JEWS IN DANGER INSIDE GEORGIA TOO

Yes, there are some people from Israel caught in the crossfire, and even locally born Jews too:

(IsraelNN.com) As the Russian offensive against Georgia rages on, 40 Israeli teachers are trying to make their way out of Georgia, via Turkey or Armenia, and some 50 Jews have requested to make Aliyah (immigration to Israel).

The 40 teachers arrived in Georgia's capital city of Tbilisi on Friday in the framework of a vacation trip organized by the Histadrut Teachers Union. Upon landing, however, they abruptly found themselves in the middle of a war zone, with no way to leave. Arkia, the Israeli airline that flew them in, has already announced the cancellation of its next flight from Tbilisi to Israel, this coming Friday, because of the war situation.

A factory run by Israeli investors was also bombed by Russia's army of darkness. With this declaration of war, I'd say Vladimir Putin has fully shed the mask and shown that he is as bad as the Leninists who came before him.

LAWYERIZED WAR

While I'm personally not an expert on law, I can say that there is what to learn about why lawyerizing war is very ill-advised (Hat tip: Patterico's Pontifications and Instapundit):

This week the IDF distributed ribbons to its soldiers and officers for their service in the war with Hizbullah in 2006. The ribbons were a source of embarrassment. Soldiers and officers, who like the general public view the war as Israel’s greatest military defeat, are loath to pin them on their uniforms.

While the soldiers and general public view the war as a failure, one sector of Israeli society sees the war as a great triumph. For Israel’s legal establishment, the war was a great victory. It was a war in which its members asserted their dominance over Israel’s political and military leadership.

The legal establishment’s ardor for the Second Lebanon War was exposed on Tuesday with the publication of the testimonies of Attorney-General Menahem Mazuz and Military Advocate-General Avichai Mandelblit before the Winograd Committee which the Olmert government established to research the war’s failures. In their testimonies both men shared their perception of the war as a great victory of lawyers in their campaign to “lawyerize” - or assert their control - over Israeli society.

In his opening statement, Mazuz extolled the war as “the most ‘lawyerly’ in the history of the State of Israel, and perhaps ever.” He explained, “The process didn’t begin in Lebanon 2006. It… is a gradual process of ‘lawyerizing’ life in Israel.”

Mazuz responded negatively to the question of whether legal considerations superseded operational and strategic goals during the war. He claimed that the government and the IDF restricted their plans from the beginning to conform with perceived legal restrictions.

As he put it, that preemptive limitation of goals was “the result of a sort of education and internalization that have taken place over the years. I remember periods where there was a great deal of friction with the senior military level regarding what is allowed and what is prohibited. But today I think that there is more or less an understanding of the rules of the game and I can’t identify any confrontation... or ... demands to ‘Let the IDF win.’”

Mandelblit and Mazuz testified that legal advisers were present at all levels of command in all the relevant service arms and in the security cabinet. At each level the lawyers were asked to judge the legality of all the proposed targets and planned operations before they were carried out. And as the two explained, in their decisions, these lawyers were informed not by the goal of winning the war, but by their interpretation of international law.

From both men’s perspectives, international law takes precedence over the national interests in wartime war. Mazuz argued, “Today international law controls our lives, no less … than domestic law. In all spheres - not just in the sphere of the laws of war… the sovereignty of states is diminishing and international law is becoming the tip of the pyramid of norms. It is becoming a substitute for the constitutions of states.”

A perfect lesson why legal issues cannot be allowed to dictate the outcome of battle. And Mazuz should be ashamed of himself if he's upholding the whole notion.

HILLARY REVERSES HERSELF: WILL NEGOTIATE WITH IRAN

 
So Hillary has changed her mind and will negotiate with Iran. Given her triple talk at the last Democratic debate, odds are she'll change her mind fourteen or fifteen more times before the general election, so we may end up okay.

Idea: Reliapundit. Cross-posted at Doug Ross @ Journal.

BOLTON SAYS IT RIGHT: WE SHOULD ATTACK IRAN AND DEPOSE OF AHMEDINEJAD

John Bolton spoke to the British Tories and had the following to say:

Former US ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton told Tory delegates in Britain Sunday that efforts by the UK and the EU to negotiate with Iran had failed and that he saw no alternative to a pre-emptive strike on suspected nuclear facilities in the country.

Bolton said that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was "pushing out" and "is not receiving adequate push-back" from the West. "I don't think the use of military force is an attractive option, but I would tell you I don't know what the alternative is.

"Because life is about choices, I think we have to consider the use of military force. I think we have to look at a limited strike against their nuclear facilities."

He added that any strike should be followed by an attempt to remove the "source of the problem", Ahmadinejad.

"If we were to strike Iran it should be accompanied by an effort at regime change ... The US once had the capability to engineer the clandestine overthrow of governments. I wish we could get it back," he said.

Bolton said that the fact that only partial intelligence about Iran's nuclear activity existed should not be used as an excuse not to act.

"Intelligence can be wrong in more than one direction... Responding after they (nuclear devices) are used is unacceptable."

Bolton also said the UN was "fundamentally irrelevant".

The former envoy criticized Britain's "softly softly" approach to Iran's imprisonment of 15 British sailors in April.

They were released after Ahmadinejad announced he was making a "gift" to the British people. "They [Iran] got no response from the UK or the US. If you were the Iranian leader, what conclusion do you draw?"

A very sad thing about how the British navy sailors were freed is that the UK may have paid Iran to get them back (H/T: Molten Thought). If that's so, I'd say it makes England an unreliable partner in the GWOT.

BRITAIN LETTING DISTASTE FOR JEWISH STATE GET IN THE WAY OF NOT HAVING A NUCLEAR WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Priorities:

The British government has blocked almost one third of British military exports to Israel this year, citing possible threats to regional stability and fears the equipment might facilitate human rights violations. According to official figures, the value of UK military sales arms to Israel declined by one third last year, and has fallen by a drastic 75 percent since 2005... in May the UK's Legal Services Commission, the state agency that provides funding for attorney's fees for indigent defendants, agreed to underwrite the costs of litigation brought by a Palestinian man in a British court seeking a ban on arms sales to Israel.

The British government is paying for someone to sue the British government to stop arms sales to Israel. That, brothers and sisters, is some solid work right there.

Anyway, this "regional tensions" thing is not just an excuse, it's an excuse that's so transparently false that you begin to suspect that Britain wants people to know that it's intentionally setting itself in opposition to Israel. There's only one thing that anyone can be really sure of about the Middle East: every time that a hostile Arab state reaches military parity with Israel, they take it as an invitation to start a war. Say what you will about deterrence theory or Israeli aggression or Arab intransigence: as a matter of undeniable historical fact, military parity between Israel and its Arab enemies is correlated with acts of war against Israel that spiral outward. And of course, the other neat thing about weakening Israel's conventional arsenal is that it forces Jerusalem to rely more heavily on nuclear weapons, both in terms of actual warfighting (if they get overrun) and in terms of the threshold for the weapons' use (to prevent same). Well played, Britain, well played.

[Read an extended version of this post at Mere Rhetoric]

JUST HOW MANY WARS WILL THERE BE IIN LEBANON THIS SUMMER?

Definitely one between jihadists and the Lebanese army:

The latest trouble in Lebanon began in a rundown refugee camp called "Cold River," where U.S. officials fear Al Qaeda is trying to ignite the war-ravaged country into an inferno once again... This time, the fighting is north of Tripoli and between the fledgling Lebanese army and Sunni groups loyal to Osama Bin Laden who are holed up in the Nahr Al-Bared ("Cold River") Palestinian refugee camp. "It's going to be a very hot summer in tiny Lebanon," predicts Fawaz Gerges, a Lebanese-born Sarah Lawrence College scholar, who is researching jihadis in the country. "You have Al Qaeda-inspired groups ready to die. These people fight until the end."

AQ is opening up a southern front, just to really ignite the country. We're not too worried about AQ taking over South Lebanon - we don't think Hezbollah will give it to them. As for the second war: anti-Syrian exiles are identifying Assad as the culprit behind last week's Katyusha attack on Kiryat Shemona. So no way this can go poorly.

[Read an extended version of this post at Mere Rhetoric]

We Will Get All Industrial On Them

Wonderful discussion going on at Dr. Sanity's about shame cultures, why they tend to despotism, and why their war on the West could lead to unfortunate consequences. Especially for them.

The Dr. not being an avid historian gives Dresden as an example of what Americans are capable of. Commenter Simon-Peter sets her straight and proves it was mainly a British show. So I decided to help the Doctor out:

Simon-Peter,

I think the point is not to make exact American points, but to show what Western Man is capable of.

The fire bombing of Japanese cities is probably the best American example - with Hiroshima and Nagasaki the exclamation points.

The generals bombing Japan were worried. They were running out of cities to destroy. As I recall they figured that by Nov. or Dec. of '45 there would be no major targets worth bombing.

Heck, the atom bomb guys were worried. The production rate was only about 3 a month. Not enough to sustain a bombing campaign.

Consider the state of mind required to think like that.

These islamo nut jobs do not want to continue tickling the dragon's tail. We will get all industrial on them.

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at Classical Values