jewsyonkersislam # 664 "Defeating" the "enemy", resources, money

jewsyonkersislam # 664 "Defeating" the "enemy", resources,
money

Below are articles, edited, concerning which I will
muse on the REAL causes of war :

No nation can be great without enormous resources at
its beck and call -another name for power and money.

India provides evidence of Pakistani involvement in Mumbnai
terrorist attacks ;
Arctic: fight over who owns those resources ;
US THWARTS LIBYAN PUSH FOR GAZA TRUCE, ( Palestine) ;
Taliban carrying out selective killings,( Afghanistan) ;
"Defeating" the "enemy" (Israel)...not possible today because such
would mean the destruction of the planet Earth and the extinction of the human
race.

ALL of these articles involve competition, for resources, for power, for money, for survival. Secondarily the also involve Islam and/vs the rest of the world.
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India provides evidence of Pakistani involvement in Mumbai
terrorist attacks


NEW DELHI: Pakistan will have its wish. Calling Islamabad's bluff, India will next week give a dossier of evidence from the Mumbai terror attacks, which will include damning evidence showing Pakistan's complicity in the planning and execution of the attacks.
After a couple of weeks when India seemed to be losing the diplomatic battle with Pakistan, the government's new move is being regarded as a major diplomatic campaign. Pakistan has spent the past days either in strongly-worded denials regarding either their terrorists or their links to Mumbai.
The dossier will be given to Pakistan, China, US, UK and other key countries. The evidence will be given to their ambassadors in India as well as in their capitals simultaneously. "We expect Pakistan to act on the evidence we provide," said senior government sources.
The other countries will be expected to use the dossier to push Pakistan to act against the terrorists. The core of India's strategy post-Mumbai continues to be to push the international community to act against Pakistan. On Saturday, PM Manmohan Singh continued the tirade. While stating that war was no solution, he said in Shillong, "I hope some sense will prevail on the leadership of Pakistan to recognise that tackling terrorism is an area that needs cooperation."
"It (Pakistan) has to take action on the demand from all civilised countries that the perpetrators (of Mumbai attacks) are brought to book. We hope that these criminals will be handed over to us to face trial," Singh said.
But the policy that is believed to be yielding diminishing returns, and by sharing evidence India hopes to get the international community to lean on Pakistan in a more forceful way.
The dossier contains the detailed confession of the lone terrorist held in the Mumbai terror attack Amir Ajmal Kasab, photographs and identities of all the terrorists, phone call logs, the GPS device's information and phone call intercepts — pretty much everything that has now emerged in the public domain. The evidence, being put together, also includes the logbook recovered from the vessel in which the 10 terrorists came from Karachi, records of satellite phone used by the attackers and transcript of conversations between the attackers and their handlers in Pakistan during the attack, sources said.
The dossier will also include the corroborative evidence tracking the journey of the attackers from Karachi to Mumbai. Investigators have found evidence to show that the terrorists, who struck at Taj Hotel, Trident Hotel and Nariman House on November 26, were in touch with their handlers in Karachi even while their three-day engagement with security forces was on.
Meanwhile, home minister P Chidambaram is expected to make his first trip to the US next week in his current capacity. His visit will almost dovetail into Barack Obama's inauguration on January 20.
The details of the visit were finalized between Chidambaram and US ambassador David Mulford on Saturday. Chidambaram's visit comes as India takes its first steps to set up a more robust intelligence and homeland security setup. The US has agreed to share its experiences in the wake of 9/11 which saw them setting up their systems.
Chidambaram's trip to US also comes after a quiet visit by the US' director of national intelligence Mike McConnell. Chidambaram is expected to meet US secretary of department of homeland security Michael Chertoff and US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice.
The US' top investigating agency, FBI, has shared quite a bit of its own findings with the Indian government. FBI was granted unprecedented access to all the evidence and intelligence collected by the Indians as well as interviewing Kasab. A lot of their findings will make it to the dossier.
The expected diplomatic gains from the move are still unclear particularly as it is becoming clear that countries like the US, China and Saudi Arabia -- the three that have any influence on Pakistan -- may not be willing to add that extra heft against Pakistan, loath to pressure a fragile civilian government. US also has to worry about Pakistan seizing upon an intervention of it for India to formally pull out of the fight against Taliban.
In his remarks on Saturday, the PM again said, "The growing menace of terrorism and naxalism is a cause of worry. The government will not compromise with terrorism...There were some initial setbacks, but we will overcome them. The government will go to any extent to root out terrorism from the country."

Arctic: fight over who owns those resources


(CNN) -- One of the planet's most fragile and pristine ecosystems sits atop a bounty of untapped fossil fuels.
The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that 90 billion barrels of oil, 44 billion barrels of natural gas liquids and 1,670 trillion cubic feet of natural gas are recoverable in the frozen region north of the Arctic Circle.
And the fight over who owns those resources may turn out to be the most important territorial(!!!!) dispute of this century. Russia, Canada, the United States, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland and Finland all have a stake in the Arctic's icy real estate.
But both the exploration, and the likely drilling at the top of the Earth, have scientists deeply concerned. One reason: Global warming has hit the Arctic's plant and animal life ferociously. The stresses and possible pollution(!!!) caused by drilling only increase the risks (as a matter of fact, we need to get out of the production and use of fossil fuels as soon as possible).
"The ecosystem that is there has been protected by thousands of years of ice. Even if there was no territorial dispute, the ice is going away," said oceanographer David Carlson, director of the International Polar Year's Program Office.
The International Polar Year (http://www.ipy.org/) is a global scientific study focused on the Arctic and the Antarctic from March 2007 to March 2009.
Arctic sea ice is usually 1 to 3 meters, or as much as 9 feet, thick. It grows during autumn and winter and shrinks in spring and summer. Scientists have monitored sea ice conditions for 50 years.
The disappearance of the ice in the past decade is astounding, climate scientists say.
"We've been seeing a retreat year after year," said Marika Holland, an oceanographer with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. "The sea ice loss we observed in the summer of 2007 was shocking."
Soon there may be no sea ice anywhere in the Arctic during some months of the year.
Although environmentalists are concerned by this melting trend, shipping and energy companies are salivating at the prospect of smaller ice caps, which makes Arctic drilling and commerce easier. Cargo ships may be able to travel from Asia to North America more cheaply and efficiently, for example.
Diplomats, politicians and oil company executives are feuding over who owns what under the ice. But the real power players might be the geologists who evaluate undersea land formations.
Unlike Antarctica, which has a treaty that prohibits territorial claims, there is no agreement for the vast expanse of the Arctic. So questions about drilling rights and shipping lanes, let alone who bears responsibility for environmental damage, are somewhat murky.
According to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, countries are entitled to exclusive economic zones up to 200 miles from their shores. Some countries with a stake in the Arctic's riches are trying to extend that zone, some in more brazen ways than others.
In a showy technological display August 2, 2007, a Russian submarine planted an underwater flag 14,000 feet (4,200 meters) below the North Pole.
Russian scientists are keen on proving that the seabed below the North Pole is part of the Eurasian continental shelf, an area called the Lomonosov Ridge.
If that's the case, the region would be under Russian control. Moscow argued before a United Nations commission in 2001 that the ridge is an extension of its continental territory. But the U.N. asked for more evidence.
Meanwhile, dueling geologists elsewhere are looking for land formations with a different provenance. Danish scientists are trying to prove that the Lomonosov Ridge is connected to Greenland, and Canadian scientists are looking for links between the ridge and Ellesmere Island, a Canadian territory.
Some territorial questions are not in dispute, however.
"Most of the estimated undiscovered resources are in areas with agreed-upon territorial boundaries," said Don Gautier, research geologist at the USGS.
"Exceptions are the East Barents Basins, where Russia and Norway are involved in bilateral discussions of the offshore boundary. Another exception is the Alaska./Canada boundary offshore, which is also subject to bilateral discussions between U.S. and Canada," he said.
The United States has unrestricted access to Arctic resources in northern Alaska. But the Bush administration's sale of oil drilling rights in prime polar bear habitat has upset environmentalists, who fear drilling's impact on the threatened species.
Security expert John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, thinks power in the Arctic may lie with whoever has the best physical access to this forbidding region.
"The Russians have got a half-dozen icebreakers. Americans have a pair of icebreakers, but they are old and worn out," Pike said.
And of course, much of countries' access to the Arctic will come down to money.
"Building a ship to operate in a foot of ice is no big deal. Building an icebreaker that can get through 2 yards of ice, now you're talking serious icebreaking. The Russians can get through 2 yards of ice without breaking a sweat," Pike said.
Ultimately, questions about what is drilled for in the Arctic, and by whom, will depend on the global economy. Recovering oil from a forbidding frozen wilderness makes sense when it's selling for $150 a barrel, but not so when it is at $40 a barrel



Jan 1, 2009
Editor's Notes: Defeating the enemy By DAVID HOROVITZ








A simple question: Can Israel defeat its enemies? (NO!!!) One need not go back decades, to the clinical successes of the Six Day War and Entebbe, to answer emphatically in the affirmative (not so over time).
Carried out in the spring of 2002, was a carefully planned and effectively executed attack on the Palestinians' suicide-bomb infrastructure in the West Bank that remade our reality in the years ever since - precisely the kind of goal enunciated for this week's Operation Cast Lead against Hamas in Gaza.
Defensive Shield was launched after the heaviest losses to terrorism in a single month in Israeli history - some 130 fatalities in more than a dozen attacks, including the Seder night bombing of the Park Hotel in Netanya. Its stated aim, as set out by then-prime minister Ariel Sharon, was to capture the terrorists and their dispatchers, and destroy their weapons, their explosives and their arms factories - their capacity to kill us (but it didn't last).
The operation was bitter and bloody. It was internationally controversial: Duplicitous Palestinian claims that Israel was massacring civilians were given widespread credence. There was heavy loss of life and massive destruction on the Palestinian side. Twenty-nine Israeli soldiers were killed - most of them in the suicide-bomber "capital," Jenin refugee camp, where the terror gangs had booby-trapped buildings for the incoming IDF troops.
But it was decisive, marking the beginning of the drastic decline in suicide-bombings that enabled ordinary life to flourish here anew. The physical destruction of the bombers' infrastructure; the knowledge that the IDF might return at any time; the deaths of key terror chiefs; the effective intelligence gathering that greatly reduced potential bombers' motivation; the construction of the West Bank security barrier - all of these factors combined if not to terminate, then to profoundly set back what had been an unprecedented strategic suicide-bomb onslaught against the men, women and children of Israel.
The deterrent effect of what had been a reluctant resort to such force, however, was gravely undermined by the subsequent abject handling of the Second Lebanon War - fought, like the current operation, across a border to which Israel had unilaterally withdrawn in the false hope of being rewarded with quiet. The Winograd Committee's scathing dissection of that conflict portrayed an IDF unprepared to battle Hizbullah(!!!), and a political leadership - headed by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and defense minister Amir Peretz - too arrogant and inexperienced to realize this. The consequence was a bumbling and hesitant confrontation, in which Hizbullah's tenacity was underestimated, as was the capacity for its thousands of Katyusha rockets to wreak havoc throughout the north of Israel. The initial air assault failed to achieve the decimation of Hizbullah that the Israeli leadership had unfoundedly predicted. And the ground forces were short of training and supplies(money, money, money), and poorly marshalled. ...incoherence of the command hierarchy...In the two and a half years since then, however, the IDF has benefited from the command of a no-nonsense ex-infantry man, Gabi Ashkenazi, who has quietly retrained and re-entrenched basic logistics and skills.
The unqualified Peretz...replaced by the rather politically unloved, but undeniably experienced Ehud Barak - a former chief of the General Staff and former head of the IDF's elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit.... the question must be asked anew: Can Israel defeat its enemies?
ISRAEL EMBARKED on its confrontation with Hamas with a clear goal: To restore security to the South....those who used his assertion to claim that Operation Cast Lead was itself this "war to the bitter end" were removing the comment from the context in which he employed it in his speech. It was uttered as Barak sought to illustrate the fundamental clash between our sovereign state and an Islamist movement that avowedly seeks our elimination, not as part of the operation's goals.
Publicly and privately, however, Israeli officials from Olmert on down did elaborate on what would constitute "restored security."...



Gaza was relatively familiar territory for the IDF, which had been deployed there until the disengagement of 2005...
The enemy, though viciously motivated and supremely indifferent to loss of life - it ruthlessly killed its own people when wresting power in Gaza in June 2007 - was far less equipped for the fight than that other Iranian proxy army to the north, Hizbullah. Its rocket capacity was limited, and its ability to melt away much constrained, especially given Egypt's refusal to let its border with Gaza serve as Hamas's supply import route and terrorist escape route.
In fact, Egypt's unprecedented criticism of Hamas, for bringing disaster to bear on Gaza by maintaining rocket attacks on Israel and cancelling the misnamed "truce," was another major asset for Israel, in turn helping to mollify some of the inevitable international criticism of the resort to force....NEVERTHELESS, AS early as Tuesday evening, sources in the defense establishment were indicating that Barak was ready to agree to a 48-hour "humanitarian" time-out in the operation - as requested by French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner - which might turn into a permanent cease-fire if Hamas halted the rocket attacks......
None of these arguments withstands serious scrutiny. The "bank" of targets continually refreshes so long as Hamas attempts to govern Gaza. Bad weather might necessitate delayed actions, but not a formal commitment to inaction. Yes, Israel might score points if Hamas continued firing through a time-out, but what if it didn't? The operation would be over without its goal attained. And while the unready IDF might indeed have benefited from an early cease-fire in 2006, to take the time to properly prepare for the confrontation with Hizbullah, this time Ashkenazi had made clear that it was ready to execute its battle plan.
After discussion by Barak, Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni that night, the time-out was rejected. On Wednesday, officials attempted to suggest it had never been seriously contemplated. But Ashkenazi, for one, plainly believed that it was a plausible possibility; he went so far as to approve the release of a statement on Tuesday afternoon dissociating the IDF from any role in hatching or advancing the idea.
On Wednesday, Olmert declared that "we didn't initiate the Gaza operation in order to end it while Israeli towns are still under fire." So why was Barak weighing the time-out, and thus seemingly signalling a desired Israeli countdown toward a cease-fire?
Hamas has been firing rockets more deeply than ever into Israel - as far as Beersheba since Tuesday, bringing an estimated 800,000 Israelis into range. Though it has sustained considerable losses, it is anything but broken, as the head of the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), Yuval Diskin, told the cabinet on Wednesday. Almost all of its leadership has gone safely to ground. Its armed forces are essentially intact. It may be temporarily unable to effectively govern Gaza at present, but it retains its capacity to regain its hold if the operation ceases.
Barak's readiness to contemplate the time-out at so early a juncture suggested that the defense minister was himself uncertain that Israel could indeed effectively quash the Hamas threat (so true). By extension, it conveyed a similar sense of uncertainty to the IDF and to those international players who have explicitly or tacitly backed Israel in this endeavor. And what a boost it must have been to Hamas and its Islamist supporters....
The IAF assaults have smashed the symbols of Hamas power, bombed many of the tunnels that are its lifeline, blown up many of its rocket silos, hit some of its weapons stores and laboratories, and killed several of its key commanders.
If much of what can be achieved from the air was indeed achieved early in this operation, other targets will nevertheless appear as Hamas leaders seek to emerge from the bunkers - as was the case on Thursday afternoon when Nizar Rayyan was killed. And if they do not show their faces, Hamas will gradually lose more credibility, and ultimately lose the capacity to govern.
Meanwhile, astute use of forces on the ground where and when necessitated - whether to tackle concentrations of terrorist power as in Operation Defensive Shield, or to target weapons stores and rocket silos callously placed by Hamas in dense residential areas unreachable from the air - would gradually reduce Hamas's capacity to threaten Israel.





As the original goal made plain, this confrontation must be concluded with Israel in a position of strength, able to dictate conditions that will prevent a resurgence of the Hamas threat in the long-term. Israel must retain ongoing freedom for military action, enabling the IDF to prevent the homefront - the schools, the kindergartens - from again becoming the front line.

A cease-fire, by contrast, that leaves Hamas able - as it was during the months of the last lull - to move around freely and organize for battle, to import arms and to improve its weaponry, would mean Operation Cast Lead had achieved nothing.
It would suggest a further deterioration since 2006, when Israel's leadership was plainly inexperienced and underqualified. Here and now, Hamas, Hizbullah, Iran and Syria would proclaim, Israel - having once more chosen to seek a decisive outcome after its people came under unprovoked attack, facing a force less formidable than Hizbullah, and led by a veteran defense minister and a highly regarded IDF chief - was again ultimately deterred.
AFTER THE shock of the initial air strikes, Operation Cast Lead was predicated on the basis of weeks, not days - a strategic, systematic effort to change the reality in the South.
It worked for Operation Defensive Shield in the West Bank. If Israeli civilians are to live free from the terror threat, it needs to work in Gaza.