Saturday, July 22, 2006

Israel seizes Hizbollah stronghold in Lebanon

MARJAYOUN, Lebanon (Reuters) -
Israel ousted Hizbollah guerillas from a stronghold just inside Lebanon on Saturday after several days of fierce fighting, the army said, as it bombarded targets across the south of the country.

Ground forces commander Major-General Benny Gantz said Israeli soldiers took control of Maroun al-Ras, a hilltop village overlooking both sides of the border, where six Israeli commandos have been killed this week.


Israel said it planned no full-scale invasion of Lebanon for now, but warned villagers near the border to leave.

In the town of Marjayoun, about eight km (5 miles) from the border, cars packed with people waving white flags fled north fearing Israel will step up an 11-day-old war which has killed 354 people, mostly civilians.

Gantz said Israeli soldiers inflicted dozens of casualties on Hizbollah. The Shi'ite Muslim group said on Saturday one guerrilla had been killed but did not say where.

An Israeli army spokesman had said troops backed by around a dozen tanks and armored vehicles had been fighting in Maroun al-Ras, one km inside Lebanese territory, and found Hizbollah bunkers and weapons stores.

He said Israel might widen its military action, but was still looking at "limited operations." "We're not talking about massive forces going inside at this point," he said.

Resisting growing calls for a ceasefire, the United States stressed the need to tackle what it sees as the root cause of the conflict -- Hizbollah's armed presence on Israel's border and the role of its allies, Syria and Iran.

"Resolving the crisis demands confronting the terrorist group that launched the attacks and the nations that support it," U.S President George W. Bush said, one day before Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice was to head to Israel.


Get The Story At Yahoo News.

Stupid rag heads have been dying well deserved deaths in southern Lebanon this past week and with the capture of this stronghold Israel has put itself in a very good position to take the fight right into Hezbollah’s backyard and cause as much damage to it’s infrastructure as possible. If Hezbollah continues to fire rockets into northern Israel, Israel will have no other alternative than to reoccupy territory to ensure the safety of its own people. On another note Hamas has offered a cease-fire, this has got to be a joke right? Who the hell do they think they are to call a cease-fire; they are the ones who initiated this military action with constant rocket attacks and the abduction of an Israeli soldier. They now say that a cease-fire has not been offered and that attacks are coming to repay Israel for its transgression. These two terrorist organizations have decided that they can hit Israel with rockets, kill its soldiers and Israel should be able to do nothing, and when Israel finally acts to protect its own, the coward UN condemns Israel again. The weak European nations want Israel to stop, and of course the media is only showing pictures of civilians who have died, why do they refuse to show what these savages are doing to totally innocent people. Israel must do everything in its power to crush them without mercy, there is a time and place for compassion and mercy, but war is not that time. Hezbollah and Hamas will show no mercy and are brutal killers who would not hesitate to chop each and every one of your heads clean off and post it on the internet for everyone to see. Those who do not understand the enemy we face will be sadly mistaken when you realize that those savages will not show you mercy because you didn’t support Bush or where against our war effort or Israel’s for that matter. They just plain want you dead or to be converted, it’s that simple.

4 comments:

Bushwack said...

Don't you see RWG, all you have to do is walk up to the biggest baddest man you can find and punch him as hard as you can right in the mouth, when he starts to hit you back, Yell out "Cease fire"
And he will leave you alone....
I promise this will work, but only if the NYT, The UN and a few ACLU folks are near by.


Disclaimer *** Please don't do this it could cause severe injury*****

jmsjoin said...

Tell me what you think about this RW
Bush Using Israel, Iran Using Lebanon: Middle East breakdown By Proxy!
I have seen so much conflicting feedback on what is happening in the Middle East any many of you know how I feel about the fact that Bush set what will be the total breakdown of the entire middle east in motion as part of his plan for new world order by attacking Iraq and unsettling the region. http://www.dailykos.com/...
We hear all the time that we must support Israel in her fight against terrorism as she is fighting for the interests of America.
http://www.chron.com/...
Then I caught sight of this article accusing Iran of fighting a war by proxy using Lebanon.
http://www.nysun.com/...

There are those like Bush and Iran who want to change the middle east landscape and are looking for others to prosecute this for them. The information in the article about Iran's proxy war was so telling I thought you should see it too so I am essentially reprinting Mr.
Batchelor's story below:
The only thing that came to my mind is that he is accusing Iran of fighting a war by proxy using Lebanon but Bush is doing the same thing but using Israel,
Follows is Mr. Batchelor's story:
Three recent events that span the globe begin to describe the scale of the threat to Israel and America represented by the Iranian war-making-by-proxy in Gaza and Lebanon.

First, on Tuesday, July 4, North Korea stunned its East Asian neighbors and rocked the U.N. Security Council by firing not only the Taepodong-2 missile that had been displayed on its launch pad for two weeks but also by launching up to nine more smaller missiles from its rocket brigades' arsenals.
Japan was the angriest of the six-party talking states and demanded sanctions from the United Nations. China expressed its frustration as well as restating its fear that any confrontation would trigger a flood of desperate North Korean refugees into Manchuria.
Even Russia was unusually alarmed. The salve to the crisis was that the Taepodong missile had failed within a minute of its launch and fell haphazardly into the Sea of Japan along with the smaller missiles. The press smirked that Kim Jong Il needed more smarts before he was ready to be the big bad wolf of Asia.

Unfortunately, the missile firings were not a failure. The confirmed fact from American observers is that the exercise was a complete success.

Up till now, North Korea has had a first-strike policy where it, as the intended aggressor, gets to prepare for a sneak attack by pre positioning, fueling and firing its missiles against multiple targets.
The July 4th exercise was instead a rapid response test to a simulated American air attack.
Prior to the launch, the North Korean rocket brigades dispersed into the countryside as if under air attack.
The military maintained radio silence to simulate the confusion after America's first and second waves took down the communications grids, as well as to practice the necessary communication security under American surveillance.
Then the Taepodong-2 was fired, simulating a strategic weapon missile launch, followed by tactical weapons chosen randomly from the mobile brigades.
The missiles landed in the Sea of Japan, but not ineptly. North Korean trawlers were pre positioned at the landing sites to observe the exercise. The Taepodong-2 missile performed correctly, simulating a nuclear weapon strike on American allies or assets.

*Crucially, observing this exercise were 11 Iranian Revolutionary Guards officers, including among them members of the elite command and control group, the Partisans of the Mahdi (the Ayatollah Khomeini). The Iranians had in part paid for the North Korean exercise, because Iran is a North Korean arms client.
The Iranians were on hand because their own strategic and tactical missile system is based upon the designs of, and built by, North Korean technicians (from Chinese plans proliferated in the early 1990's).
The Iranians were preparing for the expected American air attacks against Iran's strategic assets now being provoked in the proxy war on Israel.

Second: On Tuesday, July 11, the Iranian National Security Adviser Ali Larijani departed from Europe, the day after a pleasant evening of obfuscating supper chat with the European Union foreign secretary Javier Solana over nuclear fuel cycle violations, and flew to Damascus.
Mr. Larijani was on a mission that was linked directly to the threat of pending sanctions from the United Nations Security Council. It was time to turn on Iran's proxies to intimidate and divide the permanent five members of the Security Council.
Mr. Larijani, who was joined by the Iranian foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, met with the President of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, as well as with Khaled Mashal, head of Hamas, and Hassan Nasrallah, head of Hezbollah, and with several more significant gang leaders, all of them in the hire and under control of Iran.

Mr. Larijani told them that the strategic diversion in Gaza, started by the abduction of the Israeli soldier and the rocketing of Ashkelon with long-range Qassams, was now considered a complete success and it was time to begin a new phase, the bombardment of Israel and dismantling of Lebanon into a free-fire zone.
Messrs. Larijani and Mottaki were blunt that Iran was in complete command and control of the Lebanon campaign: as directed by the privy council of the mullahs, the Partisans of the Mahdi.
Iranian agents, special forces, communications staff and supply teams were in place in Damascus to command, stoke and sustain the operations.
The next morning Hezbollah attacked an IDF patrol, killing several and abducting two IDF soldiers. Iran knew that Israel would respond quickly.
The Hezbollah rocketing that followed along the border and then grew to the strikes against an Israeli warship and the port city of Haifa is part of the rolling campaign to pull America into the conflict.

Worse, the third event that describes the threat of Iran was on June 13, when President Bush made a surprise visit for a few hours to Baghdad to congratulate the new cabinet of Prime Minister Maliki.
At that time, the Shia commentators in Baghdad starting using the Arabic word "ihtilal," meaning occupation, to refer to the American and coalition presences.
The word "ihtilal" has a sinister connotation that communicates what Iran intends as it provokes the rage of the Shia of Iraq.
"Ihtilal" means a completely unacceptable occupation, an occupation that must be resisted at all costs until it is extirpated and destroyed.

The Iranians are at the beginning of their war to defeat America, to subjugate their neighbors, and to isolate and destroy Israel.
The rogues North Korea and Syria and Iran are working together seamlessly along with their terror proxies that are headquartered in Damascus, and they believe they are winning and that America is losing.

This concerns me but no more than watching what Bush is doing from his end. Meanwhile the peace loving and innocent in the middle east and everywhere are caught in the middle of Iran's and Bush's game that will end as WW3 once they succeed in destroying the middle east.

James Joiner
Gardner, Ma
www.anaveragepatriot.com

Douglas V. Gibbs said...

Israel walks the walk - - and they have a right to. Great post. You know, we do need to just get out of the UN. They seem to have forgotten how to recognize the obvious.

Gunny John said...

Well, isn't that special? List the dailykos as a reference source?