Friday-Lunch-Club
And they had to spend money & efforts to reach such conclusions?
In FP/ Argument/ here "... The "Blue Line" separating Israel from Lebanon is one of the most volatile borders in the world. But predicting when this area, and other tense regions throughout the world, will erupt into violence often appears to be little more than guesswork. (but now, thanks to the rubbish below, it CONTINUES to be guesswork!) How can policymakers overcome their own biases and limited information to anticipate if an incident like the recent rocket strike on Israel will spark a larger conflict, like the 2006 war, or fizzle out?
Increasingly, the answer is: Develop a computer model from historical data. The University of Maryland's Laboratory for Computational Cultural Dynamics (LCCD) constructed one such model that predicted this period of quiet along the Israeli-Lebanese border, and also provides insight into Hezbollah's priorities. LCCD developed a framework, known as Stochastic Opponent Modeling Agents (SOMA), that examines historical data and automatically generates rules assessing the probability that a group will take certain actions under certain conditions.
SOMA examines historical data about the group's behavior and tries to find conditions such that, when the condition is true, the group takes a given action with high probability and, when the condition is false, the group takes the action with very low probability....
In examining the rules generated by SOMA about Hezbollah's behavior, the most striking finding was the correlation between Hezbollah attacks on Israel and Lebanese elections. Since the re-establishment of Lebanon's parliamentary democracy in 1992, there was a 62 percent chance Hezbollah would target Israeli civilians (primarily through rocket attacks) in any given year through 2004. In off-election years the likelihood jumped to 78 percent, while in election years the probability was negligible. The one election year in which Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel was 1996. Though Hezbollah won a propaganda victory when Israel's response caused heavy Lebanese civilian casualties, the organization lost parliament seats in the 1996 elections. Hezbollah has since sought to keep its fighting with Israel within certain boundaries, avoided major escalations during election years, and re-emphasized its provision of social services within Lebanon.
The test for any model is whether or not its predictions hold. During Israel's Operation Cast Lead against Hamas in Gaza, there was concern that Hezbollah would initiate a second front to aid its ally. But Hezbollah offered only rhetorical support .... Hezbollah determined that it could not risk renewed violence with Israel -- particularly in the wake of the 2006 war, which many Lebanese felt was brought on by Hezbollah and that left much of south Lebanon in ruin.
Beyond its predictive value, these findings provide insight into Hezbollah's behavior and priorities. The SOMA results highlight how Hezbollah needs to maintain its position within Lebanon's political system, even if that restricts its ability to wage war on Israel.....
However, this balancing act is becoming more difficult to maintain ..... Earlier in October an explosion at a private home revealed the presence of a Hezbollah arms cache (Hezbollah disputes this). This incident reminded the Lebanese that Hezbollah remains capable of launching another round of fighting with Israel, and raised the specter of the conflict being sparked by accident.... As the data collected expands in breadth and depth, it may become possible to make specific predictions about how, when, and under what circumstances regional changes will occur. While the Oct. 27 rocket strike on northern Israel seems to be just the sort of incident which could cause an unpredictable chain reaction in the region, in the future its repercussions may largely be known before the rocket leaves the ground."
Posted by G, Z, or B at 8:27 PM
Hezbollah's "plenty brave on the battlefield & cowardly when it comes to rhetorically confronting what's really going on in Lebanon..."
Abu, the smartest of the 'bad' ones, at CNS's AM/ here
[By the way, Andrew Exum along with Matthew Hoh, Elizabeth Rubin & FLC 'Member Emeritus' Col. Pat Lang, will debate the "recommitment of the US Military in Afghanistan" soon.]
"... Now there are two possible explanations for why Hizballah dedicates an entire third of their manifesto to whining about American hegemony after the rest of the world -- including U.S. policy-makers -- got the memo that U.S. power is on the wane. The first explanation is that Hizballah is simply saying, like a good proxy, what they think the Iranians want them to say. Iran wants to frame all tensions in the region in terms of U.S. hegemony, which allows it to avoid talking about internal tensions and answering questions like why all Iran's Arab neighbors can't buy U.S. weapons systems fast enough in the face of Iranian ascendancy. (Even though that's kind of tough to do on a day when -- oh, irony -- U.S. oil companies get frozen out of Iraq's largest oil rights auction in years.) And lord knows, it serves the interests of no one in either Iran or Hizballah to start saying something real about the security environment in the Middle East, because that would mean talking about things like Saudi-Iranian tensions, Saudi-Syrian tensions, Sunni-Shia tensions and a host of other politically sensitive topics that might offend your sponsors or further upset sectarian tensions in Lebanon and elsewhere. Focusing on the American imperial project is, intellectually and politically, a lot easier. This means, of course, that an organization that's plenty brave on the battlefield is pretty cowardly when it comes to rhetorically confronting, head on, what's really going on in their country and in their region.
There's something else here, though.
Reading the manifesto alongside the 2025 report, I came to the conclusion that Hizballah is, while steadily maturing as a military actor, still hopelessly immature as a political actor. There is absolutely zero introspection in this manifesto, and whereas the NIC report was war-gamed in countless planning exercises and workshops -- including one held in China, for goodness sake! -- and arrived at conclusions most U.S. policy-makers would find inconvenient at best, Hizballah's manifesto reflects an organization that basically sat down among themselves to write a bunch of stuff that confirms all previously held assumptions and takes no brave or ground-breaking stand on any major issue confronting the Middle East.
If you look at Hizballah's flag, you'll note it says "The Islamic Resistance in Lebanon" at the bottom. Once upon a time, though, it read "The Islamic Revolution in Lebanon". I think they changed this because it made everyone so nervous. Well, everyone can sleep easy, because there is nothing revolutionary about this militia-cum-political party anymore. Hizballah is just as much a part of the calcified political landscape of the Middle East as Hosni Mubarak. This cliché-spewing manifesto -- "American terrorism is the origin of all terrorism in the world", says the organization that popularized suicide bombings -- only serves to confirm that. Maybe this manifesto was intended to appeal to Western leftists -- until, presumably, those leftists remember Hizballah is a religious fundamentalist organization. But the effect is to make Hizballah seem stuck in 2003, unable to confront the hard internal challenges facing the Middle East as a region and still reliant on a U.S. bogeyman to justify all its actions and rhetoric."
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