| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Aug 18, 2006 8:29 am Post subject: |
| http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article1219260.ece
Robert Fisk: Desert of trapped corpses testifies to Israel's failure
Published: 15 August 2006
They made a desert and called it peace. Srifa - or what was once the village of Srifa - is a place of pancaked homes, blasted walls, rubble, starving cats and trapped corpses. But it is also a place of victory for the Hizbollah, whose fighters walked amid the destruction yesterday with the air of conquering heroes. So who is to blame for this desert? The Shia militia which provoked this war - or the Israeli air force and army which has laid waste to southern Lebanon and killed so many of its people?
There was no doubt what the village mukhtar thought. As three Hizbollah men - one wounded in the arm, the other carrying two ammunition clips and a two-way radio - passed us amid the piles of broken concrete, Hussein Kamel el-Din yelled to them: "Hallo, heroes!" Then he turned to me. "You know why they are angry? Because God didn't give them the opportunity of dying."
You have to be down here with the Hizbollah amid this terrifying destruction - way south of the Litani river, in the territory from which Israel once vowed to expel them - to realise the nature of the past month of war and of its enormous political significance to the Middle East. Israel's mighty army has already retreated from the neighbouring village of Ghandoutiya after losing 40 men in just over 36 hours of fighting. It has not even managed to penetrate the smashed town of Khiam where the Hizbollah were celebrating yesterday afternoon. In Srifa, I stood with Hizbollah men looking at the empty roads to the south and could see all the way to Israel and the settlement of Mizgav Am on the other side of the frontier. This is not the way the war was supposed to have ended for Israel.
Far from humiliating Iran and Syria - which was the Israeli-American plan - these two supposedly pariah states have been left untouched and the Hizbollah's reputation lionised across the Arab world. The "opportunity" which President George Bush and his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, apparently saw in the Lebanon war has turned out to be an opportunity for America's enemies to show the weakness of Israel's army. Indeed, last night, scarcely any Israeli armour was to be seen inside Lebanon - just one solitary tank could be glimpsed outside Bint Jbeil and the Israelis had retreated even from the "safe" Christian town of Marjayoun. It is now clear that the 30,000-strong Israeli army reported to be racing north to the Litani river never existed. In fact, it is unlikely that there were yesterday more than 1,000 Israeli soldiers left in all of southern Lebanon, although they did become involved in two fire-fights during the morning, hours after the UN-ceasefire went into effect.
Down the coast road from Beirut, meanwhile, came a massive exodus of tens of thousands of Shia families, bedding piled on the roofs of their cars , many of them sporting Hizbollah flags and pictures of Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbollah's chairman, on their windscreens. At the massive traffic jams around the broken motorway bridges and craters which litter the landscape, the Hizbollah was even handing out yellow and green "victory" flags, along with official notices urging parents not to allow children to play with the thousands of unexploded bombs that now lie across the landscape. At least one Lebanese child was killed by unexploded ordnance and another 15 were wounded yesterday.
But to what are these people returning? Haj Ali Dakroub, a 42-year old construction manager, lost part of his home in Israel's 1996 bombardment of Srifa. Now his entire house has been flattened. "What is here that Israel should destroy all this?" he asked. "We don't deny that the resistance was in Srifa. It was here before and it will be here in the future. But in this house lived only my family. So why would Israel bomb it?"
Well, I did happen to notice what appeared to be the casing of a missile hanging from the balcony of a much-damaged house facing the rubble of Ali Dakroub's home. And a group of Hizbollah militiamen, one of them with a pistol tucked into his trousers, walked past us nonchalantly and disappeared into an orchard. Was this, perhaps, where they kept some of their rockets?
Mr Dakroub wasn't saying. "I am going to rebuild my home with my two sons," he insisted. "Israel may come back in 10 years and destroy it all over again and then I'll just rebuild it all over again. This was a Hizbollah victory. The Israelis were able to defeat all the Arab countries in six days in 1967 but here they could not defeat the resistance in a month. These resistance men would come out of the ground and shoot back. They are still here."
"Come out of the ground" is an expression I have heard several times these past four weeks and I am beginning to suspect that many of the thousands of guerrillas did indeed shelter in caves and basements and tunnels, only to emerge to fire their missiles or to use their infra-red rockets on the Israeli army once it made the mistake of sending troops into Lebanon on the ground. And does anyone believe that the Hizbollah will submit to their own disarmament by a new international force of UN and Lebanese troops once - if - it arrives? There was a symbolic moment yesterday when Lebanese soldiers already based in southern Lebanon joined Hizbollah men in Srifa to clear the rubble of a house in which the bodies of an entire family were believed buried. Lebanese Red Cross and civil defence personnel - representatives of the civil power which is supposed to claw back its sovereignty from the Hizbollah - joined in the search. The mukhtar, who so blatantly regarded the Hizbollah as heroes, is also a government representative. And at the entrance to this shattered village still stands a poster of Nasrallah and the Iranian President Ali Khamenei.
Far from driving the Hizbollah north across the Litani river, Israel has entrenched them in their Lebanese villages as never before. | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Aug 18, 2006 8:31 am Post subject: |
| http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article1219684.ece
Robert Fisk: Lebanon's pain grows by the hour as death toll hits 1,300
Published: 17 August 2006
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.
Ignoring the dangers of unexploded ordnance, several Lebanese Shia Muslims returned to their destroyed homes to retrieve personal belongings - including family snapshots and albums that contain the narrative of their lives - only to fall between gaps in the broken apartment blocks and plunge dozens of feet into the darkness beneath. Among the last to die only minutes before the UN ceasefire came into effect was a child who was found in her dead mother's arms in Beirut.
How many of these dead would have survived if George Bush and Tony Blair had demanded an immediate ceasefire weeks ago will never be known. But many would have had the chance of life had Western governments not regarded this dirty war as an "opportunity" to create a "new" Middle East by humbling Iran and Syria. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Aug 18, 2006 9:56 am Post subject: * ROBERT FISK: ISRAEL WASN'T HOPING FOR THIS |
| * ROBERT FISK: ISRAEL WASN'T HOPING FOR THIS
http://tinyurl.com/rfbrj | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Aug 19, 2006 10:15 am Post subject: The US and Israel Stand Alone" - Interview with Jimmy C |
| The US and Israel Stand Alone" - Interview with Jimmy Carter
SPIEGEL ONLINE - August 15, 2006, 12:51 PM
URL: http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,431793,00.html
SPIEGEL Interview with Jimmy Carter
"The US and Israel Stand Alone"
Former US president Jimmy Carter speaks with DER SPIEGEL about the danger posed to American values by George W. Bush, the difficult situation in the Middle East and Cuba's ailing Fidel Castro.
AP
Former US president Jimmy Carter: "I don't think that Israel has any legal or moral justification for their massive bombing of the entire nation of Lebanon."
SPIEGEL: Mr. Carter, in your new book you write that only the American people can ensure that the US government returns to the country's old moral principles. Are you suggesting that the current US administration of George W. Bush of acting immorally?
Carter: There's no doubt that this administration has made a radical and unpressured departure from the basic policies of all previous administrations including those of both Republican and Democratic presidents.
SPIEGEL: For example?
Carter: Under all of its predecessors there was a commitment to peace instead of preemptive war. Our country always had a policy of not going to war unless our own security was directly threatened and now we have a new policy of going to war on a preemptive basis. Another very serious departure from past policies is the separation of church and state, which I describe in the book. This has been a policy since the time of Thomas Jefferson and my own religious beliefs are compatible with this. The other principle that I described in the book is basic justice. We've never had an administration before that so overtly and clearly and consistently passed tax reform bills that were uniquely targeted to benefit the richest people in our country at the expense or the detriment of the working families of America.
SPIEGEL: You also mentioned the hatred for the United States throughout the Arab world which has ensued as a result of the invasion of Iraq. Given this circumstance, does it come as any surprise that Washington's call for democracy in the Middle East has been discredited?
Carter: No, as a matter of fact, the concerns I exposed have gotten even worse now with the United States supporting and encouraging Israel in its unjustified attack on Lebanon.
SPIEGEL: But wasn't Israel the first to get attacked?
Carter: I don't think that Israel has any legal or moral justification for their massive bombing of the entire nation of Lebanon. What happened is that Israel is holding almost 10,000 prisoners, so when the militants in Lebanon or in Gaza take one or two soldiers, Israel looks upon this as a justification for an attack on the civilian population of Lebanon and Gaza. I do not think that's justified, no.
SPIEGEL: Do you think the United States is still an important factor in securing a peaceful solution to the Middle East crisis?
Carter: Yes, as a matter of fact as you know ever since Israel has been a nation the United States has provided the leadership. Every president down to the ages has done this in a fairly balanced way, including George Bush senior, Gerald Ford, and others including myself and Bill Clinton. This administration has not attempted at all in the last six years to negotiate or attempt to negotiate a settlement between Israel and any of its neighbors or the Palestinians.
SPIEGEL: What makes you personally so optimistic about the effectiveness of diplomacy? You are, so to speak, the father of Camp David negotiations.
Carter: When I became president we had had four terrible wars between the Arabs and Israelis (behind us). And I under great difficulty, particularly because Menachim Begin was elected, decided to try negotiation and it worked and we have a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt for 27 years that has never been violated. You never can be certain in advance that negotiations on difficult circumstances will be successful, but you can be certain in advance if you don't negotiate that your problem is going to continue and maybe even get worse.
SPIEGEL: But negotiations failed to prevent the burning of Beirut and bombardment of Haifa.
Carter: I'm distressed. But I think that the proposals that have been made in the last few days by the (Lebanese) Prime Minister (Fuoad) Siniora are quite reasonable. And I think they should declare an immediate cease-fire on both sides, Hezbollah said they would comply, I hope Israel will comply, and then do the long, slow, tedious negotiation that is necessary to stabilize the northern border of Israel completely. There has to be some exchange of prisoners. There have been successful exchanges of prisoners between Israel and the Palestinians in the past and that's something that can be done right now.
SPIEGEL: Should there be an international peacekeeping force along the Lebanese-Israeli border?
Carter: Yes.
SPIEGEL: And can you imagine Germans soldiers taking part?
Carter: Yes, I can imagine Germans taking part.
SPIEGEL: .. even with their history?
Carter: Yes. That would be certainly satisfactory to me personally, and I think most people believe that enough time has passed so that historical facts can be ignored.
SPIEGEL: One main points of your book is the rather strange coalition between Christian fundamentalists and the Republican Party. How can such a coalition of the pious lead to moral catastrophes like the Iraqi prison scandal in Abu Ghraib and torture in Guantanamo?
Carter: The fundamentalists believe they have a unique relationship with God, and that they and their ideas are God's ideas and God's premises on the particular issue. Therefore, by definition since they are speaking for God anyone who disagrees with them is inherently wrong. And the next step is: Those who disagree with them are inherently inferior, and in extreme cases -- as is the case with some fundamentalists around the world -- it makes your opponents sub-humans, so that their lives are not significant. Another thing is that a fundamentalist can't bring himself or herself to negotiate with people who disagree with them because the negotiating process itself is an indication of implied equality. And so this administration, for instance, has a policy of just refusing to talk to someone who is in strong disagreement with them -- which is also a radical departure from past history. So these are the kinds of things that cause me concern. And, of course, fundamentalists don't believe they can make mistakes, so when we permit the torture of prisoners in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, it's just impossible for a fundamentalist to admit that a mistake was made.
SPIEGEL: So how does this proximity to Christian fundamentalism manifest itself politically?
AP
US President George Bush pauses during remarks about the Middle East while joined by Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Carter: Unfortunately, after Sept., there was an outburst in America of intense suffering and patriotism, and the Bush administration was very shrewd and effective in painting anyone who disagreed with the policies as unpatriotic or even traitorous. For three years, I'd say, the major news media in our country were complicit in this subservience to the Bush administration out of fear that they would be accused of being disloyal. I think in the last six months or so some of the media have now begun to be critical. But it's a long time coming.
SPIEGEL: Take your fellow Democrat Senator Hillary Clinton. These days she is demanding the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. But she, like many others, allowed President Bush to invade Iraq under a false pretext.
Carter: That's correct.
SPIEGEL: Was the whole country in danger of losing its core values?
Carter: For a while, yes. As you possibly know, historically, our country has had the capability of self-correcting our own mistakes. This applied to slavery in 1865, it applied to legal racial segregation a hundred years later or so. It applied to the Joe McCarthy era when anti-communism was in a fearsome phase in the country like terrorism now. So we have an ability to correct ourselves and I believe that nowadays there is a self-correction taking place. In my opinion the election results in Connecticut (Eds: The primary loss of war supporter Senator Joseph Lieberman) were an indication that Americans realized very clearly that we made a mistake in going into Iraq and staying there too long.
SPIEGEL: Now even President Bush appears to have learned something from the catastrophe in Iraq. During his second term he has taken a more multilateral approach and has seemed to return to international cooperation.
Carter: I think the administration learned a lesson, but I don't see any indication that the administration would ever admit that it did make a mistake and needed to learn a lesson. I haven't seen much indication, by the way, of your premise that this administration is now reconciling itself to other countries. I think that at this moment the United States and Israel probably stand more alone than our country has in generations.
SPIEGEL: You've written about your meeting with Fidel Castro. He appears seriously ill now and Cuban exiles are partying already in the streets of Miami. You are probably not in the mood to join them.
Carter: No, that's true. Just because someone is ill I don't think there should be a celebration of potential death. And my own belief is that Fidel Castro will recover. He is two years younger than I am, so he's not beyond hope.
DPA
Cuban President Fidel Castro and former US president Jimmy Carter at a baseball game in 2002 in Havana.
SPIEGEL: You sought to normalize relations with Castro, but that never happened. Has anything been achieved through Cuba's isolation?
Carter: In my opinion, the embargo strengthens Castro and perpetuates communism in Cuba. A maximum degree of trade, tourism, commerce, visitation between our country and Cuba would bring an earlier end to Castro's regime.
SPIEGEL: You've been called the moral conscience of your country. How do you look at it yourself? Are you an outsider in American politics these days or do you represent a political demographic that could maybe elect the next US president?
Carter: I think I represent the vast majority of Democrats in this country. I think there is a substantial portion of American people that completely agree with me. I can't say a majority because we have fragmented portions in our country and divisions concerning gun control and the death penalty and abortion and gay marriage.
SPIEGEL: As president, your performance was often criticized. But the work you did after leaving office to promote human rights has been widely praised. Has life been unfair to you?
Carter: I've been lucky in my life. Everything that I've done has brought great pleasure and gratification to me and my wife. I had four years in the White House -- it was not a failure. For someone to serve as president of the United States you can't say it is a political failure. And we have had the best years of our lives since we left the White House. We've had a very full life.
SPIEGEL: Do you feel you achieved even more out of office than you did as president?
Carter: Well, I've used the prestige and influence of having been a president of the United States as effectively as possible. And secondly, I've still been able to carry out my commitments to peace and human rights and environmental quality and freedom and democracy and so forth.
SPIEGEL: Does America need a regime change?
Carter: As I've said before, there is a self-corrective aspect to our country. And I think that the first step is going to be in the November election this year. This year, the Democrats have good chance of capturing one of the houses of Congress. I think the Senate is going to be a very close decision. My oldest son is running for the US Senate in the state of Nevada. And if just he and a few others can be successful then you have the US Senate in Democratic hands and that will make a profound and immediate difference.
SPIEGEL: Mr. Carter, thank you for the interview. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Aug 20, 2006 4:36 am Post subject: |
| http://www.independent.co.uk
No wonder the UN can't find volunteers
Europeans are sick and tired of paying to keep the peace between Israelis and Arabs
By Robert Fisk
08/19/06 "The Independent" -- -- Israel is keen to see the implementation of UN Security Council Resolutions 1559 and 1701, which demand the disarmament of Hizbollah - an organisation which Israel so dismally failed to disarm over the past six weeks after wrecking Lebanon and slaughtering more than a thousand Lebanese civilians.
And I have to say that there is a certain irony in watching Israel's diplomats paying such close attention to the wording of these resolutions and the need to abide by them after they have spent years trashing the very same UN force in Lebanon that is supposed to protect them in future.
Unifil, the so-called United Nations Interim Force In Lebanon, has been sitting in the south of the country for 28 years and has been the butt of Israel's jokes and slander and calumny for all of that time. I recall how the Israelis claimed that the Irish battalion - since withdrawn - were drunk or anti-semitic, how UN officers lied, how a Fijian commander was spreading syphilis among the women of Qana, the town whose inhabitants have just been massacred by Israel's forces for the second time in a decade.
But now, the new, reinforced Unifil is supposed to provide the buffer behind which Israel - whose army so dismally failed to protect its people in this latest war - can feel safe.
One cannot but wish the Israelis always paid such attention to UN resolutions. If only they would be so keen to adhere to UN Security Council Resolution 242, for example, as they are anxious to ensure Hizbollah and the Lebanese army abide by 1559 And 1701. Few readers will need to be reminded that 242 calls for the withdrawal of Israeli troops from territory occupied in the 1967 war in return for the security of all states (including Israel) in the area.
Now of course, Hizbollah is also playing fast and loose with the UN. It illegally crossed the UN Blue Line in southern Lebanon on 12 July to kill three Israeli soldiers and capture two others. They have already made it clear that they do not intend to be disarmed and their members - "schoolteachers, builders, university undergraduates" (I particularly admired the latter conceit) - would remain south of the Litani river, arms out of sight but not out of mind. And if 1701 is meant for Hizbollah's rubbish bin, then what is 242 worth for the Palestinians?
But there is something far more dangerous on the loose in southern Lebanon, something intimately linked with the hell-disaster into which we have turned Iraq. The famous 3,000 French troops that were supposed to arrive in Lebanon to support the Lebanese army have suddenly been reduced to 400 French engineers.
And the Spanish and the Italians, it transpires, would like to know a little bit more about the mysterious UN mandate under which their troops would be operating before sacrificing their young men's lives in Lebanon. The Spanish have not forgotten the price they paid for supporting the "coalition of the willing" - so soon to become the "coalition of the unwilling" - in Iraq. They don't want more bombs on the Madrid railway system. And the Italians are a little tired of state funerals for their fallen in Iraq.
True, the French have not forgotten their 58 murdered soldiers at the Drakkar building in Beirut on 23 October 1983, when suicide bombers associated with the Hizbollah struck them as part of the "Multinational Force" in Lebanon, another American creation. But France has watched the collapse of the American project in Iraq and is suspicious that its soldiers - despite the prospect of renewing in ghostly form the mandat français of the 1920s and 1930s in Lebanon - could end up in the same predicament as those armies which decided to follow George W Bush's into Iraq's bloody swamp.
Who is actually going to disarm Hizbollah? Will they in fact be disarmed? And what will we do if they are not? I could not help smiling when I heard Israel's Dan Gillerman announcing on the BBC yesterday that if the UN failed to disarm Hizbollah, Israel would have to do the job - despite the fact that it has patently proved itself militarily incapable of any such task. And the latest extraordinary demand by Israel is that Muslim nations who do not recognise the State of Israel will not be allowed to join the expanded Unifil force in southern Lebanon.
What in the name of God is going on? Well, I will hazard a terrible guess. The Iraq fiasco - and the growing débâcle in Afghanistan has drained the will of Nato nations to commit troops to peacekeeping operations, certainly for missions which may involve confrontations and violence with Muslims. And those Muslim nations which might be persuaded to join such a mission - Turkey excluded, of course - are going to be rigorously excluded. Which means that despite the deployment of Lebanese troops to southern Lebanon, the famous ceasefire in the south of the country is doomed.
And I'll hazard another guess. Europeans are getting sick and tired of funding and sacrificing their lives to keep the peace between Israelis and Arabs. Repeatedly in European capitals, I sense a growing anger that America should wreck all chances of peace by its uncritical support of Israel, while European taxpayers are told to hand over billions of euros to rebuild the cities of Gaza and Lebanon, which Israel has vandalised.
One European diplomat in Beirut has put forward the idea that the UN should open some form of internationally controlled escrow account into which Arabs and Israelis would contribute in order to pay for their repeated and dirty wars. Let the Arabs pay for the damage to Haifa. Let the Israelis (which I suppose means the US) pay for the billions of dollars squandered by the riff-raff of the Israeli air force in smashing Lebanon's infrastructure. Why should we go on paying for these filthy conflicts?
Maybe it is our guilty conscience. Heaven knows, we should have one. It was Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara who supported Bush's decision to delay a ceasefire in Lebanon - support which cost the lives of hundreds of Lebanese civilians who would otherwise be alive today. In Qana, they have just buried 29 of the civilians killed in Israel's murderous attack on the town. No doubt our dear Prime Minister was thinking of them yesterday. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Aug 20, 2006 5:41 am Post subject: “Honor First”; the liberation of Lebanon |
| “Honor First”; the liberation of Lebanon
By Mike Whitney
“To confront this accursed plan, to thwart the goals of this war, to fight the battle to liberate, what remains of our land and our prisoners, I state categorically under no circumstances will we accept any term that is insulting to our country, our people, or our resistance. We will not accept any formula at the expense of the national interest, national sovereignty and national independence, especially after all these sacrifices, no matter how long the confrontation lasts and no matter how numerous the sacrifices may be. Our main and true slogan is “Honor First”. Sheik Hassan Nasrallah
“The resistance is a weapon at the service of the entire nation. It has never acted against anyone but the Israeli occupation.” Talal Salman “A Guarantee Of Victory”
08/19/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- One picture tells the whole story. The photograph shows a long column of Israeli soldiers, grimy and bedraggled, limping southwards towards the Israeli border. The lead soldier looks vacuously at the camera with an expression of pure gloom and fatigue. In the background a soldier is seen comforting another who is crying inconsolably.
This is what defeat looks like.
Back in Israel, the headlines are splattered with every detail of the ongoing withdrawal from Lebanon. The op-ed pages and talk shows lash out at anyone even remotely involved with the month-long debacle. Prime Minister Olmert has become the favorite target of the media’s scathing criticism and the brunt of every joke. His public approval has dipped from a pre-war high of 80% to a meager 40%. Meanwhile, political rival Benjamin Netanyahu’s popularity has soared to a hearty 57% making him the likely successor if Olmert is forced to step down.
Israel is drowning in collective angst and self-pity. The defeat has shattered the national sense of self confidence and well being. A joke that is circulating in Tel Aviv opines that Ariel Sharon’s condition suddenly worsened “when he found out what was happening in Lebanon.”
The punch-line epitomizes the general state of malaise in Israel.
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.
In Lebanon, the extent of the damage is just beginning to be grasped. Whole cities in the south have been laid to waste and most of the vital infrastructure has been ruined. Barucha Peller summed it up this way in a Counterpunch article “This Pain has no Ceasefire”:
“The walls of homes that once protected families and cradled their lives are now in pieces, shreds, fine dust. Sift through the rubble. Kick the rubble. Stand still, silent, alone with the absoluteness of destruction and accompanied by the millions of shattered pieces of everything that was here before. Leave the rubble. Try to forget. Walk away from the terrible sight. But your mind is in pieces, lives in pieces, people who never again will stand in the doorway with greetings. You can walk away. There is a ceasefire. But missiles fall, they fall, not from the skies, but behind Lebanese eyes, they fall forever in memory, they are still crashing into what once was.”
“The absoluteness of destruction”; the faces that will never reappear “in the doorway”; this nagging, life-long suffering goes unrecorded in the Israeli media where the national obsession has turned to finger-pointing and empty recriminations. The lives and the civilization that’s been decimated are a mere footnote to Israel’s violated sense of security and the humiliation of losing to an Arab adversary. Looking at the papers, it’s easy to believe that the entire population is completely unaware of the misery they’ve caused. Instead, one gets the uneasy feeling that the anger is just beginning to mount and could wash across Lebanon in a second wave of hostilities.
Lebanon has been an embarrassing defeat for Israel, but this is probably just Round One. As public rage grows, it will be more and more tempting for Olmert to disregard the ceasefire and go on the offensive. He needs some way to acquit himself in the eyes of his people and revenge is an unfailing cure-all. He also needs to prove that he can be a reliable ally to the Bush team who gave him carte blanche to pulverize Hezbollah while they stalled the ceasefire at the UN. Israel needs to show that they can hold up their end of the bargain by cleaning up matters in their own back yard. Olmert’s failure will not go down well with the Washington neocons who’ve worked tirelessly to provide him with all the weaponry and support he needed.
According to Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, Israel originally planned an attack on Lebanon for September or October. This would have added an element of surprise to the war which could have been disastrous for Lebanon. It also may have affected the results of the 2006 congressional elections in the US.
The Bush administration has made no effort to conceal their involvement in the conflict. They provided logistical and material support in the form of satellite-intelligence and precision-guided missiles, and they blocked all efforts at the UN for an immediate ceasefire. Bush has stubbornly portrayed the war as “part of a broader struggle between freedom and terror”, but his platitudes have had less impact on public perceptions than the photos of bombed-out airports, bridges and factories which appear daily in the media.
The biggest champion of the war has been Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who characterized the vast and premeditated devastation as “birth pangs”. There now hangs a banner in downtown Beirut with a ghoulish picture of Rice with fangs dripping with blood which says, “The massacre of children at Qana is a gift from Rice”. The Farragamo-draped princess has quickly become the most reviled diplomat in US history. Move over Henry Kissinger.
It’s no surprise that she was rebuffed by President Siniora and told she wasn’t welcome in Lebanon until the terms of a ceasefire were in place.
Rice’s most revealing statement appeared in a USA Today article when she admitted that the Bush administration saw the conflict as an “opportunity to create a fundamentally different situation” in the Middle East.
“Opportunity”? Is that how the Washington mandarins see the utter destruction of an American-friendly ally?
Condi’s bromides only confirm Nasrallah’s claims that the plan to invade Lebanon is actually part of a broader strategy for establishing US/Israeli hegemony throughout the region so that they can “exclusively manage its affairs and resources”. The main obstacles to this “New Middle East” are the resistance organizations Hamas and Hezbollah as well as Syria and Iran. Bush and Olmert conspired to disarm Hezbollah by pushing Syria out of Lebanon and creating a political climate where (they believed) Hezbollah would be forced to give up their weapons.
Their plan failed. Hezbollah joined the government but maintained its guerilla network at the same time; accumulating the Katyushas and sophisticated anti-tank rockets it needed to take on Israel’s advancing army. It should be noted that Hezbollah was the only entity in Lebanon that wasn’t swept up in the heady revival of Beirut and vigilantly awaited Israel’s next rampage.
Their success in battling Israel is due in large part to the Russian-made Kornet anti-tank rockets they obtained from Syria. As reported in the UK Telegraph the rockets are “some of the best in the world” and “require serious training to operate which could be beyond the capabilities of some supposedly regular armies in the Middle East….It is laser-guided, has a range of three miles and carries a double-warhead capable of penetrating reactive amour on Israeli Merkava Tanks.”
Hezbollah used their anti-tank missiles with lethal efficiency during the campaign taking out an estimated 20 tanks, armored vehicles and buildings where troops were located. It was a critical part of the conflict and had a profound effect on the outcome.
Still, there’s little chance that Hezbollah’s victory will stop Israel from restarting the war. America and Israel are ideologically committed to establishing their mutual hegemony throughout the Middle East and they won’t be deterred by a bloody nose in south Lebanon. Israel will retool and return with greater determination to crush the resistance and set up a proxy government in Beirut. So far, they’ve enlisted the support of Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nepal, France and Denmark to patrol the southern border while Germany has offered “a rather substantive maritime component which could patrol and secure the whole of the Lebanese coast.” The German ambassador said, “We could also offer a substantial border patrol along the Syrian border.” (Al Jazeera) Germany certainly understands that their actions will establish a de-facto blockade which serves US/Israeli interests alone. This illustrates how Olmert and Bush have manipulated the UN to compromise Lebanon’s sovereignty and create a permanent state of siege. If Israel is able to cut Hezbollah’s supply-lines they can easily move in and crush them at a later date.
So, the US and Israel have found accomplices they need to help them achieve their goals of reshaping the Middle East and extending America’s dominance throughout the oil-rich region. If they succeed, they will have a stranglehold on the world’s most crucial natural resources and will be able to control the growth of China, India, Japan, and other potential rivals in the 21st century. Israel will also play a central role as regional leader in the oil trade; opening pipeline routes from Ceyhan to the Far East and from Kirkuk to Haifa. (check “Triple Alliance”: The US, Turkey, Israel and the war on Lebanon” Michel Chossudovsky)
But we shouldn’t underestimate the growing strength of non state actors and guerilla forces. In Iraq, the resistance has brought the world’s only superpower to a grinding standstill; frustrating all attempts to establish security, rebuild infrastructure, or transport vital resources.
Similarly, Hezbollah has won a stunning victory against a high-tech and well-disciplined Israeli army. They have shown the world that they are resourceful and ferocious fighters capable of forcing a fully-armed modern army of 30,000 men to withdrawal. That’s no small feat.
They have shattered the illusion of Israeli invincibility and emboldened a new generation of Arab youths to see beyond their present subjugation and despair and aspire to reclaim their countries from the corrupt US-backed regimes.
The imperial juggernaut will continue lurching recklessly through the Middle East until it is worn-down piecemeal by the bold actions of the resistance. Iraq and Lebanon foreshadow an even wider war extending from the Caspian to the Red Sea; destabilizing oil supplies and overturning the teetering Arab monarchies.
Bush and Olmert have thrown open Pandora’s Box thinking they can contain the chaos within, but have failed to achieve any of their objectives. They continue to misread the lessons of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon. High-altitude bombing and trigger-happy soldiers only swell the ranks of the resistance and feed their determination. If Bush and Olmert choose to fight a generation-long 4-G (4th Generation) war, they should at least consider the modest goals set out by their adversary, Hassan Nasrallah, in a recent public statement:
“We are not a classic army. We are waging guerilla warfare Therefore what is important is the number of losses we inflict on the Israeli enemy. No matter how deep the incursion the Israeli enemy might accomplish, and the enemy has great capabilities in this area, it will not accomplish the goal of this incursion, preventing the shelling of the settlements in north of occupied Palestine, This shelling will continue no matter how deep the ground incursion and the reoccupation the Zionist enemy is trying to accomplish. The occupation of any inch of our Lebanese land will further motivate us to continue and escalate the resistance…In the ground war we will have the upper hand. In the ground war , the criterion is the attrition of the enemy rather than what territory does or does not remain in our hands because we are not fighting with the methods of a regular army we will definitely regain any land occupied by the enemy after inflicting great losses on it”.
Bush would be wise to pay attention to Nasrallah’s warnings. The conflict that the US and Israel are facing has no central battlefield and no timeline. It is war against men who know every street and every alleyway, and every cave in every mountain. It is “death by a thousand lashes”; engaging and killing the enemy and then disappearing into the shadows. The conflict only ends when every American and Israeli soldier has left Arab soil. This is a “no win” situation. Our leaders should recognize this and withdrawal.
As the resistance continues to mushroom in Iraq and Lebanon, we’re bound to see more devastation, more retreating armies, and more hand-wringing in Washington and Tel Aviv.
It could all be so easily avoided. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Aug 20, 2006 8:33 am Post subject: Fisk: A land reduced to rubble |
| Fisk: A land reduced to rubble
'These places now look like French villages did after German bombardment during the First World War'
By Robert Fisk
08/20/06 "The Independent" -- --
Sunday 13 August
A series of profound explosions from the south of Beirut; the Israelis "jostling the rubble" of the suburbs, as we now say, although who knows how many corpses lie in this pit? An Israeli calls me from Los Angeles. She thinks she has discovered a reason why the Lebanese Red Cross may have been targeted by the Israeli air force. "I will send you a fax proving that they are helping the Hizbollah," she says.
I await the fax, which turns out to be a New York Times report from southern Lebanon, recording how the Red Cross gave medical assistance to wounded members of the Hizbollah. I call Rachel back. The Lebanese Red Cross helped wounded American marines after they were suicide-bombed in Beirut in 1983, I tell her, and they gave help - and were criticised for it by their Lebanese neighbours - to wounded Israelis after a suicide bombing in Tyre the following year. Isn't it the duty of all Red Cross teams to help all those who are suffering? "Perhaps, but they should have detained the Hizbollah," comes the voice from Los Angeles. What? The Red Cross is now supposed to imprison Israel's enemies?
I receive another fax from Rachel. "I am for dialog (sic) but not with the Devil, Nazis et al," she says. "Reality and justice are derived from the ability to discern between good and evil, between truth and lies, and between the fireman and the arsonist. Keep safe."
A ceasefire at 8am tomorrow, or so we are told.
Monday 14 August
The Israelis and the Hizbollah fought to the end, 200 rockets into Israel and a few final bombing runs on the suburbs of Beirut. Among the last to die was a small child in the Beirut Dahiya district whose body was found clutched in her dead mother's arms. A final kick to the civilians of Lebanon, just in time to meet the truce deadline.
Cody and I set off to southern Lebanon over smashed bridges, round vast bomb craters, beating the earth down to allow Hassan's "Death Car" to drive over them, trying to avoid the thousands of unexploded shells lying in the fields. So many bombs on the Litani that the river has partly changed its course and we walk into the water. We drive to Srifa, a village which clearly was - heaven preserve us from these clichés - a Hizbollah "stronghold", but whose ruins now cover dozens of civilian dead. I am photographing the wreckage - using real film because I still feel that digital cameras lose definition - and I find that I see through the lens more pain than I see with my own eyes. I think this is because the sheer extent of the bomb damage is focused in a frame. Later, I look at my developed pictures in Beirut and am appalled by the level of destruction. Some of my pictures look like the photographs of French villages after German bombardment during my dad's First World War. They will find 36 bodies under the Srifa rubble upon which I have walked.
Epic traffic jams on the way back to Beirut as hundreds of thousands of Muslim Shias try to return to homes which in many cases no longer exist. Cody, normally a cool customer, jumps out of the car in rage to remonstrate with a man who refuses to reverse up the road to let our queue of cars through to Beirut. "The arsehole says the reverse in his car doesn't work," he says in fury. I remind Cody that Captain Cook lost his life when, after many years, he lost his temper with a native and got pierced by a spear.
Tuesday 15 August
I am sending my dispatch to The Independent from an internet café when an American nurse whom I have known for years walks up to me. "We have a badly burned woman in emergency and we've just had to tell her that her three children are dead," she says. And how did she take this news? "You can imagine. We found out she'd had her tubes tied so she can't have any more children." And her husband? "Dead," the nurse replies.
The Lebanese papers carry the news of the death in action of David Grossman's son Uri, killed fighting the Hizbollah in southern Lebanon. That Grossman, a brilliant and compassionate writer well known in Lebanon - his books are on sale here and the local newspaper reports are written with dignity - should suffer in this way seems especially cruel. I turn to his work on the Palestinians of Israel, which nestles in the bookcase beside my desk. "Every acrobat knows the secret of walking a tightrope over an abyss; the Arabs in Israel have learnt something even more difficult - to stand still on the wire," Grossman wrote in 1993. "To live a provisional life that eternally suspends and dulls the will... So it has been for decades, for hundreds of thousands of acrobats."
Wednesday 16 August
Sixteen-hour power cuts, worse than before the ceasefire. Plenty of oil tankers in Cyprus but the shipowners - and the insurers - are cravenly waiting for Israeli permission to sail their vessels to Lebanon. Hizbollah says it doesn't want to disarm. The French say they want a clearer mandate before sending troops to join the international force in southern Lebanon. I hear the ceasefire creaking.
Thursday 17 August
All the talk is of a "robust" international force and my journalistic colleagues have become besotted by the word "robust". The BBC talks about a robust mandate for a robust army and robust United Nations peacekeeping. It reminds me of the Nato manoeuvres in Germany that I watched back in the 1980s when the Reuters correspondent expressed his belief that generals loved missiles because they could no longer have erections. In the Arab world, to be arrogant is to "have a big nose", and the problem is that whenever generals in Lebanon become "robust", they tend to get their noses chopped off. We shall see.
Friday 18 August
Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbollah leader, has appeared on television, talking like a president - though admittedly a more impressive one than the Syrian satrap currently installed in his palace above Beirut - but acting as if the Shias of Lebanon will now define the future of the country.
Through my office window I watch the Shia poor still driving back to the blasted south of Lebanon, mattresses on the roofs of their cars, mothers and babies in the back, interspersed on the roads with Lebanese troop trucks, tanks transporters and armoured vehicles which will soon be joined - or not, as the case may be - by foreign troops to augment the UN army in the south.
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Aug 21, 2006 7:52 am Post subject: Israel and the US are still focused on the wrong issues |
| Israel and the US are still focused on the wrong issues
http://www.guardian.co.uk/syria/story/0,,1854638,00.html
Every major political issue - Lebanon, Iraq, radicalism - links back to the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Rami G Khouri
Monday August 21, 2006
The Guardian
We have a very simple choice before us in the Middle East: we can get serious about working together to give the people of this region a chance to live normal lives in peace and security; or we can all act silly in the ways of provincial chieftains, as many public figures in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Israel and the US have done in recent days.
The chances of achieving a region-wide peace in the Middle East are slim to non existent right now, because the key non-Arab players are focusing on the wrong issues. They are trying to manage or eliminate the symptoms of our region's tensions instead of addressing the root causes. Hizbullah and Iran are among the best examples of this.
Israel and the US are obsessed with disarming Hizbullah and confronting Iran. But a quarter of a century ago neither of these issues existed. How Hizbullah and Iran became so problematic is worth recalling. Until 1979 Iran under the Shah was a close ally and friend of the US and Israel, and Hizbullah was not even born. What happened in the three decades from the mid-70s to today? Many things. The most consistent one was that we all allowed the Arab-Israeli conflict to fester unresolved. Its bitterness kept seeping out from its Palestine-Israel core to corrode many other dimensions of the region.
The constant clashes between Israel and Lebanon since the late 1960s derived heavily from the unresolved Palestinian-Israeli conflict that started with the 1948 war. Since Iran's 1979 revolution Islamist revolutionary zeal has found effective expression in its close association with Hizbullah, which Iranian revolutionary guards were instrumental in establishing and training. Tehran's assistance to Hamas today follows a similar pattern. A non-Arab power such as Iran exploits the resentment against Israel and the US throughout the Arab world to make political inroads into Arab regions. If the Arab-Israeli conflict had been resolved decades ago, Iran would not have this opportunity.
Hizbullah has many people working backwards. While the American-Israeli effort to disarm Hizbullah aims mainly to protect Israel, the fact is that Hizbullah has developed its military capability primarily in response to a need to protect Lebanon from repeated Israeli attacks in the past four decades. (Lebanese calls to disarm Hizbullah are motivated more by a desire to prevent the party from bringing more ruin from Israeli attacks, or to prevent it from taking over the country's political system and aligning it with Syria and Iran.)
The way to end Hizbullah's status as the only non-state-armed group in Lebanon is to rewind the reel, and go to the heart of the problem that caused Hizbullah to develop its formidable military capabilities in the first place. If we solve the Arab-Israeli conflict in a fair manner, according to UN resolutions, we would eliminate two critical political forces that now nourish Hizbullah's armed defiance: the Israeli threat to Lebanon, and the ability of Syria and Iran to exploit the ongoing conflict with Israel by working through Lebanon.
Iran has its own reasons, including some valid ones, for developing a full nuclear fuel cycle, though the potential atomic weapons capability that derives from this is more problematic. Iran's political meddling in Lebanon and other Arab lands is another issue. Yet it is linked umbilically to the assertion of Islamist identity, Shia empowerment, anti-western defiance and domestic challenges to autocratic Arab regimes - four dynamics that have often been associated with, and exacerbated by, the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict.
Israel's persistent attempts to secure its place in this region by military force have always generated a greater Arab will to fight it, now also supported by Iran. Local attempts to secure its borders - occupations, surrogate armies, cross-border attacks, separation walls, massive punishment and humiliation of civilian populations - have not worked for Israel, and only generate more determined and capable resistance, as with Hizbullah. Israel will also fail in its desire to subcontract its security to foreign or regional states, as it is attempting to do through the international force in south Lebanon, or by having Turkey prevent arms shipments to Hizbullah from Iran.
Every tough issue in this region - Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran, terrorism, radicalism, armed resistance groups - is somehow linked to the consequences of the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The politicians and government leaders who dominate this region, or engage it from western capitals, all look like rank amateurs or intemperate brutes as they flail at symptoms instead of grappling with the core issue that has seen this region spin off into ever greater circles of violence since the 1970s.
A comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace agreement is achievable from the Arab side, to judge by the repeated offering of the 2002 Arab summit peace proposal. Israel and the US must quickly decide if they too can become sensible and work for a comprehensive peace as the most effective way to reduce and then reverse the cycles of resentment, radicalism and resistance that now define much of the Arab-Islamic Middle East.
· Rami G Khouri is the editor of the Beirut-based Daily Star
© 2006 Rami G Khouri/Agence Global | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Aug 25, 2006 6:41 am Post subject: Hizbollah's reconstruction of Lebanon is winning the loyalty |
| http://www.independent.co.uk
Hizbollah's reconstruction of Lebanon is winning the loyalty of disaffected Shia
By Robert Fisk
08/24/06 "The Independent" -- -- Hizbollah has trumped both the UN army and the Lebanese government by pouring hundreds of millions of dollars - most of it almost certainly from Iran - into the wreckage of southern Lebanon and Beirut's destroyed southern suburbs. Its massive new reconstruction effort - free of charge to all those Lebanese whose homes were destroyed or damaged in Israel's ferocious five-week assault on the country - has won the loyalty of even the most disaffected members of the Shia community in Lebanon.
Hizbollah has made it clear that it has no intention of disarming under the UN Security Council's 1701 ceasefire resolution and yesterday afternoon, Major-General Alain Pellegrini, the commander of the UN Interim Force in southern Lebanon - which the Americans and British are relying upon to seize the guerrilla army's weapons - personally confirmed to me at his headquarters in Naqoura that "the Israelis can't ask us to disarm Hizbollah". Describing the ceasefire as "very fragile" and "very dangerous", he stated that disarming Hizbollah "is not written in the mandate".
But for now - and in the total absence of the 8,000-strong foreign military force that is intended to join Unifil with a supposedly "robust" mandate - Hizbollah has already won the war for "hearts and minds". Most householders in the south have received - or are receiving - a minimum initial compensation payment of $12,000 (£6,300), either for new furniture or to cover their family's rent while Hizbollah construction gangs rebuild their homes. The money is being paid in cash - almost all in crisp new $100 bills - to up to 15,000 families across Lebanon whose property was blitzed by the Israelis, a bill of $180m which is going to rise far higher when reconstruction and other compensation is paid.
In the 20sqkm of Beirut's southern suburbs which have been destroyed or badly damaged in 35 days of Israeli bombing, 500,000 residents - most of them Shia - lost their homes. But money is being poured in. For example, one Shia owning four floors of an apartment block, Hussein Selim, has already received $42,000 in cash for his possessions and lost furniture. And Hizbollah has pledged to rebuild the entire municipal area from its own - or perhaps Iran's - funds.
A frightening side to this long-term promise for believers in the UN ceasefire is that Hizbollah has encouraged its Shia population to rent homes in Khalde, south of Beirut, since it intends to delay its entire city construction project for a year - because of its conviction that the ceasefire will break down and that another Israeli-Hizbollah war will only wreck newly built homes.
Across the devastation of southern Lebanon, Hizbollah has now visited hundreds of thousands of Shia families for details of their losses. In some cases, Lebanese government officials - largely distrusted by the local population - have also made notes of compensation costs but all the authorities have done so far is to start the repair of water pipes and power lines. I found bulldozers working for Hizbollah's "Jihad al-Bena" company, clearing rubble from streets and tearing down half-destroyed houses. "We are doing this for nothing at the moment, but we know we will get paid because we trust Sheikh Hassan," a construction team leader told me. Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbollah leader, has promised to indemnify all survivors.
Driving more than 100 miles across the south of the country yesterday, the sheer enormity of Hizbollah's task - and of the Lebanese government's failure - becomes evident. Looking across thegreen countryside of southern Lebanon, the villages appear undamaged as they bask in thesun. But the closer you get, the more you notice vast grey fields of rubble that were once homes. Some villages - Bint Jbeil, for example, and Zibqin - have been half-destroyed.
In Zibqin itself, I found one especially poignant ruin: the bombed remains of a mosque well over 1,000 years old which the Lebanese believe contains the body of Zein Ali Yaqin, son of the Prophet Yacoub - Jacob in the Jewish faith - and grandson of the Prophet Ibrahim, or Abraham. Two of Abraham's sons - Yacoub and Ismail (Ishmael) - define the split between Islam and Judaism, the former believing God told Abraham to sacrifice Ismail and the latter contending it was Yacoub/Jacob who was to be sacrificed. Zein Ali Yaqin is thus of precious Jewish lineage - yet the casket containing his mortal remains actually moved on the floor of the shrine as Israeli bombs fell outside.
The explosives have blasted down an old façade and tumbled hundreds of rocks from the original outside wall of the green-domed mosque on the slope below, cracking open the interior walls and cascading wreckage on to the floor beside the cloth-covered tomb. "The Israelis did all this to their own man," Hussein Barakat said as he hobbled down the road below. "Everyone here knows the origin of our little shrine, but look at it now." Mr Barakat is 69 and was the only villager to remain in Zibqin when the rest of the villagers fled the Israeli bombardment. He has a wound on one finger and has been left half deaf from the sound of explosions.
Bodies of civilians and Hizbollah fighters were still being unearthed from the wreckage of southern Lebanon this week; four brothers, all members of Hizbollah it turned out, died together under Israeli fire in the eastern town of Khiam. Some civilian families searched in vain through the rubble for relatives. In Siddiqin, just east of Qana, I found one shopkeeper who had spent hours trying to discover the ruins of his two shops which had been turned to dust by aerial bombs. But he, too, believed that "Sheikh Hassan" would rebuild his home. A few miles away, I found a 65-year-old woman clambering like a cat over the pancaked roof of her home, looking for her family gold in clefts between the packed concrete.
It is Hizbollah's army of workers which has been told to rebuild these villages. The guerrilla army's political and economic organisation will hire the tens of thousands of men to reconstruct a virtual city within Beirut and turn south Lebanon's wasteland back into the farming and tobacco-growing villages that existed two months ago.
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