Unusual Lebanon responses from a real writer; a torn US Jew; a reasonable PLO guy, a Syrian, an Israeli, etc.

1. How Much Longer? by Eduardo Galeano (the real writer)

One country bombed two countries. Such impunity might astound were it not business as usual. In response to the few timid protests from the international community, Israel said mistakes were made.

How much longer will horrors be called mistakes?

This slaughter of civilians began with the kidnapping of a soldier.

How much longer will the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier be allowed to justify the kidnapping of Palestinian sovereignty?

How much longer will the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers be allowed to justify the kidnapping of the entire nation of Lebanon?

For centuries the slaughter of Jews was the favorite sport of Europeans. Auschwitz was the natural culmination of an ancient river of terror, which had flowed across all of Europe.

How much longer will Palestinians and other Arabs be made to pay for crimes they didn’t commit?

Hezbollah didn’t exist when Israel razed Lebanon in earlier invasions.

How much longer will we continue to believe the story of this attacked attacker, which practices terrorism because it has the right to defend itself from terrorism?

Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Lebanon: How much longer will Israel and the United States be allowed to exterminate countries with impunity?

The tortures of Abu Ghraib, which triggered a certain universal sickness, are nothing new to us in Latin America. Our militaries learned their interrogation techniques from the School of the Americas, which may no longer exist in name but lives on in effect.

How much longer will we continue to accept that torture can be legitimized?

Israel has ignored forty-six resolutions of the General Assembly and other U.N. bodies.

How much longer will Israel enjoy the privilege of selective deafness?

The United Nations makes recommendations but never decisions. When it does decide, the United States makes sure the decision is blocked. In the U.N. Security Council, the U.S. has vetoed forty resolutions condemning actions of Israel.

How much longer will the United Nations act as if it were just another name for the United States?

Since the Palestinians had their homes confiscated and their land taken from them, much blood has flowed.

How much longer will blood flow so that force can justify what law denies?

History is repeated day after day, year after year, and ten Arabs die for every one Israeli. How much longer will an Israeli life be measured as worth ten Arab lives?

In proportion to the overall population, the 50,000 civilians killed in Iraq—the majority of them women and children—are the equivalent of 800,000 Americans.

How much longer will we continue to accept, as if customary, the killing of Iraqis in a blind war that has forgotten all of its justifications?

Iran is developing nuclear energy, but the so-called international community is not concerned in the least by the fact that Israel already has 250 atomic bombs, despite the fact that the country lives permanently on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Who calibrates the universal dangerometer? Was Iran the country that dropped atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima?

In the age of globalization, the right to express is less powerful than the right to apply pressure. To justify the illegal occupation of Palestinian territory, war is called peace. The Israelis are patriots, and the Palestinians are terrorists, and terrorists sow universal alarm.

How much longer will the media broadcast fear instead of news?

The slaughter happening today, which is not the first and I fear will not be the last, is happening in silence. Has the world gone deaf?

How much longer will the outcry of the outraged be sounded on a bell of straw?

The bombing is killing children, more than a third of the victims.

Those who dare denounce this murder are called anti-Semites.

How much longer will the critics of state terrorism be considered anti-Semites?

How much longer will we accept this grotesque form of extortion?

Are the Jews who are horrified by what is being done in their name anti-Semites? Are there not Arab voices that defend a Palestinian homeland but condemn fundamentalist insanity?

Terrorists resemble one another: state terrorists, respectable members of government, and private terrorists, madmen acting alone or in those organized in groups hard at work since the Cold War battling communist totalitarianism. All act in the name of various gods, whether God, Allah, or Jehovah.

How much longer will we ignore that fact that all terrorists scorn human life and feed off of one another?

Isn’t it clear that in the war between Israel and Hezbollah, it is the civilians, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Israeli, who are dying?

And isn’t it clear that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the invasion of Gaza and Lebanon are the incubators of hatred, producing fanatic after fanatic after fanatic?

We are the only species of animal that specializes in mutual extermination.

We devote $2.5 billion per day to military spending. Misery and war are children of the same father.

How much longer will we accept that this world so in love with death is the only world possible?

(Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer and journalist, is author of “Open Veins of Latin America” and “Memory of Fire.")


2. Better to Tell Truth Than Parrot Propaganda
One can be a Jew who supports Israel's security without buying the notion that widespread bombing of Lebanon's civilians is justified.
by Warren Goldstein (the torn US Jew)

I am a Jew, and I am an American. I am in anguish over both identities right now.

In my name, my country has been supporting -- with armaments and its remaining diplomatic clout -- the reckless killing of civilians whose only crime is to live in a country that cannot control its own fate. (How supporting? By not exercising its immense influence over Israeli policy and weaponry.)

The country that considers itself a Jewish homeland has effectively declared Lebanon a "free-fire zone" and believes that if its military drops enough bombs on apartment buildings in Beirut (Hezbollah "strongholds") and empties enough southern Lebanese cities, it will destroy Hezbollah as a political and fighting force. The mass grave in Tyre is now burned into Lebanese consciousness, along with Sabra and Chatila.

When I visit the website of Reform Judaism, I see a propaganda effort on behalf of the Israeli bombs. "What can I and my congregation do now to help the people of Israel?" asks a headline. The answer: "Now is the time to stand with Israel in solidarity." I could, the website suggests, "Post a 'We Stand With Israel' lawn sign and proudly fly an Israeli flag at your congregation." After all, "Israel is a home for every Reform Jew."

This is moral and religious nonsense.

And it is silencing Jews who know better, because the Israel propaganda machine works most effectively through Jewish organizations, where any hint that the lives of Lebanese children matter as much as the lives of Jewish children is treated as (1) a refusal to recognize the demands of realpolitik, (2) slippery-slope "moral equivalency" reasoning, or (3) treason. By these efforts Judaism has been reduced to political cheerleading, an international equivalent to what the American religious right has done to Christianity. Too many American Jews are putting their religion on the shelf while they take up the impoverished language of strategy and tactics and realpolitik.

The God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rivka, Rachel and Leah does not distinguish between Israeli and Lebanese children.

Let me be clear. No nation ought to have to live alongside well-armed, frankly terrorist political entities committed to its destruction. I shed no tears for Hezbollah militants, whose murderous raid clearly invited the Israeli response and whose lack of respect for civilian lives knows no national or religious boundaries. Nor do I shed tears for Hamas, the latest example of Palestinians' propensity for self-destructive choices. Some form of Israeli military response is completely understandable and justifiable.

That is why we need an international police force to patrol southern Lebanon, disarm Hezbollah, and keep Israel in its borders.

Israel's far greater military power, and its ability to inflict far greater harm -- no jiggering the numbers can hide the fact that Lebanese civilians are dying at roughly 10 times the rate of Israelis -- bring greater responsibility, no matter what the other guys do.

No religious or political tradition worthy of the name justifies burning children to death in the hopes of "taking out" a rocket launcher. Doing everything possible to avoid killing civilians (using antipersonnel bombs fails the test) is not only the right thing to do -- it makes long-term strategic sense, as fewer surviving children will grow up swearing vengeance.

Nor should the fact that the Israeli public seems unusually united in favor of the current offensive silence those of us who want the killing to stop now. Most Americans supported the hopeless, pointless and reckless war in Vietnam -- which killed far more civilians than soldiers of any kind -- until its last years, but the war's critics were right from the beginning.

In that spirit, I hope Jews and non-Jews alike will reject the pall over debate about Israel and speak their minds, breaking through their fear of being labeled "self-hating" or "anti-Semitic" by so-called "friends of Israel." Israel needs friends who support its security and tell the truth, not sycophants putting out lawn signs.

I wish Jewish congregations would direct as much energy as they have lately expended on the distant, complicated killing fields in Darfur (dare I say a "safer" issue?) toward the far easier task of getting their own government to make real peace in the Middle East by ceasing its blanket support for the Israeli government and military.

In the meantime, what Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice calls a "new Middle East" is being baptized in the blood of civilians. Not on my watch.

(Warren Goldstein, a former Summer fellow of the University of Minnesota Humanities Institute, chairs the history department at the University of Hartford.)


3. Nasrallah and the three Lebanons
By Sami Moubayed (the Syrian analyst -- from Asia Times online)

DAMASCUS - Many in the Arab world are blaming the Lebanese for being so disunited and for not rallying en masse behind Hezbollah and its secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah. These divisions are strange for those who do not know Lebanon: there are in essence three Lebanons, each with its own history, objectives, alliances and leaders.

One friend from "Sunni Lebanon" cursed Hezbollah tremendously, saying that the Shi'ite militia had ruined her life, while another from "Shi'ite Lebanon" (which makes up about 40% of the population) said Hezbollah was the greatest thing about the Arab world since emancipation from the Ottomans in 1918. A third friend, from "Christian Lebanon", said Hezbollah was not the "Party of God" as its name means in Arabic, but rather "The Party of the Devil".

Still, there are many crossovers in Lebanon, according to a recent poll by the Beirut Center for Research and Information to test the country's pulse on the war in Lebanon. This was done before Israeli warplanes on Sunday bombed the ill-fated village of Qana, killing more than 51 people (including 22 children). This single event strongly increased anti-Israeli sentiment and a genuine desire for either revenge or an immediate ceasefire.

The survey was administered among the country's Shi'ites, Sunnis, Druze and Maronite Christians. It surprisingly showed that 70.9% of all Lebanese supported Hezbollah's capture of two Israeli soldiers on July 12 that sparked the Israeli retaliation.

Because of the loud criticism of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah by Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, only 40% of the Druze community voted in favor of such operations. Christian support, because of the backing General Michel Aoun has given Nasrallah, was at 55%.

In all, the survey showed that 87% of the Lebanese people supported Hezbollah's retaliation against Israel, attributed mainly to Hezbollah's celebrated military performance to date. Meanwhile, 89.5% said they did not see the US as an honest broker in the Middle East conflict. Another 64.3% were not satisfied by the performance of Prime Minister Fouad al-Siniora. Within the Sunni community, 64.8% said they did not approve of Siniora as premier.

Certainly, then, the poll shows that many Sunni Muslims (and Maronite Christians as well) support Nasrallah. All talk about him having zero support in non-Shi'ite districts is nonsense.

Nasrallah has outgrown his Shi'ite identity and transformed himself into a pan-Lebanese, pan-Arab and pan-Islamic leader. The fact that he is a cleric, a Muslim and a Shi'ite is actually of little importance at this stage of his war with Israel.

Shi'ite Lebanon

One Lebanon, mostly in the south, is that of Hezbollah, a Lebanon of Shi'ites and the epicenter of anti-Israeli rhetoric and action. This Lebanon is co-shared by the Amal movement of Nabih Berri.

Not all inhabitants of this Lebanon are members of Hezbollah, but all of them respect and love Nasrallah. In the 1960s, this Lebanon used to receive no more than 0.7% of the state budget for public works and hospitalization, while the other two Lebanons were being described as the "Switzerland of the East".

This is the no-alcohol Lebanon of veiled women, bearded men, poverty-stricken districts and ubiquitous posters of ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the late leader of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran.

This is the Lebanon we see on Hezbollah's Al-Manar TV. This Lebanon is anti-American and anti-Israeli to the bone. Many here, Nasrallah included, speak fluent English, but prefer to converse, think and write in Arabic. French culture in this Lebanon is minimal.

A friend of this correspondent lived in the Jnah district of Beirut. When he wanted to move out and sell his furniture, a member of Hezbollah visited him, saying he would buy all of the furniture and appliances and donate them, in the name of Hezbollah, to needy families in the Shi'ite community. And he did.

Another story of Nasrallah's Lebanon is that of a poor woman from the Shi'ite community. She was finding a hard time making ends meet until a member of Hezbollah visited her home in al-Dahiyyieh, a Shi'ite suburb of Beirut. He presented her with a brand-new sewing machine, telling her to work on it and produce sweaters and scarves, promising that all of her output would be bought by Hezbollah.

Many hundreds of families in Shi'ite Lebanon live off monthly stipends delivered to their homes at the start of every month, in a sealed envelope, from the secretary general of Hezbollah. The families of the wounded, the arrested in Israeli jails and those who died in combat receive free education and hospitalization, at the expense of Hezbollah.

This is the Lebanon that is being targeted by Israel. For the reasons mentioned above, among others, it will be difficult - if not impossible - to turn the tables against Hezbollah and Nasrallah in their Lebanon.

Simply put, Nasrallah is king in his Lebanon. Disarming him by force would be impossible. The Shi'ites, who had suffered from the status of an underclass in the 1950s and 1960s, reversed their fortunes through Iran, wealth from the Shi'ite community in the diaspora, and Nasrallah.

They will not disarm at will because, in addition to being a shield against Israel, they view the arms of Hezbollah as a symbol of their strength and very existence. They are strong because Hezbollah is armed. True, other parts of Lebanon have been destroyed in the latest war, but the areas to suffer the most are the Shi'ite districts, in al-Dahiyyieh and south Lebanon. They are paying the high price for supporting Hezbollah, and nobody among the Shi'ites seems to be complaining.

Sunni Lebanon

Another Lebanon is that of the Sunni Muslims, headed for 13 years by the towering influence of former prime minister Rafik Hariri, who was assassinated in February 2005. It is now under the command of his son, Saad, and Prime Minister Siniora, two US-educated politicians who value liberal economies, open society, and fine, secular education.

This is the Lebanon where both pan-Arab and Anglo-Saxon influence are very strong. Its residents speak and understand perfect English, and use it comfortably with Arabic. It is the Lebanon of fine food, good wine, beautiful women, shopping, beaches and pleasure.

This is a Lebanon historically allied to Syria. Its leaders in the 1930s and 1940s saw themselves as closer to Damascus and their co-religionists in Syria than they were to the Christians of Mount Lebanon. They originally wanted to reunite with Syria, the motherland, but by the late 1930s had abandoned this idea in favor of being part of Greater Lebanon, on the condition that they be treated as equal to the Christians.

This Lebanon broke with Syria after Hariri's assassination. Its leaders, onetime allies of Damascus, turned against Syria when it became unpopular to be pro-Syrian, accusing the Syrians of murdering Hariri.

Unlike Nasrallah's united Lebanon, however, this Lebanon is sharply divided. One side is headed by Saad Hariri. It is anti-Syrian, pro-Saudi Arabian and pro-West. The other is headed by former traditional Sunni notables (especially Beiruti) who were sidelined by the rise of Rafik Hariri in 1992 and continue to lurk in the shadows under Saad. They are pro-Syrian.

Leaders of this Lebanon are former prime ministers Salim al-Hoss and Omar Karameh, along with politicians such as Tammam Salam. They believe that Syrian influence has been traded for that of the United States.

The Americans promised the post-Syria leaders of Lebanon democracy, prosperity and stability. Instead, they have given them war and bombs, tolerating and then fanning the current war in order to break Hezbollah. Naturally, this group is still allied to Syria and praises Nasrallah as a pan-Islamic and pan-Arab leader.

Hariri's Lebanon - the one we see on Future TV (Hariri's station) - dreads the spread of Iranian influence in the Arab world. An anti-Hariri team does exist, but it has terrible public relations managers and is almost unheard or unseen in the international and local media.

Christian Lebanon

This the third Lebanon. It is the Lebanon that was once dominant, from the post-Ottoman era until the end of the civil war in 1990. This is the Lebanon that has preserved the sophistication and democracy of Lebanon. It opposed Muslim hegemony in the 1950s and 1960s, refusing to make Lebanon a revolutionary nation inspired by the rebelliousness, socialism and anti-Westernism of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser.

This Lebanon is influenced tremendously by France. Some of its residents are more comfortable with French than Arabic. Some refuse to learn English to preserve their Franco-Lebanese culture. It is a norm in this Lebanon to wake up every morning and drink coffee while reading French-language newspapers.

This Lebanon is currently headed by the ex-warlord Samir Gagegea, who was recently released from jail, and the former army commander, Michel Aoun. When Aoun allied himself to Nasrallah - sending shock waves throughout Christian Lebanon - many said this was political suicide and would ruin him within the Maronite community. He was labeled a turncoat. It would end his dreams at becoming president of Lebanon, they said.

Aoun, however, understood that Lebanon had changed, knowing perfectly well that Christian support alone was no longer enough to secure a seat for him at the Baabda presidential palace.

To understand the wonders Aoun has done for Hezbollah, one must understand how faithful his supporters have been in backing him. When he wanted them to fight the Syrians, they were anti-Syrian to the bone. When he allied to Hezbollah, they became convincing and eloquent defenders of Hezbollah. Aoun's people support everything he tells them. It's that simple. And now he is telling them to stand firm behind Hezbollah and Nasrallah.

Israel is trying to turn the tables in Lebanon against the Shi'ites. It wants the Christians to suffer from the Israeli war, and blame Nasrallah for having dragged Lebanon into this confrontation. That is why it has landed bombs in Christian Lebanon. But the Christians are not turning yet against Nasrallah. On the contrary, they are helping with the relief processes, through charity groups, non-governmental organizations, churches and monasteries. This is due to Michel Aoun.

The anti-Hezbollah factions from Christian and Sunni Lebanon say Nasrallah does not have the right to dictate the fate of Lebanon as a country destined to be at war with Israel. This is said by Hariri's and Gagegea's Lebanon. They argue that Nasrallah did not have the right to capture the two Israeli soldiers, in total disregard for the Lebanese government and the people who have subsequently suffered.

They say Nasrallah is a creation of Iran and Syria, fighting their proxy war with Israel through Lebanon at the expense of the Lebanese. This war, they argue, has cost Lebanon a staggering sum of US$9 billion to date.

Nasrallah says that (unlike other prominent Lebanese politicians currently in the anti-Syrian camp) he did not use his connections in Damascus to live an extravagant lifestyle, travel to Europe or stash money in foreign banks. He used his connections with the Syrians to buy arms and wage war against Israel - and he is very proud of it. Nasrallah, after all, does not enjoy the luxuries of life.

How he sees Lebanon is very different from how the Sunnis or Christians see it. He certainly has never been to tourist attractions in the Lebanese mountains or beach, nor has he imagined the Beirut nightlife. He lives a monastic life surrounded by his family, and drives around in a Mercedes-Benz 500 (1990 model).

He could not care less for a thriving Lebanese economy, like Siniora or Hariri, and tourism to him - which has been ruined by this war - means nothing. The point is: Nasrallah probably does not suffer when he sees Beirut in blackout and in a grinding economic standstill.

To most Lebanese, the image of downtown Beirut transformed from a city abuzz with life and spirit into a ghost city spells misery and disaster. To Nasrallah, it just means the normal and expected task of combating the Israelis is under way.

As much as Israel, these three Lebanons will decide the fate of the country.


4. Forced Peace vs. Just Peace -- by Maen Areikat (the PLO director general of their Negotiations Affairs Department -- from Boston Globe)

SUNDAY'S tragic death of more than 50 civilians, mostly children, in Israeli military strikes on the Lebanese village of Qana exposed a simple but uncomfortable truth for the Bush administration: Relying on Israel's overwhelming use of force to prepare the conditions for peace will exacerbate, not resolve, the Middle East's conflicts. Already Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate by sending rockets deeper into Israel.

Prior to this attack, the Bush administration was pushing two messages on how to resolve the latest crisis: first, that any cease-fire in Lebanon must be "enduring "; second, that a return to calm is predicated on addressing the "root causes" of violence in the region and implementing UN Security Council Resolution 1559, which calls for disarming militias in Lebanon.

These positions require urgent review. By favoring an "enduring" cease-fire over an immediate one, the United States is widely seen as providing Israel with cover to tear apart innocent lives and civil infrastructure in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. And if the root causes of the violence are reduced to the proliferation of sub-state militias, those same militias will gain, not lose, from this stance.

We have seen the failure of such policies before. In 1982, Israel launched operation "Peace for the Galilee," which was intended to crush the Palestine Liberation Organization in Lebanon. After several months of wide-scale destruction and thousands of civilian deaths, Israel managed to force the PLO out of Lebanon. But Israel never accomplished its stated mission of providing safety to its north. Nor could it avoid reaching a political accommodation with the PLO a few years later in Madrid, or again in Oslo. Meanwhile, the Lebanese population's hatred of Israel's military occupation bred Hezbollah, which fought a guerrilla war against the Israeli army until it withdrew in the summer of 2000.

Similarly, in March 2002, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon persuaded a sympathetic Bush administration to allow him to direct a strong military blow to the Palestinians in an attempt to gain their submission before the next round of peace negotiations. In the Israeli military campaign that followed, hundreds of Palestinians were killed, the Palestinian Authority's security and civil infrastructure were destroyed, Palestinian faith in a negotiated peace with Israel was shattered, and all of the agreements signed between the PLO and Israel were effectively voided. Instead of defeating the logic of violence, Israel's actions reinforced it.

That deadly blunder is currently being replayed in the Gaza Strip. The purported cause of Israel's intensified onslaught on Gaza is the capture of a single Israeli soldier by Palestinian militants. Following that, Gaza has been plunged into chaos, suffering the devastation of its civil infrastructure, the loss of about 150 men, women, and children, and the wounding of hundreds by the Israeli military, using US-made weaponry.

Yet the direct political victims of Israel's brutal campaign are not the members of the militias Israel claims to be targeting, but the members of the Palestinian peace camp, or what is left of it, most notably President Mahmoud Abbas. In January 2005, Abbas was elected on a platform of advocating peace and dialogue with Israel, but Israeli actions in Gaza are now making it impossible for him to promote this agenda. Amid the spiraling violence, hatred is on the rise and peace appears more elusive than perhaps ever before. President Bush's vision of two states, Palestine and Israel, and the US-sponsored road map are fast becoming obsolete in the absence of a determined international effort to realize either.

So the reaction of the Bush administration to the latest crisis is dangerously misguided at best and hypocritical at worst. Support for implementing UN Resolution 1559 should be welcomed, but it should not prevent an immediate cease-fire. Moreover, if it is not coupled with pressure on Israel to comply with numerous UN resolutions it has previously ignored, regional resentment toward US selectivity will only swell. And if dealing with the root causes of the conflict does not address Israel's 39-year-old occupation of Palestinian and other Arab territory, armed groups will continue to exploit the opportunity for confrontation.

If the Israeli leadership genuinely seeks security for its people, it must accept that this cannot be attained through displays of military superiority, but through a just peace agreement with its Arab neighbors, based on UN resolutions and international law. And if the US leadership genuinely seeks an enduring regional peace that tackles the root causes of local violence, it must lead the international community's re engagement in conflict resolution, not conflict acquiescence.

A peace agreement that guarantees freedom, security, and dignity to Palestinians, Lebanese, and Israelis alike is yet possible. The power of logic can still prevail over the logic of power.


5. The most unsuccessful war -- by Ze'ev Sternhell (the torn Israeli -- from Israel’s Haaretz Daily)

No situation can continue to exist for long without an ideological reason. That's how when once it was clear that it was not achieving its aims, an unsuccessful military campaign was upgraded with the wave of a magic wand to the level of a war of survival. When everyone understood that a moral reason had to be found both for the dimensions of the destruction sowed in Lebanon and the killing of the civilian population there, and for the Israeli dead and wounded (nobody is even talking about the exposure of the entire civilian population in the North of Israel to enemy fire while people are kept in disgraceful conditions in bomb shelters), a war of survival was invented, which by nature must be long and exhausting.

That is how a campaign of collective punishment that was begun in haste, without proper judgment and on the basis of incorrect assessments, including promises that the army is incapable of fulfilling, turned into a war of life and death, if not some kind of second War of Independence. In the press there have even been embarrassing comparisons to the struggle against Nazism, comparisons that are not only a crude distortion of history, but disgrace the memory of the Jews who were exterminated.

The architect of this unsuccessful campaign has outdone himself: In order to cover up his failures, he delivered a poor man's pseudo-Churchillian speech, and promised us more "pain, tears and blood." There really is no limit to shamelessness. It must be said in favor of the government spokesmen who are in greatest demand on the foreign stations, from the Israel Defense Forces Spokesman to Tourism Minister Isaac Herzog and former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu -- that none of them has stooped to propaganda of this kind.

At the same time, the campaign's goals have been reduced and shrunk during these three weeks. From restoring Israel's power of deterrence, eliminating Hezbollah, and disarming it immediately -- after three weeks we have arrived at the present goal, which is the dismantling of the forward outposts of Hezbollah and the deployment of an international force to defend the North of Israel from the possibility of a repeat attack.

At this point, the average citizen, who is not working day and night in the corridors of power and is not sunning himself near the generals' command rooms, is at a loss. Is this how we are restoring the IDF's power of deterrence? Haven't we accomplished exactly the opposite? Hasn't it become clear to the entire world that our "invincible" air force not only failed for three weeks to end the barrage of rockets, but also even needs an emergency airlift of war materiel, as during the 1973 Yom Kippur War?

Moreover, the ordinary citizen is asking himself another question: If several thousand guerrilla fighters do constitute an existential danger to a country with a strike force and weaponry that are unparalleled in this part of the world, how is it that during the past five or six years we heard nothing to that effect from government leaders?

It is true that since 2000 we have not been preoccupied with anything except the Palestinian issue. Hypnotized by the "Palestinian danger," Israel turned its back during the past two years on all national efforts that preceded the disengagement from Gaza, and then the split in the Likud and the establishment of Kadima, as a prologue to the second major campaign, "convergence" behind the separation fence. And when the present government was formed, a national agenda was formulated for the next two, if not four, years, whose main component is fulfillment of the "Sharon legacy": a unilateral drawing of borders in the territories, pulverizing them into cantons and in effect eliminating the possibility of establishing a Palestinian state in them. This led citizens to understand that this is the issue that will determine Israel's future.

The clearest evidence of the national order of priorities is the situation in which the IDF's fighting units find themselves. It was no secret that the army almost stopped training in large units and complex operations, and became totally immersed in the struggle against the Palestinian uprising. When infantry brigades turn into a police force specializing in breaking down doors and walls in refugee camps, or in pursuit of groups of terrorists in olive orchards, when the criterion for the success of a senior officer is the number of wanted men he has managed to catch rather than his operational talents and ability to command large units -- the army deteriorates.

I cannot recall that the reserve divisions that were drafted on Yom Kippur in 1973, or the Israelis who returned as individuals from abroad in order to join the fighting, were in need of training and refresher exercises. Nevertheless, the Agranat Commission of inquiry was established to investigate, among other things, the level of the forces' battle preparedness.

The Six-Day War and Yom Kippur War were wars of survival, and through them the IDF was revealed in all its greatness. The present war is the most unsuccessful we have ever had; it is much worse than the first Lebanon War, which at least was properly prepared, and in which, with the exception of gaining control over the Beirut-Damascus highway, the army more or less achieved its goals as determined by then-defense minister Ariel Sharon.

It is frightening to think that those who decided to embark on the present war did not even dream of its outcome and its destructive consequences in almost every possible realm, of the political and psychological damage, the serious blow to the government's credibility, and yes -- the killing of children in vain. The cynicism being demonstrated by government spokesmen, official and otherwise, including several military correspondents, in the face of the disaster suffered by the Lebanese, amazes even someone who has long since lost many of his youthful illusions.


6. Where Have You Gone, Ralph Bunche?
Rice and Powell have twisted the ideals that the statesman brought to diplomacy.
By Erin Aubry Kaplan (torn about African-American contributions to our foreign policy)

What would Ralph Bunche do?

It's a question I have been pondering as the violence in the Middle East continues unabated and unmediated. It's natural to think of Bunche, the renowned American diplomat who helped broker a truce between Arabs and Israelis in 1949 — when mere coexistence, much less a truce, seemed almost impossible.

My reflections on Bunche, however, were prompted not so much by the state of things half a world away as by the annual Central Avenue Jazz Festival in L.A. Bunche was a product of L.A.'s historically black Central Avenue/Eastside neighborhood, which nurtured not only jazz but ambition of all kinds. And Bunche did the neighborhood proud, earning a doctorate in government and international relations at Harvard, helping to create the United Nations and winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 — the first black man to receive the award.

Bunche was an unabashed peace activist whose sense of mission was fueled in part by the times — after World War II, the United States was not eager for more bloodshed — and in part by his own experience with the psychological and actual violence that attends the black American experience. And what would Bunche, who died in 1971, think now about the new prominence of African Americans in statesmanship?

No doubt the famously eloquent statesman would be speechless. Speechless that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who owes so much to his legacy, flouts it routinely. The nation she represents now prefers war, including preemptive war, as the most reasonable path to peace. The very word "peace" — like "love" and "community" and "evil" — has been rubberized by postmodernist spin doctors, including Rice, stretched to the point where it has no moral content.

Bunche would undoubtedly be pleased and then distressed to learn that Rice is the second African American secretary of State in six years. This is progress for the race in appearance only, and progress for the world not at all. Rice was preceded by Colin Powell, a military man who knows firsthand the agonies of war, yet who stood before the United Nations in 2003 and sold it on an Iraq invasion with information now widely acknowledged as bogus.

Bunche would certainly be dismayed that these African Americans have become the faces of American aggression rather than diplomacy. And though, as a political scientist and a scholar of race relations, Bunche may well have understood the choices Rice and Powell were forced to make to remain viable in the Bush administration, he would almost certainly not have condoned those choices.

So what would Ralph Bunche do? If he could talk to Powell and Rice today, what would he say?

First, he would have told Powell to resign from his history-making position rather than sell a dangerous war he didn't believe in — that's history nobody wants to make.

To Rice, his advice might go something like this: Ask yourself how much of your worldview is dictated by President Bush, to whom you are famously loyal, and how much is driven by an ideology formed by an education and career almost as impressive as mine. You have every right to be conservative. But if it is a conservatism that sanctions conflict and spurns resolution, perhaps you ought not be secretary of State.

I know, Bunche might say, that the Bush administration's diplomatic style is to be confrontational (just look at U.N. ambassador and master antagonizer John Bolton). But as an African American, whose ranks are still minuscule in the foreign policy business, you have a particular responsibility to try to make a difference. In that sense you — and Powell, and whoever else comes along — are in the same pioneering place I was 60 years ago.

Bunche has been largely forgotten by history. Certainly it isn't convenient for the powers that be, black and otherwise, to remember him right now. But the forgetting probably goes deeper than that. It was only after many years of neglect and disrepair that Bunche's modest childhood home off Central Avenue was restored and preserved as a museum and community center. Whether the preservation lives on in farther-away places is an open question.


7. Is US the World's Policeman or an Empire? -- by Ted Rall (torn about Jimmy Carter introducing human rights into our foreign policy)

NEW YORK -- Are we the world's policeman? Or are we an empire? The rest of the world has already made up its mind about us. The president of the Pew Research Center, whose latest poll of foreigners finds they hate the United Stats more than ever, says: "Obviously, when you get many more people saying that the U.S. [is as much of] a threat to world peace as...Iran, it's a measure of how much [the war in Iraq] is sapping good will to the United States."

But we Americans remain deeply divided over American values and intentions, and it's high time that we got our story straight.

In 1975 Philip Agee published his explosive memoir of his career as a CIA operative, Inside the Company. The former black ops specialist provided proof for what critics had long suspected, that the United States government had assassinated popularly elected foreign leaders and propped up brutal right-wing dictatorships in countries such as Ecuador, Uruguay, Mexico and Argentina throughout the '60s and '70s. Published in the wake of Watergate and the forced resignation of Richard Nixon, disgust for the dirty dealings described by Agee contributed to a reformist wave that fed Jimmy Carter's successful 1976 bid for the presidency.

Upon taking office Carter declared "the soul of our foreign policy" to be concern for human rights. Carter recalled in a 1997 interview: "I announced that human rights would be a cornerstone or foundation of our entire foreign policy. So I officially designated every U.S. ambassador on earth to be my personal human rights representative, and to have the embassy be a haven for people who suffered from abuse by their own government. And every time a foreign leader met with me, they knew that human rights in their country would be on the agenda. And I think that this was one of the seminal changes that was brought to U.S. policy. And although in the first few weeks of his term my successor Ronald Reagan disavowed this policy and sent an emissary down to Argentina and to Chile and to Brazil--to the military dictators--and said, 'The human rights policy of Carter is over,' it was just a few months before he saw that the American people supported this human rights policy and that it was good for his administration. So after that he he became a strong protector of human rights as well."

The media and the public interpreted Carter's human rights-based foreign policy as welcome, radical, and sweeping. There were worrisome inconsistencies: Carter's State Department continued to arm and finance the violent dictators of Haiti, the Philippines and Iran. Nevertheless, the CIA was subjected to budget cuts and Congressional oversight. Subsequent U.S. military involvement in Panama, Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq were wholly or in significant part marketed as attempts to liberate the oppressed and protect human rights. Carter and Reagan convinced Americans of all political stripes that defending the helpless, stopping genocide and overthrowing tyrants were our country's basic duties.

We still do. Even though 63 percent of Americans say they approve of their own government's use of torture, 86 percent continue to believe that "promoting and defending human rights in other countries" as a U.S. foreign policy goal is "important." An August 2002 Investor's Business Daily/Christian Science Monitor poll found that 81 percent think that "the impact the U.S. has on the rest of the world [on] democratic values and human rights" is a positive one.

If we're so nice, why do they hate us so much?

The trouble with putting human rights first is that we have do it all the time, in every case, even when it costs us economically. Integrity requires doing what is right even--especially--when it hurts.

Before Jimmy Carter, American foreign policy was a straightforward and cynical realpolitik. We fought in South Korea and South Vietnam as if we were moving pieces on a Cold War chessboard instead of blasting children to bits; the despotic regimes we defended there were more brutal than their enemies. Afterwards, we became hypocrites. We went into Somalia, which controlled a strategic port of entry for oil tankers, but not Rwanda, which had no significant natural resources. We backed Saddam Hussein when Iraq granted lucrative oil concessions to politically connected multinationals and attacked him when he didn't.

A true human rights-based foreign policy would require "regime change" warfare against the biggest evildoers in the world, including those willing to do business with us. What we have now is a Chinese menu pick-one-from-column-A-and-one-from-column-B mishmash. We do whatever we want, then come up with a justification--human rights, WMDs, imminent danger--after the fact.

People liked us better when we didn't pretend to be nice.

(Ted Rall is the author of " Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?" an analysis of America's next big foreign policy challenge)


8. Israel’s Dependency on the Drug of Militarism -- by Robert Scheer (torn about Israel choosing violence over negotiation)

Those who mindlessly support Israel, right or wrong, from President Bush on through the cheerleaders in Congress and the media, betray the security of the Jewish state. They are enablers who have encouraged Israel’s dependency on the drug of militarism as a false escape from the difficult accommodations needed to bring peace to the Middle East.

For too many pundits and politicians, bombing just seems so much simpler — until, as happened in Qana, Lebanon, on Sunday, those bombs blow up to your nation’s disgrace, slaughtering scores of innocents, whose only crime was to be in the crossfire. The alternative to such excessive violence—an authentic peace process—had been supported by every American president since Harry Truman. Yet it was abruptly abandoned, indeed ridiculed, by the Bush administration, which bizarrely believes it can re-create the Middle East in a more U.S.-friendly form. The president has framed this process with a simplistic good-versus-evil template, which has the Christian West and Jewish Israel on an unnecessary collision course with the Muslim world.

Israel foolishly jumped at the tempting opportunity presented by Bush, who believes all the complex issues dividing the Middle East can be neatly summarized as the choosing of sides in a playground game called “the post-9/11 war on terror.”

“The current crisis is part of a larger struggle between the forces of freedom and the forces of terror in the Middle East,” Bush said Monday. “When democracy spreads in the Middle East, the people of that troubled region will have a better future.” Apparently, Bush is unclear on the fact that Lebanon’s prime minister — elected after the country’s celebrated “cedar revolution” — has condemned the uncritical support provided by the United States for Israel since this conflagration began. Or that Hezbollah is an important part of that democratic government because of its popularity among the Shiite Muslims of southern Lebanon. Bush’s neoconservative foreign-policy cabal argued that troublesome regimes, such as that of Saddam Hussein, could be easily transformed into pliable, West-leaning democracies. Instead, the opposite has happened. Throughout the region, elections hyped by Bush have turned out to be a vehicle for the expression of religion-fueled rage against Israel and its U.S. sponsor.

Even the elected leaders in “liberated” Iraq are denouncing Israel and the United States. On Monday, the Iraqi prime minister appeared at a memorial service in which he and other speakers condemned Israel. Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani, the most important leader in post-Hussein Iraq, broke from his usually circumspect public statements to denounce this “outrageous crime,” while Moqtada al Sadr, leader of the country’s most powerful militia and a key parliamentary bloc, railed against “the ominous trio of the United States, Israel and Britain, which is terrorizing Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan and other occupied nations.”

Meanwhile, Israel, with U.S. support, has ignored what it had learned through its occupation of Palestinian territories and previous disastrous attempts to subdue Lebanon: Compromise from a position of strength is more effective than seeking a pyrrhic total victory. Not only has each attempt to crush local resistance begat more radical and disciplined enemies, such as Hezbollah and Hamas, but the likelihood of rage-fueled “blowback” is exponentially increased.

“There’s going to be another 9/11, and then we’re going to hear all the usual claptrap about how it’s good versus evil, and they hate us because we’re good and democratic, and they hate our values and all the other material that comes out of the rear end of a bull,” London Independent correspondent Robert Fisk told interviewer Amy Goodman of the radio program “Democracy Now!” after watching dozens of children’s corpses being stuffed into plastic bags or wrapped in rugs.

It is true that the Israeli withdrawals of the past half-decade, nearly complete in the case of Lebanon and cynically minimal in the Palestinian territories, did not resolve all the disputes or stop all violence. Yet the abandonment of the peace process and the renewed reliance on bombs will prove far more costly for Israel. Long after Bush is gone from office, Israel will be threatened by a new generation of enemies whose political memory was decisively shaped by these horrible images emerging from Lebanon. At that point, Israelis attempting to make peace with those they must coexist with will recognize that with friends such as Bush and his neoconservative mentors, they would not lack for enemies.

(E-mail to: rscheer@truthdig.org)


9. Banking on War – by William Rivers Pitt (torn about US as arms exporter instead of peace bringer)

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower

Only the dead, said Plato, have seen the end of war. As true as this may be, it does beg the question: why? Why is there so much conflict in the world? Why are there so many wars? Ethnic and religious tensions have been casus belli since time out of mind, to be sure. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War ruptured a framework that held for almost fifty years, bringing about a series of conflicts that are understandable in hindsight.

There is a simpler answer, however, one that lands right in our back yard here in America. Why so much war? Because war is a profitable enterprise. George W. Bush and his people can hold forth about the wonders of democracy and peace, and can condemn worldwide violence in solemn tones. Until the United States stops being the world's largest arms dealer, these words from our government absolutely reek of hypocrisy.

Mr. Bush and his people did not invent this phenomenon, of course. The United States has been selling hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons to the world for decades. In the aftermath of September 11, however, American arms dealing kicked into an even higher gear. The Bush administration, in 2003, delivered arms to 18 of 25 nations now engaged in active conflicts. 13 of those nations have been defined as "undemocratic" by the State Department, but still received $2.7 billion in American weaponry.

One example is Uzbekistan, a nation with an astonishingly deplorable record of human rights violations. Thousands of people have been imprisoned and tortured for purely political reasons, and hundreds more have been killed. Still, that nation received $37 million in weapons from the United States between 2001 and 2003.

In 2002, the United States sold almost $50 million in missile technologies to Bahrain. In the same year, the United States sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of missile technology, rocket launchers, tank ammunition, fighter jets and attack helicopters to Egypt. The United States has sold millions of dollars worth of weapons to both India and Pakistan, two nations that have been on the brink of war for years. This list goes on and on.

Analyze the list of the top twenty companies that profit most from global arms sales, and you will see American companies taking up thirteen of those spots, including the top three: Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman. These arms dealers act in concert with the Department of Defense; they exist as a sixth ring of the Pentagon.

The Associated Press reported last week that business for the arms industry is, to make a bad pun, booming. "Northrop Grumman, the world's largest shipbuilder and America's third-largest military contractor," reported the AP, "said second-quarter earnings rose 17 per cent, as operating profit at its systems and information technology units overcame a decline at the company's ships division. Raytheon Co., the fifth-largest defense contractor, reported second-quarter net income jumped 54 per cent, buoyed by strong military equipment sales."

Beyond the missiles and the tanks and the warplanes, there is the small-arms industry. This is, comprehensively, far more deadly than the large-arms sales being made. A report by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences describes the deadly situation:
Since the end of the cold war, from the Balkans to East Timor and throughout Africa, the world has witnessed an outbreak of ethnic, religious and sectarian conflict characterized by routine massacre of civilians. More than 100 conflicts have erupted since 1990, about twice the number for previous decades. These wars have killed more than five million people, devastated entire geographic regions, and left tens of millions of refugees and orphans. Little of the destruction was inflicted by the tanks, artillery or aircraft usually associated with modern warfare; rather most was carried out with pistols, machine guns and grenades. However beneficial the end of the cold war has been in other respects, it has let loose a global deluge of surplus weapons into a setting in which the risk of local conflict appears to have grown markedly.

The Federation of American Scientists prepared a report some years ago detailing the vast amounts of small arms delivered to the world by the United States. "In addition to sales of newly-manufactured weapons," read the report, "the Pentagon gives away or sells at deep discount the vast oversupply of small/light weapons that it has in its post cold-war inventory. Most of this surplus is dispensed through the Excess Defense Articles (EDA) program. Originally only the southern-tier members of NATO were cleared to receive EDA, but following the 1991 Gulf war, many Middle Eastern and North African states were added; anti-narcotics aid provisions expanded EDA eligibility to include South American and Caribbean countries; and the "Partnership for Peace" program made most Central and Eastern European governments eligible for free surplus arms."

"Around 1995," continued the report, "large-scale grants and sales of small/light arms began occurring. In the past few years (1995 - early 1998), over 300,000 rifles, pistols, machine guns and grenade launchers have been offered up, including: 158,000 M16A1 assault rifles (principally to Bosnia, Israel, Philippines); 124,815 M14 rifles (principally to the Baltics and Taiwan); 26,780 pistols (principally to Philippines, Morocco, Chile, Bahrain; 1,740 machine guns (principally to Morocco, Bosnia); and 10,570 grenade launchers (principally to Bahrain, Egypt, Greece, Israel, Morocco)."

We hear so often that this is a dangerous world. It is arguable that the world might be significantly less dangerous if the United States chose to stop lathering the planet with weapons. Much has been made, especially recently, about the billions of dollars in weapons sales offered to Israel by America. This is but the tip of the iceberg.

It is, at bottom, all about profit. We sell the weapons, which create warfare, which justifies our incredibly expensive war-making capabilities when we have to go in and fight against the people who bought our weapons or procured them from a third party. This does not make the world safer, but only reinforces the permanent state of peril we find ourselves in. Meanwhile, a few people get paid handsomely.

In the end, it is worthwhile to remember that whenever you see George W. Bush talking about winning the "War on Terror," you are looking at the largest arms dealer on the planet. We can pursue cease-fire agreements, we can topple violent regimes, but until we stop loading up the planet with the means to kill, only the dead will see the end of war.

(William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.)