Posted on 07/21/2006 10:12:59 PM PDT by BurbankKarl
An Israeli soldier maneuvers an armored personnel carrier at their position along the Israeli Lebanese border. Israel was amassing thousands more reservists on the Lebanese border to stage ground incursions aimed at destroying Hezbollah positions, warning it would not rule out a full-scale invasion despite mounting calls for a ceasefire.
Good morning. Fox is already live, indicating they intend to do actual news coverage today.
True, true, true - could be put out by the IAEA to fit their policy, could be disinformation from Iran, a diplomat trying to sound like he knows more than he does, etc, etc. However, the item should be noted and compared to other developments.
It is certainly inviting disaster to underestimate the Iranians, but on the other hand one shouldn't overestimate them either. They mustn't be allowed to bluff the West into giving them unnecessary concessions.
I'm sure they'll still find time to inform us what Paris Hilton is up to.
They're doing live coverage all day and night...they announced that last night..EVEN the Cost of Freedom will be live ;)
Thank you President Bush!
Besides that, though, he's great!
I cannot believe on of the stories one can vote on this morning is Quayle leaving that Mellencamp concert. I thnk we read about that here 3 days ago!
I must have missed the announcement. I was surprised because CNN was running a special on TWA Flight 800 about halaf an hour ago.
That's the same story -- retreat, recovery -- the media was floating yesterday or the day before. As far as the psyop goes, time will tell, but the media will surely get it wrong.
I wonder if Shep's got some Iranian promissary notes stuck in his designer jeans. Or maybe Murdoch -- or his shareholders -- just believes it's good business to have a (largely ignorant) anti-Israeli reporter on staff.
it appears the IDF is pushing the Kaytusha squads far enough back to where only the very northern most towns are being hit. But what happens when you take away the kaytusha option from Hizbullah, do we see Zedzels or some other surprise?
It's like the kid who kills his parents and then pleads hardship because he's a orphan.
The Iranians will supply them with all the longer range weapons they require.
Incursions to stay limited: IsraelBy Tom Perry in Beirut
http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,19877828-5005361,00.html
July 22, 2006 05:53pm
Article from: Reuters
ISRAEL will pursue its war on Hezbollah with more military incursions into south Lebanon but would not unleash a full-scale invasion for the moment, an Israeli army spokesman said today.
Thousands of Lebanese civilians have fled north fearing Israel will invade and expand an 11-day-old bombardment of Lebanon which has killed 345 people, mostly civilians.
Resisting international pressure for a ceasefire, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said before a trip to the region that the conflict's root causes – in her view Hezbollah's armed presence on Israel's border and the role of its allies, Syria and Iran – had to be tackled first.
An army spokesman said Israeli forces were making only limited thrusts a few kilometres into south Lebanon.
"It will probably widen, but we are still looking at limited operations," he said. "We're not talking about massive forces going inside at this point."
UN peacekeepers on the border said Israeli forces withdrew this morning from the village of Marwaheen, just inside Lebanon, but were still present further east in Maroun al-Ras, scene of fierce fighting earlier this week.
"They entered these areas two or three days ago, so they have now been in Maroun al-Ras for 72 hours," UNIFIL spokesman Milos Strugar said.
Israel has been building up its forces at the border and has called up 3000 reserves. Defence Minister Amir Peretz has talked of a possible land offensive to halt rocket attacks that have killed 15 Israeli civilians in the past 11 days.
But Israel is wary of mounting another invasion, only six years after it ended a costly 22-year occupation of the south. It has already lost 19 soldiers dead in the latest conflict.
(snip)
Michale Moore in today's Daily Telelgraph comments on a new book about the sweltering summer 1911, The Perfect Summer by John Murray. (The weather is really hot in Britain and many parts of Europe, so the book was very timely.)
Here are some excerpts:
The subtitle of Nicolson's book - "Dancing into Shadow in 1911" - shows how hindsight directs the memory. Because of what happened in 1914-18, all that sunshine is now taken to have presaged storm.
Not many people thought so at the time. Siegfried Sassoon, whose literary reputation was made by the Great War, concentrated on cricket in Kent, and remembered how no trouble mattered: "Sitting under the Irish yew, we seemed to have forgotten that there was such a thing as the future."
The then home secretary, Winston Churchill, was quite exceptional in thinking otherwise. He worried about German adventurism. On holiday in Somerset, he wrote to Sir Edward Grey, "I could not think of anything else but the peril of war" and copied out A E Housman's famous, doom-laden lines about hearing from "the idle hill of summer" the "steady drummer", "soldiers marching, all to die".
But then Churchill was mostly laughed at. Rudyard Kipling deplored his vulgarity at the Coronation of King George V that year, saying that he looked "like an obscene paper-backed French novel in the Bodleian".
- SNIP -
In two, related respects, 1911 and 2006 are similar. They are times of peace and prosperity, in which both have long been the norm and are therefore taken for granted.
In 1911, the last pan-European war was so distant that the only living link with it was a 105-year-old Frenchman who was filmed by Pathe News for his childhood memories of the battle of Waterloo. Today, you have to be 80 to have fought in the Second World War. The great majority of the population has never seen a war and has got richer, on average, almost every year since 1945.
So at the beginning of the 22nd century, people may see our own as a primitive time when people still had to do weird things such as burn fossil fuels, endure "rush-hours", and die of easily preventable diseases such as cancer, or they may just as likely look upon us as the privileged two or three generations that escaped conflagration and impoverishment.
What would a modern Winston Churchill be worrying about if he were taking a couple of weeks in Somerset today? He might notice a strange news item this week in which Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, a Muslim cleric expelled from Britain, tried to board a British boat which had arrived in Beirut to rescue citizens caught up in the Lebanese conflict.
In an interview published earlier this month, Omar Bakri declared that "one day honest Muslims in the United Kingdom will, God willing, turn it into 'Islamistan' … Muslims dream to see flags that read: 'There is no god but Allah' fluttering in the wind on top of Big Ben and the House of Commons".
Our imaginary Churchill might note that Iran, the country behind Hizbollah in Lebanon, thinks much like Omar Bakri, and is proceeding with its plans for the atom bomb, and he might wonder at our insouciance in the summer heat.
I was kind of wondering that myself.
He said there are about 35,000 Americans and Europeans there that have fled Lebanon and Israel. Hotel rooms are about impossible to find in Amman now. He said the airport is a ZOO.
If this keeps up, it looks like we'll have to start getting in and out through Kuwait (we usually use Amman) for a while.
They do? What would that "useful" information be?
A tough needle to thread.
Why...whether true or not am I not surprised the NYT would say something like that???
Did you forget your "/s" at the end?
I think the major problem we have here in the US is that a large number of Americans do not understand that we are at war, that war in Israel affects us, and that this is really serious business. If our news media operated under the ethics of WWII, we might not have this problem. Instead, they alternate between ignoring the WOT or pushing the idea that we are losing.
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