Lebanon: shit flying, citizens fleeing, Bush yelping, nobody's helping

1. New Conflicts In An Old War -- by James Carroll (from The Boston Globe)

At one dinner party with dear friends, I find that no criticism of Israel is allowed. At another, with equally dear friends, only remarks supportive of Palestinians are countenanced. As talk -- and silence -- at dinner tables shows, no question is more polarized than this one. Indeed, the polarization can occur within an individual, leading to a kind of paralyzing ambivalence. Yet as the Middle East crisis has worsened in recent days, this polarization itself seems somehow obsolete, and at a certain point ambivalence can be irresponsible.

Questions: Has the local conflict between Israel and the Palestinians opened into a regional war between Israel on one side and Lebanon, Syria, and Iran on the other? Are these local and regional contests mere instances of a global war against Islam? How does the ancient impulse to scapegoat Jews play into perceptions of Israel, especially as it finds itself the growing bull's eye of a shrinking target? Is war the best way to respond to extremist acts that clearly aim to provoke warlike responses that empower extremists?

Has Israel overreacted? Having withdrawn from Lebanon six years ago, what did Israel get besides batteries of rockets on its northern border? Having withdrawn from Gaza a year ago, what did Israel get besides rockets fired at Israeli towns? As one who rejects war, and who asks of Israel, therefore, only what I ask of my own country, I regret Israel's heavy bombing of Lebanon last week, as I deplored Israeli attacks in population centers and on infrastructure in Gaza. Authentic concern for the seized Israeli soldiers, as much as for the welfare of innocent civilians, can prompt criticism of the Olmert government's actions. Yet, given the rejectionism of both Hamas and Hezbollah, the only relevant powers, is the path of negotiations actually open to Israel? As this conflict becomes redefined in larger terms, it seems urgent to move away from the internal polarization of ambivalence by reaffirming foundational support for Israel. There is no moral equivalence between enemies here, and those who sympathize exclusively with the suffering of Palestinians make a terrible mistake in thinking otherwise. Nothing makes this clearer than the Hamas elevation of suicide-bombing to the effective status of religious cult. This perversion, in which cowardly older men exploit the anguished gullibility of the young precisely to target innocents, reveals the depth of the life-hating cynicism with which Israel is confronted. Now Hamas turns the entire Palestinian population into a suicide-bomber writ large. To destroy Israel, the mantra becomes, we will bring destruction down on ourselves.

Much of this is new, but the apocalyptic energy of this hatred, running from Gaza City to Tehran, draws on currents that run deep in history. The fury of anti-Israel rage among Arabs and Muslims is accounted for only partially by the present conflict. It resuscitates -- and then draws breath from -- the long European habit of scapegoating Jews. The fantasy that Arab and Muslim problems will be solved by the elimination of Israel partakes of the old European illusion that climaxed in the 20th century. No one should think that embedded contempt for Jews -- anti-Semitism -- is not part of the current crisis. Nor should anyone think that fresh consequences of that contempt are limited to the Middle East.

If the United States has been made so warlike by the one attack of Sept. 11, 2001, who should be surprised at the reactions of an Israel under constant siege? Indeed, the responses of Israel and America are related. Even though the futility of vengeful belligerence is on full display in Iraq, the United States does nothing to promote alternative strategies in resolving the Palestinian question. The Bush administration has not only squandered its considerable Middle East leverage, but has done more than anything to empower Islamic extremists, beginning with Iran. Thus, a threshold of dangerous escalation has been reached. It is easy to say that Israel must step back, but such a move requires a transformation of the larger context. The United States must pursue a radically different strategy in the entire region. Here is the urgency of quickly ending the war in Iraq, while nurturing new structures of international cooperation to resolve related conflicts.


2. Friends Don't Let Friends Ruin Lebanon -- by John Nichols (from The Nation)

Congressional "Friends of Israel" are busy making noises about the "need" for the United States to provide that Middle Eastern land with full support as it assaults its neighbors.

But no genuine friend of Israel can be happy with what is being done in that country's name by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his misguided followers.

Israel's attack on Lebanon, which has already killed and wounded hundreds and destroyed much of that fragile democracy's infrastructure – including airports, seaports, bridges and roads -- has done nothing to make Israel safer or more secure from threats posed by the militant Islamic organization Hezbollah. Indeed, the terrorist group's attacks on targets in northern Israel have become more brazen – and deadly – since Israel began striking Lebanon.

No serious participant in the contemporary discourse would deny that Israel has a right to protect itself. But no one in their right mind thinks Israel is going about the mission in a smart manner.

As Henry Siegman, the former head of the American Jewish Congress explains, "In Lebanon as in Gaza, it is not Israel's right to protect its civilian population from terrorist aggression that is at issue. It is the way Israel goes about exercising that right."

"Despite bitter lessons from the past, Israel's political and military leaders remain addicted to the notion that, whatever they have a right to do, they have a right to overdo, to the point where they lose what international support they had when they began their retaliatory measures," adds Seigman. "Israel's response to the terrorist assault in Gaza and the outrageous and unprovoked Hizbollah assault across its northern border in Lebanon, far from providing protection to its citizens, may well further undermine their security by destabilizing the wider region."

Seigman's right. Israel's assault on Lebanon won't bring stability to the Middle East. Instead, it makes a bad situation worse.

Unfortunately, President Bush has chosen to direct his anger over the crisis toward Syria, a largely disempowered player, and Iran, an increasingly powerful player but not one that listens to the U.S. By failing to express blunt concern about Israel's over-the-top response to a genuine problem, Bush has encouraged Olmert to continue on a course that has already proven devastating for Lebanon and that, ultimately, will threaten Israel's stability.

Bush should start listening to wise voices from Israel, voices that are saying Olmert is wrong.

Both Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Public Security Minister Avi Dichter opposed last week's bombings of Hezbollah headquarters and other facilities in Beirut, a move by Olmert and his allies that dramatically increased tensions and violence.

In the Israeli Knesset there is a good deal of opposition to the current strategy.

Writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, former Israeli Cabinet member Yossi Sarid, a well-regarded veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces, argues that Israel -- and the United States -- need to recognize that they are going about things the wrong way. Instead of destroying the economic and physical infrastructure of Lebanon and Palestine, Sarid argues that efforts must be made to improve economies and opportunities for those who now see violence as the only way to demand fairness and opportunity.

"Iraq is destroyed, Afghanistan is destroyed, the Gaza Strip is destroyed and soon Beirut will be destroyed for the umpteenth time, and hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested solely in the vain war against the side that always loses and therefore has nothing more to lose. And hundreds of billions more go down the tubes of corruption," wrote Sarid.

"Maybe the time has come to put the pistol into safety mode for a moment, back into the holster, and at high noon declare a worldwide Marshall Plan, so that the eternal losers will finally have something to lose," Sarid added. "Only then will it be possible to isolate the viruses of violence and terrorism, for which quiet is quagmire and which in our eyes are themselves quagmire. And once isolated, it will be possible to eradicate them one day."

(John Nichols, The Nation's Washington correspondent, has covered progressive politics and activism in the United States and abroad for more than a decade. He is currently the editor of the editorial page of Madison, Wisconsin's Capital Times. Nichols is the author of two books: It's the Media, Stupid and Jews for Buchanan)


3. The Force Is Not with Them
The Middle East Aflame and the Bush Administration Adrift
By Tom Engelhardt

So, as the world spins on a dime, where exactly are we?

As a man who is no fan of fundamentalists of any sort, let me offer a proposition that might make some modest sense of our reeling planet. Consider the possibility that the most fundamental belief, perhaps in all of history, but specifically in these last catastrophic years, seems to be in the efficacy of force -- and the more of it the merrier. That deep belief in force above all else is perhaps the monotheism of monotheisms, a faith remarkably accepting of adherents of any other imaginable faith – or of no other faith at all. Like many fundamentalist faiths, it is also resistant to drawing any reasonable lessons from actual experience on this planet.

The Bush administration came to power as a fundamentalist regime; and here I'm not referring to the Christian fundamentalist faith of our President. After all, Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, and our Vice President seem not to be Christian fundamentalists any more than were Paul Wolfowitz or Douglas Feith. Bush's top officials may not have agreed among themselves on whether End Time would arrive, or even on the domestic social issues of most concern to the Christian religious right in this country, but they were all linked by a singular belief in the efficacy of force.

In fact, they believed themselves uniquely in possession of an ability to project force in ways no other power on the planet or in history ever could. While hardly elevating the actual military leadership of the country (whom they were eager to sideline), they raised the all-volunteer American military itself onto a pedestal and worshipped it as the highest tech, most shock-and-awesome institution around. They were dazzled by the fact that it was armed with the smartest, most planet-spanning, most destructive set of weapons imaginable, and backed by an unparalleled military-industrial complex as well as a "defense" budget that would knock anyone's socks off (and their communications systems down). It was enough to dazzle the administration's top officials with dreams of global domination; to fill them with a vision of a planet-wide Pax Americana ; to send them off to the moon (which, by the way, was certainly militarizable).

Force, then, was their idol and they bowed down before it. When it came to the loosing of that force (and the forces at their command), they were nothing short of fervent utopians and blind believers. They were convinced that with such force (and forces), they could reshape the world in just about any way they wanted to fit their visionary desires.

And then, of course, came 9/11, the "Pearl Harbor" of this century. Suddenly, they had a divine wind at their back, a terrified populace before them ready to be led, and everything they believed in seemed just so… well, possible. It was, in faith-based terms, a godsend. Not surprisingly, they promptly began to prepare to act in the stead of an imperially angry god and to bring the world -- particularly its energy heartlands -- to heel.

First, however, because they had long been People of the Word, they created their sacred texts, their doctrine. In the form of "preventive war" and keeping other potential superpowers or blocs of powers from ever rising up to challenge the United States, they enshrined force at the apex of their pantheon of deities in their National Security Strategy of 2002 . (The term "preventive war" was in itself reasonably unique. Usually even the most aggressive dictators don't label their planned wars with terms that creep right up to the edge of "aggressive" and then promote them that way to the world.) At the same time, the President then began speaking out about the need not to wait until the threat of destruction was upon us as in his 2002 State of the Union Address where he said: "We'll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side. I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."

Soon enough, his advisors began raising Iraqi mushroom clouds over American cities and describing fantasy Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicles that might spray those cities with chemical or biological weapons in order to make an already scared populace and cowed Congress into believers as well. This was, of course, in the period when their long-time supporters and a supportive corps of pundits, radio talk-show hosts, and communicators of various sorts were speaking proudly, even boastfully, about the United States as the sole "hyperpower" on the planet or the globe's New Rome; when even a liberal Canadian commentator, Michael Ignatieff, could publish a piece in the New York Times Magazine extolling George Bush's U.S. as "a new invention in the annals of political science, an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known." He wrote as well of the necessity of Americans shouldering the "burden of empire" in Iraq. (Historically, there's only one such "burden," by the way – and it's Rudyard Kipling's nineteenth century "white man's burden.")

Those, of course, were the good times when "neoconservatism" (partially a shorthand term for this religious bent, for the love of "the most awesome military power the world has ever known") was truly ascendant. That term was also shorthand for an imperial mission to be shouldered by officials convinced that our empire should stand tall, alone, and on one leg -- the leg of "force."

In any case, having enshrined "preventive war" at the heart of the Bush Doctrine, they went in search of someplace to loose it on the world, someplace that might look militarily strong enough and heinous enough, but would be weak enough to make a point fast. They needed a roguish country, preferably run by a nasty dictator, preferably smack in the oil heartlands of the globe, that could be taken down quickly as a demonstration of that "awesome military power," a place that could be shock-and-awed into instant submission. It would be both a cakewalk and a case in point for the rest of the region about what a group of determined fundamentalists might do to anyone who opposed their religion and their wishes.

Well, we know the place; we know how they first shock-and-awed Congress and the American people into an invasion; and we all remember how they put their plan into practice -- with a confidence and lack of planning for any alternative possibilities or realities that was typical of true believers. And so, on March 20, 2003, they loosed their cruise-missile-styled lightning bolts on Baghdad because they knew one thing -- that the force was with them and that, because the United States was the military superpower of all superpowers in all of history, it was theirs alone…

Stock and Awe: The Force of an Anxious Market

Now, let's jump a few familiar years ahead on our fast-spinning, wobbly globe and see if we can land on the present moment, July 16, 2006. In the process, let's also take a little spin through our "empire lite," that vaunted New Rome, that Pax Americana as it's developed since the Bush administration decided to "take the gloves off," and apply its power fully and brutally from Iraq to Guantanamo. In fact, let's do a fly-by of what the neocons' once called "the arc of instability" three years later:

In Afghanistan, as an ABC network news journalist touring American bases reported the other night, American officers are begging for more troops. (The Brits, just taking over in the south, are already desperately sending them in!) This is a response to the "eradicated" Taliban unexpectedly ramping up their force levels ; narco-warlords growing ever more entrenched; the security situation in the capital, Kabul, and elsewhere deteriorating; and American bombing runs (including the use of B-52s) increasing. Force has truly become the arbiter of Afghanistan's terrible fate.

The situation has, in fact, deteriorated so rapidly in the Bush administration's model "nation-building" project that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, on a quick dash through sunny Tajikistan last week, suggested that bad news, looked at in another light, might actually be splendid tidings. According to David S. Cloud of the New York Times , "Mr. Rumsfeld acknowledged that the number of Taliban attacks may be up this year. But he said the increasingly brazen tactics had made it easier for American, Afghan and NATO forces to find them. ‘Every time they come together,' he said, 'they get hit and they get hurt. So the fact that we see a somewhat different method of operation during this period is correct, but it has not necessarily been disadvantageous because the more that are in one place, the easier they are to attack.'"

For a while, back in 2003-04, when things began to go sour in Iraq, various neocons suggested that the country might providentially prove to be a kind of global "flypaper" drawing all the terrorists to one spot for what, in near biblical terms, would prove to be a terrorist-zapping Armageddon. The theory was quietly dropped into the dustbin of history when only its first half proved accurate; but here it is back with us again in devolving Afghanistan and on the lips of our Secretary of Defense because… well, the idea of overwhelming force solving all problems just feels so good and sounds so right to a believer when things are going so wrong.

In the former flypaper-land of Iraq, the Bush administration's application of full-frontal force has, by now, released every two-bit sectarian thug, death-squad killer, jihadi fanatic, and angry rebel onto the streets of the capital, Baghdad -- where perhaps a fifth or more of the country's population lives -- armed to the teeth and ready to maim, mutilate, torture, and kill. Not surprisingly, overwhelming, shock-and-awe force has released a nightmare of counterforce there that has shoved every other, more peaceable possible way of doing or thinking about anything into the shade and onto the sidelines (if not simply into the morgue ).

In the wake of the killing of Abu Musad al-Zarqawi, a potential turning-of-the-tide moment, according to our President , the Iraqi capital, in particular, has been drenched in a high tide of blood; and, despite all the talk about possible "draw-downs" of American troops, commanding general George W. Casey, Jr. has just called for yet more American soldiers to be sent into the lawless, uncontrollable capital. At the same time, in America's fantasy Iraq, a single, relatively quiet southern province bordering Saudi Arabia has just been officially "turned over" to the charge of Iraqi security forces and the act declared a "milestone" by Casey and U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad. (When any American official even mutters "milestone," or "tidal change," or "turning point" in relation to Iraq, watch out!)

In fact, Iraqis seem to be paying ever less attention to American commands, demands, and orders -- and no wonder, since over the last four years every attempt to impose the administration's will on Iraq purely by force of arms and in an imperial manner has failed dismally -- and to this dismal failure there is neither an end in sight, nor an imaginable bottoming-out tidal moment.

Meanwhile, as no one could have missed by now, the Mediterranean edge of the Middle East is teetering at the edge of full-scale war, behind which lurks the threat of an even wider regional war of some previously almost unimaginable sort. There, too, the recourse to arms has overwhelmed any other possible option. Hamas guerrillas broke into Israel, killed two soldiers and captured another. They certainly must have had a sense of what the Israeli reaction to such a raid might be; but for the sake of argument, let's say they didn't.

In the meantime, at the Lebanese border with Israel, the guerrillas of the Hezbollah movement watched the Israelis mercilessly take out a power plant, government offices, and various other infrastructural targets in Gaza, while killing civilians and hammering urban areas as a "response" to the capture of their soldier. Hezbollah then launched their own incursion into Israel, killing several soldiers and capturing two more. With the example of Gaza in front of them, they had to know just exactly what the Olmert government would do to the civilian infrastructure of Lebanon itself -- and clearly it made no difference.

As for the Israelis, at this point they visibly feel free of all outside restraint or constraint, given the Bush administration, and so can bomb, blockade, missile, and attack almost at will -- and, with their eyes on Syria and Iran , are threatening to widen this war yet further, setting the region ablaze. As in the slums of Baghdad, so too in Gaza, Lebanon, and possibly elsewhere, the urge is to settle historic grudges via shock-and-awe tactics. And yet, as Rami Khouri has written recently, the Israelis are "in the bizarre position of repeating policies that have consistently failed for the past 40 years." The last time this happened, the Israelis made it all the way to Beirut and ended up stuck in Lebanon for 18 years before withdrawing ignominiously. In the process, they helped midwife the Hezbollah movement and give it luster, a reputation, and strength.

We seem today to be headed into Lebanon redux in a region where the principle of force has been set loose to trump all else. On all sides, fundamentalists in the religion of force are thundering threats and imprecations, while issuing sets of impossible demands. In the typical words of Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah (whose home and office had just been wiped out by Israeli missiles): "You wanted an open war, and we are heading for an open war… We are ready for it… The surprises that I have promised you will start now." And, of course, as in Gaza where random Palestinian civilians suffer and die under Israeli attack, so in Israel random civilians are wounded or die under a barrage of Hezbollah rockets; so, in Lebanon, helpless civilians die in homes, on highways, wherever, under a rain of Israeli bombs and missiles.

And all this is happening without either Iran, the third member of George Bush's axis of evil, or Syria, the unspoken fourth member (like an unindicted co-conspirator), have truly entered the fray (except, possibly, by proxy through their stand-ins in Gaza and Lebanon). Yet Iran is already offering up increasingly bloodcurdling threats . Emboldened by the American disaster in Iraq, its fundamentalist leaders, too, seem in a rush to threaten force and more force.

Now, just try to imagine an American attack on suspected Iranian nuclear facilities -- something that journalist Seymour Hersh, in a recent New Yorker piece , reports a "senior military official" claiming Secretary of Defense Donald Rumfeld and his "senior aides" still "really think they can do… on the cheap, and they underestimate the capability of the [Iranian] adversary." In a similar fashion, the Iranian leadership undoubtedly underestimates its bogged-down American adversary. It's the nature of such a faith to overestimate your own ability to use force and underestimate the capabilities of your opponents.

If Bush and his top officials arrived on the Iraqi scene believing that the force was with them and only them, the last three-plus years have offered (if not taught) a rather different lesson. After all, they now find themselves in a roiling crowd of medium-sized and smaller states, stateless movements, and extremist grouplets, all passionately devoted to the same principle of force as them. The fundamentalist belief in force, once let loose in this fashion -- once (you might say) modeled by the globe's reigning hyperpower -- turns out to be a distinctly pagan faith. From the streets of Gaza to the slums of Baghdad, from the mountains of Afghanistan to Beirut International Airport and the halls of the Pentagon, this is a religion open to one and all, ready to embrace many contradictory gods into its pantheon.

And here's the irony. The hyperpower that loosed this singular round of force on our world seems strangely sidelined , while others move boldly to apply its most essential principles profligately, every one of them emboldened both by our example and by our dismal failure. Talk about Pandora's Box (without Hope anywhere in sight)!

What force has done, thanks to the Bush administration's utopian foolishness, is to tie the region's many competing groups, movements, and states into an ever-tightening, Gordion-style knot -- and that knot, in turn, has been ever more tightly hitched to the global economy, so that every tug on any loose end now sends oil prices up another disastrous notch and trembling stock markets into convulsions. (Call it stock-and-awe!) Just Friday, the Dow Jones completed a three-day, 400 point shuddering drop, while oil, not so long ago hovering in the vicinity of $30 for a barrel of crude, managed to hit a staggering $78.40 a barrel by the end of last week -- and remember, this was just based on "nerves," not on more oil supplies actually going off the market, as would certainly happen, one way or another, in a widening conflict in the region.

In fact, the oil heartlands of the planet look to be heading for further rounds of violence and turmoil and, potentially, the American and global economy with them -- and the only tool imaginable to anybody is still: Force.

The Bush administration had no wish for other tools -- that was the meaning, after all, of "unilateralism" -- and so now it has no other tools in its "arsenal." It lost most of its allies while in its unilateral dream-state. Focusing all its attention on the Pentagon and on military-to-military relations globally, it also lost whatever modest capacity might have been available to it not just to head down another path, but to deploy the most basic tools of diplomacy. What it has left is, of course, force; but its own on-the-ground forces are dangerously depleted and it's evidently no longer obvious to top administration officials exactly where American force (and forces) should be applied (much as they may loathe the Iranians and Syrians).

They launched a force party in the Middle East. Now it's in full swing; the club's pilled high with dancers; many of the exits are bolted shut; the bouncers are no longer at the front door; and, on stage, the performers are brandishing blowtorches, while the Earth's last hyperpower and its hyper-commander-in-chief President are watching, helplessly, from the sidelines. As Dan Froomkin, the fine Washington Post on-line columnist, pointed out this week in a column headlined Bush the Bystander , "stopping off in Germany on his way to the G-8 summit in Russia," as the Middle East caught fire, "Bush reserved his greatest enthusiasm for tonight's pig roast -- technically, a wild-boar barbecue -- bringing it up three times. ‘I'm looking forward to that pig tonight ,' he gushed."

Conceptually, what else could he do but offer his support to the Israelis (with but polite demurrals about "restraint" from his Secretary of State). After all, what are the Israelis doing but fighting their own hopeless "war on terrorism" American-style?

As journalist Warren Strobel summed up the regional situation: "Virtually every president faces a plethora of global crises, sometimes simultaneously. What's new is that the United States' ability to influence events has shrunk, largely because U.S. troops and treasure remain mired in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Iraq war has diminished foreign confidence in American leadership, according to foreign policy experts and some U.S. officials." Former Israeli cabinet minister Yossi Beilin made a similar point to Haaretz . "The worsening conflict in the Middle East is a blatant reflection of the weakness of the American partner,"

Everywhere this administration is being less attended to . Everywhere, others are sharpening their knives, loading their weapons, and preparing to smite their enemies, inspired by the American example, liberated by its failure.

Hair-trigger World

Oh, and while I've been mentioning the international face of the two-faced religion of force, I've forgotten to mention how it's been playing out at home.

After all, in the Bush years the Pentagon and the military have been fully elevated to the role of first providers (of everything) -- a role for which they are visibly unprepared. Nation-building and diplomacy have largely become military, not State Department, matters, as has intelligence-gathering of every sort. For the first time, a permanent, peacetime North American Command ( Northcom ) has been established for the continental U.S., while the military, not the civil government, is now to be the initial, and possibly main, responder in situations ranging from disastrous hurricanes to a potential Avian flu pandemic.

But for overwhelming force to be effective at home or abroad, it must be, in the minds of fundamentalists like, say, our grey and secretive Vice President, or his own eminence gris ,David Addington , not to speak of eager force-hounds like "torture memo" author John Yoo or former Former General Counsel for the Pentagon William J. Haynes II, now up for for a federal appeals court judgeship, applied in a timely fashion and effectively. Democracy, officially to be spread to the world, turns out to be such a messy contraption in "time of war" at home. If you're a believer, then you don't want anything, certainly not congressional oversight or an informed public, to get in the way of that necessary, firm, and preventive application of force in a time of crisis -- and what time isn't?

Of course, what you really need to concentrate force effectively elsewhere -- consider this to be the unwritten part of the Bush Doctrine -- is a concentration of power at home in a single figure, not the President (a peace-time title describing a fettered office), but the President as "commander-in-chief" -- a military man, freed in "wartime" of all those nasty checks and balances, and so able to act decisively in any way necessary to make force utterly effective, whether in a distant, recalcitrant foreign land or in a nearby prison.

That summarizes, of course, the now-infamous unitary executive theory of government, a creative form of not-exactly-strict constructionism, which essentially was aimed at reinventing the Constitution (like the wheel), neutering Congress, and sidelining the American people in favor of… a single commander-in-chief preserving democracy for the rest of us as he sees fit -- essentially, when you come right down to it, an autocrat or king. And we know how our present commander-in-chief saw fit. In fact, he -- they -- came so very close, even managing to get two new justices on the Supreme Court who were, above all else, believers in the most extreme theory of the presidency ever proposed.

But as in Iraq, force, or the domestic equivalent -- the "preventive" politics of fear, manipulation, lies, and secrecy -- proved not quite enough and so at home, as abroad, the President's foes in Congress, the federal bureaucracy, the courts, and elsewhere, watching the opinion polls, noting his faltering performance, absorbing the sinkhole quality of Iraq, sensing that this administration was losing its forcefulness began pushing back or paying less attention. In turn, as with the recent Supreme Court decision on detainees at Guantanamo (or the NSA surveillance issue ), the administration has been slowly giving way, twisting and squirming, parsing words and pretzeling meanings as it retreats.

If your religion is force, then showing weakness, not smiting your foes, only encourages the look of a woebegone commander-in-chief presidency. In that light, the recent Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision of the Supreme Court was but another blow to the President's unfettered self.

And yet old faiths, and the habits that go with them, die hard. When the Hamdan decision came down, the President's reaction was an interesting (if hardly noted) one. He immediately said : "We will seriously look at the findings, obviously, and one thing I am not going to do, though, is that I am not going to jeopardize the safety of the American people." The findings? Was he under the impression that a Supreme Court decision was like the "findings" of a presidentially appointed commission, like the 9/11 Commission, offering advice to the President to be seriously looked at and considered?

Then again, that was just his first reaction. With time and further thought, here's what he said about the decision at a news conference in Chicago last week: "I am willing," he assured the assembled journalists and the American public, "to abide by the ruling of the Supreme Court." He was now willing to abide… hmmm. If that wasn't the imperial commander-in-chief of our nation hanging in there, I don't know what would be. He added: "They didn't [say] we couldn't have done -- made that decision, see. They were silent on whether or not Guantanamo -- whether or not we should have used Guantanamo. In other words, they accepted the use of Guantanamo, the decision I made." Aha…

And, of course, the acolytes of his fundamentalist faith haven't exactly gone away either. Last week, for instance, the Senate Judiciary Committee heard testimony from Steven Bradbury, head of the Justice Department's office of legal counsel. Vermont's Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy asked him about the President's claim that the Court's Hamdan decision "upheld his position on Guantanamo."
LEAHY: Was the President right or was he wrong?

BRABURY: It's under the law of war --

LEAHY: Was the President right or was he wrong?

BRADBURY: The President is always right.

The President's record in the Middle East and elsewhere tells us otherwise, of course. From Pyongyang to Tehran, Baghdad to Gaza and Tel Aviv, smaller powers -- or simply parties, militias, or mass movements -- are going their own way, considering their own narrow interests, and exploring just how far force can take them, while ignoring the words of the Bush administration. In this sense, they learned their new religious catechism well: If you can't impose it on me by force of arms, then to hell with you.

So here we are armed to the teeth in a hair-trigger world with a bevy of angry states happy to declare their own unilateral "wars on terror" and pursue their own armed solutions. They've all got the fervor and the faith. As for the rest of us, who knows what we're sliding into or how in the world to put on the brakes.

Out of the last Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon came both the fundamentalist extremism of Hezbollah and of Ariel Sharon. Who knows what will come from this round of the same -- certainly, nothing good as long as force is the only ruling deity in our world.

Oh, and there's one fundamentalist character I've left out of the mix, someone who definitely bows down to force. Call everything that's happened these last few years Osama's dream. It's hard not to think of William Butler Yeats' poem, "The Second Coming," and then wonder: "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

(Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture , a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War. His novel, The Last Days of Publishing , is now available in paperback.)


4. The Rules
By which the Middle East is managed - if at all
By Doron Rosenblum (from Haaretz Daily)

1. If one of the sides should be found to be in the possession of weapons, they shall be used immediately and without restraint, because of the very fact of their having been found.

Contrary to the accepted conventions in various other countries, according to which a military confrontation is sometimes an adjunct or an unavoidable necessity (albeit regrettable and wasteful) to the national goals set forth by leaders and states, and contrary to Clausewitz's well-known dictum that "War is the continuation of policy by other means" - in the Middle East the rule is the opposite: War is the continuation of war by other means. Should one of the sides possess a destructive implement - whether a rocket activated by a primus stove or a state-of-the-art fighter-bomber - it shall be immediately used, not in proportion to the prior provocation and without any true connection to a tactical goal or strategic plan. It's simple: If one of the sides happens to get the opportunity to surprise the other side with a volley or a terrorist attack, it will do so even if this causes the assailant long-term damage.

Examples are the random and self-defeating launching of rockets at Israeli civilians inside the Green Line (until a more sophisticated destructive implement is found) and, on the other side: "The Israel Air Force last night attacked a chicken coop in Gaza" (Yedioth Ahronoth, July 9).

2. A rolling operation, "which is not bound by a timetable," and which will end only "when all the objectives have been achieved," will end abruptly with the first fiasco.

Experts are divided about the average lifespan of every such operation, which starts with a bang and ends with a whimper - like when an act of slaughter is caused by an "unfortunate hitch," when there is a shooting of oneself in the foot, or when there is some propaganda boomerang. Some give the typical rolling operation two days, net; others maintain that the lifespan of every such incident is the period of time between the declaration of the casus belli by Roni Daniel, the Channel 2 military commentator, and the phone call from Condoleezza Rice.

One thing is clear: The "waiting period" that once characterized prewar situations now characterizes post-operations. This is the time during which the operation's tailwind slowly dies down and the time comes to formulate the goals. What was it that we actually want to achieve?

3. A war or a military operation shall achieve their full goal if said goal is articulated from the outset in a sufficiently vague way.

Thus, even if the operation is aborted, it will be declared a success, as in: "We said from the beginning that there are no wonder drugs." And, "Anyone who thinks there is a hermetically sealed solution is mistaken." Or, "That was not the intention of the operation." And so forth.

4. A kidnapped or captured Israeli soldier is valued at 1,024 Palestinians, on average.

That is more or less the going rate as determined not only by Israel but, as an acquired habit, also by the Palestinians and the Arab states themselves throughout the wars. It just goes to show what their own attitude is toward an Israeli person as compared with a Palestinian, Egyptian or Syrian. Despite the absence of an official assessor's price list, a kidnapped or captured Israeli is valued at 400 Palestinians if he is a reserve officer who suffers from dental problems, provided the prisoners do not - yet - have blood on their hands (but will). A kidnapped or captured Israeli who does not meet these conditions and has no mother, connections, lobby or military record shall serve 20 years in prison, if not life.

5. Each side shall reject outright any proposal for a cease-fire until the moment at which said side is caught head-butting or perpetrating another offense as the cameras roll.

In the Middle East wars are not decided in the field, but in their reflection in the collective consciousness and in the media. From this standpoint, the victor is often the big loser, and vice versa, with the true battle waged between the auteur known as the IDF Spokesperson and the cinematic geniuses of Palestine who won the Golden Globe award. In the category of "sitcom which is not a comedy that has children at its center and has as its subject the most shocking degree of victimization," the Palestinian film always wins.

6. The goal of every round of war is retroactive deterrence: to prevent the provocation that has already been fomented and which caused the war in the first place.

To understand this important, albeit complex rule, it is necessary to read attentively the remarks of a senior Israeli military source, who said: "We are not presumptuous enough to say that the shooting will stop as a result of the operation. Success has to be measured in the deterrence we will create when the operation ends." To which the GOC Southern Command, Yoav Galant, added remarks to clarify the rationale: "When the Palestinians do the overall calculation, in another month or two, and count hundreds of terrorists killed and infrastructures that were damaged, I imagine they will think again before making the next kidnap attempt."

In other words, most of the operations are not really geared to achieve a strategic goal, but to punish the initiators for their success, to prevent that success retroactively, to "restore the honor" lost by the army following an operational debacle - and in fact are meant to tame. It's rather like the way one pushes the dog's nose into the puddle of urine on the living room carpet in the hope that the dog will: (a) immediately grasp the circumstantial connection between his nose being pushed and the operation of his bladder; and (b) remember same in another two months, "when he does the overall calculation," and will "think again" before pissing on the carpet (though not on the sofa). In even simpler words, the frustration and the nerves have to be taken out on someone. In the absence of other words in the dictionary, the operation shall be called simply "exacting a price," meaning: to roll up a newspaper and swat the dog until we sprain our wrist.

7. In every situation of helpless rage and frustration, a sonic boom shall be sounded.

This is so they will see and be seen to be seeing - on the assumption that a sonic boom, like the gallows in the quip by Samuel Johnson, wonderfully improves the power of concentration, and encourages the "Arab street," not to mention its leaders, to do some mental stocktaking about the rightness of their path, usually in the direction of pacifism.

8. Responsibility for every terrorist attack, kidnapping, blunder or firing incident in the Middle East shall be borne by a country called Syria.

Even when the tracks lead to, say, Iran. But Syria is more compact and its human engineering enables greater access. Besides, the Americans let us do this.

9. Those whom God would punish, Israel first "acts to strengthen."

And the opposite: Those whom God would reward, Israel first attacks in order to weaken them. Consider Hezbollah, the Village Leagues, the Maronites in Lebanon, the PLO, Jordan, Hamas, Abu Mazen, each in his turn, Allah bless them.

10. In the Middle East talks can always wait - war, never.

As reported, Israel was about to free 1,000 prisoners as a good-will gesture to Abu Mazen and "in the desire to strengthen him." But we were in no great hurry, the clock did not ring, and besides, we had to go abroad. In the meantime, the soldier was kidnapped and the gesture, along with the talks, was suspended immediately, to punish Abu Mazen. That is, Hamas. On the other hand, upon hearing the kidnappers' demand to free 1,000 prisoners, we jumped as though bitten by a snake and rushed into a military operation. Because it is never too early to teach the other side that force will not get them anywhere. (And as for weakness, forget it.)


5. Tribal Lands -- by Aviva Lori (from Haaretz Daily)

Stretching from one end of the horizon to the other, one sees only yellow, a sharp and dry sort of yellow, and until the afternoon hours everything stands still - the uncultivated land, the vegetation, the camels and the donkey belonging to a deaf-mute shepherd. At 1 P.M. the wind begins to whistle loudly, penetrating the tent, carrying a trail of sand and continuing on its way. Suleiman goes out to check on his herd of camels, which has scattered over the adjacent hill. Nuri al-Ukbi remains in the tent alone. He is beginning to get used to it, to being alone. Just him, the Citroen station wagon and the flapping sides of the tent.

On April 14, a day after the Passover seder, Al-Ukbi, a Bedouin from Lod who owns a garage in that city, ascended one of the barren hills flanking the highway to Be'er Sheva, put up a tent, poured a cement floor and began his strike.

"On Passover the Jewish people emerged from slavery to freedom, that's why I built my tent on the holiday," he explains. "I also want to emerge to freedom."

Al-Ukbi, 64, the head of the Association for the Support and Defense of Bedouin Rights in Israel, does not resemble Lawrence of Arabia. He looks more like a municipal clerk who has returned from a coffee break. Polyester pants, a belt with a stylish buckle, a blue cotton shirt and a pen in his pocket. It's hard to believe that for two months he has been sleeping in a sleeping bag in his car and washing himself with water from a jerry can.

His decision to go on strike was made in late January, after the Supreme Court, sitting as a Court of Administrative Appeals, rejected the appeal he had submitted in the name of the Al-Ukbi tribe, to enable it to build a rural agricultural settlement on its historical lands. The latest rejection is the termination of years of litigation by the members of the tribe against Israel's administrative authorities, a process that began in 1951 and whose end was predictable.

Al-Ukbi says he has nothing more to lose, that perhaps a Gandhi-style strike will be the only way to arouse public opinion regarding the sad situation of Bedouin in the Negev. There is one thing he didn't take into account: The Negev is not Tel Aviv's Kikar Hamedina, or even Jerusalem. In Kikar Hamedina, the men, women and children of the so-called Bread Square (a tent city of homeless people) lived for 14 months; in Jerusalem, at the entrance to the Finance Ministry, the Bread Square people protested for 15 months. In the Negev, it seems the police are less tolerant and more efficient.

Nuri al-Ukbi managed to sit for two days when the people of Sayeret Yeruka - the Green Commando unit, which is the executive arm of the Israel Lands Administration (ILA) - came "knocking" at his door and issued him a pre-evacuation warning. A few days later police officers arrived on the scene.

"They asked me: 'What are you doing?' I said that the members of my tribe are suffering, and that I have decided to embark on a struggle and I invited them to sit, but they didn't want to. They listened to me and left," Al-Ukbi says.

On April 27 at 6 A.M., the barren hill was surrounded by police vans accompanied by a bulldozer, an ambulance and a doctor, and they began to close in on him from all directions.

"There were maybe 250 policemen and Border Police here. One officer approached me and said: 'Are you evacuating?' I said: 'Why should I evacuate? Show me an order and I'll evacuate immediately.' And then he says: 'Let's not waste time. You're under arrest.'"

"They put me into a police car," he continues, "and from a distance I saw the bulldozer pushing over the shelter that I had built, driving over the cement floor and destroying it. They took me to the station in Rahat, placed me under arrest, bullied me a little in order to scare me, interrogated me and finally said: 'We're releasing you on bail on condition that you stay away for 10 days.' I replied: 'Not even for 10 minutes.'"

At the Rahat station Al-Ukbi, who suffers from heart problems, complained of pains. He was transferred to the police station in Be'er Sheva, where a doctor examined him and sent him to the emergency room at Soroka Medical Center. He was hospitalized and released the next day. "And then a policeman approached me and said: 'Nuri, you're free, you're not under arrest."

From the hospital he returned straight to the hill. On Israel's Independence Day friends came from the Forum for Coexistence in the Negev, brought a new tent and helped him put it up. Meanwhile Al-Ukbi collected the fragments of the destroyed tent, including the cement floor, and made a monument out of them. A week later he once again had a visit: "They came from the Sayeret Yeruka with a police escort, 50 policemen this time, with clubs and gas masks, took everything - the chairs, the water, the tent, personal items - destroyed the monument, dug a pit and buried it in the ground. After they had gone I took the monument out of the ground, I rebuilt it and I put up a tent. And again after a week the police came, this time only 30, took the tent, destroyed the monument and once again buried it.

"Another week passed. The fourth time they came with a tractor and a truck. They loaded the monument onto the truck. They took the tent, but this time they left the chairs. After cleaning up the area, they erected a sign saying: 'The State of Israel, the Israel Lands Administration,' but I took the sign and ripped it out of the ground, and said: 'This is Al-Ukbi land, not ILA land.' And then the ILA man who had placed the sign ran toward me, three policemen surrounded me, and that man said: 'You're under arrest.' I didn't resist, I never resist. They placed cuffs on my legs and took me to the police station in Rahat, claiming that I had attacked an ILA man, and that I had spoken harshly to him. I don't engage in violence, I have never in my life been violent."

This scene was recorded by the camera of young director Uri Kleiner, who is making a documentary film about the Bedouin in the Negev, as part of his studies at Hunter College in New York. "Everything is recorded on my camera," says Kleiner. "Nuri did not say any harsh words and didn't attack anyone. He only pulled out the sign, that's all."

Ultimately, Judge Eyal Baumgart of the Be'er Sheva Magistrate's Court rejected the request of the ILA to keep Al-Ukbi off the land where he is now living. "Under these circumstances, when no proof has been brought that this field belongs to the ILA, the request is denied," he ruled.

Al-Ukbi set up a new tent, more like a kind of shelter, and from there he is continuing his daily routine, directing matters of Bedouin interest from a distance. As a member of the activist committee of the Al-Ukbi tribe, he receives guests who come to identify with his cause and to bring him food, he reads, writes and meditates. Sayeret Yeruka staff have visited him only once since the ruling, on a Sunday about a month ago. During that meeting the two sides were restrained. Al-Ukbi waved to the members of the ILA with an old towel, and they waved with a new warning.

"I held the towel in my hand and said to them: 'You're not coming near my tent,' and the man from the Sayeret said: 'I only want to give you a warning,' and held the paper out to me, while his friend took a picture. And then he left and the paper flew away in the wind."

An Israeli flag

The house where Al-Ukbi was born is located at the foot of the hill where he is living today. Its ruins are still visible; you can't miss them. This is almost the last vestige of Araqib, the rural community of the Al-Ukbi tribe that lived south of Rahat, west of the Lehavim junction, on an area of about 19,000 dunams (4,750 acres). On the eve of the 1948 War of Independence, the tribe was divided geographically into two. Some of its members eventually went to live in the Gaza Strip and the Jewish community of Talmei Bilu was later built on their land; the others, which numbered several hundred people, lived in Araqib, south of Rahat. The latter was bustling. The Bedouin engaged in agriculture, grew figs, olives, grapes, planted wheat and barley, and raised goats, sheep, cattle and camels. Recently Al-Ukbi found three broken blades of an old plow in the ground.

"My father was a very good farmer," he recalls. "In 1942 he already had a tractor." Suleiman Mahmad Al-Ukbi, his father, was the sheikh of the tribe and a judge in its shari'a [Muslim] court. After the establishment of the state, the Israeli flag flew over his home.

Nuri Al-Ukbi, who had four brothers and three sisters, studied for one year at a school in Be'er Sheva and then continued at a local school, not far away. He only went as far as sixth grade. In order not to forget what he had learned, he used to take the books with him to the grazing area, reading and writing with charred twigs on rocks.

His memories of the War of Independence are sharp and painful. "I remember a few pictures from that period. How before sunset a plane flew low over us in the direction of Be'er Sheva, and a few minutes later we heard explosions in Be'er Sheva." Other pictures that Al-Ukbi remembers, of death and terror, are supported by stories of the tribe's elders.

"There were gangs circulating in the area that seized people who were working the land and murdered them," says Al-Ukbi. "Once they murdered the two sons of Mustafa Abu Zaid, who were plowing 300 meters from here. Another time they gathered 14 young shepherds who were next to the wells, and shot them in cold blood. For no reason. I knew some of the people personally, and I know their sons personally. One of the 14 remained alive for almost 24 hours, and he told how they gathered them all into trucks and how they shot them later. And then people began to be afraid."

Who were the murderers?

Al-Ukbi: "I assume they were Jews. The Bedouin know. They also know who the head of the gang was, but it's impossible to prove. It's a man who has died. There were all kinds of Jewish groups and organizations here who were involved in terror against the native population. The fact is that of 115,000 Bedouin who were in the Negev in 1947, 13,000 remain."

After the War of Independence, his father joined Sheikh Saliman al-Huzail, and together with another 14 sheikhs from the Negev, he signed a treaty with the State of Israel that guarantees peace and security to both sides.

"My father was friendly with Sheikh al-Huzail, who had status in the region because of good neighborly relations with Kibbutz Shoval. He helped them during the war. After the war Sheikh al-Huzail told my father that it was a good idea for us to sign a treaty with the State of Israel and remain on our lands, and my father agreed willingly.

"Sheikh al-Huzail headed a delegation of 16 sheikhs from the Negev who met with the heads of state. I think Yigael Yadin was there. They came to a large and long tent that had been especially constructed. My father was the first to get up and sign the document, and after that he was appointed the sheikh of the Al-Ukbi tribe. The document said that the sheikhs promised not to harm the security of the state and not to harass the Jews, and the Jews and the State of Israel promised to preserve the dignity, the weapons and the lands of the Bedouin."

Eli Atzmon, former head of the Negev Bedouin Authority, and today an independent consultant on the issue of lands, saw a document about the abovementioned meeting. "It is clear that those Bedouin who remained in the Negev and did not flee remained on the basis of some agreement with the state, which promised not to harm them," he says.

And was Yigael Yadin really there?

Atzmon: "Yigael Yadin participated in many meetings of that kind. He was everywhere in those days."