STRELNA, Russia — President Bush on Saturday abandoned his earlier calls for Israeli restraint in its escalating conflict with Hezbollah, instead calling on Syria to rein in the Shiite Muslim militant group.
Bush and his aides had for several days balanced demands for Hezbollah to stop firing rockets at northern Israel with muted declarations that Israel needed to try to avoid civilian casualties as it retaliated.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-usmideast16jul16,1,3158734.story?coll=la-headlines-worldThe events of the last week have blown by so fast, so furiously and so insanely that it is especially hard to wrap your mind around what is happening with Israel, Palestine and Lebanon.
Imagine yourself living in Beirut -- no matter what nationality, religion or political affiliation. Life just put you in this city in July, 2006. Planes roar by overhead followed by a wave of explosions. The airport is out of commission, the port is closed and the highway out of the country is shut down. You are now a prisoner of the Israeli Defense Force.
The "reasons" for this military action are an insult to the world's intelligence. Organized units of terrorists belonging to Hamas and Hezbollah have attacked Israeli civilians and military personnel -- and therefore Israel has bombed Beirut. Somehow, the inhabitants of Beirut and other parts of Lebanon are responsible for the terrorist acts taking place in Israel.
When supporters of this madness bother to explicate this non-sequitur, they reason that the Lebanese Government has Hezbollah party members in it, and that it should have disarmed Hezbollah a long time ago. Unfortunately for the now trapped inhabitants of Beirut, this Lebanese Government has been in business for scarcely a year -- and it does not have the wherewithal to assert State power over Hezbollah.
Nor does the Iraqi Government have the wherewithal to control its militias, even with the assistance of 130,000 American soldiers. Thanks in no small measure to the USA and Israel, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine all lack the power to control their own territories.
Tough shit, says the IDF. You should have done something and now you have to pay the price. Obviously, there is another agenda at work to explain this bizarre temper tantrum by the Israeli government -- a speculation to which I will return in a moment.
As has happened several times before during the Bush Administration as the Israeli government has launched some violent new initiative in response to terrorism, the early pronouncements from our government call for restraint and suggest that both sides play a role in the escalation of violence. Then, after a few days,the US Government falls in line with whatever military adventure is on order to the IDF.
Today, the pattern repeated itself again -- with President Bush now reaching for the stars above in irrationality. It is up to
Syria to tell Hezbollah and Hamas to stop firing rockets into Israel. Not that facts ever play any role whatever in Bush foreign policy, but the problem with this gem of wisdom offered from St. Petersburg is that the Bush Administration lauded the removal of Syrian troops from Lebanese soil just last year as a triumph of its own devise.
For Bush's complaint today to have an validity at all, it completely undercuts his previous claim to have induced Syria out of Lebanese politics. No, instead of the Cedar Revolution showing that Democracy Is On The March, Syria's withdrawal was nothing more than a fraud disguising the fact that Hezbollah still controlled Southern Lebanon and that it did so as a surrogate for Syria.
If Bush is right, and Syria really is able to exert decisive control over Hezbollah, it also renders Israel's current campaign against hapless Lebanon into mass murder and an outrageous war crime.
It suggests that the punishment bombing campaign is misplaced -- that Israel should be bombing Syria instead. Which, I believe is the real agenda at work now between the Bush and Olmert governments.
The insanity lies in the failure to realize that military superiority does not equal domination. The USA knocked off the Iraqi government in a matter of a few weeks with minimal casualties. Israel continues to enjoy control of the skies over the entire area -- and it can lay waste to any spot of land it chooses within its sphere of influence. Yet in both cases, there is less security today than there was yesterday. And this trend toward chaos shows no sign of reversing itself in either theater of war.
This must be extremely frustrating to the political players who decided that "power" is the solution to the problems of the Middle East.
This was obvious to most of the literate people of the world when Bush defined the "War On Terror" as a series of wars against particular governments. Defeating an army is child's play when you have a monopoly on the modern technology of death. Ruling a society, however, demands the cooperation of the citizenry. And when the citizenry is hostile to you on religious, racial, linguistic, political and social grounds -- it is beyond insane to think that you can change the way people have lived for all living memory.
Personally, I doubt that the neoconservatives are as stupid as their policy choices suggest. I suspect cunning as they fancy themselves advancing a long term program of social transformation in the USA -- dragging our people into a general war for domination of the middle east one step at a time. Defeat in Iraq, while setting up the permanent bases there, is but one step toward reviving the draft and the use of nuclear weapons to enforce a total subjugation of the entire region.
I hope that I am just paranoid about that speculation. If so, it just means that they really are idiots who really thought that an invading army would be greeted with flowers and sweets . . . .
Either way, there is something horrible afoot right now.
Faced with the absolute bankruptcy of their fundamental strategy, Bush and Olmert now are doing what fools have always done when they are losing -- they are going to up the ante.
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