According to the Jerusalem Post, the Israel Defense Force's Chief of the General Staff, Lieut.- General Dan Halutz, has appointed Maj.-Gen. Moshe Kaplinsky, Deputy Chief of the General Staff, as his "representative" to the Israeli Northern Command -- the major command for IDF forces in Lebanon.
The officer commanding Israeli Northern Command, Maj.-Gen. Udi Adam, is not being replaced, the Jerusalem Post assures us. Has anybody told General Adam this? General Halutz, according to the article, has expressed his "full confidence" in Northern Command's leadership.
Excuse me for being skeptical, General Halutz, but that just does not wash. In an era of instant digital communications, you don't need your own spy in General Adam's headquarters. Looks to me like General Adam is being fired without explicitly saying so. I'm evidently not the only one who thinks this. The JPost says that "Some senior officers in the Northern Command were reportedly more disturbed. They stated that the nomination was a real hit to Adam's authority." No kidding.
General Halutz, your troops deserve better than that. If you have a real problem with General Adam, you ought to relieve him, and not send officers to play "representative." Now everybody getting orders from General Adam will wonder if that officer has yours, and the government's, confidence, or not. I bet that does wonders for morale.
Yet another sign that all is not well in the IDF.
UPDATE (2 p.m., 9 Aug.). An AP story, with more on Maj.-Gen. Kaplinsky's background, here. What an invidious position for General Adam to be in !
2 comments:
i sort of kinda maybe wonder if this is:
if general mcclellan is not using the army of the potomac, may i borrow it?
i have read all sorts of reasons for this slow build up and or tactic, of hezzy preparedness, of olmert being leftist.......but i just can't get what's left of my mind around the idea of "let's push'em north of the latani(sp) and get a buffer army in here". what happens then is the hezzys start lobbing long(er) range missiles into israel and the joooos have to go through the buffer army to get at the bad guys. that is of course in 2009. if the iranians have'nt summoned up the 12th nukam by that time.
someone has got to read history.
september 1970.
jordan.
history has to repeat itself or this is only shaping the battlefield for the war in 2009.
or is it 2010?
or is it 2011?
or is it 2012?
Trouble with the Jordan analogy is when King Hussein put the kabosh on the PFLP and the PLO, he had a reliable army with which to do it. The Jordanian Army was and is the best army in the Arab world.
Such pro Hezbollah authorities as may be in Lebanon do not have such reliable instruments to hand, even if they had the inclination to do such, which I doubt.
I agree about Iran...only solution for all these issues (Iraq, Hezbollah) is to tackle the problem at the source, while we are still able to do so. After November 2006, this may not be an option, quite aside from whatever the Mullahs have on the stove.
Ah, McClellan and the Army of the Potomac... Being from south of the Mason-Dixon, I wish he had held the command a bit longer !
I don't know what the Israelis are about with their command changes, but maybe this is more like 1864 than 1862 -- when Grant came out to Virginia and accompanied the Army of the Potomac into the field, but the command in theory remained with Meade. In any case, this business sounds like an administrative and political mess.
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