A nice little war

I am tired of rich countries bombing poor countries, and angry that I'm implicated without my consent.

I don't have anything more to say, but these guys do:

• Uri Avnery —  In the Gunsight: Syria!
  
• Gideon Levy —  Days of Darkness
  
• Nathan Gardels —  Beginning of the End for Israel?
  
• Kenneth Brown —  Suez a Half Century On:  The Continuation of War by War
  
• Alex Cockburn —   The Triumph of Crackpot Realism
  

 

From Buckley to Hezbollah

"If you had a European prime minister who experienced what we've experienced it would be expected that he would retire or resign."

Gollum in his cave

When no less a Republican deity than William F. Buckley, the Grand Poobah of the conservative movement, proclaims that the Republican president should step down, it is long past time for everyone else—across the entire political spectrum—to see the Bush crew for the bumbling clowns they are and, at the very least, stop taking them seriously.

But no, the sycophantocracy is still mesmerized and enamored of its favored role at ringside.  The band plays obliviously on, the conglomerized news outlets continue gushing out pabulum by the truckload.  You want celebrity gossip and sex advice?  No problem.  But if you're trying to understand what's really going on in the world, look elsewhere.

This emperor is naked and it's time to publicly acknowledge it.  Two and a half years remain before this catastrophically ignorant/insane administration is replaced, assuming the United States still holds elections for national office by then.  This country and the world cannot tolerate two and a half more years of mounting disasters, each instigated as a desperate ploy to distract attention from the last.  There must be a strong and genuine opposition perspective in the mainstream media, something that's been AWOL far, far too long.

Sure, there are reasons.  Screw the reasons.  The mess in Iraq is the fault of the President, as is the mess in Louisiana.  Now we have Israel attacking Gaza and Lebanon, a mess in which the United States is implicated as a full participant.  What's next?  Syria?  There are indications that Bush is pressuring Israel to extend the war there.  Syria could become another Iraq.

But then maybe you disagree.  Maybe you feel that, when it comes to holy support for the state of Israel in her hour of need against the terrorist threat from Palestinian Gaza and Hezbollah in the north, it would be heretical, possibly even anti-semitic, to suggest that support be other than total.  If that is what you think, you are in good company.

Consider that the slaughter of innocents, whether by Hezbollah, Hamas, Al Qaeda, Americans in Iraq or the Israelis, is always wrong and should never be tolerated.  As the number of civilian dead in Lebanon surges past 500 (600 according to the Lebanese government), nobody can in good conscience stand by and remain silent as thousands more are threatened by Israel's actions.

Israel is presented to the American audience as a victim of terror, but its own longstanding policy vis-a-vis its neighbors is one of unrelenting intransigence and state terror, and its policy regarding the Palestinians has always been designed to destroy their national aspirations.  Everyone knows that the Palestinians abducted an Israeli soldier (we even know his name: Shalit), and this act is commonly regarded as the precipitating event of the ongoing incursion into Gaza, which has so far killed over 100 people, but most people are unaware that Israel abducted two Palestinian civilians only the day before—a small but typical example of how our understanding is manipulated.

The state of Israel has been in existence for nearly sixty years, and in all that time it has not been able to resolve the Palestine problem, the festering wound that is the actual root cause of the current conflict.  The reason for this failure has nothing to do with a historical enmity between the Arabs and the Jews.  It has everything to do with the calculation by Israel's government that truly resolving the Palestine issue is not in Israel's interest.

During the 1982 invasion, Israel killed 18,000 people in Lebanon.  Eighteen thousand.  How many must die this time?  An answer to that question was provided by the Israeli chief of staff, Dan Halutz, who ordered his pilots to destroy ten apartment buildings for every Katyusha rocket that lands in the environs of Haifa.  (Or is it every rocket that lands in Israel?  I forget.)  This is apparently what is meant by Israel's "measured response," and it fits the longstanding pattern.

The massive destruction from aerial bombardment and resulting human suffering and loss of life also guarantee that there will be another round of violence in the next generation cycle, and in our extremely dangerous era of nuclear proliferation, that leads straight to a holocaust.  It's simple, inexorable logic.

Ergo, anyone who does not support Israel in its hard-line reliance on a military solution cares more about the fate of the Israeli Jews than, for example, the Democrats in congress, who are unanimous in their support—a cynical political calculation based on their perceived need to win votes in the upcoming election.  They don't present a genuuine opposition and therefore don't deserve to win, but then anyone in congress who is targeted by the Israel lobby (AIPAC) has a major problem on his or her hands.  As an example of AIPAC's influence, the resolution unanimously approved in congress "condemning Hamas and Hezbollah and their state sponsors and supporting Israel's exercise of its right to self-defense" was written by AIPAC, not by members of congress. (Read John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's paper on the influence of the Israel lobby, which has aroused considerable controversy, including a rebuttal by Alan Dershowitz.)

QUESTION:  Who is responsible for educating the electorate about such a crucially important issue?

ANSWER:  The press.

Frank Rich is a lonely voice at the NYT along with Krugman and Herbert, but their editorial influence is severely limited by the TimesSelect subscription wall.  The New Republic has been unreliable for decades and should not be forgiven for favoring the war.  TNR's Gates-sired offspring in the electronic realm, Kinsley's Slate, defines a liberalish center, but is mostly just clever snottery served up with cool iconoclastic attitude.  (Though I admire Michael and seek out his own essays, elsewhere.)  In disdainful silence we shall pass over the rancid buffoonery of Christopher Hitchens to skip directly to the MSNBC Mama-ship, which is, with the single exception of the brilliant and forthright Eric Alterman, a barren wasteland along with the other big portal sites.

Warning:  To avoid toxic contamination, the Surgeon General advises total abstinence from the entertainment spectacle of television news.

PBS's News Hour is engaging but compromised by its peculiar brand of competitive advocacy journalism, wherein Subject Matter Experts confound us with in-depth squawkery on both sides of every issue until there's no longer any such thing as The Truth.

In the absence of a single source for reliable and objective news analysis, there is no choice but to hunt around and look at everything.  The editorials in Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, are particularly valuable, as are those in the Lebanense newspaper The Daily Star.  Both of these are available online.  Also important is Alex Cockburn's site, Counterpunch.org, though I've noticed that my links for articles there are (surprise!) being blocked somewhere.  Due to that censorship, I emphasize the importance of that site, and recommend particularly the entries by Uri Avnery, the Israeli peace advocate who took the initiative to talk to the PLO long before the government did and whose articles are also available here, and also the articles by Alex himself, who is controversial in some quarters but whose writing is cogent and worth reading.  (I haven't mentioned the mighty Juan Cole only because I've done so before, but he has become the go-to source for this topic as he has been for Iraq for the last three years.)

If you belong to a public libary, you might be able, as I am, to get around the TimesSelect subscription wall by accessing the online archives for the New York Times, which contain everything up until the prior day (yesterday).  The Middle East Research and Information Project is another source, available here.  Then there is the BBC and the other British outlets (The Guardian, The Independent, The Financial Times).  Other sources are listed on Juan Cole's site.  Among these are often found links to the writing of Helena Cobban, whose current article in the Boston Review about Hezbollah is here and whose website is here.

 

War crimes

The news from Lebanon is horrible.  The country is being rapidly and systematically destroyed, and the killing of civilian lebanese, especially in Shiite areas, is not merely indiscriminate, it's intentional.  Several hundred people have died in one week, yet what do we see in the NYT?  Wrenching stories about a couple of people killed by the highly inaccurate katyusha rockets that Hezbollah has been lobbing into northern Israel, and other stories about Israeli Palestinians being sympathetic to Hezbollah.

Hezbollah is perpetrating a war crime by randomly targeting civilian areas, but Israel's response is disproportionately massive and is not directed at the rocket launchers but largely at a civilian population not involved in the conflict.  That too is a war crime, and the breadth and scale of the operation belies its retaliatory nature, including the destruction of much of Lebanon's infrastructure and the wholesale demolition of entire villages and "block after block" of apartment buildings in south Beirut.  The overall picture of what Israel is doing there starts to look like the economic murder of the country and ethnic cleansing of a large segment of its population.

If you want to know what is really going on now in Lebanon, you have to do some digging because the actual details are not being featured on the front pages of the news outlets.  Juan Cole's website, Informed Comment, is one place to start, but if you follow some of the links he has put up, you're going to need a strong stomach.  (Several updated links added below.)



It is terrible to once again see piles of rubble in the streets of Beirut.  After the twenty years it took to rebuild that city, it is again being demolished by bombs.  Why?  Hezbollah controls the south, and there is nothing the Lebanese citizenry can do about that, yet they are being targeted by Israeli air power.

The response of former American administrations to such hostile outbreaks between Israel and its neighbors was invariably to send the Secretary of State to meet individually with the leaders of the belligerent countries in what was called "shuttle diplomacy" in an effort to bring about a ceasefire, but Condoleeza Rice will not engage in any attempt to arrange a ceasefire until after Hezbollah has been thoroughly vanquished.  The wholesale destruction and slaughter of Shiites and the effect this will have in Iraq seems not to worry her, but this new explosion of violence is not occuring in isolation.  There are now too many problems in the region, all of them headed in the wrong direction.  Does Condi even consider the strong possiblity that the Shiite militias in Iraq are likely to turn on American forces with newly motivated ferocity?

I shudder to think what is going on in the south.  Israel has leafleted villages and towns, making it known that everyone must get out, but where can they go?  The clear implication is that all human beings in that region are considered targets, with the result that the terrified population is fleeing northward and a humantiarian crisis is now inevitable.

It gets worse.  It appears that the Israelis may be using chemical weapons to dispose of the Shiite population in certain areas, or as a weapon of terror, or both.  I would not have believed it, but I don't know what else to make of the pictures.  Juan Cole warns you not to look at them, so of course I had to, and what I saw was a lot of dead children, their skin burned to a ghastly shade of gray but their hair intact and unburned, something that can only be the result of exposure to abhorrent chemicals.  There are three possibilities:

1. The Israelis are using chemical weapons
   
2. Bombs hit an arms dump containing chemical munitions provided to Hezbollah by Syria or Iran
   
3. Bombs hit a chemical plant of some kind
   

From prior experience with accusations of such outrages, I suspect we'll never get the definitive truth, even though there is actual evidence.

All wars are obscene, and terrible pictures of dead children are an aspect of the obscenity.  Leaving aside the question of whether or not Israel is guilty of war crimes in the current conflict, one needs to consider the power of propaganda.  Just as pictures from Abu Ghraib and of American brutality in Iraq served as recruitment vehicles for Al Qaeda and the Iraqi insurgency, the enormous suffering of the Lebanese people will make heroes of Hezbollah fighters all over the Arab world.  America lost the propaganda war for the hearts and minds of Iraqis long ago, after which we lost the country, though Bush won't acknowledge it.  The lesson is simple: If your actions serve to strengthen and swell the ranks of your enemies, you will lose, but Israel is following the failed template.

A more fundamental lesson is embedded in old Judeo-Christian (or Abrahamic?) doctrine that makes a civilized world possible.  I'm referring to the one about living and dying by the sword.  A child who loses his parents to a bomb dropped on a village is a bitter enemy for life, and in the large historical view, Israel's longstanding policy of the Iron Wall leads ultimately to disaster.

It's partly the bottomless US support that has made genuine Israeli adherence to peace accords unneccesary and enabled people like Ariel Sharon to pursue the irredentist fantasy of a Greater Israel.  The US bears major responsiblity for the fact that Israel has consistently chosen the sword, and now the logical, predictable consequence of this policy and this dangerous alliance might be unfolding.

I'm reminded of Al Gore's observation— "We are living in a time of consequences" —from his recent documentary about global warming.  As a New Yorker, I also remember something David Levy, a Knesset member and one of Menachem Begin's deputies, said during the last invasion of Lebanon:

"We will not budge an inch for the Arabs even if it means nuclear flames in New York."

Hardly the warm sentiments of an ally.

So is it WWIII?  I don't know, but I don't think we've ever witnessed a more dangerous lineup of circumstances in that region, with hot fires burning from the Levant to Afghanistan.  What happens when they connect?

---

The pictures mentioned above of people apparently killed by chemical exposure have been removed from this site where I found them early yesterday morning.  Allegations of chemical weapons being used in Lebanon can be found elsehwere on the web.

New links as of Sunday July 23rd:

Robert Fisk's Elegy for Beirut
Juan Cole's entry for Saturday (yesterday) provides good analysis at Informed Comment
Stop that Shit! by Uri Avnery
Operation Peace for the IDF by Gideon Levy
Willful Fantasies and Reality in Today's Mideast Conflict by James Zogby.
The rut becomes a grave by Larry Johnson
Hezbollah, Hamas and Israel: Everything You Need To Know by Alex Cockburn
British Split with Bush as Israeli Tanks Roll in by Ned Temko, Conal Urquhart in Tel Aviv and Peter Beaumont in Beirut
Do People Know How Much We Hurt? by Najla Said.
Why is Israel Destroying Lebanon by Patrick Seale.
Is Hizbullah here? Only children here by Clancy Chassay
Western media has dropped the ball by failing to tell the real story in Lebanon by Marc J Sirois
Stop now, immediately by Gideon Levy
Purity of Arms in Lebanon by Mark Whitney
Letting Lebanon Burn, MERIP Online

 

Israel's barbarism

Our taxes help pay for it.

The last time I felt a twinge of pride for being American was twenty-four years ago.   A young American soldier was holding back a Merkava tank with only his pistol.  I am looking for the reference, but it was a minor story in the overall blitzkreig of Israel's invasion of Lebanon and I doubt I'll find it.  I can still see the pleasant face of the young soldier, and also that of the Israeli tank commander, a brutal bastard who appeared capable of firing phosphorous shells into schoolyards with no problem.

Israel's use of white phosphorous as a terror weapon is well documented.  When a shell explodes, hundreds of burning clumps are scattered throughout a wide area.  If one lands on you, it burns inside your body for days and cannot be extinguished.  Guess what?  The Americans used white phosphorous in Fallujah.

Israel is a nasty little state and I want no part in supporting what it's doing in Lebanon and Gaza.  The USA is a nasty big state and I want no part in supporting the things we're doing either, the more so since it's the result of illegitimate power, but in fact I'm supporting all of this with my taxes.

It looks as though Israel is preparing another ground invasion into Lebanon, just as in 1982, this time to demolish Hezbollah.  But is this also an opening salvo in a showdown with Iran?  Will Israel attack Iran directly?  If they do that, all hell will break loose in that region and we will be in immediate danger of losing our entire army in Iraq.  Of course, before that actually happens, Bush would go nuclear.  My sense is that—in the dark recesses of his heart, that vague and repellant object he's always yapping about—it's what he really wants to do.

 

Outing

Their gray heads bob up and down as they talk in subdued voices on the way back from the stores. I can see them in the rear-view, their puffed-up hairdos all identically elegant because they’re done by the same Polish woman in the parlor next to the cafeteria. I can hear the bags rustling over the tape of Christmas carols and the hum of the motor as they show off their purchases. The nice fabrics and gee-gaws pass back and forth among the seats.

Anna is not taking part. She’s sitting in banished isolation in the row behind me, staring ahead through the windshield and occasionally catching my eye in the mirror. She’s regretful, and I appreciate that, but if she has any idea of my responsibilities, she may also be troubled about what happens next. She’s in hot water and I’m sorry but I have to do my job. We’re running late and the superintendent will have questions that must be answered. I really have no choice. I don’t want to be fired again.

I’ve known Anna as an older woman for a few years, and have been flirting with her and driving her around all that time to various destinations and gatherings, sometimes alone but often in the company of this same group of companions. I drive all these old characters around. Mornings we go to radiation and dialysis centers, afternoons there are outings and social visits. The faces change but the hairdos remain the same as each of these old ladies rides around with me for a few months or a few years and is then replaced by another. My wife Karla says I drive them all to the cemetery. It’s not literally the case, but that's sort of how it is.

Anna is special in that she’s the only one I knew from before. Thirty years ago, she used to direct plays in the old town hall building in the Ponkapoag village, and I took part in some of them. I was in a Pirandello and a Thronton Wilder and a few others I forget. My best role was Biff Loman in Death of a Salesman. Anna said I had good timing, and for a while there was talk of sending me to some fancy place in Connecticut, but then I did a stretch in Billerica and things took a different turn.

At the mall this afternoon, I had to wait an extra half hour for Anna to show up. She knew she was late and was urgently pushing her classy walker forward with the bag almost tumbling out of the basket. As I was helping her into the van, she made a halting excuse in a barely audible voice about how important it was to get the right style of shirts for her nieces and nephews, but the helicopter view, as my dispatcher Esmerelda would say, is that she’s getting pretty far along the route. Her condition has advanced to where she’s becoming irresponsible and we can’t handle it any more.

After making the turn into the long driveway that goes up to the Briarwood Assisted Living Facility, I loop through the entryway to the nursing home building at the bottom of the hill, slowing down in front of the door as if to let someone off. Just before rolling to a dead stop, I slam the wheel hard and gun the motor to take the van the rest of the way up the hill.

 

Zidane and Materazzi

The international organization that oversees futbol is going to investigate the Zidane incident that occurred in the 110th minute of the final playoff on Sunday.  If it is determined that Materazzi racially insulted Zidane, Italy could be disqualified and lose the world cup, making France the winner this year.  There has been a lot of speculation about what passed between the players, but Zidane is going to go public with what was actually said "in a few days."  It's amazing to think that the FIFA might actually revoke the trophy, but to me it appears not unlikely, and I'd be glad to see it happen. Zenedine Zidane is a graceful and elegant player, one of the greatest in history, and his removal from the final for that head-butting incident probably lost the game for France.


As a young guy I played a lot of pond hockey and mob soccer, but now I don't follow any sports at all, including futbol, though a professional match is a lovely sight, much more so than American football with its grotesque uniforms, continuous stops and emphasis on individual stardom.  The only professional futbol match I've seen in person was in Mexico City, and I was very impressed with the beauty of the game, but this is not the case with the Italians, who rely heavily on a dirty style of play that results in many injuries and bodies lying all over the field.  The azzullis (the Italian team wears blue) have plenty of the requisite skills, especially in defense, but their violent style appears to give them an edge that, in my highly inexpert opinion, should be denied them by the FIFA.  I thought there were many uncalled fouls in the final game, including the one in which Zidane appeared to be injured, which is why Italy's sudden-death victory on penalty kicks seemed unfair.  I assume they are encouraged to provoke the better players of the opposing team in any way possible and do whatever it takes to put them out of action.

Cheaters and bullies often win outside the sports arena, so it would be heartening to see the victory revoked for symbolic reasons, but the actual deciding factor is racism.  France's team covers the spectrum from French-bread white through Algerian 'beurre' to deep Senegal ebony, but the azzullis are all tanned white guys and probably do indulge in a culture of racism, and that's not ok, no matter how cute they look in their blue uniforms.

Update:  The remarks were not racist.  Suspension and community service for Zidane, shorter suspension for Materazzi.  C'est tout.

 

Xwtpoieca

This word is a counter-alphabetic anagram of Wax Poetic, the name of the Nublu Sessions jazz (or whatever) group.  If you superimpose these letters over the backwards alphabet, so that the X is over X and W over W, etc, the letters appearing between them in the alphabet are:

vusrqnmlkjhgfdb

These are the green letters in the table below.  (xwtpoieca is red.)

z

y

x

w

v

u

t

s

r

q

p

o

n

m

l

k

j

i

h

g

f

e

d

c

b

a

This group then divides evenly into three subgroups,

vusrq
nmlkj
hgfdb

each containing five letters, for a total of fifteen.  This is not a bad result, so maybe I'll like the music of Wax Poetic, though fourteen would have been preferable, since everybody knows that multiples of seven are more satisfying than multiples of five, but you can't always get what you want.


(In fact, Ilhan Ersahin's Nublu collaborative society over in Alphabet City is certainly an exciting musical development.  Here in Brooklyn something similar might be occuring at Barbès, a scruffy French joint at Sixth and Ninth where the wonderful Las Rubias del Norte appear often, but maybe it's not really comparable.  I don't hang out there much and don't know the music scene.  There's a lot of stuff going on in NYC.)