For those of you who are in doubt over whether to buy The Road to Fatima Gate, author Michael Totten has put a chapter of it up online. You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.Labels: Michael Totten, The Road to Fatima Gate
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:28 AM
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Jennifer Rubin publishes a two-part interview with Michael Totten about his new book, The Road to Fatima Gate. What I wouldn't give to be a fly on the wall during that conversation! Part 1 of the interview is here and part 2 is here. Here are some highlights from Part 1: But Totten also learned an important lesson when he left Beirut. “I went to Hezbollah-controlled parts of the country because what I was seeing in Beirut was not the entire story.” He is blunt: “I’ve never seen such bloodthirsty, warmongering propaganda in my life.” In fact, there was “no indication you were in Lebanon.” There were Hezbollah and Iranian flags, and vicious anti-Israeli propaganda and posters of the Ayatollah were omnipresent. “They were mobilized for total war.” In some respects the oppression and Islamic extremism are worse there than in Iran. “The difference,” he says, “is that in Iran Iranians hate the government. That’s obvious now.” But in the Hezbollah parts of Lebanon, he relates, “There is no opposition to Iran.” The result, and the predicament for the West, he says, is that in southern Lebanon, “Hezbollah rules with the consent of the governed.”And here are some highlights from Part 2.
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“Public opinion was 90 percent against the conduct of the [Second Lebanon] war,” Totten recalls. The stalemate and the political fallout from an unsuccessful war rocked Israel. Unless Israel was willing to fight a long ground war (akin to what Gen. David Petraeus would wage in Iraq), Totten thinks the air force should have hit another target – Syria or Iran. He says bluntly, “Assad in Syria is the kind of guy who can have an attitude adjustment rather easily. He told Joe Klein during the Iraq war, ‘Please send this message: I am not Saddam Hussein.’”
Totten continues, “Assad is incredibly vulnerable.” Two days of bombing Syria could well have been more effective than a month of bombing Hezbollah, he contends. Hezbollah can’t be supplied and can’t sustain itself “if Assad is no longer going to be the logistics hub” for the terror group.
By 2008 the Beirut spring (the “Cedar Revolution”) was a distant memory, and Hezbollah would make strides in its domination of Lebanon. Totten says simply, “In 2008 Hezbollah proved it could do what it wants by invading and occupying the capital city. After that, all it has to say is ‘boo.’ If it wants to collapse the government, it can. It can kill you, even if you are you a member of parliament.”Read both parts.
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Now even the pretense of an independent Lebanon is gone. “Hezbollah,” Totten says “is the biggest threat the Israelis have in the world. Hamas is not even a bat boy in the league Hezbollah plays in.”
Hezbollah has a better-equipped fighting force than many countries. Totten says, “Hezbollah has rockets that can reach Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. You’ve been to Tel Aviv?” I nod. “Those glass skyscrapers would have missiles crashing through them” in a Hezbollah attack. And Totten emphasizes, “Hezbollah is the Mediterranean branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.”
Totten returns to the key point: An Iranian surrogate is on Israel’s border and “Israel failed to stop it.” But Totten doesn’t believe there was an easy military solution. He recalls, “The Israelis fought a counter-insurgency war against Hezbollah from 1982-2000, which shouldn’t be surprising since we’ve been fighting the Taliban for 10 years. Counter-insurgency is really hard.” So absent that sort of bloody effort, the options were few. The United Nations, Totten explains, “could have authorized force to block off the Lebanon and Syrian border. But that would have turned into a small Iraq.”
Totten suggests it’s folly to chase after Hezbollah. He says, “Hezbollah is a terrorist guerilla army. Iran has an address and governs people who hate it. Israel is more likely to succeed by going after Iran, but I’m not saying it should do it today. Israel is hoping the Iranians can overthrow their government.” If Israel did go after Iran militarily, “Israel would get hit really hard.” I ask if this is endangering the Zionist vision, which is to provide Jews with a haven. Totten says cautiously, “There is no getting around it; Jews are safer here than in Israel.” But he recalls, “In 1973 thousands of people were killed in a couple of days. Israel thought the Egyptian and Syrian armies might wipe out the whole country, so I wouldn’t say this current situation is worse than that.”
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In the near term, Totten says, “Regime change [is Syria] is unlikely. Assad will fight as hard as Gaddafi.” Moreover, a military option could very well “start a regional war. What could we do non-militarily? There are not really many good options. But we should not describe him [Assad] as a reformer, we should not have an ambassador in Damascus and we should not engage him except to tell him what to do.”
The underlying problem in the region is not Hezbollah or Syria, certainly. Iran is the fundamental threat to Israel and the West more generally. The threat that it will acquire a nuclear weapons capability has receded from the headlines but has not diminished. As for military action, Totten says, “I think there is a will in Israel for it, but not in the U.S. in either party.” And once Iran acquires such weapons, our already minimal ability to deter Iranian aggression will diminish even further. “We’re not going to do anything, just like we didn’t risk a nuke confrontation with Soviet Union in 1956” in Hungary, Totten contends.
Labels: Jennifer Rubin, Michael Totten, The Road to Fatima Gate
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:18 PM
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The Daily Caller interviews Michael Totten regarding his new book, The Road to Fatima Gate. Here are some highlights. 2. Tell us about your experience dealing with Hezbollah while you were in Lebanon.Read the whole thing.
Dealing with Hezbollah is surreal. When I first arrived in 2005, the media relations department was reaching out to Western journalists and academics. The party’s officials hoped to get some positive coverage in the U.S. and Europe, but the guy in charge threatened me with violence after I cracked a joke he didn’t like on my blog. I was also detained by Hezbollah security agents when they suspected an American photographer I was working with was Jewish because his middle name is Isaac. He and I were both blacklisted for life for no real reason at all, though by now I’ve done much more to cheese them off than cracking a joke at their expense.
Almost every journalist I know who has ventured into Hezbollah territory has been detained, screamed at, threatened, or all of the above. They used to kidnap American journalists and chain them to radiators. The party’s officials and security people seem oblivious to Totten’s First Rule of Media Relations: be nice to people who write about you for a living.
Yet some reporters nevertheless run off to Lebanon and romanticize these terror-guerrillas as the authentic Third World resistance. They write fanboy-style dispatches about them in various newspapers and magazines. Some pretend that’s not what they’re doing while others are utterly shameless. They’re the same kinds of people who were communists during the Cold War. Hezbollah’s obscurantist and violent behavior makes no more an impression on them than Stalin’s show trials did to true believers in the 1930s.
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9. What country keeps you up at night in terms of being a threat to America?
I can fall asleep almost instantly (waking up is more complicated), so nothing keeps me up at night except a late cup of coffee. I can and do sleep soundly even in war zones. But the one country that troubles me most — for all the usual reasons, but also for some of my own — is Iran. What Iran has done to the parts of Lebanon it controls through Hezbollah is absolutely horrendous, and I watched with my own eyes the Iranian government try with all its might to do the same thing in Iraq through the militias it sponsored there.
I don’t believe Iran will use nuclear weapons against Israel, but at the same time we and the Israelis would be fools to think it can’t happen. I believe Iran won’t nuke Israel, but I don’t believe that in quite the same way that I believe France won’t nuke Israel.
If Iran and its Syrian, Hezbollah, and Hamas allies all decide to wage war at the same time — watch out. The entire region will burn, and the entire world’s energy source will be jeopardized to an extent few of us would be comfortable contemplating for long.
Labels: Hezbullah, Michael Totten, Southern Lebanon, The Road to Fatima Gate
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:58 PM
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Michael Totten's The Road to Fatima Gate has been released. My copy is on its way to Israel (thanks Sunlight!). For those of you who have not yet decided whether to buy it, there's a lengthy excerpt here that will let you try it out. I'm looking forward to reading it.Labels: Michael Totten, The Road to Fatima Gate
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:17 AM
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I would love to get a copy of this, but unfortunately, for now at least, he's only taking orders to ship to the US and Canada (but if you want to buy me one and bring it with you to Israel for Passover...).Labels: Michael Totten, The Road to Fatima Gate
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:54 AM
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I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
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