Lebanon: Israel attacked and defended, the war explained, US helpless, neocons fucked, & some vital stats

1. Famous Author Excoriates Israel
by Sirocco

Jostein Gaarder, the author of the global literary phenomenon Sophie's World (printed in 26m copies in 53 languages), launches a scorching attack on Israel in Aftenposten, Norway's paper of record. Gaarder, a historian of ideas, describes himself as a friend of the Jewish people but doubts whether Israel truly is the same. Suffice it to say that this will not appear in the New York Times anytime soon.

The form of Gaarder's condemnation is inspired by Amos, the first Judaic prophet whose message is preserved in scroll (ca. 750 B.C.). Quoting Wikipedia: "The central idea of the book of Amos according to most scholars is that Yahweh puts his people on the same level as the nations that surround it -- Yahweh expects the same morality of them all."

God's chosen people
By Jostein Gaarder, Aftenposten 05.08.06

From the Norwegian by Sirocco

There is no turning back. It is time to learn a new lesson: We do no longer recognize the state of Israel. We could not recognize the South African apartheid regime, nor did we recognize the Afghan Taliban regime. Then there were many who did not recognize Saddam Hussein's Iraq or the Serbs' ethnic cleansing. We must now get used to the idea: The state of Israel in its current form is history.

We do not believe in the notion of God's chosen people. We laugh at this people's fancies and weep over its misdeeds. To act as God's chosen people is not only stupid and arrogant, but a crime against humanity. We call it racism.

Limits to tolerance

There are limits to our patience, and there are limits to our tolerance. We do not believe in divine promises as justification for occupation and apartheid. We have left the Middle Ages behind. We laugh uneasily at those who still believe that the God of flora, fauna, and galaxies has selected one people in particular as his favorite and given it funny stone tablets, burning bushes, and a license to kill.

We call child murderers 'child murderers' and will never accept that such have a divine or historic mandate excusing their outrages. We say but this: Shame on all apartheid, shame on ethnic cleansing, shame on every terrorist strike against civilians, be it carried out by Hamas, Hizballah, or the state of Israel!

Unscrupulous art of war

We acknowledge and pay heed to Europe's deep responsibility for the plight of the Jews, for the disgraceful harassment, the pogroms, and the Holocaust. It was historically and morally necessary for Jews to get their own home. However, the state of Israel, with its unscrupulous art of war and its disgusting weapons, has massacred its own legitimacy. It has systematically flaunted International Law, international conventions, and countless UN resolutions, and it can no longer expect protection from same. It has carpet bombed the recognition of the world. But fear not! The time of trouble shall soon be over. The state of Israel has seen its Soweto.

We are now at the watershed. There is no turning back. The state of Israel has raped the recognition of the world and shall have no peace until it lays down its arms.

Without defense, without skin

May spirit and word sweep away the apartheid walls of Israel. The state of Israel does not exist. It is now without defense, without skin. May the world therefore have mercy on the civilian population. For it is not civilian individuals at whom our doomsaying is directed.

We wish the people of Israel well, nothing but well, but we reserve the right not to eat Jaffa oranges as long as they taste foul and are poisonous. It was endurable to live some years without the blue grapes of apartheid.

They celebrate their triumphs

We do not believe that Israel mourns forty killed Lebanese children more than it for over three thousand years has lamented forty years in the desert. We note that many Israelis celebrate such triumphs like they once cheered the scourges of the Lord as "fitting punishment" for the people of Egypt. (In that tale, the Lord, God of Israel, appears as an insatiable sadist.) We query whether most Israelis think that one Israeli life is worth more than forty Palestinian or Lebanese lives.

For we have seen pictures of little Israeli girls writing hateful greetings on the bombs to be dropped on the civilian population of Lebanon and Palestine. Little Israeli girls are not cute when they strut with glee at death and torment across the fronts.

The retribution of blood vengeance

We do not recognize the rhetoric of the state of Israel. We do not recognize the spiral of retribution of the blood vengeance with "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." We do not recognize the principle of one or a thousand Arab eyes for one Israeli eye. We do not recognize collective punishment or population-wide diets as political weapons. Two thousand years have passed since a Jewish rabbi criticized the ancient doctrine of "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth."

He said: "Do to others as you would have them do to you." We do not recognize a state founded on antihumanistic principles and on the ruins of an archaic national and war religion. Or as Albert Schweitzer expressed it: "Humanitarianism consists in never sacrificing a human being to a purpose."

Compassion and forgiveness

We do not recognize the old Kingdom of David as a model for the 21st century map of the Middle East. The Jewish rabbi claimed two thousand years ago that the Kingdom of God is not a martial restoration of the Kingdom of David, but that the Kingdom of God is within us and among us. The Kingdom of God is compassion and forgiveness.

Two thousand years have passed since the Jewish rabbi disarmed and humanized the old rhetoric of war. Even in his time, the first Zionist terrorists were operating.

Israel does not listen

For two thousand years, we have rehearsed the syllabus of humanism, but Israel does not listen. It was not the Pharisee that helped the man who lay by the wayside, having fallen prey to robbers. It was a Samaritan; today we would say, a Palestinian. For we are human first of all -- then Christian, Muslim, or Jewish. Or as the Jewish rabbi said: "And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others?" We do not accept the abduction of soldiers. But nor do we accept the deportation of whole populations or the abduction of legally elected parliamentarians and government ministers.

We recognize the state of Israel of 1948, but not the one of 1967. It is the state of Israel that fails to recognize, respect, or defer to the internationally lawful Israeli state of 1948. Israel wants more; more water and more villages. To obtain this, there are those who want, with God's assistance, a final solution to the Palestinian problem. The Palestinians have so many other countries, certain Israeli politicians have argued; we have only one.

The USA or the world?

Or as the highest protector of the state of Israel puts it: "May God continue to bless America." A little child took note of that. She turned to her mother, saying: "Why does the President always end his speeches with 'God bless America'? Why not, 'God bless the world'?"

Then there was a Norwegian poet who let out this childlike sigh of the heart: "Why doth Humanity so slowly progress?" It was he that wrote so beautifully of the Jew and the Jewess. But he rejected the notion of God's chosen people. He personally liked to call himself a Muhammedan.

Calm and mercy

We do not recognize the state of Israel. Not today, not as of this writing, not in the hour of grief and wrath. If the entire Israeli nation should fall to its own devices and parts of the population have to flee the occupied areas into another diaspora, then we say: May the surroundings stay calm and show them mercy. It is forever a crime without mitigation to lay hand on refugees and stateless people.

Peace and free passage for the evacuating civilian population no longer protected by a state. Fire not at the fugitives! Take not aim at them! They are vulnerable now like snails without shells, vulnerable like slow caravans of Palestinian and Lebanese refugees, defenseless like women and children and the old in Qana, Gaza, Sabra, and Chatilla. Give the Israeli refugees shelter, give them milk and honey!

Let not one Israeli child be deprived of life. Far too many children and civilians have already been murdered.


2. Israel's Way Out
Hezbollah and Hamas attacks have backed it into a corner. Escalation against Iran and Syria might be the best hope.
By Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

FOR THE SECOND TIME in the long history of the Middle East conflict, an enemy of Israel has effectively said: We do not care what you do.

Hezbollah — in choosing not to return the two soldiers it seized on July 12, and in its bombardment of Israel — has declared that it does not care if its war-making leads Israel to attack Lebanon's cities, ruin that country's economy and kill its people. What matters most is inflicting damage on Israel, weakening its morale and goading it to a level of destruction that will incite the world's wrath. The Palestinians said as much with their second intifada and their suicide bombings. But this is different because Hezbollah's daily rainfall of rockets in Israel portends an intolerable military assault without end.

What can Israel do — what could any country do? — with such an enemy? Except for a desperate Saddam Hussein during the Persian Gulf War, other countries and armies that would have liked to destroy Israel did not target Israeli cities because they knew that Israel would intensely bomb Cairo, Amman or Damascus. Israel had deterrence. Had an enemy dared such an attack, Israel could have compelled it to stop by inflicting massive damage. With Hezbollah — and with Hamas as well — Israel's ability to deter attacks or to compel them to stop has been lost.

The third strategic means of dealing with an enemy — making a genuine peace — has not been possible because Hezbollah and Hamas are expressly committed to Israel's destruction. They see any cessation of hostilities as an interlude before further attack.

So Israel has adopted the fourth strategic possibility: to devastate its dangerous foe, which also would restore deterrence. Yet Israel has discovered that against combatants who look like civilians and whose rockets are hidden everywhere, it must fight longer and occupy and destroy much more of Lebanon than it may deem moral, wise or feasible. Even a future international force in southern Lebanon — the possibility of which is highly uncertain — may be incapable of thwarting Hezbollah and would still leave northern Israel in Hezbollah's rocket range.

What strategies remain? No. 5 is intolerable: living with ongoing, and probably increasing, rocket attacks into northern Israel and beyond. Hezbollah's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, promises that "there are many cities in the center [of Israel] which will be targeted in the phase of 'beyond Haifa.' "

The sixth option is to compel Hezbollah's suppliers and patrons — Syria and Iran — to end the terror. Neither country wishes a war with militarily superior Israel (Syria's saber rattling notwithstanding). If every Hezbollah missile into Israel produced Israeli retaliation against Syria, and possibly Iran (including its nuclear production sites), Syria and Iran would be forced to make Hezbollah stop. Obviously, this is a last-ditch option. It would escalate the conflict and increase international pressure on Israel to desist.

All of Israel's strategic choices are bad or ineffective or undesirable. And yet this last option would be the most likely to reestablish the deterrence critical to Israel's long-term survival — and to peace in the region — by demonstrating Israel's enduring power to compel an end of attacks. And it might prevent still more massive devastation of Lebanon.

Make no mistake: Israel is fighting for its life. It faces a historically new kind of fanatical foe, political Islam, which combines three characteristics: a political-religious ideology calling for its enemies' annihilation; indifference to, even the celebration of, its own people's death (because martyrs are rewarded with a place in heaven); and virtually unstoppable technology (missiles) and techniques (suicide bombing) of terror.

The political Islamists are emboldened by their newfound power. As Nasrallah has boasted, "When were 2 million Israelis forced to become displaced, or to stay in bomb shelters for more than 18 days?" And the danger will escalate a thousandfold if Iran, the epicenter of political Islam and Hezbollah's master, achieves its own invulnerability with nuclear weapons, so that it too can launch rocket and other attacks against its many targets. Iran's former president and current power broker, Hashemi Rafsanjani, spoke candidly in 2001: "The use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything," he said, although it would harm the Islamic world. "It is not irrational," he went on, "to contemplate such an eventuality."

A nuclear Iran, sharing Hezbollah's and Hamas' enmity for Israel's very existence, is a foe with a million times the wealth and destructive might to found, fund and supply many more Hezbollahs against many more enemies, including the hated West.

Israel's political Islamic enemies are studying and rejoicing over the new geostrategic situation. These totalitarians' ultimate targets — all "infidels," especially here and in Europe — should study it as well, be sobered and realize that Israel, in fighting this war in its self-defense, to reestablish a geostrategic balance, and for its long-term survival, is ultimately fighting for them as well.

(DANIEL JONAH GOLDHAGEN, a member of Harvard University's Center for European Studies and the author of "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust," is completing a book on genocide. His website is www.goldhagen.com)


3. Israel-Lebanon: the War for Recognition
This is not a traditional clash over territory or influence. It looks more like the continuation of the politics of identity by other means.
By Brendan O’Neill

Why are Israel and Hezbollah fighting a bloody war? It depends on which politician you listen to and which newspaper you read. According to some this is a ‘war on Israel’ by Islamofascist forces supported by Iran and Syria. Others claim it is a ‘war of resistance’ by Hezbollah, which is now apparently part of an ‘arc of resistance’ in the Middle East standing up to Western-backed Israeli aggression. Others still say that Israel’s incursions in Lebanon are the latest stage in an American grand plan to topple hostile regimes across the Middle East and replace them with US-friendly puppets. Or, if you listen to Israel itself, then this is a ‘war against terrorism’ to force Hezbollah 13 miles north of the Israeli border; if you prefer to believe Hezbollah then it is a ‘brave war’ by the guerrilla group to secure the release of their comrades from Israeli jails. Take your pick.

All sides of the debate are trying to force the conflict into old political categories where it simply does not fit. Politicians and pundits are using the language of state, nation and citizenship to describe the 21-day-old war, when in fact there seems to be something new and dangerous going on here. The Israel-Lebanon spat looks less like a traditional war over territory and influence, or even over terrorism and prisoners, and more like a ‘war for recognition’ being waged by both sides. Both Israel and Hezbollah seem to be waging, not a strategic war designed to secure a decisive victory over the other side, but rather a media war aimed at winning the recognition of their rights or their pain from the international community. If war traditionally was the continuation of politics by other means, then this new war looks like the continuation of the politics of identity by other means.

Both sides admit that this is not a war for territory, or even a war designed to defeat their opponents. Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert says he has ‘no interest’ in Lebanese territories; indeed, he points out that there is no territorial or ideological dispute between Israel and Lebanon: ‘There is no cause for conflict between us. There is no territorial dispute and no ideological abyss between us. We and you want the same thing – the right to a simple, quiet and safe life.’ (1) Olmert says his aim is simply to force Hezbollah, the guerrilla group originally formed in 1982 to expel Israeli forces from Lebanon during an earlier war, 13 miles back from the Israeli-Lebanese border. Despite the fact that Hezbollah is anti-Israel, and uses inflammatory anti-Israeli rhetoric, even Olmert’s bombing of the group’s strongholds in southern Lebanon does not appear to be an ideological act of war. Rather, he wants merely to push them 13 miles north, presumably because that would mean their rockets could no longer reach northern Israel. To the extent that Israel has defined its ‘war aims’, they appear extremely short-term and tactical.

For its part, Hezbollah might occasionally talk about destroying Israel or ‘liberating the Palestinians’. But every observer with more than a few brain cells knows that these guerrillas – who were increasingly isolated within Lebanese society, at least before this latest conflict began – do not have the means to do anything of the sort. Nor does Hezbollah want to, really. In recent years Hezbollah has become more and more mainstream: its political wing now has 14 members in the Lebanese Parliament, two of whom sit in the current Lebanese Cabinet, and it is better known in southern Lebanon for its community work, even its ‘environmental programme’, than for issuing any daring military challenge to the existence of Israel (2). Like Olmert, Hezbollah claims it has very specific aims in this conflict: to secure the release of a certain number of its prisoners.

Both Israel’s demand that Hezbollah shift 13 miles northwards and Hezbollah’s demand that Israel release its prisoners look like conveniently specific justifications for their military antics, attached as afterthoughts once the conflict had begun. In reality, this war looks less like a clash over specific local issues and more like a play for international attention and patronage – less a war to achieve any tangible political goal and more the use of military force to demonstrate the parties’ values and seriousness. Could it be that the current war is less the pursuit of politics by other means, and more simply the pursuit of meaning?

It is striking, for example, that Israeli leaders and their supporters in the West continually talk about Israel’s ‘right to exist’. Justifying his bombing of Lebanon, Olmert said: ‘We will not apologise to those who dare to question Israel’s right to exist.’ Dan Halutz, chief of staff of the Israel Defence Force, gave a speech to troops in which he said the war was about ‘defending the integrity of our country’; Israel is ‘fighting an extremist Islamic terrorist organisation that denies our right to exist’, he told them (3). Yet as some Israeli commentators have pointed out, no Arab state seriously challenges Israel’s right to exist today, and those militant groups that do – such as Hezbollah and Hamas – are too small to do anything about it. More to the point, both groups have made moves to recognise Israel’s right to exist in recent years. One Israeli commentator argues that the ‘right to exist’ question is more an obsession of the Israeli elite itself, a ‘metaphysical issue’, rather than being forced on to the agenda by any serious military force from outside Israel (4).

Israel seems effectively to be projecting its own crisis of legitimacy – its own doubt about what it exists for , and even where exactly it exists in terms of territory – on to those isolated groups that challenge its right to existence. Israel’s own existential crisis, if you like, translates into an obsession with those who say it should not exist in the first place. Here we can see that one reason why Israel is pursuing a war against Hezbollah is in order to alleviate its own doubt about the purpose for its existence. In a sense, it uses military force in order to assert, even to prove, that it exists, and that it exists for a reason. Israel hopes that by attacking those who challenge its right to existence – however isolated and minuscule they may be – it can demonstrate why it exists and, as the IDF’s Halutz says, that there will be a ‘continued existence’ (5).

You can see something similar in the discussion about Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’. Many Israeli leaders and supporters seem more concerned with asserting their right to use force than with simply getting on with the business of using force to defeat an enemy that allegedly threatens their security. President George W Bush said: ‘My message to Israel is that as a sovereign nation, you have every right to defend yourself.’ (6) Another US official said America ‘recognises Israel’s right to defend itself’ – a way of supporting the theory that Israel can use force without necessarily signing up for the practical consequences of such force in Lebanon (7). It is almost as if Israel uses force in order to show that it has a right to use force. This looks less like the use of military force to achieve a definite end (except maybe that 13 miles thing) but rather the use of military force for its own sake: to show both that Israel exists and that it can use force to ensure its ‘continued existence’. There seems to be something new here: a war to assert legitimacy.

Hezbollah, also, uses force to make a point rather than to achieve an aim. The military wing of Hezbollah has become isolated in Lebanese society, seen as unnecessary by many Lebanese people and as a burden, increasingly, by its bespectacled and respectable members of parliament. Hezbollah’s rocket attacks on northern Israel look like a desperate attempt to show that, contrary to all the evidence, Hezbollah is still a force to be reckoned with. Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, secretary general of Hezbollah, says the attacks on northern Israel show that Hezbollah has ‘brains, capacities and expertise’ (8). He seems more concerned with the symbolism of Hezbollah’s attacks rather than with their strategic impact. Following a successful Hezbollah strike on an Israeli navy ship, Nasrallah said: ‘Look into the middle of the sea, facing Beirut, the Israeli warship that has pounded the infrastructure, people’s homes and civilians – look at it burning. It will sink and with it will sink scores of Israeli Zionist soldiers.’ (9) In fact, the rocket caused very little damage on the ship, and no casualties at all.

Unable to launch anything like a real military attack on Israel, Nasrallah instead ‘looks into the middle of the sea’ at a minor Hezbollah hit on an Israeli ship, and imagines that Israeli soldiers, possibly even Israel itself, will ‘sink’ as a consequence. These are symbolic assaults intended to demonstrate that Hezbollah is brave and brainy, even though, as a serious military outfit, it is actually on its last legs.

Both Israel and Hezbollah use force as a substitute for politics and purpose, rather than in pursuit of those things. They are effectively staging a war in order to show that they should be taken seriously. This is why the media are so important to both sides. As Michael Ignatieff has argued, the more virtual war becomes, the more ‘the media becomes the decisive theatre of operations’ (10). Both Israel and Hezbollah are obsessed with ensuring they get the best and most positive media coverage, particularly in the West. US National Public Radio reported this week that Hezbollah is ‘running a savvy media war through their own television station Al-Manar’. It was recently reported that Assaf Shariv, Olmert’s media adviser, ‘boasted that Israelis have been interviewed by the foreign press four times as much as spokespeople for the Palestinians and the Lebanese…and [he] cited a poll of Sky News viewers that found that 80 per cent believe Israel’s attacks on Lebanon were justified.’ (11)

Meanwhile, Western supporters of both Israel and the Lebanese seem singularly obsessed by media coverage. In their columns and their blogs they monitor in minute detail what each broadcaster and newspaper says about the war. It is telling that instead of plotting the strategic developments in the conflict they analyse the extent to which media support is shifting in favour of the Israelis or the Lebanese. In war-as-stunt, where the aim is merely to assert your power or bravery to an international audience, the media become the real battlefield, where things are won and lost. Northern Israel and southern Lebanon, where the bombs are falling and people are dying, become merely a backdrop to the real battle for attention and favour.

In effect, we might say that Israel and Hezbollah are complicit in some ways: they created this conflict in an attempt to rise above their own political and moral crises and assert themselves in a seemingly dynamic and forceful manner. This takes the era of ‘humanitarian warfare’, where Western powers launch wars to demonstrate their moral superiority rather than to win territory or resources, to a new level. War is no longer fought out of necessity but rather out of narcissism. As the pretty narcissistic war reporter Chris Hedges argued in his book War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning , which told of his ‘addiction’ to the thrill of wars in Latin America, Bosnia and elsewhere: ‘War makes the world understandable, a black-and-white tableau of them and us…. [W]ar is sometimes the most powerful way in human society to achieve meaning.’ (12) The Israel-Lebanon spat is best seen as an attempt by both sides to ‘make their world understandable’, and to ‘achieve meaning’ through force where they have failed to do so through politics or progress.

Today, launching a war can be seen as an opportunity to give an impression of agency and purpose, at a time when both of those things are absent in the world of politics. It gives an impression of agency through the calling up and deployment of thousands of soldiers and their machines, and it hints at a sense of purpose in its aim to punish an enemy in the name of some national good. Of course, such wars provide only a temporary ‘thrill’, and do nothing to resolve the crisis of purpose and legitimacy that nurtured them.

Where once states and even non-state groups fought for sovereign independence and sovereign equality, today they demand international protection or recognition. Such recognition can easily lead to occupation. At an individual level, the politics of recognition is a demand for the state to value and appreciate an individual’s identity, to affirm it on his behalf. At an international level, it effectively means the international community taking seriously a state’s right to exist in peace and security – and if necessary enforcing this right by sending in peacekeepers or setting up new borders and forms of partition. This is not a demand for sovereign independence but for continual and neverending international recognition.

That the basis for this current war is flimsy does not make it any less tragic. Indeed, it seems a war for recognition can dehumanise its victims as effectively as did earlier wars over territory or ideology. The people of Israel and Lebanon are not the subjects of this war, pushing it forward for their own aims and desires; rather, they are its objects. In a media war for international attention, the people of the region become little more than front-page symbols, of either defiance or victimhood. They are not dying in some grand battle over politics or statehood. They are dying for nothing.


4. U.S. Clout a Missing Ingredient in Mideast
Inexperienced and mistrusted in region, the administration faces a hard road, analysts say.
By Tyler Marshall and Alissa J. Rubin

WASHINGTON — As the Bush administration seeks to negotiate a diplomatic end to the fighting in the Middle East, it finds it has a strikingly weak hand.

The war in Iraq, a halting U.S. response to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and now the prolonged fighting in Lebanon and Israel have led to intense anti-Americanism in the Arab world. Alliances with longtime Arab friends are strained. And the U.S. lacks relations with two key regional players: Iran and Syria.

"The Lebanon crisis is the end of the myth that we can tell the world what to do and they'll line up to do it," said Nancy Soderberg, a U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the Clinton administration. "They are going to have to do real diplomacy."

Adding to the challenge is, remarkably, inexperience. Despite 5 1/2 years in office, President Bush's foreign policy team has been involved in surprisingly few high-stakes negotiations in the region.

The draft U.N. resolution painstakingly crafted by the United States and France over the weekend was a first effort at negotiating an end to the fighting in Lebanon and Israel. But it took a long week for agreement to be reached, despite U.S. officials' constant assertion that it was just a matter of details. In that week, many Lebanese civilians died, leading many in the region to think the U.S. cares little about their lives.

The landscape looks grim for serious diplomacy.

Since U.S. forces captured Baghdad without a serious fight in spring 2003, fear of America's military might has melted away as its soldiers and Marines have been unable to control the insurgency or stem Iraq's escalating sectarian violence. The result has reduced America's aura of complete power and, with it, the ability to bend others to its will.

Successful diplomacy requires being able to broker between enemies by having the trust of both parties and enough force, moral and military, to enforce a deal. America's recent foreign forays have relied largely on force, but the military victories have been short-lived and unable to bring about the democracy that was promised.

"In the Middle East, historically people always go with the strong horse, but we don't look like the strong horse anymore," said Martin Indyk, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and now director of the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy. "To Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, we look like we're short of breath."

Added Rand Corp. counter-terrorism specialist Bruce Hoffman, "If they felt threatened then, they are emboldened now."

The Bush administration faces an unprecedented level of anti-American feeling in the Arab world, emotions driven in part by its image as an unquestioning supporter of Israel and by allegations of U.S. torture and abuse of Muslim detainees in places such as Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

One survey conducted eight months ago in Egypt, a U.S. ally, by the polling group Zogby International found that just more than 3% of those questioned had a "very favorable" opinion of the United States, whereas 71% had a "very unfavorable" view.

The result is a serious erosion of political goodwill and moral authority, both important components of diplomatic influence historically available to the United States.

Against this unsettling backdrop, a U.S. diplomatic offensive involving substantive negotiations to alter the map of the broader Middle East would be a first for Bush. Although few American presidents have initiated greater change to the political landscape of the Middle East than Bush has, little of it has come through consensus-building or negotiated agreement.

Political transformation in Iraq, like Afghanistan before it, followed a military invasion. The end of Syria's military occupation of Lebanon came mainly through international pressure triggered by the assassination of Lebanon's former prime minister. And gradual expansions of political pluralism in countries such as Egypt came from high-profile rhetoric and a firm political nudge.

"This administration doesn't do diplomacy well," said Judith Kipper, a Middle East specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations. "They are like the Arabs: They say something and think it's been done."

In addressing the long-simmering Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the White House has not turned to a special U.S. envoy or bouts of intense diplomacy such as those employed by previous administrations to achieve breakthroughs. Instead, Bush chose to support former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's unilateral steps toward carving a Palestinian state out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, on Israeli terms.

The White House sees the struggle in the region fundamentally as one between the forces of good and evil — freedom and terrorism. That, coupled with Bush's sense of mission to defend Israel and spread democracy to the region, leaves little room for the kind of compromise required for effective diplomacy, experts say.

"The U.S. has to begin to start thinking of gray resolutions that would end the current conflict and keep that border quiet for years," said Paul Salem, director designate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Middle East Center.

Those who have been involved in the administration's decision-making say there is little airing of contrary views.


5. Ending the Neoconservative Nightmare -- by Daniel Levy (from Israel’s Haaretz Daily)

Witnessing the near-perfect symmetry of Israeli and American policy has been one of the more noteworthy aspects of the latest Lebanon war. A true friend in the White House. No deescalate and stabilize, honest-broker, diplomatic jaw-jaw from this president. Great. Except that Israel was actually in need of an early exit strategy, had its diplomatic options narrowed by American weakness and marginalization in the region, and found itself ratcheting up aerial and ground operations in ways that largely worked to Hezbollah's advantage, the Qana tragedy included. The American ladder had gone AWOL.

More worrying, while everyone here can identify an Israeli interest in securing the northern border and the justification in responding to Hezbollah, the goal of saving Lebanon's fragile Cedar Revolution sounds less distinctly Israeli. Perhaps an agenda invented elsewhere. As hostilities intensified, the phrase "proxy war" gained resonance.

Israelis have grown used to a different kind of American embrace - less instrumental, more emotional, but also responsible. A dependable friend, ready to lend a guiding hand back to the path of stabilization when necessary.

After this crisis will Israel belatedly wake up to the implications of the tectonic shift that has taken place in U.S.-Middle East policy?

In 1996 a group of then opposition U.S. policy agitators, including Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, presented a paper entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" to incoming Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The "clean break" was from the prevailing peace process, advocating that Israel pursue a combination of roll-back, destabilization and containment in the region, including striking at Syria and removing Saddam Hussein from power in favor of "Hashemite control in Iraq." The Israeli horse they backed then was not up to the task.

Ten years later, as Netanyahu languishes in the opposition, as head of a small Likud faction, Perle, Feith and their neoconservative friends have justifiably earned a reputation as awesome wielders of foreign-policy influence under George W. Bush.

The key neocon protagonists, their think tanks and publications may be unfamiliar to many Israelis, but they are redefining the region we live in. This tight-knit group of "defense intellectuals" - centered around Bill Kristol, Michael Ledeen, Elliott Abrams, Perle, Feith and others - were considered somewhat off-beat until they teamed up with hawkish well-connected Republicans like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Newt Gingrich, and with the emerging powerhouse of the Christian right. Their agenda was an aggressive unilateralist U.S. global supremacy, a radical vision of transformative regime-change democratization, with a fixation on the Middle East, an obsession with Iraq and an affinity to "old Likud" politics in Israel. Their extended moment in the sun arrived after 9/11.

Finding themselves somewhat bogged down in the Iraqi quagmire, the neoconservatives are reveling in the latest crisis, displaying their customary hubris in re-seizing the initiative. The U.S. press and blogosphere is awash with neocon-inspired calls for indefinite shooting, no talking and extension of hostilities to Syria and Iran, with Gingrich calling this a third world war to "defend civilization."

Disentangling Israeli interests from the rubble of neocon "creative destruction" in the Middle East has become an urgent challenge for Israeli policy-makers. An America that seeks to reshape the region through an unsophisticated mixture of bombs and ballots, devoid of local contextual understanding, alliance-building or redressing of grievances, ultimately undermines both itself and Israel. The sight this week of Secretary of State Rice homeward bound, unable to touch down in any Arab capital, should have a sobering effect in Washington and Jerusalem.

Afghanistan is yet to be secured, Iraq is an exporter of instability and perhaps terror, too, Iranian hard-liners have been strengthened and encouraged, while the public throughout the region is ever-more radicalized, and in the yet-to-be "transformed" regimes of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, is certainly more hostile to Israel and America than its leaders. Neither listening nor talking to important, if problematic, actors in the region has only impoverished policy-making capacity.

Israel does have enemies, interests and security imperatives, but there is no logic in the country volunteering itself for the frontline of an ideologically misguided and avoidable war of civilizations.

So what should be done, on both sides of the ocean?

It is admittedly difficult for Israel to have a regional strategy that is out-of-step with the U.S. administration-of-the-day. However, the neocon approach is not unchallenged, and Israel should not be providing its ticket back to the ascendancy. A U.S. return to proactive diplomacy, realism and multilateralism, with sustained and hard engagement that delivers concrete progress, would best serve its own, Israeli and regional interests. Israel should encourage this. Israel may even have to lead, for instance, in rethinking policy on Hamas or Syria, and should certainly work intensely with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas in encouraging his efforts to reach a Palestinian national understanding as a basis for stable governance, security quiet and future peace negotiations. A policy that comes with a Jerusalem kosher stamp of approval might be viewed as less of an abomination in Washington.

Beyond that, Israel and its friends in the United States should seriously reconsider their alliances not only with the neocons, but also with the Christian Right. The largest "pro-Israel" lobby day during this crisis was mobilized by Pastor John Hagee and his Christians United For Israel, a believer in Armageddon with all its implications for a rather particular end to the Jewish story. This is just asking to become the mother of all dumb, self-defeating and morally abhorrent alliances.

Internationalist Republicans, Democrats and mainstream Israelis must construct an alternative narrative to the neocon nightmare, identifying shared interests in a policy that reestablishes American leadership, respect and credibility in the region by facilitating security and stability, pursuing conflict resolution and promoting the conditions for more open societies (as opposed to narrow election-worship). The last two years of the Bush presidency can be an opportunity for progress or an exercise in desperate damage limitation. It sounds counter-intuitive, but Israel should reflect on and even help reorient American expectations.

(Daniel Levy was a member of the official Israeli negotiating team at the Oslo and Taba talks and the lead Israeli drafter of the Geneva Initiative.)


6. A War That Shames the World

It is 28 days since Hizbollah captured two Israeli soldiers, prompting a ground and air assault on Lebanon by the Israeli army. In that time, 932 people have been killed in Lebanon, with 75 missing, presumed dead.

29 Lebanese Army soldiers have been killed. 3,293 Lebanese have been wounded. 45 per cent of the casualties have been children. 913,000 Lebanese have been displaced (300,000 of whom are children). 94 Israelis have been killed and 1,867 wounded.

10,000 Israeli soldiers are currently fighting Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. 3,000 rockets have been fired at Israel by Hizbollah. The average number of rockets fired daily by Hizbollah in the first week of the conflict was 90. Over the past five days, it has been 169.

Israel has flown 8,700 bombing sorties, destroying 146 bridges and 72 roads. Damage caused to Lebanon's infrastructure is estimated at $2bn. Up to 30,000 tons of oil have spilled into the Mediterranean since an Israeli air strike on Jieh power station.

The international community (apart from Britain and the US) has called for an immediate ceasefire. As yet, the number of UN resolutions: 0