Tuesday, April 03, 2007
Iran's Recent History of Hostage Taking
Does anyone recall what triggered last Summer's min-war between Hezbollah in Lebanon and Israel? Hezbollah made an incursion into Israel and kidnapped an Israeli soldier.
Who funds Hezbollah? Iran of course.
What was the final outcome of the kidnapping? Israel invaded Lebanon to go after Hezbollah. Hezbollah targeted Israeli citizens with hundreds of rockets. Hezbollah hid their launchers and militiamen near civilians in Lebanon, causing even more deaths because Israel had no choice but to take them out. The final result was Hezbollah gained power in Lebanon, and Israel, due to their poor handling of the entire effort, were made to look weak and incapable of protecting itself. The mass media handled the rest of the public relations/propaganda for Hezbollah, ignoring all of the Israeli civilian deaths and only focusing on the civilian deaths in Lebanon.
My point is that Iran wrote a very effective play book on how to instigate a major military power into showing its inability to act and react to a crisis with a Muslim country.
How to Embarrass Your Enemy and Expose Their Weaknesses 101
Step 1: Initiate a crisis (Kidnap soldiers, blame the other guy)
Step 2: If opposing nation attacks militarily: (If they do not attack, skip to Step 3)
- Such action will be on a limited bases because they don't want to look like their being overaggressive. This limited action will be their downfall because it illustrates weakness.
- Make sure your civilian population takes the brunt of the attack.
- Activate major Public Relations and Propaganda campaigns to portray your country as the victim of anti-Muslim aggression. Easy to accomplish with compliant global media.
- Use only guerrilla tactics to cause enemy casualties. Using your standing military will only cause the loss of your capabilities and allow the opposing nation to justify military action. You will be portrayed as a victim of an unjust military action if you maintain small-scale guerrilla tactics.
- Once the opposing nation has been show to be weak and embarrassed in the press, you have won.
Step 3: If the opposing nation pleads for diplomacy and negotiation instead of attacking militarily, you have embarrassed them and uncovered their weakness. You have won.
Israel fell for Step 2.
Britain fell for Step 3.
Who's next?
Even better, does anyone know how to avoid this playbook and defeat these tactics?
posted by El Capitan at 2:22 PM
1 Comments:
airforcewife said...
Apparently Britain missed the whole fact that Israel never got their kidnapped soldiers back.
They stopped a war, at the behest of the UN, even though they didn't get their soldiers back.
In fact, does anyone remember that Israel's soldiers were kidnapped and have not been given back?
And the latest word about that was that the UN diplomats were chagrined that Israel demanded that the soldiers be returned ALIVE.
I have little hope that the Brit sailors will be able to go home. Not all of them, in any case.