Charles Krauthammer is a smart guy, and when he makes a
mistake he should have avoided, you know this was not an inadvertent mistake
but a 'deliberate mistake', to coin a new oxymoron.
But why did he choose to make a mistake? He did to write the
article that he wrote instead of the one he should have written. Check him out;
he wrote this: “Aleppo
and American decline,” a column that was published on December 22, 2016 in the
Washington Post.
Here is the mistake he made: “During the 1973 Yom Kippur
War, Moscow threatened to send troops to support
Egypt and President Nixon
countered by raising America 's
nuclear alert status to Defcon 3. Russia stood down.” This is the
reverse of what really happened, and Krauthammer knows it. Instead of citing
history the way it happened, he delivered a load of hogwash.
What really happened in 1973 was that the Egyptian infantry
smashed through the Israeli Bar Lev defense lines in no time at all. Using
wire-guided missiles, the foot soldiers then made short work of the Israeli
tanks and armored vehicles standing between them and Israel 's border. At this point Israel had no
choice but to commit the air force and try to replicate what it did in 1967.
That was the time when it launched a Pearl Harbor style sneak attack on Egypt , caught
most of the Egyptian air force on the ground, and destroyed it.
But that's precisely what the Egyptian High Command was
hoping will happen in 1973. As part of their strategy, the Egyptians did not
commit the air force to join the attack on Bar Lev. The reason is that while
conducting a war of attrition in the Sinai during the period 1967-1973, they
were also preparing the home front to trap the Israeli air force by baiting it.
To understand what they did, we need to understand the
tactic that Israel
used in 1967. While a good part of the Egyptian air force was destroyed on the
ground, a few planes were in the air guarding high value ground targets. Israel dealt
with these ones by sending a wave of lightly armed fast planes – not to engage
them – but to get them to chase after the Israeli planes. While this was
playing out, another wave of Israeli bombers (slow planes) loaded with ordnance
appeared on the scene and bombed the valued targets with no one to challenge
them.
The Israelis used that same tactic in 1973 to the delight of
the Egyptians who had done several things to prepare for the moment. First,
they left nothing valuable in the target areas that Israel came to bomb. Second, they
built a number of small runways in remote locations from where fast fighter
planes could take off on short notice. Third, they put planes in the air,
pretending to guard the supposedly high value targets on the ground.
When the first wave of Israeli planes came, the Egyptians
chased after them. Then came the second wave of Israeli bombers and got busy.
While bombing useless targets on the ground, waves of Egyptian fighter planes
appeared from every direction. They swarmed the Israeli bombers, and in a
matter of hours, brought down what turned out to be a third of Israel 's air
force.
Golda Meir prepared to commit suicide. Moshe Dayan went
berserk and never recovered till he died. But someone called up Washington in the middle of the war and told President
Nixon that Israel had enough
radio active material to wreak havoc on Egypt
by dropping the toxic material in the Nile .
The source revealed that the Jews were so desperate; they would carry out the
plan unless America
came to the rescue.
Nixon agreed to rescue Israel but feared that the Russians
might interfere with the effort. Realizing that Russia
would have the advantage because of its proximity to the Middle
East , Nixon raised the nuclear alert. But this being the time that
the Watergate Scandal had drained Nixon of credibility (some said his sanity
too), the Secretary of Defense, James Schlesinger, worried he might do
something rash. And so, he issued an order to the military brass telling them
not to obey any order from the commander in chief before checking with him first.
Had Krauthammer told this story the way it happened, he
would have had to reveal it was the brass at the Pentagon that told Obama to
stand down because they knew what will happen if ordered to attack Syria . In fact,
a recent event has demonstrated the reality of what they knew.
Do you remember the fires that raged in Israel not long
ago? They tell the story of an Israel
that has practically no civil defense apparatus to protect its population in
the face of a large scale calamity.
Surrounded by half a million rockets, some of which carrying
chemical warheads, would have turned Israel from end to end – not into a
battlefield – but a national scene of carnage and agony. The unlucky ones who
might have escaped death would not be walking on their feet but dying a
horrible death with no one to help them.
Had America
attacked Syria , Assad would
have committed everything he had to take Israel down with him. And the
Pentagon would have been put in charge of cleaning up what can never be cleaned
up.