If only this were *the israeli viewpoint rather than an israeli viewpoint
L
----- Original Message -----
From: "Gabriel Gudding" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 28 March 2003 05:19
Subject: A View from Israel: "Where did they go wrong?" Uri Avneri]]
| again via carrol cox -- israeli viewpoint
|
| >------- Start of forwarded message -------
| >Uri Avnery
| >25.3.03
| >
| >Where did they go wrong?
| >
| >Some more thoughts about the war
| >
| ># Plan and reality. An old truism says: "No war-plan does survive the
| >first clash with the enemy." That is always true. But something even
| >worse has happened to the Americans now.
| >
| >In order to sell the war to their own public and to the world, Bush &
| >Co. have painted the picture of a "surgical operation".
| >
| >Quite simple: the Americans march on Baghdad in strength. The Iraqi
| >population wants to get rid of their cruel dictator and greet the
| >liberators with joy. The Shiites in the south shower them with rice.
| >Sadam gets killed. The regime collapses like a house of cards. The
| >Americans enter Baghdad in triumph. THE END. The whole business will
| >take a week, at most. No dead, no prisoners.
| >
| >Bush and his people did not lie. They really believed that this is going
| >to happen. As always, the spin-doctors succeeded in convincing
| >themselves.
| >
| >After drawing an imaginary map, they based their plans on it. Now they
| >meet the reality. For example, because of their contempt for the enemy,
| >the lines of communication were not properly secured, there were no
| >adequate preparations for the battles in the rear. After a rapid advance
| >through the desert that was mainly a logistic operation, they reached
| >the vicinity of Baghdad and thought that everything else will more or
| >less fall into place by itself.
| >
| ># The "Israeli Syndrome". One may call this the "Israeli Syndrome": the
| >abysmal contempt for the Arabs, the belief that they cannot fight. This
| >has caused the failures of the Israeli army in the Yom Kippur and
| >Lebanon wars and in the two intifadas. Every time the Arabs fight
| >valiantly and sacrifice their lives, it causes painful surprise. (An
| >Israeli joke: "You really can't rely on the Arabs. They are not
| >surrendering.")
| >
| ># They are afraid. The Iraqi people react as any normal people would.
| >In the face of a foreign invasion, they unite. Even the opponents of the
| >regime support the leader in battle. When the Nazis invaded the Soviet
| >Union, even the prisoners in the Gulag camps cheered Stalin.
| >
| >Many Iraqis want, quite likely, to get rid of Saddam. But they do not
| >want this to be done by foreign invaders. Especially not by the
| >Americans, whom they suspect of intending to rob them of their oil. (The
| >participation of the British, their hated former colonial masters, makes
| >things even worse.)
| >
| >And when the population does not come out to welcome the liberators and
| >the brigades of the regular army do not capitulate en masse, what is the
| >explanation? The politicians and generals find solace in a blatantly
| >ridiculous construction: the millions of inhabitants of Basra and the
| >south are afraid of Saddam's agents who are still in the area. They long
| >to greet the Americans, but do not dare, poor people.
| >
| >Even the Israeli Army Spokesman could not have invented a more pitiful
| >explanation.
| >
| ># The Palestinian example. No Arab - be he Sunni or Shiite - can look
| >upon the Americans as liberators, because, for two years now, they have
| >seen every day on their TV screens what the Israeli army, with Bush's
| >wholehearted support, is doing to the Arab Palestinian people.
| >
| >The righteous Americans, who tend to be insensitive to the feelings of
| >other peoples, cannot even imagine the intensity of the fury and hatred
| >of the Arab masses. Therefore, they could not draw the lessons from the
| >September 11 atrocities - one of them being that they must change their
| >policy in our country.
| >
| >Even now, while the war is going on, Saddam's television broadcasts
| >images of Israeli outrages in the Palestinian territories, in order to
| >show to the Iraqi people how the heroic Palestinians, including the
| >children, pit their lives against the huge might of the Israeli army.
| >
| ># The moment of shock. In the history of Israel there were several
| >moment of national shock.
| >
| >One of them happened during the Yom Kippur war. The moment is printed in
| >my memory. We were sitting in front of the TV set in a friend's
| >apartment, when there appeared on the screen a group of Israeli soldiers
| >who had been taken prisoners.
| >
| >They were sitting on the ground, their heads bent down, their hands tied
| >on their backs, trembling and frightened, surrounded by jubilant
| >Syrians.
| >
| >Up to that moment, the absolute belief in the superiority of the Israeli
| >fighter was a cornerstone of Israeli consciousness, nourished by
| >innumerable true stories and myths. At that moment it came crushing
| >down. Suddenly we saw our soldiers as normal human beings, frightened in
| >a frightening situation.
| >
| >Now it happens to the Americans. They see their sons in a similar
| >situation. No wonder the White House tries to hide the pictures, citing
| >the Geneva convention. Where was that convention when thousands of PoWs
| >from Afghanistan, soldiers of the Taliban army, where shown like animals
| >in Guatanamo?
| >
| ># Prisoners. Our own army, of course, has always put prisoners-of-war on
| >display for propaganda purposes.
| >
| >I particularly remember a star of Israeli television, the "Arabist" Ehud
| >Ya'ari, an ex-officer of army intelligence, interrogating captive Syrian
| >and Egyptian officers on television, as an army intelligence officer
| >would. No Geneva convention was mentioned.
| >
| ># Saladin. One thing is certain even now: Saddam Hussein has already
| >achieved what he wanted.
| >
| >Whatever happens during the next days and weeks, he will enter Arab
| >history as one of the great heroes, who did not flinch or run away in
| >face of the superior enemy. Generations of children in all Arab
| >countries will learn in school that he was the heir of the great Salah
| >al-Din (Saladin).
| >
| >The greatest military machine in history - as its commanders call it -
| >has attacked a small country, most of whose arms were destroyed
| >beforehand, and the people resisted valiantly under a shower of bombs
| >and missiles, even without any air defense.
| >
| >This is how it looks even now to all the Arabs in the world. They
| >compare Saddam to their own rulers, Mubarak, Fahed, Abdallah and Assad.
| >
| > From now on, the legend will only expand, growing into a national
| >myth.
| >
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