The public statements by Israeli officials are pointing very much in the direction of a long engagement in Lebanon. The Olmert government may really be intended to repeat Israel's years-long occupation of southern Lebanon, which ultimately failed.
Panic in Haifa: Residents run for cover as explosions, sirens sound in worst-hit Israeli city by Matthew Kalman San Francisco Chronicle 07/17/06
Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz toured the scene of the attack in Haifa and told municipal leaders: "We have no intention of ending this campaign until the situation in Lebanon is changed."
He said Hezbollah would not be allowed to return to the border area with Israel. ...
Touring the scene of the blast [in Haifa] Sunday, Israeli Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz said the missile that struck the engineering shed was manufactured in Syria and patterned after an Iranian Fajr-3 type, which has a range of about 30 miles.
"We must continue to attack the Hezbollah until its infrastructure, which has been built up over the years in the heart of Beirut, is wiped out," Mofaz said. (my emphasis)
From Israel Strikes Lebanon After Hezbollah Missile Attack by Jad Mouawad and Steven Erlanger New York Times 07/17/06
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel vowed that Israel would “continue doing whatever is necessary to achieve our goals,” to drive Hezbollah from the border with Lebanon and to secure the release of captured Israeli soldiers. “Nothing will deter us,” he said, “whatever far-reaching ramifications there may be regarding our relations on the northern border and in the region.” ...
The Israelis say that their operation, which follows a Hezbollah raid into Israel, is intended to “dismantle the capabilities” of Hezbollah, ensure that it no longer faces Israelis “nose to nose” across the border and allow the government of Lebanon, with international help, to take control over its own borders.
Attacking Hizbollah is no doubt part of Israel's intention. But the idea that they are helping the governmentof Lebanon regain control of the southern part of the country by wrecking civilian infrastructure all over the country is a joke.
Laura King argues describes Israel's likely goals as follows (Tempted by Opportunity, Israel Gambles on Force Los Angeles Times 07/17/06
In both instances [Gaza and Lebanon], Israeli and outside analysts say, Israel has embarked on a risky strategy that has two major elements: the use of overwhelming military force to reduce the opponent's power coupled with strikes that hurt the wider civilian economies and populations of the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. The aim of the second part of the strategy is to put pressure on more moderate elements of the Palestinian and Lebanese governments to strip Hamas and Hezbollah of some of their influence and prestige. (my emphasis)
It's hard to take serious the notion that by deliberately striking civilian targets and openly talking about punishing the civilian population and wrecking Lebanon's civilian infrastructure, that Israeli leaders could seriously believe that will force the Lebanese government into what would be a new civil war against Hizbollah. King continues:
In Gaza, the fighting had gone on for roughly a week before it became clear that the goal of the military operation had widened well beyond the efforts to stop Hamas from lobbing crude Kassam rockets into southern Israel and to free Cpl. Gilad Shalit, a captured 19-year-old tank gunner.
Soon after the offensive began, commentator Roni Shaked wrote in the Yediot Aharonot newspaper that Israel had a "golden opportunity." Whether or not the operation succeeded in freeing Shalit, "by crushing the Hamas regime, Israel can accomplish a much greater strategic step, which could have a profound effect on the entire region," he wrote.
Within days, Israeli policymakers were speaking openly of their hopes to use the confrontation to drive Hamas from power.
Israeli leaders were far faster to see the tantalizing glitter of such opportunity in Lebanon.
Israel is clearly feeling some significant economic repurcussions of the conflict already. Kalman reports:
Police ordered the citizens of Haifa to stay indoors, fearing further attacks. The streets of this noisy city emptied within minutes.
"All businesses and factories in Haifa and the north have been closed down," said Inspector Mickey Rosenfeld, an Israeli police spokesman.
Banks, shopping centers and restaurants closed, and Haifa's two universities canceled all classes and exams, instructing students to stay away. Cinemas and theaters shut their doors, and a dance festival planned for Sunday night was canceled.
And both Israel and Hizbollah seem to be ready to wage war with little or no concern for the laws and customs of warfare, i.e., in a criminal fashion.
Mouawad and Erlanger:
Sheik [Hassan] Nasrallah [leader of Hizbollah] promised Israel “new surprises” and said Hezbollah had “no choice” but to hit Haifa. “As long as the enemy acts without limitations or red lines, it’s our right to continue the confrontation without limits,” he said in a taped speech televised on Hezbollah’s Al Manar television. Sheik Nasrallah appeared from the waist up to be unhurt, despite unconfirmed reports that he had been wounded in an Israeli strike on his bunker in southern Beirut.
King writes:
In Lebanon and in Gaza, the Israeli military incursion has dramatically heightened daily hardship, and civilians are keenly aware that they bear the consequences when Islamist fighters choose to aim a blow at powerful Israel.
"When they fire a rocket from my orange grove, I want to ask them, 'Why don't you just aim it at me instead?' " said Bassam Daoud, a farmer in northern Gaza, referring to the Hamas fighters. "I will pay the price for what they do." ...
But whatever resentment is directed at the guerrillas pales in comparison with the helpless fury that Gazans and Lebanese feel when confronted by the fierce firepower Israel has brought to bear in their backyards.
"We have to be realistic about what kind of result we are likely to get when we presume to 'engineer' the population's attitudes, trying to make them run to their leaders and cry out for change," said Uri Dromi, an analyst with the Israel Democracy Institute and a former Israeli government spokesman.
"Face it - we've had a really notable lack of success with that kind of thing in the past."
Juan Cole describes this aspect of the conflict well in this Informed Comment post of 07/17/06:
Israel struck at large numbers of targets on Sunday, and early Monday morning, that had nothing to do with Hezbollah. The far north of Lebanon is Sunni, as is the port of Tripoli, where the Israelis killed a Catholic Lebanese soldier. They also hit factories in north Beirut, not a Shiite area. They bombed a village near Zahle, a notorious center of Greek Orthodox, killing 3 civilians. The Israelis are either not very good shots, since they have murdered 140 civilians since Wednesday and only managed to kill about 17 Lebanese military personnel. Or they just don't give a damn.
Aljazeera reports that Israeli air strikes on the civilian areas of southern Beirut have resumed. Hezbollah has offices in that area, and is widely supported there, but it is a heavily populated civilian area.
Speaking of Nasrallah's threats, he writes:
Hasan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbullah (Hezbollah), gave a televised speech on Sunday explaining his own strategy. He said in an eerily calm and calculating voice that he had aimed his rockets only at military targets, not at Israeli settlements "in Occupied northern Palestine" (i.e. Israel). In contrast, he said, the Israeli military had from the beginning targeted civilians. (In fact, Nasrallah's katyushas are impossible to aim with any precision and in loosing them on Israel, he inevitably killed and wounded civilians; likewise in Haifa. His opening statement is a self-serving lie.) ...
I watched in horror as this maniacal speech unfolded in which Nasrallah actually threatened the Israelis with releasing chemical gas from local factories on civilians in Haifa. Despite fighting them for all those years, he clearly does not understand the Israelis' psyche or the trauma of the Holocaust. A threat like that. The Israelis don't like being caught in a quagmire any more than the next person, which is why Nasrallah could get them to leave southern Lebanon. But his victory appears to have given him megalomania, and he has now gone too far.
Hizbullah's attacks on Israeli civilians are war crimes. The killing of the civilians in Haifa at the train station was a war crime. And threatening to release chemicals from factories on civilian populations is probably a war crime in itself, much less the doing of it.
Robert Dreyfuss has an important article on the conflict, Neocons Rise From Mideast Ashes TomPaine.com 07/17/06, in which he suggests that Israel's real strategic goal in Lebanon may be to strengthen the hand of the hardliners in Washington, i.e., Cheney and his allies:
Make no mistake: Until last week, before Israel went to war, the neoconservatives were losing across the board. They watched in horror as the war in Iraq faltered, and they were appalled by President Bush’s Condi-led opening to Iran. Indeed, to many it seemed as if the entire post-9/11 project to remake the Middle East and build American hegemony on that cornerstone was in jeopardy.
Speaking at a forum at the American Enterprise Institute [aka, Neocon Central]last week, Frederick Kagan [one of the leading neocon] warned that the United States is in “danger of losing everything” because the war in Iraq is not being pursued aggressively enough. “All of this success can and will be undone … if we do not get the security situation [in Iraq] under control, and fast,” he said, accurately enough. Now that Israel is at war, they have the chance once again to go on the offensive, against Iran, in Iraq, against Syria, and against the mythical Terrorist International that they warn about so regularly. You can imagine what Cheney and his allies are whispering to the president: Be resolute, be strong - and bring ‘em on!
No comments:
Post a Comment