France Waves the Flag

FRENCH COWARDICE SIMPLY BAFFLES

The following is taekn from Haaretz. It needs no commentary.
Chirac backs easing pressure on Iran to protect UNIFIL troops

French President Jacque Chirac has announced his support for lessening pressure on Iran to stop its nuclear program, for fear Hezbollah will strike at French troops serving in Lebanon, according to information recently received in Jerusalem. According to reports, Chirac proposed sending a special envoy to Tehran to reach understandings that would protect the French soldiers serving in in the United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL).

Last Line of Defence

Good to know Tzahal is keeping up to speed in one area of missile defence. The Arrow missile system was tested again and once again shot down an incoming missile, this time at night. While it is clearly 1000 times preferebale that Iran never obtains nuclear weapons, it is slightly reassuring that we have at least a last line of defence against total destruction to fall back on other than the U.N.

First nighttime Arrow test successful - "In the face of Iran's efforts to obtain nuclear weapons, the Israel Air Force successfully conducted its 15th test of the Arrow missile defense system Sunday night.

The test took place at 9:18 p.m. when the Arrow 2 interceptor took off towards a Black Sparrow test missile, fired by an F-15 fighter jet, and designed to simulate an incoming Iranian Shihab missile headed toward Israel.

The Green Pine Radar located and identified the incoming missile, and the Citron Tree battle management center related the information to the Arrow 2 battery."

General Musings

Since I've been out of it for nearly a couple of months I thought I'd just set down a couple of thoughts about recent events.

Since I've been gone, Saddam Hussein departed this world with a rather sudden jerk despite my protestations against the death penalty on these hallowed pages. However,, discussion with a number of my friends and a glance at a couple of comments left on the blog shows that most people I know comprise a blood-thirsty lynch mob which I am of course charmed to be associated with.

Other events include Russia's completion of its anti-aircraft missile defence system with Iran, previously mentioned here. This system is probably the best in the world and having purchased twenty-nine units, Iran will station them around all its most sensitive nuclear sites. This is a seriously concerning prospect. The system can engage two targets at once, shoot down cruise missiles and laser guided bombs as well as aircraft at a range of 12km and an altitude of 6km. As far as I can tell, although clearly I'm not an expert military analyst, were Israel to undertake a mission to knock out Iran's nuclear capabilities, her air-force would sustain serious damage. It seems that the U.S. would have to be involved for any mission to be truly effective which would have to involve stealth-bombers to avoid Iran's new air-defence system.

The requirement to act against Iran has been becoming ever clearer with Tehran announcing that it will install cascades of 3000 centrifuges at its Natanz installation by June which could theoretically be able to produce enough uranium for one bomb in less than a year.

What cheers me slightly is that Bush has sent a second aircraft carrier battle group to the Gulf which gives me hope that when the time comes the U.S. will act against this very scary threat to Israel's existence. They have also been rounding up nefarious Iranian agents in Iran who have been fanning the flames of civil war there to thwart the sprouting of any peace in that war-ravaged country.

Finally, among other things I could mention, we have the Palestinians who having now finished killing each other for the moment are very effectively creating world hysteria over Israel's archaeological and construction works outside the Temple Mount. There is of course nothing sinister in these works which are simply to re-build the broken Mughrabi bridge. The work was reported ahead of time to the Waqf which administers the site and the media and diplomatic storm which has ensued is simply nonsensical.

Ad Kaan, more to follow in the coming days.

Thoughts of an IDF Sniper

While on the subject of military matters, I thought that the following extracts from a Ma’ariv interview with an Israel sniper would be of interest. I found them to be riveting.

The solider in question has killed thirty-one terrorists to date through his sniper’s scope. The following are some of the most interesting extracts in which he relates his thoughts about his job, how he copes with it, his methods and how he feels about killing people through his sniper’s scope. Translation by yours truly.

“I was nine when I got my first rifle. It was an air-rifle which my parents gave to me and I would practice with it the whole time, standing up matches and shooting them down or shooting out the flame of a candle from a distance of thirty or forty metres.

“Two days after I finished my five-week sniper’s course I was sent on my first mission. The whole night before hand I felt unbelievable pressure. I lay on my bed and couldn’t stop thinking about all the responsibility on my shoulders. The adrenalin was flowing through my veins but I was not required to fire during the mission.

“The first time I fired my sniper’s rifle was on a mission which started out as a simple mission into Gaza during the night. I was lying out in a field when I saw two suspicious figures in the dark. I felt unbelievable stress. I was lying in a bunch of thorns and rocks but couldn’t feel a thing. I was completely focused on the two images and because of the pressure I forgot everything I had been taught. However, I received the order to shoot, I shot and one of the figures dropped to the floor and ceased to move. I think because this mission was at night and I only saw him fall through the sniper’s scope it was less frightening. I didn’t see him die in front of my eyes, it was in the dark and through the scope. When we returned to the base I couldn’t get to sleep the whole night. I began to think about the man I killed and his life but then I understood that if he had remained alive he would have hurt one of us. At this point I decided to never think about the fact that I had killed a man but the opposite: that I had saved other people.

“With time you begin to become accustomed to these missions and then you are able to relax. When I take up a position in house we’ve taken control of I find a corner and disengage from everything around me. I sit and wait patiently, sweating like crazy in the summer and suffering the cold in the winter, but I wait in silence. Sometimes we wait for hours, my personal record is eighteen hours straight. I just sat and waited with my finger on the trigger and my eyes scanning the territory in front of me.

“When I get to a certain area and begin to work I begin to understand the surroundings, who lives in which building and with who; how many people are in this or that family; who lives in which room and who he hangs out with..

“If I see an armed terrorist I don’t open fire immediately, I give him time to feel secure. One time I identified four combatants armed with RPGs and I took down just one of them and not the whole group in order not to be discovered. I heard stories about snipers that got too excited and took out a whole group of terrorists but then got an anti-tank missile into the house where they were hiding and that was the end of the story. Because of this it’s important to be patient.

“One time the opposite happened. I once watched a terrorist enter his house then leave it again, look right and left and then lifted something up which had been concealed under his legs. I already had my finger on the trigger and I nearly squeezed it when I saw he was lifting up a baby.

“In general terms it’s preferable to shoot the target in the head or the heart, depending on the distance. You aim, breathe lightly and rhythmically and then...boom! You hear the noise, the smell of gunpowder burning in your nostrils and the combatant falls.

“When we’re in these people’s [Palestinians] houses we’re pretty orderly. Sometimes we give sweets to the kids, sometimes the family offers us food. We are also always very strict to put the house in back in order once we leave.

“I don’t scratch x’s into my gun to mark my kills like other snipers because I don’t want to graffiti on the weapon and also it means I get fewer questions. My friends and family also don’t ask too many questions. It’s a little hard to explain to them what I do and the situation I’ve been in now for such a long time.

“I think that after all my missions as a sniper I have really become accustomed to what I do. A short time ago, while on a mission, I was woken up in the middle of the night and told I’ve got just a couple minutes to identify the target and take him down . I got up, stretched, identified the target, took him down and went back to sleep and in the morning they told me what it had been about. It seemed to me that what had taken place that night happened almost in my sleep.

“In four months I’ll be finished in the army. I don’t think it will trouble me afterwards. When you’re on a mission you don’t think about anything, you’re just adrenalin. When you’re outside, you understand that it’s preferable not to think about it too much. This was my work, that’s it. It was either me or them and I preferred it to be them”.

Tironut

Well, tironut (basic training) is over. What we, that is my plugah (company) got was a taster. What I mean to say is that, sure there are a lot of boys who are drafted at age 18 do the same tironut as we did and then go on to do not much for three quite boring and mind-numbing years. However, there are also a lot of boys who get put through hell and back. My tironut was four weeks of really not doing very much within a framework of strict discipline. Get up somewhere between four and five o’clock. Stand outside in the cold, forced to scream out ‘ken mefakedet’ (yes commander) at the top of your voice when you still haven’t really woken up; thirty or forty push-ups for being two seconds late at a quarter to five in the morning; holding your cold and heavy M-16 at sixty degrees with the cocking mechanism drawn back in the rain or sleet, your fingers aching and your arm sagging from the weight of the gun while the mefakedet slowly makes her way along the line checking each individual rifle of close on forty soldiers; run there in fifteen seconds, run here in twenty seconds; clean your barracks in four and a half minutes; pack up all your belongings, not a single possession to be outside your bag for morning inspection; ten minutes to eat with a three kilo assault rifle dangling round your neck; stop eating on command whether you’ve finished or not; standing still for twenty minutes in the cold until instructed otherwise; having orders barked at you day and night, a twenty-six year old having to ask permission to go to the bathroom from a nineteen and a half year old; being screamed at if just one of your tzevet, was late, spoke when he wasn’t supposed to, left his water bottle behind or a host of other minor misdemeanours.

This is not a fun lifestyle, it is tiring and unpleasant and I only did a month. What’s more, we never faced any real physical challenges whatsoever. We had a day of field training, and two days of shooting at the shooting range. We had to hike to the shooting range, which was maximum two kilometres away, with a fair amount of gear and we slept in a shed on the concrete and marched back. That was the extent of our physical challenge. Regular combat units’ tironut lasts six months and more and includes long distance hikes with very heavy gear, camping out under the sky, orienteering at night and a lot more besides. Elite units have to deal with hikes of seventy kilometres and more. The level of discipline is also extremely severe, much more so than we experienced with the smallest infraction of the rules eliciting very harsh punishments. Compared to that, our tiranut was as Paddington Bear is to a half ton Grizzly Bear – rather more soft, fluffy and cuddly than the real thing.

Yet, as I mentioned, even our tiranut was by no means fun. Basic training is largely focused on creating a new reality for the raw recruit in which he is brought to understand the fact that he is not in control of his own life, that he is under the total control and authority of the military and, as such, must fulfil, pretty much unquestioningly, all orders and instructions that he is given. As I said, we didn’t get a full dose but we came away with a good understanding of what it must be like.

The army has a slang term for raw recruits; shockistim. It refers to the state of total, bleary-eyed, vacant-expression numbness which soldiers in basic training experience as part of their induction into the IDF in which they basically don’t know what’s hit them. We were never quite there but spare a thought now and then for the eighteen-year old kids who have to give up three years of their lives for the army and then get hit with the full force of the IDF’s basic-training regime.

Caption Competetion is back

"Dress down day in Gaza."

The caption competition is back in action.
Mr Camel, I throw the gauntlet down to you.