EU to send 7000 Peacekeepers to Lebanon
Israeli Cluster Bombs Menace Lebanese Children
European nations have pledged 7000 troops to a peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon. France will lead the force, and will have 2000 of its own troops on the ground.
The Israelis are saying that they won't end their blockade of Lebanese ports until the UN force is in place. LBC satellite news reports that Lebanon is losing $3 million a day in forfeited agricultural and retail business, since no raw materials can be imported into Lebanon at the moment.
the UN estimates that Israel's war on the little country of Lebanon cost that country all the economic recovery strdes it had taken in the past two decades.
The Israeli military extensively used US-made cluster bombs in civilian areas of Lebanon, which is a war crime. The bombs frequently do not detonate, so now south Lebanon is littered with deadly fist-size bomblets that will inevitably kill and disfigure children and other civilians.
The US State Department will investigate whether Israeli deployment of these weapons in civilian areas violated secret agreements under which Washington supplied them to Israel.
Nothing will come of the investigation, given the clout of the Israel lobby in Washington, but someday the relative of an innocent maimed Lebanese may decide to take revenge on the country that supplied the cluster bombs. And the American public will ask in astonishment why anyone should hate us.
posted by Juan Cole @ 8/26/2006 12:30:00 AM
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10 Comments:
Euh !? Is this blockade by Israel not a war crime and a breach of the ceasefire ?
Why the non-biased U.N and with it the so-called International Community not doing anything ? After all the mandate is robust ... so much so that yesterday the French foreign minister managed only to give "examples" of engagement with the ... Hizb Allah to illustrate what would happen if a breach occurs.
Never once she could phantom publicly that the Israeli could breach the ceasefire or attack the multinational force. Somebody should respectfully remind here who is responsible of the attacks on the UNIFIL in south Lebanon
I highly doubt anything will come of the investigation at this point as well. AIPAC is powerful and it is an election year. Besides, our bureaucracy is pretty indoctrinated given the testing and selection procedures, individuals are picked who favor the government line, which is consistently pro-Israel. Even if they were to find something, the partisan rulers at the top would supress the report.
Being less informed about the practice of law, I sometimes wonder if there is a way to cirumvent AIPAC power through the Judiciary. The African-Americans faced similar issues of powerful vested interests in the legislative branches, and found the Judiciary an acceptably tolerant place to gain a small voice. I know AIPAC is quite strong there as well. But, as you pointed out, the exportation of these weapons and the aid we give Israel, violates our own laws, because of its human rights record, ect... It seems it could be ajudicated somehow, if there were American victims.
The Rabbinical council of America has called on the Israeli army to.in effect,dispense with the Geneva Conventions.
Rabbiis....Holy men...advocating war on civilians.
The current angst in Israel is not over the unnecessary destruction and loss of life in Lebanon but rather that they couldn't kill off Hezbollah.
Now they have been shown to have used cluster bombs on civilian targets and the US is investigating their "improper" use.
A plague on both teir houses
And the American public will ask in astonishment why anyone should hate us.
They hate our fiefdom.
+++
Wow.
Now we see where Bush takes his shoot first and ask questions lead from.
The State Department is indeed investigating Israel's use of cluster munitions in Lebanon, but what has so far gone unreported in coverage of the subject is how many cluster bombs we are currently using in Iraq. I cover this issue more extensively at "Times/WaPo Watch," available at http://ontheirtoes.blogspot.com.
-David Bikman
"Nothing will come of the investigation, given the clout of the Israel lobby in Washington, but someday the relative of an innocent maimed Lebanese may decide to take revenge on the country that supplied the cluster bombs. And the American public will ask in astonishment why anyone should hate us."
I have been quite surprised in the past by the reception that Lebanese, especially the Shiite community and various Hizbollah members, have offered to American students on summer trips there with me in 1999, 2000 and 2001... These were years that Israel had carried out strikes in Lebanon, albeit not as devastating as this July-August...
I still believe that on a strategic level the Hizbollah, and Syria-Iran, do not want to fully engage the US in a war... They have too much to lose in a direct engagement with the US, even though the US is indirectly attacking them by supporting Israel... The terror phase of Imad Mughniyeh is in the past, precisely because Iran, and by extension the Hizbollah leadership, do not want to return to isolation...
One of the reasons behind Hizbollah's massive investment in the mass media is to sway global opinion away from the Israeli-influenced West and Saudi-influenced East... They believe that by directly engaging the viewers in countries across the world they can cut across the pro-Israel and pro-Monarch filters that have greatly obscured the communication of their reality in the past...
Of course, with the US and EU banning Al Manar TV, the Hizbollah still rely heavily on coverage by Western journalists... Access to their web site is still not a crime, but how many people are actually going to go there and risk ending up on the NSA database?
A boost to the Hizbollah's popularity has also been provided by semi-autonomous regional media such as Al Jazeera, which is currently trying to launch in the American market... If the Al Jazeera International (AJI) English service is able to step into the US media sphere then, perhaps, "the relative of an innocent maimed Lebanese" might actually get a decent hearing here (as opposed to the many Western correspondents hunkered down in Israeli settlements).
Surely this 'investigation' is high farce. It is especially so given that America used cluster bombs in both Iraq and Afghanistan then supplied them to Israel.
I guess when a nation like America can no longer tell that it is engaging in profound hypocrisy and immorality, then, like a rogue elephant, it is a danger to itself and the world. It should be forcibly restrained and have its tusks removed so that it can do no more harm.
May it be soon!
Juan, I think at this point more and more people are having their eyes opened, or perhaps I have been finding myself in more enlightened company.. I think less and less Americans will ask themselves why people should hate them.. although for the moral majority this enlightnment might still take a while to come...(they're busy for looking for Jesus in the sky instead of the Jesus in their hearts..)
Ingrid
How well I remember the summer of 1982, when Tom Friedman reported in the NY Times that Israel used cluster bombs in Beirut. This information was considered so shocking that the Times refused to print his story, and they tussled over it for a while until finally Friedman got his way and the truth came out.
The world was shocked. Shocked! But Israel and the IDF suffered no consequences, kept on using cluster bombs, and events moved merrily along to Sabra and Shatila later that summer.
Pardon my bitterness. It would take a saint - or an amnesiac - to live through all that and not be a little bitter.
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