Israeli Air Strikes Kill 15 Civilians:
Hizbullah Fires longer range Missile, Misses
The Daily Star reports:
' Israel's powerful war machine pounded Lebanon for the 17th day on Friday as Hizbullah launched new, longer-range wepons on settlements in northern Israel . . . Israeli planes and warships hammered Southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley . . .
'At least 15 civilians, including a Jordanian, were killed by Israeli raids Friday and several others wounded, including four children, while a church was demolished in Safad al-Battikh . . .
"The Israeli bombing wounded one French journalist in the Southern town of Ainata and another media convoy was bombed on the road leading to the Southern town of Rmeish," the report added. The French journalist was identified as Paul Quatier from France's Channel 2. '
Pictures
Lebanese in the south, mainly Shiites are turning to Hizbullah in a big way.
The UN is calling for a three-day aid cease-fire, so that food and other necessities can be delivered to suffering Lebanese civilians. The Israelis at the moment are only authorizing aid convoys on an ad hoc basis, which means they are constantly in danger of being attacked by the Israeli army.
Many Indians are upset about what is being done to Lebanon. I would guess that there are nearly 5 million Shiites in India (they are about 5 percent of the Muslims, who are 11 percent of India's more than 1 billion persons.
What about the country's executive? Prime Minister Manmohan Singh articulated the country's feelings when he addressed parliament on Thursday:
' While condemning the Hezbollah abduction of two Israeli soldiers, which triggered the Israeli onslaught, Manmohan Singh took Tel Aviv to task: "The virtual destruction of a country which has been painfully rebuilt after two decades of civil war can hardly be countenanced by any civilized state." '
If the US Congress is going to earmark millions for the Lebanese army, wouldn't it want to ask the Israelis to stop bombarding it first?
What do the Lebanese think about all this? They have revenge on their minds and most support Hizbullah's actions, even a majority of the Christians. Christians make up 40 percent of the voting-age population, and hold the presidency and a number of cabinet posts, as well as many positions in the officer corps.
The percentage of Lebanese in a recent poll who think that the US is an honest broker and has a place in Lebanese affairs has fallen from nearly 40 percent last January to 10 percent today. Lebanon was supposed to be the Bush administration's success story. All has turned to ashes.
As for the Israeli hope of getting the Lebanese to turn on Hizbullah, that doesn't seem to be working out very well. 87 percent of the Lebanese expressed support for Hizbullah's retaliatory attacks on northern Israel. 70 percent supported Hizbullah's capture of Israeli troops to force Israel to release Lebanese prisoners. Support for this move actually rose to a clear majority even among Christians. Only
the Druze among Lebanese ethnic/religious communities mostly disapproved (they are 6 percent of the population). 63 percent expect Hizbullah to be victorious over Israel.
As for suffering in Israel, which is widespread and worrisome: The bad news is that Hizbullah was able to fire a missile a little bit south of Haifa on Friday. The good news is that they don't appear to have been able actually to hit anything.
There is another dimension, besides the deaths, wounded and psychological trauma, to the damage Hizbullah's illegal and criminal targetting of civilians is doing, which is the economic.
AFP on the damage the war is doing in Israel to Haifa's economy.
' Haifa port, the Jewish state's second-largest, is closed. So is the railway line north of the city. . . According to a recent study by the Israeli Association of Manufacturers, just a third of enterprises in Israel's north are functioning normally. Thirty-five percent have closed completely and another 35 percent are not operating at full capacity. The conflict is costing Haifa 300-500 million shekels ($68-$113 million) per day, the study estimates. '
Tourism is dead, and some restaurants have suffered a 90 percent fall-off in business.
posted by Juan Cole @ 7/29/2006 01:37:00 AM
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12 Comments:
But of course the actual infrastructure damage to Israel is slight compared to Lebanon and Gaza, and its financial loses will be offset by American aid and grants.
The real disaster is for Lebanon and whoever is next in the gun-sights of Israel and America.
But the greatest disaster of all is the deepening and widening of hatred against itself which Israel is fueling. No amount of aid will offset this!
The Pentagon needs to justify that budget somehow. This is an emergency, just not the emergency that most people are thinking of. Sure, there are hundreds/thousands dying, but all that matters to U.S. planners is how to create conflict to keep the military-industrial-congressional complex relevant. The 'spectre of peace' looms - that's why this 'war on terror' nonsense is so important. If we are not fighting something, what is there left to do, but redirect the Pentagon's budget into useful things, like health care? What would all the generals do? What would the Joint Chiefs do? Work on their gardens?
What's good for US planners and what's good for 99% of US citizens are two completely different things. The strong Hez is at the end of all this, the better. For US planners. For the rest of us, and most of the rest of the world, bad news.
Some people don't get it:
For Arab world this war is not about "democracy" or "war against terrorism". For them it is all about national pride and the right for self-determination. Philosophically speaking this conflict can be viewed as GREED vs HONOR. Guess who has the moral advantage? Read more on my blog.
When the war first started, I heard an Israeli minister brag that they had never skipped a beat with Israel's economy with the previous wars. Now, it is damaging their economy. Well, maybe it is good to feel a moderate portion of the destruction you wreak on others. They do not realize the extent that they live beyond the chaos they cause for the others around them, economically or otherwise. For all that they martyr themselves, the death tolls and injuries published by B’Tselem show no such onerous violations against them, quite the contrary.
Did I not just hear Bush and Blair say that we are trying to weaken these organizations? (Hezbollah, Hamas, ect….) Yet, we are making them regular folk heroes. My only hope, is that despite yet another policy fiasco, where we choose to side with brawn instead of brain in “the War on Terror”, this group does not come out any stronger for it. I fail to see why using understanding of these groups would hurt in the fight against them. Is it really so bad to look at them and fight them with a sense, or understanding of their entirety. It would lessen “collateral damage” ie… my dead cousins, and might actually work, where as to the best of my knowledge, “shoot’em up” style diplomacy has not.
There is a useful distinction between missile and rocket that was brought up by a reader at warandpiece.com:
Fix to topline/Update: From reader JR: "I noticed in your last post you've copied an error from the Ha'aretz reporting into your own: the use of the phrase 'long range missile'. 'Long range' is a pretty subjective term, but the word 'missile has come to mean any rocket booster with a guidance system and a warhead. The Katyusha, Fajr, and Zelzal rockets being used by Hezbollah aren't guided, so the right term for any of them is 'rocket'. There's nothing wrong with calling them 'long range rockets.' For a ballistic missile, however, long range is usually considered anything over 5,000km -- a far cry from the artillery rockets being used by Hezbollah. Given that Iran routinely states its intention to develop and field 'long range missiles,' I think it's important to use precise language." Many thanks, noted and corrected.
Bush and Blair are predicating their Lebanon peace plans on strength of the Lebanese government and army. Yet as the dust settles and the blood dries, it is becoming clear that Hizbollah will be strongest political and military entity in the country.
While the adminstration and the US media are conveniently characterizing the war as Israel versus Hizbollah, most of the damage is being done to the Lebanese nation as a whole. But is the Lebanese army joining in the defense of its country? Is the prime minister of Lebanon forming a war cabinet to defend his country? Hardly.
Why should one expect the Lebanese people to look to the government and the army for leadership when it abandoned them at the moment on greatest need? Bush casually assigns duties and responsibilities to these institutions as if they were his to control and the Lebonese to respect and obey.
If the polls taken in Lebanon are correct, the plans Bush and Blair are concocting are more likely to fan the flames thatn put them out.
"Lewis said...
Where is your sense of fair play? The Israelis can blast the hell out of Lebanon and Hezbollah should only aim at empty fields or not even respond?
I would say you are a capitalist patsy."
An ethics question:
You have a neighbor. Let's call him Bob . Your neighbor harasses your other neighbors. You protect this person because he had a traumatic childhood.
One day Bob goes onto Carol's yard and cuts down her apple tree. This is a horticultural crime, but as neighborhood protector, you refuse do anything because Bob had a traumatic childhood.
Carol reacts by trimming Bob's Hemlock. Bob screams out, "Horticultural crime, horticultural crime."
You condem Carol. Bob proceeds to fell Carol's pear tree. Ditto for a few rounds.
Finally Carol has had enough and she bush-hogs Bob's hedge. Bob is shocked. Shocked.
Carol is roundly condemned.
However, Bob, now that he understands that he will suffer consequences, stops harassing Carol, even though he had planned to start felling her oaks.
Is the wo^H^H neighborhood a better place now that Bob understands he is vulnerable, or is it a worse place because Carol got you ousted as neighborhood chair and herself elected?
Would the world be a better place if Israel got her hedge trimmed?
Khatami supports Hizbullah
According to Albawaba, prominent Iranian cleric Mohammad_Khatami hailed resistance of Lebanese Hizbullah, saying it "destroyed the false assumption about the Zionist regime to be an invincible power". In his Friday prayer at Tehran university campus, Khatami called for unity between radical Shiites and Sunnis: "Hizbullah defends Islam. The issue of Shiite and Sunni is not the question. The Shiite Hizbullah shoulders this responsibility to reduce pressure on Hamas, which is a Sunni movement".
Khatami's address is even more important considering that he was well known in the West as a moderate reformer; Khatami preceded Ahmadinehjad as Iranian PM. First, his explicit support of Hizbullah aggressively preempts the neoconservative rhetoric on "terrorist sponsorship". Next, now we see by our own eyes how war in Lebanon together with Iraqi and Palestinian crises radicalizes the ME moderates, brings them together with hardcore anti-Western radicals.
This dangerous development on the Islamist side apparently mirrors further consolidation of the US and the Israeli factions of the neoconservative movement. Take WaPo's explicit declaration that Lebanese war is Condi's own. First, this means complete abandonment of the "honest broker" principle of the US foreign policy. Next, we see that it did not take long for Rice to adopt Kristol's battle cry: "It is our war!"
So, gone are the old days when Gen.Powell fought the turf wars against the hardcore neocons and the Pentagon. Now, contrary to Fukuyama's lamentations, soft and hard neocons are pretty much on the same page.
curious that IDF appear to struggle, are perhaps even stymied by what amounts to Hezbollah's conventional "Maginot Line" of defence ~ why Israeli forces (said to be the 4th most effective global military) cannot 'leap frog' over and 'flank' around this impasse, by air and sea assaults, respectively ~ remains a mystery to this observer.
iow, creating a "Security Zone" BEHIND Hezbollah, rather than before it ~ would be advantageous, were it possible for the IDF to achieve.
Hezbollah would then become, for all intents and purposes ~ a third, isolated "ghetto" island of non-incorporated, dis-enfranchised Muslims within Greater ISRAEL, similar to the West Bank and Gaza Strip...
...which could then be likewise economically starved, militarily marginalised, thus.
If, as your postings today indicate, there exists these "islands" of refuge and resistance, then the strategy of "island hopping" vis-a-vis the U.S. and Japanese Empire during WWII ~ comes to mind :-/
I found it useful to re-acquaint myself with the entire Conflicts Forum reports by Alastair Crooke and Mark Perry, under the heading: How to Lose the War on Terror. The overall lesson being that we need to listen instead of dictate:
With the exception of Israel (where a US and European appreciation of realities is critical to the formulation of policy), there are, inter alia, five political movements and governments in the Middle East of undeniable importance: Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood. The governments of the West don't talk to any of them.
Gods help us! Some (probably) mentally unstable Pakistani American walked into the offices of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle saying he was an American Muslim angered by Israel.
Then he started shooting, killing one person and wounding at least five.
Police believe he acted alone and not on the behalf of any organization. This stands to reason as far as I can tell because this action will obviously only have a negative impact on sympathies for Muslims. I can almost imagine the logic of attacking random Americans but specifically targeting Jewish Americans seems ridiculously short sighted and inneffective for someone attempting to raise awareness of the plight of Palestinians and Lebanese.
Has the blowback already begun? I fear the entire world is going to be engulfed in senseless violence. We have shown the world that this is the way to solve problems.
Intense anxiety is gripping my soul and while this is a luxury compared to dodging rockets, missiles, bombs, mines and bullets in Lebanon, Israel and Gaza I feel like tensions are rising to a fever pitch all around me/us.
How are we going to halt this downward spiral of vengeance and hate? Is it already too late?
"If the US Congress is going to earmark millions for the Lebanese army, wouldn't it want to ask the Israelis to stop bombarding it first?"
Now, where would be the PROFIT in that silly idea?
Don't forget: bombs and fuel to Israel while Bush pledges $35M in reconstruction to Lebanon. The good news is, one day we will go broke.
Someone on ABC just called Nasrallah the 'bin Laden' of Lebanon, once again showing that it isn't a military-industrial complex, it is a military-media-industrial complex.
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