Category: Archive

Ever since the invasion in 2003 the US military and later US-supported Iraqi governments have sought to conceal the number of Iraqi civilians being killed. The US Army for long denied that it counted the number of civilians killed by its soldiers. The Iraqi Ministry of Health also refused to reveal to the UN the civilian casualty figures.

Now, for the first time, the health ministry in Baghdad has told the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq, which publishes a bimonthly report on human rights, the exact death toll recorded by hospitals around the country. The central morgue in Baghdad provides figures for unidentified bodies, of which there were 1,595 in June. In the first six months of the year the number of Iraqi civilians dying violently rose by 77 per cent.

The UN report paints a picture of Iraqi society dissolving under the stress of cumulative violence. Nobody is safe. A tennis coach and two players were shot dead in Baghdad for wearing shorts. Militias threaten the families of homosexuals "stating they will begin killing family members unless men are handed over or killed by the family". Sectarian differences are behind most killings. Assassinations are often carried out by the security forces themselves. On  June 3, for instance, 50 police cars surrounded the al-Arab mosque in Basra and killed 10 of the 20 people inside. Sunni suicide bombers attack crowded Shia mosques and markets in order to cause maximum casualties.

Kidnapping, often of children, is common and the victims are frequently killed regardless of whether or not they have paid a ransom. "In one case the body of 12-year-old Osama was reportedly found by the Iraqi police in a plastic bag after his family paid a ransom of $30,000 [£16,300]. The boy had been sexually assaulted by the kidnappers, before being hanged by his own clothing. The police captured members of this gang who confessed to raping and killing many boys and girls before Osama."

Many Iraqis have fled the country, mostly to Jordan and Syria, to avoid the violence. Syria now has 351,000 and Jordan 450,000 of these refugees, including 40 per cent of all Iraqi professionals, according to the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. It is increasingly difficult to get into Jordan from Iraq but Syria still issues visas easily.

All of the 18 Iraqi provinces are dangerous, outside the three Kurdish provinces. The health ministry revealed for the first time in June that 50,000 Iraqis have been killed violently since 2003, but added that this was probably an under-estimate. Medical care for the wounded is declining because so many doctors have left the country. The ministry says 106 doctors and 164 nurses have been killed.

Doctors in Baghdad hospitals complain that even the operating theatres are not safe because soldiers or militiamen will order them to stop an operation half way through.

Parents dare not let their children wander the dangerous streets of Baghdad alone, but until a few days ago they could give them a treat by taking them to al-Jillawi’s toyshop, the biggest and best in the city, its windows invitingly filled with Playstations, Barbie dolls and bicycles.

They go there no longer. Today the shop on 14 Ramadan Street in the once-affluent al-Mansur district is closed, with a black mourning flag draped across its front. The three sons and the teenage grandson of the owner, Mehdi al-Jillawi, were shutting down for the evening recently, bringing in bicycles and tricycles on display on the pavement in front of the shop. As they did so, two BMWs stopped close to them, and several gunmen got out armed with assault rifles. They opened fire at point-blank range, killing the young men.

Sectarian slaughter is not the only way to die in Iraq.

Yesterday US troops killed five people, including two women and a child, in the city of Baquba during a raid, claiming they had been shot at. At best it was a tragic error, at worst it spoke to the cavalier attitude of the US towards Iraqi civilian lives. Local police said that a man had fired from a rooftop at the Americans because he thought a hostile militia force was approaching.

While the eyes of the world are elsewhere, Baghdad is still dying and the daily toll is hitting record levels. While the plumes of fire and smoke over Lebanon have dominated headlines for 11 days, with Britain and the US opposing a UN call for an immediate ceasefire, another Bush-Blair foreign policy disaster is unfolding in Iraq.

In a desperate effort to stem the butchery, the government yesterday imposed an all-day curfew on Baghdad, but tens of thousands of its people have already run for their lives. In some parts of the city, dead bodies are left to rot in the baking summer heat because nobody dares to remove them. I drove through empty streets in the heart of the city yesterday, taking a zigzag course to avoid police checkpoints that we thought might be doubling as death squads. Few shops were open. Those still doing business are frantically trying to sell their stock. A sign above one shop read: "Italian furniture: 75 per cent reductions.”

Iraqis are terrified in a way that I have never seen before, since I first visited Baghdad in 1978. Sectarian massacres happen almost daily. The UN says 6,000 civilians were slaughtered in May and June, but this month has been far worse. In many districts it has become difficult to buy bread because Sunni assassins have killed all the bakers who are traditionally Shia.

Baghdad is now breaking up into a dozen different hostile cities, Sunni or Shia, heavily armed and living in terror of the other side. On July 9, Shia gunmen from the black-clad Mehdi Army entered the largely Sunni al-Jihad district in west Baghdad and killed 40 Sunni after dragging them from their cars or stopping them at false checkpoints. Within hours the Sunni militias struck back with car bombs killing more than 60 Shia.

The Iraqi government is a prisoner of the Green Zone, the heavily fortified enclave defended by US troops in the centre of Baghdad. Entering it is like visiting another country. Soldiers at the gates spend longer looking at documents than do officials at most European frontiers. "Some ministers have never visited their ministries outside the Green Zone," said one ex-minister. "They have their officials bring them documents to sign."

It seems unlikely that Baghdad will ever come together again. Sunni are frightened of being caught in a Shia district, and vice versa. Many now carry two sets of identity documents, one Sunni and one Shia. Checkpoints manned by the Mehdi Army know this and sometimes ask people claiming to be Shia questions about Shia theology. One Shia who passed this test was still killed because he was driving a car with number plates from Anbar, a Sunni province.

Where are the Americans in all this? Iraqis who used to say that they were against the US occupation but at least the Americans prevented civil war now think that a civil war has started regardless of their presence.

The Iraqi army and police are themselves divided along sectarian lines. Recognizing this, the Shia-controlled Interior Ministry ludicrously suggested that people challenge the ferocious police commanders and demand their identity cards in order to distinguish real police from death squads. It is hard to think of a surer way of getting oneself killed.

I never expected the occupation of Iraq by the US and Britain to end happily. But I did not foresee the present catastrophe. Baghdad has survived the Iran-Iraq war, the 1991 Gulf War, UN sanctions, more bombing and, finally, a savage guerrilla war. Now the city is finally splitting apart, and – most surprising of all – this disaster scarcely gets a mention on the news as the world watches the destruction of Beirut.

Thursday morning, however, as the bird sings outside my window, I awake to the news that the IDF is insisting on two weeks. In two weeks, they’ll be saying a month more – and the Americans will start to get antsy. The Arab killer regimes that back the bashing of Hezbollah are fidgeting nervously as pictures of the slaughter are beamed around the world: the Egyptians, for one, are reportedly furious that Bush refuses to endorse calls for a cease-fire. Any other American president would have long ago made such a pronouncement and fulfilled America’s mediating role, in line with our status as the predominant power in the region.

But not this president. This is all about Israel, and not the U.S., as the dominating power in the Middle East. Bush’s indifference to American interests and craven appeasement of the Israelis has led him to stand helplessly by as Israeli fighter jets paid for by American taxpayers drop U.S.-made ordnance on American citizens. There are 25,000 U.S. nationals in Lebanon, for all intents and purposes held hostage by the IDF. Instead of taking the Israelis to task for putting Americans at risk – without warning, and without apology – George W. Bush gave them the green light to keep up the bombing and the blockade for as long as they can get away with it.

The scandal over the reimbursement demanded by the State Department for rescuing U.S. citizens trapped in Lebanon will pale as Americans realize why it took so long to even begin the difficult task of getting our people out of there safely. Garance Franke-Ruta reports the outrageous truth on the American Prospect‘s weblog:

"A reliable source tells me that the reason the United States has been so slow in evacuating its citizens from Lebanon is that the public diplomacy (i.e., P.R.) issues raised by evacuating under Israeli assault are so complicated. Individuals within the State Department, I am told, have been reluctant to create an impression that the Israeli assault on Lebanon is as bad as it is or that civilian U.S. citizens are being threatened by U.S. ally Israel. If a conflict this severe had broken out in, say, Indonesia, the American embassy would have been shut down the next day and its personnel and families rapidly brought to safety. That’s how things normally work. (See Laura Rozen on the evacuation from Albania here.) In this case, however, the diplomatic message sent by shutting down the U.S. embassy in the face of Israeli bombing would have contradicted the U.S. government message of support for the Israeli mission against Hezbollah terrorists, which, when added to the general concern within lower-level diplomatic circles about ever creating a Fall of Saigon-style visual for the news media, have led the Americans to be slower than they could have been about getting U.S. citizens out of harm’s way."

In my last column, I likened the slowness of the American response to the federal government’s hapless efforts to deal with the effects of Hurricane Katrina, a comparison made by many others. However, the Lebanese disaster is much worse than what happened in New Orleans and environs. This isn’t incompetence: the U.S. government made a conscious decision to delay the rescue mission to avoid embarrassing the Israelis. The Bush administration can always be counted on to put Israel first – ahead even of the welfare and very lives of American citizens.

When it comes to kowtowing before the Israel lobby, however, Congress outdoes the executive branch by several degrees of servility. Pat Buchanan was exactly right when he described Congress as "Israeli-occupied territory." A resolution giving unconditional support to Israel passed the Senate unanimously: and, in the House, a similar measure passed overwhelmingly. Not that everyone who voted for it is proud of his or her vote: in the negotiations leading to the introduction of the resolution by the Republicans, Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) pledged to vote for the resolution and speak on its behalf, but refused to be a co-sponsor. Or, as Roll Call put it, she refused to "attach her name to it." Does she really imagine this kind of obfuscation is going to provide adequate cover on her left flank? The antiwar faction of her party, large and growing, is already on to her brand of warmongering, and she knows it. In any case, it takes a special kind of cowardice to slither around the issue with such snake-like alacrity.

The Democrats are competing with the GOP to see who can praise the Israeli blitzkrieg in the most obsequiously extravagant terms. Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid made a fire-breathing speech in favor the resolution, Hillary Clinton declared her " unreserved support" for the invasion, and even Russ Feingold, ostensibly the antiwar candidate among the Democratic presidential wannabes, averred:

"I stand firmly with the people of Israel and their government as they defend themselves against these outrageous attacks. What we have done by becoming mired in Iraq, and by deciding to change the balance of power in that region, is enable Iran and Syria to be much more open in tormenting Israel, the United States, and our allies."

That is gibberish. The "defense" of Israel hardly requires the bombing of northern Lebanon, including the Christian areas and the civilian infrastructure. The Israelis are even hitting the barracks of the Lebanese army – the very army the Israelis are demanding must police southern Lebanon and prevent Hezbollah attacks. Israel’s goal has nothing to do with getting any soldiers back: it’s all about the dissolution of a Parliament where Hezbollah’s representatives sit, and the division of the country. Forget the " Cedar Revolution" – touted by Bush and the neocons as indisputable evidence of a " democratic wave" supposedly sweeping the region as the direct result of Iraq’s " liberation." The Israelis have decided that the government brought to power in the " Beirut spring" must fall, and that is the end of that.

As for Syria, it has never been weaker, which is precisely why the Israelis are now engineering a provocation. It is also hard to believe the presence of 130,000 U.S. troops nearby emboldens either Syria or Iran to "torment" anybody, except, perhaps, their own people.

If anyone is being tormented, it is the Syrians, who have bent over backwards to cooperate with the Americans in the war on al-Qaeda and assiduously tried to avoid any conflict with Washington. To no avail: Israel’s enemies are our enemies. President Assad was recently given a sign of things to come when Israeli jets buzzed his summer palace. The Iranians, too, have signaled their willingness to negotiate, yet the U.S. is openly embarking on a campaign to fund a Chalabi-like "democratic" opposition, consisting of monarchists, Communist cultists, and job-seekers.

Baghdad – Beirut – Damascus – Tehran: get on board the "regime change" train and fasten your seat belt. Because it doesn’t matter how sick unto death the American public is of the neocons’ wars. They will get one after the other anyway, in rapid succession. This is due to the unprecedented power of "the Lobby" – as Professor John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt term it in their now-famous Harvard University study of Israel’s fifth column in the U.S.

This is Israel’s war, for the moment, but already the outline of a scheme to drag us in is taking shape, with calls for an " international force" to supplant the Israeli invaders, to be stationed in a buffer zone on the Lebanese-Israeli border. Not a UN force, however, but a "multinational" one, presumably made up mostly of Americans, Brits, and probably the French. It’s possible they could recruit from among the motley crew of Sunni Arab autocrats who have turned on their Lebanese "brothers" and left them to twist slowly in the wind: the Saudis, the Egyptians, and the Jordanians, who have all joined Israel in assigning the blame for this war on Hezbollah.

This would gather all the elements of a broad anti-Shia alliance in one place, and lay the foundations for future action – in Syria, perhaps, where a confrontation is looming, and ultimately in Iran, the real target of the regime-changers.

The narrative of this war is being carefully articulated: it is, we are told, a "proxy war" being waged by Hezbollah, which the conspiracy theorists insist is merely an Iranian instrument. According to this view, Hassan Nasrallah is merely Mahmoud Ahmadinejad writ small.

To begin with, Hezbollah is a nationalist organization, with the requisite Islamist veneer. It was created not by Iran but by the Israelis themselves, in 1982, when they foolishly invaded the first time – and provoked a reaction that eventually drove the IDF out of southern Lebanon. This fantasy that Hezbollah consists of remote-controlled robots operated by the mullahs of Tehran is convenient for the purposes of war propaganda, but the reality is a bit more complex.

Yet even if we accept the simplistic Israeli-neocon view of Hezbollah as merely Iranian-run automatons, their proposed course of action still fails to make much sense. The logic of the neocon argument, applied to Iraq, would require us to turn our guns on the very government we are pledged to defend against the insurgency. The principal elements of Iraq’s democratically elected Shi’ite coalition –including the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the Badr Corps (SCIRI’s militia), and the Da’wa party – were funded by Tehran and given sanctuary on Iranian soil during the years of Ba’athist rule. Are they, too, cat’s-paws of Tehran?

Most Americans don’t want U.S. troops to return to Lebanon – perhaps they remember what happened the last time. If the question is put as Israel versus Hezbollah, then, according to this CNN poll, 57 percent are more sympathetic to Israel, while 20 percent disdain taking sides and 4 percent are pro-Hezbollah. One suspects, however, if asked to choose between Israel and Lebanon, quite a different result would be forthcoming. In any event, 47 percent disapprove of the way President Bush is handling the crisis, with 43 percent approving – and 31 percent saying Israel’s military response to the kidnapping of its soldiers went too far. As pictures of the devastation wrought by the Israeli military machine capture the brutal reality of Israel’s exercise in "self-defense," this number is bound to go higher.

Yet the momentum of the burgeoning conflict may sideline public opinion and give impetus to the War Party’s ambitious plans. As the rescue mission got belatedly underway, and American troops set foot on Lebanese soil for the first time since the ill-fated 1980s incursion, the chances of the U.S. getting roped into this snake-pit were quadrupled. Those Marines will be a magnet for every nutball "militia" and provocateur – a tripwire just waiting to be triggered.

Which leads us to wonder if this, perhaps, wasn’t built into the calculations that went into the making of this war.

No one believes the official pretext for the invasion – the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah – and it is well-known that plans for the operation were ready to be taken off the shelf well before the incident. On Meet the Press the other day, Tim Russert asked NBC’s Martin Fletcher if the Israelis had been looking for an opportunity to attack Hezbollah and took the first one that came along. Fletcher’s answer was illuminating:

"I think so very strongly. I mean, they’ve never – they’ll never say that publicly, but don’t forget that when Israel left – ended their occupation of south Lebanon in the year 2000, the deal was that the Lebanese army would go in and police the border. Well, they never did that. Instead, Hezbollah moved in with all those rockets, and ever since then, about – for that last five years, Israel’s been planning what to do, how to fight Hezbollah, how to destroy them. So this is, this is not a quick reaction to a kidnapping, it’s the implementation of a plan Israel’s been working on for five years with very specific targets. They call it a work plan. They’re going step by step."

Step 1 – Seize a pretext, any pretext, to goose-step into Lebanon.

Step 2 – Simultaneously denounce Syrian influence and a hidden "spy network" supposedly still remaining in Lebanon – this in spite of the recent bust-up of a Mossad cell by Lebanese intelligence, which had been responsible for several assassinations.

Step 3 – Restart the Lebanese civil war – and drag Syria into it.

Step 4 – Engage the enemy on two fronts:

A. Diplomatically, in the United Nations, by imposing sanctions on Iran and demanding inspections of its nuclear facilities. This long drawn-out ritual is meant largely for American and European consumption – to convince world opinion that every possible avenue for a peaceful settlement has been explored, before the second front is opened up.

B. Militarily, in Lebanon, and beyond. Bashar al-Assad is a pincer movement away from being deposed. A right hook from U.S.-occupied Iraq and a left from the Israelis would knock out the last remaining Ba’athists and open up a veritable Pandora’s box of ethnic and religious conflicts long masked by the dictatorship of the Assads.

Step 5 – On to Tehran!

The hijacking of American foreign policy by a small but influential cadre of neoconservatives is no secret, nor is it a deep mystery that they have the president’s ear. Whether the sound of their whispered advice will drown out the plaintive cries of ordinary Americans, who are hardly in the mood for yet another " cakewalk," is not yet known. In the case of George W. Bush, however, it is always best to count on him living up to one’s worst expectations.

Let’s go on a brief excursion into pre-history. I’m talking about June 20, 2006, when Israeli aircraft fired at least one missile at a car in an attempted extrajudicial assassination attempt on a road between Jabalya and Gaza City. The missile missed the car.  Instead it killed three Palestinian children and wounded 15.

Back we go again to June 13, 2006. Israeli aircraft fired missiles at a van in another attempted extrajudicial assassination. The successive barrages killed nine innocent Palestinians. 

Now we’re really in the dark ages, reaching far, far back to June 9, 2006, when Israel shelled a beach in Beit Lahiya killing 8 civilians and injuring 32.

That’s just a brief trip down Memory Lane, and we trip over the bodies of twenty dead and forty-seven wounded, all of them Palestinians, most of them women and children.

Israel regrets… But no! Israel doesn’t regret in the least. Most of the time it doesn’t even bother to pretend to regret. It says, “We reserve the right to slaughter Palestinians whenever we want. We reserve the right to assassinate their leaders, crush their homes, steal their water, tear out their olive groves, and when they try to resist we call them terrorists intent on wrecking the ‘peace process’”.

Now Israel says it wants to wipe out Hezbollah. It wishes no harm to the people of Lebanon, just so long as they’re not supporters of Hezbollah, or standing anywhere in the neighborhood of a person or a house or a car or a truck or a road or a bus or a field, or a power station or a port that might, in the mind of an Israeli commander or pilot, have something to do with Hezbollah. In any of those eventualities all bets are off. You or your wife or your mother or your baby get fried.

Israel regrets… But no! As noted above,  it doesn’t regret in the least. Neither does George Bush, nor Condoleezza  Rice nor John Bolton who is  the moral savage who brings shame on his country each day that he sits as America’s ambassador (unconfirmed) at the UN and who has just told the world that a dead Israel civilian is worth a whole more in terms of moral outrage than a Lebanese one.

None of them regrets. They say Hezbollah is a cancer in the body of Lebanon. Sometimes, to kill the cancer, you end up killing the body. Or bodies. Bodies of babies. Lots of them.  Go to the website fromisraeltolebanon.info and take a look. Then sign the petition on the site calling on the governments of the world to stop this barbarity.

You can say that Israel brought Hezbollah into the world. You can prove it too, though this too involves another frightening excursion into history.

This time we have to go far, almost unimaginably far, back into history. Back to 1982, before the dinosaurs, before CNN, before Fox TV, before O’Reilly and Limbaugh. But not before the neo-cons who at that time had already crawled from the primal slime and were doing exactly what they are doing now: advising an American president to give Israel the green light to “solve its security problems” by destroying Lebanon.

In 1982 Israel had a problem. Yasir Arafat, headquartered in Beirut, was making ready to announce that the PLO was prepared to sit down with Israel and embark on peaceful, good faith negotiations towards a two-state solution.

Israel didn’t want a two-state solution, which meant — if UN resolutions were to be taken seriously — a Palestinian state right next door, with water, and contiguous territory.  So Israel decided chase the PLO right out of Lebanon. It announced that the Palestinian fighters had broken the year-long cease-fire by lobbing some shells into northern Israel.

Palestinians had done nothing of the sort. I remember this very well, because Brian Urquhart, at that time assistant secretary general of the United Nations, in charge of UN observers on Israel’s northern border, invited me to his office on the 38th floor of the UN hq in mid-Manhattan and showed me all the current reports from the zone. For over a year there’d been no shelling from north of the border. Israel was lying.

With or without a pretext Israel wanted to invade Lebanon. So it did, and rolled up to Beirut. It shelled Lebanese towns and villages and bombed them from the air. Sharon’s forces killed maybe 20,000 people, and let Lebanese Christians slaughter hundreds of Palestinian refugees in the camps of Sabra and Chatilla.

The killing got so bad that even Ronald Reagan awoke from his slumbers and called Tel Aviv to tell Israel to stop. Sharon gave the White House the finger by bombing Beirut at the precise times — 2.42 and 3.38 — of two UN resolutions calling for a peaceful settlement on the matter of Palestine.

When the dust settled over the rubble, Israel bunkered down several miles inside Lebanese sovereign territory, which it illegally occupied, in defiance of all UN resolutions, for years, supervising a brutal local militia and running its own version of Abu Graibh, the torture center at the prison of Al-Khiam.

Occupy a country, torture its citizens and in the end you face resistance. In Israel’s case it was Hezbollah, and in the end Hezbollah ran Israel out of Lebanon, which is why a lot of Lebanese regard Hezbollah not as terrorists but as courageous liberators.

The years roll by and Israel does its successful best to destroy all possibility of a viable two-state solution. It builds illegal settlements. It chops up Palestine with Jews-only roads. It collars all the water. It cordons off Jerusalem. It steals even more land by bisecting Palestinian territory with its “fence”. Anyone trying to organize resistance gets jailed, tortured, or blown up.

Sick of their terrible trials,  Palestinians elect Hamas, whose leaders make it perfectly clear that they are ready to deal on the basis of the old two-state solution, which of course is the one thing Israel cannot endure. Israel doesn’t want any “peaceful solution” that gives the Palestinians anything more than a few trashed out acres surrounded with barbed wire and tanks, between the Israeli settlements whose goons can murder them pretty much at will.

So here we are, 24 years after Sharon did his best to destroy Lebanon in 1982, and his heirs are doing it all over again. Since they can’t endure the idea of any just settlement for Palestinians, it’s the only thing they know how to do. Call Lebanon a terror-haven and bomb it back to the stone age. Call Gaza a terror-haven and bomb its power plant, first stop on the journey back to the stone age. Bomb Damascus. Bomb Teheran.

Of course they won’t destroy Hezbollah. Every time they kill another Lebanese family, they multiply hatred of Israel and support for Hezbollah. They’ve even unified the parliament in Baghdad, which just voted unanimously —  Sunnis and Shi’ites and Kurds alike —  to deplore Israel’s conduct and to call for a ceasefire.

I hope you’ve enjoyed these little excursions into history, even though history is dangerous, which is why the US press gives it a wide birth. But even without the benefit of historical instruction, a majority of Americans in CNN’s instant poll –- about 55 per cent out of 800,000 as of midday, July 19 — don’t like what Israel is up to.

Dislike is one thing, but at least in the short term it doesn’t help much. Israel’s 1982 attack on Lebanon grew unpopular in the US, after the first few days. But forcing the US to pressure Israel to settle the basic problem takes political courage, and virtually no US politician is prepared to buck the Israel lobby, however many families in Lebanon and Gaza may be sacrificed on the altar of such cowardice. 

Israel’s Netanyahu rejected the proposal as drafted, but George W. Bush approved a modified version of the paper which resurfaced just before he siezed power in 2001. Presumably Bush’s attention concentrated on the following: "This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important strategic advantage in its own right."

Bush was similarly interested in those parts of the document which related to Syria and other Islamic nations being "rolled back" while America simultaneously disengaged itself from interference in the ‘Palestinian problem’. The idea was for the US to withdraw completely from the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and to allow free reign to the Israelis, much as Reagan/Haig had done at the time of the Israeli-condoned Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon in 1982. In addition the "Clean Break" document advocated military pre-emption and aggression versus perceived regional ‘enemies’ of the United States, principally Iraq, Syria, and Iran. Subsequent to the release of the "Clean Break" document in 1997, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld authored a letter to President Clinton calling for military force to be used in the ouster of Saddam Hussein, urging his removal as a primary "aim of American foreign policy".

Essentially the United Stated is now fighting a regional war of aggression, both directly and by its proxy (Israel) in a last-ditch attempt to leverage the events of 911 and preserve US hegemony in an all-out war versus the Arab/Islamic world, including key oil producers.  The US/Israeli axis has been targeting Lebanon, Syria, and Iran for many years, with Saudi Arabia to follow some years down the line. With the eventual fall of the House of Saud the US Pentagon has developed a contingency plan for Saudi de-stabilization. US Pentagon officials recently approved a massive arms sale to the Saudis, but the timeline for Saudi de-stabilization is far advanced; and with Saudi dependency on US weapons, America’s rulers believe Saudi and the UAE will be totally dependent on American replacement parts and support when the time comes for war.  Meanwhile, Lebanon is essential to the re-establishment of the Haifa pipeline, which will finally be  re-opened with a larger diameter pipeline and oil port in Tripoli, regardless of any outcome re the current fighting, and will guarantee Israel’s access to low-sulphur oil, while providing a new major Mediterranean oil port thus lessening reliance on Arabian Gulf ports.

Why act now? The Neo-conservatives have been unhappy with the situation in Lebanon for several years, especially with Hezbollah’s enhanced access to more advanced weaponry. And regardless of the military disaster in Iraq, Neo-cons must push forward with their agenda for crippling the Hezbollah-Iran pact with Syria as an equally important potential power play,  because Syria has obtained more advanced weaponry in recent years, including several SCUD variants with greater accuracy and more potential for striking Israel with more powerful (conventional) warheads; in such circumstances the damage to US and Israeli corporate interests in the region would be enormous. (Example: Intel, Checkpoint, etc)

Neo-conservatives see several benefits in taking this action now.  The Iran-Hezbollah alliance poses a strategic threat to US oil and business interests in the Gulf, and attacking Lebanon now provides more leverage to the US/Israeli pact on pressuring Iran over its nuclear ambitions. In addition, Neo-conservatives believe the Lebanese and Gaza action will neutralize Hezbollah and Hamas for the foreseeable future.  

The US Israeli-pact is gambling on several key (non) developments:

• US-rael believes that no other Arab nations will step in to oppose USraeli aggression in the region.
• US-rael has calculated that the sovereign nations under attack will rapidly fold, as Iraq did.
• US-rael is gambling that the occupation and establishment of buffer zones in Lebanon and the Shebaa Farms will guarantee Israel’s security.
• With Irag as a cautionary example, US-rael believes that the nations under attack will fall in line with Bush regime doctrine, once they are militarily defeated.

Unfortunately all of the above points suffer from deep potential think-tank flaws. Miscalculation on any single point above will spell disaster for the US/Israeli pact, and their future hegemonic plans. For example, at a tactical level, the Haifa pipeline and the port of Tripoli will be a key focal point for insurgent attack. On a strategic level, world opinion will solidify against the United States and Israel, resulting in major consequences for US financial instruments and further loss of leverage in global diplomatic circles with far-reaching consequences, equivalent to foreign-imposed sanctions. Most significantly, Syria and Iran will be formidable military foes to a US military machine already stretched very thin.  And if Hezbollah can successfully resist Israel through a guerilla war of attrition (as it did from 1982 to the year 2000) Israel will find itself severely militarily tested as well; notwithstanding the intervention of the Lebanese Army itself versus Israel as another unknown and mitigating factor.

 

The Neo-conservatives must embark on their final adventure now, because world and public opinion is turning against them, and their potential timeline for action has rapidly diminished.  There are already 500,000 "refugees" in Lebanon (refugees within their own country)  and enormous resentment for the US/Israeli military aggression already taking place. Under Nuremberg and the US War Crimes Act of 1996, both Israel and the United States are already in serious violation of international war tribunal laws. 

 

But in the end it may simply be the US/Israeli miscalculation on the resolve of the Arab/Islamic state to resist them – both ideologically and militarily – that will be the pact’s final undoing. 

– Montoya

In particular they demanded the removal of the plaque that pays tribute to the Irgun, the Jewish resistance branch headed by Menachem Begin, the future Prime Minister, which carried out the attack on July 22, 1946.

The plaque presents as fact the Irgun’s claim that people died because the British ignored warning calls. “For reasons known only to the British, the hotel was not evacuated,” it states.

Mr McDonald and Dr Jenkins denied that the British had been warned, adding that even if they had “this does not absolve those who planted the bomb from responsibility for the deaths”. On Monday city officials agreed to remove the language deemed offensive from the blue sign hanging on the hotel’s gates, though that had not been done shortly before it was unveiled last night.

The controversy over the plaque and the two-day celebration of the bombing, sponsored by Irgun veterans and the right-wing Menachem Begin Heritage Centre, goes to the heart of the debate over the use of political violence in the Middle East. Yesterday Mr Netanyahu argued in a speech celebrating the attack that the Irgun were governed by morals, unlike fighters from groups such as Hamas.

“It’s very important to make the distinction between terror groups and freedom fighters, and between terror action and legitimate military action,” he said. “Imagine that Hamas or Hezbollah would call the military headquarters in Tel Aviv and say, ‘We have placed a bomb and we are asking you to evacuate the area’.”

But the view of the attack was very different in 1946 when The Times branded the Irgun “terrorists in disguise”. Decades later, Irgun veterans are unrepentant. Sarah Agassi, 80, remembers spying in the King David Hotel.

She and a fellow agent posed as a couple. They danced tangos and waltzes, sipped whisky and wine while they cased out the hotel.

On the day her brother and his fellow fighters posed as Arabs delivering milk and brought seven milk churns, each containing 50kg of explosives, into the building. Ms Agassi waited across the street until her brother rushed out. She said that she then made the warning call to the British command in the hotel.

Sitting in the luxurious hotel lobby, she expressed no regret. “We fought for our independence. We thought it was the right way . . . If I had to fight for Israel, I swear even now I would do anything.”

TWO VERSIONS

The original wording:

The Hotel housed the Mandate Secretariat as well as the Army Headquarters. On July 1946 (sic) Irgun fighters at the order of the Hebrew Resistance Movement planted explosives in the basement. Warning phone calls had been made urging the hotel’s occupants to leave immediately. For reasons known only to the British the hotel was not evacuated and after 25 minutes the bombs exploded, and to the Irgun’s regret and dismay 91 persons were killed.

The amended version

. . .Warning phone calls had been made to the hotel, the Palestine Post and the French Consulate, urging the hotel’s occupants to leave immediately.

The hotel was not evacuated, and after 25 minutes the bombs exploded. The entire western wing was destroyed, and to the Irgun’s regret 92 persons were killed.