Various articles on the Israel-Lebanon War

With the war between Israel and Lebanon, there's an awful lot of information suddenly coming out about the situation.  Here are some of the notable articles I've come across, most of which I haven't blogged about yet.

Robert Fisk in Beirut: Israeli Assault on Lebanon Inflicting "Mass Punishment on a Whole People" DemocracyNow.com 07/19/06

Fisk, a resident of Beirut for three decades, talks about some of the events in the war:

And now, suddenly this democracy [in Lebanon] counts for nothing, because, of course, what President Asad [of Syria] has done effectively is say, “Look, you may think you have your little seat of democracy over there, but I control events.” Syria is the chief supporter politically of the Hezbollah. And Iran is the chief supporter military of the Hezbollah. And this is Syria’s work. This is Syria saying, “We're back. We control events. Negotiate over the occupied Golan Heights.” And as usual, poor old Lebanon and the poor old Lebanese are paying the price for it.

But you need to realize this was planned a long time ago. No one suddenly got up in the morning and ate their hummus and had some coffee and said, “Let’s fire a missile at a warship.” The tele-guided missile attack on a major Israeli naval vessel had been planned a long time in advance. And militarily for the Hezbollah, it was an enormous success. It set the vessel on - the ship set on fire for hours, and four sailors were blown overboard. And since then, I have to tell you, I’ve only seen one gunboat off the coast of Lebanon, and that was miles away. They don't come in close anymore, not at least during daylight hours.

There’s another point which the Israelis have not talked about, because it's under strict censorship in Israel, that the Hezbollah, who had weeks earlier sent a pilot-less reconnaissance drone over Israel, made, of course, in Iran, taking pictures, they had identified the headquarters of Israel's top secret military air traffic control center at Miron in Northern Israel. This is basically where the military scientists are based. It’s like caves in a mountain. They're untouchable. But the drone identified the antenna on the top of the mountain and put missiles onto it. Israel has a secret codename of Operation Apollo. Now, this was an extraordinary breech of Israeli security. Never, insofar as I know, since the ’73 war, has it been breeched like this.

Fighting terrorism by Gene Lyons Arkansas Democrat-Gazette 07/19/06

News bulletin: Israel is a foreign country. Foreign countries have their own interests, which aren’t necessarily those of the United States. It’s not our obligation to fight their battles, particularly when their actions are brutal, rash and foolhardy, and appear calculated to force a wider war that’s definitely no good for Americans, nor, ultimately, for Israelis. Which is not to indicate sympathy for the tactics of Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that scarcely existed until Israel’s abortive 1982 invasion “radicalized” the beaten-down Lebanese peasants on the Israeli border, nor of Hamas, its Sunni counterpart in Gaza. Terrorist strikes against Israeli civilians are morally abhorrent and politically stupid, engendering contempt and rage. ...

The Israelis claim they do everything they can to avoid civilian casualties. Evidently, they’re quite bad at it, because for all the publicity given what their enemies call “martyrdom operations,” Palestinian deaths outnumber Israeli deaths by more than 10-to-1.

It used to be more like 20-to-1, but as Hezbollah’s successful raid on an Israeli army outpost showed, the militias are getting ever more “professional.” Ironically, attacks on purely military targets started the latest round of reciprocal atrocities in Gaza, Lebanon and Israel. ...

Since President Simple is famously averse to reading, somebody ought to put a world map in front of him before he signs off on World War III. After all, a map’s a kind of picture. Check out your own Mercator projection: Attacking Syria and Iran would put the U. S. in the position of simultaneously fighting every nation between the eastern shore of the Mediterranean and the Himalayas.

To be blunt, that would be simply insane. The anvil, metaphorically speaking, would eventually break the hammer. If this crisis teaches us nothing else, it should be that our president is being advised by crazy people. As an Irish-American, it occurs to me that relative peace came to Northern Ireland only after most people on both sides of the border came to realize that the Irish Republican Army had become a Mafiastyle protection racket, while Rev. Ian Paisley’s Protestant followers were the moral equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan. The Arab-Israeli dispute is far more complicated and dangerous, but its essence is similar: two peoples claiming the same land; both right, both wrong; each captive to fanaticism, neither capable of getting all it wants, the very definition of tragedy. Americans have countenanced Israeli extremism far too long.

Converging Upon War by Rober Blecher Middle East Report Online 07/18/06

But radical Islam is not the defining or unifying factor that links the south with the north: Hamas and Hizballah have different bones to pick with Israel.  Hamas' struggle is against occupation, and more specifically, about how to achieve a mutual cessation of hostilities and formalize, in one way or another, its right to govern the territories of the Palestinian Authority as the Palestinians' elected government.  Hizballah's goals in the current fighting are more limited: to secure the release of Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails while simultaneously flexing the movement's muscles to stave off pressure to disarm.  By lumping together these different struggles, and tying them to Damascus and distant Tehran, Israel casts resolvable political disagreements as unfathomable, irrational hatred, thereby justifying its broad and violent offensive.

Hizballah, ironically, has engaged in a conflation of its own.  In choosing the moment of Gaza's bombardment to launch its own attack, a cross-border raid that its leader Sheikh Hasan Nasrallah says was long planned, the Lebanese Shi‘i movement has subsumed the struggle against Israeli occupation within a larger regional drama.  Displaying the rhetorical skills and military competence that Nasrallah and his movement are known for, Hizballah has confirmed its position as the only Arab force willing and able to stand up to Israel.  (my emphasis)

Lebanon -The Rut Becomes A Grave by Larry Johnson TPM Cafe 07/21/06:

Israel's latest offensive to root out and destroy Hezbollah probably will fail and in the process will ignite a new round of international terrorist attacks that will put the United State squarely in the crosshairs. It is as if we are watching a plane crash in slow motion. We see the plane hurtling towards the earth, our mouths agape in a silent scream. We know it will explode on impact and can do nothing but watch. ...

Condi Rice still holds the crazy belief that Lebanon's Army, which is 50% Shia, will magically deploy and confront Hezbollah. She also deluded herself into believing that the radical groups, like Hezbollah and the insurgents in Iraq, are stirring up trouble because the US mission of speading democracy is actually working. Maybe Condi also believes that the Tooth Fairy passes out coins for lost teeth, but believing in fantasies does not make fantasies come true. ...

We should not confuse Hezbollah with Al Qaeda. ... Unlike Al Qaeda, Hezbollah has a real and substantial international political and financial network. They have personnel and supporters scattered in countries around the world who have the training and resources to mount attacks. Hezbollah has no qualms about using terrorist attacks as part of a broader strategy to achieve its objectives. The last major Hezbollah attack against the United States was the June 1996 attack on the U.S. military apartment complex in Dharan, Saudi Arabia. Hezbollah also organized the attacks on the Israeli Embassy in Argentina in 1992 and Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires in 1994. But they also have exercised restraint when they felt they could achieve their objectives through political means. The ten year hiatus in major mass casualty attacks could come to a shattering end in the coming months, and American citizens are likely to pay some of that price with their own blood. ...

If we [the US] choose to fight [Hizbollah] get the body bags ready and take out a home equity loan. Americans will die and gas prices will soar. We will reap our failure to learn anything from the last forty years in the Middle East.

Lebanon - The Next Weeks by Pat Lang, Sic Semper Tyrannis blog 07/21/06

The latest newsroom fantasy insists that the Israelis will not have to occupy south Lebanon for long because the Lebanese Army is going to come down to take over the role of excluding the Hizballah (by force) from the area and that various foreign countries will contribute troops to a force to back up the Lebanese Army in keeping Hizballah fighters out of the area (by force). 

If anyone wants to bet any money on either or both of those things happening, I would be interested in discussing terms with you.

Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo blog 07/21/06

It's clear that the Bush administration thinks that the answer to the situation is to let Israel crush Hizbullah, to whatever extent that is possible and then come in with some sort of international settlement once the changed situation on the ground is fait accompli. But I really wonder whether there is any serious grappling in Washington with how many fires are currently burning in the Middle East and how close they all are to bleeding into one another into a truly regional confrontation. We have three fairly hot wars going on right now in a relatively small amount of space - four depending on how you choose to measure - each of very different sorts: Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and a quasi-war in Gaza.  ...

I don't think you need to oppose Israel's response to the initial Hizbullah attack or question the need to change the status quo in southern Lebanon, to get an eerie feeling that the Bush administration seems content to let this take its natural course, as though it were some geopolitical common cold or flu, with just as predictable an outcome. If Israel goes into southern Lebanon, how does she get out? And how does this end with a Lebanese government stronger, rather than weaker, than it already was - a fairly key issue considering that the weakness of the Lebanese state, its inability to take control of the southern border region is the underlying cause of the problem. For all thelessons on offer in Iraq, I don't get the sense that the powers-that-be in the White House grasp the malign effect of what you might call geopolitical scar tissue or the unpredictability of war. This can quickly develop a dynamic that will be beyond our control to counter or guide.

Israel set war plan more than a year ago: Strategy was put in motion as Hezbollah began gaining military strength in Lebanon by Matthew Kalman San Francisco Chronicle 07/21/06.  I've discussed this one at some length at The Blue Voice.

The irreplacable Juan Cole in War in Lebanon Planned for at least a Year/The Bush Administration's Grand Strategy and the Birth Pangs of Terror Informed Comment blog, 07/23/06 uses the Kalman article as a takeoff point for describing his view of Israel's strategy in the current war with Lebanon.  I strongly recommend reading Cole's entire post.  Among other things, he says:

Clearly, if one could get rid of Iran and Hezbollah, in Rumsfeld World, Iraq is much more likely to turn out a delayed success than an absolute disaster.  And then the stalled-out rush to Bush's vision of "democracy" (i.e. Big Private Property) in the region could proceed. In fact, the instability in Iraq mainly comes from Sunni Arab guerrillas, who hate Iran and it is mutual.

The Bush administration's perceived economic and geopolitical interests thus overlap strongly with Israel's perceived security interests, with both benefitting from an Israeli destruction of Hizbullah. It is not impossible that the US Pentagon urged the Israelis on in this endeavor.  They certainly knew about and approved of the plan.

What is scarey is that Cheney and Rumsfeld don't appear to have let W. in on the whole thing.  They told him that Bashar al-Asad of Syria stirred up a little trouble because he was afraid that Iraq the Model and the Lebanese Cedar Revolution might be such huge successes that they would topple him by example (just as, after Poland and the Czech Velvet Revolution, other Eastern European strongmen fell).  (Don't fall down laughing at the idea of Iraq and Lebanon as Republican Party success stories; people in Washington, DC, coccoon a lot and have odd ideas about the way the world is.)  So, Bush thought, if that is all that is going on, then someone just needs to call al-Asad and reassure him that we're not going to take him out, and get him to rein in Hizbullah.  And then the war would suddenly stop.   No one told Bush that this war was actually an Israeli war of choice and that al-Asad had nothing to do with it, that, indeed, it could only happen because al-Asad is already irrelevant.

Not so long ago, I would have thought that comment about Rummy and the Dark Lord not letting Bush in on something like that was mostly satirical.  After reading Ron Suskind's The One Percent Solution (which could have been titled The Rule of Dark Lord Cheney) and John Dean's Conservatives Without Conscience (of which he makes Deadeye Dick one of the prime examples), I can believe it's literally the case.

Iran's Support of the Hezbollah in Lebanon by Anthony Cordesman (Center for Strategic and International Studies) 07/15/06.  A large part of Cordesman's paper is devoted to describing the kinds of weapons that Iran has been providing to Lebanese Hizbollah:

The [anti-ship missile] C-802 is a complex system uses separate or integrated TEL, radar, and fire control launch vehicles, although a lighter land launcher and fire option may exist for use on conventional trucks. It is not the kind of system that Iran would normally deploy to the Hezbollah without IRGC crews and control. ...

AP says that an Israeli intelligence official (Brig. Gen. Ido Nehushtan?)said that about 100 Iranian soldiers are in Lebanon and helped fire the Iranianmade, radar-guided C-802 at the Israeli ship late Friday, and that the Iranian forces were from the IRGC, a force controlled by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Nehushtan is quoted as saying that "We can confirm that it was hit by an Iranian-made missile launched by Hezbollah. We see this as very profound fingerprint of Iranian involvement in Hezbollah." The strike is also important because the Israeli ship is one of Israel's most modern missile ships. It carries Harpoon and Gabriel missiles, and has one of Israel's most advanced systems for detecting and electronically jamming attacking missiles. Israel states, however, that the ship's missile detection and deflection system was not operating, apparently because the sailors did not anticipate such an attack.

And he mentions something that I don't recall having seen in the news reports otherwise:

AP also reports that another Hezbollah missile also hit and sank a nearby merchant ship at aroundthe same time, Nehushtan said. He said that ship apparently was Egyptian, but had no other information. Nehushtan said the body of one of the four Israeli soldiers missing in the attack was found aboard the damaged warship. Other Israeli military officials said two bodies had been found.

I discussed the more political aspect of this paper at The Blue Voice.

Taylor Marsh has a useful run-down of the "sides" in While Lebanon Burns FireDogLake blog 07/20/06:

For those of you keeping score, here’s the breakdown, as far as I can tell. Hezbollah is Shia (Shiite), with support and backing from Iran, Syria and the Iraqi government sitting inside the Green Zone. Hamas is Sunni, with the support of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Palestinians, Syria (playing all sides), Iraq insurgents and Egypt. That’s simplistic, but you won’t hear it explainedon cable, with the nitwits and wingnuts cackling about how Arab leaders are condemning Hezbollah. Well, no kidding, because most of them doing the condemning are Sunnis. The Sunni - Shia showdown could one day be the Israeli - Palestinian conflict on steroids, if we’re not careful. The situation is getting more complicated by the minute.

Billmon describes it this way, with a touch of dark humor The All Against the All Whiskey Bar blog 07/20/06:

So many hatreds, so little time!

Let's see. We've got: Israeli Jews fighting Lebanese Shi'a and Palestinian Sunnis; Palestinian Fatah militants who've stopped fighting Hamas militants, but only because they're both fighting the Israelis; Saudi Sunni fundamentalists issuing fatwas against Hezbollah Shi'a fundamentalists; Egyptian Sunni fundamentalists backing those same Hezbollah Shi'a fundamentalists; Iraqi Sunnis killing Iraqi Shi'a and vice versa; Iraqi Shi'a (the Mahdi Army) jousting with Iraqi Shi'a (the Badr Brigade); Iraqi Kurds trying to push Sunni Arabs and both Sunni and Shi'a Turkomen out of Kirkuk; Turks threatening to invade Kurdistan; Iranians allegedly shelling Kurdistan, Syrian Kurds rebelling against Syrian Allawites who are despised by Syria's Sunni majority but allied with the Lebanese Shi'a who are hated and feared by the House of Saud and its Sunni fundamentalist minions. Oh, and American and Israeli neocons threatening to bomb both Syria and Iran.

Have I left anybody out? Probably.

Salim Lone takes a viewpoint that I hope is too pessimistic:  Sanctioning Israeli Crimes Marks New Era of Lawlessness CommonDreams.org 07/20/06.

The world's carefully-constructed international system for maintaining peace and security, built around the United Nations Charter written under US leadership in 1945, is now on its last legs.  It is mute and unresponsive, unable to fathom how to respond in the face of lawless behaviour by our sole superpower and of course Israel.

The system is unraveling so rapidly now that even as world powers push for new laws that will serve their interests, these are quickly overtaken by other demands for hegemony and ruthlessness.  What is therefore being fashioned by the US and its allies is a new, looser system in which the powerful may do as they wish.  Those who oppose their occupations, hegemony, and injustice will be labeled criminals.  Thus the labeling as terrorism of Hamas's attack and capture of the soldiers of an occupying state holding thousands of Palestinian detainees without trial, while the unrestrained destruction of populations is allowed to be proclaimed as self-defense.

The last few weeks have created intense new hatreds against Israel and the United States, and radicalized many Arabs and Muslims towards extremism.  Interestingly, Mr. Blair had indicated when backing the Iraq war that he would convince President Bush to be more forceful and even-handed in making a major push in resolving the Israeli-Arab conflict.  Britain, having already cruelly suffered from terrorism by locally-bred Muslims inflamed by its Iraq and Afghanistan occupations, has now added Palestine and Lebanon to their grievances because of Mr. Blair's almost militant backing in Parliament yesterday for the Israeli destruction of Lebanon and Gaza now underway.

Talking from strength Ha'aretz Editorial 07/20/06

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The first cases in which Israelis were taken hostage for the purpose of negotiations occurred after the Six Day War.  One example is the El Al airplane that was hijacked to Algiers, which ended in an exchange deal. Israel gradually made it a rule to release hostages by force if possible, and to free prisoners in exchange if this were impossible.  The release of prisoners was based on the precedents set in the wars that Israel fought, in which prisoner exchanges were not numerically equal, and the tactic used by Moshe Dayan and Ariel Sharon in the 1950s, of creating a "bank of prisoners" to be exchanged for Israeli captives.

This has changed over the last two decades. Israelis are no longer being captured by Arab states or by the more mainstream PLO factions, but by fanatic Shia organizations in Lebanon and their patrons in Iran ...

Now the government is acting differently.  It is treating the captured soldiers as part of the overall problem of Israel's relations with Hamas and Hezbollah, not as its main aspect. The government is firmly demanding the soldiers' return - with more than a hint that, despite its declared unwillingness to negotiate a prisoner exchange, such an exchange can indeed be expected as part of an assured coexistence in Lebanon and Gaza.  The government is not refusing to negotiate, but it is doing so, rightly, from a position of strength.