Friday, December 1, 2023

Scott Ritter: Hamas Winning Battle for Gaza

November 30, 2023 0 comment 16 minutes read

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Scott Ritter
sputnik.com

The official caption reads: Palestinians at the rubble of a destroyed building after an Israeli airstrike in the central Gaza Strip, November 5, 2023. (Atia Mohammed/Flash90).

The recently announced ceasefire is a blessing for Palestinians and Israelis alike—a chance for prisoners to be exchanged, humanitarian aid to be distributed to those in need, and for emotions on both sides of the conflict to cool down.

While the ceasefire, negotiated between Israel and Hamas by Qatar, was mutually agreed between the two parties, let no one be fooled into thinking this was anything less than a victory for Hamas. Israel had taken a very aggressive position that, given its stated objective of destroying Hamas as an organization, it would not agree to a ceasefire under any conditions.

Hamas, on the other hand, had made one of its primary objectives in initiating the current round of fighting with Israel the release of Palestinian prisoners, and in particular women and children, held by Israel. Seen in this light, the ceasefire represents an important victory for Hamas, and a humiliating defeat for Israel.

One of the reasons Israel eschewed a ceasefire was that it was confident that the offensive operation it had launched into northern Gaza was going to neutralize Hamas as a military threat, and that any ceasefire, regardless of the humanitarian justification, would only buy time for a defeated Hamas enemy to rest, refit, and regroup. That Israel signed on to a ceasefire is the surest sign yet that all is not well with the Israeli offensive against Hamas.

This outcome should not have come as a surprise to anyone. When Hamas launched its October 7 attack on Israel, it initiated a plan years in the making. The meticulous attention to detail that was evident in the Hamas operation underscored the reality that Hamas had been studying the Israeli intelligence and military forces arrayed against it, uncovering weaknesses that were subsequently exploited. The Hamas action represented more than sound tactical and operational planning and execution—it was a masterpiece in strategic conceptualization as well.

One of the main reasons behind the Israeli defeat on October 7 was the fact that the Israeli government was convinced that Hamas would never attack, regardless of what the intelligence analysts charged with watching Hamas activity in Gaza were saying. This failure of imagination came about by Hamas having identified the political goals and objectives of Israel (the nullification of Hamas as a resistance organization by undertaking a policy built on “buying” Hamas through an expanded program of work permits issued by Israel for Palestinians living in Gaza.) By playing along with the work permit program, Hamas lulled the Israeli leadership into complacency, allowing Hamas' preparations for their attack to be carried out in plain view.

The October 7 attack by Hamas was not a stand-alone operation, but rather part of a strategic plan possessing three main objectives—to put the issue of a Palestinian state back on the front burner of international discourse, to free the thousands of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, and to compel Israel to cease and desist when it came to its desecration of the Al Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third holiest place. The October 7 attack, on its own, could not achieve these outcomes. Rather, the October 7 attack was designed to trigger an Israeli response which would create the conditions necessary for Hamas' objectives to reach fruition.

The October 7 attack was designed to humiliate Israel to the point of irrationality, to ensure that any Israeli response would be governed by the emotional need for revenge, as opposed to a rational response designed to nullify the Hamas objectives. Here, Hamas was guided by the established Israeli doctrine of collective punishment (known as the Dahiya Doctrine, named after the West Beirut suburb that was heavily bombed by Israel in 2006 as a way of punishing the Lebanese people for Israel’s failure to defeat Hezbollah in combat.) By inflicting a humiliating defeat on Israel which shattered both the myth of Israeli invincibility (regarding the Israel Defense Forces) and infallibility (regarding Israeli intelligence), and by taking hundreds of Israelis hostage before withdrawing to its underground lair beneath Gaza, Hamas baited a trap for Israel which the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu predictably rushed into.

Hamas has prepared a network of tunnels underneath the Gaza Stripthat, in total, stretch for over 500 kilometers. Nicknamed the “Gaza Metro,” these tunnels consist of interconnected deep underground bunkers used for command and control, logistical support, medical treatment, and billeting, along with other tunnel networks dedicated for both defensive and offensive operations. The tunnels are buried deep enough to avoid destruction by most bombs in Israel’s possession and have been provisioned to withstand a siege of up to three months (90 days) in duration.

Hamas knows that it cannot engage Israel in a classic force-on-force encounter. Instead, the goal was to lure Israeli forces into Gaza, and then subject these forces to an endless series of hit-and-run attacks by small teams of Hamas fighters who would emerge from their underground lairs, attack a vulnerable Israeli force, and then disappear back underground. In short, to subject the Israeli military to what is the equivalent of a death by a thousand cuts.

And it worked. While Israeli forces have been able to penetrate into the less urbanized areas of the northern Gaza strip, taking advantage of the mobility and firepower of its armored troops, the progress is illusory, as Hamas forces harry the Israelis continuously, using deadly tandem-warhead rockets to disable or destroy Israeli vehicles, killing scores of Israeli soldiers and wounding hundreds more. While Israel has been reticent in releasing the figures of armored vehicles lost in this fashion, Hamas claims the number is in the hundreds. Hamas' claims are bolstered by the fact that Israel has halted the sale of older Merkava 3 tanks, and instead has organized their inventory of these vehicles into new reserve armor battalions to make up for the heavy losses being sustained in both Gaza and along the northern border with Lebanon, where Hezbollah forces are engaged in a deadly war of attrition with Israel in operations designed to support Hamas in Gaza.

But the main reason for Israel’s defeat to date is Israel itself. Having taken the bait, and fallen into the Hamas trap, Israel went on to execute its Dahiya Doctrine against the Palestinian population of Gaza, carrying out indiscriminate attacks against civilian objects in blatant disregard for the law of war. An estimated 13,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed by these attacks, including more than 5,000 children. Many thousands more victims remain buried under the rubble of their destroyed housing.

While Israel may have been able to garner the support of the international community in the aftermath of the October 7 attack by Hamas, its gross overreaction has instead turned world public opinion against it—something Hamas was counting on. Today, Israel is increasingly isolated, losing support not only in the so-called Global South, but also in traditional strongholds of pro-Israeli sentiment in the US, UK, and Europe. This isolation, combined with the kind of political pressure Israel is unaccustomed to receiving, helped contribute to the Netanyahu government’s acquiescence regarding the ceasefire and subsequent prisoner exchange.

Whether the ceasefire will hold or not remains to be seen. So, too, the question of turning the ceasefire into a lasting cessation of hostilities remains an open question. But one thing is certain—having declared that victory is defined by Hamas’ total defeat, the Israelis have set the stage for a Hamas victory, something Hamas achieves simply by surviving.

But Hamas is doing more than surviving — it is winning. Having fought the Israel Defense Forces to a standstill on the battlefield, Hamas has seen every one of its strategic objectives in this conflict reach fruition. The world is actively articulating the absolute necessity of a two-state solution as a prerequisite for a lasting peace in the region. Palestinians held prisoner by Israel are being exchanged for the Israelis Hamas took hostage. And the Islamic world is united in condemning Israel’s desecration of the Al Aqsa Mosque.

None of these issues were on the table on October 6. That they are being addressed now is testament to the success Hamas enjoyed on October 7, and in the days and weeks that followed, as Israeli forces were defeated by a combination of Hamas' tenacity and their own predilection for indiscriminate violence against civilians. Far from being eliminated as a military and political force, Hamas has emerged as perhaps the most relevant voice and authority when it comes to defending the interests of the Palestinian people.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE

A former US Marine and weapons inspector working for the United Nations, Scott Ritter is now one of the most respected geopolitical analysts, blogger, and anti-imperialist activist.

Watch/listen: "When Only Love Remains" by Charles Eisenstein

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Source: Charles Eisenstein

When Only Love Remains

A conversation with Michal Halek on how she came to reject vengeance after the murder of her son by Hamas

CHARLES EISENSTEIN

DEC 1

READ IN APP

It is my honor to share this conversation I recorded with Michal Halek. Her words shine with the kind of wisdom that is available to those for whom death has dispelled all illusions about what is important and what is not.

It is my wish that the information that her words, her voice, and her presence carry may reach the darkest corners of our personal and collective consciousness. It is the medicine the world needs right now.

Here is the audio version on Soundcloud.

Here is the video version on YouTube.

"Napoleon, Austerlitz & NATO’s Apparent Dearth of Grand Strategy" by Declan Hayes

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Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

Napoleon, Austerlitz & NATO’s Apparent Dearth of Grand Strategy

Declan Hayes

December 1, 2023

To NATO, all its battles are black and white, and grand strategy is a matinee cowboys and Indians movie where they get to munch their popcorn

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Monday, 2nd December, 1805, Napoleon’s finest day, saw his Grande Armée emerge victorious from the Battle of Austerlitz, the so-called Battle of the Three Emperors, which features prominently in War & Peace, Tolstoy’s superlative novel, where Prince Andrei Bolkonsky lies seemingly mortally wounded at the great Napoleon’s feet.

Although Prince Andrei, who once worshipped Napoleon, now dismisses him as “a small, insignificant man… with his petty vanity and joy in victory”, that was probably a trifle unkind to the great Corsican, who was arguably history’s greatest ever military tactician and whose various campaigns formed the raw material for Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz’s classic On War, perhaps the greatest and certainly the most important book on military (or any other) strategy ever written; it can be downloaded here, here and here.

Von Clausewitz’s great work forms the backbone of modern military (or any other) strategy and it was because of his work that the Prussian (and then German) High Command became the world’s best from the fall of Napoleon to the fall of Herr Hitler, the little Bohemian corporal as von Hindenburg called him, some 130 years later. The Prussian (and German Prussian) High Command were like a colony of well-disciplined ants, collectively beavering away towards a common objective Otto von Bismarck, their Iron Chancellor, clearly adumbrated. It was not entirely their fault that those objectives, for which they bled, ended up being set by a failed painter (Herr Hitler), a drug addict (Göring), a club-footed loud mouth (Goebbels), a creeping Jesus (Bormann) and a conniving chicken farmer (Himmler).

Although the aura of the German High Command all but vanished from history with the suicides of those five failures, proof that this particular history has repeated itself as farce can be found by observing Kiev’s Clown Prince Zelensky, who is an actual comedian, Genocide Joe Biden, who doesn’t know who or what he is, and that fraudulent imbecile Ursula von der Leyen, who abuses her husband’s Prussian family name to pretend she is from seasoned Prussian stock. These wretches are not the type of folk you want to be sharing a trench or anything else with.

Although von Clausewitz, like the great Napoleon before him and the great von Bismarck after him, had no doubts about how effective an iron fist could be, like Bismarck, he was also in no doubt, as this Lebanese military link declares, that war is only the instrument to political policy, the “guiding intelligence” as he called it, and not vice versa, as was all too often Napoleon’s modus operandi.

NATO’s warlords don’t see things quite that way. To them, all their battles are black and white, and grand strategy is a matinee cowboys and Indians movie where they get to munch their popcorn, whilst the cowboys, Indians, Russians and Palestinians lose their lives, as well as all they hold dear. Zelensky and Israel are the white hats and the Russians and Palestinians are hardly regarded as humans, let alone as black hats. NATO’s end objective seems to be to blast all those black hats into submission and then, like Scarface or some other Hollywood gangster, reap the dividends afterwards. How The West Was Won!

But Moltke the Elder, and even Mike Tyson, Churchill and Eisenhower, saw things differently. Von Moltke famously says that no plan survives its first contact with the enemy or, as Iron Mike Tyson puts it, until he punches his opponent in the mouth. All shown to be true again and again but the problem this time is NATO are punching themselves repeatedly in the mouth on everything from the military to the economic and cultural fronts.

We have here in Braveheart an unintentionally funny scene where a clown is defenestrated after offering English King Edward Longshanks some unproffered advice. Not only is the clown not, as he claims, “skilled in the arts of war and military tactics” but he is not even skilled enough to keep his mouth shut on matters the smouldering King Edward long before mastered.

Although von Clausewitz’ advice that “tactics is the art of using troops in battle; strategy is the art of using battles to win the war” remains as relevant today as it did in his reform of the Prussian Army, today’s real problem is NATO and the failed painters (Bush family), drug addicts (Biden family), club-footed loud mouths (Rupert Murdoch’s family), creeping Jesuses (Boris Johnson and his various crooked families) and conniving chicken farmers (von der Leyen’s family) who run it have no sense of morals, no sense of duty and no empathy with the harsh realities of the real world the rest of us live in.

The way out of this morass is to appreciate and learn from our common heritage, as handed down to us by a variety of great Prussian strategists, great syndicalist organisers and great Russian writers like Tolstoy. But that deliverance cannot come until we unchain ourselves from the manacles of their stewardship where NATO’s redundant and incompetent upper management have hijacked the political, social, cultural and economic playing fields for their own base, self-serving ends.

Though that has to be our strategic objective, the tactical questions focus on how to get there. And though this site’s Editor’s Choice often cites excellent WSWS articles, their default solution of organising “the workers and students” is not going to work, not at least until NATO’s failed painters and chicken farmers are somehow stripped of their military, economic and cultural power. And though I believe the catalysts for those changes on those three fronts will come from without, we need our own experienced von Metternichs, von Clausewitzes and von Moltkes, who are skilled in strategy, stratēgia, the “art of troop leader; office of general, command, generalship” to chart our way out of this morass those empty headed clowns are drowning us in and to give our societies some plan, some concrete and tangible hope of steering us through the wars and turbulence those imbeciles who pose as our leaders thrive off.

This is not to fall back into some nostalgic yearning for the Prussianism the self-serving British Tories had some fun condemning (along with syndicalism, and Bolshevism) after the Great War’s Armistice but to say that an appropriate and necessarily elastic cadre must emerge to achieve today’s desired objectives. This urgency may be seen in two recent articles in the sanctioned Russia Today outlet.

In the first of these, Mariana Bezuglaya, the deputy head of the Ukrainian parliament’s security, defense and intelligence committee, complains that the rump Reich has “no strategic plan for the ongoing conflict with Russia in 2024” and their High Command “only want to mobilize tens of thousands of people every month without a clear understanding of what should be done in Kiev’s ongoing conflict with Moscow”. Although there are definite echoes of the last days of the Third Reich there, there are also shades of Napoleon’s Russian retreat, without his tactical genius of course. Ukraine has been handed over to imbeciles and its graveyards are yet again full of the tragic consequences.

The second superlative article is by American Tony Cox, who plays a counter historical game that, if say, Herr Hitler had made it as a painter, then he might not have led Europe into the abyss and, had Biden been kicked out of office earlier on account of his serial lying and serial corruption, the world might have been spared all the current wars he instigated.

Having thus set us up with that Napoleonic feint, Cox then declares that “Somehow, no amount of lying, plagiarizing, racist gaffes, or corruption allegations was able to thwart Biden’s rise to power.” Having then gone on to say how Biden was deliberately given a pass for his countless sexual “indiscretions”, Cox then goes on to state that “rather than being political liabilities, Biden’s dishonesty and thick-facedness might be among the traits that got him pegged as a potential figurehead for the power brokers who get US candidates elected. He can look a skeptic in the face, tell him the opposite of the truth, and shame him for daring to ask a pointed question.”

Cox declares that it is precisely those character flaws that make cretins like Biden politically valuable and that land us with imbeciles like von Leyden rather than with an array of von Metternichs, von Clausewitzes and von Moltkes and that gives us LGBT rights (sic) rather than a modern equivalent of syndicalism or Bolshevism.

Simply put, NATO’s Big Pharma, Big Media and Big Defence bosses want charlatans and sex perverts to be their gatekeepers rather than independent-minded folk like Dutch farmers or Canadian truckers, who have suffered the most appalling abuses at the hands of these NATO charlatans.

Cox’s counter-historical article finishes by correctly telling us that “removing one particularly odious politician from the picture doesn’t mean the voters would have been given a more honorable option. In today’s Washington, virtue isn’t on the menu, and the citizens aren’t willing or able to demand something better.”

Although it is true that we get the shameful leaders that we deserve, that is because we have been groomed and conditioned to want only that. Although we might occasionally bark over genocides in Gaza or wherever else that might be politically acceptable to snarl about, as long as it has its armies of gate keepers, Robocops and Coco The Clown leaders in place, NATO is confident it can handle minor turbulence like that, as long as there is no left field eruption like happened in France from July 1789 onwards.

And so on this day, Napoleon’s finest day, let us not just remember the great Corsican but, more importantly, every single member of his Grande Armée which, for good or ill, was a product of the liberation the French Revolution brought and, which might have fared otherwise had its cock-hatted leader been as adapt at strategy as he was at tactics. And, although NATO’s strategic gate keepers have ensured through their political and media puppets that we will never again witness the dogged unity of syndicalism, the esprit de corps that was the hallmark of Revolutionary France’s armies or the iron discipline that characterised Prussia, until we can somehow unite to change the battlefield, NATO’s Bidens, Johnsons and von der Leyens will still not only rule the roost but, as in Ukraine, continue to sell what remains of the family farm to BlackRock, Monsanto and all NATO’s other puppet masters as well.

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