Quotulatiousness

October 3, 2024

Middle East situation – “There are really two international delusions we are seeing in play”

Filed under: Middle East, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

CDR Salamander on the situation in the Middle East as we come up on the one-year anniversary of the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians on the border between Israel and Gaza:

“Israeli flag, Tel Aviv, Star of David” by Tim Pearce, Los Gatos is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Less than a week since the invasion of Israel from Gaza and the resulting pogrom that witnessed the largest one day murder, rape, kidnapping and tortures of Jews since World War Two — it is clear that Israel has decided that it was finally time to reset and repair the damage from decades of bad international theory and delusion.

There are really two international delusions we are seeing in play, one Israel has more control over, one has yet to be fully revealed to be the folly it is.

You can see the threads heading back decades earlier, but the first delusion hit its peak during the Clinton Administration in the 1990s, the withdrawal from the Southern Lebanon security zone in 2000, and finished its summit with Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005.

The delusion was that The Smartest People in the Room™ in DC, New York, Brussels, and Tel Aviv could, if they talked enough, wished enough, and said nice things to each other enough, would find a way to get the various Palestinian. Hope, wishes, and a mistaken trust in international organizations convinced Israel to give peace a chance.

Peace had a chance, and it culminated on October 7th, 2023.

Now, it appears, Israel will take the world as it is, not as it and others wished it to be. The key part of “this world” that some schools of international security affairs for decades have refused to recognize is the common, evil thread connecting them all: The Islamic Republic of Iran.

Gaza

Hamas was always a proxy for Iran. It could not have been able to be the threat it was without two things: 1) Iran; 2) UN. There can be no returning to the world of October 6th, 2023.

Whatever status Gaza winds up having in the future, it will not be like the past. While there remains much hard work to be done in Gaza, the hardest military part is done. It will be pacified thoroughly, and then the really hard part — what will happen to the population and territory of Gaza — will have to be worked out.

Egypt wants nothing to do with it. The Arab nations have already let it be known they don’t want that radicalized population, and Israel cannot let another Hamas like governance take over that strip of land that points in to Israel like a dagger.

It appears that Israel is following a variation of my COA-A I posted four days after last year’s attacks. The bitter fruit of a half-century of bad theory will have to be fixed, somehow.

Lebanon

From its birth as a Shia militia boosted by Iran, Hezbollah has, even more than Hamas, been a proxy for Iran. Only vaguely connected to the Palestinian cause, it has simply become an advanced military force for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

For a year, well over 60,000 Israeli citizens have been internally displaced from their homes in Northern Israel due to unending rocket attack from Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon. As they rightfully focused on the war in Gaza, (as President Lincoln advised, “One war at a time“), Israel took the blows with minimal response until the last few weeks.

The formerly Christian led government of Lebanon cannot police their own nation, and have not been able to for decades, and the UN is more of a problem than a solution, Israel will have to take steps to secure her own safety.

Like the Gaza situation, this will create problems down the road because the hostile population is not going anywhere. That is an issue for later. For now, the rockets must stop.

September 28, 2024

Lebanon is no longer a nation … it’s a parasitized husk operated by Iran’s proxies

Filed under: Middle East, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In UnHerd, Tom McTague explains why there can be no “settlement” of the South Lebanon problem, because Lebanon ceased functioning as an independent state and is now largely controlled by Hezbollah, which means it’s indirectly controlled by Iran:

[…] A similar assessment was made about Lebanon, a country without a functioning state or economy and at the mercy of Iran’s colonial army, Hezbollah. This, also, was a situation that was thought to be containable — even as Iran exploited the anarchic chaos of Iraq and Syria to supply its proxy with enough weapons to devastate Israel.

The central conceit of the Abraham Accords was that, irrespective of Hamas, Hezbollah and the occupation of the West Bank, once the Israel-Saudi axis was formed, Iran could be pushed back and contained without direct American involvement. But, then, the depth of Hamas’s murderous brutality on 7 October shattered that assumption, leaving not only a traumatised and vulnerable Israel, but also a traumatised and vulnerable Western order forced to confront the stark realities of the Middle East.

Today, Lebanon is a dead state, eaten alive by Hezbollah’s parasitic power. The scale of the catastrophe in the country is hard to comprehend, much of it caused by the disruptive nature of Syria’s civil war. Since its neighbour’s descent into anarchic hell, some 1.5 million Syrians have sought refuge in Lebanon — a tiny country with a population of just 5 million. But, more fundamentally, with Hezbollah fighting to protect Bashar al Assad, the opposing countries — led by Saudi Arabia — began withdrawing funds from Lebanese banks. This sparked a financial crisis that left Lebanon with no money for fuel.

By spring 2020, the country had defaulted on its debts, sending it into a downward spiral which the World Bank in 2021 described as among “the top 10, possibly top three, most severe crises globally since the mid-nineteenth century”. Lebanon’s GDP plummeted by around a third, with poverty doubling from 42% to 82% in two years. At the same time, the country’s capital, Beirut, was hit by an extraordinary explosion at its port, leaving more than 300,000 homeless. By 2023 the IMF described the situation as “very dangerous” and the US was warning that the collapse of the Lebanese state was “a real possibility”.

With Iranian support, however, Hezbollah created a shadow economy almost entirely separate from this wider collapse. It could escape the energy shortages, while creating its own banks, supermarkets and electricity network. Hezbollah isn’t just a terrorist group. It is a state within a state, complete with a far more advanced army. “They may have plunged Lebanon into complete chaos, but they themselves are not chaotic at all,” as Carmit Valensi, from the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, told the Jerusalem Post.

Then came 7 October, after which Hezbollah tied its fate to that of the Palestinians, promising to bombard Israel with rockets until the war in Gaza was brought to a close. We have witnessed the frightening scale of its power over the past year, its bombardment forcing some 100,000 Israelis from their homes in Galilee to the safety of the Israeli heartlands around Tel Aviv. For the first time since modern Israel’s creation, the land where Jews are able to live in their own state has shrunk; the rockets are a daily reminder of the country’s extraordinary vulnerability, threatened on all sides by states who actively want it removed from the map — even from history itself. The pretence that the Palestinian and Lebanese questions could be contained, ignored or bypassed as part of a wider grand strategy to contain Iran has been shattered.

September 21, 2024

“This might be the greatest asymmetrical attack in human history”

Filed under: Middle East, Military, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Terrorist organizations in the Middle East always have to be aware of the risk of coming to the attention of Israel accidentally, and they’ve suffered losses whenever their operations have been prematurely exposed. The attack on Hezbollah’s communications infrastructure is, as Phil A. McBride says in The Line, “something genuinely new in warfare”:

The attack on Hezbollah’s communications through exploding pagers, radios, and other electronic devices triggered a cascade of instant memes.

Detonating the pagers and other devices would have been a relatively easy thing to do (to the extent that any of this was easy!), since it’s obvious that Israel had already penetrated the pager network, and Hezbollah’s communications generally, before the devices were even deployed. Once Israel was confident that they’d put all the devices into the right hands, they simply sent a message — remember, these devices are all intended to receive telecommunications — that somehow triggered the explosions we saw. I don’t know if the explosives did all the damage, or if the batteries were somehow overloaded as well. What is clear is that the explosions were enough to kill, injure and maim people who were directly holding the devices, but not much more. Videos posted online show people suddenly dropping to the ground in agony after their device explodes in their hands, pockets or backpacks, but people in their immediate vicinity are unharmed.

Again, none of this is easy, but if one is looking to remotely detonate a bomb, it helps when the bomb it intended to literally receive incoming communications.

[…]

That covers the pagers and two-way radios, but what about the other various items that exploded? While almost everything electronic you can buy these days has internet/wireless capability, Hezbollah went through a lot of trouble to be as disconnected from the internet as possible. I can only assume they wouldn’t have connected a device meant to read the fingerprints of terrorists trying to enter a safe house to the internet, where a Mossad hack is a constant threat. This means that any other device that exploded not only had explosive charges installed, but also a radio capable of receiving a remote detonation command. The most efficient approach would have been to tune those radios to the same frequencies used by Hezbollah’s two-way radios to minimize the infrastructure needed to pull off what was already an insanely complex operation, but we will need more information to even begin to understand that part of Israel’s plan.

And let’s talk about the plan. The level of sophistication for such an operation cannot be understated. Everything that we’ve seen over the last few days indicates a complete and total breakdown of Hezbollah’s internal security. Israel managed to intercept and infiltrate both their primary and backup communications networks before they were even deployed, as well as a swath of other electronic equipment, and turn them into bombs.

It has been said that communication is the most important component of any military system, but I don’t think anyone had ever thought of actually weaponizing the opposition’s communications infrastructure itself before now. This is something genuinely new in warfare.

October 19, 2023

Why there are no regional refuges available to Gazan civilians

Filed under: History, Middle East — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

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).

October 10, 2023

MAS-36 LG48: A Grenade Launcher for the Bolt Action Infantry

Filed under: France, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 28 Sept 2017

Once it became apparent that the MAS-36 was going to be used in a substantial amount of frontline combat (contrary to its intended role as a reserve or secondary rifle), it became important to provide it with grenade launching capability. The French military really liked rifle grenades as a way to have explosive support firepower always available with the frontline infantry, without needing to call for specialized units like mortar crews.

After various experiments with clamp-on launchers (like and including the WW1 VB launcher), the LG48 (lance grenade, or grenade throwing) rifle was adopted in 1948. It used the same basic projectile as the Mle 1937 50mm light mortar, but with a new tail assembly fitted which allowed it to slide over the muzzle of a MAS-36 rifle. The LG48 rifle was essentially just a MAS-36 with a new nosecap assembly which included a simple grenade sight and a range-setting adjustable sleeve over the barrel.

The LG48 pattern rifles were made both brand new in the St Etienne factory and also supplied as conversion kits to be applied in the field. Neither type ever received new or special markings to identify their grenade launching status. The Mle 1948 grenades and the LG48 rifles were declared obsolete in 1968, as the French had switched to the NATO standard type of rifle grenades in the early 1950s. In 1968 the existing rifles were ordered to be retrofitted back to standard MAS-36 pattern, and their lack of special markings makes those retrofitted rifles virtually indistinguishable from original MAS-36 rifles. The surviving examples, like the one in this video, are almost all from nations which received the rifles as military aid from France and were not subject to the French retrofitting order (this particular rifle was imported as part of a batch from Lebanon in the 1990s).
(more…)

January 19, 2023

Tanks Chats #164 | M-50 Sherman | The Tank Museum

Filed under: France, History, Middle East, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published 23 Sep 2022

In this episode of Tank Chats, David Willey discusses the history of the M-50 version of the Sherman.
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November 18, 2021

All the Guns on a T-62 Tank (with Nicholas Moran, the Chieftain)

Filed under: History, Middle East, Military, Russia, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 5 Aug 2021

Try out World of Tanks with a special bonus tank using this link!

https://tanks.ly/3dqGoBL

Today Nicholas Moran (the Chieftain) and I are at Battlefield Vegas courtesy of Wargaming.net, to show you around a Soviet T-62 and all its various armaments. This particular T-62 was built in 1971 or 1972 and initially sold to Syria. It saw combat in the Valley of Tears in 1973, but survived as was eventually transferred to Lebanese ownership. From there is was captured by Israel and eventually imported into the United States via the UK. The T-62 was the last of the “simple” WW2-style Soviet tanks, and equipped with an extremely effective 115mm smoothbore main gun. In addition to that cannon, we will discuss and shoot the coaxial PKT machine gun and the loader’s antiaircraft DShKM heavy machine gun.

If you enjoy this video, check out World of Tanks – and maybe they will send Nicholas and I back again to do the same thing yet again on a third tank!

For videos on the detail of tanks like this one, check out The Chieftain:
https://www.youtube.com/user/WorldOfT…
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCp4j…

0:00:00 – Introduction
0:06:02 – Coaxial PKT
0:13:12 – Antiaircraft DShKM
0:20:25 – 115mm Main Gun
0:28:43 – Firing the main gun

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September 27, 2020

Dividing Up The Middle East – The Creation of Lebanon I THE GREAT WAR 1920

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Middle East — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

The Great War
Published 26 Sep 2020

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In the summer of 1920 it became clear that the many different voices and local opinions on the future of the former Ottoman provinces were going to be mostly ignored. France and Britain had their own ideas for the new mandate states in the region.

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» SOURCES
Sicker, Martin. The Middle East in the Twentieth Century (Greenwood Publishing, 2001)

Gontaut-Biron, Roger. Comment la France s’est installée en Syrie (Paris: Plon, 1922). https://archive.org/details/commentla…

Cornwallis, K. Notes on the Middle-East No.4. 1920. File 756/1917 Pt 2-3 “ARAB BULLETIN Nos 66-114” [‎374r] (756/834), British Library: India Office Records and Private Papers, IOR/L/PS/10/658.

Miller, David Hunter. My Diary. At the Conference of Paris. Vol 4. (New York, 1924). https://archive.org/details/MyDiaryAt…

D’Andurain, J. “Gouraud, Henri” in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2014-10-08. DOI: 10.15463/ie1418.10303. https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online…

Naamany, B. “A hundred years since Sykes-Picot, maps’ reading”. General Secretariat of the Arab League. Tunis. Tunisia. 2018. http://nna-leb.gov.lb/en/show-news/98…

Meouchy, N. “Les temps et les territoires de la révolte du Nord (1919-1921).” In: Alep et ses territoires: Fabrique et politique d’une ville (1868-2011). (Beyrouth – Damas: Presses de l’Ifpo, 2014).

Raymond, André. “III – La Syrie, du Royaume arabe à l’indépendance (1914-1946)”. In La Syrie d’aujourd’hui. Aix-en-Provence: Institut de recherches et d’études sur les mondes arabes et musulmans, 1980. (pp. 55-85)

Kouyoumdjian, O. “Le Liban à la veille et au début de la Grande Guerre: Mémoires d’un gouverneur, 1913-1915″. Revue D’histoire Arménienne Contemporaine. Paris: Centre d’histoire arménienne contemporaine. 2003.

Government of New Zealand, Ministry for Culture and Heritage. “Anzac troops take revenge on Arab civilians at Surafend” https://nzhistory.govt.nz/page/anzac-….

Ministère de la Guerre. Etat-major des armées. Service historique. Les armées françaises dans la Grande guerre. Tome IX. 9, 1, ANNEXES. Imprimerie Nationale. Paris. France. 1935.

Australian Imperial Force unit war diaries. 1914-1918 War. Light Horse. Item number: 10/3/47. Title : 3rd Australian Light Horse Brigade. December 1918. AWM4 Class 10 – Light Horse. https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C13…

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September 20, 2020

Our World 100 Years Ago – September 1920 I THE GREAT WAR

Filed under: Africa, Britain, Europe, France, History, Japan, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

The Great War
Published 19 Sep 2020

Let’s take a look at our world 100 years ago, in September 1920.

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Written by: Jesse Alexander
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Editing: Toni Steller
Motion Design: Philipp Appelt
Mixing, Mastering & Sound Design: http://above-zero.com
Maps: Daniel Kogosov (https://www.patreon.com/Zalezsky)
Research by: Jesse Alexander
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All rights reserved – Real Time History GmbH 2020

August 7, 2020

Aftermath of the Beirut explosion

Filed under: Middle East — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Kareem Shaheen, who lived and worked in Beirut for some years, reports on the devastation and the ongoing debate over causes and responsibility:

Part of a photo gallery posted by CNN shows the site of the explosion in Beirut harbour. Note the massive grain elevator structure has been partly demolished, but the buildings on the other side almost certainly suffered far less damage for being in the blast shadow of such a massive concrete shield.
Photo gallery – https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/05/world/satellite-images-beirut-explosion-before-after-trnd/index.html

The Lebanese prime minister and security officials said the explosion was likely caused by a 2,700 tons of highly explosive ammonium nitrate that had been abandoned in the port. By comparison, the Oklahoma City bombing was about 2.2 tons of the same substance.

Reports indicate that the ammonium nitrate had been seized years ago, and knowing Lebanon, it was left there either out of negligence, or because the self-interested ruling classes of the country — a mafia in its own right — could not agree on how to divvy up the profits from the stuff.

Naturally, America’s arsonist and conspiracy theorist in chief, Donald Trump, speculated in a press conference that the explosion looked like a bomb. His generals told journalists, anonymously, that they had no idea what he was talking about.

But in a country already on the verge of collapse, the damage of this speculation was done. Conspiracy theories are now rampant.

Donald Trump’s comment may have been ill-informed, but the conspiracy theorists — along with anyone who thinks they know anything about explosives — were busy spinning pet theories regardless of what he said.

One that made the rounds seized on a tweet by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about a raid on pro-Iranian targets in Syria, and linked it to the Beirut explosion. The terrible size of the explosion prompted fears that it was a tactical nuclear strike. Independent Arabia — which licenses the British Independent newspaper brand and is owned by a Saudi Arabian publisher — reported, falsely, that the Canadian embassy said that the explosion’s fallout contained depleted uranium. Another media organization linked to the Lebanese president’s party claimed the explosive material was bound for terrorist groups in Syria.

The explosion could not have come at a worse time. Even before the blast, Lebanon was a failed state. Over most of the past year, it has suffered hyperinflation akin to the crisis in Venezuela.

Lebanon endured a 15-year civil war that ended in 1990 with an accord that divided power equally among its various religions and sects, while ensuring no accountability for the warlords who reigned over militias that carried out atrocities.

Many of these warlords, or their sons, are still in charge, and have built corrupt patronage networks to enrich themselves and their loyalists. Most are beholden to outside powers like Iran and Saudi Arabia, who have turned Lebanon into a proxy battleground for their own geopolitical interests. The most powerful military force in the country is Hezbollah, Iran’s favoured proxy militia, which was instrumental in keeping Syria’s dictator, Bashar Al-Assad, in power. The war drove a million Syrians to seek refuge in Lebanon, which had a pre-war population of just four million.

July 12, 2020

Free French vs. Fascist French – WW2 – 098 – July 11 1941

Filed under: Britain, France, Germany, History, Italy, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

World War Two
Published 11 Jul 2020

Germany keeps advancing on the eastern front, and yet by now, transport and supply problems are seriously undermining the capability of the German spearheads, even as they pull further away from the infantry. The Syria-Lebanon campaign is coming to an end, though, and an armistice is proposed which would give the Allies victory if accepted.

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January 14, 2019

QotD: Eisenhower’s Middle East policy about-face

Filed under: History, Middle East, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Unlike some American presidents, however, Eisenhower learned from his mistakes. In 1958, five years after being sworn into office, he reversed course. Rather than suck up to Egypt, Ike deployed American Marines to Lebanon to shore up President Camille Chamoun, who was under siege by Nasser’s local allies.

“In Lebanon,” Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs, “the question was whether it would be better to incur the deep resentment of nearly all of the Arab world (and some of the rest of the Free World) and in doing so risk general war with the Soviet Union or to do something worse — which was to do nothing.” That is almost verbatim what the British said to justify their own war against Nasser when Eisenhower slapped them with crippling sanctions.

Reality forced the United States into a total about-face. Ike’s entire Middle Eastern worldview collapsed. Even before sending the Marines to Lebanon he announced that America was taking Britain’s place as the pre-eminent power in the Middle East. He had to start over even if he didn’t want to. “Nasser,” Doran writes, “the giant who rose from the Suez Crisis, crushed Eisenhower’s doctrine like a cigarette under his shoe.”

What happened between the Suez Crisis and Eisenhower’s intervention in Lebanon? A couple of things.

Ike’s hope to bring Syria into the American orbit alongside Turkey and Pakistan collapsed in spectacular fashion. So many Syrians swooned over Nasser after Egypt’s victory in the Suez Canal that Syria, astonishingly, allowed itself to be annexed by Cairo. Egypt and Syria became one country—the United Arab Republic—with Nasser as the dictator of both.

Washington’s attempt to groom Saudi Arabia as a regional counterbalance to Egypt also hit the skids when Nasser accused the Saudis of trying to assassinate him and foment a military coup in Damascus. The Saudis responded by shoving King Saud aside and replacing him with his Nasserist younger brother, Crown Prince Faisal.

The final blow came with the brutal overthrow of the pro-Western Hashemite monarchy in Iraq and the mutilation of the royal family’s corpses in public, thus toppling the last pillar of America’s anti-Soviet alliance in the Middle East. Eisenhower had no choice but to stop being clever and return to the first rule of foreign policy: reward your friends and punish your enemies.

Michael J. Totten, “We Are Still Living With Eisenhower’s Biggest Mistake”, The Tower Magazine, 2017-02.

January 14, 2018

POWs in Japan – Great War Remembrance – Marasesti I OUT OF THE TRENCHES

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Japan, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 13 Jan 2018

Ask your questions here: http://outofthetrenches.thegreatwar.tv

In today’s episode, Indy answers questions about the state of the prisoner of war camps in Japan, the ways in which WW1 is remembered in Germany and the food shortages in the Ottoman Empire, plus he takes a closer look at the Battle of Marasesti.

May 23, 2015

The rise of the Donair

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Food, Middle East — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I first experienced a donair in Halifax in the summer of 1982. I won’t claim it was a life-changing experience, but it was a revelation that “street meat” didn’t have to be awful. At The Walrus, Omar Mouallem explains how the humble donair is on the verge of conquering the streets of Alberta:

Like shawarma and gyros, donairs are a meaty delicacy shaved from a rotisserie spit and wrapped in pitas — only spicier and sweeter. If you require further explanation, then you’re from neither the Maritimes (where they were invented, in the 1970s) nor Alberta (where they’re most consumed). Topped with a sweet, creamy sauce, they are a Canadian take on tzatziki-coated beef and lamb gyros, which themselves are a Greco-American take on centuries-old Turkish rotisserie lamb (a dish that also spawned a blander German variant called döner kebab). Adding to the cultural confusion, most donair operations are run by Lebanese immigrants such as Tawachi — or my father, Ahmed Mouallem, who introduced Athena’s product to my hometown of High Prairie, Alberta, in 1995. The town of 2,666 now supports four different restaurants that serve the food, but only three traffic lights.

[…]

No one, including John Kamoulakos, who with his brother Peter invented the street food in Halifax, is quite sure how donairs migrated from east to west. Aaron Tingley of Tony’s Meats (based in Antigonish, Nova Scotia), a supplier that purchased the Mr. Donair trademark and recipe from Kamoulakos in 2005, thinks Maritime labourers might have driven Alberta’s demand: “They want to experience a taste of home.”

That’s what Chawki El-Homeira was thinking in 1978, when he left Halifax to chase the Alberta oil patch. Only he was going to feed the workforce. The sixty-seven-year-old remembers his first encounter with the donair, in March 1976, as if it were yesterday. He’d arrived in Nova Scotia from Lebanon with neither family nor English and got a job washing dishes in a restaurant that served the delicacy. “Something attracted me to it,” he tells me. “It was close to our food: it’s pita bread and spicy, quality beef, like shawarma. I thought, someday I’m going to open my own donair shop.”

After watching Maritimers migrate to Fort McMurray, he packed his bags and followed. The timing was terrible. The oil patch dried up in 1980, before he could secure a lease (like a true Albertan, he blames Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Program). So he drove a cab instead, first in Fort Mac, then in Edmonton, looking for commercial vacancies while the meter ran.

On a fellow cabbie’s tip, he purchased a submarine-sandwich shop on Whyte Avenue in 1982 (the same year Tawachi opened his) and introduced his Dartmouth recipe to Albertans one slice at a time, offering customers free samples. Word spread of “Charles Smart Donair” (his anglicized name and a poorly translated Arabic adjective), and soon he had a monopoly as a supplier to other Lebanese shop owners. Then his best customer tried to copy his technique and, he claims, sabotage his business by spreading rumours to his predominantly Muslim clientele that he, a Christian, spiked his product with pork.

If anyone knows of a good donair place in Toronto’s financial district, feel free to drop a hint in the comments…

March 2, 2015

Lebanon braces for the “attentions” of ISIS

Filed under: Middle East, Military, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Michael Totten on the announcement by ISIS that Lebanon is their next expansion target:

The Lebanese army is one of the least effective in the Middle East — and that’s saying something in a region where the far more capable Syrian and Iraqi armies are utterly failing to safeguard what should be their own sovereign territory.

So France is going to send a three billion dollar package of weapons to Lebanon and the Saudis are going to pay for it. It won’t solve the problem any more than a full-body cast will cure cancer, but it beats standing around and not even trying.

It may seem surprising at first that Riyadh is willing to fund a Lebanese Maginot Line. Saudi Arabia is the most culturally conservative Arab country and Lebanon is the most liberal, partly because of its one-third Christian minority, but also because Lebanon’s Sunni Muslims are, for the most part, Mediterranean merchants rather than isolated desert-dwellers. They’ve been exposed to cosmopolitan ideas and culture for centuries while most Saudis outside the Hejaz region on the Red Sea have been hermetically sealed off from the wider world and its ways for millennia.

[…]

The Lebanese, of course, are in far more immediate danger. They can feel ISIS’ hot breath on their necks. The army has been scrapping with them along the Syrian border for some time now. A majority of Lebanon’s population is either Christian, Shia, or Druze, and all three populations rightly see ISIS as a potentially genocidal threat to their very existence. Even the Sunnis, though, fear and loathe ISIS. Other than the nominal sectarian sameness — ISIS also is Sunni — Lebanon’s culturally liberal Sunnis have little more in common with ISIS than the French or Italians do.

A serious invasion of Lebanon by ISIS could unleash a bloodbath that makes the civil war in Syria look like a bar fight with pool sticks and beer mugs. It would be tantamount to a Nazi invasion. Every family in Lebanon is armed to the gills thanks to the state being too weak and divided to provide basic security, but people anywhere in the world facing psychopathic mass-murderers will fight with kitchen knives and even their fingernails and teeth if they have to.

The only good thing that might emerge from an attempted ISIS invasion is that the eternally fractious Lebanese might finally realize they have enough in common with each other to band together for survival and kindle something that resembles a national identity for the first time in their history.

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