Ófriður - Þriðja heimstyrjöldin hafin eða að hefjast? - Ný orrustutækni - Barnungir hermenn

Það er ekki hægt að neita því að nokkuð ófriðlega horfir í heiminum nú um stundir.  Átök eru víða, má þar til dæmis nefna til sögunnar Líbanon, Ísrael, Afghanistan, Írak, Angóla, Súdan, Sómalíu, ekki er þetta endanlegur listi og má líklega bæta nokkuð hann þó nokkrum svæðum sem hernaður eða önnur átök eiga sér stað.

Því hafa ummæli Newt Gingrich í þætti sem ber nafnið "Meet the Press" vakið nokkra athygli.  Þar sagði Gingrich

"We are in the early stages of what I would describe as the Third World War.  And frankly, our bureaucracies aren't responding fast enough, we don't have the right attitude about this." Missile launches by North Korea, bombs in Mumbai, a war in Afghanistan, a war in Iraq "funded largely by Saudi Arabia and supplied largely from Syria and Iran," terrorist plots in Britain, Miami, Toronto and New York.

I believe if you take all the countries I just listed, that you've been covering, put them on a map, look at all the different connectivity, you'd have to say to yourself this is, in fact, World War III. You've got to understand these dictatorships all talk to each other," he continued. "There's public footage from North Korean television of the Iranians visiting with Kim Jong Il the dictator, and a North Korean missile manufacturing facility. The Iranians have now unveiled a statue of Simón Bolívar in Tehran to prove their solidarity with Venezuela. I mean, these folks think on a global basis."

Fjallað var um ummæli Gingrich´s og fleiri þekktra aðila í ágætri grein í Macleans fyrir stuttu, en þá grein má finna hér.

Sjálfur tala ég ekki um þriðju heimstyrjöldina, alla vegna ekki ennþá, en eins og ég sagði ofar, er ekki mjög friðvænlegt í heiminum um þessar mundir.  Hér á eftir "linka" ég og "kvóta" úr greinum og fréttum sem mér hafa fundist athygliverðar. 

Á vef NYT, rakst ég síðan á grein um þá tækni sem Hezbollah beitir í hernaði sínum gegn Ísrael, fróðleg grein, en baráttuaðferðir þeirra hafa vakið mikla athygli og jafnvel ugg á meðal herstjórnenda.

"Hezbollah spent the last six years dispersing about 12,000 rockets across southern Lebanon in a vast web of hidden caches, all divided into local zones with independent command.

“They dug tunnels. They dug bunkers, they established communications systems — cellphones, radios, even runners to carry messages that aren’t susceptible to eavesdropping,” said one military officer with experience in the Middle East. “They divided southern Lebanon into military zones with many small units that operate independently, without the need for central control.”

To attack Israel, Hezbollah dispersed its fighters with no distinguishing markings or uniforms or vehicles. Fighters access the weapons only at the moment of attack, and then disappear. This makes preventing the attack all but impossible. It is a significant modernization of classic guerrilla hit-and-run tactics. Israel has been unable to significantly degrade the numbers of rockets because of this approach. Hezbollah fired more than 100 a day at the start of this conflict; they are still firing more than 100 a day, despite Israeli bombardment."

"Hezbollah still possesses the most dangerous aspects of a shadowy terror network. It abides by no laws of war as it attacks civilians indiscriminately. Attacks on its positions carry a high risk of killing innocents. At the same time, it has attained military capabilities and other significant attributes of a nation-state. It holds territory and seats in the Lebanese government. It fields high-tech weapons and possesses the firepower to threaten the entire population of a regional superpower, or at least those in the northern half of Israel."

"While Hezbollah has emerged as a new kind of threat, it cannot be forgotten that the network is a creation of Iran, with the support of Syria, and both countries know they cannot attack Israel — or American interests — directly. The Bush administration is debating internally whether the best course of action against Iran and Syria is to negotiate with them, isolate them, or do something stronger."

"Within the Bush adminstration and across the military, a clearer view is emerging out of the chaos in southern Lebanon. It is that nation-states know they cannot directly take on superpowers — either regional or global — without getting their clocks cleaned, and so they use proxies they train and support to take the fight to those superpowers. The fight against groups like Hezbollah requires a strategy for dealing with their sponsors. These networks, Hezbollah included, don’t float around in the ether like free electrons bumping into each other. They alight. They attach themselves to territory. In Afghanistan it was with the full support of the Taliban. In Pakistan, it’s an ungoverned space. In Lebanon, it’s a state within a state. Cut off state support, or eliminate the ability of the networks to survive in ungoverned areas, and they collapse on themselves."

Þessa grein má finna í heild sinni hér.

Loks vil ég benda þeim sem trúa því að ófriðurinn í Líbanon hafi verið fyrirfram skipulagður af Ísrael og Bandaríkjastjórn, á grein sem birtist á vef The London Timas, þar segir m.a.:

"Until now Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group, has refused to reveal much about its response to Israel’s assault. But in an exclusive interview with The Sunday Times yesterday, Sheikh Naim Qassem, Hezbollah’s second in command, spoke out — and attacked Britain for allowing US planes carrying bombs to Israel to transit through a British airport.

“The transportation of American weapons to Israel is a blatant scandal of America’s full involvement in the battle,” he said, “and flying them over London bears large responsibility over Britain. "

"Qassem admitted Hezbollah had been preparing for conflict since Israel withdrew from south Lebanon in 2000. He claimed it had not been convinced that Israel’s aspirations in Lebanon were over, despite its withdrawal.

“The fact that Israel kept the Shebaa Farms (a strip of disputed land on the border), held on to the prisoners and its continuous reconnaissance flights over Lebanon were all indications of its aggressive intentions towards Lebanon,” he said.

Hezbollah’s stockpiling of arms and preparation of numerous bunkers and tunnels over the past six years have been key to its resistance. “If it was not for these preparations Lebanon would have been defeated within hours,” he said.

Hezbollah is believed to be in possession of four types of advanced missile: Fajr missiles with a range of 100 kilometres; Iran 130 missiles with a range of 110km; and Shahin missiles and 355mm rockets with ranges of 150km. He said that Hezbollah will use its weapons to strike deep into Israel should the attacks in Lebanon continue. "

"Qassem said that Hezbollah would not discuss disarmament. It “is not an issue up for negotiation at this stage”, he said. "

Greinina í heild má finna hér.

Rakst líka á nokkuð fróðlegan pistil Andrew Sullivan, á sama vef, hann má finna hér, en þar fjallar hann um hernaðar og pólítíska baráttu í Miðausturlöndum.  Þar kemur meðal annars þetta fram:

"While the world remains understandably transfixed on Lebanon and Israel, one fact bears keeping in mind: more people were killed in Iraq in the past two weeks than in Israel and Lebanon combined."

"But it has entered others’. The Saudi Arabian elites are rattled. All the Sunni powers are unnerved. The Hezbollah provocation, sponsored and armed by Iran, is dangerous in itself. Combined with the developments in Iraq, it presages a real and new shift in power. If Tehran gains a Shi’ite mini-state with vast oil reserves in Iraq, if its nuclear programme continues unchecked, if its proxy fighters in Lebanon continue to show the tenacity and barbaric targeting of civilians that they have demonstrated so far, we have the makings of a war in the Middle East with Iran as the central player, vowing to rival Al-Qaeda as the spearhead of the new caliphate.

The Israelis are aware of this because their survival depends on it. Their elimination as a people and a nation is a central tenet of Hezbollah’s and Tehran’s ideology. That is why their response in Lebanon, however awful the collateral civilian deaths and injuries, and however unsettling to the region, is rational from their point of view. It is disproportionate only if you ignore the existential threat that they increasingly face.

In an irony of history, Bush’s bungled, unserious Iraq occupation has given the Shi’ite Islamists an opportunity. In southern Lebanon they have opened a polarising second front. In southern Iraq they are gaining a new and potentially deadly base of operations. From that base, their true intentions will shortly become clearer. And the future darker. "

Það var annar ágætis pistill á vef The London Times, sá eftir Martin Ivens og ber titilinn:
"If this is the third world war, we’re losing it"

Eftirfarandi "klausur" má finna þar: 
"The idea of the “Islamo-fascist” enemy makes a great soundbite but in reality leaves something to be desired. Certainly Michael Aflaq, founder of the Ba’ath movement that came to power in Iraq and Syria, was an admirer of Hitler. But he came from a Christian family and his movement was militantly secular. A Ba’ath fascist like Saddam Hussein may exalt the use of violence but that does not make him an Islamist — as his Shi’ite victims can bitterly attest.

Bashar al-Assad of Ba’athist Syria is allied to theocratic Iran by opposition to Israel and America, not ideology. Israel does face real Islamist enemies who would like to see it “wiped off the face of the earth”, but the Palestinian issue has its own dynamics, its own rights and wrongs. Nor is a Sunni Muslim the same as a Shi’ite."

"That said, there are some things worth defending: democracy and liberal values. And yes, Israel shares them. In Muslim countries there is a real threat from fanatics determined to purge their fellows of any western taint, death cultists who worship only the dark side of religion. They are determined to hit western interests around the world and western civilians whether we choose to fight them or not, although as targets we come second behind their co-religionists.

True, all the intelligence agencies of the West — and Russia as well — made the mistake of assuming that Saddam still had chemical weapons when they had been destroyed after the first Gulf war. But the thought of nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists or an apocalyptic fanatic like President Ahmadinejad of Iran is enough to make the blood run cold. "

"Some cold warriors saw a single enemy made in Moscow, not realising that Mao’s China and even Tito’s Yugoslavia had their own ambitions. Third World dictators allied to the Soviet Union had their own agendas, too.

Disagreements about how to fight such an enemy are inevitable. Without the benefit of hindsight, if you supported the successful Korean war should you have automatically advocated fighting the communists in Vietnam? If you did should you have tried to play on Sino-Soviet divisions? Did it matter if our allies in the Third World were a sons-of-a-bitch as long as they were our sons-of-a-bitch or should we have made deals with only the purest democrats (as some neoconservatives suggest today)? Apply the analogy to the Middle East, Al-Qaeda, the Iraq war, the Iranian nuclear programme and the Ba’athists. When to fight and when to contain? Are we uniting our enemies instead of dividing them? Certainly an Afghanistan under Taliban rule could not be tolerated. As for Saddam, in my view he should have been toppled a long time before. But even the most belligerent supporters of the Iraq war cannot deny that its opponents have a stronger case today. And Iran is an even trickier proposition. Is the problem the bomb or the regime? We urgently require a synthesis of idealism and realism. "

Loks linka ég hér í grein um barn unga hermenn í Angóla, þar hefur hernaður geysað í langan tíma, þó að það vekji ekki mikla athygli, þessi grein birtist í Washington Times. Átakanleg lesning s.s. :  

"Nicholas, 12, and Ninety, 15, each described being forced to kill other children, with one being forced to join a group of five that was ordered to bite off the skin of a child until the victim bled to death. "