Israel warns Iran, Hezbollah not to test it

[500]

Egypt cant ban Iran from passing ships through channel according to international maritime rules.

 

[Capt.Popeye]

Egypt cant ban Iran from passing ships through channel according to international maritime rules.

About Merchant ships, the statement holds good.
But for ship's carrying Military or Radioactive cargoes , Govt. of Egypt has regulatory powers.
Same for warships.

 

[TOPGUN]

Israel seems to have a serious itch in the rear why doesn't it just mind its own business so if the these warships are passing through in int'l waters to another friendly nation now its another prob? plz don't tell me next time the iranin's go the bathroom is that going to be a problem too ? the fact of the matter is that Israel is a hostile state & the world needs to see this

 

[TOPGUN]

And why would Egypt do so ? does Israel do anything for Egypt ..plz none of this will happen plus these ships were in int'l waters or Egypts waters not israeli waters so what is the damn prob? i mean really can't israel live in peace & let others live in peace rather then practing with its mighty armed forces which is given to them by daddy sam all the tax payers funds that go to isreal to kill arabs wish that all americans eyes can open to see where our hard money goes towards sick of this nonsense .

 

[iPakMan]

When a country says "Israel needs to be wiped from the face of the earth" in the UN, then It is Israel`s business when the warships are heading to Syria and then to Lebanon, both Terrorist supporting states and both under the rule of Iran.

 

[CardSharp]

Since 1982 Arabs dont dare to send their armies against us, they use only terror groups.

2002 Defensive Shield
2006 Lebanon
2009 Cast Lead

All were very serious butt kicks to these terrorists groups.

They were smart not to fight another nation state war, Arab's are not really what you would call good in traditional armies.

http://www.ciaonet.org/conf/ssr01/ssr01af.html

I'm surprised you'd call those "victories", the IDF went stomping in some refugee camps (full of people that hate you and want harm done to you granted)


This is what happened in Gaza, no sugarcoating.



HAMAS AIN’T NO HEZBOLLAH

What’s going on in Gaza now is pretty easy to understand if you think a little bit about the way military trends have been going in the past century-but you also have to be willing to take a cold look at how wars work these days, when there’s no such thing as those “purely military” wars you WW II freaks dream about. (There never really was, but that’s another story.)

The Israelis attacked now because of two non-military cycles: the news cycle and the presidential cycle. This was like a war by an astrologer: the stars had to be in exactly the right position before the Apaches could start blasting and the Merkavas could roll.

The most important cycle of all is the news cycle. This war happened during international media dead week, between Christmas and New Year. Ordinary people are drunk or hungover or snowed in, and the people who matter, the media players, are off in Cancun and Phuket, soaking up rum and sun with their blackberries turned off. They’re not going to bum out their call girls watching the news from Gaza.

And the Israelis wanted a time when everybody was distracted for a simple reason: asymmetrical war isn’t pretty. That’s the same reason they won’t let camera crews into Gaza. To do this kind of war, you have to kill a lot of civilians, because the whole civilian/military distinction doesn’t really apply. If your neighbor is a mid-ranking officer in the military wing of Hamas, the best way to kill him is while he sleeps, before he can arm himself, deploy his men and maybe inflict casualties. Thanks to years of excellent intelligence on Gaza, the Israelis know exactly who’s where at pretty much any minute of any day. And they have attack helicopters hovering over it non-stop, ready to send a Hellfire missile down to take out anybody who might help organize a counterattack.

But Gaza is the most crowded slum in the world, so when you send that missile into his tenement apartment at 4 am, it’s going to kill him, but it’s also going to kill his wife, their kids (and Gaza has a huge birthrate) and half the block. That makes cold military sense but it doesn’t look good on the news.


Of course you could send troops in, the idea being they’re cleaner than missiles, but sending troops into a highrise slum full of people who hate your guts is not such a good idea if you’re worried about casualties. And like I’ve said before, the IDF has one big weakness: they don’t like to take casualties.

So naturally they did what they could to decapitate Hamas from the air first, then with artillery. Besides, the idea that raids by infantry are less bloody than air strikes is pretty dicey anyway. Troops get nervous, they start shooting, pretty soon the collateral damage bill is just as big as it would be with an air strike, only this way the raiding party suffers casualties too.

So it made perfect sense for the Israelis to step up their longterm policy of zapping Hamas cadres from the air, and to do it right now, while nobody’s watching TV.

The other cycle is more of a gamble: the presidential cycle. I can’t believe nobody’s saying the obvious here: the Israelis want to do this now, once and for all, while Bush is still in office. They know that Bush will let them do whatever they want. Bush and Cheney are literally more extreme than about half of the Israeli electorate. They’ve never objected to anything Israel wants to do except when the Israelis wanted to talk to the Syrians. As long as it involves blowing stuff up, Bush is guaranteed to be on their side.

So the planets aligned perfectly for Israel, not so much Age of Aquarius way as Zero Hour, last chance to blow up Gaza before Obama comes in.

Will Obama be more hardnosed with the Israelis? I doubt it. Why would he? You’re not supposed to say out loud that there’s a big rich Israeli lobby, but everybody knows there is. And more to the point, what’s their counterweight? Who cares about the Palestinians, even in the Arab world, never mind DC? So there’s a big net gain to any US politician who backs Israel and no reason at all to back their opponents.

So I don’t see why the Israelis are so worried about Obama. Still, a military planner’s job is to be paranoid and the Israeli staff has decided that since Bush is a sure thing and the new guy is an unknown quantity, why not do it now?

I’ll tell you something else: Obama’s people are cheering the IDF too, for the timing at least. “Dear IDF, Thank you for doing this while Bush is still around to take the heat! Signed, Barack.” That’s exactly what Obama meant when somebody asked him about Gaza and he said, “Hey, we only have one president at a time!”
That tells you something else about this operation: it’s likely to end before January 20, 2009. Obama doesn’t want his big inauguration party bummed out with pictures of dead Arab kids, so the IDF has this thing planned to end sometime in early January.

Of course planning is one thing, execution is another. The IDF planned for a quick clean fight against Hezbollah in 2006, but that’s not the way it worked out.

This time the IDF will succeed, at least in the short term, and the campaign will go according to plan. That’s my guess anyway. What we have here is Hamas getting a very hard lesson in why it’s dangerous to pretend you’re Hezbollah when you’re not.

Hezbollah fought so well last time around that everybody started getting uppity, and the Israelis didn’t like it at all. They weren’t getting respect. They couldn’t destroy Hezbollah, though; the Hezzies are too smart, too big, too well integrated with the locals in Lebanon. Hezbollah has all kinds of advantages that Hamas doesn’t have, like great strategic depth, pockets of Shia support all through Lebanon, far from the IDF’s reach (unless they tried another fullscale invasion of Lebanon, a real bad idea).

So for more than two years now Israel has had to put up with Hezbollah sitting just over its northern border with a smug little grin on its hairy face, strutting on the rep it made back in 2006-and there’s not much the IDF can do about it.

But the worst thing you can do is hide behind your big brother, because what if somebody chooses you out alone? That’s what’s happened to Hamas. They’re trying to be Hezbollah South, woofing at the Israelis, shooting off those stupid backyard cherrybomb rockets that couldn’t hit the ground if gravity didn’t help out…and meanwhile the IDF is in a very bad mood, embarrassed about losing to Hezbollah, bummed about Bush leaving office, and getting poked in the nonstop by hardcore settler types wanting them to blow something up right now, dammit!

It’s what they call a no-brainer. You may not be able to take out Hezbollah but just look at Gaza: a tiny strip of land, about six miles wide in most places. No strategic depth for Hamas at all. And Egypt hates Hamas like poison, so they’re quietly telling Mossad: “Go for it!”

Then there’s the issue of combat potential, as in Hamas ain’t no Hezbollah. Hamas is tougher than the PLO; they proved that in the skirmishes over the last few years about who runs the PA. But that’s not saying much; one of my grandmothers-not both, just one, I’m trying to be fair here-was tougher than the PLO too. And there’s a huge, huge difference between scaring off fat sleazy Arafat gangsters by firing in the air and actually fighting the IDF. Hezbollah has somebody doing serious strategic planning; Hamas has a bunch of hotheads. Hezbollah has been bunkering up, training in anti-armor operations, learning to deal with air strikes for years. Hamas believes in yelling at the attack helicopters.

They’re going down. Now, that’s not to say they’ll be wiped out, exterminated, whatever. That doesn’t happen any more, for reasons I’ll discuss in my next column. What we’re talking about here, what the IDF has in mind, is more what the Romans called “decimation”: killing enough of the right people to make Hamas weak for five or ten years, which may, just may, be long enough to give Israel’s allies the PLO/Fatah the edge in the Palestinian Civil War. That’s what this is about, getting your guys to win that war.

Will it work? Depends on the time frame. For a few years, yes; in the long run, Hell no. But if you’re the IDF, there are no good options in the long term. Demographics, dude; no way out of that spiral. The short term is all you’ve got, and in the short term Hamas is going to find out why it’s not a good idea to pretend you’re Hezbollah when you can’t back it up

 

[Thomas]

Yeah, just like Nasser won in 1956, Saddat won in 1973, Hussain won in 1991...


Here is a pic of Israel admitting it:

lol, is that Bagdad Bob I see........... He was always funny to watch.

 

[Pak_Sher]

Israel never did anything bad to Iran, on contrary we supported them during Iran-Iraq war. They answered with terror.

That is an incorrect statement, all the money about close to $4 billion that the Shah of Iran invested in Israel, Israel defaulted on it after the 1979 revolution. Give Iran the money back with interest frm 1979 until 2011 and they may leave you alone.

 

[flameboard]

He actually hasn't, a long part of his speech was actually cut to create the impression he wanted to annihilate the country (I'm referring to one of the earlier ones, where this all "wipe Israel off the map" began). To clarify what he stated was that the name needs to be removed and the region needs to be listed according to the wishes of the Palestinians who undeniably were there first, I should add the Palestinians also consists of Jews, even though many fled, and fewer remain.

I personally think if the people can be brought up to support this, the region should be given a third name and should be turned secular, that way a new identity has formed, eliminating a lot of the divisions.

Israelis are a bit gullible propaganda is immense in the region, did you know Israel was the only one to supply weapons and continue relations with south Africa when the country started prosecuting people based on their skin color and turning them into slaves, sometimes it was worse than the holocaust, in South Africa they would face all the same situations and even worse because they were slaves treated equivalent to disposable toilet paper.


If they stood up openly for peace so would the Arabs besides more and more Israelis are becoming atheists that just follow Jewish tradition due to their heritage, this is and never was about religion.


Peace in the Middle East

 

[JayAtl]

Americans proudly support Israelis and Indians do too. I hope you guys escalate this to blowing up the two ships if they don't heed warnings. Lord knows it would give you a prefect reason to hit their nuke plants , if Iran retaliates in any fashion.

Chinese and Pakistanis get all riled up when they hear an indian general state that the militray doctrine is to be prepared for a two front war. But somehow turn into doves when it comes to Israel's attitude towards Iran who said Israel will be wiped off the map.

 

[notorious_eagle]

Plus Israel has openly admitted that it would be destroyed if America seizes support, that doesn't sound like a very powerful country.

Lets be realistic friend. If a shooting war breaks out between Israel and the Arab States, Israel will emerge victorious. Its about time that these Arab States try to find a common ground with Israel and recognize Israel's existence. Gone are the days when we could settle this conflict with military might, the only way i see this matter being resolved is through a diplomatic solution.

 

[Abii]

lets get one thing clear, the Jews love to say that Ahmadinejad said "blah blah blah"

1) He's a nobody. He doesn't control the army, navy, airforce, nuke program, the parliament, IRGC etc...
THE ONLY THING HE CONTROLS IS THE GOVT BUDGET

2) Israel's top officials who do have fingers on the buttons however have said COUNTLESS times that Iran MUST BE DESTROYED.
McKain sang "bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran" LIVE ON TV
Clinton said "I will obliterate Iran" LIVE ON TV

Israeli supporters are a bunch of weirdos. I'm okay if you hate Iran, heck I hate Iran sometimes, but don't give me this "ahmadinejad said blah blah" because EVERYTHING he has said, has been said by the Israeli officials as well COUNTLESS times but for obvious reasons CNN and FOX aren't going to have a breaking news on the matter lol

 

[Abii]

The warships are of NO THREAT to Israel btw
they will NOT enter Israeli waters
The Suez canal is open to every country, at a time of war and peace.
One of them is actually a support ship.

I'm sorry that Israel happens to be near the canal but we can't do a thing about it now can we?

@ Israel
Is it okay if I fart? Or are you gonna start crying in all your American news papers?

 

[Jigs]

IRIS Kharg

IRIS Alvand

 

[500]

lets get one thing clear, the Jews love to say that Ahmadinejad said "blah blah blah"

1) He's a nobody. He doesn't control the army, navy, airforce, nuke program, the parliament, IRGC etc...
THE ONLY THING HE CONTROLS IS THE GOVT BUDGET

He represents regime he would not say that without approval of regime. Iran threatens to destroy Israel on their military parades too. But most important that Iran actively doing it. Iran supports illegal terrrorists groups lke Hamas, hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Iran blew Jewish centers in Latin America. Iran is responsible for murder of hundreds of innocent Israelis.

2) Israel's top officials who do have fingers on the buttons however have said COUNTLESS times that Iran MUST BE DESTROYED.

Thats lie. By the way Israel actually SAVED many many thousands of Iranians during Iran Iraqi war.

The warships are of NO THREAT to Israel btw
they will NOT enter Israeli waters
The Suez canal is open to every country, at a time of war and peace.
One of them is actually a support ship.

I'm sorry that Israel happens to be near the canal but we can't do a thing about it now can we?

Iran is terrorist supporting criminal regime, thats why it cant do everything what other countries do. For example it cant export weapons. Israel just warned Iran from provocations.

Give Iran the money back with interest frm 1979 until 2011 and they may leave you alone.

So all Iran's bitchings against Israel are just about money? Where from you get that nonsense? Can you find me any Iranian official supportin your claim?