MarkSilverberg

On February 1st, the Winograd Commission issued its long-awaited report in the Second Lebanon War. The Report Summary notes that “the unclassified Report does not include the many facts that cannot be revealed for reasons of protecting the state's security and foreign affairs”, yet much analysis on the classified aspects of the Report has been leaked out over the past year and a half. While the Report attacked the mismanagement of the War from both the political and military perspectives, it does not detail the disclosures that could represent an embarrassment to both the Olmert administration and Bush administrations were they to be delineated. In the end, the Commission noted that “the 2nd Lebanon war as a serious missed opportunity” and that “this outcome was primarily caused by the fact that, from the very beginning, the war had not been conducted on the basis of a deep understanding of the theatre of operations, of the IDF's readiness and preparedness, and of basic principles of using military power to achieve political and diplomatic goals.” The only consolation is that significant military, political and scientific changes and advances have been undertaken in the time that has passed. Should another such confrontation take place in the near future, it can be fairly assumed that both Hezbollah and Hamas will be vanquished.

America is once again a House divided. This time, it is between two schools of thought. The first argues that because we face a violent, existential threat to our way of life, we must become less tolerant to pressures from the radical Islamic lobby domestically and more aggressive against our enemies internationally. This group believes that we are confronted by an enemy that is committed to the destruction of our way of life, that is planning further attacks on American soil - attacks far more devastating than 9/11; an enemy that operates according to no rules, wears no uniform, carries no rank, displays no weapons, openly targets civilians, commits mass murder in the name of religion, has no qualms about turning passenger planes into cruise missiles, and would have no problem in sending anthrax through our mails; pouring botulism into our water supplies; or detonating 'dirty bombs' filled with radioactive waste in our cities.

Last week, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the case of al-Marri vs. Wright that a terrorist lawfully in the U.S. cannot be detained as an enemy combatant without a trial if he never fought against U.S. forces on a foreign battlefield or if he was not sent to the U.S. by the government of a nation with whom we are at war. Since al Qaeda is a transnational organization responsible to no government, Ali al-Marri, a resident alien and an al Qaeda sleeper agent operating in the U.S. could not be held as an enemy combatant in this country even though he was "engaged in conduct that constituted hostile and war-like acts including conduct in preparation for acts of international terrorism."

In his review of David Halberstam’s book The Best and Brightest, Col. Tom Snodgrass, writing in the January 2007 issue of American Thinker reviews in exhaustive detail how, in 1961, President Kennedy and his cadre of social theorists including Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, George Ball and others ignored the historical lessons of war strategy. In so doing, they set the course for an American military doctrine that had no precedent in history and that subsequently laid the foundations for American military defeats from Vietnam to Iraq.

In a recent posting in Newsday, a reference that may have passed unnoticed was made to an incident occurring in the small Baltic nation of Estonia, once under the control of the Soviet Union. For three weeks this past April, the Russians engineered a massive cyber-attack on Estonia’s computer systems and web sites in retaliation for the removal of a World War II-era Soviet war memorial from downtown Tallinn, Estonia's capital. Russia’s massive state-controlled telecommunications companies paralyzed Estonian web sites by sending more than 5,000 hits a second of bogus requests for information. It was cyber-warfare in the form of computer sabotage and it shook the NATO alliance of which Estonia is now a member.