It looks obvious

Sixty seven years ago, on September 1^st, 1939, German forces invaded Poland and started what later become World War Two. And now 67 years after that horrible war, with all the experience that we presumably gained, can we say that the world is safer?

Can we look into the eyes of a child in Darfur and explain to him why are we waiting for the Sudan’s government to approve sending international force to stop the genocide and maybe save his life? Can we look at the eyes of Leanness child and promised him that the UN will send troops that will ensure that Terror organizations will not risk her life any more?  

Can we say that we learn how to deal with world leaders like Hitler and we will not appease them and that the Munich agreement was a mistake that will not happened again? Can we say that we are even trying to make the world safer place?

While the news from Darfur indicates renewal of the war, and the massacre, the security council decided today to send international force to secure that fragile peace and the life’s of the survivors. However the decision to send the troops are followed with a condition:

Well I’m glad that the UN was established only after WWII, otherwise the UN will wait for Hitler’s permission to send troops to the concentration camps. The pattern is obvious: UNIFIL will not enforce UN resolution 1701 in Lebanon and will not confront the Hezbullah, and UN forces will not land in darfur to stop a genocide in Darfur. Shame on them!

The public debate in Israel about the army poor performance in Lebanon isn’t calming as time pass. This is important debate and it should be a tool to examine not only the tactical failures but the security concepts, the decision making processes and the preparation of the army to the war over the years.

Unlike the popular demand I don’t accept the attempts of the army to point the blame to the Prime-Minister and Minister of defense. The civilian leadership provided clear strategic goals and exceptionally convenient strategic conditions to the army to accomplish its operational objects.

I am finding the attempts to link between the amateur management of the logistic and the budget cuts repulsive. In 1952 the Israeli second chief of staff resigned because he didn’t believe that the army can stand the budget cut decided by the government. This was the right, and the only, moral decision an officer can take when he cannot agree with the orders given to him. If the chief of staff, or the head of logistic believed the budget cuts are too dangerous they should have resigned. Not doing so is an act of acceptance of the responsibility.

Another case of famous resignation in the Israeli army is the case of Col. Eli Geva who resigned in the Eve of breaking into Beirut in the 1982 war in Lebanon. Col. Geva assessment was that the orders to break into Lebanon are not moral and will cause unnecessary casualties. When his effort to change the order failed he choose the hard and moral decision and resigned.

None of the army high echelon resigned when they should have - when, as professional officers,  they should have known that the army isn’t ready. They didn’t resigned during the war - when, as they claim, the politicians prevented them from wining. Since they didn’t resign when it was the honorable decision they should resign now without it.

It is was an interesting task, to limit my selection of blogs for this post to only five. The selection criteria I applied were for Quality Israeli blogs written in English and that I did not link to before.

Here is my list of blogs for Blog Day 2006 :

The list of Quality Israeli blogs in English is much longer, and if someone will wonder why I choose these blogs over the others I will not be able to provide good answer. 

Avner Cohen, the author of Israel and the Bomb , wrote an interesting Op-Ed in Haaretz today. In the article Avner Cohen analyze the effect of Israel’s inability to accomplish victory in the war with the Hezbullah on the Iranian nuclear plans.

I wholeheartedly agree with Cohen’s assessment that the west defeatism is a vital catalyst to the Iranian plans:

It is the same weakening of the spirit that Dalrymple pointed to discussing Europe internal situation that also server the Iranian regional and global strategy.

Can someone invoke Churchill?

Tomorrows is Blog Day, which was a nice success last year. Blog day is:

What should you do if you want to participate? It is very simple:

I’m not going to say anything about Kofi Annan, really. just going to show the picture without any interpretation.

Hassan Nasrallah’s statement on Sunday that he wouldn’t order the Israeli soldiers abductions would he know the Israeli reaction is very interesting. It also demonstrates that terms, such as victory and defeat, aren’t binary. Israel’s inability to achieve its goals, and even the fact that the Hezbullah wasn’t defeated, isn’t by definition a Hezbullah victory.

Nasrallah’s statement coming in a time of growing pressure in Lebanon to disarm the Hezbullah and to complete the Lebanese extraordinarily revival, that started with pushing the Syrian out of Lebanon. Although war’s victory, mostly in the middle east, is a meter of perception the actual results fueling anger and criticism toward the Hezbullah. However it isn’t only the horrifying damage cause by war but also the growing concern in the Arab world from the Shiite axis, Teheran in one end and Hezbullah at the other with the Iraqi Shiite in the middle, with potential nuclear ability that might build more pressure to break the Hezbullah stronghold in Lebanon.

Aware of these nuances and not blinded by perceptions of victory Nasrallah have to maintain his achievements and power. Therefore in one hand he is spending money to rebuild portions of South Lebanon and appear as pragmatic and reasonable leader and in the other hand mocking the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan,  and appear as the only Arab leader that able to stand against the west and to win.

The common interests between the Arab world, Israel and the forces in Lebanon that strive for normalization might be strong enough to change the reality in the Middle East. Although Israel failed to accomplish its operational goals in this war it might be able to obtain its strategic intentions.

Awhile ago I wrote about the lack of applications using RSS in methods that will be useful to the non-technical crowds. Most of the applications that use RSS lacking the vision of turning from RSS aggregator, in whatever form, into a personalize news/knowledge source.

An interesting and very promising attempt in the right direction is the service offered by spotback, an Israeli startup that tries to deliver personalize newspaper instead of aggregations of RSS feeds. Tech Crunch provides a very comprehensive review of spotback’s different features and give the company a well deserved good review.

I differ from Mike’s assessment that spotback is in competition with services like netvibes. Unlike these services spotback making attempts to learn what interest you, instead of what feeds you want to subscribe too. spotback is an attempt to to provide the masses real alternative to the old media and is on the right track to be tomorrow’s newspaper.

I have a strong feeling that before long we are going to see more attempts in taking RSS use to the next level. However today spotback is shining alone and it deserve all the compliment that it will surely get.

I discovered recently another great programing blog. Each of the post is a good source of knowledge and experience and require active thinking of the reader. Here for example a post about Distributed Information Systems:

1. People tell the truth.
2. Content is independent of presentation.
3. Syntax doesn’t matter.
4. Identifiers are reliable.
5. Metadata and data are consistent.
6. Schema ensure interoperation.
7. All the data must be available.
8. Canonical models can be determined.
9. Index latency is zero.

Developing applications for a corporation I made, and so other make, each one of these fallacies. I wonder if I understood the list the same way before seeing all of this mistakes and their result happening…