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Work safe, but not nice, kids caught up in the fighting in Qusayr today https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pd9ZTHruJLM
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May 24, 2013 17:54
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^^ And that's just depressing  Brown Moses posted:There's another good piece on this in NOW Lebanon, especially regarding Hezbollah's strength and experience Yeah, if the IDF received a bloody nose in 2006, Hizb'Allah got its arms broken and a few ribs cracked. Between the real death tolls of its seasoned fighters and its completely destroyed infrastructure in the south, it's no surprise that Nasrallah came out, apologized to the Lebanese people and said that if he had doubted that there was even a 1% chance for things to turn that way, he never would have kidnapped those soldiers. In fact it had such a severe effect on them that it's preventing their fighters from being the potent force in Syria they would have been otherwise with those seasoned fighters still around. That's 7 years later.
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May 24, 2013 17:55
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Looks like I'll have some exciting Brown Moses Blog related news to report later today, just one signature away.... Meanwhile, he's a tactic that's become increasingly popular, mining buildings being used as firing positions by the army https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZiarSWi6fg Brown Moses fucked around with this message at 18:04 on May 24, 2013 |
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May 24, 2013 18:00
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Brown Moses posted:There's another good piece on this in NOW Lebanon, especially regarding Hezbollah's strength and experience It's worth noting that NOW Lebanon is a rabidly pro-Hariri rag regularly staffed by really sectarian people who have a huge agenda (also they'll hire almost any foreign reporter they can get even if he's poo poo.), if you read actual and reputable military documents on the 2006 war (including israeli ones) all of them conclude that the 2006 war was an unabashed triumph for Hezbollah.
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May 24, 2013 18:33
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Brown Moses posted:There's another good piece on this in NOW Lebanon, especially regarding Hezbollah's strength and experience The article that was linked earlier in this thread puts Hizbollah losses in the conflict to 184 dead and claims that the fight was handled by a single brigade of 3000 fighters. http://carl.army.mil/download/csipubs/matthewsOP26.pdf Not entirely sure of its credibility, but from preliminary googling it looks like the author is a US military analyst indeed.
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May 24, 2013 18:33
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smn posted:The article that was linked earlier in this thread puts Hizbollah losses in the conflict to 184 dead and claims that the fight was handled by a single brigade of 3000 fighters. The 184 figure is an extreme low-ball that the author gets from another military historian. It is based on the fact that there were 184 street funerals that were announced. Hezbollah itself has stated that at least 250 soldiers were killed, and it was later discovered to have been concealing casualties (such as by secretly treating the injured in Syria rather than Lebanon). Most likely the figure is between 500-600 deaths and three times as many casualties, a figure supported by the UN and most other groups and agencies, including Lebanon and Israel. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_2006_Lebanon_War Al-Saqr posted:It's worth noting that NOW Lebanon is a rabidly pro-Hariri rag regularly staffed by really sectarian people who have a huge agenda (also they'll hire almost any foreign reporter they can get even if he's poo poo.), if you read actual and reputable military documents on the 2006 war (including israeli ones) all of them conclude that the 2006 war was an unabashed triumph for Hezbollah. Anyone calling the Second Lebanon War an "unabashed triumph" for Hezbollah is deluding themselves; Nasrallah himself admitted that getting into an open war with Israel was a mistake. The damage to their civic infrastructure, not to mention the damage to the organization, was devastating (an estimated $3.5 billion - which they can ill afford). Hezbollah's victory was in surviving the attack long enough for the UN to declare a ceasefire, and proving that Israel would not be capable of preventing missile attacks without a full occupation. Much like in Vietnam, Hezbollah achieved an unexpected victory, but a Pyrrhic one that they are still recovering from. Furthermore, NOW Lebanon doesn't appear to be any more "rabidly sectarian" than any other publication in the region - the fact that they dislike Assad doesn't invalidate every word they write. Kaal fucked around with this message at 19:59 on May 24, 2013 |
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May 24, 2013 19:04
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Kaal posted:
1)of course if Nasrallah knew that Israel would go into open war over a few men, he wouldn't have done it. which is what he said. he didn't decide to go to open war for a few soldiers, he just did what was established as routine before, a few Israeli soldiers in exchange for a whole lot of Lebanese/Palestinian hostages taken by Israel, of course he didn't know that Israel would go that far because they didn't go to open war the last time a bunch of soldiers were taken. 2) when you deal with a racist fascist state such as Israel, it's only natural to expect them during war to cause as much damage to civilian infrastructure and kill as many civilians as they can, it's in it's nature. unfortunately, since arab countries don't have the anti-air power to stop them, Israel will act on it's natural instincts which is that there is no such thing as an Arab civilian in their eyes. if Arab countries had better anti-aircraft systems, then the damage done by Israel to the civilian populace would be far less. 3) read the military reports again, Israel failed to achieve every single objective they went for:- Did they stop the rockets? no. Did they Capture any towns? not even a village. Did they reach the Litani? they didnt even make it few kilometers past the border before a good portion of their Merkavas blew up. Hell did they even stop the Hezbollah TV channel? no. In a defensive war, you fight to make sure the enemy does not achieve any of it's objectives, which according to every military report written on the war, Hezbollah did in spades. which makes it an unabashed triumph. 4) NOW lebanon has a long history and reputation of a yellow paper, from day one, the fact that they dislike assad is hardly what is at the root of them, the fact that they have garbage journalism, zero professionalism and a clear agenda (because they are directly funded and operated by Hariri-saudi media) makes them not worth listening to at all. Al-Saqr fucked around with this message at 20:39 on May 24, 2013 |
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May 24, 2013 20:32
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Al-Saqr posted:2) when you deal with a racist fascist state such as Israel, it's only natural to expect them during war to cause as much damage to civilian infrastructure and kill as many civilians as they can, it's in it's nature. unfortunately, since arab countries don't have the anti-air power to stop them, Israel will act on it's natural instincts which is that there is no such thing as an Arab civilian in their eyes. if Arab countries had better anti-aircraft systems, then the damage done by Israel to the civilian populace would be far less. The point of a pyrrhic victory is that you achieve all or most of your objectives at too high of a cost. The man it was named for, Pyrrhus of Epirus, won every battle he fought, but due to attrition of his elite Greek heavy infantry he was forced to abandon his dreams of conquest and leave the Italian peninsula. The point some are trying to make isn't that Israel actually won in 2006, it's that Hezbollah paid a very high price for the victory and that might be hampering their current efforts in Syria. I'm not particularly familiar with the 2006 conflict, but if they lost anything even close to 500 men before factoring in those too wounded to fight again in a force of roughly 2000-3000 then you do have to question whether or not their victory was worth the cost. It may be that the chastening of Israel was worth it as it makes it more unlikely they'll be so militarily aggressive in the future, but that's balanced against the emerging evidence that Hezbollah has lost some of it's ability to project force. I'm not trying to say one outweighs the other, but it should be considered before claiming that such a costly victory is a triumph. As to your point under the label 2, yes the Israeli air campaign against civilians and civilian infrastructure is horrible and if there had been better anti-aircraft weapons it wouldn't have been so devastating, but that doesn't matter at all when trying to gauge the costs and benefits from the fighting.
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May 24, 2013 21:40
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cafel posted:The point of a pyrrhic victory is that you achieve all or most of your objectives at too high of a cost. The man it was named for, Pyrrhus of Epirus, won every battle he fought, but due to attrition of his elite Greek heavy infantry he was forced to abandon his dreams of conquest and leave the Italian peninsula. well I think the true metric of whether the victory they achieved in the 2006 war was phyrric would be when they go through another war with israel. The whole point of hezbollah wasnt that they would be able to project force, it was that they could defend their position, fighting strength and towns in lebanon, which is what they did. The whole point of the IDF was that they would be able to project force with impunity, but they were stopped in their tracks. So now the Israelis have to abandon any dream that Lebanon would be an easy target for invasion like it was in 1982. And I disagree with the notion that Hezbollah has lost significant projection power, according to most reports they've significantly upgraded their rocket force to the point that in the next war almost every major Israeli town all the way to Haifa can now be targeted. The thing that has changed though is now they're not going to risk another open war by taking israeli prisoners and that the situation in Syria is damaging to their position, perhaps you might be right that their participation in syria (which I think is a tremendously stupid and rear end in a top hat move by them) and that it's a totally different kind of war than what they're used to will affect their manpower and supply lines (if the regime collapses), but the reports of their recruitment drives, rocketry upgrades and now they're actually managing to send UAV's into Israeli airspace suggest otherwise, but we'll see in the next war. As for label 2, a full scale offensive campaign was imposed on Lebanon, and not vice versa. when all you can do as a defensive guerrilla movement is to hunker down and take the blows, your main objective then is to deny the offensive force all of it's aims and objectives. you cant guage costs and benefits because you dont have much of a choice in the fact that the enemy has as much power as it has to create mass destruction, and that it had the U.S. diplomatic backing to keep the war going for a full month. however by denying that attacking force all of it's objectives and halting it's ground offensive, you've won the war. how much it costs is out of your hands since the one with most of the firepower was given a full month to bomb as it pleased, with no international repercussions. but when the war was over and the dust was settled, militarily speaking Hezbollah gained victory on both the tactical and strategic levels of the conflict, and Israel gained absolutely nothing.
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May 24, 2013 22:38
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Are there any Lebanese news sources that aren't beholden to one sect or political party?
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May 24, 2013 23:05
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Depends who you ask, but they've all got biases.
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May 24, 2013 23:10
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Real interesting report about Syrian chemical weapons, supposedly from a former regime scientist who defected in 2012. Among other things he says that the regime tried mixing military grade nerve gas with sarin to make detection more difficult: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/05/2013523155639566436.html
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May 25, 2013 01:17
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Brilliant, I'm now part of a shadowy cabal on Facebook that hates Israel, according this article, Yes, There Is an Anti-Israel Media Cabal and They All Meet on Facebook. 99% of the posts are people asking each other where to buy/sell bullet proof jackets and asking about fixers so they don't end up getting killed in a warzone. Currently I'm extremely close to securing enough funding to launch Brown Moses Arabic, which will be a blog with all my posts professionally translated into Arabic, which has been one of my long term goals for my blog for a while now.
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May 25, 2013 09:14
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Why do they think you hate Israel?
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May 25, 2013 09:34
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RandomPauI posted:Why do they think you hate Israel? Because a number of members sad mean things about the IDF after this was reported, and one of the members thought they'd make their name in the Israeli press by "exposing" the group. It's like saying all of SA hates a specific group because 10 members criticised that group.
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May 25, 2013 09:41
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A much better question might be: Why do you hate Israel?
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May 25, 2013 10:01
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A better one: Have you stopped hating Israel recently?
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May 25, 2013 10:55
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You'll be calling me Goody Brown Moses next. I'm working with Google and Youtube at the moment, they're helping me improve my process, and they've asked me to record a video of me at work. Is there any good free software I can use to record my desktop and record my voice? Kind of a Let's Play for the Brown Moses Blog.
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May 25, 2013 11:15
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Brown Moses posted:You'll be calling me Goody Brown Moses next. Goody is only short for goodwife, not goodman...or is there yet something else you're not telling us...
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May 25, 2013 12:08
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Anyone who suggests Israel could do bad things is AntiIsrael. You must be on the side of the white, civilized nation - not the Jihadist Monsters. The worst part of this bigoted, simple worldview is that it is coming 'true' now that Israel has flypaper for brutal jihadism right next door. Good going, everyone.
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May 25, 2013 12:23
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Brown Moses posted:Brilliant, I'm now part of a shadowy cabal on Facebook that hates Israel, according this article, Yes, There Is an Anti-Israel Media Cabal and They All Meet on Facebook. Well, it is to me.
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May 25, 2013 12:59
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It always amazes me how Hezbollah and poo poo can have facebook pages yet Arab-feminist pages are closed in a matter months.
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May 25, 2013 13:13
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Brown Moses posted:You'll be calling me Goody Brown Moses next. Audacity is free and is pretty good voice recording software. I think most of Let's Play uses Fraps, but I think you have to pay for it.
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May 25, 2013 14:17
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An Israeli official has said that Syria has attempted to launch a cyber attack on Haifa's water infrastructure. Depending on whether or not this was something serious, or just an attempt to change their screensavers to "U BEEN HAXED BY TEH SEA," this could result in another response. eSports Chaebol posted:Goody is only short for goodwife, not goodman...or is there yet something else you're not telling us... His gay pornstar alter ego is a bottom. Mild mannered blogging journalist by day,
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May 25, 2013 15:28
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If Hezbollah had a total fighting force of 2-3000 in '06, and now they've sent 2000 troops to Syria, how big is the total fighting force now? did they basically send everyone they had?
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May 25, 2013 16:01
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Brown Moses posted:Because a number of members sad mean things about the IDF after this was reported, and one of the members thought they'd make their name in the Israeli press by "exposing" the group. It's like saying all of SA hates a specific group because 10 members criticised that group. Israel is basically the Amy's Baking Company of the world.
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May 25, 2013 16:15
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Sergg posted:I think the West should be supporting secular rebel groups like the FSA, but even that may come back to bite us in the rear end, which is why our government is so hesitant to further involve itself, but paradoxically that hesitation increases the power and influence of the radical Islamists whose backers have no such compunction or restraint. The first bit sounds nice and all, but it seems to be increasingly difficult to actually find any FSA at all. Have a post from Aron Lund on 16 March: The FSA Doesn't Exist (plus on 19 March a combined rebuttal and response). Those are a bit old by now (sorry), but the blog has other interesting articles too about the evolution and bewildering moves of factions and units from one group to another and then a third. I agree with your second paragraph, but it does seem like over time the anti-Assad forces are getting increasingly more hardline and religious, so I cannot really see anything good come out of Syria in a long time, no matter who wins.
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May 25, 2013 16:24
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Brown Moses posted:Brilliant, I'm now part of a shadowy cabal on Facebook that hates Israel, according this article, Yes, There Is an Anti-Israel Media Cabal and They All Meet on Facebook. And here I had you pegged as an MI6/CIA shill. drat it. 
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May 25, 2013 17:51
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Al-Saqr posted:militarily speaking Hezbollah gained victory on both the tactical and strategic levels of the conflict, and Israel gained absolutely nothing. Israel gained a border with Lebanon that is the quietest it has been for many decades and a Hezbollah that is so deterred from further conflict that it maintained this quiet even after Israel allegedly assassinated its military wing leader and bombed its facilties in Syria. Many Israelis view this as a sufficient gain to declare the war a strategic victory. Wether this is true or not is a matter of opinion but to claim that Israel gained nothing is evidently false IMO. Herostratus fucked around with this message at 19:01 on May 25, 2013 |
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May 25, 2013 18:59
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Mans posted:It always amazes me how Hezbollah and poo poo can have facebook pages yet Arab-feminist pages are closed in a matter months. That's because the page authors get death threats. The X-man cometh posted:If Hezbollah had a total fighting force of 2-3000 in '06, and now they've sent 2000 troops to Syria, how big is the total fighting force now? did they basically send everyone they had? Most of the troops they are sending to Syria are too young to have been in the '06 war. Hezbollah has had a big recruiting drive since then. It's difficult to accurately estimate the size of their army, particularly because they are so intertwined with the militaries of Iran, Lebanon, and Syria. Here's an article about some of the latest estimates from Israeli intelligence: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/14/iran-hezbollah-force-syrian-regime Kaal fucked around with this message at 19:26 on May 25, 2013 |
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May 25, 2013 19:22
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Brown Moses posted:Brilliant, I'm now part of a shadowy cabal on Facebook that hates Israel, according this article, Yes, There Is an Anti-Israel Media Cabal and They All Meet on Facebook. Don't worry about that one, it's just a rumor spread by the lizard people.
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May 25, 2013 20:16
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Brown Moses posted:You'll be calling me Goody Brown Moses next. Yeah Fraps you have to pay for, Microsoft Expression Encoder could do it but I don't know about the voice track. Ask in the Let's Play tech support thread maybe.
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May 25, 2013 20:34
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FRAPS is about $40 - there's probably enough people in this thread willing to put towards a kickstarter to buy it for you. Though you might be expected to do a Let's Play The Syrian Civil War thread. Matrix games would probably make the game and calculate the combat down to the individual rounds of AK47 fire.
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May 25, 2013 21:07
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Mans posted:It always amazes me how Hezbollah and poo poo can have facebook pages yet Arab-feminist pages are closed in a matter months. The situation in the middle east for feminists is pretty dire, its gaining momentum but let me remind you that we had an MRA movement before the whole phenomenon happened on the internet 
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May 25, 2013 21:17
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Comstar posted:FRAPS is about $40 - there's probably enough people in this thread willing to put towards a kickstarter to buy it for you. Though you might be expected to do a Let's Play The Syrian Civil War thread. Matrix games would probably make the game and calculate the combat down to the individual rounds of AK47 fire. It's already done, although the game's arsenal lacks Yugoslavian RPG's etc. Also the stock scenarios are about a NATO invasion of Syria, but there are plenty of custom Syrian civil war campaigns as well. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/01/10/the_syrian_invasion There was a British Forces Let's Play for that game, which unfortunately ended before we got to Damascus. An actual Syrian civil war LP would really be interesting to see.
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May 25, 2013 21:33
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Well buying Fraps would be a tax deductable business expense, so that's not a problem. I should actually do an Ask/Tell thread at some point, I don't post half the stuff that happens to me because of the blog. Only yesterday I was told the Department of Defence are fans of the blog. I'm getting loads of views on it now as well, about 120,000 in the last month, and once the Arabic version is out I'm sure to get a lot more.
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May 25, 2013 22:20
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Two Grad rockets hit the Chiyeh neighborhood of south Beirut, injuring four people and causing damage to some buildings. Chiyeh is a Shia' neighborhood with a large concentration of Hizballah/Amal targets, and recall that Syrian insurgents have threatened to attack Hizballah in Beirut as early as October 2012.
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May 26, 2013 09:17
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Abu Sakkar has been injured in fighting, more here, plus details of other smaller casualties.
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May 26, 2013 12:56
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Here's a youth camp run by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham in Abu Kamal, Syria https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0_9ywRfCxs
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May 26, 2013 13:28
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Here's more evidence from the ground in Syria of Iran breaking sanctions.
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May 26, 2013 14:24
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