Yesterday I wrote an article about how lack of aggression has allowed Israel to control the initiative and choose the time and place it wants to fight. If you haven’t read that article, please do so now.
Back in 1938 the Allied powers agreed to let Hitler cut up Czechloslovakia. At the time the Czechs had a huge army, and if supported, they were willing to fight. They weren’t supported and, soon enough, France and Britain had to fight Germany minus a massive central European army at their side.
Woops.
October 7th took the Israelis by complete surprise. For two days Hamas roved free. After that, the Israelis systematically bombed the hell out of Gaza and then invaded. They were incompetent and Hamas fought well, but Hamas was vastly outnumbered and out-equipped. To this day they haven’t been able to stop Hamas entirely, but they’ve done a lot of damage and certainly killed hundreds of thousands of civilians.
During all this Hezbollah just launched missiles. Oh, they did damage, for sure, and they caused hundreds of thousands of internal refugees and an Israeli economic crisis. Iran supplied Hezbollah and Yemen but unless hit, did nothing directly.
Hezbollah could have hit far, far harder. They could even have invaded, especially during the period when much of the army was tied up in Gaza.
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There’s a concept in military strategy and tactics called “initiative.” The side with the initiative is forcing the other side to react to it. Hamas started with the initiative, but soon lost it and the Resistance sat back and let Israel do what it wanted, when it wanted. Israel mapped out Southern Lebanon, took its time setting up assassinations and figuring out where the missile stocks were: then it struck.
Israel was gifted the initiative by the Resistance (well, not so much Yemen, they did what they could).
Hamas wasn’t ever very strong, to be sure. Not Czechloslovakia, but no joke. Their hope was always that if they provoked a war, the Resistance would join in and they could win.
But the Resistance, who were resentful that Hamas didn’t warn them of October 7th, half-assed it, and didn’t strike when Israel was most vulnerable. (It’s clear Hamas was right not to tell Iran and Hezbollah about October 7th given how compromised they both are by the Mossad.)
Now Hamas, though still fighting, is no longer a serious threat to Israel and Hezbollah was caught on its back foot though I hear at least one credible report that they’re recovering fast.
To go back to the Nazi analogy, Israel is a genocidal power with wants lebensraum.
If the shoe fits.
You don’t play around with Nazis, and so far the Resistance has been doing just that. And even more than Hezbollah, this means Iran.
Surrender, or fight. Stop the half measures.
Carborundum
Viewed objectively, without the benefit of hindsight, what does attacking Israel across the frontier on October 8th get Hezbollah? What does a specifically Lebanese resistance movement get from that action? They can hurt Israel? Okay, but to what end? What’s the strategy?
The Israelis aren’t going anywhere – the notion that Hezbollah is going to invade Israel and defeat them in detail is fantasy. They can use asymmetric strategies to bleed the Israelis and incur significant costs for relatively insignificant investments, but at the end of the day they just ain’t going to be standing victorious on the battlefield while the Israelis sail away. Some, sure. Enough, no.
Ian Welsh
Hit them when they’re off-balance. Don’t let them hit you at the time and place of their choosing.
This is strategy 101. I mean this is Sun Tzu.
Carborundum
The point is hit them to what end? It’s been a while since I read Sun Tsu but I don’t remember him advising hitting just for hitting’s sake.
Ian Welsh
To maintain the initiative and not let Israel determine the tempo of the war, which so far it has done.
As to why you’d want to do that, well, I’m trying to think of any military strategist who has suggested otherwise. Coming up blank. Letting the enemy set the terms of engagement is a sure way to lose a war unless you have a massive advantage, which the Resistance does not.
Carborundum
This is sounding like a bit of a tautology. Let me try again – If I’m Hezbollah, what am I trying to maintain initiative and determine the pace of the war *for*? What is the larger objective here? What am I hoping to achieve?
Me, personally, I don’t think that it can be pushing the Israelis into the sea. Deterring Israeli aggression seems like a possibility, as does demonstrating solidarity with Gaza – I’m sure there are others. What I don’t get, in the absence of being able to push the Israelis into the sea, is why I would go against decades of experience and not reflexively conserve forces.
Ian Welsh
Right. That’s more clear.
But what it actually lead to was the destruction of significant stockpiles of missiles and allowing Israel to attack when it chose. I’ve also seen some reports from a source I trust that Hezbollah lost a fair chunk of troops in the first days of new offensive. They didn’t die doing anything useful. Not a crippling amount, as best I can tell, but not insignificant–Hezbollah didn’t fully understand the lessons of Ukraine.
Israel’s a pretty small country. You don’t need huge advances to do a lot of damage.
Reflexive conservation of troops is a good phrase, and, I think, correct. Problem is that the situation is different from in the past. Letting Hamas be degraded so much, and so many Gaza citizens be killed without taking advantage of their sacrifice seems to me a mistake.
Time will tell.
I think the assassination of Hezbollah’s leadership is going to turn out to be a good thing for Hezbollah and a bad one for Israel, though. The new leadership will be more aggressive and hardline.
Times have changed, strategy needs to change with it.
Revelo
Easy for armchair generals to come up with contra factual histories. Russia-Ukraine war gives countless example of how war is full of surprises: surprise for Ukraine that NATO is only giving limited support, surprise for Russia that their military in 2022 was rusty and weaker than expected due to corruption and led by incompetent parquet (close relative to armchair) generals, surprise for both sides in role of drones and relative unimportance of tanks, etc.
USA wants a base in the Israel area and USA will do whatever it takes to protect such a base, including genociding anyone who gets in its way. Hamas was pushed to the brink, so had to act, but Hezbollah is not forced to act. If USA deploys it’s full might, it can simply genocide all of Lebanon, and if Israel destroyed in the process, too bad. Hezbollah wise to be cautious.
Iran is in a much stronger position but Iran’s best strategy is to wait, as USA and Israel both weaken with time.
BTW you should also recall what ultimately happened to those Nazis who took the military initiative in Czechoslovakia. Taking the initiative is often a bad idea, given the uncertainty of war. Israel is likely to discover this truth eventually, same as Nazis discovered it heading towards 1945.
TM
I agree in principle; I’m just not convinced that a light infantry / guerilla force has the capacity to invade Israel in the face of overwhelmingly superior air power, artillery and a willingness to use both indiscriminately. You’re leaving your prepared positions to take territory that you have already been able to interdict and evacuate with missiles, and placing yourself at extreme disadvantage.
Obviously viewing this from afar with no special sources in the midst of an all spectrum information war, I have no idea what any of the combatants are truly capable of. If they really have been holding back on using their missile stockpiles and strategic targeting, then it feels like they have absolutely fumbled the initiative. The depressing, nagging suspicion in the back of my mind is that this is the best they can do, and they didn’t stand a chance in the first place.
Wadangala Kaladoota
If the Iranians are looking to have more martyrs, then I’m sure Israel is happy to make them. I think they’re not trying to replicate their war with Iraq now, though; there’s too much to be done here in real life. Forget that 72-virgins bullshit they throw out to the masses, they have oil to sell before the bottom falls out of the market thanks to China pushing renewable energy and electric cars
Anonymous
Sheesh, why shouldn’t Hezbollah and Iran blow their load now and ensure that Americans will get pulled in and spend the next decade fighting an unwinnable war, exactly as Netanyahu has been prodding for since the 1990s.
Westerners always go back to WWII, the last war they “won”. When you should be looking at Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, Korea, Southern Africa, Algeria, or China. It’s always been about keeping the resistance organization alive and being willing to bear higher costs than your colonizers until they pack their bags and go home.
Israel’s open brutality and Western hypocrisy on behalf of Israel aren’t strengths. It’s a sign of desperation and intellectual bankruptcy. They couldn’t create plausible deniability for their thievery and bloodlust anymore. They’re going back to the same handbook of decapitation strikes against an organization built specifically to resist such strikes.
Who are these trusted sources on Hezbollah’s munition stocks? My sources (Elijah Magnier, The Cradle) suggest that while the strikes have hurt Hezbollah as to some additional stock that they recently brought in, their core stockpile is not touched and they still have a pipeline of more munitions through Syria. The missile hits and ground fighting are escalating, just not at a level to draw too much Western attention and give Netanyahu his US-Iran war.
On how compromised Hezbollah is by Israeli intelligence. There’s no way for outsiders to tell and a lot of the information being floated are Israeli and Western disinformation intended to confuse everyone. However, Magnier does point out that Hezbollah likely compromised a lot of their opsec and personnel information during the Syrian War and that much of the leadership expected to be taken out right afterwards. So what’s depicted as a breach may be an understandable trade-off of infosec for operational necessities. Similarly, remember that Nasrallah previously survived 3 known assassination attempts, one time because he left early and the other two times because the bunker survived the attack. Opsec can only go so far if your enemy has all of the West’s signal intelligence and human intelligence at it’s command, and when your enemies are willing to openly drop 83 bunker buster bomb on thousands of civilians to get at you. Particularly in a city like Beirut and when Nasrallah was the leading politician and religious leader in Lebanon.
Tallifer
The US probably sees Israel as a tiny besieged Czechoslovakia under threat from the regional hegemon of Iran and its proxy militias. And Lebanon as a country captured and occupied by Iran’s clients.
Feral Finster
“You don’t play around with Nazis, and so far the Resistance has been doing just that. And even more than Hezbollah, this means Iran.
Surrender, or fight. Stop the half measures.”
The difference between Israel is 2024 and nazi Germany in 1938 is that Israel wants a vigorous response so that it can run screaming to its American thug.
It would not be the first time that the United States and its catamites went to war on Israel’s behalf.
From the Israeli perspective, it’s a no-lose proposition.
bruce wilder
I suppose that most Arab states (not to be confused with mass opinion) want the war to stop. I suppose Iran wants to return, at least, to a hostile standoff. Israel is not offering either option at this time. Peace or standoff on what terms is not on offer that I know of. Israel is not offering any terms for peace that any of its opponents could conceivably accept. Netanyahu’s address (in English) “to the people of Lebanon” was absurd in its presumptions and contained no offer. Correct me if I am misinformed.
Israel is vulnerable to internal economic collapse and abandonment by an economically significant part of its population. Israel is vulnerable to reputational damage and international isolation. Israel may be vulnerable to military exhaustion, air defense in particular, in ways I know little about.
How vulnerable they really are to missiles, rockets and drones is beyond my ability to assess, but I imagine that strategically a lot depends on clever focus on indirect targeting that implicates those global vulnerabilities.
Thru the fog of western propaganda, I sense that Iran along with Hezbollah has been trying to get Israel to back off its “escalation dominance” gambit. If that has been Iran’s game — to try and reset a hostile stalemate with implied tit-4-tat “rules” — that has been a costly failure in the short-term or a mere delaying tactic in a successful long-term strategy to attrit Israel economically and narratively. Time will tell, I suppose.
In my ignorance of real military and intelligence capability, I am reluctant to be drawn into “cheerleading” for fear of substituting macabre wishes for realistic appraisal.
StewartM
Revelo
BTW you should also recall what ultimately happened to those Nazis who took the military initiative in Czechoslovakia.
I agree with Ian that the Czechoslovakia crises of 1938 that led to the Munich conference is an over-used comparison. In fact, in this book on US WWII and post-war foreign policy, Rise to Globalism Stephen Ambrose made the point that one Adolf Hitler influenced US Cold War policy more than any other person.
Hitler’s pre-conference shtick was that “I just want to unite all Germans under one flag”—hence the re-occupation of the Rhineland, and the Anschluss of Austria into the Reich. To many people in the UK, feeling (I feel mostly wrongfully) guilty about the Versailles Treaty, this is not an unreasonable aspiration. The Sudetenland region of western Czechoslovakia is ethnically German, so Hitler’s demands fit.
However, the Sudetenland is also where the Czech defenses are, where their equivalent of the Maginot line is. To boot, it’s mountainous terrain and thus defensible. So the Czechs understandably don’t want to give it up to a powerful, possibly antagonistic, neighbor and lose both their prepared defense and their natural defense.
In the crises of 1938, the French were allied with Czechslovakia, along with Romania and Yugoslavia, in the “Little Entente”. However, after the bloodletting of WWI and largely the loss of an entire generation of Frenchmen, the French leadership didn’t believe it can act without the British. So British involvement was key. This proved to be unfortunate, as it was the British (who, unlike the French, had the luxury of the geographic protection of the English Channel) who are most apt to feel guilty over the “horrible” Versailles Treaty and moreover be betoken to the notion that Nazi Germany was some sort of bulwark against Soviet communism. So they pushed to cave to Hitler’s demands.
When this happened, two other “hyenas” (Churchill’s term), joined the feast: Poland and Hungary. The USSR had offered the Czechs help, but had no way of practically helping as the USSR shared no border with Czechoslovakia. And Poland was adamant that no Soviet troops would ever be allowed to cross their frontiers to assist the Czechs. Hungary too, grabbed the southern part of Slovakia and also Ruthenia (now part of Ukraine).
However, it took only 6 months for Hitler to tear up the Munich agreement and occupy the rest of Czechoslovakia not-grabbed by Poland and Hungary. This resulted in the Poles now being surrounded on three sides by Nazi-occupied territory. A mere year later, their turn would come to feel Hitler’s embrace. Idiots!!
John Toland, in his biography of Hitler regarded the occupation of the rest of Czechoslovakia as Hitler’s first big mistake. Hitler had been able to acquire territory bloodlessly precisely because of the combination of British guilt over Versailles coupled with the notion of Hitler being a “bulwark vs Soviet communism” shtick so popular with UK conservatives (save Churchill). After Munich, even Chamberlain and the people who had signed the agreement were never going to sign another one with Hitler, and moved to offer guarantees to Poland. The aftermath of Munich showed that Hitler’s word was meaningless.
As Ambrose noted, this also had major repercussions in US foreign policy. During the Cold War in US politics, *everyone* became Hitler–Stalin was Hitler, Mao was Hitler, Ho Chi Minh was Hitler, Castro was Hitler, and even (recently) Saddam was Hitler. However, none of these were Hitler. The reason why the Czech crises of 1938 is so overused as an analogy is that “Hitlers”– the person whose greed and appetite are insatiable, and their demands are just a cover for the next demand, which will follow step-by-step, and whose ultimate goal is to destroy you–are actually pretty rare. With most countries and leaders who have a quarrel with you, it really IS about that particular issue, and no more or not much more.
To use a personal analogy, it’s like when your neighbor complains to you about
your dog pooping on his yard, you think “If I give in to him on this, the next thing he’ll do is to confiscate my lawn equipment, have sex with my wife, sell the kids into slavery, and force-feed Fido grain-filled dog food. NOOOO!!!” But no, it’s really just about what your dog is doing, and if you agree to keep your dog on your property, everything will be good again. That’s normal among us as individuals, and also normal in the interactions of nations. “Hiters” are the exception, not the rule
Now–insofar as Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran are concerned, is Bibi’s Israel a “Hitler”.? Does Bibi intend to ultimately destroy them? I think that’s a fair point, and the way Ian sees it, so here the Munich comparison would be valid.
Altandmain
@Ian
There is a point of disagreement I have – a tactically defensive strategy is often the right one. A good example of this is Russia, which after the Ukrainians, at the behest of the Biden administration backed out of the Istanbul talks in 2022, adopted a defensive strategy.
They gave ground to minimize their casualties and built defensive lines. They knew the West and Ukrainians would attack. At times, they built major defensive positions and the Ukrainians threw away their men in suicidal frontal attacks. It’s why when you saw all the claims in 2022 and 2023 of Ukraine capturing a village or a town, it really was throwing away men that hastened their defeat.
It’s only now that the Ukrainians have depleted their reserves that the Russians are now pushing on the offensive. Putin actually overruled his military, which wanted a faster win. Putin argued that this strategy lowered Russian casualties. It also meant that the Western plot to weaken Russia failed. There won’t be the high Russian death toll the neocons hoped for.
Globally as well, Russia was able to keep its reputation, keep its losses low, and the West is looking increasingly isolated. 85% of the world’s population live somewhere that has not sanctioned Russia.
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In the case of Hezbollah, there is a big case for the defensive strategy. Hezbollah has spent the past 18 years building up defenses since Israel attacked in 2006 in Lebanon because they knew that Israel would go back. Going on the attack would mean Hezbollah would not have the terrain advantage of those defenses.
Allowing the IDF to attack because Netanyahu is overly aggressive may be the best option. The IDF itself objected to Netanyahu wanting to attack Lebanon, especially due to the poor performance of the IDF in 2006. So too did the Israel intelligence. But Netanyahu and the politicians have the final decision. Netanyahu may replace Yoav Gallant, his defense minister.
Hezbollah is very decentralized and organized into cells of 500 to 1,000 people, and Israel vastly overestimated the effect assassinating Nasrallah would have. Not to mention, they probably didn’t expect an outpouring of sympathy and support for Hezbollah. Leader in an organization like means accepting that risk – for them it is an honour to be martyred. Note in many of the statements around Nasrallah, they say he was “martyred”.
Thus far, the IDF has taken losses in their incursion. Their performance has been very poor and they have been proven a poor fighting force. Hezbollah is a much better organized army than Hamas, which is more of a guerilla force with limited resources.
https://thecradle.co/articles/hezbollah-death-traps-attacks-on-supply-lines-deal-heavy-blows-to-israeli-army
The ultimate goal for Israel is to steal the fresh water supply of the Litani River in Lebanon (the area is a desert so water is scarce and now that Israel has stolen the water of the Palestinians, there isn’t much left save for desalination). But Israel won’t be able to achieve that.
Once Israel suffers from attrition, then Hezbollah’s best strategy is to counterattack. This may very well cost Israel the Galilee. Some of the smarter Israelis understand the folly of what Israel has done:
https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2024/06/14/727446/Israel-Yiftah-Ron-Tal-security-zone-Lebanon-Hezbollah-
It also means that the Israelis in the north who were evacuated away will never be able to return, which was an objective Netanyahu has set.
—
Iran is much stronger than many of the comments suggest. There’s a good technical discussion about this that Scott Ritter and Andrei Martyanov made:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8v5rX22qzM
Anyways, Iran may have a reserve of around 100k missiles plus whatever else they can make. They can fire 500 to 1,000 missiles at a time and the strike on Israel was just 180 missiles. Israel has only 5 power plants, and they could strike water treatment plants, desalination, or other critical infrastructure.
Iran’s challenge right now is to rebuild its economy and acceptance in the world economy. They’ve suffered from the Western sanctions enormously, and that has cost the government its popularity. Iran doesn’t have the kind of resources that China or Russia do – they suffered a lot, like the Cubans have, under US sanctions. The integration into BRICs, especially closer ties with China and Russia have left the Iranian economy and living standards in the best performance they’ve been in decades.
Part of the reason why the government is reluctant to be aggressive is because they are scared to disrupt that growth. They also want to gain legitimacy in the world – if Iran can’t trade with the West, they want global acceptance with that 85% of the world.
If Israel attacks first, then Iran and Hezbollah get the sympathy of the world. One of the big points that needs to be understood is that after October 7, 2023, the world was sympathetic to Israel, but they threw it away with their genocide and when people understood the apartheid nature of pre-Oct 7 2023. Like how the US threw away the sympathy of 9-11-2001 with its attack on Iraq and the pretense of Saddam and the falsified accusations he had WMDs, the nature of Israel has thrown away all of the sympathy.
That being said, unless provoked, Iran can’t just go ahead and strike Israel power plants or water infrastructure without getting the condemnation of the Global South. I think given Israel’s actions, we are reaching the point where Iran will be able to do so. The same could be said about Russia – they could not destroy Ukraine’s power plants in 2022. It was only after Ukraine’s war crimes against Russia became so egregious that the Russians could justify it without being a pariah.
At that point, I think Ian will get what he wants to see, and what most people here want to see, a major Israeli loss.
Israel is running headlong into economic ruin and the political mood in the US is not one that wants war. A common thing I’m hearing after Hurricane Helene is how the US is able to spend so much on Ukraine, but is stingy towards Americans affected by natural disasters. It’s resulted in a satire website calling it out:
https://babylonbee.com/news/north-carolina-asks-zelensky-for-100-billion-in-us-funding
If the US public en masse demands changes, maybe even not the Israeli lobby can overcome that. Hurricane Milton is worsening that anger. Without the current levels US backing, Israel isn’t viable.
Dan Kelly
what it actually lead to was the destruction of significant stockpiles of missiles and allowing Israel to attack when it chose.
So, ‘it’ didn’t in any way, shape or form ‘maintain the initiative and not let Israel determine the tempo of the war, which so far it has done.’
What is the ‘it’ we are talking about?
‘It’ was your immediate answer to these substantial questions:
‘what am I trying to maintain initiative and determine the pace of the war *for*?’
and
‘why I would go against decades of experience and not reflexively conserve forces.’
The tautology is met with further tautology in a self-defeating loop.
Sun Tzu hasn’t adequately answered this most fundamental question, and he continues to put ‘his’ people in harm’s way to an end that he himself cannot adequately define:
They can use asymmetric strategies to bleed the Israelis and incur significant costs for relatively insignificant investments, but at the end of the day they just ain’t going to be standing victorious on the battlefield while the Israelis sail away. Some, sure. Enough, no.
And the Israelis know this and they know what leverage they have inside institutions around the world – not just ‘the west.’
Please tell us what the endgame is, Sun-Tzu. Millions of our people are being slaughtered, our history is being erased and rewritten right before our very eyes.
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Israel is likely to discover this truth eventually, same as Nazis discovered it heading towards 1945
Hitler committed suicide while still German head of state on April 30, 1945. The official German Instrument of Surrender was signed on May 8, 1945:
‘…the High Command of the German Armed Forces surrendered simultaneously to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force and to the Supreme High Command of the Red Army at the end of World War II in Europe. Before the main body of the German military surrendered, there were partial surrenders of components of the German military.’
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Definitive_German_Instrument_of_Surrender_(8_May_1945)
In other words, the ‘Allied Powers’ and the ‘Red Army’ and its allies took over the entire political-military-intel apparatus of Germany including the furthest depths of its innermost bowels, and got these people to sign a document of surrender.
Parts of this apparatus had already been compromised and dismantled: ‘Before the main body of the German military surrendered, there were partial surrenders of components of the German military.’
Has any of this been done to Israel? Rhetorical. How do you envision it happening?
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On August 6 and 9, the US and allies detonated the first ever nuclear bombs inside Japan.
Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor in an alleged ‘surprise’ attack on the US naval base in Honolulu back on December 7, 1941. There is ample evidence that Roosevelt ignored warnings from a top naval commander so that the attack could proceed – a ‘let it happen on purpose’ scenario as opposed to an orchestrated false flag.
The United States was neutral in regards to entering the war at that point, and the majority of the people did not want to go to send their children to die in a war in Europe.
The attack obviously served to sway public opinion towards entering the war.
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Leading figures were then put on trial before the world – after being tortured – and a history was subsequently written.
The history presented to the masses of each side of the newly manufactured ‘east-west’ divide was, fascinatingly, extraordinarily different – this despite the fact that they had just conspired to defeat what has subsequently come to be defined as the world’s most dangerous evil.
This is all a larger conversation, but the immediate point is this:
How is this in any way, shape or form even remotely analogous to the current situation with the nuclear-armed Jewish State of Israel and its non-nuclear armed gentile ‘Arab neighbors’ who were the vast majority of the population less than a hundred years ago?
A population made up of an actual living panorama of cultures and religions and ways of life, including those of the minority Jewish populations who practiced their customs free of discrimination – until the Zionist influence began to take hold.
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Zionism, incidentally, is not Christian in origin. It is directly derived from, and still very much related to, certain canons and now modern interpretations of said canons, that preceded the rise and spread of Christianity and later Islam.
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Remember, Israel stole both the nuclear know-how and the material for it from the US after Kennedy and his administration – who were adamantly against both Israel having nukes and their, at the time, clandestinely subversive wanton ignoring of campaign finance and propaganda rules inside the US that every other nation has to adhere to.
Fast forward to today, and this once clandestine operation is now blatant.
It is currently against the law in most places inside the US and around the world to in any way question the Jewish Zionist narrative of historical events.
This includes Russsia.
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Once again, I am not a Kennedy cultist.
It is obvious that he and those he surrounded himself with correctly foresaw this monstrous tautological quagmire that is slaughering millions with no end in sight.
So, JFK was assassinated and his administration – which had wanted to reconfigure the Zionized CIA in the interest of the country, not Israel and globalized finance – his administration and its initiatives were immediately neutered.
Johnson, the man who took his place, was only there because Kennedy needed the Southern vote, and Kennedy was going to replace him upon reelection. His Zionist connections are legendary, but that again is a larger conversation.
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The pointed question is this:
How is modern nuclear-armed Israel at all analogous to Nazi Germany of yesteryear before the advent of nuclear warfare?
The answer is a resounding ‘It is not in any way related due to the nukes. Obviously.’
So please stop using it. It ignores the defacto battlefield.
How can you operate effectively. let alone win the battle, if you are unaware of the conditions within which you are operating?
mago
Lengthy and interesting comments here—involved, multi layered and nuanced.
Going off topic to express an epiphany that occurred about the Zion thing and Mormon doctrine and fundamentalist Christian types and their toxic ideologies meshing with the meshuganas’ ideas of God given rights and divine intervention/retribution.
Having grown up in Mormon country not far from Brigham Young’s Zion in-the Desert-on a salt flat (Salt Lake City) where seagulls rescued the chosen people from a locust plague back in the day, I can confidently say that what matters is what we say and what we do.
Of course it all follows from how we think.
Not making sense/stop making sense.
Same as it ever was . . .
Then there’s Bob Marley who sang his own Rasta Zion themes.
Also:
It’s not just me and it’s not just you/but it’s all around the world.
There’s no need to publish this Ian. Thanks.
I’m just dicking around in the night.