Elsewhere today (373)
Aljazeera:
UN stormed amid fury over Qana bombing
Sunday 30 July 2006, 13:35 Makka Time, 10:35 GMT
Thousands of protesters have stormed the UN building in Beirut in fury after more than 50 civilians were killed in an Israeli air strike on Qana in southern Lebanon.
Hundreds of demonstrators ran through corridors in the building smashing offices as they vented their anger of the deaths.
Smoke was seen rising from parts of the building as UN security troops struggled to contain crowds.
The anger erupted after an Israeli bombing raid killed at least 54 people, 37 of them children, as they slept in the early hours of Sunday morning.
Lebanese media reported that dozens of people remained trapped inside the three-storey building. Some of them had fled the Israeli bombardment of the Lebanese coastal town of Tyre.
Yasir Abu Hilala, Aljazeera's correspondent in Qana, said aid workers had pulled out only three people alive.
Efforts to get the wounded to hospital have been hampered as all roads around Qana have been destroyed by Israeli air strikes, he said.
The Israeli army has rejected responsibility for the deaths, saying that Hezbollah bore the blame because it used the village as a site for launching rockets.
However Hasan Fadlallah, a Hezbollah MP, told Aljazeera that Israel had committed "a new massacre".
"This massacre will enhance the Lebanese people's determination to endure Israeli aggression and will increase the [Hezbollah] resistance's determination to confront this enemy," he said.
"Israel is mistaken and deceived if it believes it can break the will of the Lebanese people in this way."
New offensive
The attack came as Hezbollah fighters battled Israeli forces making a new thrust into southern Lebanon, Lebanese security sources said on Sunday.
Fighting erupted when Israeli forces crossed the border from the Israeli village of Metula towards the town of Khiam after aircraft and artillery strikes.
The Israeli army said a new wave of Hezbollah rockets hit the Israeli towns of Nahariya, Kiryat Shemona and an area close to Maalot, although no injuries were reported.
An Israeli missile strike hit the main Lebanese border crossing into Syria on Sunday, forcing it to close for the first time since the conflict began more than two weeks ago.
Israeli fighter jets fired three missiles at the Masnaa crossing, which is about 300m beyond a Lebanese customs post. No casualties were reported in the strike.
The passage has been an escape route for tens of thousands of Lebanese fleeing the fighting into Syria after Israel bombed Beirut airport.
Buried bodies
The bodies of eight civilians were found near Tyre after Israeli missile strikes on Saturday, Salam Daher, the Lebanese civil defence chief, said.
Rescue workers say dozens more civilians, including a large number of children, are still buried in the rubble of houses destroyed in attacks around the city.
The Lebanese health minister has said the recovery of bodies in the south could raise the toll from the fighting.
Up to 600 Lebanese people, mainly civilians, are thought to have died in the offensive. Fifty-one Israelis have also been killed since Israel launched its offensive in mid-July after the kidnapping of two of its soldiers and rocket attacks by Hezbollah fighters.
Aljazeera + Agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/6334D333-E2A2-4F66-81E6-42FD108FD8BB.htm
allAfrica: "An Opportunity for
Congo's Ordinary People to Express Themselves"
By Eva Weymuller, Kinshasa
Inter Press Service (Johannesburg) NEWS
July 29, 2006
When voters in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) go to the polls, they will be participating in a general election for which the words "epic" and "historic" seem scarcely to do justice.
It is the first multi-party vote to take place for more than 40 years in a country variously described as two-thirds the size of Western Europe, or as big as the eastern United States.
More than 25 million voters (out of a 60-million strong population) will queue outside some 50,000 polling stations, to choose from 33 presidential candidates - and just over 9,700 parliamentary candidates who are vying for 500 legislative seats. This is to take place under the watchful eye of the world's largest peace-keeping mission, composed of about 17,500 United Nations troops, and several thousand local and international election observers.
Upwards of 400 million dollars have been provided by donors to finance the vote.
The hope is that Sunday's poll will enable the DRC to make a decisive break with a past which saw brutal colonial rule by Belgium until 1960, and corruption on a grand scale under former president Mobutu Sese Seko.
Some four million people subsequently lost their lives in the course of a five-year war waged between Mobutu's successor, Laurent Kabila, and rebels backed by neighbouring Rwanda and Uganda. Control of the DRC's extensive natural resources - the country's blessing and bane - lay at the heart of this conflict.
Even the size of the ballot paper is epic: with so many candidates contesting the poll, it reportedly runs to eight pages. Ballot sheets have been transported to polling stations despite great logistical challenges: decades of poor governance have taken a ruinous toll on the DRC's infrastructure, and the country now has only a few hundred kilometres of tarred roads.
Incumbent head of state Joseph Kabila is favoured to win the presidential election, although his support appears to be principally in the east. The son of Laurent Kabila, he took power in the DRC after his father was assassinated in 2001, and for the past three years has governed at the head of an interim administration established after peace talks that ended the 1998-2002 war.
National television has aired the 35-year-old Kabila's campaign to the far corners of the DRC without according other candidates the same intensity of coverage - this in contravention of electoral guidelines set up by the Southern African Development Community, of which Congo is a member.
"We have denounced Kabila's access to state television It is a problem," said an official from the High Authority of the Media (Haute Authorité de Media, HAM), on condition of anonymity.
International observers have also voiced concern on this matter.
"We have been monitoring television channels and there is a strong bias towards Kabila," said Eric Des Pallieres, deputy chief of the European Union's election observer mission in Congo. "We clearly denounce this."
Kabila leads the Alliance for the Presidential Majority (Alliance pour la majorité présidentielle), a coalition of 30 parties, but is contesting the presidency as an independent candidate.
Ex-rebel leader Jean-Pierre Bemba, who disarmed after the war in exchange for one of four vice-presidential posts, and Pierre Pay Pay - a former cabinet minister - are amongst his strongest challengers.
Bemba, 44, heads the Congolese Liberation Movement (Mouvement de Libération du Congo, MLC, formerly backed by Uganda), and is contesting the presidency on an MLC ticket. The son of a prominent businessman who reportedly made a fortune from coffee plantations, he is popular in the north-western Equator province. But in other parts of the DRC, memories of his alleged actions during the civil war make Bemba anathema.
"Bemba caused too many massacres during Congo's war. He did not work for peace like Kabila," says Nana Makaya, a 29-year-old mother of three in the Congolese capital, Kinshasa.
Even if he succeeds at the poll, Bemba's past may return to haunt him. The Central African Republic (CAR) has referred war crimes allegations against him to the International Criminal Court; Bemba stands accused of carrying out atrocities in the CAR in 2002 after then president Ange-Felix Patassé asked for his assistance in defeating a coup.
The articulate Pierre Pay Pay, 60, has united over 26 political parties in key ethnic electorates across Congo. He heads the Coalition of Congolese Democrats (Coalition des démocrates congolais), which he will represent in the election.
However, his campaign has suffered from his association with Mobutu - under whom he served in various cabinet posts. Pay Pay has also been governor of the central bank, head of state-owned copper mining enterprise Gecamines - and is said to have made a fortune during Mobutu's nationalisation of foreign-owned businesses.
Pay Pay vows to rebuild the economy by promoting foreign and private ownership of inefficient public enterprises. For their part, Kabila and Bemba promise peace and the rebuilding of Congo's decayed infrastructure, if elected president.
While Pay Pay, Bemba and Kabila take leading positions in the presidential race, another candidate is drawing attention, but not necessarily because he is seen has having a great chance of victory at the polls.
Azaria Ruberwa, also a rebel turned vice-president, heads the Congolese Rally for Democracy (Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie, RCD) - formerly backed by Rwanda. He has support from a minority Tutsi community in the east, but is blamed by others for numerous massacres and atrocities during the 1998-2002 war.
Ruberwa's campaign team was stoned on several occasions in the eastern North Kivu province, these instances being amongst several cases of violence to have marred the run up to Sunday's vote.
The former rebel has reportedly pledged not to resort to violence if he loses at the polls. However, many fear the RCD may yet take up arms, supported by renegade general Laurent Nkunda and the thousands of soldiers who are loyal to him - to retain control of North Kivu.
Veteran opposition leader Etienne Tshisekedi is also a force to be reckoned with, even though he is not in the presidential race.
Tshisekedi asked his supporters not to register as voters for Sunday's elections, insisting that he would boycott the polls. He later backtracked to say he would contest the presidency, but only if voter enrollment was re-opened to allow his supporters to register.
The Independent Electoral Commission (Commission Electorale Independente) refused Tshisekedi's demands. Despite these inconsistences, he remains an influential figure, with strong support in the capital and the diamond-rich Kasai provinces, in south-central DRC.
The opposition leader heads the Union for Democracy and Social Progress (Union pour la démocratie et le progrès social) party, which is not participating in the elections either.
"Tshisekedi is the only true president of this country," said David Makaya, a 21-year-old art student in Kinshasa . "It is a shame we will not be able to vote for him."
But Gael Lema, a medical student, seemed more optimistic: "This is an opportunity for Congo's ordinary people to express themselves There is no dictatorship now. We can all dream of leading Congo."
Not just yet, though. Candidates were required to pay 50,000 dollars to contest the presidency - a vast amount in a country where many live on less than a dollar a day, and a teacher can earn just 20 dollars a month.
In the event that none of the presidential candidates wins a majority of the vote Sunday, a run-off between the two with the most ballots will be held Oct. 15. Final results are scheduled to be in by the end of November.
Copyright © 2006 Inter Press Service. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com).
http://allafrica.com/stories/200607300003.html
Clarín: Por lo menos 54 personas murieron
en el sur del Líbano tras un bombardeo israelí
Fue en la aldea de Cana. Todas las víctimas, entre ellas decenas de niños, estaban en un edificio que se derrumbó. La Fuerza Aérea israelí dijo que transcurrieron horas entre el ataque y el derrumbe y que el colapso podría haberse debido a la explosión de un arsenal de Hezbollah. El grupo guerrillero advirtió que "Israel asumirá las consecuencias de la masacre". Por el hecho, fue convocado de urgencia el Consejo de Seguridad de la ONU.
Clarín.com, 30.07.2006
Al menos 54 personas, entre las cuales había 37 niños, murieron hoy tras un bombardeo israelí sobre la aldea de Cana, en el sur de Líbano, según el último balance de las autoridades locales.
Las víctimas estaban dentro de un edificio de tres plantas, ubicado en una de las colinas de la localidad, que según diversas fuentes se derrumbó durante el bombardeo. Sin embargo, la Fuerza Aérea israelí aseguró que entre el ataque y el colapso de la vivienda transcurrieron varias horas y deslizó la sospecha de que el derrumbe haya sido provocado por la explosión de un arsenal de Hezbollah.
"Atacamos y dañamos este edificio entre la medianoche y la una de la mañana (durante la noche del sábado al domingo), pero el anuncio sobre las víctimas civiles se hizo siete horas después (') No sabemos qué había en el edificio ni es seguro que lo sepamos un día. Es posible que el Hezbollah tuviera armas guardadas", sostuvo el general israelí Amir Eshel en conferencia de prensa.
El lugar albergaba además un refugio donde se habían instalado varias familias que huían de otras localidades del sur del Líbano. Uno de los sobrevivientes dijo que había 63 personas en ese lugar cuando se produjo el bombardeo, aunque otras fuentes hablan de 100 personas.
La secretaria de Estado de EE.UU., Condoleezza Rice, de visita en la región, se manifestó "profundamente entristecida" por la pérdida de "vidas inocentes" y suspendió su visita a Beirut a causa de ese ataque. A raiz del ataque y a pedido del primer ministro libanés, Fuad Siniora, y el secretario general de la ONU, Kofi Annan, fue convocada una reunión de emergencia del Consejo de Seguridad.
"Además de las 36 víctimas que ya fueron sacadas de los escombros, hay entre 15 y 20 personas aún bloqueadas bajo las ruinas de un refugio. La mayoría están presuntamente muertas pero hemos escuchado algunos ruidos", declaró Salam Daher, responsable de Defensa Civil para la región de Tiro.
El grupo guerrillero Hezbollah prometió "castigar" a Israel por la "masacre". "Esta masacre bárbara, que supone un giro grave y peligroso en el curso de la guerra puede conducir a reacciones contra el mundo mudo y cómplice que debe asumir sus responsabilidades, porque esta horrible masacre, como otras, no permanecerá impune", afirmó el partido shíita a través de un comunicado.
El ataque contra Cana, que duró dos horas, se produjo en simultáneo con el bombardeo contra una decena de poblados de la región de Tiro, casi todos al sur de esa ciudad costera. Medios locales informaron que esos ataques dejaron por lo menos otros 11 heridos
Mientras, más de 100 cohetes disparados por Hezbollah hacia el norte de Israel dejaron al menos 9 heridos. En los combates que siguen registrándose en el sur del Líbano, hoy murieron tres militantes de la guerrilla proiraní y resultaron heridos al menos cuatro soldados de la infantería israelí.
Copyright 1996-2006 Clarín.com - All rights reserved
http://www.clarin.com/diario/2006/07/30/um/m-01243238.htm
Clarín: El Consejo de Seguridad de la ONU analiza la situación
en El Líbano tras el bombardeo que mató a 54 civiles
Al abrir el encuentro, convocado de urgencia, el secretario general Kofi Annan le pidió al organismo que condene el ataque en la aldea de Cana. Luego, el embajador de Israel responsabilizó a Hezbollah por el "trágico accidente". "Si no estuviera, esto no habría ocurrido", dijo.
Clarín.com, 30.07.2006
El Consejo de Seguridad de Naciones Unidas comenzó a discutir hoy en una reunión de emergencia la situación en El Líbano, luego del bombardeo israelí en Cana, al sur del país. El encuentro, que había sido reclamado por el primer ministro libanés Fuad Siniora, fue convocado por un pedido expreso del secretario general de la ONU Kofi Annan.
En su discurso inaugural, Annan le pidió al organismo que condene el ataque contra la aldea de Gana, donde murieron más de 30 niños, y todos aquellos bombardeos donde se vean involucrados civiles. "Debemos condenar esta acción en los términos más enérgicos y les reclamo que hagan lo mismo", dijo ante los representantes de 15 países.
Asimismo, solicitó un inmediato cese del fuego y subrayó que "hay que actuar ahora". "Me siento profundamente decepcionado de que mis llamamientos para un inmediato cese de las hostilidades no fueran atendidos", se sinceró.
Según las cifras proporcionadas por Annan, 54 personas murieron en el bombardeo, entre ellas 37 niños.
Antes, el funcionario le envió sus condolencias a los familiares de las víctimas y lamentó la protesta que tuvo lugar en la oficinas de la ONU en Beirut, donde tres personas resultaron heridas. Además, dijo que "temen" otras demostraciones similares en la región. Por ese motivo, le pidió a las autoridades que "cuiden" las embajadas de Naciones Unidas alrededor del mundo.
En tanto, el embajador de Israel ante la ONU, Dan Gillerman, responsabilizó al grupo terrorista Hezbollah por el "trágico accidente", donde murieron al menos 54 personas. "Son las victimas de Hezbollah y del terror", manifestó. Y agregó: "Si no estuviera Hezbollah, esto no hubiera pasado".
Antes que comience la reunión, Francia hizo circular entre los miembros del Consejo un proyecto de resolución solicitando el cese inmediato de las hostilidades en Medio Oriente, según adelantó la misión francesa ante la ONU.
La iniciativa detalla una serie de medidas que se deberían tomar para lograr un cese del fuego duradero, incluido el despliegue de una fuerza internacional, indicaron fuentes de la delegación francesa. En texto "retoma las ideas que figuraban en el memorando difundido por el ministro francés de Relaciones Exteriores, Philippe Douste-Blazy, durante la reunión ministerial de Roma", confirmó el embajador francés ante la ONU.
Entre las condiciones mencionadas para llegar a un acuerdo el proyecto también señala "la liberación de los soldados israelíes secuestrados y la solución de la cuestión de los prisioneros libaneses detenidos en Israel", así como "la plena aplicación de los acuerdos de Taif y las resoluciones 1559 y 1680 de la ONU" que prevén el desarme de todas las milicias en El Líbano.
Copyright 1996-2006 Clarín.com - All rights reserved
http://www.clarin.com/diario/2006/07/30/um/m-01243258.htm
GlobalResearch:
Israelis Accused of Using Illegal Weapons
By Dahr Jamail
Inter Press Service
July 29, 2006
BEIRUT, Jul 28 (IPS) - The Israeli military is using illegal weapons against civilians in southern Lebanon, according to several reports.*
U.S.-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said this week that Israel had used cluster bombs in civilian areas of Lebanon, in clear violation of international law.
The group said cluster bombs killed a civilian and injured 12 others in Blida village in the south of Lebanon last week. Cluster bombs disperse hundreds of tiny shrapnel-filled 'bomblets' that are "unacceptably inaccurate and unreliable", and should not be used in civilian areas, HRW said.
Lebanese doctors, aid workers and refugees are reporting that the Israeli military has used the incendiary weapon white phosphorous in civilian areas, also in violation of the Geneva Conventions.
Dr. Bachir el-Sham at the Complex Hospital in Sidon in the south of Lebanon told IPS in a telephone interview that he has received civilian patients injured by incendiary weapons.
"We are seeing people that are all blackened, with charred flesh that is not burned by normal bombs and flames," he said. "I am sure this is a special bomb. They are using incendiary weapons on civilians in the south. We are seeing these patients."
The doctor also told IPS that the Israelis are again using suction bombs, which they used heavily during the Lebanese civil war.
"They are using suction bombs that implode our buildings," he added, "With implosive bombs...instead of the glass blasted out, it is inside the building. These kill everyone inside the building. There are rarely survivors when they use these bombs."
Bilal Masri, assistant director of the Beirut Government University Hospital (BGUH) had told IPS earlier that "many of the injured in the south are suffering from the impact of incendiary white phosphorous."
Wafaa el-Yassir, Beirut representative of the non-governmental organisation Norwegian People's Aid, told IPS that several of her relief workers in the south had reported assisting people hit by incendiary weapons.
"The most important thing is that we have an investigation for the Israelis' use of banned weapons," she said. "They have used phosphorous in Nabatiyeh and cluster bombs in Dahaya district of Beirut."
She also told IPS that a doctor at the Bint Jbail hospital, in the small city near the southern border of Lebanon where much of the fierce fighting has taken place, had told her agency that he was certain that white phosphorous had been used against civilians there.
Zacharia al-Amedin, an 18-year-old refugee being treated for lacerations from bomb shrapnel told IPS, "I was in a village near Tyre, and the Israelis were dropping incendiary bombs all around us, even though there weren't fighters near us. So many civilians were hit by these weapons."
The Lebanese ministry of interior has officially said that the Israeli military has used this weapon.
President Emile Lahoud said recently on French radio: "According to the Geneva Conventions, when they use phosphorous bombs and laser bombs, is that allowed against civilians and children?"
An Israeli military spokesman told Reuters news agency, "Everything the Israeli defence forces are using is legitimate." International law requires that the military distinguish between combatants and civilians. Incendiary weapons and cluster bombs when used in areas where there may be civilians contravene international humanitarian law.
"We are a country of humans, not animals," Sham told IPS. "Real people are dying here. You must ask this of the world, to please help."
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
© Copyright Dahr Jamail, Inter Press Service, 2006
© Copyright 2005 GlobalResearch.ca
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?
context=viewArticle&code=JAM20060729&articleId=2853
Harper’s Magazine:
A Cartoon
Posted on Friday, July 28, 2006. By Mr. Fish
This is A Cartoon, a cartoon by Mr. Fish, published Friday, July 28, 2006. It is part of The Cartoons of Mr. Fish: a Selection, which is part of Features, which is part of Harpers.org.
Written By
Fish, Mr.
Permanent URL
http://harpers.org/AntiSemitic-20060728.html
Information Clearing House:
Lebanon's Children and Israeli Phosphorous Bombs
By Randa Takieddin
07/27/06 "Al-Hayat" - Did the American people see on CNN the child whose face was burnt by Israeli phosphorous bombs in Lebanon? Did they hear him screaming in pain at Sidon Hospital, with his mother falling to pieces in agony beside him because of the injury he sustained from the terrible bombs? How can the American people accept their elected President George W. Bush's rejection of a ceasefire?
The insanity of the Jewish State that is brutally attacking families and children in South Lebanon and in Beirut's southern suburb has almost become an everyday feature in the Palestinian territories.
Can the disaster that has befallen Lebanon, in which fathers, mothers and children have lost their homes and relatives, be a solution for the US administration and the Jewish State?
Lebanon is grateful for the millions-of-dollars worth of humanitarian aid from the US, but it will never forget that the US administration gave Israel the green light to continue with the shelling and destruction in this dirty war.
The US administration claims that it had asked Israel not to hit Lebanon's infrastructure. But Israel has indiscriminately destroyed everything: airports, bridges, seaports, roads and houses. Israel's aim is to devastate and kill.
In Lebanon, as in the Palestinian territories, Israel's soldiers, the grandsons of the victims of the Holocaust, have demonstrated their inclination to use terrifying weapons, such as phosphorus bombs. This is disgraceful for a people who had suffered from torture and brutality.
Whatever the outcome of Israel's war on Lebanon, the Jewish State has shown that it knows no solution except the use of force. This solution leads to more violence, war and hatred.
Nobody in the world knows what the outcome of the balance of power in the world will be. Nobody knows whether Israel has weakened Hezbollah's military capabilities or defeated it. Either way, the major victim is the Lebanese people, who are now certain that they are paying for the war of others on their soil. The US and its ally, Israel, are fighting Iran and Syria on Lebanese soil, and are imposing a blockade on Lebanon, while the world's superpower claims that it will ask Israel to lift it.
Israel caused the closure Rafik Hariri Airport in Beirut under the pretext that Hezbollah uses it for bringing in arms. Many Lebanese people therefore went to Damascus, the only outlet to the outside world. Israel shelled all the Lebanese seaports. Meanwhile, Hezbollah's rockets continuously fall on several Israeli cities. The US administration claims it wants to help Prime Minister Fouad Seniora's government. But how? By maintaining the blockade on Lebanon, or by continuing with the dirty war?
Hezbollah, on the other hand, is held responsible for what it has dragged Lebanon into. Israel is a well-known enemy, and its tactics in Palestine are obvious. Does Hezbollah have the right to bring destruction, misery, displacement and disaster to Lebanon and its people? Does it have the right to turn Lebanese soil into a battlefield for others? Can this be called resistance? However, the answers to these questions have been put back until the end of the war.
The best solution is that Resolution 1559 be implemented of Lebanon's free will and that the State regain its role and spread its control over all its territory. Lebanon needs a national army that will not drag it into a venture that may end its existence.
©2004 Media Communications Group
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14208.htm
Mail & Guardian:
My life in Gaza
Mona El-Farra
28 July 2006
The irony is almost beyond belief. Since the capture of an Israeli soldier, the Gaza Strip has been subjected to a large-scale military operation, what Israel calls “Summer Rain”. Because Israel bombed the power plant, and the area needs electricity to pump water, most of Gaza now has almost no access to drinking water. In the heat of summer, rain would be a blessing far more welcome than the ongoing bombings.
I am already starting to lose track of days and nights, of how many bombs have dropped. Since the main power plant was destroyed, we have had to live with no electricity. What we do get is patchy, and barely enough to recharge our cellphones and laptops so that we do not lose all touch with each other and with the outside world.
As a physician, I fear for our patients. Twenty-two hospitals have no electricity. They have to rely on generators, but the generators need fuel. We have enough fuel to last a few days at most, because the borders are sealed so no fuel can get in. The shortage of power threatens the lives of patients on life-support machines and children in intensive care, as well as renal dialysis patients and others. Hundreds of operations have been postponed. The pharmacies were already nearly empty because of Israeli border closures and the cut-off of international aid. What little supplies were left have gone bad in the absence of refrigeration.
Food too is spoiling without refrigeration, and supplies are low. West Bank farmers threw away truckloads of spoiled fruit after sitting for days and then being denied Israeli permission to enter Gaza. Children grow hungry as we watch the food that could nourish them thrown into the garbage instead. More than 30 000 children suffer from malnutrition, and this number will increase as diarrhoea spreads because of the limited supply of clean water and food contamination.
As a mother, I fear for the children. I see the effects of the relentless sonic booms and artillery shelling on my 13-year-old daughter. She is restless, panicked and afraid to go out, yet frustrated because she can’t see her friends. When Israeli fighter planes fly by day and night, the sound is terrifying. My daughter usually jumps into bed with me, shivering with fear. Then both of us end up crouching on the floor. My heart races, yet I try to pacify my daughter, to make her feel safe. But when the bombs sound, I flinch and scream. My daughter feels my fear and knows that we need to pacify each other. I am a doctor, a mature, middle-aged woman, but with the sonic booming, I become hysterical.
This aggression will leave psychological scars on the children for years to come. Instilling fear, anger and loss in them will not bring peace and security to Israelis. Ostensibly, this bombing campaign started because of the soldier’s capture. To the outside world it might seem like an easy decision for Palestinians: let the soldier go, and the siege will end. Yet for Gazans, even in the face of this brutal violence, another decision comes, not with ease, but with resolve. He is one soldier who was captured in a military operation.
Today, several hundred Palestinian children and women are locked in Israeli prisons. They deserve their freedom no less than he does. Their families mourn their absence no less than his family does. So while Gazans endure Israel’s rainstorm, most want the soldier held -- not harmed -- until the women and children are released.
Most Gazans also believe Israel’s latest assault was pre-planned, that the soldier’s capture is merely a trigger. Israel dropped thousands of shells on Gaza, killing women, children and old people, long before his capture. This time, Israel attacked Gaza within hours of a national consensus accord signed by Fatah and Hamas, which could have led to negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis. That would have pushed Israel to give up control of Palestinian land and resources. Gazans believe that the goal of Israel’s military campaign is the destruction of both our elected government and our infrastructure, and with it our will to secure our national rights.
Though we do not now live with ease, we live with resolve. Until the world pressures Israel to recognise our rights in our land, and to pursue a peace that brings freedom and security to Israelis and Palestinians, we both will continue to pay the price.
© Mona El-Farra
Mona El-Farra is a human rights advocate in the Gaza Strip
All material copyright Mail&Guardian.
http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?
articleid=279062&area=/insight/insight__international/#
Mother Jones:
The Middle East and the Barbarism of War from the Air
Aerial warfare has always been essentially directed against civilians
Tom Engelhardt
July 28 , 2006
Barbarism seems an obvious enough category. Ordinarily in our world, the barbarians are them. They act in ways that seem unimaginably primitive and brutal to us. For instance, they kidnap or capture someone, American or Iraqi, and cut off his head. Now, isn't that the definition of barbaric? Who does that anymore? The eighth century, or maybe the word "medieval" -? anyway, some brutal past time - comes to mind immediately, and to the mass mind of our media even faster.
Similarly, to jump a little closer to modernity, they strap grenades, plastic explosives, bombs of various ingenious sorts fashioned in home labs, with nails or other bits of sharp metal added in to create instant shrapnel meant to rend human flesh, to maim and kill. Then they approach a target - an Israeli bus filled with civilians and perhaps some soldiers, a pizza parlor in Jerusalem, a gathering of Shiite or Sunni worshippers at or near a mosque in Iraq or Pakistan, or of unemployed potential police or army recruits in Ramadi or Baghdad, or of shoppers in an Iraqi market somewhere in that country, or perhaps a foreigner on the streets of Kabul and they blow themselves up. Or they arm backpacks or bags and step onto trains in London, Madrid, Mumbai, and set them off.
Or, to up the technology and modernity a bit, they wire a car to explode, put a jihadist in the driver's seat, and drive it into - well, this is now common enough that you can pick your target. Or perhaps they audaciously hijack four just-fuelled jets filled with passengers and run two of them into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon, and another into a field in Pennsylvania. This is, of course, the very definition of barbaric.
Now, let's jump a step further into our age of technological destruction, becoming less face-to-face, more impersonal, without, in the end, changing things that much. They send rockets from southern Lebanon (or even cruder ones from the Gaza Strip) against Israeli towns and cities. These rockets can only vaguely be aimed. Some can be brought into the general vicinity of an inhabited area; others, more advanced, into specific urban neighborhoods many tens of miles away - and then they detonate, killing whoever is in the vicinity, which normally means civilians just living their lives, even, in one recent Hezbollah volley aimed at Nazareth, two Israeli Arab children. In this process, thousands of Israelis have been temporarily driven from their homes.
In the case of rockets by the hundreds lofted into Israel by an armed, organized militia, meant to terrorize and harm civilian populations, these are undoubtedly war crimes. Above all, they represent a kind of barbarism that - with the possible exception of some of those advanced Hezbollah rockets - feels primitive to us. Despite the explosives, cars, planes, all so basic to our modern way of life, such acts still seem redolent of ancient, less civilized times when people did especially cruel things to each other face to face.
The Religion of Air Power
That's them. But what about us? On our we/they planet, most groups don't consider themselves barbarians. Nonetheless, we have largely achieved non-barbaric status in an interesting way - by removing the most essential aspect of the American (and, right now, Israeli) way of war from the category of the barbaric. I'm talking, of course, about air power, about raining destruction down on the earth from the skies, and about the belief - so common, so long-lasting, so deep-seated - that bombing others, including civilian populations, is a "strategic" thing to do; that air power can, in relatively swift measure, break the "will" not just of the enemy, but of that enemy's society; and that such a way of war is the royal path to victory.
This set of beliefs was common to air-power advocates even before modern air war had been tested, and repeated unsuccessful attempts to put these convictions into practice have never really shaken - not for long anyway ? what is essentially a war-making religion. The result has been the development of the most barbaric style of warfare imaginable, one that has seldom succeeded in breaking any societal will, though it has destroyed innumerable bodies, lives, stretches of countryside, villages, towns, and cities.
Even today, we find Israeli military strategists saying things that could have been put in the mouths of their air-power-loving predecessors endless decades ago. The New York Times' Steven Erlanger, for instance, recently quoted an unnamed "senior Israeli commander" this way: "He predicted that Israel would stick largely to air power for now? ?A ground maneuver won't solve the problem of the long-range missiles,' he said. ?The problem is the will to launch. We have to break the will of Hezbollah?'" Don't hold your breath is the first lesson history teaches on this particular assessment of the powers of air war; the second is that, a decade from now, some other "senior commander" in some other country will be saying the same thing, word for word.
When it comes to brutality, the fact is that ancient times have gotten a bad rap. Nothing in history was more brutal than the last century's style of war-making - than those two world wars with their air armadas, backed by the most advanced industrial systems on the planet. Powerful countries then bent every elbow, every brain, to support the destruction of other human beings en masse, not to speak of the Holocaust (which was assembly-line warfare in another form), and the various colonial and Cold War campaigns that went on in the Third World from the 1940s on; which, in places like Korea and Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, substituted the devastation of air power locally for a war between the two superpowers which might have employed the mightiest air weaponry of all to scour the Earth.
It may be that the human capacity for brutality, for barbarism, hasn't changed much since the eighth century, but the industrial revolution - and in particular the rise of the airplane - opened up new landscapes to brutality; while the view from behind the gun-sight, then the bomb-sight, and finally the missile-sight slowly widened until all of humanity was taken in. From the lofty, godlike vantage point of the strategic as well as the literal heavens, the military and the civilian began to blur on the ground. Soldiers and citizens, conscripts and refugees alike, became nothing but tiny, indistinguishable hordes of ants, or nothing at all but the structures that housed them, or even just concepts, indistinguishable one from the other.
One Plane, One Bomb
As far as anyone knows, the first bomb was dropped by hand over the Italian colony of Libya. According to Sven Lindqvist's A History of Bombing, one Lieutenant Giulio Cavotti "leaned out of his delicate monoplane and dropped the bomb - a Danish Haasen hand grenade - on the North African oasis Tagiura, near Tripoli. Several moments later, he attacked the oasis Ain Zara. Four bombs in total, each weighing two kilos, were dropped during this first air attack."
That was 1911 and the damage was minimal. Only thirty-four years later, vast armadas of B-17s and B-29s were taking off, up to a thousand planes at a time, to bomb Germany and Japan. In the case of Tokyo - then constructed almost totally out of highly flammable materials - a single raid carrying incendiary bombs and napalm that began just after midnight on March 10, 1945 proved capable of incinerating or killing at least 90,000 people, possibly many more, from such a height that the dead could not be seen (though the stench of burning flesh carried up to the planes). The first American planes to arrive over the city, wrote historian Michael Sherry in his book, The Rise of American Air Power, "carved out an X of flames across one of the world's most densely packed residential districts; followers fed and broadened it for some three hours thereafter."
What descended from the skies, as James Carroll puts it in his new book, House of War, was "1,665 tons of pure fire? the most efficient and deliberate act of arson in history. The consequent firestorm obliterated fifteen square miles, which included both residential and industrial areas. Fires raged for four days." It was the bonfire of bonfires and not a single American plane was shot down.
On August 6, 1945, all the power of that vast air armada was again reduced to a single plane, the Enola Gay, and a single bomb, "Little Boy," dropped near a single bridge in a single city, Hiroshima, which in a single moment of a sort never before experienced on the planet did what it had taken 300 B-29s and many hours to do to Tokyo. In those two cities - as well as Dresden and other German and Japanese cities subjected to "strategic bombing" - the dead (perhaps 900,000 in Japan and 600,000 in Germany) were invariably preponderantly civilian, and far too distant to be seen by plane crews often dropping their bomb loads in the dark of night, giving the scene below the look of Hell on Earth.
So 1911: one plane, one bomb. 1945: one plane, one bomb - but this time at least 120,000 dead, possibly many more. Two bookmarks less than four decades apart on the first chapter of a history of the invention of a new kind of warfare, a new kind of barbarism that, by now, is the way we expect war to be made, a way that no longer strikes us as barbaric at all. This wasn't always the case.
The Shock of the New
When military air power was in its infancy and silent films still ruled the movie theaters, the first air-war films presented pilots as knights of the heavens, engaging in courageous, chivalric, one-on-one combat in the skies. As that image reflects, in the wake of the meat-grinder of trench warfare in World War I, the medieval actually seemed far less brutal, a time much preferable to those years in which young men had died by their hundreds of thousands, anonymously, from machine guns, artillery, poison gas, all the lovely inventions of industrial civilization, ground into the mud of no-man's-land, often without managing to move their lines or the enemy's more than a few hundred yards.
The image of chivalric knights in planes jousting in the skies slowly disappeared from American screens, as after the 1950s would, by and large, air power itself even as the war film went on (and on and on). It can last be found perhaps in the film Top Gun; in old Peanuts comics in which Snoopy remains forever the Red Baron; and, of course, post-Star Wars, in the fantasy realm of outer space where Jedi Knights took up lethal sky-jousting in the late 1970s, X-wing fighter to X-wing fighter, and in zillions of video games to follow. In the meantime, the one-way air slaughter in South Vietnam would be largely left out of the burst of Vietnam films that would start hitting the screen from the late 1970s on.
In the real, off-screen world, that courtly medieval image of air power disappeared fast indeed. As World War II came ever closer and it became more apparent what air power was best at - what would now be called "collateral damage" - the shock set in. When civilians were first purposely targeted and bombed in the industrializing world rather than in colonies like Iraq, the act was initially widely condemned as inhuman by a startled world.
People were horrified when, during the Spanish Civil War in 1937, Hitler's Condor Legion and planes from fascist Italy repeatedly bombed the Basque town of Guernica, engulfing most of its buildings in a firestorm that killed hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians. If you want to get a sense of the power of that act to shock then, view Picasso's famous painting of protest done almost immediately in response. (When Secretary of State Colin Powell went to the UN in February 2003 to deliver his now infamous speech explaining what we supposedly knew about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, UN officials - possibly at the request of the Bush administration - covered over a tapestry of the painting that happened to be positioned where Powell would have to pass on his way to deliver his speech and where press comments would be offered afterwards.)
Later in 1937, as the Japanese began their campaign to conquer China, they bombed a number of Chinese cities. A single shot of a Chinese baby wailing amid the ruins, published in Life magazine, was enough to horrify Americans (even though the actual photo may have been doctored). Air power was then seen as nothing but a new kind of barbarism. According to historian Sherry, "In 1937 and 1938, [President Roosevelt] had the State Department condemn Japanese bombing of civilians in China as ?barbarous' violations of the ?elementary principles' of modern morality." Meanwhile, observers checking out what effect the bombing of civilians had on the "will" of society offered nothing but bad news to the strategists of air power. As Sherry writes:
"In the Saturday Evening Post, an American army officer observed that bombing had proven ?disappointing to the theorists of peacetime.' When Franco's rebels bombed Madrid, ?Did the Madrilenos sue for peace? No, they shook futile fists at the murderers in the sky and muttered, ?Swine.' His conclusion: ?Terrorism from the air has been tried and found wanting. Bombing, far from softening the civil will, hardens it.'"
Already similar things are being written about the Lebanese, though, in our media, terms like "barbarism" and "terrorism" are unlikely to be applied to Israel's war from the heavens. New York Times correspondent Sabrina Tavernise, for instance, reported the following from the site of a destroyed apartment building in the bomb-shocked southern Lebanese port of Tyre:
"Whatever the target, the result was an emotional outpouring in support of Hezbollah. Standing near a cluster of dangling electrical wires, a group of men began to chant. ?By our blood and our soul, we'll fight for you, Nasrallah!' they said, referring to Hezbollah's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah. In a foggy double image, another small group chanted the same thing, as if answering, on the other side of the smoke."
World War II began with the German bombing of Warsaw. On September 9, 1939, according to Carroll, President Roosevelt "beseeched the war leaders on both sides to ?under no circumstances undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations of unfortified cities.'" Then came, the terror-bombing of Rotterdam and Hitler's Blitz against England in which tens of thousands of British civilians died and many more were displaced, each event proving but another systemic shock to what was left of global opinion, another unimaginable act by the planet's reigning barbarians.
British civilians, of course, still retain a deserved reputation for the stiff-upper-lip-style bravery with which they comported themselves in the face of a merciless German air offensive against their cities that knew no bounds. No wills were broken there, nor would they be in Russia (where, in 1942, perhaps 40,000 were killed in German air attacks on the city of Stalingrad alone) - any more than they would be in Germany by the far more massive Allied air offensive against the German population.
All of this, of course, came before it was clear that the United States could design and churn out planes faster, in greater numbers, and with more fire power than any country on the planet and then wield air power far more massively and brutally than anyone had previously been capable of doing. That was before the U.S. and Britain decided to fight fire with fire by blitz- and terror-bombing Germany and Japan. (The U.S. moved more slowly and awkwardly than the British from "precision bombing" against targets like factories producing military equipment or oil-storage depots - campaigns that largely failed - to "area bombing" that was simply meant to annihilate vast numbers of civilians and destroy cities. But move American strategists did.) That was before Dresden and Hiroshima; before Pyongyang, along with much of the Korean peninsula, was reduced to rubble from the air in the Korean War; before the Plaine des Jarres was bombed back to the Stone Age in Laos in the late 1960s and early 1970s, before the B-52s were sent against the cities of Hanoi and Haiphong in the terror-bombing of Christmas 1972 to wring concessions out of the North Vietnamese at the peace table in Paris; before the first President Bush ended the first Gulf War with a "turkey shoot" on the "highway of death" as Saddam Hussein's largely conscript military fled Kuwait City in whatever vehicles were at hand; before we bombed the rubble in Afghanistan into further rubble in 2001, and before we shock-and awed Baghdad in 2003.
Taking the Sting Out of Air War
Somewhere in this process, a new language to describe air war began to develop - after, in the Vietnam era, the first "smart bombs" and "precision-guided weapons" came on line. From then on, air attacks would, for instance, be termed "surgical" and civilian casualties dismissed as but "collateral damage." All of this helped removed the sting of barbarity from the form of war we had chosen to make our own (unless, of course, you happened to be one of those "collateral" people under those "surgical" strikes). Just consider, for a moment, that, with the advent of the first Gulf War, air power - as it was being applied - essentially became entertainment, a Disney-style, son-et-lumière spectacular over Baghdad to be watched in real time on television by a population of non-combatants from thousands of miles away.
With that same war, the Pentagon started calling press briefings and screening nose-cone photography, essentially little Iraqi snuff films, in which you actually looked through the precision-guided bomb or missile-sights yourself, found your target, and followed that missile or smart bomb right down to its explosive impact. If you were lucky, the Pentagon even let you check out the after-mission damage assessments. These films were so nifty, so like the high-tech video-game experience just then coming into being, that they were used by the Pentagon as reputation enhancers. From then on, Pentagon officials not only described their air weaponry as "surgical" in its abilities, but showed you the "surgery" (just as the Israelis have been doing with their footage of "precision" attacks in Lebanon). What you didn't see, of course, was the "collateral damage" which, when the Iraqis put it on-screen, was promptly dismissed as so much propaganda.
And yet this new form of air war had managed to move far indeed from the image of the knightly joust, from the sense, in fact, of battle at all. In those years, except over the far north of Korea during the Korean War or over North Vietnam and some parts of South Vietnam, American pilots, unless in helicopters, went into action (as Israeli ones do today) knowing that the dangers to them were usually minimal - or, as over that Iraqi highway of death nonexistent. War from the air was in the process of becoming a one-way street of destruction.
At an extreme, with the arrival of fleets of Hellfire-missile-armed unmanned Predator drones over Iraq, the "warrior" would suddenly find himself seven thousand miles away at Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas, delivering "precision" strikes that almost always, somehow, managed to kill collaterally. In such cases, war and screen war have indeed merged.
This kind of war has the allure, from a military point of view, of ever less casualties on one end in return for ever more on the other. It must also instill a feeling of bloodless, godlike control over those enemy "ants" (until, of course, things begin to go wrong, as they always do) as well as a sense that the world can truly be "remade" from the air, by remote control, and at a great remove. This has to be a powerful, even a transporting fantasy for strategists, however regularly it may be denied by history.
Despite the cleansed language of air war, and no matter how good the targeting intelligence or smart the bomb (neither of which can be counted on), civilians who make the mistake of simply being alive and going about their daily business die in profusion whenever war descends from the heavens. This is the deepest reality of war today.
Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon? [Fill in the Blank]
In fact, the process of removing air power from the ranks of the barbaric, of making it, if not glorious (as in those visually startling moments when Baghdad was shock-and-awed), then completely humdrum, and so of no note whatsoever, has been remarkably successful in our world. In fact, we have loosed our air power regularly on the countryside of Afghanistan, and especially on rebellious urban areas of Iraq in "targeted" and "precise" attacks on insurgent concentrations and "al-Qaeda safe houses" (as well as in more wholesale assaults on the old city of Najaf and on the city of Fallujah) largely without comment or criticism. In the process, significant parts of two cities in a country we occupied and supposedly "liberated," were reduced to rubble and everywhere, civilians, not to speak of whole wedding parties, were blown away without our media paying much attention at all.
Our various air campaigns - our signature way of war - have hardly been noticed, and almost never focused on, by the large numbers of journalists embedded with U.S. forces or in one way or another on-the-ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. Remember, we're talking here about the dropping of up to 2,000 pound bombs regularly, over years, often in urban areas. Just imagine, if you live in a reasonably densely populated area, what it might mean collaterally to have such bombs or missiles hit your block or neighborhood, no matter how "accurate" their aim.
Until Seymour Hersh wrote a piece from Washington last November for the New Yorker, entitled "Up in the Air," our reporters had, with rare exceptions, simply refused to look up; and despite a flurry of attention then, to this day, our continuing air campaigns are largely ignored. Yet here is an Air Force summary of just a single, nondescript day of operations in Iraq, one of hundreds and hundreds of such days, some far more intense, since we invaded that country: "In total, coalition aircraft flew 46 close-air support missions for Operation Iraqi Freedom. These missions included support to coalition troops, infrastructure protection, reconstruction activities and operations to deter and disrupt terrorist activities."
And here's the summary of the same day in Afghanistan: "In total, coalition aircraft flew 32 close-air support missions in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. These missions included support to coalition and Afghan troops, reconstruction activities and route patrols." Note that, in Afghanistan, as the situation has worsened militarily and politically, the old Vietnam-era B-52s, the carpet-bombers of that war, have been called back into action, again without significant attention here.
Now, with the fervent backing of the Bush administration, another country is being "remade" from the air - in this case, Lebanon. With the highest-tech American precision-guided and bunker-busting bombs, the Israelis have been launching air strike after strike, thousands of them, in that country. They have hit an international airport, the nation's largest milk factories; a major food factory; aid convoys; Red Cross ambulances; a UN observer post; a power plant; apartment complexes; villages because they house or support the enemy; branches of banks because they might facilitate Hezbollah finances; the telecommunications system because of the messages that might pass along it; highways because they might transport weapons to the enemy; bridges because they might be crossed by those transporting weapons; a lighthouse in Beirut harbor for reasons unknown; trucks because they might be transporting those weapons (though they might also be transporting vegetables); families who just happen to be jammed into cars or minivans fleeing at the urging of the attackers who have turned at least 20% of all Lebanese (and probably many more) into refugees, while creating a "landscape of death" (in the phrase of the superb Washington Post reporter Anthony Shadid) in the southern part of the country. In this process, civilian casualties have mounted steadily - assumedly far beyond the figure of just over 400 now regularly being cited in our press, because Lebanon has no way to search the rubble of its bombed buildings for the dead; nor, right now, the time and ability to do an accurate count of those who died more or less in the open.
And yet, of course, the "will" of the enemy is not broken and, among Israel's leaders and its citizens, frustration mounts; so threats of more and worse are made and worse weapons are brought into play; and wider targeting fields are opened up; and what might faintly pass for "precision bombing" is increasingly abandoned for the equivalent of "area bombing." And the full support system - which is simply society - for the movement in question becomes the "will" that must be broken; and in this process, what we call "collateral damage" is moved, by the essential barbaric logic of air power, front and center, directly into the crosshairs.
Already Israeli Prime Minister Olmert is "vowing" to use the "most severe measures" to end Hezbollah rocket attacks - and in the context of the present air assault that is a frightening threat. All this because, as in Iraq, as elsewhere, air power has once again run up against another kind of power, a fierce people power (quite capable of its own barbarities) that, over the decades, the bomb and missile has proved frustratingly incapable of dismantling or wiping out. Already, as the Guardian's Ian Black points out, "The original objective of ?breaking Hizbullah' has been quietly watered down to ?weakening Hizbullah.'"
In such a war, with such an enemy, the normal statistics of military victory may add up only to defeat, a further frustration that only tends to ratchet the destruction higher over time. Adam Shatz put this well recently in the Nation when he wrote:
"[Hezbollah leader] Nasrallah is under no illusions that his small guerrilla movement can defeat the Israeli Army. But he can lose militarily and still score a political victory, particularly if the Israelis continue visiting suffering on Lebanon, whose government, as they well know, is powerless to control Hezbollah. Nasrallah, whom the Israelis attempted to assassinate on July 19 with a twenty-three-ton bomb attack on an alleged Hezbollah bunker, is doubtless aware that he may share the fate of his predecessor, Abbas Musawi, who was killed in an Israeli helicopter gunship attack in 1992. But Hezbollah outlived Musawi and grew exponentially, thanks in part to its followers' passion for martyrdom. To some, Nasrallah's raid may look like a death wish. But it is almost impossible to defeat someone who has no fear of death."
As the Israelis are rediscovering - though, by now, you'd think that military planners with half a brain wouldn't have to destroy a country to do so - that it is impossible to "surgically" separate a movement and its supporters from the air. When you try, you invariably do the opposite; fusing them ever more closely, while creating an even larger, ever angrier base for the movement whose essence is, in any case, never literal geography, never simply a set of villages or bunkers or military supplies to be taken and destroyed.
Degrading Behavior
Someday someone will take up the grim study of the cleansing language of air power. Every air war, it seems, now has its new words meant to take the sting out of its essential barbarism. In the case of the Israeli air assault on Lebanon, the term - old in the military world but never before so widely adopted in such a commonplace way - is "degrading," not as at Abu Ghraib, but as in "to impair in physical structure or function." It was once a technical military term; in this round of air war, however, it is being used to cover a range of sins.
Try Googling the term. It turns out to be almost literally everywhere. It can be found in just about any article on Israel's air war, used in this fashion: "CBS News senior White House correspondent Bill Plante reports that around the world the U.S.' opposition to a cease-fire is viewed as the U.S. giving Israel a ?green-light' to degrade the military capability of Hezbollah." Or in a lead in a New York Times piece this way: "The outlines of an American-Israeli consensus began to emerge Tuesday in which Israel would continue to bombard Lebanon for about another week to degrade Hezbollah's capabilities, officials of the two countries said." Or more generally, as in a Washington Post piece, in this fashion: "In the administration's view, the new conflict is not just a crisis to be managed. It is also an opportunity to seriously degrade a big threat in the region, just as Bush believes he is doing in Iraq." Or as Henry A. Crumpton, the State Department's coordinator for counterterrorism, wielded it: "It's not just about the missiles and launchers? [I]t's about the roads and transport, the ability to command and control. All that is being degraded. But it's going to take a long time. I don't believe this is going to be over in the next couple of days." Or as an Israeli general at a Washington think tank told the Washington Times: "Israel has taken it upon itself to degrade Hezbollah's military capabilities." Sometimes degradation of this sort can be quantified: "A senior Israeli official said Friday that the attacks to date had degraded Hezbollah's military strength by roughly half, but that the campaign could go on for two more weeks or longer." More often, it's a useful term exactly because it's wonderfully vague, quite resistant to quantification, the very opposite of "precision" in its ambiguity, and capable of taking some of the sting out of what is actually happening. It turns the barbarity of air war into something close to a natural process - of, perhaps, erosion, of wearing down over time.
As air wars go, the one in Lebanon may seem strikingly directed against the civilian infrastructure and against society; in that, however, it is historically anything but unique. It might even be said that war from the air, since first launched in Europe's colonies early in the last century, has always been essentially directed against civilians. As in World War II, air power - no matter its stated targets - almost invariably turns out to be worst for civilians and, in the end, to be aimed at society itself. In that way, its damage is anything but "collateral," never truly "surgical," and never in its overall effect "precise." Even when it doesn't start that way, the frustration of not working as planned, of not breaking the "will," invariably leads, as with the Israelis, to ever wider, ever fiercer versions of the same, which, if allowed to proceed to their logical conclusion, will bring down not society's will, but society itself.
For the Lebanese prime minister what Israel has been doing to his country may be "barbaric destruction"; but, in our world, air power has long been robbed of its barbarism (suicide air missions excepted). For us, air war involves dumb hits by smart bombs, collateral damage, and surgery that may do in the patient, but it's not barbaric. For that you need to personally cut off a head.
[Note on Other Websites: For keeping me up-to-date on the present crisis in the Middle East, I would especially like to thank (and recommend to readers): Juan Cole's Informed Comment website (his recent essays there have been inspired); Antiwar.com, which provides an incredible range of Middle Eastern coverage that no one could collect on his or her own; the War in Context whose editor has an especially good eye for the telling article (and a sharp tongue for the absurdities of our moment); and Truthout and Common Dreams on which I rely regularly for so many things.]
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War. His novel, The Last Days of Publishing, is now out in paperback.
Copyright 2006 Tom Engelhardt
This article appeared first at Tomdispatch.com.
This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.
© 2006 The Foundation for National Progress
http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2006/07/barbarism_of_air_war.html
Mother Jones:
The EU Must Act in Lebanon
Can the European Union muster the will to stop the fighting in the Middle East?
Michael Shtender-Auerbach
July 28 , 2006
Article created by The Century Foundation.
The international conference in Rome on July 26 offered hope that a consensus could be reached on a plan that would end the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah. But the conference ended without a resolution, and the members of the European Union are scrambling to salvage their first diplomatic attempt to end the current crisis. The European Union should not be discouraged; it is capable of conducting a pro-active foreign policy and has the ability to commit the necessary financial, diplomatic, and military resources to bring stability and peace to the region. The European Union must act decisively as a counterbalance to U.S. unilateralism by proposing a European solution to the current crisis.
The failure of the talks have been blamed on U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who was “under siege” from the European and Arab state participants who were calling for an immediate cease-fire. Dr. Rice remained steadfast in her demand that any cease-fire must be preceded by the disarmament of Hezbollah. In true diplomatic fashion, humanitarian and reconstruction aid were agreed upon, but the hypocrisy of Washington doling out reconstruction aid to Lebanon with one hand and missiles to Israel with the other did not go unnoticed.
However, the chief problem is that the European Union, which has an unprecedented opportunity to bring regional stability and an end to the deadly conflict between Israel and its neighbors, is holding back, as if it needs a permission slip from the United States before it can act.
Unlike the United States, whose inaction in the face of the widening catastrophe has squandered its bona fides as a negotiator for peace, the European Union is still a credible broker in the region; Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority are members of the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP)—their relationship yields more than 45 billion dollars in trade annually. The European Union also has normalized diplomatic and trade relations with Iran, the implicit puppet-master of this proxy war.
The European Union should consider the immediate dispatch of its EU Rapid Reaction Force (RRF)—invoking the EU Rapid Reaction Mechanism (RRM)—to southern Lebanon. The RRF is a European military force that can be “triggered in situations of crisis and armed conflict,” and falls under the auspices of the EU Common Foreign and Security Policy. Its development was predicated on the idea that the European Union needs a force that can act independently of U.S.-led NATO missions. The RRF’s mandate limits its deployment to six months, which would afford enough time for Europe to build a semi-permanent EU force like the one deployed in the Balkans, or ideally, the development and deployment of the Lebanese army to secure its own peace.
Moving in this direction is necessary for a number of reasons. For one thing, Dr. Rice's desire to see a U.S.-led NATO force deployed to southern Lebanon with the charge of ridding the area of Hezbollah operatives entirely, involves NATO deployment for ninety days, after which a UN-sponsored force would take charge. However, France's president Jacques Chirac, who would support an EU force, opposes the idea of a NATO-led force, stating, "As far as France is concerned, it is not NATO's mission to put together such a force…Whether we like it or not, NATO is perceived as the armed wing of the west in these regions, and as a result, in terms of image, NATO is not intended for this." Thus, if Washington continues to push for a NATO force, the Atlantic alliance is at risk of collapse. Moreover, the United Nations is not up to the task: UNIFL, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon , has failed to keep the peace, loses its mandate at the end of this month, and has already suffered casualties in this war.
Another solution that would not work is that proposed by Javier Solana, the EU’s foreign policy chief and former secretary general of NATO, who has proposed an international force made up of troops from Europe, Turkey, and the Arab states (which would be almost all Sunni). Dr. Solana’s vision is short-sighted and likely has more to do with a desire to pawn the manpower needed onto Turkey and Egypt, even though Egypt has categorically stated that it will not be a part of such a force.
The other problem with Dr. Solana's vision is that by putting Sunni boots on Shia ground, the possibility of more bloodshed and wider scale conflict increases dramatically. In Iraq, radical Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has voiced his support for Hezbollah (which is a Lebanese Islamic Shi'ite group), and announced he is recruiting an army to deploy to southern Lebanon. The Iranian press reports that a deployment of Shi’ite suicide bombers has been dispatched to Lebanon with a mandate of inciting a civil war. While there may be Sunni support for Hezbollah, including Al Qaeda (a Sunni fundamentalist terror network) in its campaign against Israel, this support will be short-lived once a cease-fire has been attained. Osama bin-Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri has stated as much: “War with Israel does not depend on ceasefires. It is Jihad for sake of God and will last until religion prevails from Spain to Iraq.” The religion al-Zawahri speaks of does not include his Shi’ite brothers.
The case for an EU force must also take into account Europe's refusal to list Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, which opens the door for direct negotiations with hopes for the possibility that an EU force can maintain the peace without firing a shot.
Israel also has indicated willingness for a highly trained European force to be deployed as a stabilization entity in Lebanon. In fact, this is the second time in a year that Israel has requested EU military assistance. Back in November 2005, Israel asked EU monitors to guard the Gaza/Egyptian border. While the EU monitors had no mandate to use force, Israel requested it. Israel realizes that it needs international support now more than ever, and the Europeans would be remiss to squander this opportunity.
On Tuesday, August 1, the EU foreign ministers will hold an emergency meeting to discuss how best to organize a UN-mandated international force; a force that, the European Union must be reminded, is readily at their disposal. There is no time to waste. As Terje Roed Larsen, the United Nation’s chief envoy for Syrian/Lebanon issues, just said, “I do not feel confident that this war between Israel and Hezbollah has peaked yet.” The European Union must act before it is too late.
Michael Shtender-Auerbach writes on foreign policy for The Century Foundation and is press director of the Security and Peace Initiative.
This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.
© 2006 The Foundation for National Progress
http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2006/07/EU_must_act.html
The Independent:
'57 killed' as Israeli air strike hits children
By Kathy Gannon AP
Published: 30 July 2006
Dozens of children were feared dead today after Israeli missiles struck the southern Lebanese village of Qana, flattening houses on top of sleeping residents. Survivors said that more than 50 adults and children had died.
The Israeli army said missiles had been fired from the area before the 1am air strike in which a three-story building took a direct hit.
Rescuers aided by villagers were digging by hand to look for casualties.
The bodies of at least 27 children were found in the rubble, said Abu Shadi Jradi, a civil defence official at the scene. At least 10 children's bodies had been pulled out, placed in plastic bags and loaded in ambulances, he said.
"We want this to stop," shouted villager Mohammed Ismail. " May God have mercy on the children. They came here to escape the fighting. They are hitting children to bring the fighters to their knees."
The Israeli army said rockets had been launched repeatedly from the area on Israel. "We were attacking launchers that were firing missiles," said Capt. Jacob Dallal, an Israeli army spokesman. He said the army dropped leaflets several days ago telling civilians to leave Qana.
The Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert today said that the village of Qana was used as a Hizbollah base for launching hundreds of rockets at Israel.
"From the village and its surroundings, hundreds of Katyusha (rockets) have been fired at Israel, toward Kiryat Shemona and Afula," he said during Israel's weekly Cabinet meeting, according to a participant. "The army did not get an order to strike at Lebanese civilians. In Kfar Qana, hundreds of Katyushas are hidden."
The Lebanese Defence Minister Elias Murr told the Qatar-based al-Jazeera TV station: "What do you expect Israel to say? Will it say that it killed 40 children and women?"
The Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora said the attack reinforced his calls for a ceasefire: "There is no place at this sad moment for any discussions other than an immediate and unconditional ceasefire as well as international investigation of the Israeli massacres in Lebanon now."
In April 1996 more than 100 Lebanese civilians were killed at the same village in an Israeli artillery shelling of a UN base. The civilians had sought refuge with the UN to escape Israeli bombardment.
The attack on Qana, in the hills east of the port city of Tyre, came as heavy fighting erupted along the border between Hizbollah and the Israeli army.
Hizbollah's al-Manar TV channel said Israeli troops had "infiltrated" a zone known as the Taibeh Project area, some three or four kilometers inside Lebanon. It said the Israeli force was a commando unit known as "the Golani Brigade," and that two soldiers had been killed.
The Israeli army would not immediately comment on this report, and it was not clear whether this was a small-scale clash or the large invasion Lebanese authorities have been fearing.
Along the border, several Hizbollah-held sectors were pounded overnight by the Israeli army, witnesses said.
Lebanese officials said yesterdayday that Israeli troops had massed on the sector of the border where Israeli troops were reported to have entered Lebanon. That area was about 20 kilometers to the northeast of the town of Bint Jbail, from which Israeli troops pulled out on Saturday after a week of fierce clashes.
Al-Manar also broadcast a communique from Hizbollah saying it had shelled Israeli outposts along the border.
The Israeli army said Katyushas rockets were falling in Nahariya, Kiryat Shemona and an area close to Maalot. It said the rockets mostly fell in open areas, and that no injuries were reported.
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article1204845.ece
ZNet | Israel/Palestine
On a Red Cross mission of mercy when Israeli air force came calling
by Robert Fisk; July 28, 2006
07/28/06 "The Independent" - It was supposed to be a routine trip across the Lebanese killing fields for the brave men and women of the International Red Cross. Sylvie Thoral was the "team leader" of our two vehicles, a 38-year-old Frenchwoman with dark brown hair and eyes like steel. The Israelis had been informed and had given what the ICRC likes to call its "green light" to the route. And, of course, we almost died.
Trusting the Israeli army and air force, which are breaking the Geneva Conventions almost every day, is a dodgy business.
Their planes have already attacked - against all the conventions - the civil defence headquarters in Tyre, killing 20 refugees. They have twice attacked truckloads of refugees whom they themselves had ordered from their villages.
They have already attacked two Lebanese Red Cross ambulances in Qana, killing two of the three wounded patients inside and injuring all the crew - a clear and apparently deliberate breach of Chapter IV, Article 24 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions.
But the ICRC must put its trust in the Israeli military and so off we sped from southern Lebanon for Jezzine to the sound of gunfire, under the crumbling battlements of the crusader castle at Beaufort, through the ghostly, shattered streets of Nabatiyeh, bomb craters and crushed buildings on each side of us.
To cross the Litani river, we had to drive through the water, listening for the howl of airplane engines, one eye on the road, one on the sky. Sylvie and her comrades - Christophe Grange from France, Claire Gasser from Switzerland, Saidi Hachemi from Algeria and two Lebanese colleagues, Beshara Hanna and Edmund Khoury - drove in silence.
There were fresh bomb craters on the highway north of Nabatiyeh - the attacks had come only a few hours earlier, a fact we should have thought more about. Pieces of ordnance littered the roads, shards of wicked shrapnel, huge chunks of concrete. But we had had that all-important "green light" from Tel Aviv.
The ICRC teams may be the only saviours on the highways of southern Lebanon - their reticence in criticising anyone, including the Israelis and Hizbollah is a silence worthy of angels - although their work can attack their emotions as surely as an air strike. Only a day earlier, they had driven to the village of Aiteroun scarcely a mile from the Israeli army's disastrous assault on Bint Jbeil. In each "abandoned" village on the way, a woman would appear, then a child and then more women and the elderly, all desperate to leave.
There were perhaps 3,000 of them and, last night, Sylvie Thoral was trying to arrange permission for an evacuation convoy. The Israelis are promising the Lebanese much worse than the punishment they have already received - well over 400 Lebanese civilians dead - for Hizbollah's killing of three Israeli soldiers and the capture of two others. But still the Israelis have suggested no "green light" for Aiteroun.
"They were begging us to take them with us and we had no ability to do that," Saidi says with deep emotion. "Their eyes were filled with tears."
ICRC workers in Lebanon travel without flak jackets or helmets - their un-militarised status is something they are proud of - and driving with them in the same condition was an oddly moving experience.
They live - unlike the Israelis and their Hizbollah antagonists - by the Geneva Conventions. They believe in them when all others break the rules. But yesterday, when we reached the town of Jarjooaa, the ICRC in Beirut told us to turn back. The Israelis were bombing the road to the north and so we gingerly reversed our cars and started back down the hills to Arab Selim. The highway was empty and we had almost reached the bottom of a small valley.
I was reflecting on a conversation I had just had on my mobile phone with Patrick Cockburn, The Independent's correspondent who has just left Baghdad. Our guardian angels were working so hard, he said, that he was fearful they would form a trade union and go on strike.
That's when five vast, brown, dead fingers of smoke shot into the sky in front of us, an Israeli air-dropped bomb that exploded on the road scarcely 80 metres away with the kind of "c-crack" that comic books express so accurately, followed by the scream of a jet. If we had driven just 25 seconds faster down that road, we would all be dead.
So we retreated once more to Jarjooaa and parked under the balcony of a house where two women and three children were watching us, waving and smiling.
Sylvie was silent but I could see the rage on her face. The Israelis, it seemed, had made an "error". They had misread the route - or the number - of our little convoy. "How can we work like this? How on earth can we do our work?" Sylvie asked with a mixture of anger and frustration. On all the roads yesterday, I saw only three men whom I suspect were Hizbollah - no respecters of the Geneva Conventions they - driving at high speed in a battered Volvo. They can cross the rivers of Lebanon at will - just as we did - by circling the bomb craters and crossing the rivers. So what was the point in blowing up 46 of Lebanon's road bridges?
An old man approached us carrying a silver tray of glasses and a pot of scalding tea. Generous to the end, under constant air attack, these fearful Lebanese were offering us their traditional hospitality even now, as the jets wheeled in the sky above us. They asked us in to the house they had refused to leave and I realised then that these kind Lebanese people - unarmed, unconnected to Hizbollah - were the real resistance here. The men and women who will ultimately save Lebanon.
But before we abandoned our journey and before Sylvie and her team and I set off back to their base in the far and dangerous south of Lebanon, a man carrying a bag of vegetables walked up to Beshara Hanna. "Please move your cars away from my home," he said. "You make it dangerous for us all."
And the shame of this shook me at once. The Israeli attack on the Qana ambulances - their missiles plunging through the red crosses on the roofs - had contaminated even our own vehicles. He was just one man. But for him, the Israelis had turned the Red Cross - the symbol of hope on our roofs and the sides of our vehicles - into a symbol of danger and fear.
The laws of war
The laws of war, as the Geneva Conventions are sometimes known, often may seem like a lesson in absurdity. But for centuries countries have adhered to central principles of combat.
At the start of this conflict, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour said: "Indiscriminate shelling of cities constitutes a foreseeable and unacceptable targeting of civilians."
The rules of war state:
* Wars should be limited to achieving the political goals that started the war (and should not include unnecessary destruction).
* Wars should be ended as quickly as possible.
* People and property should be protected against unnecessary destruction and hardship.
The laws are meant to :
* Protect both combatants and non-combatants from unnecessary suffering.
* Safeguard human rights of those who fall into the hands of the enemy: prisoners of war, the wounded, the sick and civilians.
* Prohibit deliberate attacks on civilians. But no war crime is committed if a bomb mistakenly hits a residential area.
* Combatants that use civilians or property as shields are guilty of violations of laws of war.
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=107&ItemID=10660
ZNet | Israel/Palestine
Confrontation with Hamas and Hezbollah
by Noam Chomsky; July 29, 2006
[The following excerpt is from the Epilogue to Perilous Power: The Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy, by Noam Chomsky & Gilbert Achcar, edited with a Preface by Stephen R. Shalom, to be published by Paradigm Publishers September 15, 2006, Hardcover $22.95.]
Q: How would you assess the Israeli and U.S. responses to the election of Hamas, and to the ensuing conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon?
Noam Chomsky: The U.S. response reveals, once again, that the United States supports democracy if and only if it conforms to U.S. strategic and economic objectives.
Perhaps it would be useful to review some highlights since Hamas was elected in late January 2006.
On February 12, the statements of Osama bin Laden were reviewed in the New York Times by NYU law professor Noah Feldman. He described bin Laden's descent into utter barbarism, reaching the depths when he advanced "the perverse claim that since the United States is a democracy, all citizens bear responsibility for its government's actions, and civilians are therefore fair targets." Utter depravity, no doubt. Two days later, the lead story in the Times casually reported that the United States and Israel are joining bin Laden in the lower depths of depravity. Palestinians offended the masters by voting the wrong way in a free election. The population must therefore be punished for this crime. The "intention," the correspondent observed, "is to starve the Palestinian Authority of money and international connections" so that President Mahmoud Abbas will be "compelled to call a new election. The hope is that Palestinians will be so unhappy with life under Hamas that they will return to office a reformed and chastened Fatah movement." Mechanisms of punishment of the population are outlined. The article also reports that Condoleezza Rice will visit the oil producers to ensure that they do not relieve the torture of the Palestinians. In short, bin Laden's "perverse claim"; but when the United States advances the claim, it is not ultimate evil but rather righteous dedication to "democracy promotion."1
These paired articles elicited no comment that I could discover. Also overlooked was the fact that bin Laden's "perverse claim" is standard operating procedure. Familiar examples are "making the economy scream" when Chileans had the effrontery to elect Salvador Allende - the "soft track"; the "hard track" brought Pinochet. Another pertinent illustration is the U.S.-UK sanctions regime that murdered hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, devastated the country, and probably saved Saddam Hussein from the fate of other monsters like him (often supported by the United States and Britain to the very end). Not quite bin Laden's doctrine; rather, much more perverse, not only in terms of scale but also because Iraqis could not by any stretch of the imagination be held responsible for Saddam Hussein.
The most venerable illustration is Washington's forty-seven-year campaign of terror and economic strangulation against Cuba. From the internal record, we learn that the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations determined that "[t]he Cuban people are responsible for the regime," so they must be punished with the expectation that "[r]ising discomfort among hungry Cubans" will cause them to throw Castro out (JFK). The State Department advised that "[e]very possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba [in order to] bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of the government."2 The doctrine remains in force.
Without continuing, we find ample evidence that it is no departure from the norm to adopt bin Laden's most perverse claim in order to punish Palestinians for their democratic misdeeds.
The United States and Israel then proceeded to implement their "intention," with scrupulous care. Thus, for example, an EU proposal to provide some desperately needed aid for health care was stalled when U.S. "officials expressed concerns that some of this money might end up paying nurses, doctors, teachers and others previously on the government payroll, thereby helping to finance Hamas." Another achievement of the "war on terror." With U.S. backing, Israel also continued its terrorist atrocities and other crimes in Gaza and the West Bank - in some cases, perhaps, in an attempt to induce Hamas to violate its embarrassing cease-fire, so that Israel could respond in "self-defense," another familiar pattern.3
In May 2006, Israeli Prime Minister Olmert announced his plan to formalize Sharon's West Bank expansion programs, which were announced along with the "Gaza disengagement." Olmert chose the term "convergence" ("hitkansut") as a euphemism for annexation of valuable land and resources (including water) of the West Bank, programs designed to break the continually shrinking Palestinian areas into separated cantons, virtually isolated from one another and from whatever corner of Jerusalem will be left to Palestinians, all imprisoned as Israel takes over the Jordan valley and controls air space and any external access. In a stunning public relations triumph, Olmert won praise for his courage in "withdrawing" from the West Bank as he put the finishing touches on the project of destroying any hope for recognition of Palestinian national rights. We were enjoined to lament the "anguish" of the residents of scattered settlements that would be abandoned as they "converge" into the territories illegally annexed behind the cruel and illegal "Separation Wall." All of this proceeds, as usual, with a kindly nod from Washington, which is expected to fork up the billions of dollars needed to carry out the plans, though there are occasional admonitions that the destruction of Palestine should not be "unilateral": It would be preferable for President Mahmoud Abbas to sign a surrender declaration, in which case everything would be just fine.
The people of Gaza and the West Bank are supposed to observe all of this submissively, rotting in their virtual prisons. Otherwise they are sadistic terrorists.
The latest phase began on June 24, when the Israeli army kidnapped two civilians, a doctor and his brother, from their home in Gaza. They were "detained" according to brief notes in the British press. The U.S. media mostly preferred silence.4 They will presumably join the 9,000 other Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, 1,000 reportedly in prison without charges, hence kidnapped - as were many of the rest, in that they were sentenced by Israeli courts, which are a disgrace, harshly condemned by legal commentators in Israel. Among them are hundreds of women and children, their numbers and fate of little interest. Also of little interest are Israel's secret prisons. The Israeli press reported that these have been "the entry gate to Israel for Lebanese, especially those who were suspected of membership in Hezbollah, who were transferred to the southern side of the border," some captured in battle in Lebanon, others "abducted at Israel's initiative" and sometimes held as hostages, with torture under interrogation. The secret Camp 1391, possibly one of several, was discovered accidentally in 2003, since forgotten.5
The next day, June 25, Palestinians kidnapped an Israeli soldier just across the border from Gaza. That did happen, very definitely. Every literate reader also knows the name of corporal Gilad Shalit, and wants him released. The nameless kidnapped Gaza civilians are ignored; international law, while rightly insisting that captured soldiers be treated humanely, absolutely prohibits the extrajudicial seizure of civilians. Israel responded by "bombing and shelling, darkening and destroying, imposing a siege and kidnapping like the worst of terrorists and nobody breaks the silence to ask, what the hell for, and according to what right?" as the fine Israeli journalist Gideon Levy wrote, adding that "[a] state that takes such steps is no longer distinguishable from a terror organization." Israel also kidnapped a large part of the Palestinian government, destroyed most of the Gaza electrical and water systems, and committed numerous other crimes. These acts of collective punishment, condemned by Amnesty International as "war crimes," compounded the punishment of Palestinians for having voted the wrong way. Within a few days, UN agencies working in Gaza warned of a "public health disaster" as a result of developments "which have seen innocent civilians, including children, killed, brought increased misery to hundreds of thousands of people and which will wreak far-reaching harm on Palestinian society. An already alarming situation in Gaza, with poverty rates at nearly eighty per cent and unemployment at nearly forty per cent, is likely to deteriorate rapidly, unless immediate and urgent action is taken."6
The pretext for punishing Palestinians is that Hamas refuses to accept three demands: to recognize Israel, cease all acts of violence, and accept earlier agreements. The editors of the New York Times instruct Hamas leaders that they must accept the "ground rules that have already been accepted by Egypt and Jordan and by the Arab League as a whole in its 2002 Beirut peace initiative" and, furthermore, that they must do so "not as some kind of ideological concession" but "as an admission ticket to the real world, a necessary rite of passage in the progression from a lawless opposition to a lawful government" - like us.7
Unmentioned is that Israel and the United States flatly reject all of these conditions. They do not recognize Palestine; they refused to end their violence even when Hamas observed a unilateral truce for a year and a half and called for a long-term truce while negotiations proceed for a two-state settlement; and they dismissed with utter contempt the 2002 Arab League call for normalization of relations, along with all other proposals for a meaningful diplomatic settlement. Even when it accepted the "Road Map" that is supposed to define U.S. policy, Israel added fourteen "reservations" that rendered it entirely meaningless, eliciting the usual tacit approval in Washington and silence in commentary.8
The Hamas electoral victory was eagerly exploited by the United States and Israel. Previously, they had to pretend that there was "no partner" for negotiations, so they had no choice but to continue their project of taking over the West Bank, as they had been doing systematically since the Oslo Accords were signed (extending earlier actions). The pace of settlement peaked in 2000, the last year of Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, then escalated under Bush-Sharon. With Hamas in office, Olmert and his cohorts can lament that there is "no partner." Therefore, they must proceed with annexation and destruction of Palestine, counting on articulate Western opinion to applaud politely, perhaps with mild reservations about unilateral "convergence," and to suppress the fact that while Hamas's programs are in many respects entirely unacceptable, their own are comparable or much worse, and are not just rhetoric: They are systematically implementing their denial of any meaningful Palestinian rights, a crucial difference.
The next act in this hideous drama opened on July 12, when Hezbollah launched a raid in which it captured two Israeli soldiers and killed several others, leading to an all-out Israeli attack, killing hundreds and destroying much of what Lebanon has painfully reconstructed from the wreckage of its civil wars and the Israeli invasions. Whatever its motives, Hezbollah took a frightful gamble, for which Lebanon would surely pay dearly. Here we see the danger of processes that have led to the rise of "parallel or alternative leaderships that can protect [civilian populations] and deliver essential services" with their own military wings, as veteran Middle East correspondent Rami Khouri has noted.9
On the motives, analysts differ. "Hezbollah's official line," the Financial Times reports, "was that the capture was aimed at winning the release of the few remaining Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails. But the timing and scale of its attack suggest it was partly intended to reduce the pressure on the Palestinians by forcing Israel to fight on two fronts simultaneously." Many agree, recalling Hezbollah's reaction to the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada in September 2000 - when it seized soldiers in a cross-border raid that led to a prisoner exchange - as well as its response to Israel's devastating attacks in the West Bank in 2002 (Amos Harel).10 Others highlight the prisoner motive, which is also suggested by the exchange in 2000, by the fact that Hezbollah had attempted capture of soldiers before the recent crisis, and by the matter of Israel's secret prisons, mentioned earlier. Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a Lebanese academic specialist on Hezbollah, regards the Gaza connection as primary, but argues that one should not ignore "the domestic significance of these hostages."11
Still others regard Iran and/or Syria as the main actors. Many experts and Iranian dissidents disagree, though few doubt that Iran and Syria authorized Hezbollah's actions. Most Arab rulers place the blame on Iran. At an emergency Arab League summit, they were willing "to openly defy Arab public opinion" because of their concerns about Iranian influence. One Dubai military specialist commented that the Iranians, by means of Hezbollah, "are embarrassing the hell out of the Arab governments," who are doing nothing while "[t]he peace process has collapsed, the Palestinians are being killed. . . . And here comes Hezbollah, which is actually scoring hits against Israel." The criticism of Hezbollah was opposed by Syria, Yemen, Algeria, and Lebanon; the Iraqi parliament, "in a rare show of unity," condemned the Israeli attack as "criminal aggression," and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose designation Washington applauded, "call[ed] on the world to take quick stands to stop the Israeli aggression." The fact that most Arab leaders, however, are willing to "defy public opinion" may have large-scale regional implications, strengthening radical Islamist groups. It is noteworthy that the "Supreme Guide" of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Mahdi Akef, sharply condemned the Arab states. "The Brotherhood would win a comfortable majority" in a free election in Egypt, according to Middle East scholar Fawwaz Gerges, and has broad influence elsewhere, including with Hamas, one of its offshoots.12
A broader analysis is suggested by retired colonel Pat Lang, former head of the Middle East and terrorism desk at the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency: "This is basically tribal warfare. If you have someone who's hostile to you and you're unwilling to accept a temporary truce, as Hamas offered, then you have to destroy them. The Israeli response is so disproportionate to the abduction of the three men it appears it's a rather clever excuse designed to appeal both to their public and to the U.S."13
Speculation about motives and conflicting factors should not blind us to the tragedy that is unfolding. Lebanon is being destroyed, Israel's Gaza prison is suffering still more savage blows, and on the West Bank, mostly out of sight, the United States and Israel are consummating their project of the murder of a nation, a grim and rare event in history.
These actions, and the Western response, illustrate all too clearly the amalgam of savage cruelty, self-righteousness, and injured innocence that is so deeply rooted in the imperial mentality as to be beyond awareness. One can easily understand why Gandhi, when asked what he thought of Western civilization, is alleged to have said that he thought it might be a good idea.
- July 20, 2006
Notes
1. Noah Feldman, "Becoming bin Laden" (review of Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden), New York Times Book Review, February 12, 2006, p. 12; Steven Erlanger, "U.S. and Israelis Are Said to Talk of Hamas Ouster," New York Times, February 14, 2006, p. A1.
2. Louis Pérez, "Fear and Loathing of Fidel Castro: Sources of U.S. Policy Toward Cuba," Journal of Latin American Studies 34, no. 2 (May 2002), pp. 227–254.
3. Steven R. Weisman, "Europe Plan to Aid Palestinians Stalls Over U.S. Salary Sanctions," New York Times, June 15, 2006, p. A10. See also Tanya Reinhart, "A Week of Israeli Restraint," Yediot Ahronot, June 21, 2006. A striking illustration of this pattern is the intense (and failed) effort to elicit Palestinian violence to justify the planned 1982 invasion. Palestinian violence does continue, however, notably in the form of Qassam rocket attacks from Gaza by groups that refused to accept the Hamas truce - actions both criminal and foolish.
4. Jonathan Cook, "The British Media and the Invasion of Gaza," Medialens (UK), June 30, 2006; Josh Brannon, "IDF Commandos Enter Gaza, Capture Two Hamas Terrorists," Jerusalem Post, June 25, 2006; Ken Ellingwood, "2 Palestinians Held in Israel's First Arrest Raid in Gaza Since Pullout," Los Angeles Times, June 25, 2006, p. A20. Apart from the Los Angeles Times, there were only a few marginal words in the Baltimore Sun (June 25) and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (June 25). Moreover, no mainstream media source chose to refer to this event when discussing Shalit's capture. The only serious coverage I know of in the English-language press appeared in the Turkish Daily News (June 25). (Database search by David Peterson.)
5. Aviv Lavie, "Inside Israel's Secret Prison," Ha'aretz, August 22, 2003; Jonathan Cook, "Facility 1391: Israel's Guantanamo," Le Monde Diplomatique, November 2003; Chris McGreal, "Facility 1391: Israel's Secret Prison," Guardian, November 14, 2003, p. 2.
6. Gideon Levy, "A Black Flag," Ha'aretz, July 2, 2006; Christopher Gunness, "Statements by the United Nations Agencies Working in the Occupied Palestinian Territory," July 8, 2006; Amnesty International press release, "Israel/Occupied Territories: Deliberate Attacks a War Crime," AI Index: MDE 15/061/2006 (Public), News Service No. 169, June 30, 2006.
7. Editorial, "A Problem That Can't Be Ignored," New York Times, June 17, 2006, p. A12.
8. Israeli Cabinet Statement on Road Map and 14 Reservations by State of Israel, July 9, 2004, originally released on May 25, 2003.
9. Rami G. Khouri, "The Mideast Death Dance," Salon, July 15, 2006.
10. Roula Khalaf, "Hizbollah's Bold Attack Raises Stakes in Middle East," Financial Times, July 13, 2006, p. 5; David Hirst, "Overnight Lebanon Has Been Plunged into a Role It Endured for 25 Years - That of a Hapless Arena for Other People's Wars," Guardian, July 14, 2006, p. 29; Megan K. Stack and Rania Abouzeid, "The Nation of Hezbollah," Los Angeles Times, July 13, 2006, p. A1; Neil MacFarquhar and Hassan Fattah, "In Hezbollah Mix of Politics and Arms, Arms Win Out," New York Times, July 16, 2006, pp. I:1; Amos Harel, "Israel Faces a Wide Military Escalation," Ha'aretz, July 12, 2006; Uri Avnery, "The Real Aim," July 15, 2006, Gush Shalom Web site.
11. Mouin Rabbani, Democracy Now!, July 14, 2006, transcript available online; Saad-Ghorayeb, quoted in Halpern and Blanford, "A Second Front Opens for Israel," p. 1. [The number of prisoners is unknown, apart from the one or two officially admitted. In what may be the first mainstream reference, Ha'aretz commentator Nehemia Shtrasler writes that in the course of the six years since Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon, "no one found it correct to neutralize the central demand of Hezbollah: freeing the Lebanese prisoners. The head of the Lebanese government, Fuad Siniora, stated two days ago that freeing these prisoners is a central condition for any agreement. In addition to Samir Quntar, Israel holds about 15 Lebanese prisoners, who have been held here for many years. It was possible to free them long before - to the hands of the moderate Siniora." See Shtrasler, "A Path to Strengthen the Extremists," Ha'aretz, July 21, 2006 (in Hebrew). (Information added July 22, 2006.)]
12. Hassan Fattah, "Militia Rebuked by Some Arab Countries," New York Times, July 17, 2006, p. A1; Dan Murphy and Sameh NaGuib, "Hizbullah Winning over Arab Street," Christian Science Monitor, July 18, 2006, p. 1; Edward Wong and Michael Slackman, "Iraqi Prime Minister Denounces Israel's Actions," New York Times, October 20, 2006, p. A1; Fawwaz Gerges, Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Inc., 2006), p. 26.
13. Lang, quoted in Dan Murphy, "Escalation Ripples Through Middle East," Christian Science Monitor, July 14, 2006, p. 1.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=107&ItemID=10663
ZNet | Mideast
Oil Spill Hits Lebanon
by Dahr Jamail; IPS; July 30, 2006
*BYBLOS, Lebanon, Jul 29 (IPS) - Israeli air strikes on an electricity plant have released oil that has now spread over much of Lebanon's
coastline.*
More than 15,000 tons of oil have hit the coast after the bombing of five of six storage tanks at the plant in the coastal village El-Jiye, 30km south of Beirut. The northern winds have taken the massive oil slick to beaches and ports a long way up the coast.
"The Lebanese government definitely does not have the capability to clean this up," Nabil Baz, a restaurant owner in Byblos town on the coast, 38km south of Beirut, told IPS.. "I heard we were going to get some help from Kuwait, but I don't know how true this is or when they might start the cleanup process."
Byblos, whose economy relies heavily on fishing and tourism, dates to the 5th millennium BC. It is believed that the linear alphabet originated here.
Sitting in his empty restaurant overlooking the once scenic ancient fishing harbour, Baz shook his head looking at the thick oil sludge covering most of the harbour now.
"No fishermen are able to work at all," he said. "I have no idea how our community will recover from this. We are going to need some serious help."
Joseph Chaloub, a 55-year-old fisherman, said "the problem is there is no cleanup, and then there is the Israeli blockade. It's a catastrophe.
People have lost their livelihood.." The Israeli naval blockade of Lebanon is stopping boats leaving the coast or coming in to Lebanon.
The economy of Byblos that relies on tourism, like so many other cities in Lebanon, has ground to a near standstill.
"Everything is down now, only the local markets and the refugees are keeping our economy going," local banker Tony Ashar told IPS. "Also there is no U.S. currency in our banks to give to people when they want to make a withdrawal."
Ashar said dollars have been in short supply since Israeli warplanes bombed Beirut airport. Lebanese banks keep dollars for tourists since the value of the Lebanese currency is low and fluid.
"We usually have U.S. currency flown in, but now there's a big concern that we may have to limit the amount of U.S. dollars we can give out,"
Ashar said. "So that makes it difficult for people to travel, which is a big problem since so many people are leaving the country now."
In Beirut, Lebanese immigration authorities are working 18 hours a day and issuing an average of 5,000 passports daily as the flow of people out of Lebanon continues.
Mohamad Yasouk, an information technology engineer, said the already weakened economy of Lebanon would not survive if the war lasted another two weeks.
"With the oil spill and the war, all of the tourists are gone," he said.
"I came to Byblos from south Beirut since my home was bombed, yet even here two nights ago the Israelis bombed an Army radar nearby. The same one they bombed two weeks ago."
The tourist beaches off the coast of Beirut stand empty as well. Pools of oil slosh up with the waves, staining the beach and the rocks.
"If we tried to fish, the Israelis would kill us," said Hafez, a Palestinian fisherman. "But nobody would eat the fish anyway even if we could fish.. Now we wait for a miracle, something to take this oil away and stop this war."
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=10664
ZNet | Corporate Globalization
W.T.O. IS DEAD, LONG LIVE FREE TRADE
Globalisation And Its New Avatars
by Vandana Shiva; July 30, 2006
The Doha round negotiations collapsed once again at the Mini Ministerial in Geneva on 23rd July 2006. Martin Khor of Third World Network reports from Geneva that when asked of the Doha Round is dead or in intensive care, Mr. Kamal Nath, India's Commerce Minister, said it is somewhere between intensive care in hospital and the crematorium. Peter Mandelson, the EU Trade Commissioner told the press following suspension of WTO negotiations, "we have missed the last exit on the motorway."
The U.S. is being identified by all as responsible for the collapse of talks, by its refusal to reduce its agricultural subsidies. The US and its corporations were the driving force behind two agreements of the Uruguay Round, which have the highest impact on the poor of the Third World. The Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement has increased the cost of seeds and medicine by promoting monopolies. Thousands of Indian farmers have committed suicides due to debts resulting from a new dependence on costly yet unreliable hybrid and Bt cotton sold by Monsanto and its Indian partners. The Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) has destroyed agricultural livelihoods of millions of peasants and food security of the world's poor.
The willingness of the US to allow the Doha Round negotiations to grind to a halt by showing inflexibility in offering to reduce distorting farm subsidies in exchange for increased market access is not because agricultural market access is no longer of interest to the US. The US does not have to give up anything multilaterally because it is getting market access bilaterally, often with "non-agreements" like the US - India Knowledge Initiative in Agriculture, which is promoting GMOs, agricultural imports and the entry of US grant Walmart in Indian retail. Monsanto, Walmart and ADM are on the board of the US India Agriculture Initiative.
US Aid is interfering directly in India's GM policies and has financed the push to commercialise Bt Brinjal, which would be the first GM food crop approved for large scale commercial trials and seed production in India. While India's biosafety assessment framework has no reference to the unscientific "substantial equivalence" principle, (a principle promoted in the US to avoid looking for the unique biological impacts of GM foods), the "substantial equivalence" is the basis of Bt Brinjal data submitted by Monsanto-Mahyco to the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC), the statutory body for granting approvals for GMOs. The virus of biosafety deregulation is thus being subtly introduced into India. GMOs are spreading bilaterally without the WTO, which had to be used against Europe in the US - EU GMO dispute.
The US biotech agenda is also being internalized into India's agricultural policy. The Planning Commission, India's highest planning body, headed by Montek Singh Ahluwalia is appointing a non-resident, the US based Dr. Deshpal Verma, Professor of Genetics and Biotechnology at Ohio, to head a cell to promote GMOs in agriculture and increase the role of global corporations like Monsanto in the farm sector. Bilateral deals are thus mutilating into unilateral policies referred to an "autonomous liberalisation."
US Agribusinesses like Cargill and ADM do not need WTO's market access rules anymore to capture India's markets. As part of the Bush-Singh agreement, India has been influenced to import wheat, even though there was enough wheat produced in India. And domestic markets too have been captured by MNC's like Cargill, Canagra, Lever, and ITC. India's food security is being systematically dismantled. Food prices have increased dramatically, and with it, hunger and malnutrition. While being presented as an economic power and the new poster child of globalisation, India now is the home of one third of the world's malnourished children. And the problem of hunger will grow as peasants as pushed off the land and food prices increase.
Meantime, corporations like Walmart are trying to grab India's retail market, which consists of the small-scale informal sector employing more than 200 million people. Walmart is trying to get in to capturing this large market and has succeeded in getting FDI pushed through in retail. It is also trying to partner with Reliance Industry Ltd (RIL), which is planning to build new super stores in 784 Indian towns, 1600 farm supply hubs, and move the produce with a 40-plane air cargo fleet. The Reliance group has also become the largest land grabber in India, using governments to forcefully acquire hundreds of thousands of acres of fertile farmland at 1/1000th the market price. These are the subsidies Walmart is seeking through partnerships. And Walmart does not need a GATS to take over retail services in India. Bilateral and unilateral policies are opening up India's markets for Walmart.
WTO might be on life support, but "free trade" is alive and kicking.
Bilateral and unilateral, initiatives are the new avatars of globalisation and free trade. And it is these avatars we must challenge to stop corporate rule, while WTO hangs between intensive care and the crematorium.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=13&ItemID=10669
posted by attilav at 22:15
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