[a topic first covered by this space here]

According to this NY Times article, which exhibits that subtle combination of ‘here are the facts’ reporting with unquestioned (and unquestionable, in polite society) assertions so typical of contemporary media, Hamas has “sworn to the destruction of Israel.”

Well that being the case, surely we can all agree with Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni who told her “Fox News Sunday” hosts that Israel’s aggression is necessary “…to change the realities on the ground, and to give peace and quiet to the citizens in southern Israel.”

Case closed.  Let the bombs fall!   And since they’re being dropped by the world’s ‘most humane military’ it’s a sure bet that all casualties are ‘bad guys’.  Except for those which aren’t.  Those deaths make our heavily armed humanitarians and their enablers in Washington and other capitals weep for what the monsters made us do.

But is Hamas what it’s made out to be?

Here’s Lenin’s Tomb on the “Myth of Hamas Rejectionism” –

Israel’s opponents are always rejectionist, refusing to acknowledge the Jewish state’s repeated olive branches and fanatically insisting on a maximalist programme. Thus, the late Yasser Arafat could never be Israel’s much sought after ‘partner in peace’. This image was never accurate. The PLO spent the 1990s engaged in a drastic reduction of its aims and aspirations, eventually coming close to negotiating a two-state settlement at Taba, before Ehud Barak called off the discussions. Former Clinton aide Robert Malley pointed out that far from Arafat rejecting a ‘generous offer’ from Israel (as has been alleged), “it could be said that Israel rejected the unprecedented two-state solution put to them by the Palestinians, including the following provisions: a state of Israel incorporating some land captured in 1967 and including a very large majority of its settlers; the largest Jewish Jerusalem in the city’s history [and] security guaranteed by a US-led international presence”.

Still, the myths persisted throughout the assaults on Jenin and Rafah, throughout the bulldozings and massacres, until Arafat died under seige. Mahmoud Abbas is so craven that it is difficult to depict him as a sinister rejectionist. Instead, Sharon insisted that Abbas use the scant resources of the Palestinian Authority to pursue a war against Hamas, even as the settlement building continued and the wall was erected, with Palestinian farmland being destroyed and the economy crushed. This was itself one of the causes of the surge in support for Hamas which, contrary to prevalent misconceptions, was far more pragmatic in its ability to work with other forces, such as the PFLP (despite the latter’s occasional sectarianism).

[...]

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Grim.   But at least we can look forward to President Obama changing US-Palestinian relations and  putting the brakes on Israeli violence.

Oh wait, cancel that:

…David Axelrod, appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation, did reaffirm Obama’s commitment to the “special relationship between the United States and Israel” in a way that suggested general sympathy for the Jewish state’s actions.

Speaking a day after Israeli airstrikes, targeting and destroying Hamas facilities in Gaza, killed more than 275, Axelrod said the president-elect, from on-the-ground experience, understood the urge for retaliatory action.

Last July, Obama visited Sderot, a southern Israel town on the border of the Gaza Strip that has taken the brunt of Hamas attacks, Axelrod reminded host Chip Reid. “He said then that when bombs are raining down on your citizens, there is an urge to respond and act to try to put an end to that. That’s what he said then. I think that’s what he believes.”

[...]

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Oh liberals,  is there no humanitarian murder you won’t eagerly condone?

Over at Jezebel, Jessica theorizes about what it is about Gov. Palin which inspires so many to spin like murder tops:

[...]

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The Jezebel post suggests Palin has no beliefs of her own, absorbing ideas with all the mindfulness of a paper towel soaking up spilled juice, and that she glided to the top by being a cheerleader/priestess for masculinist gods.  Some of that is surely going on (after all, there is a patriarchy and it does like to be petted) but it’s also very likely that she actually likes to hunt moose and wolves from the comfort of low flying aircraft, likes to fish till her pores are salmonized and truly believes that the US should ‘drill now, drill forever and drill on Mars too’…or whatever that silly slogan is.

Really, I think some people – including a lot of mainstream feminists of the Jezebel variety — are having a hard time accepting that a ‘normal seeming’, attractive woman is a Mayberry Machiavellian.  It’s easy to vilify McCain. For one thing, he’s a genuinely vilify-able war lord and for another, he’s an old white guy who always seems about five seconds away from waving a shotgun while yelling at everyone to get off his damn lawn.

But Palin? The crafty Governor presents an interesting perceptual challenge.  She looks like the woman you had a pleasant conversation with the other day while waiting at the dentist’s office, or, the woman you shyly asked out to dinner at the Olive Garden, or the woman who smilingly rides her Vespa to work (probably while wearing a cute scarf!) because she’s worried about her ‘carbon footprint’.

How dare she actually be a dark lord of the Sith?

Well, that’s one angle.

The other angle is that a lot of her liberal detractors (see, for example, the heroes over at DailyKos) — the ones going on and on and on about the beauty queen thing and the daughter and the baby and I don’t know what else — are simply misogynist assholes (I’m including women and men here). Their camouflaged assholoisty is de-cloaked from time to time to be directed against selected targets.

Since 11 Sept 2001 and the creation of the DHS which followed, some people (How many? I don’t know) entering the US have been subjected to a variety of humiliations. Every Internet news savvy leftist and civil libertarian is familiar with stories of unwarranted detentions, deportations, odd “security” interrogations and so on.

There is, for example, the recent experience of Erla Osk Arnardottir Lillendahl, a woman from Iceland who reports being shackled and denied food, water and rest for 14 hours and held for a total of two days after arriving at New York’s JFK. Her apparent crime was overstaying her visa by a week or so…in 1995. Here’s an excerpt from her blog entry describing the detention:

<snip>

I was completely exhausted, tired and cold. Fourteen hours after I had landed I had something to eat and drink for the first time. I was given porridge and bread. But it did not help much. I was afraid and the attitude of all who handled me was abysmal to say the least. They did not speak to me as much as snap at me. Once again I asked to make a telephone call and this time the answer was positive. I was relieved but the relief was short-lived. For the telephone was set up for collect calls only and it was not possible to make overseas calls. The jailguard held my cell phone in his hand. I explained to him that I could not make a call from the jail telephone and asked to be allowed to make one call from my own phone. That was out of the question. I spent the next 9 hours in a small, dirty cell. The only thing in there was a narrow steel board which extended out from the wall, a sink and toilet. I wish I never experience again in my life the feeling of confinement and helplessness which I experienced there.

[...]

Full (and I recommend you read it).

Let’s look beneath the story’s immediate details and consider the mechanics.

A woman is detained and treated as if she were a dangerous criminal (or, more to the point, terrorist) because of a twelve year old technicality. She’s subjected to what sound like civilian-adapted versions of the “harsh interrogation” techniques used at Camp X-Ray. She’s asked questions about her beliefs. Her jailers maintain an abrupt and harsh demeanor as if they’re tough operatives working against the clock to uncover the location of a ‘dirty bomb’.

What is this if not a form of pornography?

Someone – I believe it was a friend of Susana Breslin – recently said that pr0n performers are modern gladiators. The ancient Romans used gladiatorial games as, among other things, a method of vicariously experiencing the danger of combat: a danger they held in high esteem. Of course, the gladiators were actually fighting and dying but the circumstance (for example, the war against Carthage, re-staged in the Coliseum generations after the fact) was often a simulacrum.

Porn is very much like this. The performers may or may not be experiencing pleasure but the circumstance – for example, the pizza delivery boy gifted with much more of a tip than he hoped for – is pure fantasy, a world in which vigorous sex can happen anywhere and anytime. Porn performers stand in for us, doing things many of us can’t, or won’t do.

The sexual act is real: the setting, unreal.

…

The DHS’ creation was inspired by the fantasy that the US faced an imminent threat to its existence (and this is the key thing to keep in mind: not merely a new law enforcement problem, but an existential threat) which required the founding of a vast state apparatus. In truth, outside of contested hot zones and ‘failed states’, terrorist acts are rare and the total number of active participants small.

What is there for a vast state apparatus to do?

Incidents such as the story of Erla Osk Arnardottir Lillendahl reveal its true job: DHS, TSA and the entire “Global war on Terror” complex are elements of a new sub genre of government sponsored, live action security pr0n. The cruelty is very real, but the circumstance (the security allegedly being created via cruelty) is false, through and through.

Lillendahl had no information to reveal; she concealed no perfidious plans. And yet, she was interrogated as if she held dreadful secrets which desperately had to be uncovered. She became a victim of a gladiatorial event which requires live participants to complete the fashioning of its simulacrum. The guards, the supervisors the rent-a-cops: all stand ready with nothing to do hour after hour except try to portray themselves as grim faced defenders of freedom.

Empowered by their superiors to be arbitrarily vigilant (and with vigilance unofficially defined as cruelty and excess of zeal), it’s inevitable they would select an unsuspecting person, guilty of a minor transgression or victim of a bureaucratic error, upon whom they could act out their false scenarios and dark fantasies.

In his most recent book, ” A Brief History of Neoliberalism“, David Harvey analyzes the neoliberal turn that first Western, and later, practically every economy on Earth took to varying degrees of depth over the past 30 or so years.

Several key features of neoliberalism are dissected:

1.) Neoliberalism as a power restoration technique (i.e., restoring to capitalists the margin of power lost during the post war years of high growth and detente with labor)

2.) Neoliberalism as imperfect tool against stagnation and the problems of over production

and

3.) Neoliberalism as a method for monetizing practices and spaces previously excluded from market concerns and controls

To properly understand the strategic concessions Microsoft made to the entertainment industry — concessions that led MSFT to deploy a software-based version of the Advanced Access Content System ( AACS) in Windows Vista — you need to carefully consider that third aspect of neoliberalism.

Enter the Advanced Access Content System

Briefly, the Advanced Access Content System is a platform, created at the behest of the entertainment industry, whose sole purpose is to enforce a (it is vainly hoped) completely un-crackable environment for “premium content” to flow through from player — device or software-based — to a display and/or audio output. Of course, the phrase “premium content” is a term of art inasmuch as the actual content might be anything from a slapdash teen sex comedy to the most subtle examples of musical or filmed art.

The motion picture and recording cartels have long been disturbed by the fact that people could record, remix and redistribute “content” at will. Over the years, many copy protection schemes have been tried; all have failed. Advances in computing power and storage capacity — moving in parallel with advances in cryptology — have finally made the old dream of an automated copyright enforcement system achievable.

Achievable, because under the AACS system, ‘intelligent’ hardware is constantly on the lookout for security breaches (for example, interceptions of the content data stream from player to output) and empowered, so to speak, to take action. What sorts of action? Actions such as actively preventing component outs from working if the HD-DVD or Blu ray disk you’re trying to view has been flagged as being compromised (or more specifically, if the cryptological “key” associated with the disk has been compromised, leading to your play privileges being ‘revoked’ by the key issuing authority).

All high definition hardware — players, digital sets, audio units — are designed to enforce this automated copyright infrastructure. Your HD-DVD or Blu Ray player will talk to your high def display over what are called High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection compliant outputs. Together, they’ll ensure that RIAA and MPAA copyright concerns are being addressed wherever and whenever “premium content” is being viewed.

The addition of the Advanced Access Content System (AACS) component in Vista enables MSFT and its entertainment sector partners to create false scarcity – that is, by using the technology to limit, constrain and otherwise interfere with your ability to use “content” as you’d like, they can treat lectronically stored movies and music as metered commodities in defiance of what the technology could do and has done, until the AACS era.

The Era of False Scarcity

Microsoft wanted Vista to be marketable as a media platform (and MSFT also wanted to create the de facto standard for software based AACS implementation) so they crafted a complex encryption/decryption methodology within the operating system that obeys — and then some — AACS rules. Doing so gave them negotiating space with the entertainment industry.

As any user of consumer electronics and Microsoft software knows, shit happens. The copyright enforcement, content monitoring and encryption/decryption technologies in next gen players and Vista are always on. This exacts a performance price from the devices (because our CPUs and memory are good, but not so good that they can effortlessly do both content presentation and advanced cryptological functions without exhibiting some problems at least some of the time) and especially from the software, which is very brittle and prone to malfunction.

But beyond the false piracy alarms, stuttering playbacks and other technical annoyances that are already being seen in the wild, there’s an overriding fact to keep in mind: AACS gives the entertainment industry the ability to treat the products you buy as leased objects, which can be (say, in a case of revocation resolution) the source for ever renewable revenue long after they were originally purchased.

It also creates a method for modularizing in unprecedented ways — and therefore monetizing — functions that were previously considered more or less all of a piece, such as playing and therefore viewing the disks you buy.

In order for this system to work as planned, all devices must comply with the AACS standard. The idea is to close all potential areas of escape. Eventually, perhaps after 5 to 15 years, the full magnitude of the lock-in will be in effect as older DVD and audio players are retired.

It’s rumored that Hollywood and the RIAA are fully aware AACS is, despite all their efforts, eminently hackable, and that the true target of these new constraints are ordinary people who don’t have easy access to workarounds.

The goal then, is to have a lever that can be pulled at any time to extract more income from “consumers”.

One of the recurring arguments of the current age is this: how do you prevent terrorism – via military action or police investigation?

Many Americans are fond — in a distractedly enthusiastic, television and movie viewing sort of way — of military action. Indeed, even the phrase “military action” immediately places in the mind an image of forward movement, of efficiencies, of things getting done. To say that you will handle terrorism through investigation, through quiet infiltration, through arrests and evidence and courts…this seems weak in comparison to helicopter gunships pushing metal into your enemy at supersonic speeds (that enemy, no longer human but dubbed “the terrorists” and sometimes labeled ‘rats’ or ‘cockroaches’ or ‘termites’ and so on).

This fondness for military technique — perhaps it can be described as an instinct — guarantees that terrorist acts inspire spectacular responses which, in turn, produce further impetus for terrorist acts. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, justified by their architects and defenders as quintessential anti-terror actions (for if the military response is the best way forward, full scale invasion — to replace, via “regime change”, your enemy with his “moderate” brothers — is the best example of the best technique, an apotheosis of counter-terror).

And now, let’s reconsider Baudrillard’s essay, “The Spirit of Terrorism” which, as I recall (but memory is faulty), was roundly criticized as “postmodernist” navel gazing when it was released in 2001. Americans in particular, even those who were opposed to military action, dismissed it as missing the point, of minimizing the martyrdom of the 2000 plus who died in the towers, of sympathizing with nihilists who sought to destroy civilization.

To many, Baudrillard played the role of the ultimate (stereotypical) European intellectual: trapped in his thoughts when he should have been feeling more deeply – feeling the loss of the hallowed dead, the perfidy of the means by which they were killed, the special nature of the American loss, the painful struggle ahead.

Baudrillard writes (translation and translation-related comments by Dr. Rachel Bloul):

No need for a death wish or desire for self-destruction, not even for perverse effects. It is very logically, and inexorably, that the (literally: “rise to power of power”) exacerbates a will to destroy it.

And power is complicit with its own destruction. When the two towers collapsed, one could feel that they answered the suicide of the kamikazes by their own suicide. It has been said: “God cannot declare war on Itself”. Well, It can. The West, in its God-like position (of divine power, and absolute moral legitimacy) becomes suicidal, and declares war on itself.

[...]

It’s easy to be distracted by this line “When the two towers collapsed, one could feel that they answered the suicide of the kamikazes by their own suicide” and lose the message: the attacks occurred within the system built by the West – it was an attack from within, not without as conventional thought has it. The “kamikazes” were not anti-modern (as was commonly stated at the time) but thoroughly modern. The scope of the attack — Hollywood-esque in scale — and the means were both completely part of modernity.

Baudrillard writes (translation and translation-related comments by Dr. Rachel Bloul):

When the situation is thus monopolized by global power, when one deals with this formidable condensation of all functions through technocratic machinery and absolute ideological hegemony (pensee unique), what other way is there, than a terrorist reversal of the situation (literally ‘transfer of situation’: am I too influenced by early translation as ‘reversal’?)? It is the system itself that has created the objective conditions for this brutal distortion. By taking all the cards to itself, it forces the Other to change the rules of the game. And the new rules are ferocious, because the stakes are ferocious. To a system whose excess of power creates an unsolvable challenge, terrorists respond by a definitive act that is also unanswerable (in the text: which cannot be part of the exchange circuit). Terrorism is an act that reintroduces an irreducible singularity in a generalized exchange system. Any singularity (whether species, individual or culture), which has paid with its death for the setting up of a global circuit dominated by a single power, is avenged today by this terrorist situational transfer.

Terror against terror – there is no more ideology behind all that. We are now far from ideology and politics. No ideology, no cause, not even an Islamic cause, can account for the energy which feeds terror. It (energy) does not aim anymore to change the world, it aims (as any heresy in its time) to radicalize it through sacrifice, while the system aims to realize (the world) through force.

[...]

Here Baudrillard is stating something most of us cannot accept, not even as part of an intellectual exercise: that the Western system’s success at achieving power created — via a process as natural as the formation of antibodies in response to foreign bacteria — an anti, a resistance, a pushing against. On the face of it, this seems similar to the mantra loosed upon the world shortly after the towers collapsed – ‘they hate us because of our freedoms’. This has a satisfying ring and absorbs easily into our psyches. But the difference between that incantation and Baudrillard’s description is whereas one presents an image of good against evil (lovers of freedom against against their moral opposites) Baudrillard is making a structural argument – the house has been built this way and has this set of problems because of the way it has been built. The Right explains terrorism as nihilistic evil in bloody motion (’false’ faith against real, ‘primitive’ practices against market advancement), the Left as a criminal response to legitimate grievance (the history of Western colonialism, the CIA engineered overthrow of Mossadeq and so on).

Baudrillard pushes these competing explanations aside and says that what is really at war is the system’s attempt to absorb the whole world through ideology and force (”taking all the cards to itself”) pitted against attempts to reverse this relentless, totalizing effort.

Although our superstructure seems sound, there are weaknesses, which our adversaries have uncovered (and this explains so much of our rage and sense of ennui at how poorly things have gone in Iraq: it began with promises of flawless power and knowledge and descended into a parade of meaningless death, sectarian warfare and endless incompetence).

Baudrillard writes (translation and translation-related comments by Dr. Rachel Bloul):

Until now this integrating power had mostly succeeded to absorb every crisis, every negativity, creating therefore a deeply hopeless situation (not only for the damned of the earth, but for the rich and the privileged too, in their radical comfort). The fundamental event is that terrorists have finished with empty suicides; they now organize their own death in offensive and efficient ways, according to a strategic intuition, that is the intuition of the immense fragility of their adversary, this system reaching its quasi perfection and thus vulnerable to the least spark. They succeeded in making their own death the absolute arm against a system that feeds off the exclusion of death, whose ideal is that of zero death. Any system of zero death is a zero sum system. And all the means of dissuasion and destruction are powerless against an enemy who has already made his death a counter-offensive. “What of American bombings! Our men want to die as much as Americans want to live!” This explains the asymmetry of 7, 000 deaths in one blow against a system of zero death.

Therefore, here, death is the key (to the game) not only the brutal irruption of death in direct, in real time, but also the irruption of a more-than-real death: symbolic and sacrificial death – the absolute, no appeal event.

This is the spirit of terrorism.

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Paul W. Schroeder writes:

The Bush administration originally sold the Iraq War to the public, Congress, and the world with two propaganda packages appealing respectively to fear and hope. One drew a horrifying picture of The Disastrous Consequences of Inaction in Iraq; the other depicted The Bright Promise of Victory in Iraq. Everyone remembers the absurd predictions, false promises, and outright lies these packages contained.

Today both have been totally discredited by events. The president, administration officials, and loyal supporters in the Congress and media spin the ongoing disaster in Iraq and looming one in Iran as signs of coming victory, but only true believers are convinced. With rebellion rising even among Republicans and control of Congress in jeopardy, the president is touring the country with a series of speeches designed to refurbish the old propaganda of fear. This newest package, The Disastrous Consequences of Failure in Iraq, seeks to terrify the public, mobilize the base, and vilify the opposition by portraying worse disasters sure to arise should cowardly, cut-and-run Democrats cause America to fail.

It should be easy for opponents of the war to refute this fear-mongering campaign with The Disastrous Consequences of Staying the Course. Though any such exertion comes hard to a divided party with its so-called moderates pulling in the opposite direction, the evidence showing the current campaign to be as illegitimate and self-deluding as the original pro-war campaign is overwhelming. But such a counterattack, though necessary, will not defeat the White House’s strategy by itself and could even play into its hands.

The reasons are simple. Like other Bush-Cheney ploys, this one is not designed to educate or persuade rationally but to arouse and exploit patriotic emotion. Any counterargument, however solidly grounded in logic and evidence, will be politically and emotionally distasteful to many voters. Moreover, Americans want not merely to be warned of impending disaster but also to be told how it can be averted. To Republican true believers, “Stay the course” still represents the answer, simplistic and delusional though it is, while the majority skeptical about this answer demand something positive in its place.

The Republican electoral strategy thus rests on two pillars: on Bush’s reported private quip during the 2004 campaign, “You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you have to concentrate on,” while keeping the rest distracted, divided, and on the defensive; and on the opposition party’s tearing itself apart trying to devise a positive alternative policy, with some leaders, including Hillary Clinton, still endorsing John Kerry’s message in 2004, The Bright Promise of Letting Us Handle Iraq Better. This approach, now even more than in 2004, will divide the Democrats, confuse the public, and fail to rally supporters. Worse still, it would continue to obscure the central point and the first critical requirement for any solution in Iraq or progress toward one: that the current American venture has decisively failed, cannot be rescued or reformed, and must be abandoned.

This essay proposes an answer to this problem—not to the tactical electoral dilemma faced by the Democratic Party but to the policy dilemma faced by the country, an answer not offered by either party and almost certain to be denounced and repudiated by both. By frankly acknowledging failure in Iraq and acting quickly, decisively, and prudently on that recognition, the U.S. not only could avoid further disasters there but might also achieve a kind of success. Call it The Bright Promise of Accepting Failure in Iraq.

[...]

From Nasa’s Earth Observatory:

In the summer of 2006, the conflict between Israel and Lebanon caused an oil spill along the coast of Lebanon. Damage to the Jiyeh Power Station in mid-July 2006 spilled thousands of tons of oil into the nearby Mediterranean Sea. Continuing hostilities delayed cleanup efforts along the Lebanese coast, and evidence of the oil slick was still apparent in early August.

GeoEye’s IKONOS sensor collected these images of Beirut on August 5, 2006 (top), and December 24, 2001 (bottom). The top image shows the aftermath of the spill, where oil coats the shoreline in an opaque layer of black. Although the oil is apparent along the beach, the black-looking surface of the water should not necessarily be interpreted as an oil slick. A satellite sensor may not be directly over an area when it makes an observation; often, it views the area at an angle. IKONOS not only acquired these images at different times of year, but also from completely different angles. Notice that the buildings in the top image seem to lean strongly to the left while, in the bottom image, they appear to lean slightly upward. They also cast different shadows. Such changes in angle and lighting can make the water surface look very different.

[...]

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Lebanon.

Death, destruction, chaos, shadowy geopolitics – the usual blood splattered muddle. Have we learned anything of lasting value? Morally, probably not. We’re stubborn creatures, we learn our lessons hard and eagerly repeat. But tactically, quite a bit has already been learned and quickly absorbed.

Armour penetration behind ERA, mm 800

Warhead types tandem hollow-charge, HE

Firing range (day/night), m: maximum 1500, min 80

Missile calibre, mm 130

Average missile speed, m/s 180

Weight, kg: missile 13.8 launcher 10.0

IR system weight (with power supply cells and bottles), kg 6.0

Operating temperature range, °C -30 … +50

Warhead tandem HEAT, thermobaric

Armor penetration, mm 850 – 900

Firing range, m:

maximum 1,500

minimum 80

Guidance semiautomatic with commands transmitted

over wire link

ERA penetration ensured

Time into and out of action, s 10 – 20

Rate of fire, rds/min 3

Weight, kg:

launcher 10.5

container with missile 13.8

Overall dimensions, mm:

missile caliber 130

container length 980

Weight of packs, kg:

№ 1 (launcher and missile/thermal sight) 25.1/18.5

№ 2 (two missiles) 28.6

The METIS-M ATGM system is designed to defeat modern armoured targets with improved protection, including those equipped with explosive reactive armour, as well as fortifications and weapon emplacements, and other pinpoint targets.

[...]

WARFARE.RU

“The mission of US forces is to kill or capture Muqtada al-Sadr”

Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of US ground forces in Iraq April 12, 2004

“Israel is determined to continue on in the fight against Hizbollah. We will … stop them. We will not hesitate to take severe measures against those who are aiming thousands of rockets and missiles against innocent civilians for the one purpose of killing them”

Ehud Olmert, Israeli Prime Minister, July 2006

IN AUGUST OF 2004, American forces under Lt. General Sanchez launched a full scale assault on Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army, then massed in Najaf.

Reportedly, hundreds of Mahdi fighters were killed which, considering the Americans’ command of overwhelming firepower (and the Mahdi’s lack of combat experience), was a completely unsurprising outcome.

And yet, despite producing significant losses, Washington’s objective to, in so many words, vaporize al Sadr and neutralize his organization proved beyond reach.

At the time, University of Michigan Prof. Juan Cole described the Mahdi’s structure as being like the “layers of an onion”. One layer could be heavily damaged or destroyed but this wouldn’t kill the organization as a whole. Distributed groups such as the Mahdi, with both centralized and decentralized command and control elements, are, the Americans have re-learned, extraordinarily resilient and able to recover from all but the most extreme forms of military punishment (thermonuclear ordinance comes to mind as “most extreme”).

TEL AVIV’S ASSAULT on Lebanon is, we’re told by both Israeli and American officials, designed to destroy Hezbollah’s war fighting capacity, cajole (read: terrify) Hezbollah’s Lebanese supporters into rejecting the organization, motivate its domestic opponents to take more drastic steps (read: civil war) to neutralize the group as a force and convince its foreign supporters in Iran and the Arab world to cut it loose.

Israeli Air Force commanders were confident, it seems, that a devastating air campaign (a classic ‘total war’ scenario in which civilians are considered targets because of their role in supporting combatants) would simultaneously deal strategically fatal blows to Hezbollah and eliminate its civilian support network.

Now that IDF ground forces are engaging Hezbollah fighters in combat – and taking losses in both equipment and men – the failure of the campaign’s strategic component is being revealed.

Indeed, at the moment it appears unlikely Israel will achieve any of its main objectives (perhaps shattering the Lebanese economy was an objective – if so, that’s largely been accomplished but beyond this criminality…).

Both Washington and Tel Aviv wage classic ‘big war’ military campaigns: aerial bombardment, followed by ground incursion – a French derived tactic fashioned during the First World War. The Israelis have added so-called “targeted assassinations”, kidnappings and other ’special operations’ to their bag of military tricks but in the main, as we’re seeing right now in Lebanon’s smashed towns and villages, there’s a devout faith in the effectiveness of large-scale force deployments to accomplish political and tactical goals.

But modern warfare has evolved beyond the point where states are able to decisively destroy competitors and establish systems more to their liking.

This is partly due to advances in portable killing technology – devices such as shoulder launched anti tank and anti aircraft launchers – that give out-gunned teams of fighters unprecedented amounts of firepower.

Mostly however, it’s the result of the distributed structure of the non and quasi-state organizations Washington and Tel Aviv confront.

Having smashed the Iraqi state and failed to create a viable replacement, the Americans find themselves facing a variety of well-armed, difficult to isolate groups, each with a base of popular support (some more than others, of course). Everything from ex-Baathist military professionals to ruthless Jihadis and gangsters roam Iraqi streets, killing anyone who opposes or displeases them. In this chaotically violent situation it’s impossible to impose your will on more than a very limited amount of territory (US bases and the Green Zone in Iraq for example).

Similarly, Tel Aviv, having denied the Palestinians autonomy in the occupied territories (indeed, occupation itself, along with the ’security barriers’ and bantustans that come with it is, by definition a denial of independence) and frustrated Lebanese politics has not evolved in a direction to its liking is trying to suppress resistance to its objectives by punishing populations supporting non-state adversaries.

Instead of smothering resistance, such wanton destruction tends to make it grow.

Washington and Tel Aviv are unable to alter course and will continue to use their overwhelming military power to force events, as best they can, into desired paths. The outcomes won’t change. As their plans routinely fall into disarray, they will become more dangerous, upping the ante of force employed (other options, such as honest negotiation will not seriously be considered).

Washington and its Israeli proxy pose a great – and growing – threat to global stability. The more defeats they suffer, the more unpredictable they’re likely to become.

Future Feeder writes:

Inner-City Youth, London is a narrated photo essay by Simon Wheatly. It attempts to capture the lives of Londons under-privalaged youth and the music culture (grime) that is developing out of their real-world experiences and the influence of mainstream American hip-Hop.