The Russians have won a decisive victory in Georgia, one that will probably lead to the removal of the Georgian president by either the Russians or the Georgian populace. It is a huge defeat for the US, NATO and Israel. They sought to transform Georgia into a sort of Israel of the Caucasus, a country that would enforce the edicts of the US throughout the region.

The Russians have mercilessly exposed this lunatic scheme, and no amount of belligerent bleating by Bush and Cheney can revive it. From a tactical standpoint, it is a positive development for the global left. A US military outpost of the "war on terror" has been overrun, an outpost created for the actual purpose of extending the reach of a neoliberal capitalist order with global aspirations.

But how should the left understand this situation within the context of American social and political life? The conflict has highlighted four disturbing trends. First, and most importantly, it has exposed the hyperaggressiveness of US foreign policy, a foreign policy that increasingly relies upon militarism and threats of force to achieve its objectives. Of course, this is nothing new, it has been a primary feature of US policy since 9/11, but the Georgian situation demonstrates that such aggressiveness has become not only entrenched but emboldened.

The US has been directly involved in two wars that it has lost, Afghanistan and Iraq, armed Israel and diplomatically supported it during a 2006 conflict in Lebanon that killed over 1,300 Lebanese civilians, armed the Fatah faction in Gaza and the West Bank in a low intensity conflict with Hamas, and now, armed and trained, along with Israel, the Georgian military for battle with the Russians. This is an extremely serious escalation, as the US either approved the action in advance or failed to deter Georgian preparations by informing the Russians of the planned assault.

Accordingly, the competition between the US and the Russian Federation in the Caucasus and Central Asia crossed the line from being diplomatic and economic in nature to militaristic when Georgian forces leveled Tskhinvali. I therefore believe, as I said on Friday, that there is a much greater likelihood of a major global conflict in the next decade or so.

The second trend is interwoven with the first one: the enthusiastic willingness of US media to promote the jingoism of the government. Most news accounts invariably deemphasized the fact that the Georgians had started the war by using force in South Ossetia to indiscriminately kill civilians in Tskhinvali and, if one believes Putin, other villages as well. Instead, reporters displayed the significantly lesser deaths of Georgians front and center, along with alarm about the disproportionate use of force by the Russians. Quite amazing, especially when one recalls the media tolerance for about three weeks of sustained Israeli aerial bombardment of Lebanese infrastructure and South Beirut neighborhoods in 2006 because two soldiers had been kidnapped. And then, there's Iraq, but we don't really need to go there, do we?

The implications are serious here as well. Some people may have mistaken the mea culpas of media sources responsible for the dissemination of propaganda about Iraq's non-existent WMDs as an indication that they will be more objective next time round. Biased coverage of the dispute between the US and Iran over Iran's nuclear research program should have dispelled such a belief, but, if not, the current reflexive anti-Russian response conclusively eliminates any remaining doubt. I predict that, during the next war involving the US, the media will generate stories in support of the government even more credulously than it did in 2003. We may even experience deliberate disruption of the Internet by the government and its transnational allies to prevent the distribution of information that contradicts the official line.

Third, as with Iran, there is no viable electoral alternative for people who are genuinely frightened by this violent foreign policy. Obama echoed McCain's machismo towards the Russians sotto vocce. After a cursory search of the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, I was unable to find any congressional Democratic response at all. This is not surprising, as few elected political figures are courageous enough to confront the bellicosity of US policy around the world. Once US bombs start raining on Iran, Pakistan, or even, heaven forbid, Georgia, they will form a line to step to the microphone to fervently embrace the new conflict. As I have said here several times in the year or so, the only remaining institution constraints against US militarism are, paradoxically, officers within the US military itself.

Lastly, there is the question of the American populace. Does it support these dangerous policies? If not, is it possible that public opposition could prompt a change in direction away from the reflexive use of force? While I don't believe that most Americans support these policies, primarily because most know little, if any, about them, I doubt that they possess either the willingness or the capability to force the government to pull back from the brink.

Most Americans now live atomized lives, separated from any meaningful political engagement. If they have any interest at all, they are prone to accepting the media characterization of events, such as the portrayal of the war in Georgia, not necessarily because they are bellicose, racist or xenophobic, but, rather, because adoption of the mainstream media perspective constitutes a safe harbor of conformity, as does the more common pose of ignorant disinterest. To engage these subjects would require them to confront something quite frightening, their political powerlessnes in a society where consumerism has severed the bonds of community involvement.

Everyone knows how to find the best deal at Costco or Target, but very few understand how to make contacts and politically organize in an attempt to influence policy. It is difficult even at the local level, and almost impossible when the issue is national or international in scope. Furthermore, they perceive institutions with people that have such skills as discredited, with labor unions being the most well known example. The exception is when the issue directly involves the family. The most vociferous opponents of the war in Iraq have been veterans, members of their families and families of children, with the parents fearful that their military will somehow persuade their child to volunteer when they aren't around.

Labels: American Empire, Democrats, Georgia, Israel, Israeli/Lebanese/US War, Mainstream Media, Russia

UPDATE: This is the new strategy for the survival of the Siniora government:

The homes, offices and cars of several anti-government Sunni figures and clerics have been attacked, the leftist daily As Safir reported Monday.

The daily said among those harassed were Sidon's mayor Abdul Rahman Bizri, followers of former Premier Omar Karami in the north and ex-cabinet minister Abdul Rahim Mrad in the Bekaa in addition to a number of Sunni clergymen.

The paper said the latest attack targeted the house and the car of Sheikh Zuheir Jaeed in Iqlim el-Kharroub's town of Barja Sunday afternoon.

Former MP Zaher Khatib, who was attending a meeting at Jaeed's house the time of the assault, accused supporters of parliamentary majority leader Saad Hariri's Mustaqbal movement of throwing stones at the sheikh's house and destroying his car.

Mrad's Ittihad party has also accused the Mustaqbal movement and some members of the pro-government March 14 Forces of harassing its supporters in several Bekaa towns.

After getting over the shock of discovering that there are Sunni supporters of Hizbollah, we can ask the pertinent questions. Is Lebanon on the verge of a conflation like Iraq? Are the neoconservatives about to strike the match?

INITIAL POST: As noted here during the course of the conflict, one of the peculiarities of the recent war between the US, Israel and Hizbollah, a war in which Israel, with US support and US arms, targeted civilians and infrastructure throughout Lebanon, was the enactment of a UN cease fire with terms based upon the fantastical notion that US and Israel prevailed. Another equally strange outcome was the survival of the Lebanese government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, a government that, in order to please its American and Israeli patrons, presented only token verbal opposition to the Israeli attacks for public relations purposes.

Meanwhile, this rather odd government, a government that represented its citizens by aligning itself with the two foreign powers raining down bombs upon them, is now creating a new security force that excludes a substantial part of the country's population, perhaps nearly half of it, the Shia, with weapons received from the United Arab Emirates with US approval. Not surprisingly, as reported by Anthony Shadid in the Washington Post, this hasn't gone down very well with the people that were on the receiving end of these attacks, and they have decided that they no longer want to be governed as a client state:

Hezbollah and its allies turned out the biggest crowds yet in downtown Beirut, sending hundreds of thousands of followers to the gates of the government headquarters Sunday in a feat of mobilization and discipline described by some leaders as the last mass protest before the 10-day campaign escalates.

Legions of flag-waving protesters danced, blew horns and beat drums in a demonstration that, as in past days, was festive, swathed in a cool breeze on a sunny day. But its leaders stipulated only a few days before more measures were taken to topple the government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. By nightfall, the city, suffused with a military presence, was rife with rumors over the next step. Hezbollah refused to confirm or deny that it planned to cut roads in the capital in a mounting campaign of civil disobedience, and Michel Aoun, a Christian ally, suggested a more forceful march on the government itself.

"All these actions become legitimate when the rulers start committing crime after crime, and refuse to step down, and find refuge in illegitimate actions," he told the crowd. "Legitimate actions are for rulers who respect the legitimacy of its people."

According to Reuters:

There were no official estimates of the crowd size on Sunday but one security source said it was the largest such gathering ever seen in Lebanon. Opposition sources said the crowd was 2 million strong -- roughly half Lebanon's population.

Predictably, and quite properly, the tone of the protest was anti-American and anti-Israel, the two countries that dictate the policies of the Siniora government:

The pounding of martial music, the roaring din of the excited crowd floated up a nearby hill to pierce the thick walls of the stately government building, the Grand Serail, as Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, entered a ceremonial room for a news conference. “I don’t understand what is this great cause that is making them create this tense political mess and stage open ended demonstrations,” he said to a small group of reporters.

Over and over, the crowd, the speakers, the posters, offered clear explanations. They did not want a government controlled by the so-called March 14 coalition, an amalgam of Sunni, Christian and Druse parties. They did not want a government aligned with Washington. In short, a very large number of Lebanese citizens said they did not want the present leadership.

A banner that hung down the side of a building, showing a picture of the prime minister hugging Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “Thanks Condy,” it said just beneath another image of dead children, referring to Lebanese civilian casualties during Israel’s war with the militant Shiite group Hezbollah during the summer.

“There is no longer a place for America in Lebanon,” Hezbollah’s deputy leader, Naim Qassem, said in remarks that boomed through loudspeakers.

“Do you not recall that the weapons fired on Lebanon are American weapons?” he added.

Prime Minister Siniora’s somewhat surprising expression of bewilderment seemed to capture the spirit dividing this country of just four million people. There are government supporters who appear afraid and threatened, and there are opponents of the government, particularly those who support Hezbollah, who seem empowered and confident that they stand at the threshold of victory.

Shadid, in another one of those well documented and focused stories of the kind that made him the source of neoconservative ire when he covered Iraq in 2003 and 2004, hits the nail on the head:

After Nasrallah accused the government of complicity in Israel's waging war this summer, protester after protester mentioned it in interviews Sunday. The government, many claimed, was at best under the sway of U.S. Ambassador Jeffrey Feltman, at worst staffed by traitors.

"In the trash can of history, the government of Feltman," one sign read.

"The government walks as the Americans tell it to walk. It does what Feltman asks it to do," said Hussein Awadeh, a 17-year-old from the largely Shiite southern suburbs of Beirut. "Is it possible we'd accept a government like that?"

Of course not. Lebanese apparently don't appreciate being governed by US clients anymore than the Iraqis do. Hizbollah may not be leftist, but it is anti-imperialist, and for that reason, in addition to the fact that its Shia supporters, along with Aoun's Christians and some dissident Sunnis, represent the majority perspective in Lebanon, we should hope that it brings down the Siniora government. lenin, over at Lenin's Tomb, makes the case quite well, even as he acknowledges Hizbollah's true fault in this political struggle, its unwillingness to acknowledge its complicity in the adoption of neoliberal policies implemented by the Siniora government.

As already mentioned, Shadid mentions a rumor that Hizbollah and its supporters are about to block the roads into Beirut. Perhaps, they might also consider engaging in civil disobedience by surrounding the US embassy. After all, the US military greenlighted the IDF attack upon Lebanon prior to the kidnapping of the two IDF soldiers by Hizbollah. Could anything more effectively reinforce the reality of US control over the Siniora government than the forcible removal of protesters from the approaches to the embassy by the Lebanese Army? The birth pangs of a new Middle East, indeed.

Labels: Activism, American Empire, Hizbullah, Israeli/Lebanese/US War, Lebanon

American Leftist was ahead of the curve in regard to the anticipated economic pillaging of war ravaged Lebanon by international lenders. Now, Asia Times Online has discovered the story:

On Thursday, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said the damages could reach $3.5 billion or more for infrastructure alone.

"We have heard of preliminary estimates of $3.5 billion in infrastructure damage, to which one needs to add the impact of the massive displacement of the population, the exodus of many professionals, and possible private sector bankruptcies," the IMF's representative at the Stockholm meetings said in a statement.

At this rate, Beirut will most certainly continue to turn to international lenders and donors for help with reconstruction for a long time. And this, debt watchers say, will in turn plunge the country into greater debt.

World Bank figures show that Lebanon was already up to its neck in debt - some $22.2 billion - even before the war. For a country of only 3.5 million people, the smallest Arab nation, it is a colossal burden.

"What was already a difficult budgetary and debt situation has been made much more precarious by the conflict," the IMF said. Government debt stood at 175% of gross domestic product (GDP) at end-2005, one of the highest ratios in the world. "The conflict has made matters much worse," the IMF said.

The country's main creditors are Saudi Arabia and France. Both have pushed for a neo-liberal set of policies in Beirut that led to the privatization of pubic assets and, critics say, the empowerment of local elites and foreign companies at the expense of the middle classes and the poor.

The European-based Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt (CADTM) notes that in 2004, Lebanon paid out $4.4 billion to service its external debt and warns that new borrowing will bring further pressure from rich nations and international financial institutions such as the IMF.

"This implies another increase in its debt and in new economic measures of structural adjustment which accompany it," said Éric Toussaint and Damien Millet of CADTM in a brief assessment of the country's new needs. "Therefore, the Lebanese people are going to have to pay very dearly, in the years to come, for consequences of this war inflicted by Israel in violation of international treaties governing relations between states."

Yes, new economic measures of structural adjustment. Let's look to that old friend of the blogger, wikipedia, for more information:

Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP) are loans from the IMF given to a nation with certain conditions. Nations are required to follow these conditions for approval of the loan. These conditions are technically known as "conditionalities".

Some of the conditions commonly are:

Cutting social expenditures, also known as austerity,

Implementing user fees in basic services such as education and health,

Focusing economic output on direct export and resource extraction,

Devaluation of overvalued currencies,

Trade liberalization, or lifting import and export restrictions,

Increasing the stability of investment (by supplementing foreign direct investment with the opening of domestic stock markets),

Balancing budgets and not overspending,

Removing price controls and state subsidies,
Privatization, or divestiture of all or part of state-owned enterprises,

Enhancing the rights of foreign investors vis-a-vis national laws,

Improving governance and fighting corruption.

Perhaps, wikipedia has a sense of humor, as it placed improving governance and fighting corruption at the bottom of the list. Certainly, this has never been a priority of foreign lenders in the past, if anything, they have preferred inept governance and pervasive corruption as a means of procuring assets at firesale prices, securitizing them and then transferring the proceeds out of the country, as they have done numerous times in countries like Mexico, Russia, Indonesia, Argentina and South Korea.

In any event, it appears that Lebanon, like Iraq, constitutes a new model of primitive accumulation whereby lenders seize upon opportunities created by the destruction of countries through conflicts initiated by the United States or its allies, like Israel. With the depressed commodities prices of the 1980s and 1980s, and the economic distress that they generated around much of the world, a fond, distant memory for the loan officers of global finance capital, they are making the transition to something more straightforward and crude, military neo-liberalism, as described by the Retort collective. Meanwhile, Hizbollah, and, probably, in the background, Iran, rebuild homes, hospitals and schools.

Labels: IMF, Israeli/Lebanese/US War, Lebanon, Neoliberalism, War

***A TALE OF TWO COUNTRIES***

Yesterday, in the Guardian:

David Cameron is on course for a possible general election win, according to a Guardian/ICM poll published today that shows support for the Conservatives climbing to a lead that could give them a narrow majority in the Commons, while Labour has plunged to a 19-year low.

The Tories have gained over the last month while support for Labour has fallen heavily in the wake of the recent alleged terror plot against airlines. An overwhelming majority of voters appear to pin part of the blame for the increased threat on Tony Blair's policy of intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mistrust of Blair and the Labor government is pandemic:

The findings will shock many at Westminster who had expected Labour to gain ground following John Reid's high-profile handling of the alleged plot against transatlantic airlines. Carried out over the past weekend, following the series of terror arrests, the poll shows voters do not believe the government is giving an honest account of the threat facing Britain. Only 20% of all voters, and 26% of Labour voters, say they think the government is telling the truth about the threat, while 21% of voters think the government has actively exaggerated the danger.

Meanwhile, in the United States:

The arrest of terror suspects in London has helped buoy President Bush to his highest approval rating in six months and dampen Democratic congressional prospects to their lowest in a year.

In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday, support for an unnamed Democratic congressional candidate over a Republican one narrowed to 2 percentage points, 47%-45%, among registered voters. Over the past year, Democrats have led by wider margins that ranged up to 16 points.

Now 42% of Americans say they approve of the job Bush is doing as president, up 5 points since early this month. His approval rating on handling terrorism is 55%, the highest in more than a year.

The boost may prove to be temporary, but it was evidence of the continuing political power of terrorism.

Additional comment is superfluous, isn't it?

***MILITARY NEO-LIBERALISM***

In Afflicted Powers, the authors, Iain Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts, characterize this phenomena:

. . . It is only as part of this neoliberal economic firmament, as which a dominant capitalist core begins to find it harder and harder to benefit from "consensus" market expansion or corporate mergers and asset transfers, that this new preference for the military option makes sense. Military neo-liberalism seems to us a useful shorthand for the new reality; but in a sense the very prefix "neo" concedes too much to the familiar capitalist rhetoric of renewal. For military neo-liberalism is no more than primitive accumulation in disguise.

With Iraq proving itself a more difficult opportunity for such activity than anticipated (see Naomi Klein's seminal article, Baghdad: Year Zero: Pillaging Iraq in search of a neocon utopia), the field has been expanded to include Lebanon:

Lebanon's 15-year economic and social recovery from civil war was wiped out in the recent Israeli offensive against Hezbollah, the UN development agency has said.

"The damage is such that the last 15 years of work on reconstruction and rehabilitation, following the previous problems that Lebanon experienced, are now annihilated," said Jean Fabre, a spokesman for the UN Development Programme (UNDP) on Tuesday.

Lebanon's relatively healthy progress towards the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals, which cover a range of social and economic targets, "have been brought back to zero," he told journalists.

"Fifteen years of work have been wiped out in a month."

Fabre estimated that overall economic losses for Lebanon from the month-long conflict between Israel and Hezbollah totalled "at least 15 billion dollars, if not more".

As a result, the country lacks the ability to fulfill basic human needs for survival:

The most urgent issues are the need for clean water and sanitation and to clear unexploded munitions, relief agencies said Tuesday.

Underground waterpipes and sewers were destroyed in 10 out of 12 war-struck communities visited by the UN Children's Fund in recent days, and a similar scale of damage was reported elsewhere.

"Everywhere we go... everybody is talking about water and the need for it," said Paul Sherlock, a UNICEF water specialist.

To stave off more immediate needs, 100,000 litres of bottled water will be delivered every week to villages in southern Lebanon where thousands of people have tried to return to their homes, the agency said.

Meanwhile, temporary water tanks will gradually be set up in Nabatiyeh and villages along the Israeli border until water systems are restored.

"There's a huge job to be done on the infrastructure," Sherlock said.

"But access to water also runs into the problem with unexploded ordnance, because you have to dig among the rubble to sort pipework out, so it's a very dangerous game right now," he added.

At least five Lebanese children were killed in recent days when they picked up unexploded munitions, and more than a dozen have been injured, UNICEF said.

No need to worry, though, G-8 donors are riding to the rescue:

Upcoming donor meetings to raise funds for rebuilding war-damaged Lebanon could be an opening for Western lenders to look for fresh commitments from Beirut to resume politically difficult economic reforms.

Lebanese officials say the 34-day Israeli war against Hizbollah guerrillas will erase growth this year and increase the country's already massive public debt load, which has been rolled over thanks to economic support from the Arab world.

An August 31 donor meeting in Sweden will seek to raise immediate reconstruction funds for the estimated $3.6 billion in war damages and will likely be followed by a later meeting in Beirut for wider economic support.

The country was growing at a healthy 6 percent before the war broke out on July 12 but Lebanese politicians have bickered for months over draft reform plans, especially the privatization of the power and telecommunications sectors, higher taxes and lower spending.

Western lenders are signaling they are willing to help with overall economic support if Lebanon agrees to adopt reforms, possibly seeking an International Monetary Fund program as a signal of its commitment to reform and to frame how donor money could be best used.

The enthusiasm for IMF involvement is telling, if one recalls recent analysis by Gabriel Kolko:

. . . the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been undergoing both a structural and intellectual crisis. Structurally, its outstanding credit and loans have declined dramatically since 2003, from over $70 billion to a little over $20 billion today, leaving it with far less leverage over the economic policies of developing nations--and even less income than its expensive operations require. It is now in deficit.

A large part of the IMF's problems are due to the doubling in world prices for all commodities since 2003 -- especially petroleum, copper, silver, zinc, nickel, and the like -- that the developing nations traditionally export. While there will be fluctuations in this upsurge, there is also reason to think it may endure because rapid economic growth in China, India, and elsewhere has created a burgeoning demand that did not exist before, when the balance-of-trade systematically favored the rich nations.

Kolko identifies the alarming consequences:

As early as 2003 developing countries were already the source of 37 percent of the foreign direct investment in other developing nations. China accounts for a great part of this growth, but it also means that the IMF and rich bankers of New York, Tokyo, and London have far less leverage than ever. Growing complexity is the order of the world economy that has emerged in the past decade, and with it has come the potential for far greater instability, and dangers for the rich.

Kolko's article is fascinating, and well worth reading in its entirety, which you can do through the link provided. While it is certainly a stretch to say that the G-8 actively instigated this war (although certainly not nearly so much if one limits the accusation to the United States), such concerns place the willingness of the G-8 to support Israel from the inception of this conflict, as well as its subsequent insistence upon a UN ceasefire resolution in favor of Israel, despite defeat on the battlefield, in a new light.

Labels: Israeli/Lebanese/US War, Labour Party, Lebanon, Neoliberalism

UPDATE 2: Raed Jarrar of Raed in the Middle and Global Exchange, describing his recent experience in Lebanon on Democracy Now!:

And people were furious against the U.S., people were furious against Israel. And, I mean, even for me, I mean, it was such a, like, catch-22, because even for me as an Arab and Muslim who just immigrated to the U.S. last year, I was shouted at, because I’m a U.S. taxpayer, and I was accused with other people in the delegation who went to visit one shelter where Lebanese refugees were staying. We were accused of funding the war and buying these bombs by our money. So we were kicked out of these refugee camps, because they told us, “If you are good Americans, go and try to stop your government. Don't come here and apologize in our shelters.”

So you can feel that even the sense of anti-Americanism and, like, hatred to the U.S. increased very much in a very unfortunate way that even prevents us, as people who are representing the antiwar or peace and justice movement, from going there. It's like burned bridges with many countries in the Middle East. And like, you know, it made Israel and the U.S. less secure, made Hezbollah, as a means or tool for armed resistance, one of the only choices that people are supporting. So what happened there during the last one month’s war against Lebanon is so tragic. It’s just a tragic, devastating political mistake that turned the region into more extremism and into more potentiality to have violence.

If you click on the link for the interview, you can also read about how he was harassed by Jet Blue and airport security when he boarded a flight from D. C. to San Francisco, California.

UPDATE 1: Mike Whitney nails it:

The coverage of the Lebanon fiasco in the Israeli media is alternately narcissistic and hysterical. The details of the massive destruction to Lebanon’s civil infrastructure and environment are brushed aside as inconsequential; the 1,300 civilian deaths, irrelevant. The only thing that matters is Israeli suffering; everything else is trivial. While Lebanon is busy digging out another 300 or so corpses from the rubble of their destroyed homes, Israel is preoccupied with its loss of “deterrents” or its battered sense of “invincibility”.

It is an interesting study in the prevailing megalomania of Israeli society, a culture as pathologically self-absorbed as its American ally. It’s no wonder security is so hard to come by when people are so lacking in empathy.

INITIAL POST: On Monday, I posted about the hypocrisy of David Grossman, and associated intellectuals in the purported Israeli peace movement. Grossman, like his associates, Amos Oz and A. P. Yehoshua, supported the war in Lebanon, and, even worse, consigned the dead, the wounded and the displaced Lebanese to invisibility. Even as they spoke out for a ceasefire before last weekend's IDF ground invasion, they emphasized it in terms of the lives of Israelis, not Lebanese.

And, then, Grossman receives the shattering news: his son had died in Lebanon. Was this the personal motivation for his advocacy of a ceasefire all along? Fear about the safety of his son? Certainly, we can all strongly empathize with such a fear, and it would explain the paradox as to why Grossman supported the war in its initial stages, as necessary for the defense of Israel, despite the horrific consequences for the Lebanese, and then opposed the expansion of it, even though Hizbollah's effective resistance should have, according to Grossman's perspective, increased the threat.

All of this, if true, is understandable, an acceptable expression of human frailty that many of us might display in similar circumstances. Wrapped within a man's love for his son is, however, something sinister. Grossman, through his silence, his unwillingness to acknowledge what the IDF has done to the Lebanese, refuses to acknowledge that the Lebanese possess a similar humanity, that they suffer as he did when he learned of his son's death, as they have done over 1,300 times, and deserve our compassion for the hardships that they, unlike the Israelis, must still endure.

Today, the Observer published a translation of Grossman's eulogy for his son. As one reads it, the Lebanese remain invisible, as they will be the next time the IDF attacks Lebanon, and the intellectuals of the Israeli peace movement again choose cowardice and social acceptability over personal integrity. I can only hope that the translation provided by the Observer is a partial one, or that Grossman has made some highly visible public statements in recent days about the many personal tragedies experienced by the Lebanese as well, because, otherwise, there is a coldheartness, a self-centeredness in his remarks, when he could have reached out to those on the other side of the divide, people who have also lost loved ones.

In this respect, Grossman has become a tragic symbol of the narcissism of Zionism, a social doctrine that justifies the indiscriminate killing of the Lebanese in the name of power politics, but romanticizes the deaths of its own as the most profound personal loss. It echoes a similar moral myopia in this country, where the voluntary enlistees of an army that has inflicted the most unspeakable brutalities in Iraq have been transformed into victims, especially if they have been killed or maimed by the resistance, with the experiences of the Iraqis themselves relegated to a distant, secondary status. Hence, there is a peculiar logic to periodic Pentagon malapropisms that disassociate participants in the Iraqi resistance from their own country.

Labels: David Grossman, Israel, Israeli/Lebanese/US War, Lebanon, Zionism

It is unlikely that I will be posting here until Sunday or early next week, as I am going on a brief vacation. Meanwhile, according to Robert Fisk, over 1300 dead have now been discovered in Lebanon:

They are digging them up by the hour, the swelling death toll of the Lebanon conflict. The American poet Carl Sandburg spoke of the dead in other wars and imagined that he was the grass under which they would be buried. "Shovel them under and let me work," he said of the dead of Ypres and Verdun. But across Lebanon, they are systematically lifting the tons of rubble of old roofs and apartment blocks and finding families below, their arms wrapped around each other in the moment of death as their homes were beaten down upon them by the Israeli air force. By last night, they had found 61 more bodies, taking the Lebanese dead of the 33-day war to almost 1,300.

In Srifa, south of the Litani river, they found 26 bodies beneath ruins which I myself stood on just three days ago. At Ainata, there were eight more bodies of civilians. A corpse was discovered beneath a collapsed four-storey house north of Tyre and, near by, the remains of a 16-year old girl, along with three children and an adult. In Khiam in eastern Lebanon, besieged by the Israelis for more than a month, the elderly village "mukhtar" was found dead in the ruins of his home.

Not all the dead were civilians. At Kfar Shuba, dumper-truck drivers found the bodies of four Hizbollah members. At Roueiss, however, all 13 bodies found in the wreckage of eight 10-storey buildings were civilians. They included seven children and a pregnant woman. Ten more bodies were disentangled from the rubble of the southern suburbs of Beirut - where local people claimed they could still hear the screams of neighbours trapped far below the bomb-smashed apartment blocks. The Lebanese civil defence organisation - almost as brave as the Lebanese Red Cross in trying to save lives under fire - believe at least three families may be trapped in basements deep below the wreckage.

Thus did the IDF, with the thunderous support of the US Congress, exercise Israel's right to defend itself. Conversely, I recall one of the chants during the Saturday march and rally in San Francisco against this war: US planes, US bombs, Israel out of Lebanon.

Labels: Activism, Israel, Israeli/Lebanese/US War, Lebanon

UPDATE 2: From Updates on the Aggression Against Lebanon: more people that Grossman, Oz and Yehoshua, as intellectual and purportedly moral voices of the Israeli peace movement, seek to erase from our consciousness:

15:35 al-Jazeera: most bodies pulled out from under rubble in Ainata not identified yet

15:34 Red Cross: 11 bodies pulled out from under rubble in Ainata

14:08 al-Jazeera: 6 bodies pulled out from under rubble in al-Teebeh

00:20 Lebanese security forces say that 2 Lebanese civilians, including 1 child, killed and 5 wounded in southern Lebanon in cluster bomb explosions following implementation of ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israeli

And, from the Angry Arab News Service, the passionate, personal commentary of Hanady Salman, managing editor, As-Safir in Beirut:

As of yesterday, new stories will unveil : those returning to find .. nothing. Those returning to find their loved ones under the rubble. But returning anyway. 7 a.m. ( or 8) was the official time for the cease fire on Monday morning. People were on the roads at 7 sharp. I am so proud. Sad, hurt, but proud. Proud of my people, proud of their resistance, proud of their commitment and dignity. Hussein Ayoub, my colleague, finally found his mother today. Ten minutes ago actually. He went to Aynatha in the morning and the rescuers were able to pull her out of the rubble of a house where she, and some 17 other people had taken refuge. We don’t know when she was killed. But at least he was able to recognize her body. She was 75. His father was killed by the Israelis in 1972. We will be fine, I hope. We will burry our dead, the way they deserve to be buried, we will remember them as long as we live. We will tell their stories to our children; they will tell their own children the story: the story of a great people, one that never lost faith despite all the crimes, pains and injustices. One that started rebuilding the minute the fighting stopped. Rebuilding although they know that the enemy might destroy everything again, as it did so many times before. We will also tell them the stories of our enemy : how they killed our children, our elderly, how they hit us from the air, from the sea and from the ground and how we prevailed. How they starved our families in their villages, killed them on the roads, bombed their houses, their shelters, their hospitals, they even bombed vans carrying bread to them; and how in return we did not give up.

As for the rest of us, we should also remember those who professed to believe in peace, in non-violence, in the necessity of people of different cultures to live and work together, who, when confronted with the planned, systematic destruction of Lebanon, a deliberate effort to subordinate the identity of the Lebanese to the Zionist project, were not just mute, but publicly rationalized such brutality.

UPDATE 1: Yitzhak Laor, in the London Review of Books, evaluates the performance of Israel's peace activist intellectuals:

Amos Oz, on 20 July, when the destruction of Lebanon was already well underway, wrote in the Evening Standard: ‘This time, Israel is not invading Lebanon. It is defending itself from a daily harassment and bombardment of dozens of our towns and villages by attempting to smash Hizbullah wherever it lurks.’ Nothing here is distinguishable from Israeli state pronouncements. David Grossman wrote in the Guardian, again on 20 July, as if he were unaware of any bombardment in Lebanon: ‘There is no justification for the large-scale violence that Hizbullah unleashed this week, from Lebanese territory, on dozens of peaceful Israeli villages, towns and cities. No country in the world could remain silent and abandon its citizens when its neighbour strikes without any provocation.’ We can bomb, but if they respond they are responsible for both their suffering and ours. And it’s important to remember that ‘our suffering’ is that of poor people in the north who cannot leave their homes easily or quickly. ‘Our suffering’ is not that of the decision-makers or their friends in the media. Oz also wrote that ‘there can be no moral equation between Hizbullah and Israel. Hizbullah is targeting Israeli civilians wherever they are, while Israel is targeting mostly Hizbullah.’ At that time more than 300 Lebanese had been killed and 600 had been injured. Oz went on: ‘The Israeli peace movement should support Israel’s attempt at self-defence, pure and simple, as long as this operation targets mostly Hizbullah and spares, as much as possible, the lives of Lebanese civilians (this is not always an easy task, as Hizbullah missile-launchers often use Lebanese civilians as human sandbags).’

The truth behind this is that Israel must always be allowed to do as it likes even if this involves scorching its supremacy into Arab bodies. This supremacy is beyond discussion and it is simple to the point of madness. We have the right to abduct. You don’t. We have the right to arrest. You don’t. You are terrorists. We are virtuous. We have sovereignty. You don’t. We can ruin you. You cannot ruin us, even when you retaliate, because we are tied to the most powerful nation on earth. We are angels of death.

The entirety of the article is well worth reading for its insight into the IDF's cultural dominance of Israeli society, and the unwillingness of anyone to contest it. Hat tip to the Angry Arab News Service.

INITIAL POST: On July 20th, David Grossman, a novelist and Israeli peace activist, supported the Israeli attack upon Lebanon, an attack that has killed over 1,000 Lebanese, created over 900,000 refugees and destroyed much of the country's infrastructure and economy:

Hizbullah's surprise blitz against the Galilee, Israel's northern region, proves - if anyone needed proof - how sensitive and explosive this region is, and how little it takes to bring it to the brink of war. Israel has launched a counter-attack, and it has every right to do so. There is no justification for the large-scale violence that Hizbullah unleashed this week, from Lebanese territory, on dozens of peaceful Israeli villages, towns and cities. No country in the world could remain silent and abandon its citizens when its neighbour strikes without any provocation.

In language echoing Alan Dershowitz, Grossman rationalized the consequences upon the Lebanese people:

Israel has attacked Lebanon because that country is officially responsible for Hizbullah. It is also the address from which missiles are being fired at Israeli cities. Hizbullah's leaders are members of the Lebanese cabinet, and participate in setting the country's policies. Even those who hope for an immediate end to violence and the opening of negotiations must acknowledge that Hizbullah deliberately created the crisis.

On the date of the publication of Grossman's column in the Guardian, the IDF had already killed 306 Lebanese civilians, 20 during a notorious airstrike in southern Lebanon when it attacked a convoy of civilians fleeing their village after being warned to do so, and displaced approximately 500,000 people. The IDF had targeted homes, schools, village centers and vehicles, including ambulances. One-third of the dead were Lebanese children. As reported by NPR, in urbanized south Beirut, block after block, whole roads were choked with chunks of cement, twisted metal and wiring from buildings that crumbled under the barrage of Israeli ordnance.

Read Grossman's Guardian column carefully. Nowhere does he express the slightest remorse at what the IDF had already done to Lebanon, or express any compassion for what the Lebanese have experienced. Indeed, the entire subject goes unmentioned. A highly regarded novelist, known for his humanism, antiseptically writes with the emotion of a bureaucrat. His mind was sharp, but his heart was still.

To his credit, Grossman had, at least, awakened to the fact that no military victory was possible, even if he closed his eyes to the collective punishment of the Lebanese:

What began as a justified Israeli response to aggression now looks like a trap with two doors, one for each side. Neither can defeat the other, but neither can concede. As the popular saying in these parts goes, each adversary is willing to lose an eye if that is the price to pay for gouging both of its enemy's eyes. Now is precisely the moment when the international community must step in, mediate, formulate a compromise, and save both sides from self-destruction.

Sensing the peril from the escalation of the war through a massive invasion of ground forces, Grossman again expressed opposition to it about a week ago, but, again, in ambiguous, if not cynical fashion:

Acclaimed Israeli authors Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, and David Grossman publicly stated their opposition Thursday to the cabinet's decision to expand ground operations in Lebanon, calling for a diplomatic solution to the crisis based on the proposal put forth by Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora.

This past Sunday, the literary giants published an advertisement in the press calling for a cease-fire and negotiations. Critics felt the demand for a halt in the fighting was late in coming, and that the advertisement was aimed both at justifying the war as well as an attempt to distance the authors from the war.

The three men convened a joint news conference with reporters Thursday afternoon, a rarity in the world of Israeli literature, a few meters from the Defense Ministry compound at the Kirya in Tel Aviv. Later Thursday evening, Meretz and Peace Now are to stage a large demonstration in the vicinity.

"The literary people who are sitting here thought that Israel initiated a just war," said the organizer of the joint briefing, Professor Nissim Calderon. "After yesterday's cabinet meeting, they feel that the decision to widen the war is mistaken, and that [we] need to go from a military operation to a diplomatic operation."

Again, if the linked Haaretz article accurately reflects the content of the advertisement and the remarks at the press conference, little, if any, alarm was expressed over the extent of the carnage inflicted by the IDF, which, by that time, included 759 known dead Lebanese civilians, through killings of refugees at Qana and farmworkers at Qaa, and increasing numbers of refugees, approaching the 900,000 currently reported. Nor was there any mention of the fact that Hizbollah has been killing significantly more IDF soldiers than Israeli civilians, while the IDF has been killing far more Lebanese civilians than Hizbollah.

Now, David Grossman's son is dead:

There were an estimated 30,000 Israeli Defence Force (IDF) troops in the 30km strip of Lebanon south of the Litani river yesterday. But last night they were still fighting battles with Hizbullah close to the Israeli border, and suffering their heaviest casualties to date - 24 dead on Saturday with another heavy toll expected yesterday.

Among the dead was staff sergeant Uri Grossman, the 20-year-old son of David Grossman, one of Israel's most celebrated authors and peace activists who three days ago issued a public appeal with two other writers for the government to end the war.

One must ask the impertinent question: Did David Grossman abandon his initial support for the war for any reason other than the prospect that the resilience of Hizbollah and its allies in southern Lebanon would result in the unanticipated deaths of large numbers of Israelis in combat? Robert Fisk reports 43 dead IDF soldiers within a 24 hour period on Sunday.

From the West Coast, the record is no doubt incomplete, but, based upon what we already know, it appears that the Lebanese have only been, at best, a fleeting presence in his thought. I empathize with his grief, but shudder at his apparent erasure of the far greater suffering of the people of Lebanon. Perhaps, there is something very telling in it, and, maybe, something hopeful as well, because Israelis will eventually discover that they cannot personally avoid what they have done to Lebanon. In other words, the return of the repressed, and the consequences are likely to be both unpredictable and profound.

Labels: David Grossman, Israel, Israeli/Lebanese/US War, Lebanon, Zionism

Generally, I try to avoid being just another portal, but, from time to time, I consider it worthwhile to identify some interesting articles. With the weekend upon us, here's some relaxed reading to provide context to the turbulent events of recent weeks and beyond.

First, Mother Jones has an informative interview with Tariq Ali. In his free ranging responses, Ali directly addresses many subjects of importance, such as his opinion of the Cuban revolutionary project, as implemented by Castro, the negative impact of NGOs around much of the world, the reform of Islam, the emerging implausibility of a two state solution in Palestine, and, the right of the Lebanese, and especially, Hizbollah, to resist the Israeli invasion:

MJ: How can you support Hezbollah’s actions—or those of Hamas—given both groups’ adherence to a fundamentalist ideology that you make no secret of disliking?

TA: Well look, I don’t agree with their religious views, obviously. I’m not a believer. That’s hardly a secret: I state it in public. However when a country is invaded and attacked and people resist it’s important to speak up and to say they have the right to resist and to defend their right to resist. The whole history of the 20th century is a history of resistance groups which are either nationalist or, in large parts of the Muslim word, religious groups, including for instance in Libya and the Sudan. There, the groups resisting the Italian invasion were ones that [Europeans] couldn’t support politically—but nonetheless they defended them against attack. When Mussolini invaded Abyssinia and Albania in the name of European civilization and said he was going to wipe out these backward feudal despotisms, most people in the West defended the Ethiopians and the Albanians against the Italian onslaught and said they had the right to resist. So it’s on that principle—that when people, whoever they may be, you may not like them, but when they decide to resist, you have to defend their right to do so.

Second, John Ross describes the ongoing protests in Mexico City against the refusal to recount the ballots of the presidential election in Mexico:

The encampments stretch from the Periferico out in the ritzy Polanco district nine kilometers east to the Zocalo in the crumbling old quarter of the city. The great square has been sectioned off into 31 state camps where AMLO's [Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's] people live under enormous tents, the origin of which is uncertain. Some of the encampments function better than others. The Oaxaca delegation, veterans of such camp outs (striking teachers back home have been occupying the state capital's main plazas for three months) are said to have the best "cocina". Oaxacan cuisine is internationally celebrated. Meanwhile the folks from Campeche have run out of money and will soon be heading back to that far-off southern state.

AMLO sleeps with the delegates from the states--albeit in a fenced-off enclave under a private tent. It is not the first time that Lopez Obrador has encamped in the Zocalo. In 1995, after big-time electoral fraud in his home state of Tabasco, the leftist led hundreds of ragtag campesinos in a 1300-kilometer odyssey, "the Exodus for Democracy", which bedded down on these rain-soaked stones for weeks. Later, he would govern the capital from City Hall on one corner of the Tiennemens-sized Square and if he does ever ascend to the presidency, he has promised to move into the National Palace on another corner.

Extending west from the Zocalo, AMLO's people in the 16 delegations or boroughs of the capital have set up their own encampments. The Cuauhtemoc and Carranza delegations occupy Madero Street on a strip of the Centro Historico refurbished by Lopez Obrador in collusion with the third richest tycoon in the known universe, Carlos Slim. The contours of the old quarter or Centro Historico roughly correspond to the island of Tenochtitlan, the heart of the Aztec empire.

AMLO's encampments here bear more than a passing resemblance to those set up on these same streets by the "damnificados" refugees) from the killer 1985 earthquake that may have taken as many as 30,000 lives--the damnificado movement was the "caldo" (soup) in which Mexico's resilient civil society was brewed. In fact, some of those living on the streets now, lived on them back then. At a meeting in one of the tents on Madero and Motelinia to hash out food supply problems, Tona Lechuga from nearby Regina Street recalls how food stores were organized after the 1985 cataclysm. "We need to do this right" she insists, "We have an army to feed."

Lastly, we have another obituary for Murray Bookchin, by Mike Small in the Guardian:

His magnum opus was The Ecology of Freedom (1982). "The domination of nature by man stems from the very real domination of human by human," he wrote. "The long-term solution to the ecological crises is a fundamental shift in how we organise society, a new politics based on face-to-face democracy, neighbourhood assemblies and 'the dissolution of hierarchy'."

For Bookchin there was a clear distinction between ecology, which wanted to transform society, and environmentalism, which wants to ameliorate the worst aspects of capitalist economy. In Remaking Society (1990) he wrote: "To speak of 'limits to growth' under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society. The moral pieties that are voiced today by many well-meaning environmentalists are as naive as the moral pieties of multinationals are manipulative. Capitalism can no more be 'persuaded' to limit growth than a human being can be 'persuaded' to stop breathing."

And, don't forget, there are protests against the Israeli attacks upon Lebanon and Gaza in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle this weekend.

Labels: Anarchism, Elections, Hizbullah, Israeli/Lebanese/US War, Lebanon, Mexico, Murray Bookchin, Obituaries, Tariq Ali

UPDATE: Incisive military analysis by As'ad Abukhalil, Angry Arab News Service, superior to anything on CNN or Fox:

I am no military expert, but I can state this: Israel's campaign against Hizbullah has been an abysmal failure, while Israel's campaign against Lebanese civilians has been a great success. Supporters of Israel should be very proud.

INITIAL POST: It is a rather peculiar aspect of the psychology of war: the greater the resistance, the greater the grandiosity, the more extravagant the anticipated outcome. Perhaps, it has always been this way. One can imagine Roman generals promising more land and more gold in response to unanticipated initial reversals.

Hence, Israel, having lost the war in Lebanon militarily, symbolically and morally, while paradoxically retaining the ability to inflict catastrophic loss of life and property, seeks to partition southern Lebanon through indefinite occupation and the expulsion of the indigenous population. It is remarkable, however, as noted by Ran Ha'Cohen, that much of the G-8, currently operating through the UN, continues to align itself with Israel in this endeavor:

The U.S. has so far blocked any attempt to make Israel cease its fire. Now that Israel is about to reach its desired territorial aims, the U.S. deems it the right time to anchor Israel's occupation in a UN Security Council resolution.

According to the current resolution draft, the UN Security Council "calls for a full cessation of hostilities based upon, in particular, the immediate cessation by Hezbollah of all attacks and the immediate cessation by Israel of all offensive military operations." Note the asymmetry, as well as the term "immediate." While Israel is occupying Lebanon, Hezbollah – or, as it is often called in Lebanon, "the resistance" (al-muqawama) – is not allowed to take any military action against this occupation. If it does, the resolution draft allows Israel to defend its occupation militarily, as long as it uses "non-offensive" means. Thus the UNSC, perhaps for the first time, waives the moral and internationally accepted legal principle of the right of occupied peoples to resist occupation. The resolution draft not only forbids Hezbollah resistance to the occupation, but also legitimizes Israel's right to defend its occupying forces against any Lebanese resistance.

Of course, as reported here on Sunday, the Lebanese, like Karim Makdisi, recognize the mendaciousness of the UN better than anyone else:

The draft UN resolution proposed by the US and France on Saturday thus seems strangely out of place, as though Israel had won this war decisively and is in a position to dictate the terms. The draft does not reflect either the reality of a balance of terror that clearly exists between Hizbullah and Israel today, or the political unity that this war has created in Lebanon and across the Arab world. As such, it has come as a shock to many people in the region. In the words of the influential Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri (who is mediating between Hizbullah and the Lebanese government), "if Israel did not win the war and it gets all this, what would have happened if it had won the war?"

Here are some preliminary observations on this draft resolution:

1. It clearly adopts the Israeli narrative that this war was begun by Hizbullah"referred to dismissively as an "armed group" "on 12 July when it "abducted" (as opposed to "captured") two Israeli soldiers, and makes clear that to prevent the "resumption of hostilities" Hizbullah must be banned in all areas between the Blue Line and Litani River. Elsewhere, the text refers to the Sheba'a farms as "disputed or uncertain" as opposed to "occupied."

2. It calls for a "cessation of hostilities" until an international force is deployed, as opposed to the "immediate cease fire" that the Lebanese government has repeatedly demanded. This gives Israel the face-saving mechanism it needs to justify the heavy costs of this war to its own public, given its pledge not to stop the war until an international force is in place in southern Lebanon.

3. It further calls on Hizbullah to cease all "attacks" while Israel must only cease "offensive military operations." Given that Israel has all along stated that this war is in self-defense, this phrasing clearly gives Israel the green light to continue to hit Hizbullah targets whenever it interprets the need for self defense.' And since 'Hizbullah targets' apparently includes the full spectrum of civilian installations throughout the country as well as all civilians in Lebanon, Israel could interpret this to mean a green light for the continuation of its onslaught.

4. It refers to the "unconditional release" of Israeli soldiers, but only to "encouraging the efforts aimed at resolving the issue of the Lebanese prisoners detained in Israel." It says nothing about the exchange of prisoners, a key Lebanese demand.

5. It does not heed Lebanon's demand for an immediate lifting of the Israeli siege of Lebanon. Rather it makes clear that airports and ports will be reopened only for "verifiably and purely civilian purposes." In other words, everyone and everything going in and out of the country will be monitored, thus turning Lebanon into a new Gaza.

6. There is no mention of an international investigation into Israel's savage attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure as Lebanon's Prime Minster has repeatedly demanded. There is moreover no reference to war crimes, international humanitarian laws or the Geneva Conventions.

7. The heart of this draft resolution calls for a permanent ceasefire based on the disarming of "all armed groups in Lebanon" under UN resolution 1559, and the deployment in Lebanon (as opposed to Israel, or both countries) of an "international force" under Chapter VII of the UN Charter to help implement a "long term solution." The Lebanese government has insisted that the disarming of Hizbullah must be part of Lebanon's national dialogue in the context of the Taif Accords, and that the Lebanese army should be the main player in securing southern Lebanon, with an expanded UNIFIL there to assist it as needed.

In other words, the G-8 has expanded upon its determination that only Israel has a right of territorial self-defense to include the extermination of the Shia communities of southern Lebanon, as elaborated by Ahmad Samih Khalidi:

. . . What Israel now seeks is less of a secure border, and more of a major rearrangement of the Lebanese domestic scene that will crush resistance not only in Lebanon, but by extension in Palestine as well, and wherever else it may exist across the seething Arab Muslim world.

If Hizbullah, as many have argued, is indeed the people of south Lebanon and the voice of Shia Lebanese empowerment, then the Israelis seem to believe that the best means of defeating them is to disperse them, uproot the communities in which they thrive, and destroy the infrastructure that sustains them and provides them with their means of livelihood.

That is why Israel has been pounding away at the Shia areas of south Beirut that Hizbullah evacuated even before the bombing began. That is why it is attacking Shia population centres in the Beka'a valley in the east of the country. And that is why it is deliberately depopulating south Lebanon, driving almost a million civilians northwards in the hope of destroying what remains of the area's infrastructure, so as to make it impossible for its residents to return home any time in the near future. As in Gaza - which has been hit by 12,000 artillery shells over the past six weeks - Israel is creating a system of free fire and buffer zones, where it will be free to act in response to any "provocation".

Sadly, there is really not much new here. Depopulation is a longstanding Israeli expedient, used sometimes for grand strategic purposes, as in the 1948 war in Palestine, and at other times for less grandiose aims, but no less painfully, as in Lebanon in the 1978, 1982 and 1996 invasions.

The difference this time is in the purposeful destruction of the social and economic structure of the south, and the rest of the country. With no popular sea to swim in, Hizbullah's fighters will have been denied a secure social base for a long time to come. And now there seems to be the additional goal of creating a new socio-demographic reality in Lebanon, one that will make an impact on the already fragile domestic confessional and sectarian balance. After "cleansing" the south, Israel expects the rest of Lebanon, with support from the international community, to continue the elimination of Hizbullah - politically if possible, but by force of arms if necessary.

But facts on the ground, a favorite phrase of the Israelis in regard to the expropriation and settlement of the occupied territories, appear, in this instance, to be compelling the US, the British and the French to call upon long discredited powers of transubstantiation, the proverbial power to turn lead into gold, to transform a debacle into an opportunity for territorial expansion. Francis Bacon failed, and, likewise, the great powers are failing in Lebanon as well.

Today, for example, 15 IDF soldiers killed, 25 wounded in southern Lebanon, with anecdotal accounts indicating that a mass resistance to the invasion has emerged:

According to Mohammed, some of those keen to join the war have made it south and have been allowed to remain in their villages to defend them. "There is Hizbullah in the villages but there are others there as well. You can go back to your village and defend it if you can reach it, but Hizbullah will not allow you to accompany them on their operations."

A senior Hizbullah member who asked not be named said: "Religiously it is not permitted to waste people's lives by putting them in danger when they are not adequately trained. There are volunteers who help with supplies and other things."

Young women are among those eager to volunteer. Sitting with three friends in one of the Zarif school's empty classrooms recently converted into a women's prayer room, 21-year-old Sanine says: "As a woman I can help in many non-military ways. I can help the wounded; I can provide food and bring supplies. We all want to help in anyway we can."

Despite ideological differences, many young leftists are also now backing the fight against Israel. They see Hizbullah as filling the vacuum left by the largely ineffective Lebanese government and respect what they see as the dedication and competence of the fighters.

Samir, a 21-year-old journalism student and member of the Lebanese communist party, is helping to distribute supplies at the school in Zarif. "Every boy and man here longs to go and fight in the south. We will fight eventually."

Are these echoes of Madrid and Leningrad merely verbose posturing? If not, Israelis may soon find themselves traumatically adjusting to life in the absence of the military superiority of the IDF. As for the US, we can only hope that the war in Lebanon does not reach these shores again.

Labels: Hizbullah, Israeli/Lebanese/US War, United Nations

UPDATE 3: Two interesting articles in the Observer provide some insight about the war in Lebanon. First, some IDF pilots are beginning to wonder about the nature of their targets:

Yonatan Shapiro, a former Blackhawk helicopter pilot dismissed from reserve duty after signing a 'refusenik' letter in 2004, said he had spoken with Israeli F-16 pilots in recent days and learnt that some had aborted missions because of concerns about the reliability of intelligence information. According to Shapiro, some pilots justified aborting missions out of 'common sense' and in the context of the Israeli Defence Force's moral code of conduct, which says every effort should be made to avoiding harming civilians.

Shapiro said: 'Some pilots told me they have shot at the side of targets because they're afraid people will be there, and they don't trust any more those who give them the coordinates and targets.'

He added: 'One pilot told me he was asked to hit a house on a hill, which was supposed to be a place from where Hizbollah was launching Katyusha missiles. But he was afraid civilians were in the house, so he shot next to the house ...

'Pilots are always being told they will be judged on results, but if the results are hundreds of dead civilians while Hizbollah is still able to fire all these rockets, then something is very wrong.'

So far none of the pilots has publicly refused to fly missions but some are wobbling, according to Shapiro. He said: 'Their target could be a house firing a cannon at Israel and it could be a house full of children, so it's a real dilemma; it's not black and white. But ... I'm calling on them to refuse, in order save our country from self-destruction.'

Second, mass resistance appears to be developing among those who remain in southern Lebanon:

'I'm not like the Israelis,' Yahia said.

'I won't fight without a reason. But because I have a reason I will fight. Because this is my land, I am prepared to die for it. How could you stay silent when you see your land burn and your children get killed? The whole population here is now resisting.'

It is a crucial difference, he seems to suggest, which explains why Israel is struggling to make ground in this campaign - its soldiers are not fighting in their own villages to defend their homes. 'They hit and run,' Yahia said scathingly about the Israeli tactics. 'When they meet us they run like rabbits.'

It is something that strikes you forcefully when you reach the front line of this war. In these villages that form the strongholds of the Islamic Resistance, the men - many of them obviously fighters out of uniform - do not talk much in terms of ideology or religious fanaticism. They are not the zealots and jihadis that Israel claims. Instead, they talk about their damaged property and their livestock scattered by the shelling on the mountains. They talk about family who have fled and those who have stayed. And all the time they carefully skirt talk of the fighters. If they do talk politics it is sometimes with an unexpected spin. Several say that it is not so much the Israelis they blame for this - indeed, who they suggest would agree to a truce - but US President George Bush, who they claim is the real force behind the war.

While religion is an element, it is part of a much more complex formula. Yahia mentions that he follows Ayatollah Sistani, the moderate Shia leader in Iraq, and says he is prepared to be a martyr in this fight for his home. But it is said in a casual way. For Yahia, like the other men in the village, religion is important in the same way as his land, his home, his family and his people.

The south of Lebanon, with its Shia majority, is both strongly observant and socially conservative. 'We do have time to pray while we are fighting,' said Yahia. 'Some of us defend while others pray and then we pray while others defend. If I get an hour of rest I will try to visit my family. Otherwise we eat sand and bullets!'

As we talk, Yahia's commander and another younger fighter arrive to examine a dud shell. The older man is bearded and in his late fifties. 'I don't want to say how many fighters we have in Kfar Kila, but it is a large number. If the Israelis come again they will not get in.'

All the evidence suggests that the commander is not exaggerating. While uniformed members of the Hizbollah missile brigades in the villages around the largely Christian town of Marjeyoun are almost invisible, evidence of their presence is not. It suggests that the fighters here are more numerous, better armed and better trained than Israel imagined.

Even within the villages near the Israeli-Lebanese border, they recognize that this is our war. Only Americans remain unaware, at least for now.

UPDATE 2: Rather oddly, it appears that Hizbollah is more killing more IDF soldiers, and fewer Israeli civilians, while, with the IDF, the opposite is true, they kill far more Lebanese civilians than Hizbollah:

By the end of last week, 45 Israeli soldiers had died, and as many as 250 Hizbullah fighters had perished. Thirty-three Israeli civilians had been killed in the rocket barrages, while more than 480 Lebanese had died.

Note also that Hizbollah has been consistently disputing casualty figures provided by the IDF, so the number published in this Newsweek account may well be significantly lower, acknowledged by the reporter's use of the phrase: and as many as 250 Hizbollah fighters had perished. If you didn't already know, you have to read American news articles carefully.

Furthermore, note also, that at least 759 Lebanese have died since the war began, possibly more to be discovered in the rubble of buildings, with a third of the dead children under the age of 12. Meanwhile, today, Hizbollah rockets killed 12 IDF reservists and 3 civilians in northern Israel, again, possibly much the reverse of what the IDF has done in Lebanon, where it killed 19 civilians and a Lebanese soldier. Hizbollah casualties are admittedly unknown, but it is hard to imagine that they were substantial, given the failure of the IDF to publicize claims of this nature.

Expect to see American media deemphasize Lebanese casualties even more than they have previously done. On Friday, underscored links to articles on the websites for the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post all highlighted the destruction of the bridges connecting Lebanon to Syria, without mentioning 33 farmworkers killed nearby by IDF airstrikes. The Chronicle was the only newspaper to reference the deaths in explanatory text beneath the link, and, predictably, the Times headline in the Saturday print edition failed to note the deaths as well. Bridges are more newsworthy than people in this conflict, at least when the deaths are not Israeli ones. For more on this subject, visit Eli over at Left i on the News.

UPDATE 1: Living the Zionist dream, dying in defense of Israel. Apparently, extremist Islam is not the only practitioner of a seductive death cult, one that attracts from recruits from around the world:

Three soldiers with no family in Israel (termed 'lone soldier') have been killed since the fighting started in the North and two others have been wounded. Last Tuesday Staff Sergeant Yonatan Vlasyuk from the Ukraine, who served in an elite unit and lived with an adopted family in Kibbutz Lahav, was killed. A day later, Sergeant Assaf Namer of Australia, of Golani was killed, followed Tuesday by the death of an American, Staff Sergeant Michael Levin, a paratrooper. In the same incident another lone soldier in Levin's unit, Yonatan Marcus, was wounded. Another lone soldier, Ilan Grapel, of Queens, New York, was among 20 soldiers wounded Tuesday night in the battle of Taibe.

Major Avital Knacht, who deals with lone soldiers in the IDF human resources branch, said the IDF does not give out information about the number of its lone soldiers or those serving in combat units. However, she noted that the rate of volunteering for combat units among lone soldiers is higher than in the general population. Knacht said the lone soldiers "come to Israel ready to give their all, and the best way to do that is through combat duty."

Here's more, from today's Los Angeles Times:

O'Neil, 20, and several other soldiers at the Tiberias hotel are part of a program that brings Americans to Israel specifically to join the army to fulfill their concept of a Zionist mission.

Hundreds of young Americans have taken part. They come without their families. Some are placed in a kibbutz or similar situation, and all end up in the military. After a three-year tour of duty, many stay as residents and Israel gives them financial aid with school tuition and housing.

Zionists evidently receive their reward in this world, Muslims in the hereafter. And, even more, from the London Times:

At first sight Ben and his mates could be at a wedding party on the lawns of an hotel in his native Yorkshire. Except that this hotel is a short drive from the Israel-Lebanon border and, despite his Leeds accent, Ben is an Israeli soldier. He is also cradling an Israeli-army issue Colt AR15 semi-automatic rifle stamped “Property of US Govt”.

Ben, 26, who arrived in Israel last year, is one of thousands of those serving in the Israeli military either as newly arrived citizens or on army programmes for Zionists who want to defend Israel while deciding whether to emigrate.

Earlier in the day he was ducking Hezbollah mortars in the Lebanese village of Adessa, just across the border. Now he sits chatting in two languages about two lives — as a would-be medical student in Britain and as an Israeli soldier known among his colleagues for his stamina and ability to carry a heavy machinegun over long distances.

“My father is very supportive,” he tells The Times. “My mum is a bit anxious.” Ben arrived in Israel 15 months ago and serves in the Nahal Brigade, an infantry unit with a tradition of absorbing new immigrants.

INITIAL POST (The UN Backs Israel): Lebanon, Hizbollah, and their Sunni and Amal allies, find themselves fighting a war against much of the world, a world that seeks to legitimize the permanent presence of Israel troops in southern Lebanon:

Lebanon rejects a draft U.N. Security Council resolution to end 26 days of fighting because it would allow Israeli forces to remain on Lebanese soil, Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri said on Sunday.

Slamming the French-U.S. draft as biased, Berri said it ignored a seven-point plan presented by Lebanon that calls for an immediate ceasefire, the withdrawal of Israeli forces and the return of all displaced civilians among other things.

"Lebanon, and all of Lebanon, rejects any resolution that is outside these seven points," said Berri, who has been negotiating on behalf of Hizbollah guerrillas.

"Their resolution will either drop Lebanon into internal strife or will be impossible to implement," he told a news conference.

The draft resolution, which the Security Council is expected to vote on either Monday or Tuesday, calls for a "full cessation of hostilities based upon, in particular, the immediate cessation by Hizbollah of all attacks and the immediate cessation by Israel of all offensive military operations".

A senior Israeli government official said the Jewish state views the draft favorably, because it allows Israel to respond to Hizbollah attacks once a truce takes effect and did not order Israel to withdraw its 10,000 soldiers from southern Lebanon.

Israel wants its troops to remain until an international force mandated by the United Nations can take over.

Berri said that there could be no peace while Israeli soldiers remained on Lebanese soil.

It is easy to understand Berri's blunt dismissal of the proposal, after all, in 1982, the Israelis claimed that they were conducting a limited military operation in Lebanon to expel the PLO from southern Lebanon, but then proceeded to launch a full scale invasion and remain in southern Lebanon for 18 years, until they were expelled as a result of prolonged armed resistance by the indigenous Shia population.

Yet again, the UN finds itself the role of legitimizing imperial American policies in the region, regardless of the consequences. As Tariq Ali scathingly observed after a suicide bombing of the UN headquarters in August 2003:

The bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad shocked the West, but as Jamie Tarabay of the Associated Press reported in a dispatch from the Iraqi capital last week, there is a deep ambivalence towards the UN among ordinary Iraqis. This is an understatement.

In fact, the UN is seen as one of Washington's more ruthless enforcers. It supervised the sanctions that, according to UNICEF figures, were directly responsible for the deaths of half a million Iraqi children and a horrific rise in the mortality rate. Two senior UN officials, Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, resigned in protest against these policies, explaining that the UN had failed in its duties to the people of Iraq.

Simultaneously the US and Britain, with UN approval, rained hundreds of tonnes of bombs and thousands of missiles on Iraq from 1992 onwards and, in 1999, US officials calmly informed The Wall Street Journal that they had run out of targets.

By 2001, the bombardment of Iraq had lasted longer than the US invasion of Vietnam.

That's why the UN is not viewed sympathetically by many Iraqis. The recent Security Council decision to retrospectively sanction the occupation, a direct breach of the UN charter, has only added to the anger.

All this poses the question of whether the UN today is anything more than a cleaning-up operation for the American Empire?

If there was any doubt, the proposed UN resolution for a ceasefire in Lebanon dispels it. One can only look admiringly upon the political sophistication of the Lebanese: they attacked UN offices in Beirut about a week before the resolution came forward. Angered by the deaths in Qana, they understood that the UN would do nothing to protect anyone, an understanding tragically confirmed by subsequent events, and, even worse, would eventually exploit their suffering as a justification for intervening for the benefit of Israel.

Surveying the desolation around him, Robert Fisk whispers the unmentionable:

In fact, one of the most profound changes in the region these past three decades has been the growing unwillingness of Arabs to be afraid. Their leaders - our "moderate" pro-Western Arab leaders such as King Abdullah of Jordan and President Mubarak of Egypt - may be afraid. But their peoples are not. And once a people have lost their terror, they cannot be re-injected with fear. Thus Israel's consistent policy of smashing Arabs into submission no longer works. It is a policy whose bankruptcy the Americans are now discovering in Iraq.

And all across the Muslim world, "we" - the West, America, Israel - are fighting not nationalists but Islamists. And watching the martyrdom of Lebanon this week - its slaughtered children in Qana packed into plastic bags until the bags ran out and their corpses had to be wrapped in carpets - a terrible and daunting thought occurs to me, day by day. That there will be another 9/11.

In a world in which nation states cynically presume to dictate the fate of the people of Lebanon, others will emerge, to resist in their own way, no matter how gruesome and misguided. The oligopoly of violence enforced by the world's major powers dissolved a long time ago.

Labels: Hizbullah, Israel, Israeli/Lebanese/US War, Lebanon, United Nations, Zionism

UPDATE 3: Kevin Sites reports from Qana:

I ask Abbas Kassab who he blames for the bombing and death in Qana, and the answer I receive is similar to what I have heard elsewhere on the streets of Lebanon:

"America," he says. "Only America."

"Why?"

"America gave the green light for Israel to do this. Israel can't shoot one bullet without America's permission. America is responsible. There are not resistance fighters here. Only kids playing. Even if there were, why would they kill civilians? Let them fight in Bint Jbail where the resistance is. Let Israel go to Bint Jbail and see what they can do."

UPDATE 2: Perhaps, this is more important than we realize:

Iraq's top Shiite cleric Sunday demanded an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon, warning the Muslim world will ``not forgive'' nations that stand in the way of stopping the fighting.

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani issued the call following the Israeli airstrike that killed at least 56 Lebanese, mostly women and children, in the village of Qana. It was the deadliest attack in nearly three weeks of fighting.

``Islamic nations will not forgive the entities that hinder a cease-fire,'' al-Sistani said, in a clear reference to the United States.

``It is not possible to stand helpless in front of this Israeli aggression on Lebanon,'' he added. ``If an immediate cease-fire in this Israeli aggression is not imposed, dire consequences will befall the region.''

Significantly, Sistani is known for being measured in his public statements, so we should be careful before we dismiss his remarks as politically expedient.

Meanwhile, the Israeli cabinet approves Olmert's plan to expand the war upon the civilian populace of Lebanon.

UPDATE 1: Lebanese tell Dahr Jamail about the consequences of the IDF's war upon the civilian population of southern Lebanon:

Wounded people from southern Lebanon narrate countless instances of indiscriminate attacks by the Israeli military.

Thirty-six-year-old Khuder Gazali, an ambulance driver whose arm was blown off by an Israeli rocket, told IPS that his ambulance was hit while trying to rescue civilians whose home had just been bombed.

"Last Sunday people came to us and asked us to go help some people after their home was bombed by the Israelis," he said from his bed in Hamoudi Hospital in Sidon, the largest city in southern Lebanon. "We found one of them, without his legs, lying in a garden, so we tried to take him to the nearest hospital."

On the way to the hospital, an Israeli Apache helicopter hit his ambulance with a rocket, severely injuring him and the four people in the back of the vehicle, he said.

"So then another ambulance tried to reach us to rescue us, but it too was bombed by an Apache, killing everyone inside it," he said. "Then it was a third ambulance which finally managed to rescue us."

Khuder, who had shrapnel wounds all over his body, said "this is a crime, and I want people in the West to know the Israelis do not differentiate between innocent people and fighters. They are committing acts of evil.. They are attacking civilians, and they are criminals."

At Labib Medical Center in Sidon, countless survivors of Israeli bombardment had similar stories to tell.

Sixteen-year-old Ibrahim al-Hama told IPS that he and his friends were hit by an Israeli bomb while they were swimming in a river near a village north of Tyre.

"Two of my friends were killed, along with a woman," said al-Hama. "Why did they bomb us?"

In an adjacent room, a man whose wife and two small children were recovering from wounds suffered in Israeli bombing told IPS that they had left their village near the border because the bombings had become fierce, and the Israeli military had dropped leaflets ordering them to leave.

"We ran out of food, and the children were hungry, so they left with my wife and her sister in a car which followed a Red Crescent ambulance, while another car took the two other sisters of my wife," he said. "They reached Kafra village, and an F-16 bombed the car with my wife's two sisters. They are dead."

Such killings have been common throughout the south.

On July 23, a family left their village after Israelis dropped leaflets ordering them out. Their car carried a white flag, but was still bombed by an Israeli plane. Three in the car were killed.

The same day, three of 19 passengers in a van heading away from the southern village Tiri were killed when it was bombed by an Israeli plane.

A 43-year-old man from the village Durish Zhair south of Tyre lay at the Labib Medical Center with multiple shrapnel wounds and half his body blackened by fire.

"Please tell them to stop using white phosphorous," he said. "The Israelis must stop these attacks. Do not allow the Israelis to continue murdering us." He and his family were bombed in their home.

Zhair said his family were scattered in hospitals and refugee centers in Sidon and Beirut. But in the hospital hallway outside his room, head nurse of the hospital Gemma Sayer said "all of his family is dead. We cannot tell him yet because he is so badly injured."

INITIAL POST: For an excellent article about the horrendous IDF airstrike on Qana, read the Guardian.

For blunt analysis, which I shall not try to replicate, visit Lenin's Tomb.

I will limit my comment today to two observations.

First, if you read the Guardian attentively, you will discover yet another illustration that the war on Lebanon is our war:

The strike that destroyed the building was a precision-guided bomb dropped from the air, the same kind of bomb that destroyed a UN position in Khiyam last week, killing four UN observers. Writing on fragments of the US-made bomb at the site read: GUIDED BOMB BSU 37/B.

Second, the IDF continues to flail about like a crazed monster, irrationally attempting to recover its shattered perception of invincibility through the slaughter of the Lebanese. Each incident of this kind merely serves to highlight that the IDF prefers to prosecute the war through the collective punishment of Lebanon, fearful of direct combat with Hizbollah. And the whole world is watching.

Labels: Israel, Israeli/Lebanese/US War, Lebanon, Qana

UPDATE 3: Yet again, our war, as, in a video report available on YouTube, Kevin Sites describes the angry response after an Israeli missile attack upon an apartment block in a residential area of Tyre today resulted in civilian casualties, including women and children. According to Sites, the destruction was immense, almost a full city block. Missiles exploded in a neighborhood where refugees had taken refuge. Survivors told Sites that they hated America, they didn't even mention Israel. Elsewhere, an Israeli airstrike in Nmeiriya in southern Lebanon destroyed a house, killing a woman and 5 children.

UPDATE 2: Again, our war, as Ireland refused to permit US planes delivering weapons to Israel to refuel at Shannon Airport, with the high density uranium warheads routed through Scotland instead:

The two Israeli-bound cargos of US bombs that were expected to refuel at Prestwick Airport last night contained deadly, high-density uranium warheads which represent a serious safety risk to the airport.

The arrival of the bomb cargos at Prestwick has caused a storm of protest, with opposition MPs describing the use of the Scottish airport to re-arm the Israeli offensive in Lebanon as “completely unacceptable”.

Anger over the flights was compounded after it emerged that the Irish government refused to allow the US administration to use Shannon Airport for similar shipments to Israel. Dermot Ahern, the Irish foreign affairs minister, said he would block any attempt by the US to transport arms through his country.

A spokeswoman for Ahern told the Sunday Herald: “Minister Ahern did say during the week that permission would not be granted if there was an application made to transport munitions of war to the Middle East.”

The bunker-buster weapons, thought to be GBU28 bombs, are being supplied by the US to Israel in a bid to assassinate Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and other senior militia officials who may be hidden in tunnel networks in southern Lebanon.

UPDATE 1: Our war, as previously explained here about a week and a half ago:

Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah on Saturday vowed to fire rockets on communities in central Israel if the military operation in Lebanon continued, and accused Israel of being an American "slave."

"The bombardment of Afula and its military base is the beginning ... Many cities in the center [of Israel] will be targeted in the 'beyond Haifa' phase if the savage aggression continues on our country, people and villages," Nasrallah said in a speech aired on Hezbollah's Al-Manar television.

"The Israelis are ready to halt the aggression because they are afraid of the unknown. The one pushing for the continuation of the aggression is the U.S. administration. Israel has been exposed as a slave of the U.S.," he said.

The neoconservatives aren't shipping Israel bunker buster weapons and jet fuel for them to be placed in storage.

INITIAL POST (The Multilateral Peacekeeping Force Delusion): Do Bush and Blair really believe that the deployment of a purported peacekeeping force will stop the war in Lebanon?

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice returned to Israel on Saturday evening to press for a substantive agreement that could lead to a more rapid cease-fire and the insertion of an international force along the Lebanese border with Israel.

Ms. Rice, on her way back from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, praised the Lebanese government, which includes two Hezbollah ministers, for agreeing on the outlines of a negotiating package that could include international peacekeepers.

As she spoke of “fairly intense” negotiations to come with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel, there was a sense here that President Bush, after his meeting in Washington with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, had suddenly decided to give Israel a shorter period in which to hammer Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon.

Ms. Rice is working to draft a United Nations Security Council resolution that would allow for the insertion of some 15,000 to 20,000 international peacekeepers along the Lebanese border with Israel and along Lebanon’s border with Syria, to prevent the rearming of Hezbollah. The force would also work with the Lebanese Army to enable it to begin patrolling the border itself.

A more carefully reading of this New York Times article reveals, however, that the support of Hizbollah ministers within the Lebanese government is conditional, at best:

In an interview with Reuters in Beirut on Saturday, Hezbollah’s deputy chief, Naim Kassem, cast doubt on the depth of the movement’s commitment to the cabinet plan. During the meeting, he said, “Hezbollah expressed its observations and asked a few questions because there are things that need more discussions, more details and more debate.” When asked about international demands that the group disarm and make way for an international force in south Lebanon, he said, “America and Israel have no right to get a result from their defeat.”

Predictably, the Times fails to recognize that the deployment of these so-called peacekeepers will only mark a transition to new stage in the conflict, a stage whereby the countries who participate in the composition of the force militarily align themselves in support of the Israelis, as observed by Christopher Deliso:

For Israel to be satisfied, the new peacekeeping force will thus have to be "a professional one, with soldiers from countries who have the training and capabilities to be effective." In other words, they will be de facto front-lines soldiers for the Israeli army, recruited from the militarily strongest countries, led ideally by the United States.

Perhaps, the peculiar notion is that the multinational force, along with the IDF, can prevail against Hizbollah, as it has become evident that the IDF by itself cannot. If so, it seems dubious:

With Israeli forces pulling back from a key Lebanese border town after several days of bloody fighting, UNIFIL’s top commander says that Hezbollah cannot be defeated militarily.

“A military victory will never be possible,” Major General Alain Pellegrini, the commander of UNIFIL, the acronym of the UN peacekeeping force deployed in south Lebanon, told The [London] Times in an interview.

He said that only a political solution can resolve the fate of Hezbollah’s military wing, adding that after more than two weeks of heavy fighting, the Lebanese group is “still strong”. . . .

Unfil estimates there are between 800 to 1,000 Hezbollah combatants deployed throughout the south, operating in groups numbering as few as 12 to 15.

They have ready access to weapons and ammunition and have retained their channels of communication, speaking in code over walkie-talkies.

“Sometime they use radio frequencies that are the same as ours and we can hear them talk,” Mr Morczynski said. “They say ‘This is brother 13. We are going to carry out operation seven. Hope you are all safe’.” He said that Hezbollah is showing little sign of weakening despite the intensity of the Israeli onslaught. “They are mobile, dedicated and willing to act. When there’s shelling, they’re not scared. They’re not sitting in bunkers,” he said.

Journalists with experience in the region, like Patrick Cockburn, have a clear-eyed perspective of what is likely to transpire:

The arrival of the multinational force in Lebanon in 1982 brought with it a train of disasters. I still recall that great concrete sandwich near the airport that was all that remained of the US barracks in which 241 Marines died after it was hit by a suicide bomber on 23 October 1983. Elsewhere in Beirut, 58 French paratroopers were entombed when the building in which they were living was rammed by a second vehicle packed with explosives.

There is no reason why a multinational force landing in Lebanon in 2006 will not face the same dangers, and possibly suffer the same disasters, as 24 years ago. Its arrival will be opposed wholly by the Shia community, 40 per cent of the population, since the force will be seen as the creature of the US, which has so wholly supported the Israeli onslaught.

Of course, it shouldn't be nearly as bad this time. Hizbollah only has the support of 87% of the Lebanese population in its conflict with Israel, with a report that armed Lebanese Sunnis are already fighting alongside Hizbollah in southern Lebanon.

Here is an example of what appears to be the emerging attitude, as expressed by Lamia Osseiran, an organizer of a rally outside UN offices in Beirut, demanding a ceasefire:

"The Israelis are radicalising Lebanon, even liberal democrats like me. I took part in last year's demonstrations against Syria. I was a critic of Hizbullah. Now I cannot help but support Hizbullah's fighters who are defending our country." What about Hizbullah's rocket attacks on Haifa? "It's right," she replied. "It's not only Lebanese who should have to suffer. Are human rights available only to Israelis? You can't have winter and summer on the same roof."

Is there a sinister motivation behind the enthusiasm of the neoconservatives, both here and in Israel, for the destruction of Lebanon? Do they actually want to increase the influence of Hizbollah within Lebanon, thus justifying even more extreme measures against the populace, with the belief that Americans would accept mass slaughter on the scale of the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, and possibly, even worse? Is there a deliberate policy of polarization through violence, with the expectation that it will generate popular support for war with Syria and Iran?

Labels: Hizbullah, Israel, Israeli/Lebanese/US War, Lebanon, United Nations