a prosperous outcome for the Iraqi people.
I don't see the current circumstance in Iraq as a civil war. I see the emergence of one in the PA. That's it. You're welcome to your own view. We differ. I won't convince you, and vice versa. But you do betray a surprising apathy towards the circumstances faced by Israel. Israel has faced existential threat since it was founded in 1948. It has faced unceasing, relentless assaults since its infancy. It faces daily assaults on its people, not just the bombing of innocents in restaurants, but shelling from Gaza and Lebanon onto its territory.
You know, if you want to dismiss that as trivial, I suppose you are entitled to. But you must at least acknowledge that others might legitimately view these types of assaults as more serious than you. It is nothing if not ironic that at the same instant that you view Iraqi domestic violence as an existential threat to the democratically elected Iraqi government and its standing army (notwithstanding the commitment of American people and treasure to support them), you dismiss as piffle what Iran, and Hezbollah and Hamas intend for Israel, a country none of them even recognize.
Still, given your views, it is easy enough to predict your conclusions.
By Dawnfire82, at
Tue May 09, 07:42:00 PM:
I made an in-depth post a few months ago on the subject of civil wars and their definition in response to a similar idea by Screwie (I think...) but I hate repeating myself. So in short:
Armed gunmen walking around making targeted killings does not qualify as a civil war. If it did, the Mafia, the Ku Klux Klan, at cetera would count as revolutionary groups. But they don't, they're just violent groups pursuing their own aims. Neither do riots or groups of protestors bashing each other. That's domestic unrest, and its fairly common in the world.
To have a civil war, there must be two or more parties competing violently for the right to rule a nation (attempted revolution) or part of a nation (separatism). The goal must be political control. ('liberation' is just another perspective of control changing control) Anything else is simple crime.
Therefore, if two armed groups (let's called them Fatah and Hamas) start shooting each other in order to determine who can establish a legitimate monopoly on violence in a given territory then there is a civil war. If one armed militia patrols around and acts as vigilantes to enforce the law due to governmental weakness (let's call them Peshmerga, or maybe even Minutemen) or kill people because they don't like the way they think (they'll be, say, Sadrists or Klansmen) then there is not a civil war because the government is not being challenged.
And no, acting outside the law is not necessarily a challenge to the government. Hence the difference between an outlaw and a rebel.
By , at
Wed May 10, 02:50:00 AM:
"Have you ever noticed that Lebanese Hizbollah stopped attacking Israel? Do you know why that is? Because Israel got the hell out of Southern Lebanon. Think there's a lesson here?"
Actually, I haven't noticed it because Hizbollah has kept on attacking Israel whenever it has had the chance. The lesson, apparently, is that Shochu John is a compulsive liar.
Oh, and by the way the reason I didn't name "Arabs" is because Iran, which has 10x the population of Israel, vast oil resources, and is trying to get nukes for the expressly stated purpose of wiping out Israel, is not Arab. Oops! Somehow you forgot to mention them when dismissing the "existential" threat to Israel. An oversight, I'm sure.
As for your whining about "straw men", your alleged condemnation of terrorism came only by way of another rancid exercise in moral equivalence between suicide bombers and Israel's attempts to defend itself from them. In this you remind me of no one so much as Juan Cole, who suddenly discovered "friends" oppressed by Iran when Hitchens nailed him for whitewashing that psychopathic regime. You could be Cole's sock puppet. Come to think of it, Juan = John ... hmmmmm ....
