Let me make just a couple of points in summary.
I'M OK, YOU'RE OK
You must see that by now.
What I see even more clearly is the point I made way upstream (http://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=21288949) that you and I are focusing on different things.
Everything you have said is special-forces-centric and it seems to me that you've been reading special forces into everything I say. My memory of the incident from forty years ago is not about special forces, something that rarely touches my radar and then only in a fuzzy way, but about the politics of the event. My perspective is that of a civilian sports fan glued to the Olympics, not a military operative. My memory of the event was as I described earlier (http://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=21288196).
As I relate my memories, "the Germans" does not mean the German SF. It means the German officials associated with the Munich Olympics. In "I would use the Israelis," "the Israelis" are the Israelis, in general, with their tough-as-nails, resolute, and businesslike approach to terrorism and, in particular, those with Israel's unique insight into the psyche and practices of Palestinian terrorists and their effective counter, not the Israeli SF, had they had one. "Use" means take to advantage of their utility, not defer in any sense of the word to them.
As for my not being there, no, I wasn't. But neither were you who and where I was, which was a typical civilian sports fan in the States sprawled on my sofa watching the events play out on TV. Take off your beret for a moment and put yourself in the our shoes, or, more likely our stocking feet. You and I saw an event forty years ago from a different angles and we naturally have retained that which was most relevant to us, which means we have different but not necessarily contradictory memories, memories of different aspects of it.
FORGIVENESS
You are getting closer to forgiveness.
Speaking of forgiveness...you called me a liar.
"Your comment above about commentators at the time (1972) basing arguments on a (then) demonstrated Israeli hostage rescue capability are a bald faced lie. Pure BS."
Message 21292410
Backing off from calling me a "bald-faced" (unscrupulous) liar to an ordinary serial liar, while an encouraging gesture, still isn't accurate.
It was a very minor incident ... It was so minor, it has never even been discussed in SF training.
I don't question that it was a minor incident in the annals of SF history, only a footnote. But from the broader perspective, which is what politicians and officials and commentators and viewers were thinking at the time of the Munich event, it was very important because it, in addition to the already famous Israeli attitude, set the stage for the common mind-set, valid or not, that the Israelis were the go-to guys when it came to terrorism, an mind-set that later grew over time fostered by the Entebbe event.
At the point in time we're discussing, the Israelis had, indeed, demonstrated a hostage rescue capability. They had just rescued one hundred hostages from terrorists on the tarmac in Tel Aviv, a dramatic event widely publicized. Maybe that wasn't a big deal from a technical SF POV and maybe there were countervailing Israeli failures familiar to the cognoscenti, but to the rest of us, that was a big public deal.
I am not easily offended. You practically have to use physical force against me before I feel offended or angered. Since I tend to not take offense at what is generally perceived as insults, I don't operate in an apology and forgiveness paradigm. What offends my sensibilities about calling something a lie that is not a lie is the illogic of it, and illogic is not something that calls for apology or forgiveness but for correction.
You have repeatedly insisted that the Israelis did not have/were not known to have hostage rescue capability at the time of the incident. That is demonstrably not so. A prominent rescue shortly before the Olympics is conclusive evidence of capacity. One can no more call that a lie than call the assertion that apples fall from trees a lie having just been hit on the head by one. You may want to add caveats and quibbles, but that capacity cannot logically be called untrue let alone a lie.
OLD MEMORIES
I had to call an old teammate who was in that AO to get my memory refreshed. Don't chastise me for that. I am certain you were not there.
After you made an issue of Entebbe, I commented: "Of course it hadn't happened yet, but it was of the same era." After finding that "library" link, I discovered that that the two events weren't of the same era after all. (See, Google can be useful.) But I was sure of the contemporaneous mindset. The mention at that site of the Sabena incident refreshed my memory of what provoked the commentary and my thinking at that time that the Israelis had expertise in this area. So, my memory of the basis for that mindset took some prompting, but it was quickly restored.
Dontcha love these little stories? I luv the old memories.
I had a stopover at the Entebbe airport not long before that event. I was flying KLM on my way to Nairobi. It was a really creepy experience. Before we landed, the pilot directed us to close all the window shades, to put away any cameras or electronics, and to sit still and shut up. I could tell he was serious. Ugandan troops boarded the plane with some serious hardware and stared menacingly at us during the entire stop. So Entebbe has a special place in my memory.
Slight change of subject.
In the course of this discussion, I had occasion to reflect on the notion of not negotiating with terrorists. I remember clearly that it was considered a radical notion by the public at some point in my life but has evolved over time and seems to be accepted now, for the most part. Time has a way of fuzzing out or compressing and I don't have a good sense of how that thinking evolved here in the States. I have a sense that the notion was an Israeli "invention" that proliferated but that could be simply the context in which I first became aware of it. This is not the sort of question for which Google is not well suited. Perhaps your experience is a better source. Can you provide a perspective on the history of that idea and how it evolved and came to be internalized by the US public? Or recommend an accessible source? |
