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Deadly Israeli airstrike sparks fury
By KATHY GANNON, Associated Press Writer 42 minutes ago
An Israeli airstrike Sunday killed at least 56 Lebanese, mostly women and children, when it leveled a building where they had taken shelter. The deadliest attack in nearly three weeks of warfare forced Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to cut short a Mideast mission and increased world pressure on the United States to back an end to the fighting.
The stunning bloodshed pushed American peace efforts to a crucial juncture, as fury at the United States flared in Lebanon, which said it no longer would negotiate a U.S. peace package without an unconditional cease-fire. U.N. chief Kofi Annan sharply criticized world leaders — implicitly Washington — for ignoring his previous calls to stop the violence.
The attack in the village of Qana brought Lebanon's confirmed death toll to more than 510. Throughout the day, workers pulled dirt-covered bodies of young boys and girls — dressed in the shorts and T-shirts they had been sleeping in — out of the rubble of the three-story building.
Two extended families, the Shalhoubs and the Hashems, had gathered for shelter from another night of Israeli bombardment in the border area when the 1 a.m. strike brought the building down.
"I was so afraid. There was dirt and rocks and I couldn't see. Everything was black," said Noor Hashem, 13, whose five siblings were killed.
Noor was pulled out of the ruins by her uncle, whose wife and five children also died.
Israel apologized for the deaths but blamed Hezbollah guerrillas, saying they had fired rockets into northern Israel from near the building. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said the campaign to crush Hezbollah would continue, telling Rice it could last another two weeks.
"We will not stop this battle, despite the difficult incidents this morning," he told his Cabinet after the strike, according to a participant. "If necessary, it will be broadened without hesitation."
The U.N. Security Council held an emergency meeting to debate a resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire — a step Washington has stood nearly alone at the council in refusing until the disarmament of Hezbollah is assured.
In a jab at the United States, Annan told the council in unusually frank terms he was "deeply dismayed" his previous calls for a halt were ignored.
"Action is needed now before many more children, women and men become casualties of a conflict over which they have no control," he said.
After news of the deaths emerged, Rice telephoned Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora and said she would stay in Jerusalem to continue work on a peace package, rather than make a planned Sunday visit to Beirut. Saniora said he told her not to come.
Rice decided to cut her Mideast trip short and return to Washington on Monday morning.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who only days earlier gave his support to the U.S. stance, struck a more urgent note Sunday, saying Washington must work faster to put together the broader deal it seeks.
"We have to get this now. We have to speed this whole process up," Blair said. "This has got to stop and stop on both sides."
But Saniora said talk of a larger peace package must wait until the firing stops.
"We will not negotiate until the Israeli war stops shedding the blood of innocent people," he told a gathering of foreign diplomats.
But he underlined that Lebanon stands by ideas for disarming Hezbollah that it put forward earlier this week and that Rice praised.
He took a tough line and hinted that any Hezbollah response to the airstrike in Qana was justified.
"As long as the aggression continues there is response to be exercised," he said, praising Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah.
Hezbollah said on its Al-Manar television that "the massacre at Qana will not go unanswered."
The largest toll from a single Israeli strike in past weeks was about a dozen — and Sunday's dramatic deaths stunned Lebanese. Heightening the anger were memories of a 1996 Israeli artillery bombardment that hit a U.N. base in Qana, killing more than 100 Lebanese who had taken refuge from fighting. That attack sparked an international outcry that forced a halt to an Israeli offensive.
Some 5,000 protesters gathered in downtown Beirut, attacking a U.N. building and burning American flags, shouting: "Destroy Tel Aviv! Destroy Tel Aviv!" and chanting for Hezbollah ally Syria to hit Israel. Another protest by about 50 people on a road leading to the U.S. Embassy forced security forces to close the road.
Images of children's bodies tangled in the building's ruins and being carried away on blankets or wrapped in plastic sheeting were aired on Arab news networks. The dead included at least 34 children and 12 women, Lebanese security officials said.
In Qana, Khalil Shalhoub was helping pull out the dead until he saw his brother's body taken out on a stretcher.
"Why are they killing us? What have we done?" he screamed.
Israel said Hezbollah had fired more than 40 rockets from Qana before the airstrike, including several from near the building that was bombed. Foreign Ministry official Gideon Meir accused Hezbollah of "using their own civilian population as human shields."
It said residents had been warned to leave, but Shalhoub and others in Qana said residents were too terrified to take the road out. The road to the nearest main city, Tyre, is lined with charred wreckage and smashed buildings from repeated Israeli bombings.
More than 750,000 Lebanese have fled their homes in the fighting. But many thousands more are still believed holed up in the south, taking refuge in schools, hospitals or basements of apartment buildings amid the fighting.
Lebanese Defense Minister Elias Murr disputed allegations that Hezbollah was firing missiles from Qana.
"What do you expect Israel to say? Will it say that it killed 40 children and women?" he told Qatar-based Al-Jazeera TV station.
On Thursday, the Israeli military's Al-Mashriq radio that broadcasts into southern Lebanon warned residents their villages would be "totally destroyed" if missiles were fired from them. Leaflets with similar messages were dropped in some areas Saturday.
Israel on Sunday also launched its second significant ground incursion into southern Lebanon. Before dawn, Israeli forces backed by heavy artillery fire crossed the border and clashed with Hezbollah guerrillas in the Taibeh Project area, as far as 2.5 miles inside Lebanon.
Hezbollah said eight Israeli soldiers were killed. The Israeli military said only that four soldiers were wounded when guerrillas hit a tank with a missile.
Health Minister Muhammad Jawad Khalifeh said more than 750 Lebanese were believed dead, including more than 200 people buried in the rubble around the south or reported missing.
Thirty-three Israeli soldiers have died, and Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel have killed 18 civilians, Israeli authorities said.
The U.N. World Food Program canceled an aid convoy's trip to the embattled south after the Israeli military denied safe passage, the group said. The six-truck convoy had been scheduled to bring relief supplies to Marjayoun.
Many in the Arab world and Europe see the United States as holding the key to the conflict, believing that Israel would stop its offensive — sparked by Hezbollah's July 12 abduction of two Israeli soldiers — if top ally Washington insisted.
The United States has balked at doing so, saying any cease-fire must ensure real and lasting peace.
Rice came to the Mideast with a peace package calling for disarming Hezbollah, releasing Israel's soldiers, deploying a U.N.-mandated force in south Lebanon and establishing a buffer zone along the border.
Hopes were raised earlier in the week when Hezbollah signed onto a Lebanese government peace plan containing some similar items — though it left disarmament and deployment of the international force for later and dependent on conditions. Chief among those conditions was that Israel release Lebanese in its jails and agree to resolve a dispute over a piece of land it holds claimed by Lebanon.
Saniora said those ideas still stand but Lebanon would not discuss them until the fighting stops.
Lebanese President Emile Lahoud lashed out at the United States, saying that if it was "serious, it can make Israel cease firing ... They (Americans) are still giving the green light to Israel to continue its aggression against Lebanon."
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'How can we stand by and allow this to go on?'
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14287.htm
By Robert Fisk
07/31/06 "The Independent" -- -- They wrote the names of the dead children on their plastic shrouds. "Mehdi Hashem, aged seven - Qana," was written in felt pen on the bag in which the little boy's body lay. "Hussein al-Mohamed, aged 12 - Qana',' "Abbas al-Shalhoub, aged one - Qana.'' And when the Lebanese soldier went to pick up Abbas's little body, it bounced on his shoulder as the boy might have done on his father's shoulder on Saturday. In all, there were 56 corpses brought to the Tyre government hospital and other surgeries, and 34 of them were children. When they ran out of plastic bags, they wrapped the small corpses in carpets. Their hair was matted with dust, most had blood running from their noses.
You must have a heart of stone not to feel the outrage that those of us watching this experienced yesterday. This slaughter was an obscenity, an atrocity - yes, if the Israeli air force truly bombs with the "pinpoint accuracy'' it claims, this was also a war crime. Israel claimed that missiles had been fired by Hizbollah gunmen from the south Lebanese town of Qana - as if that justified this massacre. Israel's Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, talked about "Muslim terror" threatening "western civilisation" - as if the Hizbollah had killed all these poor people.
And in Qana, of all places. For only 10 years ago, this was the scene of another Israeli massacre, the slaughter of 106 Lebanese refugees by an Israeli artillery battery as they sheltered in a UN base in the town. More than half of those 106 were children. Israel later said it had no live-time pilotless photo-reconnaissance aircraft over the scene of that killing - a statement that turned out to be untrue when The Independent discovered videotape showing just such an aircraft over the burning camp. It is as if Qana - whose inhabitants claim that this was the village in which Jesus turned water into wine - has been damned by the world, doomed forever to receive tragedy.
And there was no doubt of the missile which killed all those children yesterday. It came from the United States, and upon a fragment of it was written: "For use on MK-84 Guided Bomb BSU-37-B". No doubt the manufacturers can call it "combat-proven" because it destroyed the entire three-storey house in which the Shalhoub and Hashim families lived. They had taken refuge in the basement from an enormous Israeli bombardment, and that is where most of them died.
I found Nejwah Shalhoub lying in the government hospital in Tyre, her jaw and face bandaged like Robespierre's before his execution. She did not weep, nor did she scream, although the pain was written on her face. Her brother Taisir, who was 46, had been killed. So had her sister Najla. So had her little niece Zeinab, who was just six. "We were in the basement hiding when the bomb exploded at one o'clock in the morning,'' she said. "What in the name of God have we done to deserve this? So many of the dead are children, the old, women. Some of the children were still awake and playing. Why does the world do this to us?"
Yesterday's deaths brought to more than 500 the total civilian dead in Lebanon since Israel's air, sea and land bombardment of the country begun on 12 July after Hizbollah members crossed the frontier wire, killed three Israeli soldiers and captured two others. But yesterday's slaughter ended more than a year of mutual antagonism within the Lebanese government as pro-American and pro-Syrian politicians denounced what they described as "an ugly crime".
Thousands of protesters attacked the largest United Nations building in Beirut, screaming: "Destroy Tel Aviv, destroy Tel Aviv," and Lebanon's Prime Minister, the normally unflappable Fouad Siniora, called US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and ordered her to cancel her imminent peace-making trip to Beirut.
No one in this country can forget how President George Bush, Ms Rice, and Tony Blair have repeatedly refused to call for an immediate ceasefire - a truce that would have saved all those lives yesterday. Ms Rice would say only: "We want a ceasefire as soon as possible,'' a remark followed by an Israeli announcement that it intended to maintain its bombardment of Lebanon for at least another two weeks.
Throughout the day, Qana villagers and civil defence workers dug through the ruins of the building with spades and with their hands, tearing at the muck until they found one body after another still dressed in colourful clothes. In one section of the rubble, they found what was left of a single room with 18 bodies inside. Twelve of the dead were women. All across southern Lebanon now, you find scenes like this, not so grotesque in scale, perhaps, but just as terrible, for the people of these villages are terrified to leave and terrified to stay. The Israelis had dropped leaflets over Qana, ordering its people to leave their homes. Yet twice now since Israel's onslaught began, the Israelis have ordered villagers to leave their houses and then attacked them with aircraft as they obeyed the Israeli instructions and fled. There are at least 3,000 Shia Muslims trapped in villages between Qlaya and Aiteroun - close to the scene of Israel's last military incursion at Bint Jbeil - and yet none of them can leave without fear of dying on the roads.
And Mr Olmert's reaction? After expressing his "great sorrow", he announced that: "We will not stop this battle, despite the difficult incidents [sic] this morning. We will continue the activity, and if necessary it will be broadened without hesitation." But how much further can it be broadened? Lebanon's infrastructure is being steadily torn to pieces, its villages razed, its people more and more terrorised - and terror is the word they used - by Israel's American-made fighter bombers. Hizbollah's missiles are Iranian-made, and it was Hizbollah that started this war with its illegal and provocative raid across the border. But Israel's savagery against the civilian population has deeply shocked not only the Western diplomats who have remained in Beirut, but hundreds of humanitarian workers from the Red Cross and major aid agencies.
Incredibly, Israel yesterday denied safe passage to a UN World Food Programme aid convoy en route to the south, a six-truck mission that should have taken relief supplies to the south-eastern town of Marjayoun. More than three quarters of a million Lebanese have now fled their homes, but there is still no accurate figure for the total number still trapped in the south. Khalil Shalhoub, who survived amid the wreckage in Qana yesterday, said that his family and the Hashims were just too "terrified" to take the road out of the village, which has been attacked by aircraft for more than two weeks. The seven-mile highway between Qana and Tyre is littered with civilian homes in ruins and burnt-out family cars. On Thursday, the Israeli Army's Al-Mashriq radio, which broadcasts into southern Lebanon, told residents that their villages would be "totally destroyed" if missiles were fired from them. But anyone who has watched Israel's bombing these past two weeks knows that, in many cases, the Israelis do not know the location in which the Hizbollah are firing missiles, and - when they do - they frequently miss their targets. How can a villager prevent the Hizbollah from firing rockets from his street? The Hizbollah do take cover beside civilian houses - just as Israeli troops entering Bint Jbeil last week also used civilian homes for cover. But can this be the excuse for slaughter on such a scale?
Mr Siniora addressed foreign diplomats in Beirut yesterday, telling them that the government in Beirut was now only demanding an immediate ceasefire and was not interested any longer in a political package to go with it. Needless to say, Mr Jeffrey Feltman, whose country made the bomb which killed the innocents of Qana yesterday, chose not to attend.
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Robert Fisk Reports From Lebanon on the Israeli Bombing of Qana That Killed 57, Including 37 Children
Monday, July 31st, 2006
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/31/1435219
Lebanon is marking a national day of mourning, a day after Israeli warplanes bombed the village of Qana killing 57. Israel has announced it will halt air strikes for 48 hours in Southern Lebanon, but its ground troops continue to fight. Robert Fisk was in the nearby city of Tyre, where many of the victims were taken following the attack. He joins us from his home in Beirut. [includes rush transcript]
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After the attack, Israel released what appeared to be video footage of Hezbollah rockets being launched from Qana towards towns in northern Israel, and the Israeli military said that Qana had been targeted because Hezbollah had been using the village as a base from which to launch rockets. This is not the first time that Qana has been devastated by Israeli fire. In 1996, more than 106 villagers died after Israel bombed the UN compound where they were seeking refuge. In the aftermath of the strike 10 years ago, reporting by Robert Fisk led to the United Nations condemnation of the attack. Robert Fisk had just returned from Tyre, where the victims from Sunday's Israeli air strike in Qana were taken following the attack.
Robert Fisk.Veteran war correspondent, London Independent, reporting from Beirut.
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RUSH TRANSCRIPT
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AMY GOODMAN: Following Israel’s bombing of the town of Qana, that killed nearly 57 people, we turn to veteran war correspondent, Robert Fisk. I reached Robert Fisk early this morning at his home in Beirut. Robert Fisk's reporting in Lebanon led to the United Nations condemnation of the Israeli attack on Qana ten years ago, in 1996. Early this morning, when we reached Robert Fisk, he had just returned from Tyre, where victims from Sunday’s Israeli air strike in Qana were taken, following the attack.
ROBERT FISK: I went to Tyre, Amy. By the time this has happened -- to get from Beirut now to the south takes 46 hours, because of the broken bridges and the bombed roads, and I realized that by the time I got down there, the wounded would have been in the hospitals in Tyre, and the dead would be already brought from Qana to the villages. So when I got there, I went straight to the government hospital in Tyre, where many of the wounded -- and there weren't many, because most of them died -- had been taken and where they were counting the number of children.
When I arrived there, there were a number of, maybe 20, 30 children, the corpses of children, lined up outside the government hospital, hair matted, still in their night clothes. The bomb that killed them was dropped at 1:00 in the morning. And they ran out of plastic bags. They were trying to put the children in plastic bags, their corpses, and they would put on it, you know, “Abbas Mehdi, aged seven,” and so and so, aged one, and use a kind of sticking tape on it. But then they ran out of plastic bags, so they had to put the children's corpses in a kind of cheap carpet that you can buy in the supermarkets, and they roll them up in that and then put their names on again. I was having to go around very carefully and write down, from the Arabic, their names and their ages. It would just say “Abbas Mehdi, aged seven, Qana.”
And, of course, every time I saw the “Qana,” I remember that I was actually in Qana ten years ago when the massacre occurred there then. This is the second massacre in the town whose inhabitants believe that this is the place where Jesus turned water into wine in the Bible, most of whom, 95% of whom, are Christians -- I’m sorry, are Muslims. I think all who died were Muslims. The 5% is Christians who have been there for hundreds of years, their families, because they do believe it is the Biblical Qana. There is a claimant to the rival of Qana in Galilee in northern Israel actually.
The Lebanese soldiers were trying take down the names of all who had died, but I found a man with a clipboard who had taken down 40 names, and he said that they weren't accurate, because some of the children were blown into bits and they couldn't fit them together accurately and there might be -- they couldn't put the right head on the right body, and therefore they might not be able to have an accurate list of the dead. But he was doing his best in the circumstances of war to maintain the bureaucracy of government.
One by one the children's bodies were taken away from the courtyard of the government hospital on the shoulders of soldiers and hospital workers and were put in a big refrigerated truck, very dirty, dusty truck, which had been parked just outside the hospital. The grownups, the adult dead, including twelve women, were taken out later. The children were put in the truck first. Pretty grim. As I said, the children's hair, when you could see the bodies, were matted with dust and mud. And most of them appear to have been bleeding from the nose. I assume that’s because their lungs were crushed by the bomb, and therefore they naturally hemorrhaged as they died.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Fisk reporting from Beirut. After the attack Sunday, Israel released what appeared to be video footage of Hezbollah rockets being launched from Qana toward towns in northern Israel. I asked Robert Fisk about the footage.
ROBERT FISK: I’ve seen the video footage. It’s impossible to tell from the footage if indeed this is from Qana. You know, you have to realize that last time the massacre occurred at Qana in 1996, when they killed 106 refugees who were sheltering in the then-UN base that was there -- it doesn't exist anymore, but it did then -- more than half of them children, again. They said that missiles had been fired from within the UN base. It turns out that they were fired from half a mile away. They then said that they didn't have a live time pilot-less aircraft over the UN base at the time. And, in fact, on the Independent, I found a UN soldier who did have a videotape, showing clearly at the time of the bombardment -- this is in 1996 -- a live time photo reconnaissance unmanned aircraft over the base. The Israelis were later forced to admit that they had not told the truth: indeed there was a machine over the base at the time. You know, you can do what you want with photo reconnaissance pictures and with photographs after the event. It’s interesting that we weren't shown these pictures before the massacre. We were only shown them after the massacre.
But they may be correct. The Hezbollah are firing missiles from villages in southern Lebanon, just as, for example, when the Israelis entered southern Lebanon and go into places like Bent Jabail, they're using civilian houses as cover for their tanks, so the Hezbollah use houses as cover for their missile launching. But the odd thing is the idea that for the Israeli military that somehow it’s okay to kill all these children; if a missile is launched 30, 90 feet from their house, that's okay then. We’ve got some film to show the missiles were launched; that's okay then. I mean, did the aircraft which dropped this bomb, a guided weapon, by the way -- they knew what they were hitting. It’s a guided weapon. We know that because the computer codes have been found on the bomb fragments. Did they say, “Oh, well, then, the man who launched the missile is hiding with the children in the basement of the house we're going to hit”? Is it the case now that if you happen to live in a house next to where someone launches a missile, you are to be sentenced to death? Is that what Israel thinks the war is about?
I’m sitting here, for example, in my house tonight in darkness -- there’s no electricity -- next to a car park. What if someone launches a missile from the car park? Am I supposed to die for that? Is that a death sentence for me? Is that how Israel wages war? If I have children in the basement, are they to die for that? And then I’m told it’s my fault or it’s Hezbollah's fault? You know, these are serious moral questions.
It’s quite clear from listening to the IDF statement today that they believe that family deserved to die, because 90 feet away, they claim, a missile was fired. So they sentenced all those people to death. Is that what we're supposed to believe? I mean, presumably it is. I can't think of any other reason why they should say, “Well, 30 meters away a missile was fired.” Well, thanks very much. So those little children’s corpses in their plastic packages, all stuck together like giant candies today, this is supposed to be quite normal, this is how war is to be waged by the IDF.
The fact that when they made these comments, they went unchallenged on television, was one of the most extraordinary scenes I’ve seen. I got back from Tyre on a very dangerous overland journey on an open road, which was under air attack, and I got back, and just before the electricity was cut, I saw the BBC reporting what the Israelis had said, but without questioning the morality that if someone fires a missile near your home, therefore it is perfectly okay for you to die.
AMY GOODMAN: We’ll return to our interview with Robert Fisk of the Independent newspaper in Britain, reporting from Beirut.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We return to our interview with Robert Fisk of the Independent. He has been based in Lebanon for the last 30 years. I spoke to him early this morning, after he had just returned from Tyre. I asked him to respond to Israel's announcement it would suspend air strikes over southern Lebanon for 48 hours.
ROBERT FISK: That would certainly give the United Nations and particularly the International Red Cross the opportunity of getting thousands of people out of the region. But whether you can arrange convoys for thousands of people to leave in that period of time, I don't know. The people who the haven't left are either too frightened to leave, or they’re too poor, or they have no cars, or they’re too elderly or too young. Can the International Committee of the Red Cross with whom I have been traveling for some of the last few days -- does that give them enough time to get people out? Does that mean there will be no shells on the road, or is it just air attacks that are stopping?
You know, it’s very interesting that the Israelis should say now, now after all these days, they're going to give 48 hours. Why didn't they give an extra 48 hours at the beginning to get the people out? Why now? Is this a bonus, a plus point, something you -- a supermarket extra card that you win because you’ve killed so many people? Is it a monopoly board that you're going to gamble? Okay, you get 48 hours free of air attack, because you killed so many people yesterday. Is that what this is supposed to mean?
AMY GOODMAN: In an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council, it voted Sunday not for a cessation of hostilities -- the U.S. was opposed to that -- but to deplore what happened in Qana and an end to the violence. I asked Robert Fisk to respond.
ROBERT FISK: John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has consistently opposed any kind of ceasefire, because he believes, as Mr. Bush does and as our own dear prime minister, Lord Blair, as I call him, does, that the Israelis can accomplish these hopeless political military aims. Well, the Israelis believe that they can actually destroy one of the most disciplined and most ruthless guerrilla armies in the world. They can't, anymore than the Americans could destroy the Vietcong or the North Vietnamese or British could destroy the IRA. And, believe me, the Hezbollah are not as weak and cowardly as the IRA was. But they can't. These are hopeless political aims. All the United Nations is doing by postponing a ceasefire is condemning more Lebanese to death. I wrote in Saturday’s paper, before Qana, that the actions of Blair and Bush, and Bolton by extension, and Condoleezza Rice, were going to condemn more innocents to death.
You know, I went into a hospital in Marjayoun last week, and I saw this very beautiful young woman lying in bed, and her skin had been pitted with very familiar wounds, the little tiny round crimson holes of cluster bomblets. We used cluster bombs in Iraq in 2003. I know exactly what the wounds look like. I identified them at once. Indeed, she described the cluster bombs falling like grapes, as she put it, out of the sky, oddly enough an _expression used by an Iraqi woman in 2003 to me. This young woman had been wounded 48 hours before I saw her. Had Bush and Blair insisted on a ceasefire at the beginning, this woman, her skin would not be destroyed in the way it has been.
On the ground, when you're here, when you see the wounded, see the dead, you realize the immorality, the obscenity, the atrocity of statesmen, as they think they are, claiming that, you know, it isn't yet time for a ceasefire. A hasty ceasefire would not be a good thing, as Condoleezza Rice said. 24 hours before, I saw a picture of her on a beach in Malaysia. And people remember this. People remember this. In the hospital it was a young man who said -- turned to me, he said, “Why have you done this to us? Why have you done this to us?” And the woman I was talking to said the same: “Why does the West want to do this to us?”
You know, this has been going on for more than two weeks now. I’m traveling around the south, increasingly outraged at what I see, as a human being. And I’m not a Muslim. I’m not a Muslim. And I keep saying to myself, “If I was a Muslim, how much more outraged might I be?” I turned to an American friend of mine tonight back in Beirut before I came home, and I said, “You know, I’ve been watching this now for more than two weeks, and there's going to be another 9/11.” There’s going to be another 9/11, and then we’re going to hear all the usual claptrap about how it’s good versus evil, and they hate us because we’re good and democratic, and they hate our values, and all the other material that comes out of the rear end of a bull that your president and my prime minister talk.
What’s going on in southern Lebanon is an outrage. It’s an atrocity. The idea that more than 600 civilians must die because three Israeli soldiers were killed and two were captured on the border by the Hezbollah on July 12, my 60th birthday -- I’ve spent 30 years of my life watching this, this filth now, you know -- is outrageous. It’s against all morality to suggest that 600 innocent civilians must die for this. There is no other country in the world that could get away with this.
You know, when -- I wrote in my paper last week, there were times when the IRA would cross from the Irish Republic into northern Ireland to kill British soldiers. And they did murder and kill British soldiers. But we, the British, didn’t hold the Irish government responsible. We didn't send the Royal Air Force to bomb Dublin power stations and Galway and Cork. We didn't send our tanks across the border to shell the hill villages of Cavan or Monaghan or Louth or Donegal. Blair wouldn't dream of doing that, because he believes he's a moral man, he’s a civilized man. He wouldn't treat another nation like that.
But when the Israelis treat Lebanon like that, it's okay, and Blair doesn't want a ceasefire. You can’t have a real ceasefire. In other words, we've got to have the Lebanese on their knees to sign the dotted line, before we give them a ceasefire. And that dotted line means the disarmament of Hezbollah, which will be impossible for the Lebanese to do without restarting the civil war, because to disarm Hezbollah, you must use the army, and most of the Hezbollah are, of course, Shiite Muslims, and most of the army are Shiite Muslims. So you’re going to have brothers assaulting brothers to take their weapons away. It will not happen. However much you may wish it and however much I may wish it, it won't happen. And, again, this double morality: Blair wouldn't dream of attacking the Irish Republic because the IRA crossed the border from Ireland, but it’s quite in order for Israel to attack the Lebanese Republic because the Hezbollah crossed the border from Lebanon.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Fisk, speaking to us from Beirut, Lebanon. He had just returned from Tyre, where victims of the Qana bombing had been taken. We'll play part two of this interview tomorrow on Democracy Now
U.S. risks backlash in Mideast
Deadly Israeli assault strikes at core of U.S. foreign policy in region
ANALYSIS
By Peter Baker
The Washington Post
Updated: 10:40 p.m. CT July 30, 2006
The Israeli bombs that slammed into the Lebanese village of Qana yesterday did more than kill three dozen children and a score of adults. They struck at the core of U.S. foreign policy in the region and illustrated in heart-breaking images the enormous risks for Washington in the current Middle East crisis.
With each new scene of carnage in southern Lebanon, outrage in the Arab world and Europe has intensified against Israel and its prime sponsor, raising the prospect of a backlash resulting in a new Middle East quagmire for the United States, according to regional specialists, diplomats and former U.S. officials.
Although the United States has urged Israel to use restraint, it has also strongly defended the military assaults as a reasonable response to Hezbollah rocket attacks, a position increasingly at odds with allies that see a deadly overreaction. Analysts think that if the war drags on, as appears likely, it could leave the United States more isolated than at any time since the Iraq invasion three years ago and hindered in its foreign policy goals such as shutting down Iran's nuclear program and spreading democracy around the world.
"The arrows are all pointing in the wrong direction," said Richard N. Haass, who was President Bush's first-term State Department policy planning director. "The biggest danger in the short run is it just increases frustration and alienation from the United States in the Arab world. Not just the Arab world, but in Europe and around the world. People will get a daily drumbeat of suffering in Lebanon and this will just drive up anti-Americanism to new heights."
The White House recognizes the danger but thinks the missiles flying both ways across the Israel-Lebanon border carry with them a chance to finally break out of the stalemate of Middle East geopolitics. Bush and his advisers hope the conflict can destroy or at least cripple Hezbollah and in the process strike a blow against the militia's sponsor, Iran, while forcing the region to move toward final settlement of the decades-old conflict with Israel.
"He wants a resolution that will solve the problem," White House spokesman Tony Snow told reporters yesterday. "Not only do we feel sorrow for what happened in Qana, but also a determination that it is really important to remove the conditions that led to that."
"This moment of conflict in the Middle East is painful and tragic," Bush said in his radio address Saturday. "Yet it is also a moment of opportunity for broader change in the region. Transforming countries that have suffered decades of tyranny and violence is difficult, and it will take time to achieve. But the consequences will be profound for our country and the world."
Broader struggle with Iran
At the heart of the crisis for the United States is a broader struggle with Iran for influence in the Middle East, one that arguably has been going on since the Islamic revolution of 1979 and that has escalated during Bush's presidency. The United States not only backs Israel in the current war but also has accelerated weapons delivery to Israel. Hezbollah, on the other hand, has long acted as a surrogate for Iran, and in the past three weeks it has shown off Iranian weapons never before used by the radical group.
"It's really a proxy war between the United States and Iran," said David J. Rothkopf, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of "Running the World," a book on U.S. foreign policy. "When viewed in that context, it puts everything in a different light."
The Hezbollah attacks on Israel that touched off the latest conflict came just as international pressure on Iran to give up uranium enrichment had reached a crescendo. Bush aides suspect Iran orchestrated the attacks to distract attention from its nuclear program or to demonstrate the consequences of pushing too hard. "It's tempting to believe that," said a senior official involved in the crisis but not authorized to speak on the record. "Iran spends a very large amount of money on Hezbollah."
The president hopes the crisis will ultimately help him rally world leaders against Iran's nuclear program. Even as the U.N. Security Council today considers a peacekeeping force for Lebanon, it may vote on a U.S.-backed resolution to threaten sanctions if Iran does not suspend uranium enrichment in August.
"There's no question that this is going to stiffen up in the long run the resolve of the Europeans in dealing with Iran," said Henri J. Barkey, a former State Department official who teaches at Lehigh University. "Even if they don't like what Israel is doing," he said, they will recognize that Iran "is a menace."
Others are not so hopeful. Outside the White House, the mood among many foreign policy veterans in Washington is strikingly pessimistic, especially as leaders of Hezbollah and al-Qaeda, traditional rivals based in different Islamic sects, began calling for followers to take the fight to the enemy.
Analysts foresee a muddled outcome at best, in which Hezbollah survives Israel's airstrikes, foreign peacekeepers become bogged down, and U.S. relations with allies are severely strained. At worst, they said, Hezbollah and Iran feel emboldened, Islamic radicalism spreads, and a region smuggling fighters and weapons into Iraq fractures further along sectarian lines.
Increasingly isolated U.S.?
"What the conflict has exposed in a really clear way is how linked all these issues in the region are to each other," said Mara Rudman, a deputy national security adviser in the Clinton White House now at the liberal Center for American Progress. "The worst-case scenario . . . is a much more radicalized Islamic fundamentalist Middle East and much more isolated Israel and a much more isolated United States and fewer people to talk with."
Haass, the former Bush aide who leads the Council on Foreign Relations, laughed at the president's public optimism. "An opportunity?" Haass said with an incredulous tone. "Lord, spare me. I don't laugh a lot. That's the funniest thing I've heard in a long time. If this is an opportunity, what's Iraq? A once-in-a-lifetime chance?"
In the long run, he and others warn, the situation could cement the perception that the United States is so pro-Israel that a new generation of Arab youth will grow up perceiving Americans as enemies. The internal pressure on friendly governments in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere could force them to distance themselves from Washington or crack down on domestic dissidents to keep power. In either case, Bush may have little leverage to press for democratic reforms.
Jon B. Alterman, a Middle East specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, outlined "not even the worst-case scenario, but a bad-case scenario: South Lebanon is in shambles, Hezbollah gets credit for rebuilding it with Iranian money, Hezbollah grows stronger in Lebanon and it's not brought to heel. The reaction of surrounding states weakens them, radicalism rises, and they respond with more repression. None of this is especially far-fetched. And in all of this, the U.S. is seen as a fundamentally hostile party."
All of this is far too gloomy for administration officials, who see such dire forecasts as the predictable reactions of a foreign policy establishment that has produced decades of meaningless talks, paper peace agreements and unenforced U.N. resolutions that have not solved underlying issues in the Middle East.
"Some of the overheated rhetoric about how the United States can't work with anybody, we've lost our leadership in the world, is just completely ridiculous, and this crisis proves it," said the senior administration official involved in the crisis. "We are really indispensable to solving this crisis, and you're not going to solve this problem merely by passing another resolution."
While the diplomats work, the Pentagon is studying the possible impact on an already-stretched U.S. military. Commanders have diverted the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit and the Iwo Jima Expeditionary Strike Group from a training mission in Jordan where they were available as reserves for Iraq. Now they are on ships in the Mediterranean Sea to help with humanitarian efforts, and another unit has been put on alert as backup for Iraq.
The Pentagon has done contingency planning for U.S. troops participating in a multinational peacekeeping mission, but Bush aides have all but ruled out such a scenario. A more likely option, officials said, would have the United States provide command-and-control and logistics assistance.
U.S. troops in Lebanon?
Peter W. Rodman, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, said that officials are studying the possibility of putting troops in Lebanon but that it is too early to comment on what such a force would look like. "The concept is still under development, and discussion of any potential U.S. participation would be premature."
Some analysts acknowledge the varied challenges the United States faces but consider the possible gain worth the risk. "It's a Rubik's Cube. It's very, very difficult to resolve," said Peter Brookes, a former deputy assistant defense secretary under Bush who is now at the conservative Heritage Foundation. "But if we were able to dismantle Hezbollah, that would be very positive for the war on terror."
The White House is acutely aware of the dangers of stirring up anti-American sentiment in the region. "There may be times when people say that they're unhappy with whatever methods we pursue," the White House's Snow said last week. "We are confident that in the long run, people are going to be much happier living in freedom and democracy than, for instance, in nations that are occupied by terrorist organizations that try to hijack a democracy in its formative stages."
Staff writer Josh White contributed to this report.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14110834/from/RS.1/
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I am very saddened by what Israel did yet again at Qana (the prior Qana massacre in 1996 had lit the match for the 9/11 attack as Jim Bamford conveyed in his 'A Pretext for War' book as such is included after Ian Williams' article via http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/07/17/israel-s-attack-on-lebanon-resulted-in-9-11.php ).
Jim Bamford has an excellent article about the coming attack Iran in the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine as he was on with Ian Masters to discuss it this morning (can listen to such online via the latest 'Background Briefing' program when it gets added to the archive at http://www.ianmasters.org). Jim mentioned that the neocons had used CBS News as well. Hoping to get a transcript of his interview if possible... You are absolutely right about how few Americans know about 'A Clean Break', JINSA, etc. (Jim mentioned Michael Ledeen's association with JINSA in that Rolling Stone article and mentioned the 'A Clean Break' agenda in that interview with Ian Masters this morning). I blame the US mainstream media (the execs who are in control of it) as this was discussed as well in the second hour of Ian Masters' program this morning ('Live from the Live Coast') which also will be archived at http://www.ianmasters.org soon).
Last edited by Alpha on Mon Jul 31, 2006 7:56 pm; edited 1 time in total | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Jul 31, 2006 7:50 am Post subject: |
| Margolis also has another excellent piece below:
http://torontosun.canoe.ca/News/Columnists/Margolis_Eric/2006/07/30/1709698.html
July 30, 2006
The Final Say
Israeli soldiers are again being sent into the quagmire of Lebanon, being used as battering rams by the U.S. against Syria and Iran
By Eric Margolis
The spreading war in Lebanon has bared the bizarre contradictions and self-destructive nature of U.S. Mideast policy.
With one hand, the U.S. sends $30 million of food and blankets to Lebanon for the 20% of its population made refugees by Israel's bombing.
With the other, it rushes planeloads of precision bombs to Israel, one of which may have destroyed a UN border observer post, killing four, including a Canadian major.
In Rome, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last week blocked international efforts by Europe and Washington's Arab allies to halt the war. Not since Colin Powell's grotesque lies to the UN about Iraq has American diplomacy so debased itself. Small wonder hatred for America is surging across the Muslim world.
Rice also proclaimed the U.S. was going to midwife the birth of a "new Middle East" by means of the Lebanon war. This latest absurdity comes from the same fools and right-wing ideologues that fathered the Iraq debacle.
However, Canadian PM "Steve" Harper has no doubts. He suggested the deceased Canadian major and his UN-mandated post may have been at fault for being in the way of Israeli bombs, and that Israel's destruction of the southern third of Lebanon was a "measured response." Many Canadians must suspect they elected a prime minister who actually may be George Bush's intellectual equal.
In Washington, Vice President Dick Cheney and his neocon Praetorian Guard's true agenda is becoming clear. Israel's attempted destruction of Hezbollah is the first step in a long-planned bid to strip away Iran's allies and effectively turn Lebanon into a joint U.S.-Israeli protectorate. The second step will no doubt be an assault on Syria. Step three: Isolating and crippling Iran by a massive bombing campaign accompanied by renewed efforts to overthrow its government.
Attacking Hezbollah also serves as the long-predicted (by this column) "November surprise" to boost sagging Republican fortunes in U.S. mid-term elections.
Americans, steeped in deep ignorance and prejudice about the Mideast, are now being misled by the administration and its media allies that Lebanon is a new front in the so-called war on terrorism. As I recently learned doing radio shows across the U.S., a great many Americans cannot distinguish between Hezbollah, al-Qaida, Taliban, the PLO, Hamas, etc. All are terrorists. Listeners even called in to ask if the fighting in Lebanon was the prelude to Armageddon.
Bush has failed to stop al-Qaida and is stuck in lost wars in Iraq and Afghanistan costing $300 billion. His answer: Start a new crusade in Lebanon against the latest bogeyman, Hezbollah, and its Syrian and Iranian allies. War fever wins elections.
Having covered Israel's disastrous invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s, I am appalled it is again getting sucked into another bloody, dirty, pointless war there. Hezbollah, which represents as much as a third of Lebanon's population, won't be defeated by bombing or limited ground assaults: It fought Israel for 18 years and won.
Hezbollah's 3,000 tough fighters just battled Israel's mighty armed forces to a standstill for two weeks. Only the ethnic cleansing of southern Lebanon's Shias will push it back.
Israel's new government under Ehud Olmert is allowing itself to be used by Washington as a battering ram against Syria and Iran. It could likely have avoided this war and Hezbollah's rocket barrages by a low-key response, some ritual artillery fire, and the usual prisoner swap.
But Olmert allowed the chief of defence staff, an air force general, to take charge and go destroy much of Lebanon, guided by emotions, not sense. Now Israeli soldiers are being once again sent into the Lebanese quagmire.
The bitter lessons of Israel's 1980s disaster in Lebanon are forgotten, just as the U.S. military in Iraq forgot the lessons of Vietnam. A triumphant Hezbollah may even emerge as the victor of this battle. The big winner? Osama bin Laden.
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Correction: Due to an editing error, a reference was made in Eric Margolis' column last Sunday to Israeli soldiers being "murdered." It should have said they were "killed."
margolis@foreigncorrespondent.com | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
