- So who launched those rockets? It’s possible this was a freelance, “lone wolf” (God, I hate that term!) operation by a few angry Palestinian refugees. SW Syria is home—if you call a miserable tent camp “home”—to hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. One of the biggest, oldest, nastiest of these camps is near Daraa, very close to Golan.
- Palestinians in the camp have been bombarded by nearly every faction in the war. Their lives were bad enough before, and they’ve become intolerable since the war began. It’s not hard to imagine that some of them might want to send a rocket at Israel even if they knew it wouldn’t do any good. But again, I just can’t see any of the local militias letting them do it. It’d be like agreeing to take your nerdiest friend for a paintball drive-by on the local Mexican Mafia HQ. Just not a smart idea. The IDF has had a policy of massive retaliation against any threat, no matter how pathetic, for a long time.
Do you like reading Pando(a lot of your posts have origins there)? What sort of journalism is it exactly (from your perspective) and why do you find it exciting? What can one learn from it and why would one invest in it? Oh boy those are a lot of questions, I am sorry about that.. I am just interested in your reading habits.
I've been championing Paul Carr, Mark Ames and John Dolan since The eXile. They get themselves in trouble by being snarky assholes... but sometimes, snarky assholes speak more truth than polite assholes. I champion them because they're doing the same sort of stuff as Consortium News, who I used to support but sort of stopped because Bob Parry stopped writing about things I consider important. I championed Bob Parry because Bartcop told me to. I read Pando because when NSFWCorp went tits up, it got absorbed into Pando... which meant 10% NSFWCorp, 90% Silicon Valley bullshit. However, since they've decided that the (failed) NSFWCorp model was the way to go with Pando, they're about 50% NSFWCorp, 50% Silicon Valley bullshit. They shuffled off a few great people in that Pando thing, in particular, Olivia Nuzzi. She's now writing for The Daily Beast but her stuff isn't nearly so interesting. It's a shame. Anyway. I back Brecher/Dolan because of this article. He was the one guy who actually said "holy shit - Warsaw pact heavy armor vs. NATO heavy armor and nukes aren't even flying. It's a brave new world."See, this is the war that I used to see in the paintings commissioned by Defense contractors in Aviation Week and AFJ: a war between two conventional armies, both using air forces and armored columns, in pine-forested terrain. That was what those pictures showed every time, with a highlighted closeup of the weapon they were selling homing in on a Warsaw Pact convoy coming through a German pine forest. Of course, a real NATO/Warsaw Pact war would never, ever have happened that way. It would have gone nuclear in an hour or less, which both sides knew, which is why it never happened. So all that beautiful weaponry was kind of a farce, if it was only going to be used in the Fulda Gap. But damn, God is good, because here it all is, in the same kind of terrain, all your favorite old images: Russian-made tanks burning, a Soviet-model fighter-bomber falling from the sky in pieces, troops in Russian camo fighting other troops, also in Russian camo, in a skirmish by some dilapidated country shack.