Classic Vehicle Channel
Published 18 Apr 2020The oil industry and the manufacture of fuel.
October 20, 2023
Look at Life – Oil Aboard (1963)
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October 19, 2023
Why there are no regional refuges available to Gazan civilians
Ed West outlines the sad story of Palestinian civilians uprooted from their homes by the many conflicts that have convulsed the region:
Arab attacks in May and June 1948.
United States Military Academy Atlas, Link.
It is generally a good idea for refugees to be housed in neighbouring countries rather than on different continents, for a number of reasons, but we should be wary of casually stating that Arab states should house Gazans. In a difficult region many of these countries have already put themselves under enormous strain through acts of immense generosity, and none more so than Jordan.
[…]
The survival of Jordan’s monarchy has been one of the more surprising outcomes of the past few decades, and experts have repeatedly bet against it. The country has an unusually bad hand in many ways. Situated beside the disputed Holy Land, it lacks the natural resources of neighbouring Saudi Arabia and Iraq, while also being more remote than Lebanon or Syria, which had long been at the heart of Mediterranean trading networks and far more plugged into European markets.
But most of all it has suffered the destabilising effect of refugees. Abdullah is named after his great-grandfather, the first King of Jordan, whose assassination in 1951 forms the opening of Hussein’s autobiography; indeed he calls it “the most profound influence of my life”. He was just 15 years-old when he travelled with his grandfather to Jerusalem to perform Friday prayers, where the monarch was shot dead by a Palestinian. The gunman then fired at Hussein but the bullet struck a medal his grandfather had given him.
Abdullah I had ruled the new kingdom for just five years, and it endured an incredibly bad start with defeat in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, which led to a surge of refugees. Estimates of exact numbers seem to vary hugely, but in Lion of Jordan, Avi Shlaim writes that 700,000 Palestinians left in 1948, and of these “450,000 ended up in Jordan, which did more than any other Arab state to help them resettle and integrate with the rest of society”.
He wrote: “The refugees in Jordan wanted to preserve their separate Palestinian identity, but this ran counter to Abdullah’s policy of ‘Jordanization’.” He gave them citizenship rights “but the refugees were a great burden on the weak Jordanian economy; it simply did not have the financial resources to cope with a humanitarian tragedy on such a vast scale.” Many ended up in resentful poverty and “the Palestinians thus became an important factor in domestic Jordanian politics”.
Another source suggests that in 1949, “Jordan welcomed approximately 900,000 refugees by amending the country’s 1928 Law of Nationality to grant equal citizenship to Palestinians; the 1954 Law of Jordanian Nationality later extended citizenship to Palestinians who arrived in Jordan after the 1949 addendum.”
After another defeat against Israel in 1967, up to 300,000 displaced Palestinians in the West Bank retained Jordanian citizenship, and today around 40% of the Jordanian population descend from Palestinian refugees, although the figure may be higher (again, they vary hugely). What seems certain is that about 40% of displaced Palestinians and their descendants live in Jordan, with another 10% in Syria (although many of those have since fled to Lebanon).
The Hashemites, unlike some Arab countries, were keen to integrate the newcomers and to avoid them having to endure a permanent refugee existence; that is why three-quarters of Palestinians in Jordan are Jordanian citizens, although Palestinians from Gaza aren’t, that area having been part of Egypt before the Six-Day War.
In contrast Palestinians who fled to Syria were not given citizenship, for all the talk of solidarity, and often remained in refugee camp-cities for decades (many of which were heavily affected by the Syrian war).
In Lebanon it was even worse; there the Palestinians could neither gain citizenship, nor in many cases access things like healthcare, education or work. The situation here was uniquely dangerous, because their arrival tipped the country’s incredibly delicate balance between Christians, Shia, Sunni and Druze; in 1975 the country descended into civil war, a horror that saw a modern example of shibboleths where Christian militiamen would present tomatoes to suspected Palestinians and ask them to pronounce the name.
This refugee surge had a destabilising effect on Jordan. Already in 1958 things were so bad that Hussein hoped to form a tripartite union with Saudi Arabia and Iraq to counter the influence of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt. Neither neighbour was too keen on the idea, and Saudi prince Abd al-Ilah remarked that “Hussein’s trouble stemmed from the fact that 70 per cent of his subjects were Palestinians with no loyalty to the throne”.
But in 1970, three years after the Six-Day War, it reached a crisis point, with the British ambassador commenting that “the mixture became so volatile that the container exploded”. There now came full civil war in Jordan between the army and the Palestinian fedayeen.
Jordan had become home to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, but this umbrella group was itself split into different factions, Fatah being the largest and most moderate. They were reluctant to get involved in the internal affairs of other Arab states, but this was not the case with the more extreme Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine led by Dr George Habash (who, as his name suggests, was a Christian) and the Marxist-Leninist Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (yes, it does get very Life of Brian).
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October 17, 2023
Why WW1 Cavalry Was Essential On The Battlefield
The Great War
Published 13 Oct 2023The First World War was a catalyst for modern warfare with tanks, poison gas, flamethrowers and more. Cavalry didn’t have a place anymore on the modern battlefield – or so the common misconception goes. In this video we show how useful cavalry still was in WW1.
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October 16, 2023
After the attacks, Hamas proudly shared photos and videos of the victims
In UnHerd, David Patrikarakos describes what he calls “the week Hamas reinvented horror”:
Israel and Gaza are a Pathé newsreel of violence. Atrocity mounts upon atrocity. Blood smeared on gristle. Festivals mottled with corpses. Women dragged off to be raped and killed. And, now, perhaps the ultimate taboo. “This is the most difficult image we’ve posted”, ran the Daily Telegraph’s front page, reprinting a tweet from the State of Israel’s official account. “As we are writing this we are shaking. We went back and forth about posting this. But we need each and everyone of you to know. This happened.”
The images were of the charred and blackened corpses of babies. Dead bodies are a fixture of my professional life, and I have never seen anything like it. I have never felt that level of nausea. Nothing is beyond the sadism of Hamas. Nothing, now, might be beyond the response — comes the reply from Israel.
Clearly, nothing now is beyond being live-streamed, uploaded, posted, tweeted or shared. Amid the horror and disgust, one thing has struck me above all: the footage has overwhelmingly come from the perpetrators. Yes, there is video shot by terrified and fleeing victims, but scroll through Twitter, Telegram and Instagram and what do you see? Hamas filming themselves barking at cowering Israeli families on the ground; parents covering their children’s eyes, desperate to banish reality; Hamas yanking soldiers off tanks and throwing them into the dirt; Hamas grinning as they parade an elderly woman around in a golf cart.
This conflict has lasted for almost a century, yet what we have seen this week has never been seen before. It is a nasty and brutal war fought over land where ideology and the interminable cycle of reprisals has made its resolution impossible. But it is something else, too. It is perhaps the world’s longest running geopolitical media spectacle. Nothing, not Kashmir nor the Balkans nor any of the other enduring conflicts largely created by empire, has received anywhere near this level of coverage. The depths plumbed by Hamas are unprecedentedly low.
Several factors explain the brutality. First is a perennial of human nature: old-fashioned rage and bloodlust. No one, least of all it seems Hamas, expected the attacks to be so successful. Coming upon hundreds of unarmed Israelis was obviously too much of a temptation for many of these incontinent fanatics.
Then there is the desire to provoke. To get Israel to overreact, but also its neighbours. Broadcast images of dead Palestinian babies onto those feeds and then maybe your Arab allies will start to wonder about the wisdom of their various normalisation agreements with Israel. History is turning away from Hamas. The warming of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia threatens to destroy them forever. If the “Custodian of the Two Holy Places” decides the “Zionist Entity” is actually ok, then it’s only the politically impotent and half-witted Bashar al-Assad beside you, and the Iranians, who are formidable but largely alone.
It’s a basic strategy but a generally successful one. Don’t forget that one of the reasons bin Laden struck the World Trade Center was to get the Leviathan to lash out, which it did. Hamas has limited options. This is perhaps the one card it can play with any real efficacy.
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October 14, 2023
Lessons the Israelis must learn from the Hamas attacks
CDR Salamander finishes off his short series on the Hamas terror attacks on southern Israel last week by highlighting some of the things the Israeli military and intelligence organizations must take away from the failure to anticipate and parry or repel the attackers:
- Complacency Born from Excellence:
Israel is one of the richest, most educated and advanced societies on the planet. Their social capital is almost unmatched. Gaza is one of the poorest, miseducated, and dependent societies on the planet. On paper, one would think there would be no way what happened over the weekend could have happened. No, belay my last. I can very much see this scenario being on paper — and probably was — but it was not “the paper” that drove policy. The overconfident and optimistic won the argument. Like in 1973, if you spend most of your brief talking about how great you are and discussing how weak your opponent is, you might be missing something … or a lot of things.
- Technology Briefs Better Than it Performs:
How many times must this be learned? High tech solutions to human problems brief well when not properly cross examined or wargamed by skeptics. Tech seems clean, effective, and affordable — but it is not robust outside its planning assumptions. They work wonderfully in narrowly scoped vignettes, and not much more. Remote control machine guns on towers seem much more exciting than soldiers on patrol in an APC … but which one is more resilient to the unexpected? There is always compromise and risk. Sometimes well meaning and smart people make the wrong call.
- Coddling Useful Idiots is a False Economy:
In times of peace when facing very ugly truths, it is human nature to a large percentage of the population to defer to emotion, desire, and aspiration as opposed to reason, reality, and capabilities. It is easy to project your best intentions and world view on your enemy in the hope that their motivations are the same as yours. The fact remains, well meaning people can be wrong. Hate is irrational and as such, immune to reason. Well meaning but wrong people cannot be allowed to drive policy when there is no backup plan.
- Doomsday Cults Sometimes Take Over Entire Cultures:
Two people or two million people can become part of and enablers to a death cult. Humans are capable of the most wonderful things, and the most horrible things. This duality of mankind is what brought us to our advanced stage of civilization. When these death cults are closer to two million than two — more Hamas than Heaven’s Gate — you need to be prepared to respond in what ever way removes that threat should it cross over in to your reason-based society. They cannot be ignored. They grow until they take a nap to Hale-Bopp or fly in to a music festival.
- Evil Waits While Good is Impatient and Forgetful:
A free people can get distracted by their own pursuits that can only exist in a free society. Evil is hard to counter, uncomfortable to think about, and easy to avert your eyes when it is “over there” and forgotten and not “in here” trying to kick in the door. Too many people will make excuses, and ask you to accept their excuses, to avoid the unending and hard work of keeping evil away. Evil will exist always, the key is to not just keep it contained but to make sure it is small, isolated, and socially unacceptable. If you don’t do the last two, the first one will grow.
- F=MA:
How hard have you actually wargamed your defenses? In hindsight it is easy to second guess the border around Gaza, but at some time there had to be someone warning it was not enough. If you can run a bulldozer through a wall, it isn’t a wall — it is an aspiration. That, I hope, will be part of the post-war investigation.
There is the quick look so far this Thursday. In that Top-6 there are lessons for every nation to hoist onboard — especially the U.S.A.
In his Friday Q&A, Severian answers a question about what Hamas expected to gain from launching these attacks:
Which brings us, at long last, to Hamas. I too am baffled by this, because it seems so very Tet-like. NOT that the Mullahs are trying to “get rid of” their version of the Viet Cong, as the question suggests, but because it really seems like a big mistake. Bare minimum, it reveals the catastrophic failure of Israeli / AINO intelligence. If they have an ounce of Seriousness left anywhere in their government, they will have to massively clean house. Which would be terrible for Hamas – the guys who were asleep at the switch, allowing huge shipments of first-rate arms and etc. to be smuggled into Gaza, are now wide awake.
Same deal with training and financing. As incompetent as the Intel services were, I’m pretty sure even they would’ve noticed that hey, the Gaza Hang Gliding Club sure has a lot of new members! Where in Gaza could they possibly have practiced this stuff? It’s a sophisticated operation that betrays high levels of strategic and tactical coordination, with well-trained commandos doing something really innovative. I mean, parasailing? That’s some Otto Skorzeny shit right there. Whether or not Hamas dreamed it up on their own, or they had help with the operational concept, they surely had to train somewhere other than Gaza. Now, where could that possibly be?
You don’t roll the dice that way unless you really think you’ve got a strong chance of winning. But … win what? Unless they seriously thought Hamas could defeat the Israeli Army straight up … which, maybe they did. History’s full of that kind of thing. The Japanese at Pearl Harbor. Hitler in the Ardennes. America ended up beating those guys, so it’s ok to acknowledge that they made dumb mistakes based entirely on wishcasting. But Ho won, so it was brilliant 4D chess. Something similar might be happening here. It’s not very satisfying, but … there it is. We’ll have to wait and see.
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October 13, 2023
One of the reasons Israel was surprised by the Hamas attacks
In UnHerd, Edward Luttwak explains why Israeli intelligence was deceived leading up to the Hamas terror attacks last week:
The last major news item about Gaza before the first news of Hamas’s surprise attack was the September 22 announcement that 17,000 Gazans would immediately receive permits to work in Israel, with that number set to rise to 20,000. All understood the likelihood of a permit-holder smuggling in a bomb, or perhaps stabbing an Israeli fellow worker, but that seemed a risk worth taking.
Hamas, after all, had stopped launching rockets against Israel, and appeared to be focused on containing the influence of Islamic Jihad — Hamas’s only remaining competitor after its suppression of the PLO, and one which is financed by Iran to propagate Shi’ism in Gaza. This obvious rivalry was skilfully exploited by Hamas to deceive the Israelis into thinking that it was no longer launching rockets because, as an emphatically Sunni organisation, it wanted to join the Sunni reconciliation with Israel that was already a fait accompli from Morocco to Bahrain.
Once again, as so many times before, Israel’s leaders were deluded into thinking that a Palestinian leadership had some concern for the welfare of its own people, as opposed to its ideological aim: “Palestine” for the nationalist PLO (which always included Christians), and Islamic supremacy for Hamas. The latter’s leaders have frequently explained that Islamic rule must be imposed not just on Israel but on the entire world, and that Palestinian nationalism is un-Islamic twice over — because it includes Christians, and because any nationalism intrinsically subverts Islamic unity.
With Hamas seemingly on a path to reconciliation, only the much smaller Islamic Jihad was still assembling and launching rockets. But most of those attempts were pre-empted by Israeli strikes, guided by precise intelligence supplied by a seemingly reliable agent network. Almost certainly, Hamas itself supplied the “actionable” information passed on by those agents. This efficiently blinded Israeli intelligence, which has plenty of expertise in detecting double agents peddling false information, but could hardly suspect agents who were supplying highly accurate information.
This was the first Israeli failure: its intelligence analysts did not realise that the silence of Hamas was not due to inactivity, but to planning that they could not detect. Such silence was far from normal, and it should have inspired efforts to find out what was going on. But it did not.
On top of that, there was a separate failure which was purely military. Even if intelligence reported that all was well and that Gaza was on the path to peace, military planners should not have yielded to such optimism — for a very specific Israeli reason. Since the Israeli armed forces rely on reservists, who must be recalled to duty and kitted out before they can fight, as opposed to an enemy that can switch from peace to war instantaneously, military planners must be professional pessimists no matter what. They must always be mindful of the minutes needed to broadcast an alert, of the hours that even soldiers in situ need to prepare for action, and the full 24 hours required to mobilise the reservists.
At Spiked, Frank Furedi is angered by the widespread victim-blaming being shared on social media to pretend that the Hamas terror attacks were somehow “legitimate” and the atrocities committed against civilians somehow “okay”:
The assault on southern Israel last weekend was more than an atrocity. This callous and systematic murder of civilians was nothing less than a 21st-century version of a barbaric pogrom. The videos recorded by Hamas operatives as they slaughtered people serve as a frightening testimony to human depravity. They more than match the numerous beheading videos that glorified the barbarism of Islamic State and other terrorist organisations in recent decades.
Seeing the Hamas-orchestrated pogrom was gut-wrenching. But what I have found almost as disturbing are the smug voices of those in the West who say that Israel is responsible for Hamas’s barbarism. That it brought this horror on itself.
Ever since Hamas operatives embarked on their depraved killing spree, self-styled “progressives” have been queuing up to tell anyone who will listen that the evil Zionists had it coming. Not even this week’s reports of Hamas’s massacre of babies have given them pause for reflection. Their victim-blaming is echoed by numerous Western Muslim organisations and even by some mainstream politicians. They too say that Israel had it coming. With his usual smug complacency, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis declared in an interview that he would never denounce Hamas for these atrocities. Pointing the finger at Israel, he stated that “the path to ending the tragic loss of innocent lives – both Palestinian and Israeli – begins with one crucial first step: the end of the Israeli occupation and apartheid”.
Varoufakis’s apologism for atrocities against Jewish men, women and children appears civilised compared with the response of the West’s Palestine-solidarity campaigns. Many of them have actively celebrated this pogrom. One speaker at an “All Out for Palestine” protest outside the Israeli consulate in New York seemed to think that the systematic murder of 260 young people at the Supernova music festival provided excellent “comedy” material. “As you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time”, he said, “until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took out at least several dozen hipsters”. The rabble assembled outside the Israeli consulate responded to this “joke” about the mass murder and kidnapping of “several dozen hipsters” with gales of laughter.
Time and again, these atrocities are excused and their victims are dehumanised. Dr Mennah Elwan, an NHS medic, tried to excuse Hamas’s assault on innocent Israeli civilians by claiming that these youngsters fleeing for their lives were not civilians at all, because “there are no civilians in Israel”. She then said of the revellers that “if it was your home, you would stay and fight”.
On Saturday, while the pogrom against Jewish people was still unfolding in Israel, Somali-American journalist Najma Sharif felt the need to remind her followers on X: “What did y’all think decolonisation meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? Losers.” That she associates a blood-soaked pogrom with the objectives of the “decolonisation” movement in Western universities is revealing.
Indeed, Sharif was far from alone in framing this pogrom as an instance of decolonisation. This view has been systematically promoted by Hamas apologists. Maggie Chapman, a Green member of the Scottish parliament, responded to public disquiet over the Hamas attack by posting: “The oppressed are fighting back for their rights … Don’t let the Western media fool you into thinking it’s terrorism, this is decolonisation.” It is worth noting that Chapman is deputy convenor of the Scottish parliament’s human-rights committee. How long before she argues that perpetrating a pogrom is the human right of the oppressed?
The “decolonisers”, whether they realise it or not, are sending an unambiguous message to the world: “This is no time to be squeamish; after all, they are only Jews.”
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October 12, 2023
Considering Israel’s potential courses of action in Gaza
CDR Salamander puts on his Operational Planning hat and sifts through what Israel may decide to do in light of open source information from Israeli and other sources:
This isn’t going to make anyone happy. It doesn’t matter if you are on the “cease fire and de-escalate” left or the “Linebacker III” right — none of my COAs will be quite what you are looking for … though the Linebacker III crowd might be OK with COA-B and COA-C … but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Cut this ‘ole Operational Planner some slack, and a few caveats:
- I’ve had to rewrite 85% of this from its first draft over the weekend as we now have Commander’s Intent (CI) and higher Direction and Guidance (D&G). That had me discard two of my three Courses of Action (COA).
- I am quite sure the Israeli Defense Forces had appropriate draft Operational Plans (OPLANS) on the shelf with all sorts of Branch Plans and Sequels waiting to be updated and providing enough once dusted off to get things in to Phase I.
- I don’t have a Planning Staff or even a Core Planning Group, intel support, or even some Italian colleagues to remind me to take my 10:00 and 15:00 coffee breaks, but I’ll do my best anyway. As anyone in crisis response planning can tell you — as opposed to advanced plans types — you have to be comfortable enough to accept that you don’t have enough time, staff, or information to produce a great OPLAN, but you’ll come up with a good enough plan anyway. You’re happy to be wrong about a detail or two, and are open-minded enough, secure in your ego, and content to change what you thought was perfect — some or all of your plan — the moment you get better information, changes in CI or D&G, or the situation develops in unexpected ways … as they do.
- If you are looking for a detailed Tactical OPLAN or a sweeping Strategic OPLAN, you’re at the wrong substack. I’m an Operational Planner and what I am about to do is an “elevator speech” level Preliminary COA Decision Brief with the principals (J2, J3, J4, J5, and the Chief of Staff) where they get to weigh in and refine what the Planning Group I am the Chair of has produced (OK, I’m a Planning Group of one and I made myself Chair … I don’t care, it’s going on my FITREP anyway). Following the Principals’ input — especially from the Chief of Staff who has had better one on one time with the Commander and as such has the nuance no one else does — I’ll beg for a day and will be told I have two hours to make changes and then well brief the Commander.
Working from open-source information, we have CI and D&G from the Prime Minister and the Minister for Defense.
If you go to YouTube you can get the script, but we’ll use this statement from the weekend as a close approximation of POLMIL-level guidance from Prime Minister Netanyahu;
As a Planning Staff, what do I need to take away from this?
- Israel is at war.
- Israel will finish it.
- We will exact a price that will be remembered by them (Hamas) and Israel’s other enemies for decades to come.
From Defense Minister Yoav Gallant we have:
- Gaza won’t return to what it was before.
- We started the offensive from the air, later will also from the ground, and that’s how it will end.
- Gaza will never return to what it was.
Like I said … that had me ditch two of the my three COA from this weekend. If you wanted to know how it shifted, my most dovish COA is gone, and my most harsh COA is now the center of my Overton Window. A planner must try to align with CI and D&G as it is understood — not how he wishes it to be.
October 11, 2023
“It’s our first-ever live-streamed pogrom”
In The Line, Matt Gurney recounts (some of) the opening atrocities of the terror attacks on Israel by Hamas terror squads:
As I write this, Israel seems close to clearing out its invaded southern areas. In the coming hours, we will be presented with more scenes of horror and atrocity as new killing sites are found. Israel’s counterattack into Gaza will almost certainly be massive, far beyond any of the campaigns we’ve seen in recent years, and we’ll see all the awful carnage that causes from close up, too. Hamas has already said they will respond to these retaliatory actions by killing their hostages one by one and sharing the video and audio of the killings for the world to see. I believe that they will indeed do exactly that. You should all prepare yourselves for that.
For me, though, as we wait for the future to arrive, I’ve been thinking about the books on my shelf and what they tell us about the past. Books about the Holocaust and Sept. 11, and how the world grappled with truly evil regimes in eras past. There are lessons there, in simple black and white. What I saw on my phone wasn’t that. It was visceral, and awful, but in its own way, usefully clarifying.
But how many people saw what I did?
[…]
During that time, and I’m limiting my summary here to reasonably verified videos, I’ve seen an Israeli family forced to watch the apparent execution of one of their children/siblings; a man having his head either smashed in or chopped off with what looked like a garden tool of some kind (the video was a bit grainy); I’ve seen what looks like some kind of shelter that was breached, with all the occupants inside gunned down. A terrorist steps inside into ankle-deep blood and corpses and puts a few rifle rounds into bodies that are still moving.
I’ve seen a shocked looking woman being dragged out of a vehicle, her pants soaked with blood flowing from between her legs, and I know what that is. (See first photo, above.) I’ve also seen a video that I’m not sure, but that I think, happened to catch a glimpse of a rape in progress. I didn’t have the stomach to go back and watch that one again, though, so I can’t be totally sure. Whatever it was, the woman was terrified and the men around her were delighted. They enjoyed her fear and torment.
How many others have seen these things? I would bet a bunch, but not a majority, or even close to a majority. Most news savvy people are probably aware that there is a conflict, and may even know the outlines of it, but if they aren’t well-plugged into the online ecosystem for news and don’t know where to look and have hepful media contacts in the region to help filter out the garbage sources, what they’ve seen of it is sanitized and curated by well-meaning news editors whose default assumption is that graphic detail is to be avoided lest the reader or viewer be traumatized and send in a complaint.
I glanced throughout the weekend and again this morning at the major Canadian news websites, and the photos are mostly what you’d expect. Evocative, but not graphic. The most graphic ones shown aren’t a fraction of what’s available. The presentation of this story looks familiar because of all the other times we’ve seen some version of it: rockets flying up atop their exhaust trails, tanks manoeuvring over desert sand, troops looking grim as they put on their equipment, clouds of smoke and dust over Gaza. This is all bulked out by the odd tasteful photo of a grieving family member, from either side. Or perhaps even both sides, for balance.
This situation completely inverts the truism that many of us overly online people have had to cling to in recent years: this time, Twitter is real life. It’s the rest of the presentation of reality that is distorting your understanding of what’s happening. Twitter is a tire fire these days, full of bots and deliberate disinformation accounts, but for those with local sources and who’ve taken the time to curate their trusted sources — and again, Ukraine has been what forced me to do that — it can still be an invaluable tool.
But you’ve got to work at that. How many do? There is a very good chance that many of the people forming and expressing opinions about this right now are doing so with only a pretty basic understanding of what’s actually happened. The coverage they’re seeing of it looks familiar, so they’ll assume it’s basically the same as ever, if maybe slightly worse. They won’t bother assessing it or wondering if they should tweak their usual prior default response to The Latest Middle East Violent Flare Up. They see a headline on the CBC and Reuters and simply man their usual culture war battlestation. It’s a reflex by now.
That’s a mistake this time. This is one is different. Not exactly unprecedented; Lord knows Israel has suffered defeats and intelligence failures before. But none like this in 50 years, and never in an age when the simple act of seizing a victim’s phone allowed the raping and butchering to be uploaded onto the Facebook pages of the victims for their families and friends to watch. It’s our first-ever live-streamed pogrom, and I can’t be the only one who spent part of the long weekend warily glancing at some of the history books on my shelf, remembering scenes described therein that many of us have now seen happen live from our homes.
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In their attacks on southern Israel, Hamas is “making a dead zone, and they intend to make a dead zone”
Chris Bray explains the otherwise insane tactics employed by Hamas terrorists:
The border area between the Gaza Strip and the State of Israel, 9 October 2023.
Map by Ecrusized via Wikimedia Commons.
Hamas broke through a fortified border, had unchallenged freedom of movement inside Israel for a shockingly long time, and attacked … a dance music festival and some kibbutzim. Not airfields, not fuel depots, not power stations, not army motor pools to deny mobility to the enemy. They went after soft targets first, and focused especially on women and children. Eyewitness reports and footage of female hostages are telling us that Hamas engaged in sustained sexual violence, and took care to make it known. A subhed in Tablet: “Scenes of young women raped next to the dead bodies of their friends.”
And I think we know what this means.
But first, look at the proposed explanations offered in the news:
It seems that Hamas, also, is trying to force Israel into negotiations. In 2018, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar sent a note in Hebrew to Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, suggesting he take a “calculated risk” by agreeing a long-term truce. While Netanyahu agreed to some easing of pressure on Gaza, he was unwilling to accept Hamas’s long-term demands, including a large-scale prisoner swap, lifting the siege by opening the international border crossing, and establishing a port and airport in Gaza. After 16 years of siege and several catastrophic rounds of war, in which thousands of Gaza residents have been killed, Hamas may be hoping to break the deadlock.
That’s not it. Here’s another try:
Hamas could well be trying to torpedo the Saudi deal and even try undo the existing Abraham Accords. Indeed, a Hamas spokesperson said that the attack was “a message” to Arab countries, calling on them to cut on ties with Israel …
To be clear: Saying it makes strategic sense for Hamas to engage in atrocities is not to justify their killing civilians. There is a difference between explanation and justification: The reasoning behind Hamas’s attack may be explicable even as it is morally indefensible.
So the much-repeated claim is that Hamas in engaging in diplomatic maneuvering, sending messages to nation-states. They used mass rape at a dance festival to gain leverage in negotiations over a possible new port.
That’s absolutely not it, and I strongly suspect that the presence of widespread and carefully displayed attacks on 1.) families with children and 2.) the sexually traumatized bodies of women represent an extremely deliberate and calculated adoption, explicitly planned for months or years, of the familiar tools of ethnic cleansing.
Hamas is dirtying the memory of the Jewish spaces bordering on the Gaza Strip. They’re marking southern Israel in the memory of future families, and especially women of childbearing age, with the deliberately cultivated images of murdered children and the mass rape of young women, so that young women regard the place with dread and don’t return to have children there. They’re making a dead zone, and they intend to make a dead zone.
Mass rape by armies is not a mystery; it has been studied carefully.
Group X, as a group and deliberately, rapes women from Group Y in Neighborhood Z so women from Group Y never feel that they can safely return to Neighborhood Z, in a tribal memory passed down to later generations. Now the space belongs to Group X.
Hamas is making sites of trauma. To empty them, and to keep them empty.
Their military objective is to use the witnessed mass rape of women, the documented hunting and torture of families, and the videotaped murder of children in front of their parents to keep Jews out of southern Israel in the future. Their military target is site-specific Jewish fertility.
In the comments, Chris also points out the military insanity of how Hamas is implementing the propaganda aspects of their plan:
It’s insane for infantry to carry cellphones into combat, because cellphone locations can be tracked. But Hamas seems to be recording everything they do, and they’re stopping to upload new footage as they capture it. They’re taking the risk of carrying trackable devices in combat for the intended benefit of the display. I’d be very curious to hear if they’re all carrying standardized, organization-issued cellphones, and I’d be very curious to see a detailed analysis of where all of the footage is appearing first. This is a deliberate information operation.
Hamas has clearly calculated that the risk is worth the propaganda bonanza they are reaping from the atrocities being beamed almost in real time to the outside world.
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October 10, 2023
“… I think her face captures well the moment history returned to Israel”
CDR Salamander on the terrorist attacks this weekend that inflicted casualties on Israel proportionally nearly ten times the 9/11 attacks on the United States:
“Terrorists” is perhaps too much of an honorable word to describe the death squads that set out from the Gaza Strip this weekend hunting civilians.
I started to do this post about the failure of intelligence, imagination, and the seduction of modernism to see the nature of man — and perhaps that will be my post for tomorrow — but I want to make sure we establish an understanding, a baseline, to what has happened.
[…]
We are already seeing in the West the useful idiots in the externalized self-loathing left, and the imported Jew hatred already his the streets in support of death squads, rape, and the kidnapping of women and children.
We have also seen the defenders of the fruit of faculty-lounge-foreign-policy that we’ll discuss in Part II start to tut-tut Israel’s budding response and what “smart policy” recommendations they have on offer to layer on top of their already failed world view’s prior policy recommendations that got us here — but again, I’m getting ahead of myself, we’ll get to that tomorrow.
Today we need to make sure we have our mind right.
Considering America’s vast population and geography, we may not really understand the scale. There is also so much coming out of Israel, it is hard to focus, so I’ll pick just one event and two families to set the mind, then we’re going to help establish a perspective in a broader context.
One part of the attack that sticks in most people’s mind is the attack on the music festival. Exceptional reporting from Liel Liebovitz at Tablet;
I’ve spent the last 12 hours speaking to Israelis who were at the Supernova music festival. Their testimonies, as you would imagine, are very emotional. At least one broke down mid-conversation and wasn’t able to continue his recollection.
The attack on the festival outside of Re’im began around 7 a.m. The party was at its peak by then — which meant that by then most people were inebriated. At first, partygoers heard a loud explosion, which they took to be another sporadic rocket attack on southern Israel. But then the explosions grew louder and constant, and kept going for about five minutes. The music stopped, and the police protecting the 4,000 or 5,000 ravers began pushing everyone to leave.
As is always helpful in such situations, we should go to the map.
Re’im. It is just 3.5 miles as the rocket flies from the Gaza border. The difference is so stark, all you need is an overhead;
That isn’t a difference in soil or terrain. That is simply culture based on a dividing line put on a map 73 years ago, back when the Gaza Strip had a population of about 120,000. Today, it has a population of about 2.3 million.
Problems do not get better with time.
By then, the terrorists were approaching in pickup trucks bearing Hamas military markings.
Shooting began. Many were executed on the spot. 260 bodies have been found, so far, on the site of the rave.
Many of the young men and women started running in the flat expanse of the western Negev desert. Faced with the spectacle of kids fleeing for their lives on a largely flat surface, the terrorists began rounding up the rest of their victims.
Others were captured and bound and kidnapped. “I saw videos with a male getting held by a group of Arab kids. Like, they’re like 16, 17,” one survivor recalled. “They’re kids, but they’re they’re young men already, and they’re holding this guy, and he looks as his girlfriend is being mounted on a bike and driven away from him. God knows what she’s going to experience … Women have been raped at the area of the rave next to their friends bodies, dead bodies.”
Her name is Noa Argamani, 25. A little younger than my oldest daughter
You can see the video here, but I think her face captures well the moment history returned to Israel.
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Sarah Hoyt – “Shut your Kumbaya”
Sarah Hoyt isn’t normally one to mince her words or conceal her true feelings, and she certainly doesn’t do that here:
The world is full of pretty lies. And normally, I’m able to scroll past them and go “oh, idiocy, more idiocy”.
Today is not that day. No, listen to me. Today is not that day.
I was scrolling through twitter looking for an update on the war in Israel, and I came across this:
And I stopped. And I read that post. Every single word of it is a lie. A lot of it are pernicious lies. And they’re told by well-intentioned people who can’t or won’t look at the world without the rose-colored glasses.
It’s not just these things are lies. It’s “they’ve been proven to be lies, over and over again”. But a lot of, perhaps the majority of “educated” people in the west piously believe them. Because they want them to be true.
Start therefore with that “Education” — education can be many things, but some of the best educated people in the world at the time led World War I. And while on that, do you realize the cultures fighting knew each other very, very well. Heck, most of the nobility was related to each other across Europe. Which did not stand in the way of turning Europe into one vast abattoir.
In fact, most of the vicious wars were civil, or between neighboring countries that knew each other’s cultures intimately. So this “Get to know the other culture better” is utter and complete poppycock. Or as the British say “Bollocks”. And smelly bollocks, at that.
As for all cultures, all systems, all value systems being equally worthy of respect?
Oh, really? So, a culture that enslaves women is the same as one that values women? A culture that protects and takes care of the weak is the same as one that tortures and kills them? A culture that welcomes difference is the same as one that pounds down the nail that sticks up? A system where — as in all communist systems — a small elite lives very well while others starve is the same as one where private property allows even the poor to suffer from obesity? And a culture that doesn’t believe it has to exterminate its neighbors is the same as one that does?
Don’t be ridiculous.
And as for not stigmatizing, dividing, etc? Pernicious bullshit. Pernicious bullshit on stilts. The horrible savages who kidnapped innocent people at a rave and raped women to death are not the same as people who are breaking themselves trying to spare the innocent. There is no comparison.
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October 7, 2023
QotD: Saudi princes
I see that Prince Abdul-Rahman bin Abdulaziz al Saud died the other day. If you’re having trouble keeping track of your Saudi princes, well, I don’t blame you. Unlike the closely held princely titles of the House of Windsor, the House of Saud is somewhat promiscuous with the designation: there are (at the time of writing) over 10,000 Saudi “princes” running around the country — and, in fact, at this time of year, more likely running around Mayfair and the French Riviera, exhausting the poor old blondes from the escort agencies. I believe that’s Abdul-Rahman at right, although to be honest all Saudi princes look alike to me, except that some wear white and others look very fetching in gingham. As I once remarked to Sheikh Ghazi al-Ghosaibi, the late cabinet minister, he was the only Saudi I knew who wasn’t a prince.
Abdul-Rahman was a longtime Deputy Defense Minister, whose catering company, by happy coincidence, held the catering contract for the Defense Ministry. The first Saudi prince to be educated in the west, he was a bit of a cranky curmudgeon in later years, mainly because of changes to the Saudi succession that eliminated any possibility of him taking the throne. But he nevertheless held a privileged place as the son of Ibn Saud, the man who founded the “nation” and stapled his name to it. When I say “the son”, I mean a son: Ibn Saud had approximately 100 kids, the first born in 1900, the last over half-a-century later, in 1952, a few months before ol’ Poppa Saud traded in siring for expiring.
Abdul-Rahman’s mother was said to be Ibn Saud’s favorite among his 22 wives — or, at any rate, one of the favorites. Top Five certainly. She also had the highest status, because she bore him more boys — seven — than any other other missus. They’re known as the Sudairi Seven or, alternatively, the Magnificent Seven. She also gave him seven daughters. They’re known as the seven blackout curtains standing over in the corner. This splendidly fertile lady’s name was Hussa bint Ahmed, and she was Ibn Saud’s cousin once removed and then, if I’m counting correctly, his eighth wife. But she’s a bit like the Grover Cleveland of the House of Saud — in that he’s counted as the 22nd and 24th President of the United States, and she’s the eighth wife and also either the tenth or eleventh. He first married her when he was 38 and she was 13. But he divorced her and then remarried her. In between their marriages she was married to his brother, but Ibn Saud was a sentimental lad and never got over his child-bride-turned-sister-in-law, so he ordered his brother to divorce her.
Don’t worry, though: In the House of Saud, it’s happy endings all round. Two of their daughters wound up marrying two of the sons of another brother of Ibn Saud. The Saudi version of Genealogy.com must be a hoot: “Hey, thanks for the DNA sample. You’re 53.8 per cent first cousin, and 46.2 per cent uncle.”
Mark Steyn, “The Son of the Man who Put the Saud in Saudi Arabia: Prince Abdul-Rahman bin Abdulaziz al Saud, 1931-2017”, Steyn Online, 2017-07-18.
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October 2, 2023
The fall and rise of siege warfare
Sieges are probably about a year or so younger than the first fortified village — as soon as someone came up with the bright idea of throwing a wall around it for protection, some equally bright spark likely started coming up with ways to get inside that wall. In The Critic, Peter Caddick-Adams considers the eclipse and return of siege warfare in Europe in reviewing Iain MacGregor’s The Lighthouse of Stalingrad and Prit Buttar’s To Besiege a City: Leningrad 1941-42:
A model of the Vauban fortress at Arras in northern France. Arras is one of the Fortifications of Vauban, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.
The history of war is never far removed from battles for cities. Many of us, of whatever creed, were brought up on the story of the walls of Jericho tumbling after the Israelites marched around the stronghold once a day for six days, seven times on the seventh day, and then blew their trumpets. Though no archaeological evidence at Tell es-Sultan, in modern Palestine, corroborates the arresting visual image related in Joshua, Chapter 6, diggers have uncovered a range of defensive stone and brick walls dating back to 8,000 BC. It indicates that even 10,000 years ago, the ancients indulged in the odd siege when the mood took them. The biblical story also introduces us to the concept of intimidation, today fashionably called “psychological warfare”.
The much younger fortress of Troy provides insights into another city-focussed era of battles. Beneath today’s Hisarlik in northern Turkey are nine archaeological layers. Troy VIII was the alluring city of Classical and Hellenistic times, as portrayed in the Iliad, Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid. The Romans took the lessons of Homeric Troy seriously and clad all their major settlements with defensive walls, as any exploration of Canterbury, Chester or York will confirm. These acted as magnets for opponents, as in Boudicca’s revolt of AD 60–61. Cities such as Colchester, London and St Albans were sacked, as much for what they represented as for their physical presence.
When the Normans arrived in their longships, they imported the concept of stone castles to control the newly conquered English. Their walled cities would be ungraded and contested scores of times over the succeeding six centuries. Henry V’s siege of Harfleur (modern Le Havre) in 1415, the beginning of the Agincourt campaign famously depicted in Shakespeare’s play, underlined the drawback of traditional sieges. They took longer and were usually far costlier than expected. Several thousand men camped in a small area with no knowledge of hygiene inevitably resulted in a high mortality rate amongst the attackers before a shot was fired.
Harfleur was also the first time an English army made use of gunpowder artillery in a siege, a technology that had trickled its way across the world from China. Powder and fuse heralded events 38 years later, when an Ottoman army shook the Christian world to its core by breaching the massive walls of Constantinople (Istanbul) after a 53-day bombardment using cannons. On Tuesday, 29 May 1453, stone finally gave way to bronze and iron, finishing the last remnant of the Roman Empire. Europe was never quite the same again. Fortress architecture started to employ breadth, using earthen ramparts and ditches, rather than height.
Strategy for urban warfare intensified during the lifetime of the French fortress engineer Vauban (1633–1707), who used landscaped terrain as well as geometrically designed defensive walls to deter would-be besiegers. When viewed from above, his fortification designs resemble starfish. So successful were his tactics that sieges, always costly and time-consuming, lessened in importance. His contemporary Marlborough recognised that on any cost-benefit analysis, Vauban had rendered sieges militarily unprofitable, restoring manoeuvre to campaigns.
Subsequent wars fought in the Napoleonic era, the Crimea, between the American North and South, and by Prussia generally reflected this return to mobility. There was the odd attritional discrepancy with the 1854–55 siege of Sevastopol, that of Petersburg in 1864–65 and Paris in 1870–71. Cities were still fought for, but usually contests were removed away from the walls, where forces could conduct wide sweeping manoeuvres, such as Leipzig in 1813 or Ypres in the Great War. As weapons grew more accurate and their munitions heavier, fortifications broadened and sank into the ground, culminating in the trenches of 1914–18. In this era, dominance of terrain became the hallmark, and it was virtually siege-free.
It was remarkable that urban warfare returned on an industrial scale during the Second World War, a time usually associated with blitzkrieg and rapid tank thrusts. This happened at Leningrad, Sevastopol and Stalingrad in the East; at Ortona and Cassino in Italy, Caen; Carentan and St Lo in Normandy; in Aachen and later assaults on Aschaffenburg and Cologne, Magdeburg, Leipzig and Berlin in 1945. Subsequent NATO doctrine for the defence of central Europe focussed on the threat of more attrition. Plans were devised to defend quite small localities, putting grit in the Soviet steamroller and making the cost of attacking Western towns and cities prohibitive.
Update: Broken URL corrected.
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September 30, 2023
Why did the North Africa Campaign Matter in WW2?
The Intel Report
Published 8 Jun 2023As Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps rolled into Egypt in 1942, the only thing standing between them and Cairo and the Suez Canal was the British 8th Army. In this video we look at what was at stake for both sides, and why the North African campaign made a crucial impact on the outcome of the Second World War.
(more…)
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September 16, 2023
QotD: The Persian “Royal Roads”
The oldest road network that we have pretty good evidence for was the Persian Royal Road of the Achaemenids but these too were not the first (the Achaemenid dynasty ruling a vast empire from 559 to 330 BC; this is the Persian Empire of Xerxes and Darius III). Even before them the Assyrians (Middle and Neo-Assyrian Empires running from 1363 to 609 BC)1 had build roadways to hold together parts of their empire, though I confess I know very little of the extent of that road system except that we’re fairly sure it existed and like the later systems we’re going to talk about, it included not just the physical infrastructure of the roads but a sophisticated relay system to allow official messengers to move very rapidly over the network.
The modern perception of the Persian Royal Road is conditioned perhaps a bit too much by Herodotus who described the royal road – singular – as a single highway running from Susa to Sardis. Susa was one of several Achaemenid royal capitals and it sat at the edge of the Iranian plateau where it meets the lowland valley of Mesopotamia, essentially sitting right on the edge where the Persian “heartland” met the area of imperial conquests. Meanwhile, Sardis was the westernmost major Achaemenid administrative center, the regional capital, as it were, for Anatolia and the Aegean. So you can see the logic of that being an important route, but the road system was much larger. Indeed, here is a very rough sketch of how we might understand the whole system.
Compare the dashed line – the Royal Road as described by Herodotus – with the solid lines, the rest of the system we can glean from other sources or from archaeology and you can see that Herodotus hasn’t given us the whole story. For what it is worth, I don’t think Herodotus here is trying to lie – he has just described the largest and most important trunk road that leads to his part of the world.
This system doubtlessly emerged over time. Substantial parts of the road network almost certainly predated the Achaemenids and at least some elements were in place under the first two Achaemenid Great Kings (Cyrus II, r. 559-530 and Cambyses II, r. 530-22) but it seems clear that it is the third Achaemenid ruler, Darius I (r. 522-486; this is the fellow who dispatched the expedition defeated at Marathon, but his reign was far more important than that – he is the great organizer of the Persian Empire) who was responsible for the organization, formalization and expansion of the system. And in practice we can split that system into two parts, the physical infrastructure of roads and then the relay system built atop that system.
In terms of the physical infrastructure, as far as I can tell, the quality of Persian Royal Roads varied a lot. In some areas where the terrain was difficult, we see sections of road cut into the rock or built via causeways over ravines. Some areas were paved, but most – even most of the “royal” roads (as distinct from ancillary travel routes) were not.2 That said, maintenance seems to have been more regular on the royal roads, meaning they would be restored more rapidly after things like heavy rains that might wash an unpaved road out, making them more reliable transport routes for everyone. They also seem to have been quite a bit wider; Achaemenid armies could have long logistics tails and these roads had to accommodate those. Several excavated sections of royal roads are around 5m wide, but we ought to expect a lot of variation.
On top of the physical infrastructure, there was also a system of way-stations and stopover points along the road. These were not amenities for everyone but rather a system for moving state officials, messengers, soldiers, and property (like taxes). While anyone could, presumably, walk down the road, official travelers carried a sealed travel authorization issued by either a satrap (the Persian provincial governors) or the king himself. Such authorizations declared how many travelers there were, where they were going and what the way-stations, which stocked supplies, should give them. Of course that in turn meant that local satraps had to make sure that way-stations remained stocked up with food, fodder for animals, spare horses and so on. Fast messengers could also be sent who, with that same authorization, would change horses at each way-station, allowing them to move extremely fast over the system, with one estimate suggesting that a crucial message could make the trip from Sardis to Susa – a trip of approximately 2,500km (1,550 miles, give or take) in twelve days (by exchanging not only horses, but riders, as it moved).
All of which gives some pretty important clues to why royal roads were set up and maintained. Notice how the system specifically links together key administrative hubs, like the three main Achaemenid capitals (Susa, Ekbatana and Persepolis) and key administrative centers (Memphis, Sardis, Babylon, etc.) and that while anyone can use the roads, the roads serve as the basis for a system to handle the logistics of moving officials and state messages, which of course could also serve as the basis for moving armies. After all, you can send messengers down the royal roads, through the existing system set up for them, to instruct your satraps to gather local forces or more importantly to gather local food supplies and move them to the road in depots where the army can pick them up (and perhaps some local troops) as it moves through to a nearby trouble spot (while the nice, wide road allows you to bring lots of pack animals and carts with your army).
In short this is a large, expensive but effective system for managing the problem of distance in a large empire. Cutting down travel and message times reduces the independence of the satraps, allowing the Great King to keep an eye on them, while the roads provide the means to swiftly move armies from the core of the empire out to the periphery. We can actually see this play out with Alexander’s invasion. He crosses into Asia in 334 and defeats the local satrapal army at Granicus in 334. Moving into the Levant in 333, he’s met at Issus by Darius III with a massive army, collected from the central and western parts of the empire – which means that news of Alexander’s coming has reached Darius who has then marshaled all of those troops from his satrapies (and hired some mercenaries), presumably using his efficient message system to do it and then moved that force down the road system to meet Alexander. Alexander defeats that army, but is met by another huge army at Gaugamela in 331, this time gathered mostly from the eastern parts of the empire. While the Persian army fails in defeating Alexander, the exercise shows the power of the system in allowing the Great King, Darius III to coordinate the military efforts of an enormous empire.
So this is a system meant to enable the imperial center to control its periphery by enabling the court to keep tabs on the satraps, to get messages to and from them and move armies and officials (and taxes!) around. And doubtless it was also not lost on anyone that such a visible series of public works – even if the roads were not always paved and had to be repaired after heavy rains and such – was also an exercise in legitimacy building, both a visual demonstration of the Great King’s power and resources but also a display of his generosity and industry.
And I lead with all of that because the Roman road network works the same way, just on an even larger scale. Which isn’t to say the Romans were copying the Achaemenids (they don’t seem to have been) but rather that this is a common response to the problem of managing an uncommonly large empire.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Roman Roads”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-06-02.
1. The Middle Assyrian Empire and the Neo-Assyrian or New Assyrian Empires were, in fact, the same state. We split them up because of a severe contraction in Assyrian power during the Late Bronze Age Collapse.
2. On this, see Henkelman and Jacobs, 727-8
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