ShrinkWrapped

Heroes of Hezbollah

Not long ago I wrote a post which addressed the question of Who is Samir Kuntar?  At the age of 16, Kuntar became a hero to the Palestinian people, and now to Jew-haters everywhere, by slaughtering an unarmed man and his 4 year old daughter.   Hezbollah began the current war with Israel by killing Israeli soldiers and seizing 2 young Israeli soldiers, with the express goal, often stated explicitly by Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, of trading the soldiers for prisoners held by Israel.  Every time Nasrallah has made this statement, he has mentioned Samir Kuntar by name.  Kuntar is emblematic of the kind of inhuman monster that is considered a hero to many of the people of the Middle East. 

Last week I received a note from Daniel Brook thanking me for my post on Kuntar.  He is a nephew of Danny Haran:

Dear Charles of LGF, owner of shrinkwrapped.blogs.com, your supportive readers, and everyone who has blogged about terrorist Samir Kuntar's triple murder,

I'd like to thank you for your blog entries about the terrorist Samir Kuntar.  As you know, on April 22, 1979, a group of terrorists led by Samir Kuntar murdered 28-year-old Danny Haran by machine gun, then murdered his 4-year-old daughter Einat Haran by smashing her head in, and also causing the death of 2-year-old Yael, as her mother, Smadar, tried to protect her.

These were members of my family and I know that Danny's mother, Nina, who is very elderly now, and his father, David, who died a few years ago, would be particularly grateful for your support that the terrorist Samir Kuntar should serve the full three life sentences that he received for his cowardly acts of cold-blooded murder.

The Council Has Spoken!

This week the winning post was my attempt to offer A Perspective on Tribes and Anti-Semitism.  It is unfortunately rather timely since the disease of anti-Semitism shows no signs of abating anytime soon.  Second place went to Dymphna's post on another ancient scourge,  As Old as the Garden of Eden.

Among non-Council posts, the winning post was by Solomonia for Mayhem at the Defend Hizballah Rally!, a description of "peaceful" anti-Semitism.  The second place post was by Bill Roggio at the Counterterrorism blog, where he examined the Worst Case Scenario: Hezbollah's Conventional Forces.

As always, the full complement of nominated posts can be found at the Watcher of Weasels, and all will reward your time and effort.

Further Thoughts on Strategy

Israel enters any battle with certain pre-ordained constraints which make lasting victories extremely difficult to achieve.  The current hostilities are no different in that respect yet it just may be that the Israelis are actually fighting to win this war.

What we know:

1) Israel can never initiate open-ended hostilities.

2) Israel typically has a very small window in which to fight back against attacks.

3) The International Community will never tolerate Israel destroying an Arab opponent.

4) The Western Media is functionally allied with the enemy.

These prior constraints have dictated Israel's strategy for the last 40 years:

5) Israel has always had to rely on speed and audacity to surprise and destroy Arab armies.

Knowing this, under the well worn dictum that armies always prepare to fight the last war:

6) Hezbollah has spent the last 6 years preparing themselves for an Israeli assault based on speed and audacity.

7) Part of the Hezbollah strategy (and Arab strategy in general) is to maximize civilian casualties in order to provide propaganda for the world's press to use against Israel.

Further, these constraints determine the shape of victory for either side:

5) Hezbollah only needs to survive to win this war; Israel can only win by destroying Hezbollah as a fighting force.

6) For an Israeli victory to be consolidated, the Lebanese army must be able, eventually, to maintain the ensuing peace.

7) Israel must do all this while minimizing collateral damage.

Many commentators believe the Israelis need a massive ground campaign to beat Hezbollah and instead are currently fighting a short-sighted campaign which aims to minimize their casualties at the risk of losing the war. 

Narcissism in the Real World III

In my post Narcissism in the Real World II, I described what happens when people Narcissistically over-value their own ideas:

When ideas become attached to "self-objects" or take on an aspect of a partial "self-object", the ability to discriminate between good and bad becomes impaired by the need for ideas to support self-esteem as opposed to existing relatively free from contamination by the person's psychological make-up.  [Emphasis added-SW]  To a Narcissist, all opposing opinions are sh*t.  Thus, if their favored group is not in charge, the country is a cesspool.  People like this have regressed to treating everything on only two dimensions.  While they applaud themselves for nuanced thinking and object to Bush as being a simpleton who makes hard and fast distinctions between good and bad, in fact they only make the simplest distinctions:

"Good" are things they agree with in their entirety.

"Bad" are things they disagree with in whole or in part.

This suggests an alarming inability to make significant discriminations. 

The worst aspect of such a mental arrangement is that they are incapable of reasoning about the beliefs they use to support their self-esteem.  They cannot construct supportable arguments that there might have been a better approach to stabilizing the Middle East and removing the threat of WMD; all they can do is attack the current administration, and in a pinch, resort to "the country is a cesspool."

Yesterday, Dr. Sanity and Gagdad Bob both made important contributions toward understanding some of the difficult concepts which characterize the Narcissistic Character. 

Dr. Sanity offered a critique of the Narcissistic idealist in MALIGNANT NARCISSISM - Sociopathic Selfishness and Sociopathic Selflessness.  She points out that the evil that emerges from the Grandiose Self (GS) is usually relatively clear, yet the evil that emerges from the Idealized Object (IO) is often much more dangerous even while it is more often hidden from view:

The Council Has Spoken ...

Last week the winning Council post was When History bites back, by JoshuaPundit.  He does a wonderful job showing how history tends to repeat.  In second place was a clear explication of blogging philosophy that every blogger should read, Blogging for Dummies Like Me, at The Sundries Shack.

Among the non-Council posts, the winning post, by Tigerhawk, attempts to answer the question Wither the 'democratization strategy'?   Whether you think he succeeds or not, his post is an essential addition to understanding the importance of the Iraq War.  Second place was by Fjordman, whose post on Beheading Nations - The Islamization of Europe's Cities, was hosted at Dhimmi Watch.  A Fjordman essay is always worth reading.

This week also saw the exit of Dr. Sanity from the Council; her departure is mitigated by the arrival of Abbagav.  Gavriel has some big shoes to fill, but if his most recent posts are indicative, the Council will be very well served by his presence.

As always, all the nominated posts can be found at the Watcher of Weasels and all will reward your time and effort.

Fantasies and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

The conventional wisdom has been, since the start of the current fighting between Hezbollah and Israel, that Syria, especially, does not want to widen the war.  There is more ambiguity about the position of Iran, which is far from the battlefield in any event, and hides behind the international community's fiction that they are merely an interested bystander rather than an active participant.  (This fiction is maintained despite the aggressive comments of the Iranian leadership and the provenance of Hezbollah's funds and arms; the international community, including our Western "allies", has been reluctant to actually confront Iran in any meaningful way, and the current crisis merely proves the point.)  Israel has little interest in enlarging the battlefield and the United States, currently experiencing our own difficulties bringing calm to Iraq, has no interest in further military involvement either.

Unfortunately, the difficulty Israel has been having in gaining control of Southern Lebanon, in conjunction with the fantasy structure I discussed yesterday, is creating fertile conditions for miscalculation and escalation.

There are two concurrent fantasies that lie at the base of the Arab risk of escalation.  Muslim governments around the Middle East have based their legitimacy on two pillars.  One pillar has been their fidelity to the absolute authority of the Koran.  The Saudis entire claim to legitimacy is based on their possession and management of Mecca and Medina (helped by their oceans of oil, of course).  Iran has long challenged Saudi Arabia for primacy based on their belief that their version of Shia Islam is the only true Islam supported by the Koran.  If left to their own devices, the fighting in the Middle East would be between these competing radical versions of Shia Islam and Sunni Islam. 

The second pillar of belief is much more consequential.

Another Letter From David

David G., who went to school from K-12 with my oldest son, is now in Israel and sent another letter from the front; all of Northern Israel is now "the front." 

[His first letter is here.]

On sunday I made the desision that I would no longer be taking hebrew classes.  I came to this decision for a few reasons.  The first is that attending class in a bomb shelter is just too much for me.  The second reason is because I want to take a more active roll in the kibbutz workwise especially when labor is a such a lowpoint due to everyone heading south.  So I was assigned a new job in the store.  The job pretty much consists of stocking the drinks (which no one buys because the store is closed or people are afraid to go out) and talking to one of the most beautiful females in all of Israel-  However she has a boyfriend who just finished his army service and is traveling around Brazil for a year.  After about an hour of work and funny talk we begin hearing HUGE explosions.  No warning no siren no nothing.  The explosion was so loud and clearly close the windows, ground and almost everything else shook.  This was the first time sinse arriving in israel since fighting began that i actually heard people say "I am afraid".  This is also the first time I saw older people and I mean much older people even come into the bomb shelters.  However they had seen so much in their lives that they began to comfort people who were clearly shooken up.  On lady even handed me a magazine with Paris Hilton on the cover and said "look at the pretty girl".  After 15 mins we returned to work only to hear sirens 2 more times to return to the bunkers.

The Danger of Fantasy in International Affairs

There is a very dangerous dynamic interaction occurring between Western Civilization and the Islamic World which has not yet attained the level of a "Clash of Civilizations" but threatens to precipitate the catastrophe that so many fear.  The dynamic is visible in the current war between Israel and Lebanon and deserves closer scrutiny.

All people understand the world through various templates or paradigms.  Most of the time, we fit new data into our existing templates until the model breaks down in the face of reality.  In Psychoanalysis, much of the work involves exposing and delineating the unconscious paradigms and templates through which our patients view the world.  Psychoanalysts refer to such templates as "fantasies" and transference, and by exposing such fantasies, we help our patients make a closer approximation to reality and change their dysfunctional behavior, if they so desire.

In a very simple example, consider a women who, by virtue of experiences of childhood abuse, unconsciously equates abuse with love.  When her significant other behaves in an abusive way, she needs to preserve her image of him as a loving boyfriend and thus has to find ways to see it as her fault; the abuse is deserved punishment.  His abuse is then taken as evidence that he "really cares."  This is an over-simplification, but makes the point that our unconscious fantasies can control our behavior, often in detrimental ways.

When someone believes that his fantasy is a direct and accurate depiction of reality, it can readily lead to misperceptions and place them in danger. 

There is an analogous situation with national fantasies.

A Perspective on Tribes and Anti-Semitism

Throughout most of humanity's tenure on the planet, societies have been organized primarily along tribal lines.  Tribes are by their nature based on shared ethnicity and shared religious beliefs.  They also tend to have a very limited number of leaders who have first choice of assets with the rest, essentially shared communally.  Furthermore, before the very recent past, most societies lived on the edge of subsistence, with very little left over for accumulating material goods.  The disparity between those with the most and those with the least was actually fairly small, though this did not keep "envy" from being a significant issue and a great many tribal rules were developed in order to manage such envy.  This all began to change when man began his slow march to technology. 

For the first time, societies were able to provide a surplus of material goods (including food) for its people.  The basic tribal template still held, however.  A small group of leaders monopolized the newly created wealth and continued to wield their power over the lives of their members.  As time went on this template continued to be the model for most social orders.  In the middle ages a small middle class grew up based on new technologies creating increasing wealth.  Wherever one looks, the model of a society with a small, often hereditary, ruling class, a small intermediary (middle) class whose position depended on their facility utilizing cutting edge technology, and a vast lower class with relatively even levels of deprivation has been the rule, rather than the exception. 

Monotheism, the scientific method (and its attendant industrial revolution), and the American Revolution began the process of overturning a system that has worked for billions of people for a hundred thousand years. 

When Jesus came to the ancient Jews, among his messages was a time bomb which took almost 2000 years to fully explode.  The separation of church and state ("render unto Caesar...") was a death blow to the divine right of Kings.  In fact, it was an idea that fatally undermined the notion of an hereditary aristocracy.  The American Revolution, a fundamentally Judeo-Christian revolution, enshrined the principle of man's Rights emerging from their individual relationship with God.  While the new nation did not fully live up to its own principles, the damage to the tribal organization of society was fatal.

Tribal societies manage envy in two ways. 

A Letter From Israel

David G. is a young man who went through school with my Oldest Son.  He is now in Israel and sent this letter to a friend, who forwarded it to me. 

Well folks I don't know what story the media is telling in America, but it is raining rockets here!!!  Followed by retaliatory Israeli Air force strikes that sounds similar to thunder except it lasts about 2 minutes.  I have been attempting to send an email for 2 days now; however I am continually interrupted by the Air Raid sirens followed by barrages of missiles/rockets. 

The fighting has been going on for about a week in the North now, and the attacks are getting longer and more frequent.  At least 3-5 times a day for the past few days we are startled to death by the air raid sirens warning us of an imminent attack.  Just to give you a hint of how loud the sirens are- if you put your ear next to a police siren, multiply that by a million.  From my Kibbutz we can hear the sirens going off in Haifa (9kms away).  From the second we here the siren, we have about 1 minute before the rocket hits and to get in the bunkers.  When you first get into a bunker a third of the people are in shock, a third are hysterical and another third are searching for a way to deal with it.  Everyone crowds around the TV to see where the rockets have landed (praying its not in an area where they have friends or family).  Some times the attacks are so long it is unbearable to look at the tv for another second- volunteers, adults begin playing with the children's games just to distract themselves.  Today we actually completed a 1,000 piece puzzle we were in the shelters so long.