Lebanon Never Sleeps

I missed this:

A U.N. Special Tribunal has indicted four Hiz'B'Allah members in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.  Nasrallah had desperately tried to prevent this from happening.  That’s because the indictment rips the veneer off Hiz'B'Allah's claim to work only for the protection of Lebanon.  Most Lebanese know his militia was created by Iran, armed by Tehran and Damascus, and worked at the behest of the Iranian and Syrian regimes.  Hariri’s killers sought to protect Syrian control of Lebanon by eliminating its most effective critic.

I picked this up at the blog site of Great Satan's Girlfriend.  For sure, Hizballah has been fighting this for some time.  Of course Lebanon is a nation with several civil wars going at any one time and the late Rafik Hariri represented one of the factions.  Then there are the outside players, including Syria and Israel.

The next blog post down at the Great Satan's Girlfriend is a derision of the 2011 National Military Strategy.

I do have some sympathy for the writers of an UNCLASSIFIED National Military Strategy.  In my mind, strategy should tend to be secret, at the military level.  Not so much so a National Security Strategy, but even so, the Famous George Kennan "Mr X" paper, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct", published in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs, was classified when it came out of the National Security Council as NSC 68.

Folks will try to tell you that strategy is matching "Ends, Way and Means".  That is too simple.  A better version would be "Strategy is matching objectives, threats and opportunities in the light of risk in a resource constrained environment".  Resources do matter and taking advantage of opportunities is important, but having the right objectives (Ends in the "classic" formulation) is also very important.  And, there has to be a threat—a threat properly evaluated.

Regards  —  Cliff