Lebanon: news from various fronts

1. 'Hezbollah aren't suckers, they know how to fight. You're scared all the time'
Israeli soldiers recount stories of a terrifying week facing the snipers and missiles of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon
By Stephen Farrell

AT FIRST light they filtered from the undergrowth, camouflaged, laden with captured hunting rifles and crested Lebanese scimitars, and high-fiving with relief at still being alive.

After nearly a week of vicious ditch-to-ditch fighting with Hezbollah fighters in the village of Taibeh, hundreds of exhausted Israeli soldiers slipped back across the border early yesterday after the hardest fighting they had ever experienced.

As they trudged across the brow of a hill in broken single file they were indistinguishable in their battle fatigues and green face paint — some even black out their teeth in Hezbollahland — and all were drunk on adrenalin. “I was hoping to go in and kill Hezbollonim. I killed three,” one shouted as he embraced colleagues from the Nahal Brigade.

As soon as they reached the outskirts of an Israeli hilltop town, which cannot be named for security reasons, they stopped and cleared their M16 automatic rifles in unison — the last task before they could relax. Some then reached inside their huge battlepacks for their mobile phones to call families and girlfriends. Others collapsed with exhaustion, washing away their fear with bottles of cola and lungfuls of cigarette smoke. A few grabbed newspapers to find out how their war was going. “What is happening in other places? What is happening in Gaza?” one asked The Times .

Down a sidestreet a cluster of Israeli tourist buses waited with drinks and packed lunches. Slowly the soldiers began morphing from death-bringers to nice Jewish boys preparing for the Sabbath, peeling off clothes and cavorting halfnaked with each other beside the bougainvillea.

As they did so, all the rainbow shades of Israeli society began to re-emerge — secular, Orthodox, Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, Sabra, Ethiopian, Russian, Brooklyn. To their matted hair they pinned all types of skullcap — knitted, military-green, Braslav, settler or none at all. But on one thing they were unanimous: the prowess of their foe.

“It was hell. They are really well trained. They’re not suckers, they know how to fight,” said one, slumped on the pavement. “You’re scared the whole time over there. We didn’t get any sleep the whole week.” There was not a voice of dissent.

The soldiers told how they had worked their way through the dry, scrubby hillsides towards Taibeh, facing continual attacks from Hezbollah sniper and anti-tank missile positions concealed in houses, farms, underground bunkers and seemingly deserted streets.

To counter this they called in frequent support from 155mm artillery batteries on the Israeli side of the border, which pounded Taibeh sending huge plumes of smoke into the sky.

“We killed ten, and the artillery must have killed thirty or forty,” said a soldier who, like his colleagues, was not allowed to give his name. He had simply lost count of Hezbollah’s attacks. “Many, many, it was very bad because you don’t know where they are coming from. But we succeeded.”

Another soldier said that serving in the Palestinian militant stronghold of Jenin in the West Bank, as he had, was nothing compared with fighting Hezbollah’s guerrillas. “It was horrible,” he said. “You don’t know what it’s like, with every second a rocket- propelled grenade shooting over your head.”

A third soldier said: “All the time, they fired missiles at us. They never come face to face, just missiles. When we find them we kill them. It’s just not right, the way we are doing it. Our air force can just bomb villages and not risk our lives fighting over there.”

Another, slugging cola as his friends posed for photos, added: “It feels good to do the job. And come out alive.”

More than 40 Israeli soldiers have been killed in the 25 days of fighting.

Watched by bemused Thai immigrants, who, post-intifada, have replaced the cheap Palestinian labour upon which the Israeli economy once relied, one soldier shouted: “I love this country.”

Some of the returned fighters were optimistic. “We will defeat all the Arabs,” said one.

But others, chastened by their experiences north of the border, were less sure. “It’s a lose-lose situation,” said one. “They’re a bunch of terrorists. We are an army. We can never beat them completely because we have to obey certain rules. They operate from within civilian populations, and can do whatever they like. They don’t give a shit about these things.

“So it doesn’t matter if we are there for another couple of days or two weeks. But what is very important is that this is a just war on our part. Because they are a bunch of f***ing terrorists.”


2. In Israel, Questions About the Conflict
Public Support, Once Nearly Unanimous, Begins to Fray as Toll Rises

By Molly Moore and Jonathan Finer (from Washington Post(

With much of Israel's northern population huddling in underground shelters and Hezbollah proving more resilient than Israeli leaders had publicly predicted, Israel's news media, intellectual elite and public are starting to question the judgment of the country's political and military leadership.

After an extraordinary national surge of unanimity during the first days of the conflict, public support is starting to fray, with some of the nation's most influential voices criticizing political leaders and Israel Defense Forces generals for military strategies they say have failed to protect Israeli citizens.

They blame Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz for trying to lull citizens into a false sense of security, fault generals for relying too heavily on air power to destroy Hezbollah rocket launchers, and worry that Israeli troops may not have been prepared to defeat a force far tougher than Palestinian fighters.

"The public should demand of the political echelon: Stop or reduce the Katyusha rocket fire," the popular daily newspaper Ma'ariv wrote Friday. "Do what you should have done two weeks ago. . . . Bang on the table in front of the white-faced IDF officers, and demand more proposals; think and think again. . . . The time for patience has passed. You have an army, use it, or go for a cease-fire."

The behind-the-scenes disagreements between the generals and the politicians, and among competing branches of the military, are becoming part of the public debate.

This weekend, Olmert's top security advisers are scheduled to debate whether Israeli forces should be sent deeper into Lebanon, beyond the approximately two-mile strip they are now battling to clear of Hezbollah fighters. Olmert reportedly has been reluctant to expand the military operations, while military officers are said to be chafing under his restrictions. According to military officials, field commanders are pressing Olmert, Peretz and other key ministers to approve an expansion of their offensive to include all land up to the Litani River, which roughly parallels the Israel-Lebanon border and ranges 15 miles north of it in some places. The goal would be to push Hezbollah fighters who are firing rockets farther away from Israel.

"Wherever we are present, you do not see rockets fired," Brig. Gen. Guy Tzur, commander of the Steel Division, which includes armor and infantry units operating on the eastern half of Israel's border with Lebanon, said in an interview Friday at his headquarters in the northern town of Philon. "But we're getting to the edge of where the government permits us. We're not present everywhere we have to be present in order to stop more of the attacks. If we can go farther, the Israeli citizens will feel a difference."

Much of the Israeli news media and many analysts are skeptical, however .

"The strikes on the home front are becoming worse as the IDF sends more and more brigades into Lebanon," wrote Amos Harel in the daily newspaper Haaretz. "Launchings from areas in which the army is operating have been reduced by half, but Hezbollah combatants simply relocate to the next range of hills and fire from there."

But Brig. Gen. Tzur said intelligence shows that the vast majority of Hezbollah rockets have a range of 12 to 15 miles. If Israel can stop rocket launches south of the Litani River, the radical Shiite Muslim militia would be forced to use longer-range munitions, which take longer to launch, are easier to detect and destroy, and have been depleted already by Israeli bombardment.

Israel's top security officials already authorized one large expansion of the ground campaign in a four-hour meeting last week.

"I hope the new decision is to let us get to the Litani. Then we will need two weeks to finish things," Tzur said. "Believe me, after that the situation will be different. If we have the permission, we will achieve the goals. It's very easy, we know how to do it."

Many Israelis say they no longer trust that kind of bravado.

"Their thinking of the war is anachronistic," said Yaron Ezrahi, one of Israel's most prominent political analysts. "They set certain kinds of goals which are unachievable like crushing and stopping missiles."

Ezrahi said he thinks the hail of Hezbollah rockets into Israel has demonstrated to the rest of the world the dangers Israel faces in the region -- particularly the risks of letting Iran, one of Hezbollah's benefactors, proceed with its nuclear programs.

Rather than push deeper into southern Lebanon, where Israel ended an unpopular occupation of a self-declared security zone six years ago, Ezrahi said, "we can have a lot to gain by stopping now and moving to convert what we have done to political assets."

Public sentiment, which had overwhelmingly supported the war two weeks ago, is also beginning to waver. Even leftist groups supportive of peace moves with the Palestinians backed the anti-Hezbollah offensive in its first days, but several dovish groups have now called their first peace rally in Tel Aviv on Saturday to demand a stop to the war.

"I fought the same battles against the same enemy in the same places 16 years ago," said Ido Ahronson, 36, a Jerusalem computer technician who served in Israel's previous conflict in Lebanon. "We didn't accomplish anything then, and I don't see how we can accomplish that much now. How would you feel if George Bush decided to send you back into Vietnam? We are fighting an enemy that uses civilians as protection, knows the terrain well and is brainwashed to believe they are fighting for Islam."

The Israeli public and news media are also growing disenchanted with what some analysts see as efforts by Olmert and Peretz -- both facing their first major crisis on the job -- to use overly optimistic rhetoric.

In a speech Tuesday, Olmert said of Hezbollah's capability to fire rockets at Israel: "Twenty-one days later, that threat is not what it was."

The next day, Hezbollah pummeled Israel with 230 rockets -- the most of any day of the conflict.

In a public opinion survey published Friday by Ma'ariv, 55 percent of respondents said they thought Israel was winning the war, and only 3.5 percent said Hezbollah was winning. But nearly 38 percent said "no one" was winning.

"Look at what is going on in Haifa," said Shaul Malka, 28, a Jerusalem taxi driver. "Haifa is a huge busy city, and now it is a ghost town. People are scared to leave the bomb shelters and walk on the streets. So how can they say we are winning?"


3. Funny comment on Israeli intentions

From a Blogcritics thread:

"Hezbollah wants to eliminate Israel. They don't give a shit about the West Bank except maybe as stage 1 in the elimination of Israel. They state this explicitly. Do you think they're joking?"

You have it reversed.

At the end of the six day war in 1967, Ariel Sharon said, "We have peace - a piece of Egypt, a piece of Jordan, a piece of Syria, a piece of Lebanon."

Asked what he would do with the Palestinians on the West Bank which was occupied by 1.2 million Palestinians, Sharon said, "We will make a pastrami sandwich out of them - we will put settlements through them so that in 25 years they will be no more."

Further: “"We'll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, so that in twenty-five years' time, neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart."

These statements preclude any semblance of adhering to international law or expectation of peace. This Israeli attitude, which is the source of terrorism, can exist only with the complicity and support of weak politicians in the United States.

To confirm this, Sharon has said, "We own America".

Therein lies the problem for America.

4. Traumatised and afraid - 300,000 children who want to go home -- by Anne Penketh and Kim Sengupta

"I don't want to die. I want to go to school," says Jamal, a four-year-old Lebanese boy scarred by the Israeli bombing of his country. Home for Jamal is now a "displacement centre" in the southern town of Jezzine, where his family fled in fear for their lives.

"We've had our picnic, and we want to go home now," says another child,staying in a makeshift refugee camp in the Sanayeh public gardens in Beirut. "We are bored and afraid and we want to go home," says another.

These are the voices of the dispossessed of Lebanon, the hundreds of thousands of children whose world was changed forever in the seconds that followed the explosion of a bomb. "Mummy, what is a massacre?" another child asks.

About 300,000 Lebanese children have been displaced by Israel's three-week war against Hizbollah - a third of the number of people who have abandoned their homes. In many cases they were ordered out by Israeli army leaflets. They are living in open-air camps, like the one in the Beirut park, or in schools, where many sought refuge. Many children have been housed with host families - in the port of Sidon, 48km (30 miles) south of the capital, 40 per cent of the 22,700 children in temporary accommodation are doing so. The rest are in displacement centres.

Ribka Amsale, an aid worker with Save the Children, visited a school in Sidon yesterday. Children were playing football as their mothers cheered them on. The children seemed cheerful enough, but the stress and trauma are already etched in their psyches.

"Many are undergoing enormous stress in this situation," said Save the Children's Deborah Haines in Sidon. "Although some are out playing, there are issues of safety and security. Many are at a loose end, as their toys and games have been left behind. Their parents haven't got the time or the patience to set things up for the children."

Many of the displaced children are behaving aggressively, getting into fights, in a sign of the underlying pressure that also manifests itself through crying, bed-wetting and bad dreams.

Children placed with host families are not necessarily better off than those in the centres, says Ms Haines. "There are tensions, they have to get used to living with strangers."

Save the Children, which has launched a humanitarian appeal jointly with The Independent, is working with the Lebanese education and social affairs ministries, local non-government partners, and donor countries to assess urgent needs. Save the Children had received 300 telephone calls by yesterday afternoon, pledging an average of £100 a time, thanks toThe Independent's Lebanon appeal, which was launched on Wednesday.

Rania al-Ameri, a Lebanese child psychologist working with young internally displaced people, said: "They desperately need help because they are the ones who are suffering the most. Many children have lost members of their families as well as their homes. They are severely traumatised."

There have been discussions on creating safe places for children to play in. It sounds straightforward, and is relatively easy to organise in the camps, where children can be supervised. But for the displaced living with families, the natural caution of mothers must be overcome by house visits.

Schools have become the displacement centres of choice because of the holidays, which run until 15 September in Lebanon. But the water is of poor quality, the showers - if there are any - are overcrowded, and the lavatories reek of sewage.

In addition to basic necessities such as mattresses, the children need fresh fruit and vegetables for a balanced diet. But "in some of the camps in Tyre, the displaced people need food full stop," said the aid worker Jeremie Bodin of Save the Children. "The stress means that women are no longer breast-feeding, so we need [an] infant-feeding formula, and we need nappies because the children haven't been changed for days." Emerging from his basement, where he has spent the past three weeks, Ali, nine, said: "My father and mother went with my other brothers and sisters to another town. They said they will come and get me when the bombs stop." After another nearby explosion, he said: "Why are the Israelis hitting us? Do they hate us? My cousin told me nuclear bombs are really big. Are they as big as these rockets?"


5. Human Rights Watch Accuses Israel of War Crimes -- by Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - In systematically failing to distinguish between Hezbollah fighters and civilian population in its three-and-a-half-week-old military campaign in Lebanon, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) have committed war crimes, according to a report released by Human Rights Watch Wednesday. The 50-page report, "Fatal Strikes: Israel's Indiscriminate Attacks Against Civilians in Lebanon," detailed nearly two dozen cases of IDF attacks in which a total of 153 civilians, including 63 children, were killed in homes or motor vehicles.

In none of the cases did HRW researchers find evidence that there was a significant enough military objective to justify the attack, given the risks to civilian lives, while, in many cases, there was no identifiable military target. In still other cases cited in the report, Israeli forces appear to have deliberately targeted civilians.

"By consistently failing to distinguish between combatants and civilians, Israel has violated one of the most fundamental tenets of the laws of war: the duty to carry out attacks on only military targets," according to the report.

"The pattern of attacks during the Israeli offensive in Lebanon suggests that the failures cannot be explained or dismissed as mere accidents; the extent of the pattern and the seriousness of the consequences indicate the commission of war crimes," it concluded.

The report, which was based on interviews with victims and independent witnesses of attacks, as well as investigation of the sites where the attacks occurred, called for the United States to immediately suspend transfers to Israel of arms, ammunition, and other material credibly alleged to have been used in such attacks until they cease.

In addition, it called on United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan to establish a formal commission to investigate the alleged war crimes with a view to holding accountable those responsible for their commission.

Such a commission should also investigate Hezbollah's rocket attacks against Israel which have been the subject of previous HRW reports. Since the onset of the latest round of fighting July 12, Hezbollah has launched some 2,000 rockets into predominantly civilian areas in Israel, killing at least 19 Israeli civilians and wounding more than 300 others. Given the inherently indiscriminate nature of the rockets, these attacks also constitute war crimes, according to the New York-based group.

The report, whose main conclusions about Israel's failure to discriminate between civilian and military targets echo a statement by Amnesty International two days ago, was issued just hours after HRW released the preliminary results of its investigation of the July 30 Israeli air strike on an apartment building in Qana in southern Lebanon, which was initially reported to have killed 54 people, most of them children, who had taken refuge in the basement.

HRW, which took testimony from some of the nine survivors it identified, said that it had confirmed the deaths of 28 people, including 16 children, in the building and that 13 others remained missing and were believed to be buried in the rubble. It said that at least 22 people survived the attack and escaped the basement.

One of the survivors, Muhammad Mahmud Shalhub, as well as a Qana villager who helped in the rescue effort, strongly denied initial Israeli claims that any Hezbollah fighters or rocket launchers were present in or around the home when the attack took place.. HRW said its own on-site investigation, which took place July 31, as well as interviews with dozens of international journalists, rescue workers and international observers who visited Qana July 30 and 31, also yielded no evidence of any Hezbollah military presence in or around the building.

"The deaths in Qana were the predictable result of Israel's indiscriminate bombing campaign in Lebanon," said Sarah Leah Whitson, director of HRW's Middle East and North Africa Division, who called for international investigation to determine what took place.

Israel has insisted that it has tried hard to avoid civilian casualties, although the great majority of the more than 500 Lebanese who have reportedly been killed by Israeli fire have been civilians. Israel has claimed that Hezbollah's alleged practice of shielding its fighters and arms by locating them in civilian homes or areas and firing off missiles in populated areas -- allegations which HRW said are the subject of ongoing investigations -- has made civilian casualties unavoidable.

But the rights group said its own investigations of specific Israeli attacks, which included interviews with victims and witnesses, on-site visits, as well as corroboration, where available, by accounts by independent journalists and aid workers, had failed to uncover any evidence that Hezbollah was operating in or around the area during or before each attack.

"Hezbollah fighters must not hide behind civilians -- that's an absolute -- but the image that Israel has promoted of such shielding as the cause of so high a civilian death toll is wrong," according to HRW's executive director, Kenneth Roth. "In the many cases of civilian deaths examined by (us), the location of Hezbollah troops and arms had nothing to do with the deaths because there was no Hezbollah around."

He cited a July 13 attack which destroyed the home of a cleric known to be a Hezbollah sympathizer but with no record of having taken part in hostilities. The strike killed the cleric's wife, their ten children, the family;s Sri Lankan maid, as well as the cleric himself, according to the report.

In a July 16 attack on a home in Aitaroun, an Israeli aircraft killed 11 members of the al-Akhrass family, including seven Canadian-Lebanese dual nationals who were vacationing in the village at the time. HRW said it interviewed three villagers independently, all of whom denied that the family had any connection to Hezbollah. Among the victims were four children under the age of eight.

The report also assailed statements by Israeli officials and IDF commanders that only people associated with Hezbollah remain in southern Lebanon, so all are legitimate targets of attack. Israel has dropped leaflets in the region and even telephoned residents warning them that if they do not flee, they will be subject to attack.

But the report stressed that many civilians have been unable to leave because they are sick, wounded, or lack the means, such as money or gasoline, or are providing essential services to the civilian population that remains there. Still others have said they are afraid to leave because the roads have come under attack by Israeli warplanes and artillery.

Indeed, the report documents 27 deaths of civilians who were trying to flee the fighting by car and notes that the actual number of killings is "surely higher". In addition, the report cites air strikes against three clearly marked humanitarian aid vehicles.

"The pattern of attacks shows the Israeli military's disturbing disregard for the lives of Lebanese civilians," said Roth. "Israeli warnings of imminent attacks do not turn civilians into military targets," he added, noting that, according to the IDF's logic, "Palestinian militant groups might 'warn' Israeli settlers to leave their settlements and then feel justified in attacking those who remained."

Amnesty accused Israel of trying to convert southern Lebanon into a "free-fire zone" which it said Monday was "incompatible with international humanitarian law."


6. Between two friends -- by Tom Segev (from Israel’s Haaretz Daily)

It is difficult to decide which of the two war starlets is more annoying - Miri Regev or Condoleezza Rice. The Israel Defense Forces spokeswoman parades in front of the cameras stammering officers, some of whom do tell the truth at least. Among other things, she produced a press conference with one of the air force commanders, who sounded like a character in an Agatha Christie novel: He does not know what happened during the hours that passed between the bombing of the home in Qana and the deaths of dozens of children who had crowded together in its cellar, he claimed with a tone of mystery in his voice. Who knows? Perhaps someone else killed those children. Perhaps they killed themselves.

A few hours later, during the early morning, the U.S. secretary of state emerged from her Jerusalem hotel room with an announcement that was no less fantastic: By week's end - by tomorrow, in other words - everything will be fine, she declared. She took her sheet of paper and flew away.

Rice is more troubling than Regev: It isn't easy to be the spokesperson for a confused and meaningless war; the faltering stance of the Americans requires, on the other hand, a re-evaluation of what the appropriate attitude toward the United States should be - the United States of George W. Bush at least. The following lines should not be counted among those foolish anti-American outbursts heard in Europe. But, as we approach the fifth anniversary of the attack on the Twin Towers, it is possible to say that the country many Israelis adopted as their beacon of values, almost a second motherland, has lost a great deal of its moral authority in the past few years. This is a good opportunity to rethink our relationship with Europe.

During the past 39 years since the Six-Day War, the United States did not force Israel to pull out of the West Bank, but more than once acted to block Israeli military actions. Over time, we have grown accustomed to the Americans saving us, not only from the Arabs, but from ourselves too. Not in this war. It is still unclear whether this war was coordinated with the United States; only the release of government records of the past three weeks will shed light on this. Whatever the case may be, the impression is that the Americans are linking the events in Lebanon to their failing adventure in Iraq.

Israel's elites, in all fields, are made up of people who spent a number of years in the United States and returned with not only professional skills but also an appreciation for the value of the individual and basic freedoms. For the most part, this was a useful process, even though it did contribute to a fading of social compassion. This process of Americanization has led Israel in recent years to covet a role in what Bush has described as a war on the "axis of evil."

As such, Israel has adopted the moral values of Hezbollah: Whatever they are doing to the residents of northern Israel, we can also do to the citizens of Lebanon, and even more. Many Israelis tended to look at the Qana incident primarily as a media disaster and not as something that imposed on them any ethical responsibility. After all, the restrictions of humanitarian warfare are not applicable to the "axis of evil." Just like in Iraq, the lessons of Vietnam have been forgotten. It is hard to avoid the impression that the routine brutality of oppression in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank is also reflected in the unbearable ease with which Israel has forced out of their homes hundreds of thousands of Lebanese and bombed civilians. No less than three weeks have passed, and only now is Rice beginning to make noises suggesting that enough is enough.

If Europe had some say in the region, Israel may have started negotiations with Hezbollah on the release of the soldiers it abducted - and hopefully, it still will do so - instead of getting mixed up in war. For some years now, more Middle East-related wisdom emanates from Europe than from the United States. It wasn't Europe but the United States that invented the diplomatic fable called the road map; it wasn't Europe but the United States that encouraged unilateral disengagement and is allowing Israel to continue oppressing the population in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The United States is not engaged with Syria; Europe is. Syria is relevant not only for settling the situation in Lebanon, but also in managing relations with the Palestinians. This is the real problem. Because, even if the United States conquers Tehran, we will still have to live with the Palestinians. In Europe, they already understand this.


7. Future History: A Glimpse of What U.S. Lebanon Policy Could Spawn -- by Lawrence Pintak

It is very likely that the world will look back at the summer of 2006 as a seminal moment in Middle East history.

We may well be seeing, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says, “the birth pangs of a new Middle East.” But it is also quite possible a monster will be born.

If the Bush administration is not very careful in the next few weeks, history may well record that this bloody summer was one in which:

1. Arabs realized, once and for all, that Israel had definitively lost its façade of invincibility. Hezbollah – which humbled America in 1983 and drove Israel out of south Lebanon in 2000 – has won this war by the very fact that it fights on. Israel’s survival has always depended on the perception of strength. The implications of the loss of that psychological armor are profound, both for its impact on Israel’s enemies and the potential destabilizing effect of an Israel that must restore the balance of fear.

2. Hezbollah reclaimed the crown of militant Islamic leadership from al Qaeda and the Sunnis of Iraq. Videos from the Hindu Kush and internecine slaughter in Iraq pale in comparison to fighters locked in what is being positioned in the Arab media as an epic battle. A new phase has begun.

3. Iran re-emerged as the region’s broker of war and peace. Already empowered by America’s toppling of its one real rival, Saddam Hussein, the Tehran regime – even without nuclear weapons – sent a strong message to both Washington and the conservative Arab governments: Don’t mess with us. The Gulf could once more become the Persian lake it was under the Shah.

4. The leaders of the “old” Arab world were rocked by the power of the Arab street. The initial condemnation of Hezbollah by the governments of key Sunni countries has sparked a popular backlash. Suddenly the democracy so ardently sought by the Bush administration is taking form in a way never anticipated; public opinion is driving policy – in a direction counter to U.S. interests and dangerous for existing regimes.

5. A powerful new confluence of interests arose between Sunni and Shi’ite militants – and angry young secular Arabs – around Palestine, regional political change and opposition to America. The movement will resemble the brief alliance-of-convenience in the 1950s between Nasserites and Muslim Brothers that sparked the Egyptian revolution. Look for Iranian-funded militants to step up efforts to undermine regimes in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt.

6. The Arab world was cleaved into a dangerous new top-down Sunni-Shi’ite Cold War, driven by Sunni governments and elites threatened by the rise of Iran and the Shia. Even as the agendas of the most militant Sunni and Shi’ite forces – Hezbollah, Hamas, al Qaeda and their kin – briefly coincide, a regional confrontation between nations could result.

7. Lebanon once more descended into civil war as Hezbollah usurped the power of the central government. Many Lebanese Sunnis and Christians have rallied to Hezbollah’s side in the face of the Israeli assault, but it will not take much to send the country spiraling back into confessional chaos.

8. The obituary for America’s Iraq adventure was written. The intimate ties of family and religion between the Shi’ites of Lebanon, Iraq and Iran mean engagement with Hezbollah via the Israelis could easily provoke open war against the U.S. by the Shia of Iraq. Even Iraq’s U.S.-backed prime minister is a Hezbollah ally.

9. Western peacekeepers embarked on a doomed mission to restore peace to Lebanon. Multinational forces have been trying to bring peace to the country since the 1840s. Each time, they have been driven out bearing coffins. The tactics being now used against American forces in Iraq were pioneered in Lebanon.

10. A new terrorist force was awakened. Hezbollah has not targeted U.S. interests since the 1980s. But America’s support for Israel’s attempt to annihilate it may change all that.

The last time a U.S. administration tried to isolate and marginalize Syria and Iran, the result was the birth of Hezbollah, the dawn of suicide bombing and the humbling of a superpower. Now, America is at it again.

“Folly,” wrote historian Barbara Tuchman, is “the pursuit of policy contrary to self-interest.”

The Bush administration set out to redraw the map of the Middle East. Instead, it has set it on fire. Three weeks ago, Hezbollah was a militia/political party engaged in a domestic struggle to survive on the new Lebanese political landscape reshaped by the withdrawal of Syria’s forces. Today, it is the inspiration for a generation. Meanwhile, Iraq is becoming the new Afghanistan.

This is, President Bush tells us, “a moment of opportunity.” The question history will decide is, for whom?

(Lawrence Pintak is the director of the Adham Center for Electronic Journalism at The American University in Cairo. A former CBS News Middle East correspondent, he is the author of Seeds of Hate: How America’s Flawed Middle East Policy Ignited the Jihad .His most recent book is Reflections in a Bloodshot Lens: America, Islam & the War of Ideas. He can be reached at lpintak ~at~ aucegypt.edu)


8. A proxy war of a different sort
Pro- and anti-Israel wings of the Western political class are exporting their own 'culture wars' to the Middle East.
By Mick Hume, editor of Spike

Why is the Middle East conflict dominating the news and public debate in Britain and the West so completely, generating such intense passions that many will think it outrageous even to ask such a question?

Of course, everybody has been moved by the terrible scenes of dead civilians, many of them children, after the Israeli attack on the Lebanese village of Qana. But put such a loss of life in a wider context, and it becomes clear that the death toll to date is not particularly high by historical standards. Around 750 Lebanese and 50 Israelis are estimated to have been killed in three weeks of conflict. That is a tragedy for all concerned, but it does not compare to wars and ‘scorched earth’ offensives in the past. Nor would it seem to justify the description (in this case by ITV News, but many have taken the same tack) of ‘Apocalyptic’ devastation. Indeed, as other commentators have pointed out, the daily body count in Lebanon is lower than in other current conflicts, such as those in Iraq and Sudan, which attract far less coverage and concern.

So the death toll alone cannot explain the obsessive Western focus on the Middle East. Nor can the strategic importance of the conflict. Little Israel’s attempts to deal with Hezbollah in littler Lebanon, and Hamas in the tiny Palestinian territories, do not count for much in geo-political terms. This is not the Cold War era, when Israel’s role as America’s gendarme and the Soviet Union’s sponsorship of Arab nationalism made the Middle East a cockpit of global politics.

Of course no conflict in the Middle East will be ignored in the West, given the historical links to the region and the continuing strategic importance of oil reserves. But something else is clearly going on to explain the overwhelming emphasis given to it today - and the shrillness of the debate on both sides.

This has more to do with developments in the West itself than in the Middle East. It appears that more observers in Britain have now identified strongly with one side or the other, and cranked up the importance of the conflict, for reasons largely to do with domestic political matters. There is much talk of the battle between Hezbollah and Israel being a proxy war between Iran and America. It can alternatively be seen as a proxy war of a different sort, between competing wings of the Western political and media class, who are exporting their own ‘culture wars’ to the Middle East.

UK prime minister Tony Blair has just made a speech in which he belatedly sought to describe the confusion caused on both the left and the right by the breakdown of the old political divides. ‘And of course’, he concluded, ‘foreign policy is now creating strange bedfellows across the piece.’ Reactions to the Middle East crisis illustrate those points better than Blair could imagine.

On all sides in domestic politics today there is uncertainty about old principles and an inability to hold the line. In response, many (from Bush and Blair downwards) have sought to project their problems outwards on to international affairs, to find some foreign ground on which they can stake out an imaginary clear line between right and wrong. The Middle East has now become the focus of that displacement activity. In the process, all sides risk reducing this complex conflict to a simple moral parable of good vs evil.

On one side of this culture war stand those, often from the old left but with significant support from elsewhere, who imagine Israel and its American supporters as the embodiment of all that they think wrong with Western values – racist, arrogant, macho, militaristic. These people have long since adopted the Palestinians as the cause célèbre of Western victim-centric politics, exemplified by the popular slogan ‘We’re all Palestinians now’ - a gesture not of political solidarity, but of pity.

The rise of this pathetic, degrading political tendency explains why on spiked , while we have always supported the Palestinian right to self-determination, we have become increasingly critical of the anti-Israeli current in Western and especially European politics (see Turning Palestinians into the basket cases of the world , by Brendan O’Neill). Now many from this side of the culture war have shifted their concerns on to Lebanon, some denouncing Israel’s attacks as war crimes and genocide. This in turn encourages what one American commentator calls the ‘global fad’ of jihad among Muslim youth (1). Those who marched in London with banners declaring ‘We are all Hezbollah’ were only the militant wing of a far wider, more respectable anti-Israeli/American movement.

On the other side of the culture war, we are witnessing a backlash against the anti-Israel backlash. Influential figures from both the old right and left want to stand up for what they believe are the values of Western society, yet find it hard to hold the line on traditional domestic issues. Instead they too have turned outwards, first focusing their concerns on support for the ‘war on terror’ against the threat they imagine from ‘Islamofascism’, and now embracing Israel as their champion against the bogeymen of Hamas and Hezbollah.

Just as some would now depict Israel as the embodiment of all that is wrong with the world, for these supporters it has become the foremost fighter for what is right. As a consequence they sometimes make it seem that, if you want to defend democracy and civilisation, then you have to support bombing raids on Lebanon. In similarly shrill fashion, leading supporters of Israel insist that the drunken outburst by Hollywood star and Catholic crackpot Mel Gibson, about how ‘the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world’, is somehow proof of a rising tide of anti-Semitism in the Western world.

So a local conflict in the Middle East has been turned into a proxy culture war between different wings of the Western political class, the protagonists fighting across the battlefield of the international media. One side imagines itself in the bunker with the Lebanese and Palestinians, the other sees itself standing in the Israeli lines. And both sides become increasingly over-the-top in their protests about the other.

It is striking how the West’s media war over the Middle East has become a grisly auction to depict one side or the other as the real victims. As the stakes are raised, some on either side risk becoming hysterical in their interventions. While the pro-Israeli zealot Melanie Phillips describes Lebanon as ‘an accessory to genocidal terror’, the anti-Israeli zealot John Pilger says the earlier attacks on Gaza are not far removed from ‘the Nazi bombardment and starvation of the Jewish Warsaw ghetto’.

None of this would appear to bear much relation to what is really happening on the ground in Lebanon, Palestine and Israel. Instead it is a bitter war of words being fought for the moral high ground over here. Such a bitter war of words, however, can have real and dangerous consequences. The shouting match is helping further to mystify Middle East issues for a Western audience, making it difficult to make sense of events. Worse, the internationalisation of the conflict can actually intensify it, as all sides in the embattled region try to win over international opinion to intervene on their side.

We have said it before and will keep on saying it: the Middle East is the last place on Earth in need of yet more Western intervention, which has stirred and sustained conflicts there for more than a century. The peoples of that blasted corner of the world should not be turned into stage armies for somebody else’s argument.

It is high time we had a no-holds barred debate about the future of our societies in the West, about what we should believe in and will stand for together. If that is the culture war people want to start, then bring it on – we look forward to exchanging some critical fire with both sides of the existing argument. But let us stop trying to export our problems into the militarised cockpit of the Middle East, and expecting the Israelis, Palestinians or Lebanese to fight our battles for us.