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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: aladin who wrote (163252)	4/10/2006 10:25:47 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793890

The case you should look at for the practice run on these future wars is the Israeli/Arab conflicts. It's been a combination of very fast hot wars (the Israelis had to move fast since they always knew they were fighting against the clock before the superpowers shut them down) and very slow low-grade terror wars, of which the 2000 - 2004 "second intifada" was just the latest in a series. Since 1973, the Arab states got discouraged about the results of the hot wars and have shifted to terror wars. If you'll notice, the strikes in the terror wars are usually calibrated. Even if successful, they are designed to harass and hurt and terrify but not to kill too many people at once, because the Palestinians depend on Israeli restraint in order to carry on the war. If the Palestinians had a really lucky day and killed Israelis by the thousands, then Israel would get tacit permission from the world and from their own public to take the gloves off. That would not be good news for the Palestinians. They need to maintain their victim status as part of their shoot'n'whine strategy. So they don't try attacks on that scale. So you get long drawn-out low-grade conflicts, with much wailing and whining about the condition of Palestinian civilians. I have often thought that these terror wars must be the first in human history where one party developed his strategy with the knowledge that his adversary valued the lives of his enemy's women and children more than that enemy did himself. I don't really expect Al Qaeda to try to nuke a city. They must know by now that Osama bin Laden badly miscalculated America's reaction to 9/11. I think their ideal attack would be massively disruptive with huge media coverage, and casualties in the hundreds. A small dirty bomb would do the trick. jmo.