Middle East news (really M.E.!)

V7 said:

Again I'll disagree - its comes down to the lethality of the weaponry if Hamas reaches a point where its able to neutralise the IDF's armour and air power things will start to look very different (and AT and AA weapons are generally much less expensive than the tanks and aircraft they negate) - again I don't see that as a near term outcome but I think the trend is towards increasingly sophisticated weapons becoming more widespread.

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AT and AA weapons are defensive, not offensive. You can do sneak, hit, and run type strikes on fortified positions with AT missiles (the Hezb has some pretty cool videos of some they did in South Leb), but they won't let an irregular force seize positions from a regular one, nor breach their defensive lines. Better-guided or better-targeted rockets or other projectiles, such as the GPS-guided mortar shells Israel has been using in Gaza just now, would make cross-border strikes more lethal; OTOH the technologically more sophisticated army can quickly triangulate the source and return fire.

This would make it possible for the guerrilla army to make the conventional one less comfortable, and ground incursions like we're seeing more costly, but the regular army has lots of things to fall back on -- GPS-guided artillery shells instead of air strikes, for example, if it gets dangerous to fly sorties. Or just use jets that fly high and fast; those are very difficult to hit even with big vehicle-mounted AA missiles, let alone the shoulder-launched kind an irregular force would deploy. Means more collateral damage, naturally, but doesn't fundamentally change the equation.

Prime Junta said:

And I think the bio-weapon threat is much, MUCH exaggerated. The Aum Shinri Kyo had top-notch technical expertise, millions of dollars, several years of working completely undisturbed. They made two anthrax attacks on Tokyo, one by spraying their weaponized anthrax spores over the city from a light plane, another by spraying them directly into the air from their office in a high-rise.

Nobody even noticed.

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Actually I'll take that as evidence for my arguement - we've had two known seperate bioweapons attacks in recent decades, Aum Shinri and the anthrax letters in the US. Agreed both were small scale and relativly ineffective, but the infrastructure needed to produce more is much smaller and more easily hidden than nuclear developement (as you pointed no one even knew what Aum Shinri was up to) and harder to trace. I suspect its only a matter of time before someone manages something both lethal and contageious. Reguardless I can't think of any nuclear incidents off hand so the score for bioweapons is already ahead.

...and again I don't see this as likley from the Palestinians I was just digressing on the relative threats of nuclear vs biological weapons (sorry ) - personally I'd be keeping a close watch on research and medical proofessionals with close ties to the middle east and Pakistan, people like the doctors who tried bombig London.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7784799.stm

There's another pretty good reason why the Pals wouldn't use bioweapons: they're hard to contain, and their effectiveness is directly tied to public health and general sanitation and living conditions. Given that the Palestinians' living conditions are much worse than Israelis, it follows that they would also be far worse affected. If you sprayed all of Israel and the Palestinian territories with any military-grade biological agent -- even the real heavies like smallpox or the nastier varieties of influenza --, the Palestinians would be for all practical purposes wiped out, whereas most Israelis would survive. Given the geographical proximity there, it's just not possible to target bioweapons precisely enough that only would group would be exposed.

Come to think of it, that makes it more likely that some apocalyptic group from the Israeli side would use them. They would have far more resources to develop them, too, and might even have connections to the Israeli or American bioweapons programs. If they calibrated the virulence well, they might be able to wipe out, say, 80% of the Palestinian population, with 80% of the Israeli population surviving, simply due to better sanitation and better public health infrastructure (and most of the fatalities on the Israeli side coming from the lower socioeconomic groups, among which Israeli Arabs are disproportionately represented). To a certain mindset, that looks like a pretty attractive trade-off.

Prime Junta said:

AT and AA weapons are defensive, not offensive.

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Not sure the distinction makes a big difference in a place as small as Israel, natrually the taticts have to evlove as capibilities change the question is whether Hamas can rasie the kill ratio to more favorable levels.

I also suspect our outlook is not far different here anyway - what do you think will happen when the IDF is made 'uncomfortable' as you put it? The only stable outcomes I can see from there are genocide or a Palestinian win.

V7 said:

Not sure the distinction makes a big difference in a place as small as Israel, natrually the taticts have to evlove as capibilities change the question is whether Hamas can rasie the kill ratio to more favorable levels.

I also suspect our outlook is not far different here anyway - what do you think will happen when the IDF is made 'uncomfortable' as you put it? The only stable outcomes I can see from there are genocide or a Palestinian win.

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More or less, yeah.

There is the possibility, however remote it seems at this time, that they'll find some way of coexisting and eventually integrating.

Well, to the certain extend, Hizbullah has already learned how to deal with Israeli tanks. During the July war they have managed to destroy 20 of them and damage further 20 or so. While destroyed machines were only a 5% of total number of tanks deployed, the deaths of 30 tank crews came as quite a shock to casualty sensitive Israelis.

Prime Junta said:

More or less, yeah.

There is the possibility, however remote it seems at this time, that they'll find some way of coexisting and eventually integrating.

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...and thats the tick tock outcome that I think we both agreed was the brightest likley future. I'm just much more gloomy about the likelyhood of that happening if there's another fifty years of occupation and insurgancy.

zahratustra said:

Well, to the certain extend, Hizbullah has already learned how to deal with Israeli tanks. During the July war they have managed to destroy 20 of them and damage further 20 or so. While destroyed machines were only a 5% of total number of tanks deployed, the deaths of 30 tank crews came as quite a shock to casualty sensitive Israelis.

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Certainly -- but that was playing defense on home ground, after years of digging in and training for just such an eventuality. There's no way the Hizb could survive entering ten meters into Israeli territory.

And I very much doubt Hamas is able to achieve that kind of capability in the foreseeable future. The Hezb had the benefit of Iranian training, well-funded and large training camps in the Beka'a, reasonably sophisticated weaponry, gobs of experience doing counter-intelligence, a tightly knit community and religious identity, that Shi'ite thing about martyrdom, and the ideal combination of years of quiet for training and equipping interspersed with weeks of violence to test how it worked.

The Hamas, OTOH, is riddled with Shin Bet, packed in probably the most closely spied terrain in the world, has extremely limited logistics, nowhere to train in tactics and use of equipment, and a heterogenous population base at odds with itself and feeling very ambivalent about its sponsors. I can't see how the Hamas could get close to Hezb military capability in these conditions, and it's quite easy for Israel to keep the conditions such that this can't happen.

From where I'm at, this sort of mutual deterrence is not a bad thing. In fact, the one often overlooked fact about that horrible 2006 war is that it *worked* -- the Hezb has been very careful not to poke Israel with a pointed stick, and Israel has clearly been careful not to do anything too hasty on the northern border. Mutual deterrence was created.

Perhaps that occurred to the Israeli cabinet too, when they launched Cast Lead.

I'm closing this thread and opening another simply because this one has grown too large for people to find references.