Posted on 11/30/2005 11:29:27 PM PST by F14 Pilot
The full quote:
Into the Abyss
By Martin van Creveld
Martin van Creveld lives and teaches in Jerusalem. He has written several books that have influenced modern military theory, including Fighting Power, Command in War, and most significantly, The Transformation of War.
http://www.d-n-i.net/creveld/into_the_abyss.htm
Earlier interviews on the Israeli situation.
Interview with Martin van Creveld
Broadcast: 20/03/2002
Reporter: Jennifer Byrne
Professor Martin van Creveld, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is Israel's most prominent military historian. In this interview with Jennifer Byrne he claims that despite the recent increase in Israel's military operations, the huge Israeli defence forces will inevitably lose to the Palestinians.
Transcript
Byrne: Thanks for joining us tonight on Foreign Correspondent. How has it come to this, Martin... how is it that the mighty Israeli army – one of the world’s most powerful - with its helicopter gunships, with its tanks, with it’s missiles, can be losing to this relatively small, relatively under-armed if fanatical group of Palestinians?
http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/stories/s511530.htm
Dutch-Israeli Military Historian -
'We Are Destroying Ourselves'
"The following interview of the Jewish military historian Martin van Crefeld by the Dutch magazine Elsevier was discovered on Indymedia by one of our readers. The views and opinions revealed here expose Israeli policy with a frankness only possible for a Jew. (...) We recommend that our readers give careful study to this interview.
"The prominent Dutch magazine Elsevier has published a conversation with Dutch-Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld. The following has been translated from the Dutch [and then from the German]":
http://www.rense.com/general34/dutchisraelimilitary.htm
It amuses me when people with a hereditary monarch say anything about impeaching anybody.
Professor van Creveld has previously drawn parallels between Iraq and Vietnam,
Thats his first mistake. Next moonbat please...
"Ike was very pontifical and quoted Clauswitz to us, who have commanded larger forces than Clauswitz ever heard of." - Patton.
You can always count on the guardian to publish looney claptrap
Limey poofter!
Hmmmmmm!
How about some guy named Von Clauswitz?
This is an email I sent to the journalist above:
I am sorry, but I am having trouble understanding why an adult man...someone who can get his words in print...would assume that, with 6000 years of history as a guide, a superpower would even *want* to retreat from a center of vast wealth and resources.
I am having a problem understanding why a grown man would think that the USA would *want* to step back from a battle where the casualties are 50:1 worse for the enemy. Who do you think are leaving their Syrian mothers for battle? The A students or the criminals? Did you ever stop to think how the home communities must be IMPROVING with their "freedom fighters" off to war in Iraq (never to be welcomed home to the new democracies).
Sure, you would be right to assume that a few guys are going to come out of Iraq highly trained as terrorists. But a few Nazis came out of the Russian front highly trained as fighters as well. What happened with them?? Well, they had to go back to standing firm against the Soviets even after the war! The current batch of newly trained Islamic fighters in Iraq are going to have to fight Shiites FOREVER! So don't be all smug about them being able to ever leave Iraq. They can do that. They can blow up Picadilly Square's best restaurant. But their main enemy are the Shiites in Iraq and the Shiites are taking deliveries of Hungarian tanks and Polish machine guns every single day. The best trained of Zarqawi's men only have their busiest days AHEAD of them. If they leave Iraq, they will soon be asked by their paymasters to go right back in. To die of course.
The "Bring em on" phrase was on purpose. It was part of the Flypaper Strategy. What makes you think the enemy is NOT getting killed and captured in large numbers? Why would American snipers give up the turkey shoot?
Do you have DSL at home? I don't think you are reading about (and watching the videos of) the stupid insurgents who die sometimes 5 at a time because they don't know that their buddies are being picked off by American snipers 1000 meters away and they don't know where the shots are coming from. Why pull the snipers out and spoil all the fun? This is happening daily.
Ever here of RFID technology? The insurgents haven't. The steal "valuables" and then stupidly lead Americans and Iraqi soldiers to their friends and weapons depots every day. Why would any army want to "pullout" of that kind of fun?
OK. Let's take a look only at the "official" numbers since September: The Pentagon announced 700 dead enemy and 1500 new prisoners in 3 months, mostly taken from the Euphrates River Valley which is finally getting a presence. You cannot expect the 1500 prisoners to be released anytime in the next 4 years if ever...so we have 2200 enemy eliminated in 3 months to 220 dead US soldiers (I think less than that).
I guess that is only a 10:1 ratio, right? But those Sunni anti-democrats who are eliminated by paramilitaries are not counted in this figure. Now...imagine if British leftists were eliminated at a 10:1 ratio by a new Cromwell in a civil war. Imagine if MI5 was conducting a secret program where leftist leaders and opinion makers were disappeared in large numbers in the middle of the night. This is what is happening to the Sunni community right now.
How long would you, as a leftist partisan in a futuristic civil war England, like a 10:1 attrition rate to go on?
Go ahead please, calculate. How long would you like to fight under such conditions? Would you be standing on "principle" or would you only be part of the insurgency because your only source of income is now a small stipend from a rich Saudi prince who has sex with all the ladies while you try to get by and prove that you really are trying to kill Americans so the sex-hungry Saudi prince will throw you a few more of those precious US dollars keeping you alive.
What's that you say? They're taking huge casualties but the real purpose of the insurgency is to get the American and British publics to force their leaders to quit? Correctomundo!! Now look at reality: It is too late for a US pullout to mean anything more than the massacre of the Iraqi Sunni population (with very little corresponding bloodshed in the other direction). Meanwhile, Bush was reelected until January 2009 and 70% of the American public agrees that the Democrats are hurting soldiers' morale with their defeatist talk regardless of whether the person asked agreed with the Democrats and/or the idea of a pullout or not (leftist talk hurting soldier morale is a fact and not an opinion anyway). The 2006 midterm elections are NOT going to be a Democratic cakewalk (although thinking this is why the insurgents still fight in Iraq). The USA needs only one car bomb in New York City in order for most of the population to turn against the Democrats for being the party of defeat. Blair was reelected and he is not going anywhere (his liberal party isn't forcing him out). Merkel, who was for the Iraq War, just ousted Schroeder (who voted for the occupation at the Security Council in April 2003 and has provided most airfields and warehouses for the war) and she isn't going to be hurt by the pathetic kidnapping incident because 47% of the German people want her to IGNORE the kidnapping. The London bombings made Britain more right wing. The French riots made France more right wing. In Spain, 50% of the people are embarrassed that they have a left wing government as a result of the Madrid bombings, but Zapatero is very good at hunting down Al Qaeda and controlling Chavez.
So the right wing is on the rise in the west, or at least sensible foreign policy is. The UN Security Council just voted unanimously to back the occupation of Iraq for another year. The US is legally in Iraq according to the UN. Don't believe that: Go check the UN website.
And you have the nerve to still pin your hopes that the former bulwark of anti-imperialist left wing ideology in the Middle East (the Baathist Party) still has a future in Iraq (or Syria for that matter)?
In your dreams. Your best ideological booster will be the sham elections in Venezuela on Sunday. Most conservatives will boycott the election, meaning Chavez will get 75% of the vote at least. Will he then cynically take all the new powers granted to him?? Or does the opposition, by boycotting the election, signal that another coup is in the offing?
I know whose side you are on! You will say "on the side of the democratically elected leader." Yeah right! You are on the side of your ideological buddy. You would be screaming like a stuck pig if the socialists just pulled out of an election rigged by a right wing Venezuelan junta. You would be praying for a coup.
Let's be honest.
I just don't know if leftist thinking is genetic or not. I was a Manhattan liberal until 9-11, so that theory might be wrong. Even if Bush caused 9-11 himself...I can still see the defeatism and the willful distortion or ignorance of facts on the left. Even if Bush murdered 3000 people on 9-11, he successfully showed me what leftists are really like.
More facts: the Libyan nuke program was an Iraqi WMD program. It just wasn't on Iraqi soil. So what? Bush knew that. Sure, he lied to the Baathists when he went to war in Iraq. He pretended to them that he was only after WMD. He really wanted to throw them all out on their butts. He had to lie to us in order to lie to them. So what? The leftist Baathist generals would have fought for Baghdad if they knew they were going to lose their power. We tricked them into thinking that we would let the leftists keep their jobs if they let us take Baghdad and then search for WMD. We told them that we only wanted Saddam and a few others. We lied. That is how war is done. Do you think FDR didn't lie about the Normandy Invasion? Everyone was fooled. That is the point.
And then you have the nerve to say things like Bush lied to "us"? He lied to the enemy. Blair lied to the enemy. Of course we had to be included as those being lied to. That is how war is done. Even if Bush murdered 3000 people on 9-11 himself, it is the failure of minds like yours to grasp such elemental concepts of reality...that has made me oppose the left wing.
The left wing is, by definition, overwhelmingly the poor and uneducated...smattered with a thin frosting of socalled intellectuals who get money from publications that cater to the poor and uneducated and who probably think they will get more status (and maybe sex) if businessmen and soldiers are marginalized, especially in the colleges where young nubile women abound.
Can you imagine Bush ever admitting that a secondary point of the war was to remove the arab world's leftist icons and replace them with conservatives?
Can you imagine Bush ever admitting that the main point of the war was to weaken Sunni Islam and strengthen Shiite Islam and democracy while providing the Sunnis with a choice of the latter two options?
Bush has quietly told Sunni Islam: "I will flip a coin in the Middle East: Heads I win, tails you lose".
^5's
Why don't some of you write to the journalist and ask him an important question:
If his main argument is that young arab men are getting excellent terrorist hands-on experience in the Iraq War then:
1) Would you say the Soviets gave young German males excellent "hands-on" experience on the Russian Front in WW2?
2) Would you say that 1+ million young American men and women now also have "hands-on" experience in fighting terrorists?
With the German males, how did the highly trained German survivors of the Russian Front make a difference in future history? Didn't they not just ask their sons to join the Bundeswehr and stand with their former American enemies against the Soviets? Or did they spend the past 60 years blowing up American office buildings in revenge for all the battles we put them through in WW2?
With the highly trained American veterans of the Iraq War...they are going to be commanding police forces, entering Congress, taking management positions in companies, getting promoted to lead the military in the future. That is bad, correct?
How about this: The US Military is now battle hardened and experienced with even the National Guard battle hardened and experienced for possible battles on the homeland (it was brilliant of the President to get the National Guard battle hardened in Iraq). Training, from now on, will be conducted by veterans of intense urban combat. Fallujah? Very few insurgents survived that battle to train terrorists in the future. But how many Americans survived that battle to train anyone and everyone (including allied soldiers) on how to kill the enemy in intense urban combat? 3000 or 5000 or more? How many good Iraqi soldiers now have Fallujah experience? Euphrates battle experience?
How much experience do the Venezuelan Army recruits have in battle if Chavez wants to export leftism in South America?
Please write to the journalist and ask this kind of question. Sure, some terrorists are going to escape from Iraq highly trained, but they are going to have to go right back to Iraq to fight because that is where their main enemy (the Shiites) gets stronger every day...while US and British soldiers vastly increase their experience for future battles.
His email is brian.whitaker@guardian.co.uk
Good write-up.
My!
Such a splash of ice water.
You have effectively welded leftist cynicism with right wing realism and produced a cold, glaring beam of light straight into the Marxist heart.
Well done.
I would really like this to happen and show up all these liars.
It is amazing to me that all the documented connections between Iraq and terror (including Al Qaeda) are just simply ignored and the "no wmd" lie regurgitated ad infinitum.
Let me add:
American combat veterans can openly speak about fighting terrorists in Iraq...on British streets and at black tie balls in Monaco...even in most places in the Arab world an American combat veteran of Iraq can openly and proudly talk about his kill ratio (well, maybe not at some restaurants before being served).
But an Iraqi insurgent veteran?? If his third cousin in Madrid even whispered about his experiences at a seedy brothel...the prostitutes would be on the phone with the Spanish police and the cousin would be brought in for questioning. An Iraqi insurgent veteran would not, even in the arab world, be able to brag about having combat experience in Iraq. He would soon be a wanted man.
I have been occasionally tuning in to Hairball lately.
It is truly amazing how Matthews can have one leftist whackjob after another on night after night (including the journalists) w/ no balance.
I saw only Frank Gaffney on one night to provide any other POV. And he was opposite Amy Goodman (blecch!)
Yes, well put, you have made some good points. However, this current crop of politicos and at least half the electorate, just hav'nt got a clue and unless we can turn it around we will be screwed. We need leaders, not just in the top spot but in Congress, people who will stand up and fight! Forget all this PC crap and 'my good friend across the aisle' crap, tell 'em they are full of it and tell 'em why! not once, but again and again. Hell, we stop at the borders of Syria and Iran and let 'em re-group and come after us yet one more time - that just ain't no way to fight a war! Having spent some 40 years living and working in the 3rd world, much of it in the Middle East and Africa, I know what they think of us. They admire our technology and abilities, our can do, get it done, attitude - they despise us for our perceived lack of aggressivness and permissivness. They don't give a damn about torture and killing as long as their team wins. That is how it is in much of the third world and especially in the Middle East, you can't change that kind of culture in twenty years, let alone three. President Bush's failure to repeatedly emphasize that this is gonna' take a long time, at least years and maybe decades is part of the problem Many in our dumbed downed electorate probally don't know 'WHAT' Iraq is, let alone where it is. Thanks to the media the President does'nt have much to work with!
End of quarterly 'rant'!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.