Wonkette
UMM isn’t Bill Kristol’s mockery of a one-year contract with the liberal New York Times over by now, after one year, and he should not be writing anymore? Wait, what? “Stay the course” you say? Well then that’s good by us. Let’s check out the latest prose poetry from America’s “lightning rod conservative” about… Israel and Hamas, in which he argues that nothing short of an Israeli “victory” (undefined, as per usual) will lead to American war with the Iranians.
Heard this before:
Obviously, war is an unpredictable business, so I say this with some trepidation: I think the conventional wisdom will be proved wrong. Israel could well succeed in Gaza.
Ah, so now it can never happen, thanks to Kristol’s unusual ability to jinx everything. EXPLAIN?
For one thing, southern Lebanon is a substantial and hilly area, bordered by northern Lebanon and Syria, through which Hezbollah could be re-supplied, both by Syria itself and by Iran. Gaza is a flat, narrow strip, bordered by Israel, as well as by the sea and by Egypt, no friend to Hamas. By cutting off the northern part of Gaza from the southern, Israel has basically surrounded northern Gaza, creating a military situation very different from that in Lebanon in 2006.
= Victory!…??
In addition, in Lebanon, Israel proclaimed war goals that it couldn’t achieve — such as retrieving its two kidnapped soldiers and disarming Hezbollah. Now the Israeli government says that it seeks to weaken Hamas, lessen its ability to fire rockets from Gaza and secure new arrangements along the Egyptian-Gaza border to prevent Hamas from re-arming. These may well be achievable goals.
Ha ha okay! A little more detail would help… but meh. All Muslim countries would love Israel, while the 40-45 remaining Palestinians would starve to death after their underground FOOD tunnels were destroyed too in, you know, “collateral damage.”
An Israeli success in Gaza would be a victory in the war on terror — and in the broader struggle for the future of the Middle East. Hamas is only one manifestation of the rise, over the past few decades, of a terror-friendly and almost death-cult-like form of Islamic extremism. The combination of such terror movements with a terror-sponsoring and nuclear-weapons-seeking Iranian state (aided by its sidekick Syria) has produced a new kind of threat to Israel.
But not just to Israel. To everyone in the Middle East — very much including Muslims — who aren’t interested in living under the sway of extremist regimes.
Can someone, anyone, in the media please mention that Hamas was democratically elected?
Oh and Iran needs to be invaded too, because of the Gaza Strip:
The huge challenge for the Obama administration is going to be Iran. If Israel had yielded to Hamas and refrained from using force to stop terror attacks, it would have been a victory for Iran. If Israel were now to withdraw under pressure without accomplishing the objectives of severely weakening Hamas and preventing the reconstitution of a terror-exporting state in Gaza, it would be a triumph for Iran. In either case, the Iranian regime would be emboldened, and less susceptible to the pressure from the Obama administration to stop its nuclear program.
But a defeat of Hamas in Gaza — following on the heels of our success in Iraq — would be a real setback for Iran. It would make it easier to assemble regional and international coalitions to pressure Iran. It might positively affect the Iranian elections in June. It might make the Iranian regime more amenable to dealing.
With respect to Iran, Obama may well face — as the Israeli government did with Hamas — a moment when the use of force seems to be the only responsible option. But Israel’s willingness to fight makes it more possible that the United States may not have to.
Lies, all lies, and it’s not working again. Israel and Hamas are each insane. So how about we pay attention to our two (2) current, endless American wars — we still have those, did you know that? — instead of caring so much about a small foreign land strip and the douchebags constantly pissing over them. As if our position is negotiable!
Why Israel Fights [NYT]
LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU BILL KRISTOL! I CAN’T HEAR YOU!
Seriously, W can’t start a whole war with Iran in the next week, can he?
Too bad General Kristol didn’t advise us on the war in Iraq; things might have gone better. Oh, wait.
God it’s pure heaven to hear Billy K talk about military logistics. He probably knows a lot about it — like, when there’s hills’n’shit in the way, it’s harder to get there.
And this priceless piece of drivel:
“Hamas is only one manifestation of the rise, over the past few decades, of a terror-friendly and almost death-cult-like form of Islamic extremism. The combination of such terror movements with a terror-sponsoring and nuclear-weapons-seeking Iranian state (aided by its sidekick Syria) has produced a new kind of threat to Israel.”
If only it had a few more commas, parentheses, and word-joinments, and maybe a semicolon or two, it could achieve total meaninglessness. So he’s not even good at tossing a word salad.
But keep spewing that neocon all-war, all-the-time horeshit, Billy. Somebody will listen!
Kristol needs to chill out. He should go to Wasilla to get some dope from Levi’s mom and shoot it right there in Sarah Palin’s living room.
Bill’s military geniuz astounds me by proving wrong about urban combat as written by such awful military fuck ups like Sun Tzu and Patton and why every infantryman leaps with joy at the prospect of going to the Happy Fun Disney Land that is Close Quarters Urban Combat.
I’m reading The Perfect War right now and Kristol can go suck that doods ballsack. The Middle East is entirely fucked for all eternity. Goodnight.
Bill Kristol may well be the only 200 pound man on earth who could also take a 200 pound shit.
That douch of a nutjob needs to enlist..
it all war all the time, it will be, and it always has been
Nothing says “we abhor terrorism” like blowing up countless civilians.
“in Lebanon, Israel proclaimed war goals that it couldn’t achieve — such as retrieving its two kidnapped soldiers and disarming Hezbollah. Now the Israeli government says that it seeks to weaken Hamas, lessen its ability to fire rockets from Gaza and secure new arrangements along the Egyptian-Gaza border to prevent Hamas from re-arming.”
So, the first time, they had two very specific goals the solution of which would be concrete and obvious, a clear recipe for failure. Now, they have completely ambiguous goals which have no obvious resolution, a clear American recipe for SUCCESS.
Uhh, doesn’t he know that the Clinton Twins are about to swoop in and save the Middle East from itself any day now?
“…the rise, over the past few decades, of a terror-friendly and almost death-cult-like form of Islamic extremism.”
I think he’s taking a shot at the Obama supporters here.
Oh wow, Jim, it never occured to me until just now that the neo-con tub thumping for Israel is in direct proportion to the miserableness of the failure in Iraq! No wonder panties are twisted into knots!
Too bad we don’t have Sarah Palin to help figure this out.
We shall hoist Bill Kristol to the masthead and see who salutes him.
>>(aided by its sidekick Syria)
So Bashir Assad is like Robin and Ahmedinijad is Batman?
(BRB going to write a fanfic.)
Wait, wait. I’ve been to Lebanon many times and I can assure you Northern Lebanon DOES NOT border Southern Lebanon. You forgot about Mid-west Lebanon (the Mid-west of the Mid-east)
What a dork. Does this dickbag get a fucking paycheck from Israel? Our “success” in Iraq? Wha? And thanks for the info. on the terrain in southern Lebanon, Bill. I’ll bring my hiking boots the NEXT time i visit. And oh, how would the US feel it were referred to as Israel’s “sidekick”?
I rest my case. Shut the fuck up.
This whole thing just reeks of someone who has no clue about what they are talking about. They should get Bill Kristol in to make sense of a bad situation. He might actually be a great negotiator in the end.
(Note to Kristol: if you sew a Canadian Flag on your backpack, you won’t get kidnapped, I promise)
Naked Bunny with a Whip: The Debbil made them do it.
Everyone knows that the way to make Muslims love you is to kill their families. That’s how I met my current boyfriend. He probably misses his sisters every now and then, but hey, that’s the price you pay for a broader objective.
I swear he writes his missives as if he is having a conversation with other blue-blood “intellectuals” in a wood trimmed room with leather-backed chairs and fireplaces on every wall in some men-only club.
The NYT editors must take out the lines that say, “I sucked on my pipe while thinking about the question posed by Charles…”
His analysis is EXACTLY what passes for keen and thorough insight by blue blooded know-nothings who were legacies at Yale and Harvard, or worse, rich kids sent off to Hamden Sydney or Randolph Macon because they were too stupid/drunk/drug-addled to even get in on a legacy gig.
“You see, to the North, it’s all hills and of course that simply favors the defense.”
Of course, Gaza is mostly a built-up area which means lots of CQB with little help from Air unless you decide to just kill everything…which I imagine is an option in Bill’s world.
Billy Kristol, not having served in a field position, no less as a grunt, in the military, today holds himself as the von Clausewitz of Israeli strategy, comparing mistakes made in the Israeli 2006 incursion into Lebanon (which, at the time, he supported) to mistakes which may avoided in Gaza.
As someone here acutely stated, what does this guy have to do to get fired?
He’s not just phoning it in, he’s sending it via the Pony Express’ gimpiest steed.
4tehlulz: So so wrong. Link?
populucious: I know, right? It’s like, “Oh, we’ll win the war by defining ‘winning’ as something that we think we can kind of do, or at least make the definition something squishy enough that we can claim to have done it! Yes, we blew up a lot of shit in Gaza, like we said we were going to in advance, so technically we won! Huzzah!”
this is why the Times, tragically, is doomed.
if they can’t figure out that they’re throwing good money after bad at an irrelevant, discredited piece of broken wonkery, how they hell are they going to figure out creative ways to save their own business ?
seriously — are you going to invest in a company that has a nice reception area, but keeps Nazis and Orangutans in the attic ?
Let me get this straight - Southern Lebanon is bordered to the north by Northern Lebanon?
Is that really true?!?
Jesus H. Christ, this fucking guy. Why do they let him publish this inane bullshit?
…following on the heels of our success in Iraq…
Oh, we’ve succeeded in Iraq, have we? Well let’s just have Dubya and Cheney and all the neocons who brought us that wonderful clusterfuck fly into Baghdad on January 21st to celebrate their victory. And let’s announce the arrival time in advance, since we’ve succeeded there and don’t have to worry in the least about terrorists attacking the plane. We’ll have achieved victory there when Americans don’t have to sneak in unannounced and have the pilots do the corkscrew landing maneuver to keep from getting blasted out of the sky.
magic titty: “Let him”? They pay him for this shit!
Haha, when you order the column comments by “reader recommended” you get pages of pleas for the NYT to stick a fork in this shit bubble.
SayItWith ….. i’ve given up …. even Obama was too tired, or too uninterested to point this out:
there has been ZERO success in Iraq — there is relative (very relative) quiet now, because the rampant genocide and ethnic cleansing that was taking place up to the surge was a complete success.
mission accomplished — the place is an empty, balkanized, ethnically cleansed hell hole. those who didn’t get decapitated in their sleep managed to flee, and find sanctuary in a rat filled appliace box in the Syrian desert.
Yeah — lots of success there.
The Times needs to put the “conservative lightning rod” out to pasture–preferably in an electrical storm.
Amazing how spreading democracy involves attacking the democratically elected Hamas and the democratically elected Achmehnisuperallahobamajihad.
SayItWithWookies: Thanks for being the first one to notice that everyone else buried the lead. The news from Bill is that we had success in Iraq. How much success? UMM QASR is being added as stopover on this summer’s Weekly Standard Seminar Cruise.
timeoutofmind: No, we’ve completely succeeded there — instead of having the equivalent of a Virginia Tech massacre every twelve hours, we’re down to two a week. Of course if we stop paying the Iraqis to be in our little “Awakening” supper club, then all hell’s gonna break loose again. But hey, as I hope the cops say, with a shrug, after Don Rumsfeld gets his ass shot, “Freedom is untidy. Free people are free to make mistakes and do bad things.”
Wow, did he say “following on the heels of our success in Iraq ” WAH?
“Israel and Hamas are each insane”- well, that’s true, thanks Wonkette for bring me back to reality so quickly. I was about drop another hit of acid.
bago: Well, Hamas was democratically elected, but then they rounded up all the Fatah supporters and welcomed them to the party with a bullet in the brain. So, I’d call it a Pakistani-style democracty at best.
Just clarifying is all….
GDTRFB: Those savages. Don’t they know how to resolve things except through violence?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6754499.stm
Bruno: in 1970 when I first went to Europe, lots of people sewed Canadian flags on their backpacks(not me). I no longer travel with a backpack- and I don’t worry about the kidnapping- I’m more worried about TSA pulling me aside for a 3.5 ounce bottle of something and putting me on the no-Fly list.
Kev-O-Tron: Christ I’m dumb. It’s called the Forever War stupid! And it’s a great fucking book. Highly recommend it.
S.Luggo: you tell me: “Hamas fighters overran most of Gaza on Thursday, capturing the headquarters of Fatah’s Preventative Security force and hailing Gaza’s “liberation”.”
V572625694: Kristol is going for the big one: the world-record for over-use-of-emdashes to suggest substantial-connections-where-none-exist: “terror-sponsoring and nuclear-weapons-seeking Iranian state”. I counted six dashes in those two sentences.
In the spirit of the immortal Rudy “David Mamet is my hero” B.: F*cking-d*ckwad-dumbf*ck Kristol is a fatuous-f*cked-up-feeble-minded-f*ck-brained-force-loving-Fascist-f*cking-freaking-f*ckhead. Too dim-witted to punctuate properly.
You ready, Kristol? Mr. Chckenhawk?
Na-na-na boo-boo.
Word processors at ten paces. First one to use an emdash improperly DIES.
Manual of Style Rules.
Gaza at dawn.
AfghanVet: Your comments remind me a lot of my thoughts about Max Boot. Another neocon “military theorist” with no military experience whatsoever.
Meh. Hitler was democratically elected, too. If you follow up an election by shooting, jailing and/or exiling your political opponents, your election-based legitimacy tends to wane. Hamas ain’t the Social Democrats.
That said, Bill Kristol is a retard.
S.Luggo: You can do that in a parliamentary system. Happens in Italy, on average, about every 10 months. Dismissing a “government” (administration in American-speak) isn’t the same thing as a violent coup. It just means you have to hold new elections.
Lazy Media: And before somebody gets pedantic, I know Hitler was appointed Chancellor, but only because the Nazis had the largest number of seats in the Reichstag, and the rest of the parties couldn’t form a coalition government.
“Mr Kristol, Mr Sulzberger would like to see you say Monday at 9 a.m. while he’s on the treadmill at Equinox to fire you. Can you make it then? You can? Good.”
With Arthur now selling the bottom of the front page for advertising, why not sell the 15 column inches where Kristol’s drivel used to run? Any takers? I’m looking your way Campbell Brown.
“Crystal”,”Rush”,”Bush”,”Dick”…..
Teh baby Jesus was trying to warn us but we not listenin’. Now we bein’ punished for it. Not Billy Meth though, he’s still got a job with the Noo Yak Times. No hobo sandwiches for Billy.
The McDonalds is closing, I got to get over to the dumpster before that damn risk manager gets all the good leftovers. Things have really gone down hill since Lehman brothers dumped it’s trash in Hobo heaven.
It seems to me that the poor Palestinians get hosed by everyone. There, I said it.
Now I have to watch The Story of India.
smellyal8r:
…Campbell Brown….
Where did you go Campbell?
We used to meet every night here, you’d smile at me from the right sidebar, you whimsical little muffin, but now…nothing.
Dear Wonkette;
Since you’ll never be able to sell the sidebar to anyone ever again, especially now that sea shells are replacing paper currency, perhaps you would decorate it with an homage of tastefully photoshoped pornographic images of Campbell Brown? The ladies can have whatever they want(probably pictures of shoes) on the other margin. You’ll never make a penny off the sidebar, not with cannibalism running rampant, you might as well try to drive up page hits.
The huge challenge for the Obama administration is going to be Iran.
Does this mean that Iran is about to implode and become irrelevant for a decade?
SayItWithWookies: having won Iraq:
These dickwads always begin and end their war with the so-called “surge”. I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel a trillion dollars safer from terrorism (and, oops, the meter just clicked on another million as I typed that) and am damn pissed that the repubtards are bitching about a plan that might actually spend some money here in America, while ignoring the enormous outlay in Dick Cheney’s wars.
Meanwhile, I kept waiting for someone in the elections to ask the obvious: What the fuck is winning in Iraq? Winning what? How will we know we’ve won? I want that asked of these assholes, with or without the fuck.
Back to the Story of India, where they’re washing themselves in the Ganges.
I can’t tell if that’s Bill Kristol or Billy Crystal. It’s this kind of sharp focus that Bill’s insightful commentary consistently fails to elicit.
Silly Billy. The point of being a neocon is to get us to fight Israel’s wars, not vice versa.
populucious: Well played, populucious!
Mmmm, me’ums loves my Bill Kristol comments!
Secr. O’State Clintbabe: “I am here and I am wearing the lime green pantsuit (nodding repeatedly). Peace is at hand.”
Pop Socket: Also dang good observation!
Kev-O-Tron: Great book. I got it for Hanukkmanzwaa and ate it up in one sitting.
KristolBall may be the Singularity at the Black Hole of Stupid.
jmt
Is the NYTimes seriously going to extend this clown’s contract?
If so, the antidote would be for the progressive blogosphere to unite and send out an APB on the internet tubes to boycott his pieces. Instead of responding to his insipid commentary and cheap attention-getting ploys, let’s work to shrink his comments tally. If people stop paying attention to him, the Times will make him go away. I doubt the editors enjoy combing through his factual errors and tweaking his 5th grade prose much either, but he attracts an audience, which the struggling Times is desperate for.
Give them a business reason to fire him.
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chascates: Let Pfc Kristol be the first to jump out of the plane.
Zhu Bajie
tiger: No, real Israelis are fucked up in entirely different ways. If he were a real Israeli, he’d have done a lot more military service.
Zhu Bajie
smellyal8r: Is Kristol too old to be drafted? I know they are taking 50 something retards/felons. Kristol fits, right?
Zhu Bajie
dijetlo: No more Campbell Brown, please. Asia Times Online gets ads for Asian Sex Gazette; why not you? It’s your main chance of meeting women not shaped like tomatoes, anyway.
Zhu Bajie
lumpenprole: The huge challenge of the Obama admin is going to be economic collapse and Iraqi-style civil war between various nut-jobs blaming each other. The End-times nuts will blame the Gays and the Liberals for delaying the Rapture, for example. G-d is punishing them for not exterminating us! They must help do it now!
Zhu Bajie
Joey Ratz: It is INTENSE! I don’t read as much as I used to now that I get most of my news online and from the New Yorker, etc. but this book is changing the way I look at things.