One night on the road when the campground at lovely Morro Rock near San Luis
Obispo was full, I found myself in an odd, impersonal sort of campsite a few
miles
further down the interstate, where to my surprise (and I don't really know what
must have gone through my French companion's mind) we were awakened in the
middle
of the night by gunshots, explosions, the ra-tat-tat and boom-boom-boom of
warfare
in peaceful 1990s California. Now at last I know exactly where this came from.
Though I obviously had immediately figured out that these were army exercises,
or
at least, after the first few minutes!
Michael H Goldhaber wrote:
Three small buildings! A joke! The danger is that these nitwits will
take their wargames there to be a realistic exercise and plunge the
world into future Iraqs. We only aid that by taking this seriously.
Unfortunately those nitwits do take their games seriously and they have a lot of
help from the Israelis after the invasions of Jenine and Nablus -- I watched
videos gathered by Eyal Weisman where an Israeli officer explained, in a kind of
Derridean way, that everything has to do with how you interpret a city. You can
interpret the walls, for instance, as solid, or as permeable- In Nablus they
intererpreted them as permeable, bored systematically through them, and were
able
to attack and destroy the Palestinian resistance from behind. They seem to have
applied a swarming doctrine, gathering around the city, pulsing inward,
retreating, and then pulsing again from other directions. It is a commonplace to
say that the Israelis have replaced the British as the chief purveyors of urban
battle strategy, but I wonder if anyone on the list has good bibliography on
that
subject.
best, Brian
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