Check out the latest Haveil Havalim #172 hosted by my old friend (appropriate since it’s the “old fogey” edition) Daled Amos. Truth is he’s doing what he does daily anyway. If there’s any blogger out there who’s promoting the rest of the J-Blogosphere on a regular basis, I haven’t seen him or her. Not only does Daled Amos regularly link to other J-bloggers, he also keeps Google Reader windows linking to Israel and Jewish related blogs. So if you want to know what Jewish bloggers are blogging about, Check out Daled Amos regularly.

Ehud Olmert does the predictable, and ignores all Palestinian truce violations. Mortar fire? No problem. Kassam rockets? Not an issue. Sniper attacks on Israeli farmers? Hey, it’s just another day in Gaza Town.

Palestinians opened fire Sunday afternoon at farmers working in fields near Kibbutz Nahal Oz in the Gaza vicinity. There were no reports of injuries.

This is the first time gunmen shoot at farmers since the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas went into effect about two and a half weeks ago. Since the truce began, Palestinians have fired several Qassam rockets and mortar shells into the western Negev on a number of different occasions.

Addressing the fragile truce, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said last week that “an absolute lull cannot be imposed within a short while, and therefore we have shown and will show some patience. However, no one should interpret this patience as weakness.

“Should the lull not be maintained, we will respond with full force,” he said.

Liar. The lull is not maintained. There has been violation after violation. In fact, a day without an attack on Israel is still the rarity, not the exception. So what is the lull truly accomplishing? No Hamas terrorists have been killed in three weeks, and Hamas has been able to smuggle more weapons and train more terrorists without fear of being attacked by Israel.

Well done, Hamas. And say, Israel? You might want to look into dumping this PM and getting another. This one really sucks.

Update: The tractor may have been hit by a rock. However, Olmert still sucks.

I’ve learned many important things from Barry Rubin. Last week’s column taught me something new: Celine Dion covered Eric Carnen’s “All by myself.” Dr. Rubin used the lyrics to illustrate the shifting sands of politics of the Middle East.

For more than a half-century, the region’s politics revolved around Arab nationalism. Individual states sought to have influence, leadership, or just to survive. The Arab-Israeli conflict was an important issue in this framework, though not the sole or even the most significant one.

Now, as Celine Dion sings, “Those days are gone.” Today, the centerpiece is a struggle between two blocs, one well-organized, the other weak and facing internal conflict. The former is the Tehran-led alliance of the HISH (Hamas-Iran-Syria-Hizballah); the latter is just about everyone else, call it the coalition of the unwilling.

So how do the moderate Arab states deal with this?

Still, their behavior is understandable. They want to use the radical appeal of Arab nationalism, Islamism, anti-Americanism, and xenophobia to divert attention from their own failings while mobilizing support for themselves as the true defenders against all those big and little satans out there. At the same time, they are happy to appease their foes if possible.

A particularly blatant example is Kuwait’s foreign minister who denounced those who want to wage a false jihad at home. He explained that instead of murdering innocent Muslims, young people should kill Israelis instead. Much of the regimes’ “anti-terrorist” rhetoric is merely really aimed at shifting the targets away from themselves.

On one hand, the Saudis host a global interfaith dialogue conference; float a peace initiative toward Israel, fight domestic terrorism, and battle Syria and Hizballah in Lebanon. On the other hand, they aid terrorists and spread extremist forms of Islam. Egypt is horrified by radical Islamism but refuses to go all-out against Hamas. The official media demonize the West and Israel, while the official Islamic religious apparatus endorses terrorism against Israel and in Iraq.

I’d say that this is a somewhat generalized form of what Dr. Rubin writes in “The truth about Syria,” in that the Assads use all means at their disposal to deflect criticisms of themselves and preserve their family’s tenuous hold on power.

So how does the West respond. I once wrote in a letter to the editor that every time Hafez Assad or Yasser Arafat sneezed it was interpreted as a signal of moderation. It appears that I was more or less correct.

By apologizing, conceding, refusing to defend themselves, or by negotiating, exaggerating the potential for moderation, and dropping sanctions, they can strengthen the extremists and undercut the regimes. When that happens, the regimes know they might better cut their own deal. So while there are arguable reasons to bargain with Hamas, Hizballah, Iran, or Syria, such a strategy splits the anti-HISH alliance and starts a race toward appeasement.

In the Dion song, “Love so distant and obscure, Remains the cure.” But this is politics. The best one can hope for is the wisdom to build on coinciding interests and courage to stand up to unrelenting enemies

And strengthening the extremists, no matter how well they keep the trains running on time, does not help.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Last week, Cheat Seeking Missiles went after Seymour Hersh for an recently written “expose” in the New Yorker. What troubled me is that CSM took everything Hersh wrote at face value. Hersh cherry picks some stuff, confuses some stuff, makes some stuff up and exaggerates the rest. It’s hard to know exactly what’s true in a Seymore Hersh story.

Max Boot read the same article and concluded that there’s probably a nugget of truth in the article but the rest is speculation.

For my part I am skeptical that there are a lot of Special Operations raids occurring in Iran. It’s probable that there are small penetrations of Iranian territory by CIA and Special Operations teams as part of the covert destabilization program to meet with Iranian “assets.” There may even have been a few operations carried out against the Quds Force, but, given the risk-averse culture of the U.S. government, I doubt that it amounts to very much.

I find David Ignatius’s analysis plausible. He writes:

In the new cold war between America and Iran, the U.S. appears to be running some limited covert operations across the Iranian border. But according to knowledgeable sources, this effort shares the defect of broader U.S. policy toward Iran–it is tentative and ill coordinated, and undermines diplomacy without bringing serious pressure on the regime.

He quotes “one Arab official familiar with the covert program” as saying, “There are attempts to cause mischief inside Iran and go after the Quds Force. Some things are being done, but not with the seriousness that’s needed.”

Boot adds:

He also perpetuates a myth that there is a major policy divide between the White House which supposedly favors a “military strike” on Iran and the armed forces which supposedly oppose such a move. It would be more accurate to say that there are some political appointees in the administration who favor a strike on Iran because they don’t think that any other action will stop or even significantly slow its nuclear program. But there are also political appointees who oppose such a move. A similar division exists in the military, but you would never know it from Hersh who paints a crude caricature of hawkish civilians and dovish soldiers. No doubt he is partly a victim of his anti-Bush worldview and partly a victim of his sources: Since it’s pretty obvious that no one who is reasonably hawkish or conservative will speak to a journalist with Hersh’s reputation, he must be reliant on those who favor a softer line.

Boot also attacks a major premise of Hersh:

The biggest misunderstanding, or outright deception, in the entire article is its very premise: that the covert action program that Hersh describes is a prelude to a larger military action against Iran—that it is, as the headline has it, “Preparing the Battlefield.” Actually it’s far more likely that such a program, if it exists, is designed to be a substitute for military action.

Hersh unfortunately isn’t the only writers engaging in such speculation. Tim Shipman of the Telegraph writes (via memeorandum):

American commanders worry that Israel will feel compelled to act within the next 12 months with no guarantee that they can do more than slow Iran’s development of a weapon capable of destroying the Jewish state.

Gaps in the intelligence on the precise location and vulnerabilities of Iran’s facilities emerged during recent talks between Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the American Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Israeli generals, according to an official familiar with the discussions who has briefed Iran experts in Washington and London.

The assessment emerged as Iran in effect thumbed its nose at proposals by the West to freeze its uranium enrichment programme in exchange for easing economic sanctions. In its reply, sent to the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, Iran said it was prepared to negotiate but only from a position of equality – and made no reference to the specific proposals.

Israel Matzav thinks that there is a gap between what Israeli and American intelligence know and that Israel may have better knowledge of where it needs to hit. Arthur Herman wrote that destroying the nuclear facilities may not be as important as crippling Iran economically and conventionally.

Still one gets the impression that Shipman cherry picks his sources to reach his conclusions and fills the rest in with speculation.

I wonder how much of the military threat against Iran is real and how much is Israeli or American disinformation. I can’t believe that planning of a potential attack on Iran is such an open book in either country.

Two years ago I speculated that Israel would have a difficult time carrying out a raid on Iran as it did on Iraq, if for no other reason because it couldn’t have the same secrecy that surrounded the attack on the Tamuz reactor.

All this speculation about what Israel might do, does nothing to alleviate my skepticism that Israel could pull off the same sort of attack again.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.