Domino diplomacy
Condi Rice and Co. are using the conflict in Lebanon as a proxy war with Iran that will somehow rescue the U.S. from failure in Iraq.
By Sidney Blumenthal
July 27, 2006 | Once again the Bush administration is floating on a wave of euphoria. Israel's offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon has liberated anew the utopian strain of neoconservatism that had been traduced by the Iraqi sectarian civil war. And Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has propelled herself forward as chief cheerleader. "What we're seeing here," she said, "are the birth pangs of a new Middle East." At every press conference she repeats the phrase "a new Middle East" as though its incantation were magical. Her jaunt to the region is intended to lend the appearance of diplomacy in order to forestall it.
In Rome Wednesday, a proposal by European and Arab nations for an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon was scuttled by U.S. opposition. As explained to me by several senior State Department officials, Rice is entranced by a new "domino" theory: Israel's attacks will demolish Hezbollah; the Lebanese will blame Hezbollah and destroy its influence; and the backlash will extend to the Palestinians' Hamas, which will collapse. From the administration's point of view, the Israel-Lebanon conflict is a proxy war with Iran (and Syria) that will inexplicably help turn around Iraq. "We will prevail," Rice says nearly as often as she refers to a "new Middle East."
The Bush administration has traditionally engaged in promiscuous threat conflation -- al-Qaida with Saddam Hussein, North Korea and Iran in "the axis of evil," and now inferentially the Shiite Hezbollah with the Sunni Iraqi insurgency. By asserting "we" before "will prevail" Rice is engaging in national-interest conflation. According to the Rice doctrine, the United States has now deserted its historical role as ultimate guarantor of Israel's security by acting as the honest broker among all parties. Rather than emphasize the paramount importance of Lebanese sovereignty, presumably a matter of concern to an administration that had made a nation's sovereignty Exhibit A in the spread of democracy in a "new Middle East," Rice has downplayed or ignored it in favor of an uncritical endorsement of Israel's offensive against Hezbollah, which has destroyed much of Lebanon's infrastructure, made refugees of about 20 percent of the Lebanese, and treated the Lebanese government as a contemptible irrelevance. Rice's trip was calculated to interpose the influence of the United States to prevent a cease-fire and to give Israel at least another week of unimpeded military action.
To the Bush administration the conflagration has appeared as a deus ex machina to rescue it from the Iraq quagmire. That this is patently absurd does not dawn on those who remain in thrall to the same pattern of thought that imagined the invaders of Iraq would be greeted with flowers in the streets of Baghdad. Denial is the basis of repetition. New and irrefutable revelations of the administration's disastrous consequences are brushed off like lint.
more at:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2006/07/27/middle_east/