Secrets of Hezbollah’s Success

Stolen from Ben Heine:

Hezbollah's winning the peace

1) Organizational Improvements

The central secret to Hezbollah‘s success is that it trained its guerrillas to make decisions autonomously at the small group level. (…) The result of this decentralization is that Hezbollah‘s aggregate decision cycles are faster and qualitatively better than those of their Israeli counterparts.

2) Hybrid Methods

Ancillary to the improvements in organizational design, Hezbollah also demonstrated its ability to supercharge antiquated conventional tactics with off-the-shelf technology to create weapons systems and hybrid tactics attuned to defeating Israeli military systems. We can expect to see this behaviour accelerate among non-state groups as readily available commercial technology continues its pace of radical improvement.

3)Extracting an Economic Toll

Hezbollah‘s success against Israel codifies two strategic methods that global guerrillas emulate. The first is the value of strategic coercion through economic attrition. Ongoing disruption of the Israeli economy through rocket attacks attaches a quantifiable strategic cost to the conflict. (…) Israel has been forced into an aggressive air campaign to accelerate progress on the ground against missile launch sites and interdict resupply of new missiles from Syria. This air campaign has backfired due to the asymmetry of targets, in that Israeli air strikes have alienated the Lebanese government and increased the moral cohesion of its foes.

4)Leveraging force protection and an aversion to casualties

A second strategic method is to trade territory for the blood of professional soldiers and delay. The intent is demonstrated by Hezbollah‘s dispersal of small units across a wide geographic area. This clearly shows Hezbollah‘s willingness to trade ground for the lives of Israeli soldiers and time. It succeeds by leveraging the aversion to casualties and dedication to force protection found in modern Western militaries (these men are professionally educated and therefore considered too valuable for use as cannon fodder).

Source : http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com
John Robb is the first Internet analyst at Forrester Research and a key architect in the rise of Web logs and RSS. He is writing a book on the logic of terrorism.

V for alliteration

The man just does not stop! After that dynamite alliterative intro he keeps the magic alive in all his public speeches, and I hadn’t even noticed until cruising through YouTube. Of course you know that alliterative verse was popular with the Vikings…you can connect the dots, right? Did you know that the last alliterative verse drama performed in England was written by JRR Tolkien? And it’s not half bad, either.

But, frankly, it’s not this good.

TWAT: new crime, flying while brown

Raise fears, sink foes!

Rohinton Mistry had the right idea years ago; after being body-searched one too many times, he simply refused ever to fly into or through the United States again.

But it’s not just the US. Let’s go to BoingBoing for the report of panic-striken Brits fingering each other at airports. Although we could go anywhere in the blogosphere, really. This is major, major news.

Two brown men were forced off a plane by a bunch of non-brown British passengers who became convinced that they were behaving suspiciously and were therefore terrorists. Shocking — who’d have thought that putting signs everywhere telling you that you were in danger of terrorists and that terrorists were everywhere and that you should look out for suspicious terrorism behavior would turn normal people into witch-hunting racist mobs?

scared shitless and Proud!

The extraordinary scenes happened after some of the 150 passengers on a Malaga-Manchester flight overheard two men of Asian appearance apparently talking Arabic. Passengers told cabin crew they feared for their safety and demanded police action. Some stormed off the Monarch Airlines Airbus A320 minutes before it was due to leave the Costa del Sol at 3am. Others waiting for Flight ZB 613 in the departure lounge refused to board it…

Websites used by pilots and cabin crew were yesterday reporting further incidents. In one, two British women with young children on another flight from Spain complained about flying with a bearded Muslim even though he had been security-checked twice before boarding.

Link

Ahmed Farooq, the hottie doctorNow let’s look a little closer to home. Winnipeg, in fact, where we meet hottie doctor Ahmed Farooq, who was kicked off a flight for praying.

Naturally, the hotel room he where he had to spend the night, plus the flight home the next day, were out-of-pocket expenses that for which the airline takes no responsibility.

A Winnipeg doctor is demanding an official apology and compensation from United Airlines after being kicked off a flight in the U.S. this week, an incident he has characterized as “institutionalized discrimination.”   Dr. Ahmed Farooq, a Muslim, was escorted off an airplane in Denver on Tuesday. 

According to Farooq, reciting his evening prayers was interpreted by one passenger as an activity that was suspicious…

Farooq said the allegation came from a passenger who appeared drunk and had previously threatened him during the trip.

When flight personnel were alerted, the 27-year-old radiology resident and two colleagues — a man and a woman — were taken off their flight. They had been returning from a conference in San Francisco.

Farooq said that even officials from the Transportation Security Administration soon realized the flight crew had overreacted, but by the time that conclusion had been reached the trio were forced to stay in Denver for the night and catch a flight the next day — at their own expense.

“There’s no recourse,” Farooq said. “There’s no way to really be able to talk to anybody to really be able to reason it out. The police officers who talked to me afterwards and subsequent officials within the first three to five minutes, they were like, ‘You know what? The crew made a mistake. We apologize that they took you off. They overreacted.‘”  

Thank god I’m not tanned! But if I may be permitted this remark, I’d just like to say that, having checked out the picture, I wouldn’t mind detaining him…in my apartment!

Patriot Pampies vs the Dark Stain of Valour

You know you remember that song (and probably that movie). But you don’t know the latest version.

Let’s go to Jesus’ General and let him explain to our tender ears the background on Ofjoshua‘s great invention, Patriot Pampies.

 Our Lady of the Concentration Camps, Michelle Malkin
Hugh Hewitt, Townhall
Bob Owens, Confederate Yankee
Pamela, Atlas Shrugs
Biggus Dickus, Blue Crab Boulevard
Ace, Ace of Spades HQ
Allahpundit, Hot Air

Dear fellow Fighting Keyboarders,

After seeing our reactions to the capture of various vaseline-wielding senior citizens and brown people in ninja costumes, my wife, Ofjoshua, suggested that we might consider creating a product that would prevent us from soiling our pants. She even came up with a name for it, “Patriot Pampies.”Patriot Pampies

Although I promised I’d run it by all of you, I don’t think much of the idea, myself. I’m not ashamed of the sudden incontinence I experience when I see a swarthy person. The dark stain that radiates from my crotch isn’t an external display of fear. It’s a warning symbol to all around me that I’ve spotted a potential terrorist and will report him or her to the State Security Apparatus the moment I stop shaking enough to dial my cellphone.

I like to think of it as a kind of self-awarded medal, a “Dark Stain of Valor” or “DSV” if you will. It’s a commendation that almost anyone, no matter their class, can obtain. Just as Sen. Specter wore it deservedly and proudly when he attempted to pass his warrantless wiretap legislation, so did Allahpundit when he risked a coronary reporting on the “Ahmadinejad virus” and the dangers of petroleum jelly. Their respective stations in life made no difference. Each earned the DSV solely on his own merit.

I guess, I’m not really giving Ofjoshua‘s idea a fair hearing. I suppose there are advantages to wearing Patriot Pampies. They’d save us a little in laundering costs and the French would stop laughing while pointing to our crotches (although I still get a lot of that even when I haven’t soiled myself).

So what do you think? Would you buy Patriot Pampies if they were available?

Or would you rather wear your Dark Stain of Valor, proudly, like me?

Heterosexually yours,

Gen. JC Christian, patriot

So much for background. I think these things would sell like hotcakes, myself! Since everything in America eventually gets super-sized, including the children, it was inevitable that the sanitary pad was destined for bigger and … uh … bigger things.

Now if only I could get some of them on that CC list to try the tampons, we’d really be onto something.

Particularly if they put them in their mouths.

Call 1-800-shoot-to-kill

In any case, Corrente has taken inspiration from the General’s call for DSV-wearing patriots to stand up and be counted. And he’s set it to music, of which we present a slice here.

Stain alive, people, stain alive.

Pissing Our Pants
(sung to the tune of “Staying Alive”)

Well, you can tell by the way I stain my pants
I’m a patriot: just read my rants
Muslims make me want to hiss, when they come at me
I start to piss
And now it’s airtight, it’s inside
I have hung onto my pride
We just want to all be safe
But when I walk I tend to chafe

When you are so frightened the tension is quite heightened
You’re pissing your pants, pissing your pants
Feel the bladder leakin’, everybody freakin’
And we’re pissing our pants, pissing our pants
Ah, ha, ha, ha, pissing our pants, pissing our pants
Ah, ha, ha, ha, pissing our pants…

Well now, I get moist and I get dry
Sometimes in back I “bake a pie”
My body sometimes like to twist
I’m leakin’ from every orifice
And now it’s airtight, it’s inside
I have hung onto my pride
We just want to all be safe
But when I walk I tend to chafe

Saw a brown person. Somebody help me.
Somebody help me, yeah
Saw a brown person. Somebody help me.
Somebody help me, yea. Pissing my pants.

Brings a tear to the eye, don’t it?

war profiteering: not just for Haliburton anymore!

War Profiteering sinks the ship of stateIn fairness, not just for Haliburton and Osama bin Laden, who was discovered to have shorted airline stocks just before 9/11, making himself an estimated $3,000,000.

From Reuters, via Fark.

JERUSALEM, Aug 15 (Reuters) – Israel’s armed forces chief came under political fire on Tuesday after a newspaper reported he sold off a stock portfolio just hours after Hizbollah abducted two Israeli soldiers in a raid that triggered a month-long war.

Lieutenant-General Dan Halutz, acknowledging the sale in comments to reporters, denied any impropriety.

The Maariv daily said Halutz went to his bank branch and sold shares worth 120,000 shekels But really...how much?($27,460) three hours after the soldiers were seized by the Lebanese guerrilla group on July 12.

Key share indexes in Israel fell around 12 percent at the outset of fighting between Israeli forces and Hizbollah after the abduction. Share prices gradually recovered and now stand slightly below pre-war levels.

“It was my portfolio of shares, on which I had lost 25,000 shekels,” Maariv quoted Halutz as saying.

“It is true that I sold the portfolio on July 12 but it is impossible to link that to the war. At the time, I did not expect or think there would be a war,” he said, according to Maariv.

A day after the abduction, Israeli aircraft carried out a major attack in Lebanon, bombing runways at Beirut airport.

Well again, in fairness how was he to know that Israel would attack Lebanon? He was only the commander in charge of the armed forces and you can ask any enlisted man how clueless the officers are.