Current Location: 30045
Current Mood:  indescribable
Current Music: Gary Numan / Exile / Down in the Park (Live at Hammersmith Odeon)
I've been avoiding writing about politics for a while, not the least reason being that it shoots my blood-pressure up like a spike to note that pretty much all my inherent predictions about the Middle East are coming true, with the de-fanging of Iraq bringing out the true destabilizing influences in the region, Iran and Syria, through covert action and proxies. There's nothing that decreases one's will to write on such subjects as being repeatedly borne out by events, but your readership being indifferent at best and hostile at worst. The drawback of being a fiscally conservative, socially liberal, military-active libertarian, I suppose. But I've been surfing through everything I can get my eyes on regarding the evolution of events, and I'm pretty sure I've found a source on a story that I find personally really disturbing because of its implications. Hezbollah hit an Israeli naval vessel far offshore with a UAV carting a warhead: Haaretz has details on the attack which damaged an Israeli naval vessel, by an UAV, in the dark and while operating 16 km from the Lebanese coast. An explosives-laden drone, apparently launched by Hezbollah, hit an Israel Navy warship off the coast of Beirut, causing serious damage to its steering capability, Israel Defense Forces confirmed Friday night. The incident occurred at around 8:30 P.M., as the ship was some 16 kilometers from the Lebanese coast. The blast caused a fire close to the helicopter landing pad onboard. The ship's steering mechanism also sustained some damage. Several hours after the vessel was hit, an Israel Defense Forces spokeswoman said the damage was worse than originally thought. She added that the ship, still burning, was being towed back to Israel. There were some 80 people on board the ship when it was hit.
This is a major warship operating in line of sight, but beyond normal nighttime visual range. According to the Security Watchtower, the drone was probably a Mirsad-1. A Hezbollah unmanned aerial drone crashed into an Israeli warship off the Mediterranean coast on Friday, damaging the steering of the vessel. Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah claimed the ship had been sunk. The UAV was likely a Mirsad-1, built by the Iranian state owned Qods Aviation Industry. On previous occasions, Nasrallah has boasted that "you can load the Mirsad plane with a quantity of explosive ranging from 40 to 50 kilos and send it to its target." In 2005, U.S. and Israeli intelligence noted that Iranian soldiers were stationed in southern Lebanon where they operated the Mirsad-1, eight of which are believed to have been given by Iran to Hezbollah. Reports indicate that an estimated 30 Hezbollah operatives have completed training in Isfahan, Iran. Asked about the threat of the UAV's, Joseph Cirincione, a weapons expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said "the danger is that Hezbollah will now have the capability to inflict greater damage on Israel by more precise targeting."
The Mirsad-1, perhaps unsurprisingly, is an Iranian design. And its not the first time one has attacked Israel (see the link for some detail). The disturbing issues here involve the fact that at night, on the ocean any ship is a hard target to find, hit, and damage significantly. This takes no small amount of skill. Being able to do so tells us something meaningful about the operational capabilities of Hezbollah at this point in time: they are not inconsiderable, and the capability to accomplish this act is a rarity. The direct implication is that there are Iranian military agents in Southern Lebanon involved in direct and aggressive acts against Israel. Combine this knowledge with the Israeli attacks against the Beirut runways (but pointedly not control towers or other infrastructure; the airport is currently unusable but salvageable, and with a minimum of lost lives) and Lebanese highways, combined with the embargo of the main ocean passages into Lebanon, and you can see another pattern beyond the stated desire to keep Hezbollah from getting the two kidnapped Israeli soldiers out of the country.  They're also keeping the Iranians in.
Examine the larger version of the inset map at right. The bright yellow line south of Sour is the border between Israel and Lebanon. Haifa, lower left, is the city recently hit with missiles launched from Southern Lebanon. Beirut sits on a prominence jutting out into the gulf.  That country to the east, containing Damascus? Syria, a loud and extremely verbal ally of Iran, and the probable destination of the two Israeli soldiers at this point. For further reference, East of Syria is Iraq, holding roughly 230,000 Coalition soldiers and east of that, Iran itself. And East of Iran is Afghanistan, but the situation there is such that the military assets there are out of play.
Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia have already stated publicly that Hezbollah is on their own, essentially washing their hands of things in the court of public opinion and effectively walling off the escape to the south. That means Lebanon-controlling Syria is effectively isolated and with an extremely pissed-off Israel with forces massing on the ground just over the border, from which missiles were coming in daily -- and much diminished since Israel started their bombing runs over the past couple days. Which brings us full circle as to the significance of the UAV attack. If (more likely when) Israel pushes up into Southern Lebanon, they're going to find Iranian equipment in great profusion with Syrian fingerprints all over it, and because Hezbollah is a "legitimate" party in the Lebanese government, they have a perfectly legitimate reason to simply declare war on both Syria -- well within reach -- and Iran. If the Israelis get their hands on active Iranian military, like the gentlemen who equipped Hezbollah with and probably did the guidance of the armed UAV, they'll have more than a reason to just declare war. They'll have reason to arm and launch some of their missiles, and unlike the North Koreans and Iranians, the Israeli don't play with half-arsed technology. They make big, ugly explosions. Potentially nuclear, if Iran strikes at them with nuclear or chemical missiles, which they certainly would not shirk at and have said as much. Implications are ugly things, but worse are irrational actors. Iran and Syria have been irrational for decades, but the actions of the US in restructuring Iraq and Libya's subsequent cooperation has pushed them into making bold moves that are near-suicidal ... if you don't believe Allah is on your side. For those who still maintain the Iraqi experiment was unwarranted, imagine this occurring five or ten years down the line, with Iran having that much more nuclear development completed and with Iraqi money from Hussein fueling a much hotter fire in a place even less providential. Its pretty close to a nightmare as-is. In the absence of a US-controlled Iraq, it would be an absolute apocalypse. | 
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Pushing west, one element recon'd the open field between the tanks and objective Pawn, and just after noticing the whole area was littered with abitises, took a sabot through the front.
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