The first official day of fall will start with coffee tomorrow on America’s right-hand coast. The last full-moon of summer is waning over the West Wing at our corporate HQ, the one we don’t directly work for, and which is not, therefore, responsible for anything we might be thinking from moment to moment.

We looked in Wiki to determine some objective facts, a feature it is well known for when it is not accused of something else. The Autumnal Equinox, is at 7:44 AM, or “ante-meridian,” tomorrow in the Northern Hemisphere. It is one of only two days in the year in which the sun is directly above our Equator, dividing night and day into equal symmetrical portions.

From now until the winter solstice, which will be Dec. 21, days will shorten and nights will lengthen.

That always makes us feel a little complete and you know it has been a week of incompletions.

Which brings us around to the double shooting down in Alexandria, the colonial town that anchors Arlington county’s southern flank. There isn’t much on the morning police report except the block where it happened and that no one appears likely to die from the event, though it is early.

We have much more information on the Radwan Force in Lebanon because people want us to know about it. It has been a remarkable story on a personal level quite unlike previous means of warfare like the ones with which we were familiar.

We offer the particular story of a fellow named Ibrahim Akir as an illustration. He is- was, rather- the fellow at the lower right of the intro slide this morning. He was just one of the dozens of Hezbollah commanders just killed in a multi-faceted wave of killings conducted last week. We heard about it in parts, but a unified version of the operation is only now circulating.

Unconventional warfare requires reliable communications, right? We all have it in our pockets or purses, plus access to universal knowledge. Handy, since they also can collect and broadcast sound and images. The base of the plot was to convince the Hezbollah organization that the GPS locations required for the phones could be turned into precise targeting information, and thus needed to be replaced in order to continue military operations by guerrilla forces.

Which of course involved killing civilians as a means of instilling fear and sadness.

The Israelis are opposed to that. Having sown the seeds of distrust in the cell phones as safe means of talking, an alternate means of C3 was proposed to Hezbollah as a defensive measure. That was a scheme involving pager devices acquired and distributed to the people who needed it to continue a righteous struggle against Zionist imperialism.

Except it was the Zionists who provided the pagers and the little things contained an ounce of high explosives. Hundreds of them were detonated on Monday, often with a face pressed against the screen to see the glowing letters.

That was big news on Monday, the death count rising from nine in the original accounts to dozens, including two kids. You can imagine the reaction by those whose phones were on mute and how far away from them people realized they needed to be. There was a frantic effort to find another way to communicate, and they went to the back-up plan, which was hand-held radios.

Those blew up on Tuesday.

The response by those who could still speak was to gather in person to figure out how to respond. One of those means was a Hezbollah strike with 140 missiles on beleaguered northern Israel. An in-person meeting in Beirut was called to clarify the situation and continue the retaliation. Then the Israeli jets came over and blew the meeting site to pieces.

Senior Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Akil was one of the people at the meeting yesterday in Beirut. He was an interesting man, commander of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force. He is one of those people whose unfortunate death is not mourned here at the picnic table. He used the aliases “Tahsin” and “Abdelqader” in his covert career which started in the Beqaa Valley around 1960. Before becoming a founding member of Hezbollah, he had served in the Iran-aligned Lebanese Shiite political movement Amal.

Here is where it gets personal. In the 1980s, Akil was a principal member of the Islamic Jihad Organization, the one responsible for bombing the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. That attack killed 63. In October 1983 another blast killed 241 U.S. personnel.

So, his phone call this week was a little late, but successfully completed.

At the moment, two of the three Iranian proxy groups are conducting direct military operations. The Hamas forces in Gaza have been knocked down hard, their tunnel networks mostly flooded with explosives. Hezbollah in Lebanon is now rightly concerned with what might be in their pockets, and only the Houthis firing rockets at merchant ships in the Red Sea are continuing to light things up.

So, that leads to some other issues that involve people like the Egyptians, who like that canal thing they have at Suez that only generates income when ships pass through it.

So clearly, there is more to come on all that. Hang on, would you? Excuse us for a minute. We think we hear the phone ringing and it might be important.

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com