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ZNet | Mideast

Hizbollah's Victory (2000)

by Gilbert Achcar and Tikva Honig-Parnass; July 28, 2006

[This spring 2000 interview, originally written at the time of the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon, provides useful background for understanding current events. It was first published in May 2000 in News from Within, a publication of the Alternative Information Center in Jerusalem, and subsequently appeared as a chapter in Achcar's collection, Eastern Cauldron (Monthly Review Press). It has not previously appeared on the web.]

Q: Hizbollah's victory gives a broad blueprint of a comprehensive strategy (military, political) in defeating Israeli occupation. Can you evaluate the possibility of its reproduction elsewhere?

Achcar: In order to do so, one has to separate the various elements of this "broad blueprint" as you call it. Let us start with the military aspect, since you mention it: I would say that the peculiarities of the Lebanese terrain should be as obvious to anyone in the Arab world as the peculiarities of the Iraqi terrain are now to anyone in Washington who took the 1991 Gulf War as a "broad blueprint" for further US interventions. I mean that, just as the desert is the ideal terrain for taking full advantage of the superiority in air power (as proven by the great contrast between the six weeks of carpet-bombing of the Iraqi troops in 1991 and the poor results of NATO's air campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999), the mountainous and populous character of southern Lebanon should be taken into consideration before generalizing its experience into a "broad blueprint".

This being said, what should be emphasized in the first place is that the victory in southern Lebanon was not a "military" victory. The Israeli army has not been defeated militarily: it was much less exhausted than the US forces in Vietnam, and even in the latter case it would be quite improper to talk of a "military defeat." In both cases, the defeat is primarily a political defeat of the governments, against a background of an increasingly reluctant population in the invader country. In that regard, the military action finds its value in its political impact, and not primarily in its direct military impact. The guerrilla actions of the Lebanese Resistance against the occupation - which was very far, even proportionally, from matching the scale of the Vietnamese Resistance - were mainly effective through their impact on the Israeli population, just as the coffins of GI's landing back in the US were during the Vietnam War. In both cases, the population of the invader country became more and more opposed to a war effort that was clearly devoid of any moral justification.

This had already been experienced by Israel since the beginning of its full-scale invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The withdrawal from Beirut in 1982, and later on from most of the occupied Lebanese territory in 1985, were mainly motivated by the fact that the Israeli population could not endorse a situation in which Israeli soldiers were facing death every day for the sake of an occupation which could hardly be justified, even from a mainstream Zionist view. So the key issue is that of the balance between the cost and benefits of an occupation: whereas in the Golan the benefits for Israel exceed the present costs, in southern Lebanon the reverse was very obviously true.

Let us now extrapolate to the Palestinian occupied territories: during twenty years the benefits clearly exceeded the costs from the viewpoint of Israeli "security." The desperate "guerrilla" operations of the Palestinian Resistance could not counterbalance the feeling of enhanced security stemming from the extension of the border to the Jordan River. The situation began to change dramatically with the mass mobilization of the Intifada. This made the cost nearly intolerable for the morale of the Israeli army and for the reputation of Israel in its backer countries. The pressure mounted within the Israeli army, up to its highest ranks, in favor of a withdrawal of the troops from the populated areas, and their redeployment in those strategic parts of the West Bank where no Palestinians are concentrated.

It is precisely to this pressure from the military that Rabin was responding when he entered the Oslo negotiations. He tried to get the highest possible price for the implementation of this withdrawal from a PLO leadership that had been accumulating concessions and capitulations for many years. And he got what he wanted, to a degree that he could not have even imagined when he started the talks with the Arafat leadership! Instead of building on the impetus of the Intifada, and doing everything possible to sustain it until they got the withdrawal of the Israeli army from the entire populated areas - without betraying anything of what they stood for previously and with very minimal accommodations, negotiated not by the PLO but by the leadership of the Intifada within the territories - the Arafat leadership went into what even some Zionist commentators described as an ignominious surrender, leading to the execrable situation prevailing now.

Hizbollah acted differently: they kept up the pressure uncompromisingly. And they forced the unconditional and total withdrawal of the Israeli army from the Lebanese territories occupied since 1978 (the remnant goes back to the 1967 War). A tremendous victory, indeed! And surely a feat that the Palestinian population will ponder and from which they will draw some inspiration.

Q: To what extent is the Hizbollah victory a slap in the face for the imperialist agenda in the region? What might we expect from it in the future?

Achcar: The Lebanese victory is certainly a defeat for the US agenda which, like that of its Israeli ally, foresaw the insertion of this withdrawal into an overall peace agreement with Syria including all sorts of conditions, concessions and guarantees obtained for Israel. Besides, Israel is the "most brilliant" proxy of the US armed forces, the one always quoted as an example to follow. And here is a withdrawal, taking the shape of a debacle, evoking irresistibly the images of the US debacle in Vietnam, in1975 - incidentally just at the time of the 25th anniversary of the latter! This is a new vindication of the famous "dare to struggle, dare to win" that inspired so bravely the Vietnamese Resistance. And it can be expected that it will contribute to reversing the winds of defeatism that have swept through such a big part of those who once used to fight imperialist domination.

However with regard to the US agenda in the Middle East, I think that the main change in the Israeli agenda - which will certainly be integrated in the agenda of the next US administration - is that the prospect of a peace treaty with Syria is pushed back indefinitely. The Zionist establishment is definitely not eager to relinquish the Golan for the sake of just establishing relations with Syria, relations that will never be "normal" anyhow. And they are all the less eager to do so in that the Syrian dictator Hafiz Al-Assad is on the verge of death [he died in June 2000] and the political future of the country is highly uncertain.

Q: Why has the Lebanese victory been claimed by Hizbollah alone? Were not other forces - Palestinians, Lebanese Left - involved in the resistance movement? If not, why not?

Achcar: The reason Hizbollah appeared as the only father of victory (as the saying goes, victory usually has several fathers, whereas defeat is an orphan) is that they did everything they could to monopolize the prestige of the resistance movement. After the 1982 Israeli invasion, you had an uneasy coexistence and competition between two tendencies in the fight against the occupier: the Lebanese National Resistance, dominated by the Lebanese Communist Party, and the Islamic Resistance, dominated by Hizbollah. The Palestinian forces had been wiped out from southern Lebanon by the invaders; those remaining in the refugee camps were not really a match for Hizbollah, especially since some Lebanese forces like the Shiite communalist militias of Amal were keen on preventing them from spreading again out of the camps. Amal are still there - they are among those who recuperated the stretch of land abandoned by Israel and its local proxy. But they were never a key force in the Resistance movement: they lost their impetus long ago to the benefit of Hizbollah, and turned into a purely conservative and patronage-based party.

Hizbollah conducted all sorts of operations to establish their monopoly over the resistance movement, up to repeated onslaughts against the Communists, murdering some of their key Shiite cadres in particular. The CP behaved in a most servile manner, not daring to retaliate and instead calling on the "brothers" in the Islamic Resistance to behave in a brotherly manner - a call which has no real chance of being heard if it is not backed by decisive action to show the damage that could result, precisely, from the alternative behavior! Such an attitude contributed greatly to the progressive shift in the balance of forces to the advantage of Hizbollah. Many of the most militant members of the Lebanese left among the Shiites were attracted to Hizbollah.

We should recall that at the beginning of the Lebanese civil war in 1975 there was no Hizbollah and the CP was the major militant force among the Shiite population in southern Lebanon. The party started losing ground to the advantage of Amal first, and Hizbollah later after 1982. In both cases the lesson was the same: all these movements were appealing to the same constituency, i.e. the traditionally very militant Shiite population of southern Lebanon. In such a competition, the shyest is doomed to lose inevitably, all the more so when you don't even dare to put forward your own radical program and you end up tail-ending the dominant communalist forces. Here again you need to dare to struggle and dare to win!

Hizbollah have been very effective on that score. They were definitely very "daring" in their actions, inspired by their quasi-mystical views of martyrdom. And they knew also how to win the souls and minds of the population, by making a very clever use of the significant funding they got from Iran, thus organizing all kinds of social services to the benefit of the impoverished population. To be sure, they also took advantage of the ideological winds, which blew much more in their direction than in the direction of a left that became utterly demoralized by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Q: What are the implications of the Hizbollah victory on the relation of the political forces in Lebanon? For the Palestinian refugees there? And for the entire region?

Achcar: One thing is sure. This victory will greatly enhance the appeal of Hizbollah in Lebanon, and of the Islamic fundamentalists in the whole region. In Lebanon, Hizbollah faces an objective limitation due to the religiously very composite character of the population. Hizbollah are inherently unable to win over Christians, Druzes, or even Sunni Muslims, in any significant numbers. They are no threat to the Palestinian refugees, since their Islamic universalism make them champions of the Palestinian cause. In that sense, they are actually competitors to the Palestinian forces in Lebanon, whether Arafat loyalists or left dissidents; at best they can contribute to strengthen the Palestinian Islamic fundamentalist tendencies.

In that sense too, their victory is a bad omen to Arafat, obviously, as I have already explained. Among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, Hamas members are the only ones likely to be boosted by Hizbollah triumphalism. More generally, we can say that this victory will be precious for the whole Islamic fundamentalist movement in countering the negative impact of the recent events in Iran. Those who thought they could already bury Islamic fundamentalism (a French "Orientalist" recently produced a book heralding the terminal decline of this phenomenon) are blatantly refuted. As long as they have no real competitor for the embodiment of the aspirations of the downtrodden masses, and as long as the social effects of "globalization" are with us, the fundamentalists will also be part of the picture, with ups and downs naturally.

GILBERT ACHCAR grew up in Lebanon, before moving to France, where he teaches political science at the University of Paris-VIII. Among his most recent works are Eastern Cauldron (2004) and The Clash of Barbarisms (2d ed. 2006); a book of his dialogues with Noam Chomsky on the Middle East, Perilous Power, is forthcoming from Paradigm Publishers.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=10656

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ZNet | Mideast

Is Israel Losing Its War In Lebanon?

by Robert Fisk ; The Independent; July 27, 2006

Qlaya, Southern Lebanon - Is it possible - is it conceivable - that Israel is losing its war in Lebanon?

From this hill village in the south of the country, I am watching the clouds of brown and black smoke rising from its latest disaster in the Lebanese town of Bint Jbeil: up to 13 Israeli soldiers dead, and others surrounded, after a devastating ambush by Hizbollah guerrillas in what was supposed to be a successful Israeli military advance against a "terrorist centre".

To my left smoke rises too, over the town of Khiam, where a smashed United Nations outpost remains the only memorial to the four UN soldiers - most of them decapitated by an American-made missile on Tuesday - killed by the Israeli air force.

Indian soldiers of the UN army in southern Lebanon, visibly moved by the horror of bringing their Canadian, Fijian, Chinese and Austrian comrades back in at least 20 pieces from the clearly marked UN post next to Khiam prison, left their remains at Marjayoun hospital yesterday.

In past years, I have spent hours with their comrades in this UN position, which is clearly marked in white and blue paint, with the UN's pale blue flag opposite the Israeli frontier. Their duty was to report on all they saw: the ruthless Hizbollah missile fire out of Khiam and the brutal Israeli response against the civilians of Lebanon.

Is this why they had to die, after being targeted by the Israelis for eight hours, their officers pleading to the Israeli Defence Forces that they cease fire? An American-made Israeli helicopter saw to that.

In Bint Jbeil, meanwhile, another bloodbath was taking place. Claiming to "control" this southern Lebanese town, the Israelis chose to walk into a Hizbollah trap. The moment they reached the deserted marketplace, they were ambushed from three sides, their soldiers falling to the ground under sustained rifle fire. The remaining Israeli troops - surrounded by the "terrorists" they were supposed to liquidate - desperately appealed for help, but an Israeli Merkava tank and other vehicles sent to help them were also attacked and set on fire. Up to 17 Israeli soldiers may have died so far in this disastrous operation. During their occupation of Lebanon in 1983 more than 50 Israeli soldiers were killed in just one suicide attack.

The battle for southern Lebanon is on an epic scale but, from the heights above Khiam, the Israelis appear to be in deep trouble. Their F-16s turn in the high bright sun - small, silver fish whose whispers gain in volume as they dive - and their bombs burst over the old prison, where the Hizbollah are still holding out; beyond the frontier, I can see livid fires burning across the Israeli hillsides and the Jewish settlement of Metullah billowing smoke.

It was not meant to be like this, 15 days into Israel's assault on Lebanon. The Katyushas still streak in pairs out of southern Lebanon, clearly visible to the naked eye, white contrails that thump into Israeli's hillsides and border towns.

So is it frustration or revenge that keeps Israel's bombs falling on the innocent? In the early hours two days ago, a tremendous explosion woke me up, rattling the windows and shaking the trees outside, and a single flash suffused the western sky over Nabatiyeh.

The lives of an entire family of seven had just been extinguished.

And how come - since this now obsesses the humanitarian organisations working in Lebanon - that the Israelis bombed two ambulances in Qana, killing two of the three wounded inside. All the crews were injured - one with a piece of shrapnel in his neck - but what worried the Lebanese Red Cross was that the Israeli missiles had pierced the very centre of the red cross painted on the roof of each vehicle. Did the pious use the cross as their aiming point?

The bombardment of Khiam has set off its own brush fires on the hillsides below Qlaya, whose Maronite Christian inhabitants now stand on the high road above like spectators at a 19th century battle. Khiam is - or was - a pretty village of cut-stone doorways and tracery windows, but Israel's target, apart from the obviously marked UN position whose inhabitants they massacred, is the notorious prison in which - before its retreat from Lebanon in 2000 - hundreds of Hizbollah members and, in some cases, their families, were held and tortured with electricity by Israel's proxy militia, the South Lebanon Army.

This was the same prison complex - turned into a "museum of torture" by the Hizbollah after the Israeli retreat - that was visited by the late Edward Said shortly before his death. More important, however, is that many of the Hizbollah men originally held prisoner here were captives in cells deep underground the old French mandate fort. These same men are now fighting the Israelis, almost certainly sheltering from their fire in the same underground cells in which they languished, perhaps even storing some of their missiles there.

In Marjayoun, next to Qlaya, once the SLA's headquarters, Lebanese troops are trying to prevent Hizbollah guerrillas using the streets of the Greek Catholic town to fire yet more missiles at Israel. Seven-man Lebanese army patrols are moving through the darkened roads of both towns at night in case the Hizbollah brings yet more Israeli bombs down on our heads.

In Beirut, one observes the folly of Western nations with amusement as well as horror, but, sitting in these hill villages and listening to how the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, plans to reshape Lebanon is clearly a lesson in human self-delusion. According to US correspondents accompanying Ms Rice on her visit to the Middle East, she is proposing the intervention of a Nato-led force along the Lebanese-Israeli border for between 60 and 90 days to assure that a ceasefire exists, the deployment of an enlarged Nato force throughout Lebanon to disarm Hizbollah and then the retraining of the Lebanese army before its own deployment to the border.

This plan - which, like all American proposals on Lebanon, is exactly the same as Israel's demands - carries the same depth of conceit as that of the Israeli consul general in New York, who said last week that "most Lebanese appreciate what we are doing".

Does Ms Rice think the Hizbollah want to be disarmed? By Nato? Wasn't there a Nato force in Beirut which fled Lebanon after a group close to the Hizbollah bombed the US Marine base at Beirut airport in 1983, killing 241 US servicemen and dozens more French troops a few seconds later? Does anyone believe that Shia Muslim forces will not do the same again to any Nato "intervention" force? The Americans are talking about Egyptian and Turkish troops in southern Lebanon; Sunni Muslims ruling Shia territory.

The Hizbollah has been waiting and training and dreaming of this new war for years, however ruthless we may regard the actions. They are not going to surrender the territory they liberated from the Israeli army in an 18-year guerrilla war, least of all to Nato at Israel's bidding.

Yesterday's assault on the Israeli army in Bint Jbeil proved that. The problem is that the US sees this slaughterhouse as an "opportunity" rather than a tragedy, a chance to humble Hizbollah supporters in Tehran and help to shape the "new Middle East" of which Ms Rice spoke so blithely this week.

It is Israel which is running out of time in southern Lebanon. Its attacks have for the fifth time in 30 years placed it in the dock for war crimes in Lebanon. The toll of Lebanon's civilian casualties has reached 400. And still the US will not intervene to prevent the carnage, even to call for a 24-hour ceasefire to allow the 3,000 civilians still trapped between Qlaya and Bint Jbeil - who include a number of foreign nationals - to flee.

The only civilian walking those frightening roads to Qlaya was a goatherd, guiding his animals around the huge bomb craters in the tarmac. Talking to him, it emerged that he was almost stone deaf and obviously could not hear the bombs. In this, it seemed, he has a lot in common with Condoleezza Rice.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=10655

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ZNet | Mideast

Is Beirut Burning?

by Uri Avnery; July 27, 2006

Tel Aviv - "IT SEEMS that Nasrallah survived," Israeli newspapers announced, after 23 tons of bombs were dropped on a site in Beirut, where the Hizbullah leader was supposedly hiding in a bunker.

An interesting formulation. A few hours after the bombing, Nazrallah had given an interview to Aljazeera television. Not only did he look alive, but even composed and confident. He spoke about the bombardment - proof that the interview was recorded on the same day.

So what does "it seems that" mean? Very simple: Nasrallah pretends to be alive, but you can't believe an Arab. Everyone knows that Arabs always lie. That's in their very nature, as Ehud Barak once pronounced.

The killing of the man is a national aim, almost the main aim of the war. This is, perhaps, the first war in history waged by a state in order to kill one person. Until now, only the Mafia thought along those lines. Even the British in World War II did not proclaim that their aim was to kill Hitler. On the contrary, they wanted to catch him alive, in order to put him on trial. Probably that's what the Americans wanted, too, in their war against Saddam Hussein.

But our ministers have officially decided that that is the aim. There is not much novelty in that: successive Israeli governments have adopted a policy of killing the leaders of opposing groups. Our army has killed, among others, Hizbullah leader Abbas Mussawi, PLO no. 2 Abu Jihad, as well as Sheik Ahmad Yassin and other Hamas leaders. Almost all Palestinians, and not only they, are convinced that Yassir Arafat was also murdered.

And the results? The place of Mussawi was filled by Nasrallah, who is far more able. Sheik Yassin was succeeded by far more radical leaders. Instead of Arafat we got Hamas.

As in other political matters, a primitive military mindset governs this reasoning too.

A PERSON returning here after a long absence and seeing our TV screens might get the impression that a military junta is governing Israel, in the (former) South American manner.

On all TV channels, every evening, one sees a parade of military brass in uniform. They explain not only the day's military actions, but also comment on political matters and lay down the political and propaganda line.

During all the other hours of broadcasting time, a dozen or so have-been generals repeat again and again the message of the army commanders. (Some of them don't look particularly intelligent - not to say downright stupid. It is frightening to think that these people were once in a position to decide who would live and who would die.)

True, we are a democracy. The army is completely subject to the civilian establishment. According to the law, the cabinet is the "supreme commander" of the army (which in Israel includes the navy and air force). But in practice, today it is the top brass who decide all political and military matters. When Dan Halutz tells the ministers that the military command has decided on this or that operation, no minister dares to express opposition. Certainly not the hapless Labor Party ministers.

Ehud Olmert presents himself as the heir to Churchill ("blood, sweat and tears"). That's quite pathetic enough. Then Amir Peretz puffs up his chest and shoots threats in all directions, and that's even more pathetic, if that's possible. He resembles nothing so much as a fly standing on the ear of an ox and proclaiming: "we are ploughing!"

The Chief-of-Staff announced last week with satisfaction: "The army enjoys the full backing of the government!" That is also an interesting formulation. It implies that the army decides what to do, and the government provides "backing". And that's how it is, of course.

Now it is not a secret anymore: this war has been planned for a long time. The military correspondents proudly reported this week that the army has been exercising for this war in all its details for several years. Only a month ago, there was a large war game to rehearse the entrance of land forces into South Lebanon - at a time when both the politicians and the generals were declaring that "we shall never again get into the Lebanon quagmire. We shall never again introduce land forces there." Now we are in the quagmire, and large land forces are operating in the area.

The other side, too, has been preparing this war for years. Not only did they build caches of thousands of missiles, but they have also prepared an elaborate system of Vietnam-style bunkers, tunnels and caves. Our soldiers are now encountering this system and paying a high price. As always, our army has treated "the Arabs" with disdain and discounted their military capabilities.

That is one of the problems of the military mentality. Talleyrand was not wrong when he said that "war is much too serious a thing to be left to military men." The mentality of the generals, resulting from their education and profession, is by nature force-oriented, simplistic, one-dimensional, not to say primitive. It is based on the belief that all problems can be solved by force, and if that does not work - then by more force.

That is well illustrated by the planning and execution of the current war. This was based on the assumption that if we cause terrible suffering to the population, they will rise up and demand the removal of Hizbullah. A minimal understanding of mass psychology would suggest the opposite. The killing of hundreds of Lebanese civilians, belonging to all the ethno-religious communities, the turning of the lives of the others into hell, and the destruction of the life-supporting infrastructure of Lebanese society will arouse a groundswell of fury and hatred - against Israel, and not against the heroes, as they see them, who sacrifice their lives in their defense.

The result will be a strengthening of Hizbullah, not only today, but for years to come. Perhaps that will be the main outcome of the war, more important than all the military achievements, if any. And not only in Lebanon, but throughout the Arab and Muslim world.

Faced with the horrors that are shown on all television and many computer screens, world opinion is also changing. What was seen at the beginning as a justified response to the capture of the two soldiers now looks like the barbaric actions of a brutal war-machine. The elephant in a china shop.

Thousands of e-mail distribution lists have circulated a horrible series of photos of mutilated babies and children. At the end, there is a macabre photo: jolly Israeli children writing "greetings" on the artillery shells that are about to be fired. Then there appears a message: "Thanks to the children of Israel for this nice gift. Thanks to the world that does nothing. Signed: the children of Lebanon and Palestine."

The woman who heads the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has already defined these acts as war crimes - something that may in future mean trouble for Israeli army officers.

IN GENERAL, when army officers are determining the policy of a nation, serious moral problems arise.

In war, a commander is obliged to take hard decisions. He sends soldiers into battle, knowing that many will not return and others will be maimed for life. He hardens his heart. As General Amos Yaron told his officers after the Sabra and Shatila massacre: "Our senses have been blunted!"

Years of the occupation regime in the Palestinian territories have caused a terrible callousness as far as human lives are concerned. The killing of ten to twenty Palestinians every day, including women and children, as happens now in Gaza, does not agitate anyone. It doesn't even make the headlines. Gradually, even routine expressions like "We regret…we had no intention…the most moral army in the world…" and all the other trite phrases are not heard anymore.

Now this numbness is revealing itself in Lebanon. Air Force officers, calm and comfortable, sit in front of the cameras and speak about "bundles of targets", as if they were talking about a technical problem, and not about living human beings. They speak about driving hundreds of thousands of human beings from their homes as an imposing military achievement, and do not hide their satisfaction in face of human beings whose whole life has been destroyed. The word that is most popular with the generals at this time is "pulverize" - we pulverize, they are being pulverized, neighborhoods are pulverized, buildings are pulverized, people are pulverized.

Even the launching of rockets at our towns and villages does not justify this ignoring of moral considerations in fighting the war. There were other ways of responding to the Hizbullah provocation, without turning Lebanon into rubble. The moral numbness will be transformed into grievous political damage, both immediate and long term. Only a fool or worse ignores moral values - in the end, they always take revenge.

IT IS almost banal to say that it is easier to start a war than to finish it. One knows how it starts, it is impossible to know how it will end.

Wars take place in the realm of uncertainty. Unforeseen things happen. Even the greatest captains in history could not control the wars they started. War has its own laws.

We started a war of days. It turned into a war of weeks. Now they are speaking of a war of months. Our army started a "surgical" action of the Air Force, afterwards it sent small units into Lebanon, now whole brigades are fighting there, and reservists are being called up in large numbers for a wholesale 1982-style invasion. Some people already foresee that the war may roll towards a confrontation with Syria.

All this time, the United States has been using all its might in order to prevent the cessation of hostilities. All signs indicate that it is pushing Israel towards a war with Syria - a country that has ballistic missiles with chemical and biological warheads.

Only one thing is already certain on the 11th day of the war: Nothing good will come of it. Whatever happens - Hizbullah will emerge strengthened. If there had been hopes in the past that Lebanon would slowly become a normal country, where Hizbullah would be deprived of a pretext for maintaining a military force of its own, we have now provided the organization with the perfect justification: Israel is destroying Lebanon, only Hizbullah is fighting to defend the country.

As for deterrence: a war in which our huge military machine cannot overcome a small guerilla organization in 11 days of total war certainly has not rehabilitated its deterrent power. In this respect, it is not important how long this war will last and what will be its results - the fact that a few thousand fighters have withstood the Israeli army for 11 days and more, has already been imprinted in the consciousness of hundred of millions of Arabs and Muslims.

From this war nothing good will come - not for Israel, not for Lebanon and not for Palestine. The "New Middle East" that will be its result will be a worse place to live in.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=10652

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ZNet | Mideast

Applauding While Lebanon Burns

by Norman Solomon; July 27, 2006

Syndicated columnist Richard Cohen declared in the Washington Post on July 25 that an-eye-for-an-eye would be a hopelessly wimpy policy for the Israeli government.

"Anyone who knows anything about the Middle East knows that proportionality is madness," he wrote. "For Israel, a small country within reach, as we are finding out, of a missile launched from any enemy's back yard, proportionality is not only inapplicable, it is suicide. The last thing it needs is a war of attrition. It is not good enough to take out this or that missile battery. It is necessary to reestablish deterrence: You slap me, I will punch out your lights."

Cohen likes to sit in front of a computer and use flip phrases like "punch out your lights" as euphemisms for burning human flesh and bones with high-tech weapons, courtesy of American taxpayers.

In mid-November 1998, when President Clinton canceled plans for air attacks on Iraq after Saddam Hussein promised full cooperation with U.N. weapons inspectors, Cohen wrote: "Something is out of balance here. The Clinton administration waited too long to act. It needed to punch out Iraq's lights, and it did not do so."

The resort to euphemism tells us a lot. So does Cohen's track record of sweeping statements on behalf of his zeal for military actions funded by the U.S. Treasury.

On February 6, 2003, the Washington Post published Richard Cohen's judgment the morning after Colin Powell made his televised presentation to the U.N. Security Council. "The evidence he presented to the United Nations - some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail - had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them," Cohen wrote. "Only a fool - or possibly a Frenchman - could conclude otherwise."

Cohen's moral certainties are on a par with his technical ones.
While he condemns rockets fired into Israel, he expresses pleasure about missiles fired by the Israeli government. That the death toll of civilians is far higher from Israel's weaponry does not appear to bother him. On the contrary, he seems glad about the killing spree by the Israeli military.

In a column with bigoted overtones ("Israel is, as I have often said, unfortunately located, gentrifying a pretty bad neighborhood"), Cohen's eagerness to support additional large-scale bombing by Israel is thematic. Consider this passage: "Hezbollah, with the aid of Iran and Syria, has shown that it is no longer necessary to send a dazed suicide bomber over the border - all that is needed is the requisite amount of thrust and a warhead. That being the case, it's either stupid or mean for anyone to call for proportionality. The only way to ensure that babies don't die in their cribs and old people in the streets is to make the Lebanese or the Palestinians understand that if they, no matter how reluctantly, host those rockets, they will pay a very, very steep price."

Such phrasing is classic evasion by keyboard cheerleaders for war:
"The" Lebanese. "The" Palestinians. "They will pay a very, very steep price." Meanwhile, in the real world, the vast majority of the victims of the Israeli onslaught are civilians being subjected to collective punishment.

Cohen - like so many others in the American punditocracy - depicts the death of an Israeli civilian as far more tragic and important than the death of an Arab civilian.

There's something really sick about such righteous support for civilian death and destruction.

Osama bin Laden, meet Richard Cohen.

Richard, meet Osama.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=10653