And the war just keeps getting worse
Seth Green, in his post on Senators Schumer and Boxer boycotting the recent speech of the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, beat me to the punch. This was going to be my first point on how the ongoing Israeli-Hezbollahwar in Lebanon is bad for the U.S.
So let me just say this to the Democratic leadership. When Sen. Harry Reid, the minority leader says, “I will lose a lot of confidence in Maliki if he doesn’t denounce what Hezbollah has done,” he is being stupid, as in S T U P I D.
In case the senator had not noticed, Al-Maliki is facing the challenge of a lifetime trying to prevent Iraq from a full throated, utterly barbaric civil war, as opposed to the horrific, low level one it is now experiencing. Expecting him to act like a talking parrot, repeating the establishment line that everything Israel does is just dandy, is counterproductive, to say the least. The senator should remember that to date thousands of Americans have died, at least according to the last known Bush administration justification, to allow Iraq to become a democracy. That means the people there get to enjoy free speech.
Maliki labeled Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon aggression. Months of years from now when the dust settles, people can try and decide whether it was justifiable. Maybe it is. But there is no question that it IS aggression. Definitionally, all wars are acts of aggression.
But what I really want to dwell on, continuing from my previous post, are the negative consequences of this war. The longer it goes on the more of them there are. Here are just a few.
Consider how Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, a very Sunni organization, is reacting to the news of Hezbollah, a very Shia organization, confronting Israel. Even though al-Qaeda normally hates Shiites they have been astute enough to release propaganda siding with the Lebanese people, if not Hezbollahitself. This will undoubtedly aid its recruiting efforts.
Israel’s shelling and killing of four United Nations peacekeepers at the Khiyam base of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), which was long-established and clearly marked, will make it far more difficult for the U.N. to engineer a ceasefire. Many, especially the conspiracy theorists, will say that was exactly the point. Already people are comparing this to Israel’s June 8, 1967 attack on the USS Liberty.
Also the Saudis have changed their tune on the crisis. Their earlier position, implicitly criticizing Hezbollah, is now history. Now the Saudis sing another tune. The Saudi Press Agency put out a statement which implicitly threatened a Saudi reassessment of the Abdallah peace plan adopted at the Beirut Arab summit a few years ago. It indicates, as did the Egyptian refusal to host the Rome meeting that the earlier Arab government “cover” for a strong Israeli/American reaction to the Hezbollahkidnapping of Israeli soldiers is gone. And the time when a combination of more limited Israeli force targeted narrowly on Hezbollahmilitary targets and aggressive American diplomacy might have mobilized European, Arab and UN support for pressure on Hezbollahto at least partially accede to UNSC 1559 and on Syria to step up on this issue is also history.
And, since some claim that Iran is using the war to divert attention away from the issue of its nuclear program, it is worth pointing out that Israel also had incentives to use Hezbollah’s cross border attack in order to unite a country that was on the bring of civil war over the plan to evacuate the settlements and to delegitimize the rationale behind, and any further plans that involved the evacuation of settlements as being inimical to Israel’s national security; and to prove that Israel’s first non-military prime minister and defense minister in decades were not wimps.
Finally, in response to the contention put forward by neocons like William Kristol who wrote that the U.S. must support Israel because it is the United States’ war also I think it worth quoting remarks made July 20 by former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. He said:
neither Israel nor the United States in the final analysis have the capacity to impose a unilateral solution. There may be people who deceive themselves of that. We call them neo-cons in this country and there are other equivalents in Israel as well. They may think that either the United States or Israel can impose a solution … I hate to say this but I will say it. I think what the Israelis are doing today for example in Lebanon is in effect, in effect–maybe not in intent–the killing of hostages. The killing of hostages. Because when you kill 300 people, 400 people, who have nothing to do with the provocations Hezbollah staged, but you do it in effect deliberately by being indifferent to the scale of collateral damage, you’re killing hostages in the hope of intimidating those that you want to intimidate. And more likely than not you will not intimidate them. You’ll simply outrage them and make them into permanent enemies with the number of such enemies increasing.
Way to go! Keep it Up! Yaaay!
Comment on July 27, 2006 @ 9:36 am
Haven’t you guys heard — Lance Bass came out of the closet. And not one politician voiced an opinion on the subject. Geez. What’s this world coming too?
Comment on July 27, 2006 @ 10:26 am
If the UN doesn’t want their observation bases shelled, maybe they should keep Hezbollah away from them instead of letting the UN observers to be used as human shields.
Comment on July 27, 2006 @ 10:33 am
The myopic Bush and his band of neo-con virgins are pushing this country and the
World to the abyss. I’m hopeful this country will throw Bush and his presidency into the
abyss and move away from the edge .I fear the Genie is out of the bottle and our children
will be hiding from the dogs of war asking how we could have been so foolish.
Comment on July 27, 2006 @ 10:33 am
It’s a mad world when one zealot can declare a war and the entire government rubber stamps it. I can not see how a government that impoverishes it’s people to benefit a few with no oversight or accountability can survive for long. The political displays of rancor and debate have become so transparent that they are no longer be capeable of hiding the truth, that a privalege few run the country for thier own private benefit, and put on poor political theater toward this end.
The islamic republics are closer to communism and marxism then capitalism. The grand displays of the weaknesses in capitalist systems will only further erode support for them and foster a new life into socialist and communist proponents throughout the world.
Can you say commrade?
Comment on July 27, 2006 @ 10:47 am
Having now followed this tit-for-tat war over the past two months (assuming that it all started with the June 9th indiscriminate Israeli howitzer shelling of a Gaza public beach that killed 9 members of a Palestinian family), could it possibly be that the real motivation behind Israel’s attack on Lebanon is its booming tourist economy?
Historically, Palestinans, Hezbollah followers and Israeli military have been routinely captured, held and repatriated over the past 20+ years essentially without a second thought. This time, Israel decided to eliminate all Lebanese competition to their #1 national industry.
If nothing else, food for thought?
Comment on July 27, 2006 @ 10:57 am
The Israelis are the new Nazis. Just as the League of Nations dallied and argued but couldn’t get a consensus to stop Hitler’s war machine in 1939, the E.U is repeating the same behavior with these new Nazis. Israel is the only country to have ever been created by a U.N. Charter. As the saying goes, “What was given, can be taken away.” Israel countless crimes against humanity and terrorist attacks upon civilians and U.N. Observers have gone way beyond the pale. Israel needs to be dealt with exactly as Germany was dealt with after WWI. The Zionists must forefit their country. They have more than shown that they consider themselves above international law and are unfit to rule anything. Israel and the Zionists must be cut out like the cancer they are.
Comment on July 27, 2006 @ 1:37 pm
[...] The more important argument, though, is the political one, the case that internal debate about the best course of action in fact helps the enemy. This view pervades much more than just these comments about why Israel hasn’t defeated Hezbollah decisively. It also explains why supporters of the administration’s policy in Iraq call well-intentioned people looking for alternative ways to seek America’s goals unpatriotic (this New York Times editorial inveighs against this practice). And it at the same time provides their own explanation for why their grand plans for positive transformation in the Middle East have not come to fruition: doubters in the U.S. undermined our success; we cannot conclude from the situation in the Middle East today that their vision was wrong, only that it was not properly carried out. Convenient. A useful dodge from the more likely explanation that the vision itself over-reached and that we were always unlikely to be able to “cause stability” in Iraq, no matter how unified the American effort and no matter how free a hand was given to the American military. This argument about when debate is appropriate and when it is not turns up in unexpected places, too. On this blog, Seth Green and David Isenberg both criticized Senators Boxer and Schumer for walking out on the Iraqi Prime Minister’s speech to Congress because of al-Maliki’s pro-Hezbollah remarks. Neither of my fellow bloggers agrees with al-Maliki’s support for Hezbollah, but they also felt that Americans should not criticize him for his position, since he is just expressing the will of the people of Iraq — an expression of democracy. And American Senators, they argue, should not debate the democratically ratified decisions of foreign governments’ policy-makers. That position strikes me as wrong for two reasons. [...]
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