Time indeed!

One of the neat things about subscribing to The New Yorker is the email that arrives most every week with a preview of the coming issue's articles, with a link to the online edition in case you can't wait to read one of them. Thus it was that I hurried to investigate "David Remick on Obama and the Middle East." (Not available to non-subscribers.) I just naturally assumed that it dealt with the great issue of the day--Libya's murdering of its own people--and it does in fact contain a clarion call for action: "It is time for President Obama to speak clearly and firmly."

Alas, as I should have guessed, Mr. Remick is not calling for action against an enemy--an enemy of the U.S. and of democracy--but against a friend, and the only true democracy in the region, to wit: Israel. Wouldn't you know it? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Has the Israeli attack begun?

Almost in passing yesterday, the New York Times reported rumors that Iran's nuclear program is under attack by computer warriors--spooks that actually have access to the Iranian computers, which aren't connected to the internet. That requires three things: sophistication in cyberwarfare, a great desire to stop the Persian Bomb, and agents on the ground in Iran. The Gray Lady lists three leading suspects: the U.S., Israel, and Britain. Post-Blair, I think we can rule out the UK. The U.S. of course is a possibility--the Obama administration seems to favor standoff warfare to the belt-buckle sort, as it has displayed with its generous use of drone attacks in Pakistan. But after years--generations!--of emasculating the CIA, where would we get the agents capable of slipping a thumb drive into the computer that runs the Persian version of Los Alamos?

No, I'll lay my bet on Israel.  Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Eichmann, the takeaway

Some memorable moments from Eichmann in Jerusalem:

For the lesson of such stories is simple and within everyone's grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that "it could happen" in most places but it did not happen everywhere. (p. 233)

It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven't done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and repent. (p. 251)

For the truth of the matter was that by the end of the Second World War everybody knew that technical developments in the instruments of violence had made the adoption of "criminal" warfare inevitable.... Hence, it was felt that under these new conditions war crimes were only those outside all military necessities, where a deliberate inhuman purpose could be demonstrated. (p. 256)

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied ... that this new type of criminal ... commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong. (p. 276)

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Turkey's pursuit of peaceful resolutions

Here's one that I missed, because it wasn't on the front page of  the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, my daily reading: a few days before Turkey led the rest of the world in condemning Israel for using violence to stop a blockade-runner heading for Gaza, the Turkish air force was bombing a neighboring country! This from the Daily Star of Beruit, dated May 21:

ANKARA: Turkish warplanes on Thursday bombed dozens of Kurdish rebel targets in neighboring northern Iraq, in one of the biggest raids in recent years, Turkish media reports said.

About 20 fighter jets took part in the operation that targeted positions of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the Zap-Khakurk region of the Kurdish-held autonomous north of Iraq, the NTV news channel reported. 

Nearly 50 targets were hit in day-long missions carried out mainly on intelligence passed on by the Unites States, it said.

The Anatolia news agency reported that the strikes were ordered after a group of PKK rebels were detected on their way toward the Turkish border from their mountainous hideouts in northern Iraq.

NTV said the operation, the second this month, was believed to be a success although there was no immediate confirmation of possible losses to the rebels.

Evidently such bombing attacks are routine along the Turkish-Iraqi border. Can you imagine the universal condemnation that they would have aroused, if it had been Israel bombing Hezbollah targets in Lebanon?. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On blaming Israel

Now here’s a really astonishing thing: for days we were bombarded with sound and video about the botched Israeli seizure of the Turkish ferry, Mavi Marmara. Only rarely was a word written in Israel’s defense, and those mostly by online bloggers—and they were written words, never as effective as the stuff dressed up and fed to us by Robin and George on Good Morning America. Yet what does the American public think about the fracas that left nine “activists” dead?

Rasmussen made this question the subject of its nightly telephone poll (which is conducted by voice recording, on the theory that people will be more honest with a machine than with a human interviewer)? Here are the results:

* 49 percent blame the activists for the bloodshed
* 19 percent blame Israel
* 32 percent aren’t sure

Fascinating. Blue skies! – Dan Ford

Apologize this!

Victor Davis Hanson is a splendid historian--he wrote, among other things, A War Like No Other, about how the Spartans and Athenians did Greek civilization to death. He is also a bit of a right-winger--he writes for, among other venues, Pajamas Media. What set him off yesterday was the Turkish ambassador's demand that Israel apologize for its attack on that ferry running the Gaza blockade:

"If anyone might be offering apologies, it should be Ambassador Tan, or at least an explanation for why a ship left a Turkish port headed for a planned confrontation. A ship, it should be added, staffed in large part by the Insani Yardim Vakfi organization, which according to American and European intelligence chiefs is a terrorist organization with ties to al-Qaeda — an apparent conclusion that formerly a Turkish government used to share when it periodically raided the IHH’s compounds.

"But on a larger point, the sanctimonious tone of Tan’s piece is depressing. Turkey currently quite illegally and against world opinion sponsors the occupation of Cyprus. Nicosia is a far more divided city than Jerusalem. The Turkish government has killed far more Turkish Kurds than the Israeli government has Palestinians; it has zero tolerance for foreign human rights organizations that have wished to investigate the treatment of Kurds in Turkish prisons."

Emphasis mine. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On taking a ship with paintball guns

Aviation Week has a hard-headed comment on the Israeli landing on that Turkish ferry--or perhaps I should say, on the day Israeli took the bait the Turks and Gazans had laid for it. In particular, the writer gives a vivid description of the initial drop, and one you're unlike to hear on CNN:

As each commando, armed only with paint guns, rappelled down the from a helicopter, he was immediately besieged by a violent crowd, beaten, stabbed and assaulted with flying objects. Some were pushed down into the hold and stripped of their anti-flak vests first. Only when reinforcements boarded the ship were weapons used to disperse the furious chaos, which raged uncontrolled aboard the ship's upper and lower decks.

Paint guns!  It's easy to second-guess men in combat (because that's what they were in, armed only with toys), so let's just say that the vaunted Israeli intelligence service seems to have dropped the paint-ball on this one. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

From Gaza to YouTube

I would have wished for more detail, but it does seem pretty clear from this IDF video that there was a quite a riot aboard that Turkish-sponsored cruise ship trying to run the blockade off Gaza. One of the Israeli marines was almost certainly "thrown to a lower deck," as it's generally phrased--thrown off a roof onto a parking lot, in landlubber's terms. Nobody seems to be asking the obvious question: whatever happened to passive resistance? "They are people who seek martyrdom for Allah, as much as they want to reach Gaza, but the first is more desirable," in the words of one admirer. 

Max Boot has some sensible thoughts on this debacle. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

'We never thought there would be any violence'

A dozen or so of the Freedom Flotilla are dead, the Israelis have received another black mark in world opinion, and the flaming idiots who backed the blockade runners have had their illusions shattered. "We never thought there would be any violence," says the wonderfully named Greta Berlin of the Free Gaza Movement. No, of course she didn't. They never do. They lie down in front of bulldozers, curse at National Guard troops, and throw stones at police, and then express astonishment when someone gets hurt.

Channel 10, a private television station in Israel, quoted the Israeli trade minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, as saying between 14 and 16 people had been killed. He said on Israeli Army Radio that commandos boarded the ships by sliding down on ropes from a hovering helicopter and were then struck by passengers with “batons and tools.”

“The moment someone tries to snatch your weapon, to steal your weapons, that’s where you begin to lose control,” Mr. Ben-Eliezer said....

Indeed. There were some on board who wanted that to happen. Ms. Berlin should have known that, if indeed she wasn't one of them herself. So, of course, should the Israeli military have known it. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford