h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The policy is becoming clearer. The world has decided this is the 'War on Terror' being played out in Lebanon. Noone is going to stop the Israelis because htey are going after the bogeyman: Iran's HizbAllah. This has nowhere *near* started. The airlift evacuations are almost done and the Israleis have given the southern a couple of days to get out.... *Now* the fun starts. Watch and learn

The conclusion of the article states:


Leaving Israel to significantly weaken Hezbollah's military infrastructure would have equally perilous consequences. If there is anything more dangerous than a strong Hezbollah, it is a weak Hezbollah. One can only imagine what would happen if the organization were left bereft of leadership, clinging to its remaining weapons and operating underground, while the Shiite community is seething with resentment at Israel, the United States and the government that it perceives as its betrayer. As one Hezbollah member said, "All hell would be let loose."

Which is a reminder that although this past week has been bad, we haven't seen hell yet.

Amal Saad-Ghorayeb teaches at the Lebanese American University in Beirut and is the author of "Hizbu'llah: Politics and Religion" (Pluto Press).
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/21/AR2006072101363.html

Graham Fuller, formerly vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA, an accomplished Arabic scholar and historian, most recently author of the book The Future of Political Islam: "Most of the US thinks this crisis was started by Hamas and Hizbullah and that therefore those parties should be made to pay the price. A more objective reading of the situation would note US and Israeli determination to strangle Hamas in the nest from day one, to starve it, humiliate it and, typically and expectedly, to drive its radical wing to undertake a guerrilla operation against Israel. So the region does not view this conflict as prompted by Hamas and Hizbullah, but rather as one made inevitable and justifiable by unrelenting and merciless pressure from the US and Israel. I fear in the end this will be one more bloody chapter in this now widening struggle. In the interim, unseen to our eyes, the radical jihadis are making silent recruits every night through the flickering television images of yet new regional horrors. But sadly we will be seeing those recruits as they turn to action in weeks, months or even years from now.

Chuck Cogan, former Chief of the CIA's Near East Division, and station chief in several countries, now lecturing at Harvard: "The irony in all this is that Israel has an interest in a multicultural Lebanon and not an Islamist Lebanon, and the high hopes for the former are being dashed."

Ray Close, former CIA analyst for the Middle East: "Israeli actions in Lebanon are belligerently challenging the continued viability of the fragile coalition government that is struggling to achieve credibility and legitimacy at a critical period in Lebanon's history. Israeli actions are, even more importantly, threatening to revive the deep, sectarian divisions and inter-communal tensions that led to 15 years of tragic civil war (1975-90). American national interests will suffer more than Israel's if chaos results. Secondly, we Americans have other critical interests to worry about if we take a position that (continues to) support Israel's demand that Hizbullah must be totally defeated and disarmed (a futile objective in any case), and especially if Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the revered spiritual leader of Hizbullah, is physically harmed, the Shia populations of Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East will be inflamed - greatly undermining American prospects of working cooperatively and constructively with the Shia religious parties in Iraq that control the overwhelming political power in that country. Open confrontation of Hizbullah with the US, allied with Israel, will have a powerful impact on the Iranian people, as well."

Former CIA operative in the Middle East, now an analyst for the agency: "Even if the Israelis were again to occupy and hold a 20-mile [32-kilometer] defensive cordon sanitaire above Israel's northern border, then missiles of a 40 or 50 or 60-mile [64 or 80 or 96-kilometer] range, as the need demanded, would render that barrier obsolete and useless - while Hizbullah guerrillas, using the other new set of super-weapons, the IED [improvised explosive device] and the suicide bomber, would make Israelis just as vulnerable and just as miserable in that so-called 'protective zone' as they were during the 18-long years when they occupied the same swath of Lebanese territory the last time round. The same applies to Gaza. In 38 years, a large modern Israeli war machine, equipped with every high-tech weapon that modern military science can devise, has been unable to contain, much less defeat, a virulent and lethal resistance movement in tiny little Gaza.

Arnaud De Borchgrave International Editor at United Press International.

http://www.metimes.com/articles/normal.php?StoryID=20060722-090931-1343r

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/B/BUSH_PROTESTERS?SITE=TXSAE&SECTION=US&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

In the months before the 2004 election, dozens of people across the nation were banished from or arrested at Bush political rallies, some for heckling the president, others simply for holding signs or wearing clothing that expressed opposition to the war and administration policies.

Similar things have happened at official, taxpayer-funded, presidential visits, before and after the election. Some targeted by security have been escorted from events, while others have been arrested and charged with misdemeanors that were later dropped by local prosecutors.

Now, in federal courthouses from Charleston, W.Va., to Denver, federal officials and state and local authorities are being forced to defend themselves against lawsuits challenging the arrests and security policies.

Wilma, that is absolutely true. It happened here at the University. Students were 'detained' in a holding area for having anti-Bush signs or shirts until after the rally was finished and he had left.

So when the inevitable terrorist action occurs on US soil once again, I am sure that the media here will manage to once again portray it as a totally unprovoked attack on "innocent" Americans.

In a lot of places, people are not even being told what is going on on the other side of the world. If you read our local paper, the only thing that is going on is that it is very hot and there are meth addicts breaking into people's houses and stealing VCRs. Oh yeah, and the interest rates are going up. Buy a new car! There is furniture on sale!

Americans are not innocent so much as uninformed, ignorant, self centered. We are being lulled into security and fed pap by Fox News, we will be outraged when we finally suffer an attack. No one will be able to see the connection between our attack on Iraq and our providing arms to Israel as it stomps all over the Middle East, and the anger and retribution of the jihhadist response.

It is all so sad and unnecessary and stupid and wrong.

Such irony......







Despite meager resources, Palestinian refugee camps in southern Lebanon opened their doors Saturday to villagers fleeing Israeli bombardments on the south.

"In an act of solidarity, the refugee camps of Ain Al-Helweh and Mieh Mieh have started this morning to receive hundreds of displaced people," Amneh Jibril, head of the Palestinian women's union in Lebanon, told AFP Sunday.

Refugees at the two Palestinian camps near the main southern coastal city of Sidon have opened up schools to house the displaced villagers, and given them mattresses, blankets and food, she said.

Further south near Tyre, the three Palestinian refugee camps of Rashidiyeh, al-Bass and Burj al-Shemali have also started to distribute bread, flour and other basic necessities to displaced Lebanese.

Sidon Mayor Abdel Rahman Bizri told AFP that the number of displaced people in the city has risen to at least 30,000.

"Part of the problem was resolved when the Palestinian refugee camps in Sidon received the displaced people of the south," he said.

"They opened their schools to receive them and made dispensaries available for them," he said.

More than 400,000 Palestinian refugees are registered in Lebanon. Half of them live in miserable conditions at 12 camps scattered across the country.
http://arabia.msn.com/channels/msnnews/article.aspx?CatID=1&ID=87381&S=Hl

and on and on and on ...





continued a vast operation in the West Bank town of Nablus where troops destroyed almost all the local Palestinian Authority headquarters, sources on both sides have said.

Ahmed Anab, a 38-year-old local resident whose house is adjacent to the local "muqataa" compound, was killed outside his home from the force of explosives detonated by the Israeli army, a medical source said.

A Palestinian security official confirmed that for the third straight day, Israeli forces were working at destroying the muqataa.

"Three bulldozers are destroying it night and day and reducing the buildings to dust," he said.

"The police building, local interior ministry and preventive security building have been entirely destroyed," he added.

Adel Illah al-Atiri, director general of the local interior ministry in Nablus, told AFP that the ministry's archives dating back to 1918 had been destroyed.

An Israeli military source said the object of the operation was to flush out wanted gunmen, "some of whom are connected to Hezbollah" whose Shiite militiamen have been locked in deadly fighting with Israeli troops in Lebanon.

"They are still exchanging fire and we are using stronger means because they've refused to come out," the source said.

"We have information that the Hezbollah are trying to increase their power in Palestinian territories and are operating in the security forces."

Friday's death brings to 5,250 the number of people killed since the start of the Palestinian intifada or uprising in 2000, the overwhelming majority Palestinians.


http://arabia.msn.com/channels/msnnews/article.aspx?CatID=1&ID=86910&S=Hl

Preparing for an extended ground operation: The IDF has started constructing a temporary detention center designed to hold the Lebanese prisoners that will be captured during army operations in Southern Lebanon, Ynet has learned recently.

A truck convoy carrying barbed-wire fences, containers, and mobile showers and toilets started unloading equipment at the Filon military base near Rosh Pina Friday, and construction works at the place are already underway. According to plans, the structure should be able to hold up to hundreds of Hizbullah prisoners at any given time.

The fact that the army was granted special permission from the Chief Military Rabbinate to continue with construction works throughout Saturday attests to the urgency attributed to the project.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3279762,00.html

As ever, my staunchly Republican neighbor gives me a way of measuring the attitude of the average CNN-watching conservative. She can't understand, and she resents, my perspective on what is happening now in the Middle East. She sees Israel acting on its own. She doesn't see the chain of consequences that lead all the way back to January 2000, when one of the Bush administration's first actions was to abort (and I use the word advisedly) the peace negotiations that Clinton had been conducting with Arafat and I-forget-who, the Israeli leader at the time. Not only did they shut down the negotiations, they spanked Arafat over the phone before they invited the Israelis to Washington.

The danger for the Americans is mirrored by the danger for the Lebanese. We allowed ourselves to be lulled into a sense of security by the illusion of peace, a sense of superiority, intelligence, international support and wealth. See how fragile all that is? True the population of Lebanon is about 1/100th of the US and its land the size of Rhode Island, but the parallels are there.

I say it again, nothing is forever - and if the deep cracks are not mended at the root of their cause, the whole edifice will come crashing down.

I have to admit that I found the Midwest a totally alien environment. When I moved to Youngstown, OH in 1986, I felt I had landed in an alternate universe. Two years later, at grad school in Cleveland, I felt I could make a space for myself. Then I graduated... In September that year I moved back to London. Your country is so vast and so powerful, you have such immediate needs and desires and are so removed from the concept of 'memoire de l'histoire' that the rest of the world has, that you must be forgiven the political naivete of your population. It is the leaders who are so short sighted and so ruthless who I find it difficult to comprehend....

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/01/20/opinion/diplomatic/main1226605.shtml

Using public speeches, question-and-answer sessions and background briefings for reporters, Rice and senior members of her team spent much of the week announcing and explaining her plans for what she calls "Transformational Diplomacy." Rice’s objective, she told students and faculty at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, is to forge a new way to work with other countries “…to build and sustain democratic, well-governed states that will respond to the needs of their people and conduct themselves responsibly in the international system. Let me be clear,” Rice continued, “transformational diplomacy is rooted in partnership; not paternalism. In doing things with people, not for them; we seek to use America’s diplomatic power to help foreign citizens better their own lives and to build their own nations and to transform their own futures.”

..../

For now, it is clear Rice’s actions should be viewed not only in terms of management reform, but also as stemming from her understanding of the lessons of recent history. This Secretary of State sees the early years of the 21st century as a period during which dramatic and innovative policy changes are called for and in fact are overdue in the aftermath of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union. Rice often cites the bold changes made after World War II by her predecessors, Secretaries George C. Marshall and Dean Acheson, which led to the formation of NATO and, ultimately, as she said to her Georgetown audience, “…..a Europe whole and free and at peace.” If viewed simply in that historical light, we should not be too surprised at the steps announced this week.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/07/19/opinion/meyer/main1819526.shtml

The de facto war in and around Israel has inspired an important and passionate debate about democracy. Can democracy be exported to Arab countries? Is doing so a good idea? Are free elections destabilizing the region?

Much of this debate, I fear, is predicated on false premises or unexamined assumptions. The danger of that is twofold. Some of these notions may become conventional wisdom, and a wrong-headed debate can obscure important issues. In the current conflict, the issues, to my mind, have little to with Western political theory and everything to do with war.

.../


Many American intellectuals of the left and right who supported the war, or who did not clearly oppose it, are fervently rooting for democracy to take hold in the Mideast because that is their last chance for redemption, the last remaining justification they can use for losing so many American lives — and others — in Iraq. I can sympathize with that.

But the Mideast is too cruel for wishful thinking. Democracy is our ideology for the place, the form of vindication we want. It is not yet a pragmatic foreign policy or a realistic program. Success in the Mideast is still best measured simply by the absence of blood.


---------------------------------------------------

Dick Meyer is the editorial director of CBSNews.com.

Oh, these many moons ago, I said out loud that you cannot make a people free. You cannot GIVE them freedom. They have to take their freedom. Our country went into Iraq on the basis of the idea: Operation Iraqi Freedom (Which they had to change because Operation Iraqi Liberation spelled OIL which was way too obvious. . .) Anyway. You support people who are fighting for their own freedom. You do not invade their country and then ram freedom down their throats. You do not force them to adopt a democratic government that they do not understand and are not ready for. Especially when YOU do not have a democracy, you have a republic, and you are so ignorant and stupid that you don't even know the difference.

By the way, I was out visiting my mom and we have been drinking wine and so I guess I may be ranting more than usual. . .

And WHY are we (The US of A) not supporting the demonstrably "democratic" government of Lebanon???

We will be reaping the rewards of this folly.

Yeah. I've had debates regarding this subject with other people. My point is that sure democracy is good. But at the same time it doesn't always work. To change the way a government works, you have to do it slowly and gradually. You can't force change, particularly if you're from the outside. Take a look at Iraq. It's a mess right now.

I wish that this would stop. That Israel would be stopped from invading Lebanon, and that Hizbollah would stop the attacks on Israel, and it could be talked out and sorted out. There's no sense to all this killing.

Isarel is not going to stop, and the noone is going to tell them to stop (that has any influence on them) because this is not about Lebanon and the people in Lebanon who are dying are casualties of war/ The way this is being rationalised is this:

1. HizbAllah are hiding behind the civilians, their HQ is in a residential neighbourhood... thus the civilian deaths.

2. To paralyse the movement of munitions, the infrastructure needs must be destroyed.
3. HizbAllah is seen as the head of the snake of Islamic radicalism.

In reality, the truth is about 6 decades in the past. The root is there. there is one other reality also. Wheels turn and cycles pass. the Shia have been the neglected rural and urban poor throughout the Arab world for a very long time. The sense of power they feel now must be incredible.

I don't know what the solution is - I know what needs to be done but this is not a solution because noone will do it. We need to find something that everyone will agree to, but if it does not include Palestinian repatriation, this scenario *will* repeat.

W

Hey Wilma hope you don't mind me joining this thread but I'm keen to learn more.

One thing I'm interested in learning is how close are Hezbollah and Hamas. My impression has always been that Hezbollah are very much the tool of Iran who are not Arabs, although Shi-ite. But Hamas and the Palastinians are Arab. Do you really think Hezbollah care about the Palastinians? I've always had the impression that they are mainly concerned with a hatred of Israel. Sorry if my questions sound simplistic. It's all so complicated and so many websites don't really seem to go to the heart of the matter. It's so confusing for an outsider. But I'm not surprised because I know how difficult it is to explain the complexities of British/Irish relations, and that's as nothing compared to the middle east.

Hi Fanny, nice to see you here

You know, for a simplistic question, you have got me stumped. I will have ot have a think about how to reply - and not least go have a nosey and see if I can't get you some info.


W

Fanny, I can't find anything that shows a direct link in policies between Hamas and HizbAllah, but I did read this, and while I do not buy into all of the rhetoric (see next article I found I do think it explains to a 't' the 'other side' of the whole issue... I say 'other side' because there is a third side... but I am not unable to explain that right now, and besides, it has has its legs cut out from underneath it by the current events. I guess I would call it the moderate middle...

Have a read:

The author, Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: [Personal Details removed by Moderator]

http://www.counterpunch.com/Roberts07222006.html

http://www.liberation.fr/opinions/rebonds/195601.FR.php


The translation by my cousin (he emailed me the link)


LIBERATION
Rises Again

The opposition between western rhetoric and oriental dialectic is at the heart of the conflict between Israel and the Hezbollah.

The Inversion of the Speeches
By Percy KEMP
QUOTIDIEN: Friday July 21, 2006 - 06:00
Percy Kemp, Writer. Last Publication: “And the Cuckoo, in the Tree, Ignores the Husband”, Albin Michel.


Whatever the outcome of the arm wrestling bout that began in July between Israel and the Lebanese Hezbollah, it is already apparent that something has changed and that it would affect us in the long run.

It is not only that for the first time Arabs are holding ground to the Israeli army, suggesting that a certain change has occurred in the usual balance of force. It is rather on the epistemological plan that real change is happening, and this became evident as I watched the televised addresses of the two main protagonists, the Israeli Prime minister, Ehud Olmert, and the Chairman of Hezbollah, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah.

This Monday July 17 on TV, I saw a clean shaven man in a suit and tie (a man who in a way resembles me) lose his nerves before the Knesset, throwing random imprecations, threatening his enemies of war excesses, using all artifices of rhetoric to appeal to the most primary instincts of his voters. The evening before, I had seen his adversary, bearded and turbaned (a man who does not look a thing like me), using a well measured language, juggling with well weighed words without ever raising his voice, calling things by their name, handling dialectics as if he had just finished Plato's Gorgias, and advising his enemies to ignore emotions and to concentrate on reason.

In a word, I saw an Israeli leader behaving as one would expect an Arab raïs to behave in such circumstances, and an Arab militia leader to behave like a western leader should behave, under any circumstances.

Shortly thereafter, and always on TV (without their knowing that CCTV was open), I saw the president of the United States and the Prime minister of United Kingdom exchanging, about Lebanon, topics of such vulgarity that it makes me shiver when I think that these two apprentice sorcerers preside to our destinies.

The shift from dialectics toward rhetoric mentioned here is not limited to the State of Israel: It touches the west in its totality. However, as Socrates once said, the rhetoric is only effective if the public is ignorant of the facts. Rhetoric is used daily by dictators and Arab leaders to maintain themselves in power. And now our own leaders are following. It is rhetoric that allowed President Bush to assert his power while invading Afghanistan following September 11, 2001, keeping American citizens ignorant of the incestuous relationship their government maintained with Ben Laden and the Afghan extremists. It is rhetoric that permitted the invasion and the occupation of Iraq by Americans and British, because of imminent world peril, the public being left ignorant of the lack of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. It is the same rhetoric that allows our leaders to transform our liberal societies into police states, under the alleged reason of fighting a terrorism that they cannot, nor want to, eradicate.
Conversely, it is the rhetoric that the former Spanish rightist government attempted to use following the Moslem attacks in Madrid (rhetoric that wanted these attacks be perpetrated by ETA), but the Spanish public foiled its plans because it was no longer ignorant of the facts. It is also rhetoric that now attracts Israel in the Lebanese quagmire. Two possibilities exist: Either the Israeli government was aware of the considerable capabilities of Hezbollah but decided to keep its citizens ignorant of the facts, or they knew nearly nothing about Hezbollah and thought the attack would be a simple workout. In either case, there is rupture: rupture between governing and governed on the one hand, and rupture between the state machine and the reality on the ground.

This is where one realizes that, no matter how useful for eloquence, rhetoric notions such as "terrorists" and "axis of evil" are glib in the epistemological sense and ominous in the operational sense. Amazingly, such uses of rhetoric that inflame the minds and numb the brains, stir the passions and lull the consciences, are seldom found in the speech of Hezbollah’s leader since the beginning of this conflict. Nasrallah says what he does, and does what he says, without imprecations nor fusses, without boasting nor self-pity. His speech is of a dialectic nature and calls to his interlocutor's reasoning. This may well be a political strategy that makes sheikh Nasrallah the oriental equivalent of our Ulysses of the one thousand ruses. As reasonable as he may be, Nasrallah may be pitiless. Pitiless and inexcusable too; as he chooses to answer an injustice by another injustice. As mullah as he may be, his attitude is anchored on a rigorous research of the truth and a rational presentation of the facts.

The truth that had been the foundation of our civilization since Copernicus and Galilee is changing sides, why? The answer to this question probably resides in the vanity and self-sufficiency in which we take pleasure since our victory on the soviet block. Because only the weak feel the real need to stick to the truth -- truth that they need in order to act to the best of their interests -- whereas the strong estimate to be able to rely on their power, and on their “good star”.
We should also question why we are turning our backs to dialectic rigor, which was our attribute, to be seduced by the effects of rhetoric. The answer to that question is to look for the slide in our liberal democracies, which, after defeating the popular democracies, are now changing into populist democracies where dialectics are no longer required. In a populist democracy, a direct link is established between the leader and the masses, bypassing the elite. Security becomes panacea, fear is capitalized and rhetoric is the best technique.

Paradoxically, it is necessary for us to seek in the East the beginnings of a truly dialectic speech. As we distance ourselves from our Hellenistic legacy, it takes Asian descendants of the Trojans to remind us that there was a time when Socratic rigor was important to us.

A quarter of a century ago, Michel Foucault offended many a soul while praising the Iranian Islamic revolution. The right-minded of all flavors did not spare him any strokes, all in good conscience. I confess not to have a tiny fraction of the knowledge and talent of Foucault, and I am far from having his fame. Therefore, I urge my critics to send their strokes fairly: in a pro-rata fashion.