New Civilization News: more positive reasons    
 more positive reasons7 comments
3 Aug 2006 @ 18:54, by Sandi Hunter

WSWS : News & Analysis : Middle East

US-Israeli onslaught on Lebanon intensifies

By Mike Head

3 August 2006

Use this version to print | Send this link by email | Email the author

Backed by the Bush administration, Israel has poured thousands more troops into Lebanon and escalated its aerial bombardment in its bid to crush all resistance and take control of the south of the country. With the US blocking all calls for an immediate ceasefire—to give the Israeli military more time to complete the job—Israeli leaders have openly declared that the offensive will continue for weeks.

Aided by the lack of any opposition from the UN and the European Union, the objectives set by the US and Israel from the outset of the war are being pursued methodically and with barbaric devastation. Hezbollah’s capture of two Israeli Defence Force (IDF) soldiers has been used as a pretext to attempt to kill or drive out the population of south Lebanon and bring the entire country under its political sway.

Up to 20,000 IDF troops have invaded Lebanon on multiple fronts, backed by tanks, military bulldozers and ferocious air power. There is no indication that the offensive will necessarily stop at the Litani River, the northern border of Israel’s self-proclaimed “security zone”. IDF infantry have already crossed the river in several places, going beyond the territory that Israel occupied for 18 years from 1982 to 2000.

Throughout southern Lebanon, south Beirut and the eastern Bekaa Valley, the IDF is pursuing a scorched earth policy, reducing towns and villages to rubble, leaving the remaining residents—those too old or weak to escape—without water and food. Far from “surgical incursions” to dismantle Hezbollah command posts, as claimed by Israel, the operation is systematically blowing up and bulldozing houses, apartment buildings, community facilities and essential services to make whole areas uninhabitable.

Following the end of the 48-hour cessation of air strikes, Israeli war planes carried out a wave of bombings throughout Lebanon on Wednesday. Air strikes resumed in the battered outskirts of Beirut in the early hours of today. Residents heard the impact of large explosions about every five minutes starting at 2.30 a.m. as missiles hit Dahieh, a Shiite Muslim suburb that has been repeatedly shelled by Israel since fighting began three weeks ago.

Yesterday IDF commandos provocatively landed near the eastern city of Baalbeck, 100 kilometres into Lebanon and close to the Syrian border. Seizing a Hezbollah-run hospital, they captured several alleged Hezbollah militants under the cover of an Israeli bombardment that killed at least 19 civilians, including five children. Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, the IDF chief of staff, told reporters at a briefing that the raid was intended to show that Israel could strike anywhere in Lebanon.

There is open speculation in the US media that the ground war will not be limited to the south but could lead to a wider military operation if Israel decides to push toward Beirut. Brigadier General Shuki Shahar, the deputy chief of the military’s Northern Command, was quoted saying: “The farther north we can push them, the fewer Israeli citizens they can put under threat with these rockets.”

Further south, in Tyre, the mass burial planned for 90 victims of the Qana massacre and other atrocities had to be postponed because of the intensity of the Israeli missile barrage. Tens of thousands of people are streaming out of the ancient Mediterranean city. In recent days, its population had swollen to 100,000 because of the influx of refugees from villages inland. By Tuesday, only about 15,000 remained.

It is now obvious that the slaughter of innocents at Qana was part of a wider plan to terrorise and force people to flee. With the official Lebanese civilian death toll already nearing 1,000 and the number of displaced people one million—a quarter of the country’s population—Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert yesterday boasted that this was a mark of success in the war. “All the population, which is the power base of the Hezbollah in Lebanon, was displaced,” he declared.

In other words, the strategy—agreed with Washington from the start—is the systematic de-population of south Lebanon, where the three-week onslaught has only increased popular support for Hezbollah as a national resistance movement. With IDF troops meeting further fierce opposition and Hezbollah firing more rockets into Israel on Wednesday than on any previous day of the 22-day-old war, Olmert declared that the army would not stop fighting or withdraw until a “robust” international force moved into southern Lebanon on Israel’s terms.

His government is confident that this could take weeks or more because of the insistence of the US, joined by Britain and Germany, that no truce be permitted until Israel has conquered the area. A cabinet minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, said on army radio he expected the offensive to take up to two weeks. Israeli generals are publicly predicting an even longer war. Brigadier General Alon Friedman of Israel’s Northern Command said seizing control of south Lebanon could take a week, and securing it “could take from three to eight weeks, depending on the size of the area.”

Israel is intent on retaining a free hand to carry out military operations throughout Lebanon even after a peace-keeping force is put in place. Writing in Haaretz today, Israeli military analyst Ze’ev Schiff commented: “Meanwhile, there is a delicate situation emerging over the mandate of the future multinational force... The danger is that sanctions will apply to both sides. This may make it very difficult for Israel to defend itself, even if it argues self-defence.”

Whatever tactical differences exist with France over the timing and composition of the planned international “stabilisation force,” there is no disagreement over its basic function, which will be to obliterate all opposition to Lebanon being reduced to a protectorate, completely subservient to US and Israeli interests.

White House spokesman Tony Snow said an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon was not on the agenda, and downplayed differences with France on the urgency of ending the fighting. “An immediate ceasefire is something that at this point doesn’t seem to be in the cards. Neither side is headed that way,” he told a press briefing.

The truth is that Washington is urging the Israelis to get on with the slaughter as quickly as possible, as Schiff alluded to in his Haaretz comment yesterday. A fervent advocate of the war, he complained that the Olmert government had not yet provided the US with the “military cards” it needed to ensure the permanent eradication of Hezbollah.

“US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is the figure leading the strategy of changing the situation in Lebanon, not Prime Minister Ehud Olmert or Defense Minister Amir Peretz. She has so far managed to withstand international pressure in favor of a ceasefire,” he wrote.

The Lebanese government has continued to denounce Israel’s war crimes. Foreign Minister Fawzi Salloukh called Tuesday for an immediate ceasefire and the creation of an international tribunal to try the Israeli officials. Speaking of Qana, Justice Minister Charles Rizk said: “Israel committed a hideous crime against children, women and elderly and [there should be] an international and independent committee to probe the crime.”

In Beirut, Lebanon’s High Relief Committee (HRC) said it had counted 828 people killed and 3,200 wounded so far. “These are identified bodies, and the toll does not count the people still believed to be under the rubble,” an HRC spokesman said. The number of displaced has reached 913,760. Economic losses caused by the destruction of the country’s infrastructure are now estimated at $4 billion.

Such is the “new Middle East” promised by the White House. The barbaric war on Lebanon, alongside the worsening bloodletting in US-occupied Iraq, are the product of a neo-colonial policy directed at suppressing all resistance to American dominance of the region’s massive oil and gas reserves and US imperialism’s wider goal of achieving unchallenged global hegemony.

See Also:
Slaughter in Lebanon enters fourth week
What way forward in the struggle against war?
[2 August 2006]
Following Qana massacre
Israel escalates Lebanon offensive with US backing
[1 August 2006]
The Qana massacre: Slaughter of innocents in Lebanon
[31 July 2006]
Rice leaves bloody footprints in Lebanon
[26 July 2006]
The real aims of the US-backed Israeli war against Lebanon
[21 July 2006]

[< Back] [New Civilization News]

Category:  


7 comments

4 Aug 2006 @ 18:36 by gabacho : Islam v. Christians and Jews
Here's a little reality-check for you:

Lebanon has no one to blame but itself for the current invasion of their South. Israel was no threat to Lebanon or any other Middle-eastern nation until Lebananese muslims illegaly entered Israel, kidnapped Israeli citizens, and then began fierce rocket attacks on northern Israel's civilian population, attacks which have continued to this very hour.

Now Israel is working to clear a security zone across southern Lebanon along the Israeli northern border to regain their security and sovereignty. Who can blame them. Hezbollah is an official part of the Lebanese government. Thus Lebanon, as a nation, is directly responsible for the war in their country, having started the whole thing.

I feel no sympathy whatever for these murderous Muslim perpetrators. Let them die like the filthy dogs that they are. If I had my way, I'd nuke Iran and Syria right back to the stone age, and put the rest of the Muslim world on notice to shut up and get the hell out of our faces.

Hot and bothered in California  



5 Aug 2006 @ 20:50 by spells : thanks ....
for showing us yet another positive reason to live as if it is us vs. them, all the way. I'll bet in your next life you end up related to a Murderous Muslim perpetrator, because you haven't learned much in your previous lives, so maybe it'll be time to see the other side of it. Maybe after doing this a few hundred more times, you'll realize that we are all of the same essence and only our intents, the vibration of our energy and the level of our awareness separate us.

But let me tell you...I am finally getting convinced about the "positive" effects of not learning and keeping our separateness (aka egoes) important. (That was saracasm) and to show you more reasons please read on...

US-Israeli war aim is to annihilate Lebanon

By the Editorial Board

5 August 2006

This article is available as a PDF leaflet to download and distribute

The sharp escalation of the attacks against Lebanon Friday have made it abundantly clear that the objective of this US-Israeli war of aggression is to demolish Lebanon as an independent and sovereign country.

The war is aimed at transforming the country into an occupied territory controlled by the US and Israel, perhaps through the medium of a NATO “peacekeeping” force. The destruction of Lebanon is being carried out quite deliberately, and with very definite designs. For Israel, it is yet again a matter of annexation of more territory. And for Washington, it is the preparation of new and even bloodier wars, directed in the first instance against Syria and Iran.

The pretense that this war is being waged to defend Israel from terrorism or even to destroy the Shiite Hezbollah movement is belied by the Israeli bombing campaign that is now striking targets and claiming victims far from the Shiite centers of south Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut.

In one of the worst atrocities since the war began, an Israeli air strike claimed the lives of over 33 farm workers, blown to pieces as they loaded plums and peaches onto trucks at a farm warehouse in the far north of the Bekaa Valley, near the Syrian border. At least another 20 people were wounded in the attack. Most of the victims were Syrian Kurds. They were taken across the border to Syrian hospitals, because previous bombing raids had demolished roads leading to hospitals in Lebanon itself.

This massacre of farm workers followed airstrikes that systematically demolished bridges on the main coastal highway linking Beirut and the Lebanese south to the northern half of the country. Marking the first major attacks on the predominantly Christian North, these attacks served to cut the country in two and to cut off the sole remaining lifeline for relief supplies from abroad. At least five people were killed in these bombings, which were conducted during the morning rush hour, including motorists who were crushed to death as the bridges were bombed from beneath them.

In the south of Lebanon, near the Israeli border, yet another horror was reported Friday, after Israeli airstrikes demolished two homes where civilians were apparently seeking refuge from the military offensive. According to Lebanese officials some 57 people were trapped beneath the rubble of the buildings, and it was unknown how many were dead and if there were survivors.

Meanwhile, Israeli warplanes have resumed their bombings of the urban Shiite neighborhoods of southern Beirut, demolishing apartment buildings, roadways and other structures. Planes have dropped leaflets demanding that all residents of the crowded urban districts flee for their lives.

After nearly four weeks of Israeli attacks, Lebanon’s Prime Minister Fouad Siniora declared in a speech broadcast to an emergency session of the Organization of the Islamic Conference convened in Malaysia, that 900 civilians have been killed in Lebanon, 3,000 wounded, and more than one million, a quarter of the Lebanese population, have been turned into internal refugees. A third of the dead, he said, were children under the age of 12.

The Israeli campaign to cut Lebanon off from the outside world while severing one part of the country from another is threatening to create a humanitarian catastrophe that could cause even more deaths than the bombs and shells being dropped on the country’s civilian population.

Israel has been enforcing a total air and sea blockade of Lebanon since mid-July. As a result, fuel supplies are running critically low, threatening to plunge the country into darkness. Fuel tankers have been turned away by Israeli warships. The most immediate catastrophic impact is that major hospitals, including ones that remained open during the civil war of the 1970s, are being forced to close because of lack of fuel and medicine, as well as the inability of staff to get to work. Medical personnel have warned that critical patients will likely die as a result of the blockade.

Throughout Beirut and the rest of the country, power outages are becoming commonplace, with some areas getting only two hours of electricity a day. Meanwhile, stores are running out of essential foodstuffs.

Lebanon’s President Emile Lahoud issued a statement accusing Israel of waging a “war of starvation” against the Lebanese people. “It is an aggression that has exceeded Israel’s declared objectives. Israel has now decided to destroy Lebanon,” he said.

The effect of Friday’s bombing of the key bridges linking the north and south of the country is to accelerate this destruction by cutting off the last route for aid entering the country.

The deliberate sabotaging of any attempts at relieving the suffering of the Lebanese people threatens to have catastrophic consequences. The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) warned that the contamination of drinking water due to the destruction of infrastructure and the cutoff of fuel supplies threatened south Lebanon and its displaced population in particular with the outbreak of deadly epidemics.

Lahoud’s statement is not merely an emotional denunciation of the savage Israeli attack on Lebanon, but rather an accurate appraisal of the real objectives of this war.

The Bush administration in Washington and the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in Israel, have launched a war whose aim it is to smash Lebanon as a country, using mass terror to expel entire populations and to reduce the nation as a whole to the status of a semi-colonial protectorate, wholly subordinated to the interests of Washington and the Zionist regime.


Annexation and “regime change”

The war aims are emerging out of the barbaric methods that are being employed against the people of Lebanon. For Israel, it appears increasingly likely that the objective is the annexation of a significant portion of Lebanese territory, after it has been emptied of its civilian population through the means of massacres and terror. Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz has ordered the military to prepare to drive all the way to the Litani River, 15 miles north of the border. The control of this river has been a strategic objective of the Zionists since before the founding of the Israeli state.

The experience of the last 40 years have demonstrated that Israel is a state without fixed borders. The momentum of each new war expands its control over new territory to meet its supposed security needs. In Lebanon, the Israeli state is pursuing the equivalent of what was referred to under Hitler’s Third Reich as lebensraum—the killing or expulsion of populations viewed as inferior in order to repopulate their land.

For Washington, the Israeli offensive has a far broader significance. The destruction of Lebanon is seen as a stepping stone to the launching of new aggressive wars aimed at achieving “regime change” in Syria and Iran. The unconditional US support for Israel’s criminal war against the Lebanese people is driven most fundamentally by US imperialism’s strategic goal of establishing its undisputed domination of the Middle East and its oil wealth.

This was undoubtedly the same goal that motivated US support for last year’s so-called “Cedar Revolution.” That this event and the elections that followed only served to strengthen Hezbollah’s political influence was seen by Washington as an intolerable impediment to its aims, best remedied through the use of murderous military force.

The naked aims of US imperialism found expression in a column published Friday by Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post, one of the most consistent proponents of the Bush administration’s policy of militarism in the Middle East. “America’s green light for Israel to defend itself is seen as a favor to Israel,” he wrote. “But that is a tendentious, misleadingly partial analysis. The green light—indeed, the encouragement—is also an act of clear self-interest. America wants, America needs, a decisive Hezbollah defeat.”

Krauthammer criticized Israel not for the murderous character of its war against the Lebanese people, but rather for failing to utilize even greater force. Washington, he wrote, had “counted on Israel’s ability to do the job. It has been disappointed. Prime Minister Olmert has provided unsteady and uncertain leadership. Foolishly relying on air power alone, he denied his generals the ground offensive they wanted, only to reverse himself later.”

These are the real sentiments within the Bush administration. It wants Israel to get on with the business of mass killing in Lebanon, bringing the casualties into the tens if not hundreds of thousands to achieve US objectives.

That the brutality of this strategy is provoking massive upheavals throughout the Middle East is beyond dispute. Much of it is directed against the abject hypocrisy and criminality of the American role in planning and supporting this bloody enterprise. It should be recalled that not too many years ago official Washington and the American mass media was waging a massive campaign invoking “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo as a pretext for war in the Balkans. Now it is rushing bombs and missiles to Israel in order to facilitate the rapid cleansing of south Lebanon of its entire Shiite population through the indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas.

Over 100,000 marched in the predominantly Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City in Baghdad on Friday denouncing Israel and the US for the war in Lebanon and vowing to fight the US occupation. Right-wing Arab regimes such as in Jordan and Egypt have been forced to distance themselves from Washington.

And the Beirut newspaper Daily Star warned in an editorial on Friday that the war is exacerbating “the conspicuous disenchantment of large segments—perhaps majorities—of Arab public opinion with their own government policies.” It added, “The consequences are ominous in a region with so much of the world’s energy reserves, and so many governments and ordinary citizens willing to use the most awful kind of violence to achieve their goals. The signs of radicalization that continue to manifest themselves in various Arab countries, as a consequence of the war between Lebanon and Israel, must not be ignored.”

The Bush administration seems oblivious to this apparently sound advice. Having led the country into the disastrous quagmire of Iraq, it is welcoming the possibility of new wars and new terrorist attacks as a means of reinvigorating its flagging “global war on terrorism.”

The growth of mass opposition to the policies of Israel and Washington will be attributed to “terrorism,” and the pretexts will be found for new and even more terrible wars.

The ostensible opposition party in Washington, meanwhile, is vying with the administration over which of them is the most enthusiastic supporter of the Israeli war on Lebanon.

Representative of this party is Hillary Clinton, the Democratic senator from New York and leading candidate for the party’s presidential nomination in 2006.

Speaking in Buffalo, New York on Tuesday, just days after scores of people, the majority of them children, were massacred in the village of Qana, Clinton reiterated her unconditional backing for the Israeli state. The US, she said, “needs to take the lead in protecting Israel. It has to guarantee Israel’s security...whether that means putting troops in or not, I don’t know.”

Not a word of sympathy or concern for the bleeding Lebanese population passed Clinton’s lips. This attitude is not the exception, but the rule, for the entire American political establishment as well as the mass media. Atrocities that recall nothing so much as the crimes of German and Italian fascism in the 1930s—Ethiopia, Guernica, the Blitzkrieg against Poland—are treated as perfectly acceptable and understandable acts of Israeli “self-defense.”

Underlying this utter lack of morality lie the class interests of America’s ruling oligarchy, which has determined that its global interests can best be furthered through the utilization of unrestrained militarism.

In the end, American working people will be forced to pay the price for this seemingly insane policy. The costs of US militarism will be increasingly felt in the destruction of living standards and what little remains of social services for working people at home.

Moreover, the ever-widening war in the Middle East cannot be sustained much longer without the imposition of the military draft. It is highly probable that once the 2006 midterm elections are over, a bipartisan effort will be mounted—no doubt spearheaded by the Democrats—to resurrect the dragooning of American youth into the expeditionary forces that are being prepared to wage the so-called “long war” for US imperialist hegemony.

The struggle against war can be advanced only through the independent political mobilization of working people based upon a socialist program that seeks the international unification of workers in every country in a common struggle against the global financial and corporate interests that dominate the planet. The Socialist Equality Party is intervening in the 2006 elections in order to advance such an alternative.

See Also:
Human Rights Watch catalogues Israeli war crimes in Lebanon
[4 August 2006]
US-Israeli onslaught on Lebanon intensifies
[3 August 2006]
Slaughter in Lebanon enters fourth week
What way forward in the struggle against war?
[2 August 2006]
Following Qana massacre
Israel escalates Lebanon offensive with US backing
[1 August 2006]  



8 Aug 2006 @ 08:03 by maxtobin : Fighting for Peace
We knew when 'Conning' Conni Rice went on a 'Peace Mission' that there was no longer any hope of sanity or humanity in this situation, and that before we witnessed George stumbling down the ladder. If it were not so tragic this would be high farce worthy of Mark Twain or Shakespeare even.
Prayers for peace in the USA are now part of a daily ritual for many on this planet, for surely there the Karma of this current course of action will soon be noticed. Glad to be so far away!!!
The solution is to get beyond the duality and over the dis-ease of separation.
Having visited Israel in the late 80’s; this current course of action is as sensed (seen) then. There will be no peace in the mid east (and the human ‘civilization’ therefore) until God/Jehovah and Allah have ‘had it out’.

Divine life pulses through us all and we are all in this together even if/when we feel alone or disempowered.
All life is ONE, this is the knowing of the Galactic Underworld* which will be anchored in the Universal Underworld* that sees the end of evolution as we know it and the return of our conscious free will choice to embrace a unity consciousness and at oneness with the divine creator.

I hope beyond hope that my vision of a nuclear solution to this deep division in Jerusalem does not come to pass. We hold the energy for a coming to the senses of all involved. We seek to practice the way of the peaceful heart warrior and forgive all for their ignorant acts which are so destructive of our global peace of mind and being. They say the darkest hour is just before the dawn. May the light of the Risen SON (solar logos) shine through the hearts of all involved in the human dance of awakening to the full romance of co creation with the divine (Mother/Father/All that is)

Blessings to All; especially those who seem so hurting at this time by observations such as mine!

**more info on the patterns of divine evolution Sorry folks dont see whats not right here will look more deeply at this later so www.breakthroughcelebration.com is the link intended for your use.  



8 Aug 2006 @ 16:38 by blueboy : Max,
I so like your comment! But this link you gave....????.... Is this what the website you intended to give us? This is what opens up when I klick on your link; "more info on the patterns...."
[link]

is this correct??? ( i can't really grasp the "divine evolution" in this link that I get up.... Heeeeelp! *!*....  



8 Aug 2006 @ 17:42 by bushman : No
This is the link he was trying to put up, [link] he just had 2 http//, if you had looked at the address bb. I don't see how you could get the link you put there, bb, from the link Max posted.  


8 Aug 2006 @ 18:29 by spells : thanks everyone....
Thanks for your comments....here's another relevant article from wsws.org for you....

Behind Bush’s “truce” plan: the drive towards a wider Middle East war

By Bill Van Auken
8 August 2006

US President George W. Bush on Monday declared his full support for a US-French United Nations resolution that dictates Israel’s terms to the Lebanese people while allowing the Israeli military to indefinitely continue its occupation and devastation of Lebanon.

This document, far from an agreement for peace, represents one more step in widening the war initiated by the Bush administration in 2003 with the invasion of Iraq into a regional conflagration that poses an immense threat to working people not only in the Middle East, but in the US and all over the world.

Speaking at his Crawford, Texas ranch, Bush made it clear that his administration intended to accept no substantive changes in the UN resolution, and that it was particularly opposed to an amendment, advanced by the Lebanese government and supported by the entire Arab world, specifying that any settlement require the invading army of 10,000 Israeli troops to immediately withdraw from Lebanon.

Standing by his side, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who worked systematically over the past month to block a ceasefire and ensure that the killing in Lebanon be allowed to continue, belittled the objections of the Lebanese. “We understand how emotional this is for the Lebanese,” she declared. “They’ve been through a very difficult war.”

The UN document makes no condemnation whatsoever of Israel’s blitzkrieg against Lebanon—supposedly in response to the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers—resulting in the deaths of over a thousand Lebanese civilians, the wounding of thousands more, the expulsion of one million Lebanese from their homes and the decimation of the country’s infrastructure.

Nor does it call upon Israel to relinquish its control of Lebanon’s Shebaa Farms territory, an occupation that, under international law, makes Hezbollah’s armed resistance a legitimate form of struggle.

The UN resolution amounts to the kind of victor’s peace traditionally imposed on a nation decisively defeated in war. In fact, despite the carnage Israel has wreaked upon Lebanon, largely through the use of missiles, shells and cluster bombs supplied by the US, Israel has failed to achieve its military objectives or secure its grip on any Lebanese territory. Israel’s military setbacks on the ground are the result of fierce opposition by Hezbollah fighters.

Nor has Israel been able to stop Hezbollah rocket attacks, the most deadly of which occurred Sunday, killing 12 Israeli soldiers preparing to join the invasion of Lebanon.

The demands set forth in the draft resolution—that Hezbollah disarm and cease all military operations while Israel continues occupying Lebanese territory and carrying out “defensive” air strikes against defenseless civilians—are completely unacceptable not only to Hezbollah, but also to the Lebanese people and the Lebanese government, as well as the governments of Syria and Iran.

After stonewalling efforts to bring about an immediate ceasefire so as to allow its Israeli ally to continue its offensive, Washington is now brushing aside all objections by the Lebanese—in the name of “peace.” Thus, at his Monday press conference, Bush declared hypocritically, “Everyone wants the violence to stop.”

This is a lie. Washington no more wants an end to the violence now than it did a month ago.

Nabih Berri, the speaker of the Lebanese parliament, drew the correct assessment of the UN draft resolution, declaring that by legitimizing Israel’s occupation it would “open the door to never-ending war.” There is every indication that “never-ending war” is precisely the strategy of the Bush administration in the Middle East.

This is the real meaning of Bush’s statement Monday that the UN resolution was designed to get at “the root causes of the conflict.” By this he did not mean addressing the grievances, stretching back nearly six decades, of the Palestinian people, who were expelled from their homeland with the creation of the Israeli state in 1948, and then subjected to nearly four decades of illegal and brutal occupation after Israel seized the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967.

Nor do the “root causes” Bush has in mind include the century-old domination of the region by Western imperialism—first British and then American—maintained with the single-minded objective of installing pliant Arab regimes that would insure a steady flow of oil at profitable rates, while suppressing the aspirations of their own people.

For Bush and the right-wing layers directing the affairs of the American government, the “root” problem is popular resistance to both Israel’s land grabs and the drive by the US to establish undisputed hegemony over this strategic area of the globe.

The perverse and fraudulent character of the UN resolution is epitomized by the fact that what purports to be a truce agreement has been negotiated essentially between one of the combatants—Israel—and its principal backer, the US.

The terms of the resolution, which the Bush administration cooked up with the French government, are intended to be unacceptable to both Hezbollah and the Lebanese government. The aim is to place the onus on them for the policy being carried out by Israel and the US—a continuation and escalation of the war against the Lebanese people.

The reaction of the Israeli government makes transparent the bogus character of the supposed truce effort. Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz told a parliamentary committee Monday, “I gave an order that if within the coming days the diplomatic process does not reach a conclusion, Israeli forces will carry out the operations necessary to take control of Katyusha rocket launching sites in every location.” The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), he added, “will operate anywhere in Lebanon.”

This is a clear signal that the IDF will be sent to clear out the population and occupy Lebanese territory up to the Litani River and perhaps beyond. The logic of this military campaign is yet another annexation of territory to Israel.


“No limits” on Israeli attacks

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert declared that he would place “no limits” on the IDF’s use of force.

The Israeli daily Haaretz quoted an unnamed senior military officer as saying that Israel now plans to “attack strategic infrastructure targets and symbols of the Lebanese government.” Another officer told the newspaper, “It could be that at the end of the story, Lebanon will be dark for a few years.”

The escalation of the Israeli aggression was already evident on Monday, with the bombing of a crowded shopping area in a southern suburb of Beirut located on the edge of the city’s predominantly Christian district. The death toll was put at 20 by the official Lebanese news agency, though more victims were believed buried in the rubble. The air strike demolished a residential building close to a shopping mall where many refugees had taken shelter.

Meanwhile, in south Lebanon, the IDF announced a 10 p.m. curfew, warning that anyone on the streets after that hour would be considered a terrorist and shot.

Washington has made it a point of principle that it will have no contact with either Hezbollah or the two nations with the strongest ties to Lebanon and its Shiite population—Syria and Iran. Instead, it has sought to demonize all three, laying the ideological groundwork for further wars of aggression.

Thus, Bush spoke of the UN resolution serving to “prevent armed militias like Hezbollah and its Iranian and Syrian sponsors from sparking another crisis.”

Asked by a reporter why Washington refused to talk to either Syria or Iran, he replied, “I appreciate people focusing on Syria and Iran, and we should, because Syria and Iran sponsor and promote Hezbollah activities—all aimed at creating chaos, all aimed at using terror to stop the advance of democracies.” He added, for good measure, “The actions of Hezbollah through its sponsors of Iran and Syria are trying to stop that advance of democracy. Hezbollah launched this attack. Hezbollah is trying to create the chaos necessary to stop the advance of peace.”

There is no reason to believe that Bush knows anything more about Lebanon than he did about Iraq. (According to one recently published account, he did not know before the war that there were two branches of Islam—Shiite and Sunni). But the reality is that Hezbollah is not some cat’s-paw of either Syria or Iran, and neither government can control its actions.

It is a movement that grew out of the Lebanese Shiite population’s resistance to the 18-year Israeli occupation of their land. It gained immense prestige by succeeding in expelling Israeli troops from Lebanese territory, and emerged as a powerful movement that appealed to the aspirations of the Lebanese Shiite population, historically the country’s most impoverished and most politically disenfranchised layer.

In the most chilling section of Bush’s remarks on Monday, he related the events in Lebanon to his administration’s broader policy in the Middle East and the so-called “global war on terrorism.”

He declared: “...[W]hat the American people need to know is we’ve got a strategy—a strategy for freedom in the Middle East which protects the American people in the long run. And we’ve got a strategy to deal with the situations that arise in the Middle East—first Lebanon; of course, the Iranian nuclear weapon issue.”

He continued: “The challenge in the 21st century is to remind people about the stakes, and remind people that in moments of quiet, there’s still an Islamic fascist group plotting, planning and trying to spread their ideology. And one of the things that—one of the things that came out of this unfortunate incident in the Middle East is a stark reminder that there are those who want to stop the advance of liberty...”

Bush’s “strategy” is to widen the wars for “regime change” in the Middle East that began with the toppling of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. When the American president—whose closest allies in the region are the police state regimes and absolutist monarchies of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan—uses the words “freedom” and “liberty,” he is talking about the freedom of American banks and corporations to exercise exclusive domination over Middle East and its oil wealth.

Facing a catastrophe in its occupation of Iraq (with thousands of US forces now being sent back into Baghdad to resecure the capital and confront its restive Shiite population), the Bush administration has decided that the solution is not to withdraw, but rather to launch new wars, not only in Lebanon, but ultimately against Syria and Iran.

There is undoubtedly an element of madness in this strategy of escalating militarism, but this is not merely the lunacy of America’s dim-witted president and his advisors. Rather, it reflects an irrational social system based on private ownership of the planet’s productive forces and vital resources and the division of a globally integrated world economy into rival nation states.

US policy is essentially to utilize its military power to assert domination over the oil resources of the Middle East and Central Asia, and thereby assure American capitalism both a secure energy supply and the ability to dictate terms to its economic rivals.

The turn to escalating militarism is also driven by the profound internal contradictions of American society, dominated by an unprecedented polarization between a wealthy elite and the masses of working people, and faced with a growing prospect of economic slump combined with rising inflation—a recipe for social explosions.

A military attack on Syria and Iran has the gravest implications. With US military forces already stretched to the limit by the failing imperialist adventure in Iraq, a new war will inevitably bring with it the reinstitution of the draft, forcing American young people to serve as cannon fodder for the conquest of Iranian oil fields.

Moreover, a war against Iran has the most deadly implications. A US attack would provoke an Iranian response against Israel, and, in turn, a possible nuclear retaliation by Israel. The path now being taken by US imperialism leads to the death of millions.

The carnage in Lebanon has demonstrated that there exists no genuine political opposition to this turn towards global warfare within the US political establishment, with the ostensible opposition party, the Democrats, seeking to outdo the Republicans in their support for Israel. At the same time, the draft resolution produced by the US and France makes it clear, once again, that the European bourgeoisie is incapable of mounting any opposition to US militarism, and that the UN itself serves only as a tool for imperialist policy.

The threat of a far wider and more devastating war can be countered only through the independent mobilization of the working class, in the US and internationally, based on a common socialist program.

See Also:
UN resolution on Lebanon: blueprint for intensified war and colonial occupation
[7 August 2006]
US-Israeli war aim is to annihilate Lebanon
[5 August 2006]
Slaughter in Lebanon enters fourth week
What way forward in the struggle against war?
[2 August 2006]
The real aims of the US-backed Israeli war against Lebanon
[21 July 2006]  



14 Aug 2006 @ 03:16 by enora : One sided, as usual
250 Hezbollah rockets hit Israel today. Israel is defending itself against terrorists, murderers. When will you understand, and is it even possible for you to feel the same about the carnage Israel has had to deal with for years?!  


Your Name:
Your URL: (or email)
Subject:       
Comment:
For verification, please type the word you see on the left:


Other entries in
8 Nov 2008 @ 15:46: War Hurts Families
21 Oct 2008 @ 08:33: 36 MILLION DEAD BY AMERICA’S AGGRESSIONS, WHAT SAYETH OBAMA?
5 Sep 2008 @ 11:35: BEIJING OLYMPICS: LAST GAMES, AS WORLD WAR III COMES
17 Aug 2008 @ 12:48: AUGUSTUS CEASAR OR BONAPARTE RETURNED TO ROLE-PLAY GLOBAL TYRANT
9 Apr 2008 @ 15:44: An Introduction To Social Pathology Of Police And Federal Agents
3 Apr 2008 @ 18:10: Few Care To Listen, *Until They Discover That...
12 Nov 2007 @ 11:23: Re: happy veteran's day & Pakistan?
17 Sep 2007 @ 09:57: This Is Worse Than Viet Nam
28 Aug 2007 @ 19:56: AmericanMilitaryCoup-2012
16 Aug 2007 @ 23:55: The War Ahead


[< Back] [New Civilization News] [PermaLink]?