A New Thread fot the Current Israel/Palestine/Lebanon mess

Mainly to prevent the influx of weapons and supplies for Hezbollah, most or all of which were received either at the airport or via the main highway to Damascus. Pretty basic military strategy, it seems.

Why pick a fight with the Lebanese (because, I'm sorry, at this point it looks like picking a fight) instead of offering to help them shut down at least the militant arm of Hezbollah, since guerrilla armies tend to undermine any government?

Nice dream. Lebanon is still under Syria's thumb, Syria funds Hezbollah, Hezbollah operates a state within a state in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah is there because Syria wants them there, and unfortunately there's very little the Lebanese govt can do about that. This is Syria's mess to clean up. And Israeli-Arab cooperation in shutting down terror groups has worked so well in the Palestinian territories.

-- NoTimeBeforeTime (mbvarkestra197...), July 14th, 2006 10:03 AM. (Barry Bruner) (later) (link)

Yeah I understand the Hezbollah-Syria connection. It still doesn't explain why Israel is bombing LEBANESE military installations, especially if, as you say, the Lebanese can't do anything about Hezbollah. I was assuming that Israel was trying to force Lebanon to take action against Hezbollah, but if what you say is true, obviously that won't work.

-- pleased to mitya (mitya_il...), July 14th, 2006 1:23 AM. (mitya) (later) (link)

Man, I hope this isn't the prevalent theory in the fundamentalist South, otherwise my weekend's going to be a total downer. :p

Just out of curiosity, is your brother one of the "the jews are the problem" Born Agains or is he of the "the jews are God's Chosen People" variety?

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/738530.html

I was there, at the cabinet table, at the security cabinet table, in "the kitchen," when we were bombed by the bad news: One terrible report followed another horrific report that came after an intolerable report. There was a feeling of suffocation. Even before we met, we had heard the usual declamations, which unfortunately are generally empty phrases. The artillery salvo - of threats and ultimatums - does not really change the situation, and sometimes only aggravates it. The first minutes are the most difficult: The decision-makers, too, have no clear idea of what is going on, who was hit and who was kidnapped and what is happening on the ground. Rumors of all kinds penetrate even their closed and guarded quarters.

The cabinet ministers arrive urgently and they are all worked up - we can no longer accept, there is a limit to everything, this time we will teach the bastards a lesson they will never forget. The senior officers, faces grim, huddle among themselves, spread out maps and bend over them, running a finger across the Green Line, the Purple Line and all the lines in the world, which must now unavoidably be crossed and hit.

I don't remember any introspection, because at these moments the blood boils and goes to the head and blinds the eyes. On several occasions I suggested that consultations not be held and decisions not be made on the day of the disaster itself, because the day of the disaster is always prone to a further disaster of hotheaded and wrongheaded judgment.

I was no different. My blood boiled, too. How much can we take? Wild thoughts rushed through my mind, but at least I knew that I had to be cautious with respect to myself and my thoughts. Most of the people there were experts on force; I was an expert on its limits. It is so easy, in meetings like these, to be tempted into undertaking such promising operations, which will prove counterproductive. Nearly every operation looks promising on the map.

The meeting begins and the army reports and the army proposes. Sometimes someone, a minister or an officer, tries to moderate things here and there, but moderation no longer has a chance between the chastisers with whips and the chastisers with scorpions.

Thus it happens that we invade Gaza again - not really reoccupying, just "raiding," as though there is a difference. And once again we invade Lebanon, not to stay, only to demonstrate a presence, and the paper of the "decision-makers" does not blush. And thus we immediately blast power stations as an initial target, and immediately afterward it is not clear who darkened whose world. And that's the way we expelled 400 Hamas members to Lebanon, so they could be prepared in advance of their return, better trained and more determined.

The cabinet also decided that "there is and will be no negotiating on the release of Palestinian prisoners." If Israel holds direct or indirect contacts in the wake of the kidnapping of Corporal Gilad Shalit, and ransoms him in return for the other side's prisoners, our enemies' appetite will grow and the kidnappings will only increase. And yet we did not conduct a dialogue and we did not release anyone, and the kidnappings increased anyway, and this time there were two, not one, such incidents.

The abduction in the north took place just two days after the publication of Giora Eiland's report on the abduction in the south. The report uncovered many flaws and did not uncover others. Another orphaned failure in our orphanage. It was precisely this form of orphanhood I meant when I referred to the "introspection" that I found lacking. If with all the red lights flickering and all the warning bells going off two more soldiers were kidnapped, then something has rotted and decayed here, and that something is irresponsibility as a method. So, before we pummel our enemies, or maybe while doing that, we have to heal ourselves, and such healing is totally self-directed and self-contained, and does not depend in the least on Hezbollah or Hamas.

Once I read a seminal book in criminology, "Crimes Without Victims," about suicides and drugs and prostitution. Now the time has come for a book to be written about blun ders without anyone being responsible and with a great many victims.

One rainy day Yitzhak Rabin explained to me, as a prime minister and as a friend, why he had to look for every possible crack that would allow a settlement with Israel's neighbors. "It is impossible to stretch the muscles and the nerves of a nation for so many years. Sooner or later they become lax," he said, and added: "The Israel Defense Forces is a good army, all in all, but even the best army's strength is limited and its staying power is liable to decline, and it must not be subjected to too many tests, certainly not unnecessary ones."

One can always make excuses and say that it is our enemies who are testing us, but experience shows that we have sacrificed our sons on too many occasions.

The situation has not become better since Rabin spoke and I listened to those words - it has become worse. And not only in our region, but throughout the world. If ever there was "deterrent capability," and especially the power of the lone superpower to exert deterrence, it has lost it completely. Instead of dealing properly with Iran, which is pulling the strings of international aggression, and also the strings of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah, George Bush slammed Iraq, of all countries, and now all the villains have learned that the Americans are not all- powerful and that they can gradually be worn down and routed. And instead of dealing with North Korea and its proven missiles and nuclear weapons, America mired itself in Afghanistan, which is in the process of being retaken by the Taliban. And now Somalia, in the Horn of Africa, has also fallen prey to murderous fundamentalism following failed American intervention and taking the wrong side, as Bush and Dick Cheney are wont to do.

Until American enlightenment brings the world its redemption, it is destroying it and "innocent people" continue to be blown up in Mumbai, in London, in Madrid and everywhere else. Never was there a World Cup of blood such as the one that began with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, where 50 people are murdered each day in the capital alone.

From overuse, Israel, too, lost its regional deterrent capability. A pistol that is aimed and in a safe mode is in most cases more threatening and deterring than a pistol that fires all the time and only rarely hits the target. For example, people continue to suggest that we deliver a crushing blow to Beirut. But we were in Beirut not so long ago and conquered it lock, stock and barrel, and very quickly it sent us packing. What will the aerial bombardments do now that the ground occupation did not do before? The noise of the tanks, preparing for a renewed incursion, sends shivers up my spine and makes me break out in a cold sweat.

Deterrent capability consists not only of military might, but also of moral might. After all, Bush himself, and not the defeatist bleeding hearts, often talks in the name of the Moral Majority and world morality and cites it as the culmination of his vision. The trouble is that you cannot set rules of behavior and serve as an example to others when your own soldiers are daily attacking people who have done no wrong, torturing prisoners, sending suspects to "black holes" that are as far as East from West, and holding detainees indefinitely without judicial review. The president himself is violating human and civil rights by ordering mass wiretapping, by the wholesale penetration of private bank accounts and by unrestrained assaults on journalists who are faithfully doing their job. Most of these phenomena are of course not foreign to Israel, which encountered difficulties when, in the biblical metaphor, it did the deed of Zimri and demanded the reward of Pinhas. This is not deterrence; this is joining the evildoers and strengthening them and their arguments.

I am not ideologically opposed to the use of force when needed, and woe to us if our force fails us. I do not represent pacifists, not even individuals who refuse to do army service, and I have never represented them. I am still trying to represent acquired skepticism and to speak in favor of perplexity and in condemnation of whitewash. We have too many whitewashers in the government and in the General Staff.

Amid all the militant machismo, the voice of moderation must also be raised and heard, and it says now that force alone will simply not cut it. It is better for the ministers and officers to remember what Gaza did to us in the past 40 years and what Beirut did to us, and what Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan and Somalia did and are doing to powerful America - and to calm down. It is best to arrive at the crucial meetings calm and sober-eyed.

Only once in history did America manage not only to win, but also to rehabilitate. The outcome of World War II was dictated not only by Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, but also by Harry Truman and George Marshall. Since then America has only been winning, continually winning and losing. And so it is with us, too - winning and winning, yet we have had no quiet for 40 years or even 40 days.

Iraq is destroyed, Afghanistan is destroyed, the Gaza Strip is destroyed and soon Beirut will be destroyed for the umpteenth time, and hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested solely in the vain war against the side that always loses and therefore has nothing more to lose. And hundreds of billions more go down the tubes of corruption.

Maybe the time has come to put the pistol into safety mode for a moment, back into the holster, and at high noon declare a worldwide Marshall Plan, so that the eternal losers will finally have something to lose. Only then will it be possible to isolate the viruses of violence and terrorism, for which quiet is quagmire and which in our eyes are themselves quagmire. And once isolated, it will be possible to eradicate them one day.

Shalit

What is the intention of the VIPs, in uniform and without, in visiting the Shalit family at its home in Mitzpeh Hila? What do they mean when they say, "the magnificent family which is behaving with unparalleled nobility," or "we came to strengthen and came out strengthened" - and all the other self-righteous and expatiating cliches? What they intend, these important people, is to swaddle Gilad's mother and father in adulation, and to seal them and their voice behind a greasy layer of insulation, lest their outcry escape and fill the land.

And now they will visit another family and another family and will come out strengthened. And then, strengthened, they will pay one-time condolence visits to the families of the soldiers who were killed.

This phrase strikes me the most.

This is looking less like a "send a message" campaign and more like Israel is planning to drive Hezbollah out of Lebanon by force. They've effectively cut the country off from the outside world, so they're free to bomb away at leisure. You can't blame them for reacting to a buildup of antagonistic armed forces along their border, but the response does seem hair-trigger and designed to punish the Lebanese government as much as Hezbollah (or perhaps the military goal is being pursued so zealously that there's little thought or care as to who gets caught in the crossfire).

Keep in mind it's only been a couple months since that the US resumed normalized relations with Lebanon, after Gaddafi's apparent willingness to reform. Is the message now that you can normalize relations with the US all you want, but that still won't protect you from Israel? What is the incentive for an Arab nation to pursue normal relations with the west when your current models are Iraq and Lebanon? The leaders of Egypt and Jordan are certainly soiling their pants, since the general populance is going to decry Israel's (over) reaction and move further towards the extreme.

Thousands of Americans are stranded in Lebanon while Hezbollah and Israel duke it out - there was talk last night of Marines having to airlift them out if fighting continues to escalate. Meanwhile the lame duck US president can only wag his finger from afar while the chickens come home to roost. After the unilateral aggression against Iraq, he can't really condemn any country's overzealous use of force.

I have to say Iran is playing this thing perfectly. And now they can point to Lebanon and say, "Look, we need nuclear weapons to protect ourselves from Israel!" Sure, Iran fomented the conflict in the first place, but Israel aren't doing themselves any political favors by effectively declaring war on Lebanon. All tactics, no strategy.

Please ignore my misguided point about Gaddafi & Libya (aka Lebanon).

http://redstateson.blogspot.com

"War is what Israel does best, and we're about to get a full bloody plate of it....

SUPPORT: The brave activists of Gush Shalom, who protested in front of Israel's Ministry of Defense, only hours after the bombing of Lebanon began. Let's hope their numbers grow."

http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en

Before Friday's bombing of Beirut airport, the United States helped broker an unusual deal that allowed a runway at the Beirut airport to be repaired long enough to allow a private aircraft carrying former Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Nakati and five planes from Middle East Airlines to take off.

If we know how to do something, it's how to get the rich people out of the country! (sorry, total conjecture on my part, anybody know more about this?)

Americans in Lebanon were urged to consider leaving the country, and U.S. citizens were advised to defer travel to the region.

Leave the country, just don't use the airport, highways, or ports!

anyway, back to the current bloodshed (which I'm sure will be as instructive and productive as ever *sigh*)

Nothing good will come of this.

Just a few things that spring immediately to mind.

Holiday in Hell, indeed:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/holiday-in-hell-australians-stranded-in-lebanon/2006/07/14/1152637871546.html

Here's a question; if Israel presses too hard militarily, what's going to stop Lebanese militants from driving around and gathering up Western hostages as bargaining chips?

A comment from the inside:
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/charles_chuman/2006/07/beirut_blues.html

...and this is not what they might want?

I think it's going to get worse before it gets better.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1213591,00.html

Just out of curiosity, is your brother one of the "the jews are the problem" Born Agains or is he of the "the jews are God's Chosen People" variety?

I have such a visceral reaction in these discusssions, that I don't honestly know. I would assuming not of the "jews are the problem" variety, which would shift him from my "crazy brother-in-law" to "my deeply objectionable brother-in-law with whom i would prefer not to have any contact."

-- San Diva Gyna (and a Masala DOsaNUT on the side) (dot@dot.dot), July 14th, 2006.

Sorry, should've been an x-post - I wasn't responding to you, and I think we're agreeing, that is what they want...(except what took me a paragraph to say you had in one sentence!)

agreed.

Apologies if this was discussed above, but given that Israel was prepared to go this far, why did they actually stop at Lebanon? Wouldn't the best way to stop Hizbollah to jump to the source and strike at Syria (or even Iran, although that seems a step too far). At least there were some moderate/democratic elements in that country, who are now probably totally anti-Israel.

This was the first thing that came to mind when NoTimeBeforeTime said I wasn't being grounded in reality when I brought up WWIII.

(hi ned)

The whole WWI parallel doesn't fly with me, frankly. This is a newer form of idiocy all its own.

Now, if, say, Israel attacked Lebanon and Iran/Syria IMMEDIATELY came to their aid, dragging in the US and Russia and then... that would be a lot closer to WWI.

I would actually just like to see them have a conversation. Putin seems so much more knowledgable on foreign policy lingo, etc. Also I bet Bush would slip up and call him "comrade".

In the 1980s, what Hezbollah did was take Western hostages. The United States is enormously sensitive to hostage situations. It led Ronald Reagan to Iran-Contra. Politically, the United States has trouble handling hostages. This is the one thing Hezbollah learned in the 1980s that the leaders remember. A portfolio of hostages is life insurance. Hezbollah could go back to its old habits. It makes sense to do so.

It will not do this while there is a chance of averting an invasion. But once it is crystal clear it is coming, grabbing hostages makes sense. Assuming the invasion is going to occur early next week -- or a political settlement is going to take place -- Western powers now have no more than 72 hours to get their nationals out of Beirut or into places of safety. That probably cannot be done. There are thousands of Westerners in Beirut. But the next few days will focus on ascertaining Israeli intensions and timelines, and executing plans to withdraw citizens. The Israelis might well shift their timeline to facilitate this. But all things considered, if Hezbollah returns to its roots, it should return to its first operational model: hostages.

Syria has no roof. It's air force would be gone in a day, or a night, if it chose to engage. So Syria is in a poor position if things escalate conventionally. It could stand to be greatly embarrassed if Israel chose to launch a variety of demonstration strikes.

As for attacking Iran, it would be easier for the US to apply a beatdown. Iran has a lot to lose in a conventional military engagement. Like it's entire air force, it's navy, all of it's air defense network, and whatever is above ground worth hitting. Behind the scenes, no one has any idea what is being said to Iranian leaders by diplomats. But in the past, it has been said, that walking diplomats up to the brink and telling them what will occur has been effective, maybe once.

So hostages -- that's an alternative. But it only works if the opposition hasn't passed a certain point of resolve and is determined to have its way with you. And since the crisis is already past the point of proportionate response and escalation, it might be argued logically that hostages -- since hostage-taking started this -- well, taking more of them isn't going to slow it down or give an advantage to the militarily weaker side.