THE ROVING EYE
Lebanon left
for dead By Pepe Escobar
Lebanon is mired in a terrifying labyrinth
of death and destruction. Beirut's airport is
bombed. Israel has imposed a sea blockade. Other
than privileged Westerners who are being evacuated
by air or sea, people have overnight become
refugees. They are plunged into an exodus of
hundreds of thousands crammed on rickety rural
trucks, overcrowded buses, Red Crescent convoys
and even Mercedes with Saudi license plates on a
mad dash through Lebanese back roads to Syria.
Israel's lethal bombing is ubiquitous -
raining hell over family homes in the Bekaa
Valley, over the Liban Lait milk factory on the
road to Baalbek, over a Greek Orthodox church,
over civilian trucks carrying rice and sugar near
the Christian village of Zaleh, over a
civil-defense building in Tyre, over a paper mill,
over a
packaging firm, over a
pharmaceutical plant, over the Lake Qaraoun dam,
over bridges, water reservoirs, electric plants,
gas stations, ambulances, even over Beirut's main
Christian neighborhood.
Among the 300-plus
killed so far in Lebanon, Israel has killed
Canadians and Brazilians of Lebanese ancestry.
None of these "targets" are military; this means
the Lebanese could prosecute Israel for war
crimes. Roberto Laurenti, the United Nations' man
in Beirut, had to scream that the situation is
"both alarming and catastrophic. There are about
500,000 people displaced already. The situation is
extreme."
So where is the much-vaunted
"international community"? It is not listening.
The figures don't lie. At the end of the
eighth day of fighting, a total of 29 people had
been reported killed on the Israeli side of the
border, including 14 soldiers and 15 civilians.
But the majority of Lebanese deaths have been
civilian - and only a very few, less than a
handful, according to any number of Lebanese-based
news media, were Hezbollah military.
Civilian Lebanese are thus being killed,
in proportion to Israelis, at a rate of more than
10:1. This implies that Israel is not
targeting Hezbollah, but above all Lebanon's
infrastructure.
Israel's war has nothing
to do with Hezbollah's ideology, as the Israeli
public relations machine spins non-stop; it's
already configured as collective punishment
unleashed over the Lebanese civilian population.
Israel officially ordered the entire population of
southern Lebanon in essence to become IDPs
(internally displaced persons). Southern Lebanon's
population, overwhelmingly poor Arab Shi'ites,
overwhelmingly supports Hezbollah.
Hezbollah for its part may have fired
about 1,000 Katyusha rockets toward Israel.
Hezbollah may possess 12,000 rockets in total. At
the current rate, it could keep firing rockets
non-stop for more than two months - while Israel
bombs Lebanon back to the Stone Age. The decision
anyway has been made. According to diplomatic
leaks in Washington, London and Brussels, the
Israeli offensive will last at least for another
week to 10 days.
You deserve to
die Although there is no direct evidence
pointing to Iran and/or Syria behind Hezbollah's
strategy, US President George W Bush has blamed
Syria ("What they need to do is to get Syria to
get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit" - as
overheard during the Group of Eight summit in St
Petersburg on the weekend).
Israeli Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert for his part has blamed
Hezbollah as being in cahoots with Iran. US
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said there
were no "conducive circumstances" for a ceasefire;
she will land her Ferragamo-clad feet on Middle
Eastern soil only when it's "appropriate",
"necessary" and "helpful to the situation"
(perhaps "appropriate" would mean the
"international community" waiting until Lebanon is
totally destroyed and hundreds or thousands more
Lebanese are dead).
At any rate, Lebanon
is fast joining Bush's "democratic" Iraq. The
latest UN report states that more than 3,000 Iraqi
civilians were killed in June, and no fewer than
14,338 civilians were killed in the first six
months of 2006.
The US ambassador to the
UN, notorious neo-con John Bolton, believes "it
would be a mistake to ascribe moral equivalence to
civilians who die as the direct result of
malicious terrorist acts". Israel's bombing for
its part is "self-defense" that has had "the
tragic and unfortunate consequence of civilian
deaths".
Translation: dead Lebanese
civilians are collateral damage, expendable and
not worth the life of a single Israeli. After all,
the Israeli foreign minister had the gall to
proclaim that "many civilians in southern Lebanon
have Katyusha and other rockets under their beds".
Former Israeli congressman and committed
pacifist Uri Avnery, on the Israeli website Gus
Shalom, says that Israel's real objective is
"regime change in Beirut, and the installation of
a puppet government". It's what Israel wanted -
and didn't get - with the 1982 invasion led by
Ariel Sharon. Israeli journalist Gideon Levy goes
one step further, accusing Israel of being a
society in "moral collapse". Israelis overwhelming
support the bombing of Lebanon to dust.
Even if you survive, no one will help
you The tragedy is that the "international
community" has totally deserted the Lebanese
people; they are the new Palestinians. The minutes
at the recent Arab League meeting in Cairo were
leaked. The Arabic-language press could not fail
to notice what Egyptians, Jordanians, Saudis and
Kuwaitis were up to; basically a united front to
smash and "disarm" Hezbollah. The specter of the
Shi'ite crescent - brandished by Washington
neo-cons and dictatorial Sunni Arab governments -
is alive and kicking.
The ultra-wealthy
Persian Gulf emirates could not give a damn -
their only interest is oil at US$80 a barrel. Both
Egypt and Jordan are US client regimes - and
non-North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies -
and in addition have signed peace treaties with
Israel. Turkey is also a US-Israel-axis ally. And
US-controlled Iraq is smashed, destroyed and mired
in its own "Lebanonized" civil war.
Even
by its own standards of irrelevance, the European
Union has excelled - with the added spectacle of
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, French
President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor
Angela Merkel meekly toeing the US line. Britain,
France, Germany and Italy may condemn -
rhetorically - the gulag established by Israel in
occupied Palestine. But they are afraid of Hamas
and they are also afraid of Hezbollah - what if
these Arabs started striking right at the heart of
Fortress Europe? Under this rationale, the
indiscriminate killing of Lebanese civilians would
never rate as a priority.
All according
to plan The world has seen this movie
before. The seed for understanding the New Middle
East war was sown 10 years ago, in 1996.
Everything keeps pointing back to the infamous
paper "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing
the Realm", prepared by neo-cons such as Richard
Perle, David and Meyrav Wurmser and Douglas Feith
for Likud hardliner Benyamin Netanyahu. [1]
The "getting rid of Saddam" part has
already been accomplished. The total degradation
of the Palestinians is ongoing. The "destabilizing
of Syria in Lebanon" took place last year. The
next step would be hitting at both Syria and Iran
via Lebanon.
Five months ago, Hassan
Nasrallah, Hezbollah's leader, warned in a public
speech that if Israel did not release the Lebanese
prisoners it was holding, "we will try to get an
Israeli soldier". That's exactly what happened.
Israel knew it and had five months to prepare for
an invasion and/or the current "pinpoint" bombing
of Lebanon's infrastructure - something that any
military strategist knows cannot be prepared in a
day or two.
The fact that the Bush
administration and the Olmert government in tandem
blame both Syria and Iran follows the Clean Break
plan to the letter. And the plan could have been
fine-tuned very recently. Former Likudnik Olmert
went to the US in May and Likud chairman Netanyahu
followed him in June - and landed in neo-con
heaven, participating in a meeting with US Vice
President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld at a conference organized by the American
Enterprise Institute in Colorado.
As far
as Bush's "get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop
doing this shit" is concerned, it makes absolutely
no sense: it was Bush himself who forced Syria out
of Lebanon last year, to clear the way for Israel
to attack Lebanon facing no resistance. As for the
Israel-Iran confrontation, it has nothing to do
with ideology, as the Bush administration puts it.
It's pure power play. Israel and Iran are two
regional military powers entangled in a battle for
regional supremacy. And even the guessing game on
Syria and/or Iran supporting Hezbollah is also
irrelevant.
The US/Israel axis has
historically supported plenty of Islamist groups
all over the Arab world - in tune with the supreme
objective of fighting what it always considered
the real enemy, pan-Arab and secular nationalism.
Hamas has been supported by Israel in the past.
The US supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
And the US (blowback, anyone?) also supported the
Afghan mujahideen in the anti-Soviet 1980s jihad.
Give me a (Clean) Break There
is simply no solution whatsoever to the ongoing
Middle East disaster until "David" Israel (with
its nuclear weapons) stops stealing Arab lands and
returns all occupied territory to the "Goliaths" -
the Sheba Farms to Lebanon, the Golan Heights to
Syria, the West Bank and East Jerusalem to the
Palestinians.
Arab puppet regimes will
inevitably fall, by the force of their
population's rage. The Washington elite may even
realize one day (no one is counting on it, though)
that the US gains absolutely nothing from Israel's
wag-the-dog tactics. Israel inevitably will be
forced to negotiate with its neighbors. Then and
only then, if still no peace can be reached,
Israel might find some legitimacy to keep
attacking Arabs at random.
There are
diplomatic rumblings about a peace agreement of
sorts. Israel and Hezbollah would exchange
prisoners; the Lebanese army (what army?) would be
deployed up to the Israeli border, and Hezbollah
would pull back north of the Litani River; and a
new, bigger, UN monitoring force would step in.
There are reports that Israel "might"
accept these blue helmets - but only temporarily.
Israel, though - as Clean Break rules - does not
feel any incentive to accept this solution. Its
military logic points to a devastating preemption
of both Hamas and Hezbollah - so Iran would have
much reduced means to retaliate against Israel in
the (likely) event of a US or US/Israeli strike on
Iran's nuclear installations.
No one at
this point may predict with certainty what the
Bush/Blair/Olmert troika is actually cooking. But
there is the terrifying possibility that these may
be the early stages of the Great Middle East war
outlined in A Clean Break; the chance for the
US/Israel axis to strike at both Syria and Iran -
with no one, be it Russia, China or the cowardly
EU, being able to stop it.
Note 1. Readers can
access the essential points on
www.iasps.org/strat1.htm.
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