By Stanley Rogouski, 8/18/06
It began on July 12th, with a clash along the
border between Israel and Lebanon, 8
Israeli soldiers dead and two taken hostage. George Bush seemed paralyzed as
the crisis spun out of control. IDF Chief Dan Halutz, who promised to “turn
Lebanon’s clock back 20
years,” quickly made good on his word and launched a massive bombing
campaign against Lebanon’s
civilian infrastructure. Sheik Hassan
Nasrallah countered by firing thousands of Katyusha rockets into Northern
Israel, killing 40 Israeli civilians and all but shutting down Haifa, its third
largest city.
According to Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker, George Bush’s
glacial response was no accident, but had been carefully planned in close
cooperation with the Israeli government and the Pentagon.
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060821fa_fact:
The Israelis told us it would be a cheap war with
many benefits,” a U.S.
government consultant with close ties to Israel said. “Why oppose it?
We’ll be able to hunt down and bomb missiles, tunnels, and bunkers from the
air. It would be a demo for Iran.
At first, everything seemed to go according to plan. Egypt, Jordan,
and Saudi Arabia lined up
behind Israel.
Public opinion in the United States
quickly fell in behind public opinion in Israel, which ran in favor of the
war 88% to 12%. Floundering for the better part of a year against increasing
democratic criticism of the prosecution of his war on Iraq, George Bush finally seemed to hit the
Democrats in their weak spot, their unwillingness to oppose the state of Israel. Indeed,
not only did the Democrats offer Bush their support, they criticized him for
not being hawkish enough. Liberal Democrats Hillary Clinton, Frank Lautenburg,
and Jerry Nadler howled for blood in front of a pro-Israel rally in Manhattan. Howard Dean
hurled the accusation of “anti-Semitism” against Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki,
who was in the United States
to address Congress and who, as a Shiite, was unwilling to commit political
suicide by lining up with the Israelis against his fellow Shiites in southern Lebanon. Even
maverick Senator Russ Feingold echoed the Democratic Party line and offered his
support for the IDF’s bombing campaign.
But, astonishingly, considering the ongoing war in Iraq and
the constant nuisance of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Shiite militia in Baghdad, and even
more astonishingly, considering how they’ve inflated the threat from Iran into
something more dangerous than even the Soviet Union, both the Israelis and the
American government severely underestimated Hezbollah’s potent light infantry,
who knew Southern Lebanon like the back of their hands and had spent the past
six years digging in for the long haul. Bring it on, Hassan Nasrallah bellowed,
as the IDF was ground down into a stalemate around Bint Jbeil, their casualties
mounted, and then surpassed the point where it started to become politically
dangerous for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Not able to defeat Hezbollah
on the ground, Olmert and Halutz lashed out with the fury of frustrated
children, intensifying their bombing campaign, turning all of Lebanon into a
free fire zone, taking out Lebanon’s airport, tearing up its highway system,
knocking out all the bridges between Lebanon and Syria, and bombing the Jiyeh
power station, which covered Lebanon’s coast in a massive oil slick big enough
to rival the Exxon Valdez disaster.
Nobody counted on Hezbollah’s tunnels and anti-tank missiles
– you could almost hear Bush mutter under his breath as his dry run for the
invasion of Iran
turned into a catastrophe. You could almost see him looking around for his
guitar or his copy of “My Pet Goat” as it quickly became obvious
that, far from the crack military geniuses Israel is renowned for, Olmert,
Peretz and Halutz were not only brutal colonialists, but bumbling fools who had
picked what had looked like an easy fight but had wound up getting knocked on
their asses.
Bush’s support seemed to vanish as easily as it gathered.
Our clients in Saudi Arabia
and Jordan,
not relishing the thought of empowering radical Islamists in their own
countries, fell silent. Fouad Siniora, the Prime Minister of Lebanon, who had
begged for international help, all but kicked Condoleezza Rice out of Beirut
when he realized that she wasn’t even going to make a pretence of being an
honest broker. Even the Democratic Party’s grassroots seemed to grow uneasy at
the ongoing destruction of an entire country right in front of their eyes.
Finally, the Europeans, who had at first seemed to offer Bush their support and
who had taken steps to help him isolate Hezbollah in the UN, realized that Bush
and Olmert were completely out of their depth. It ended on August 12th
with United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, Beirut, the “Paris
of the Middle East” in ruins, Israel’s economy spiraling into a recession,
1000 dead Lebanese civilians, close to 100 Israeli soldiers killed, and the
ecosystem of the Eastern Mediterranean damaged, possibly beyond repair.
David Grossman, the famous Israeli novelist, who has written
sympathetically about the Palestinians, wound up paying the highest price of
all. Initially a supporter of the war, he got behind United Nations Security
Council Resolution 1701. When it become obvious that Olmert and Halutz were
going to use the two days before the cease fire took effect to “mop
up”, he got together with fellow novelists Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua to
hold a press conference to demand an immediate cessation to military
operations. But it was too late for his son, Uri Grossman, who was burned alive
a few days short of his 21st birthday in his Markava tank after it
was hit by one of Hezbollah’s anti-tank missiles.
But it’s unlikely that Uri Grossman will be the last man to
die for this particular mistake. Even though Hezbollah has dealt the plans of
Dan Halutz and George Bush a severe setback and even though Hassan Nasrallah
can stand among piles of dead Lebanese children and proclaim victory, we can
all see how this is going to end. George Bush, who is famously not a member of
the reality based community, is already calling the disastrous war in Lebanon a
victory. Already we are seeing all the telltale signs of the run up to war some
of us remember so vividly from 2002 and 2003, the breathless “terror
alerts” in the media and the return of the “color coded” system
of fear, the endless parade of Likud shills, neocons, and “terror
experts” warning us of the dire consequences of not stopping Iran’s WMD
program, the comparison of the Iranian mullahs to the Nazis, the intentional
hardening of American public opinion through a government framed media blitz.
Most frighteningly of all, Bush is starting to talk about United Nations
Security Council Resolution 1701 (which makes no provisions for any UN
troops on the border between Syria
and Lebanon)
in a way that makes it obvious where his intentions lie. We are on a collision
course with Syria and
ultimately Iran.
http://maxspeak.org/mt/archives/002438.html:
Bush: “The first step is – and part of the mandate in the U.N.
resolution was to secure Syria’s
borders. Iran is able to
ship weapons to Hezbollah through Syria. . . . In other words, part
of the mandate and part of the mission of the troops, the UNIFIL troops, will
be to seal off the Syrian border.”
Surveying the wreckage of
the Eastern Mediterranean, the tens of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians, the
2600 dead American soldiers, the 1000 dead Lebanese civilians, the 100 dead
Israeli soldiers and 40 dead Israeli civilians, and the hideous black oil slick
covering the same beaches St. Paul looked out on as he planned the growth of
the Christian religion, Homer wrote about and Ulysses sailed, it’s clear that,
whatever our differences, the Lebanese, Israeli, Iranian, Syrian and American
people cannot afford to see George Bush continue as president.
The Israelis, who often
spend too much time listening to their sycophants in the American media and in
the Democratic Party and not enough time wandering through the Ninth Ward of
New Orleans or talking to the families of American soldiers killed in Iraq,
are starting to turn against Olmert, Peretz and Halutz. When it surfaced that
Halutz had spent time tinkering with his stock portfolio, only three hours
after his two soldiers had been taken hostage, the pretext for the war itself,
cracks in the uniformly pro-war façade of Israeli public opinion began to
surface. The August 16th lead editorial in Haaretz, entitled “First Halutz
Must Go”, demanded the immediate resignation of Dan Halutz and
thoroughgoing investigation of the Kadima party. Columnist Bradley Burston
called for a “purge” of Olmert’s government.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/750980.html
But a purge of the Olmert
government will not stop the coming war with Iran. First of all, Olmert and the
Kadima Party’s fall is as likely to benefit the fascist right in Israel as it is
the reality based left. Just browse the comments of the editorial “First
Halutz Must Go” and realize that the immediate beneficiary of Olmert’s
fall is likely to be the hard-core fascist head of the Likud Party, Benjamin
Netanyahu. In fact, for those inclined to think along the lines of conspiracy
theories, it also surfaced that Amir Peretz, the ex-Israeli labor leader and
defense minister, had not even been told about Hezbollah’s missiles by the IDF,
a clear sign that there are quite possibly right-wingers inside the Israeli
military who are trying to engineer Netanyahu’s return to the Prime Minister’s
office.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/751477.html:
When Peretz took office four months ago, Hezbollah and the
missile threat were at the bottom of the priority list senior IDF officers
presented him, Peretz says.In private conversations over the past few days, Peretz
said officers did not tell him there was a strategic threat to Israel, and did
not present him with all relevant information about the missile threat.
What’s more, in spite of
the raging debate on the American left about the influence of AIPAC and
“the lobby”, it’s clear that, whatever influence its sycophants in
Washington have on American politics, Israel is still a tiny country and an
American client, Cuba to our Soviet Union, not the Soviet Union to our Cuba,
and that if the rush to war in Iran is going to be stopped, it has to be
stopped here in the United States.
But, client state of America’s notwithstanding, Israel presents some difficulties to anybody
wanting to stop the rush to war with Iran. First of all, the debate
about the Israelis in the mainstream media (and even in the progressive
blogosphere) is largely closed. You may argue about whether or not the Israelis
were successful or not in destroying Hezbollah. You may not argue about whether
or not they had the right to destroy Lebanon. The Democratic Party,
which is much more interested in courting the Christian right and
“moderate” voters in the Midwest than in appealing to the antiwar
movement is, if anything, even more closed to any real debate than the media.
Indeed, Bush, Rove and Cheney have found the sweet spot. Attack Iran through Israel
and you can count on even weaker opposition from the Democrats than they put up
about the invasion of Iraq.
The only solution
therefore is to cut the Gordian knot and go right to the source, to drive
George Bush out of office through mass non-violent protest.
First Bush must go.
On October 5th,
World Can’t Wait – Drive Out the Bush
Regime will be holding a series of actions designed to do just that, to
create a mass, non-violent movement in the United States to drive George W.
Bush out of office.
http://worldcantwait.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2655&Itemid=223
Yes, this is only a month before the election, but consider
this. Ned Lamont and the people behind him, while they have a lot of skill in
organizing and fundraising and while they may be well intentioned are not going
to stop the invasion or bombing of Iran. Indeed, shortly after Israel invaded Lebanon, Lamont issued a statement
fully supporting Olmert’s bombing campaign. World Can’t Wait, on the other
hand, has correctly identified the problem from the very beginning. For all
their machismo, chest thumping and dick swinging, the Israeli colonialists and
Shiite theocrats who are currently setting the Eastern Mediterranean on fire
and piling up the bodies of dead children as quickly as a frat house piles up
empty beer cans are only actors in a play being orchestrated from the White
House, in the Bush Regime’s project to radically remake society very quickly,
in a fascist way, and for generations to come.
“People who steal elections and believe they’re on a
‘mission from God’ will not go without a fight.”
Indeed, on thing that strikes me about all the major players
in the war between Hezbollah and Israel is that their pious,
religious machismo is matched only by the icy, almost sociopathic indifference
to their own people. Nasralleh, for all his talk about how Hezbollah will help
rebuild the economy of Lebanon,
stupidly began a war with an overwhelmingly superior military without once
thinking about the consequences to the Lebanese people to about any plan to
help protect them once it started. Dan Halutz may beat his chest and bellow
about “Israel’s
right to self-defense” but in private he’s checking his stock portfolio
even as his own soldiers are being taken hostage. George Bush may talk about
family values and about bringing morality back to the White House, but, just as
he left tens of thousands of African Americans to die on their roofs in New
Orleans, he coldly orchestrated a war between Israel and Lebanon, treating the
Israeli and Lebanese people as so many laboratory rats in his experiment of
remaking the region in his own image. It’s quite clear that the theocratic
worldview is an obsolete, destructive way of organizing society and that if
George Bush is allowed to remake not only the Middle East but the United States
in his image, we might not be able to survive it and this includes all of us.
The coarsest, most tribalist right-wing Israeli from Eastern Europe, the
hardcore supporter of Hezbollah, the Fox News watching, troop supporting,
church going American are all in the same boat, whether they know it or not.
“The point is this: history is full of examples where
people who had right on their side fought against tremendous odds and were
victorious. And it is also full of examples of people passively hoping to wait
it out, only to get swallowed up by a horror beyond what they ever imagined.
The future is unwritten. Which one we get is up to us.”