Author: Helena

160 IDF infantry soldiers accuse their commanders

We are still only 36 days after the start of the 33-day war, and already a group of some 160 IDF infantry soldiers have decided they wanted to join a “demonstration that would call on the resignation of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz.” However, that piece by Nir Hasson in Friday’s HaAretz noted, “their release was put off until Friday, preventing them from reaching the protest.”
Hasson reported these comments from angry soldiers:

    “I’ve been in the army and reserves for 26 years and what happened this time was not merely a fiasco, it was a complete debacle. We felt like tin soldiers in a game of Olmert and Peretz’s assistants and spin masters,” said Avi, a soldier in the brigade…
    “They sent us into a village they knew 15 Hezbollah fighters were holed up in at mid-day, we were like sitting ducks, it was total insanity. Two of our comrades were killed because of that. We are being used as though we were in the Chinese army, where it doesn’t matter how many are killed,” he said.

I note that this was not a classical type of anti-war protest. Hasson wrote:

    A few dozen demonstrators arrived at Rabin Square Thursday to take part in the protest that had been organized on Internet sites.
    They called for Olmert’s resignation and blasted halting the war before its goals were achieved.
    Ariella Miller, one of the protest’s initiators, said she was not acting on behalf of any political body. “We are family people who used the Internet to form a group. When we went to war they promised us to bring back the soldiers and restore Israel’s deterrent force.”

However, the feelings of these soldiers and their readiness to speak to the press about their desire for Olmert’s resignation provide yet more evidence of the political upheaval inside Israel this week.

More on Israeli leadership chaos

Israel’s leadership truly is in chaos. Not only are there all the messy recriminations, charges, and counter-charges over the unsuccessful handling of the war. But in addition we have:
(1) The Chief of Staff’s stock-selling at a time of crisis scandal, as noted here.
(2) “Justice” Minister Haim Ramon reportedly about to be tried for sexually harrassing a female employee. Ramon, who came into Kadima from Labor, was one of the loudest voices in the cabinet calling for a large-scale ground incursion of Lebanon. Was this belligerence a way to deflect attention from what he must have known was an increasing threat of such prosecution?
(3) And now, this report from the usually excellently informed Ari Shavit, stating that Ehud Olmert and his wife,

    will be summoned to an investigation in the State Comptroller’s office within a few days.
    The prime minister and his wife will be presented with these findings: The price they paid for their new house on 8 Cremieux Street in Jerusalem is lower than its market price by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
    The difference between the sum they paid – some $1.2 million – and the house’s value – $1.6-1.8 million – is hard to explain. It raises suspicion that the prime minister and his wife illicitly received about half a million dollars.
    There is another suspicion: The house the Olmerts bought had been earmarked for preservation. Converting a house marked for preservation into a house that can be torn down, rebuilt or expanded requires special and irregular permits from the Jerusalem municipality. There is evidence to support the suspicion that Olmert’s confidants helped the contractor who sold Olmert the house obtain those irregular permits. If this is the case, the real estate deal was probably a bribery deal. The prime minister and his wife will be questioned about that.
    Presumably, the questioning of the Olmerts by State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss’ investigators and his adviser on corruption, retired detective Yaakov Borovsky, will wrap up the comptroller’s investigation.
    The comptroller will present the attorney general with a slim but weighty document. It is very likely that the document will leave Attorney General Menachem Mazuz with no choice but to open a criminal inquiry against the prime minister and his wife.
    It is highly doubtful that Olmert could even temporarily survive such a police probe considering the present public mood. Chances are that within about two months he will no longer be Israel’s prime minister.

I’ll just repeat what I put at the end of my most recent post here:

    I do note… that the disunity in Israel’s national command authorities could allow some devastating military adventurism to arise there. This, in a country with (by conservative estimates) some 100 to 200 nuclear warheads…
    Please, will the adults in the international community pay attention to this risk and exert all possible efforts to end the long-festering irresolution of three vital strands of the Israeli-Arab conflict before things get even worse?

The collapse of decent public values in Israel that I noted here earlier, and the resulting political chaos, leadership fracturing, and all the big risks attendant thereto all seem much worse than I had earlier thought. It is truly time for the adults in an international community that gave this deeply troubled state its original birth certificate back in 1947 to step in and take responsibility for restoring sanity, peace, and hope to a region that has seen none of these qualities in the past few years.

Hizbullah building bridges; Israel’s command authorities fracturing

I just read this Yahoo/AP news report about Lebanese Army units deploying to south Lebanon today, and I clicked onto the slideshow accompanying it. In a number of slides you can see the Army convoys crossing vital bridges across waterways that the Israelis three weeks ago pulverized with their air assault against the country’s infrastructure– and these crossing points had already been rebuilt with temporary but very serviceable-looking replacement structures.
E.g. here, you can see a rather nice-looking emergency bridge that has been put up over the Litani south of Tyr– at the point where just last week we saw desperate aid volunteers handing medical supplies to each across a raging torrent. (Look at the pic before that one, too.) Or this one, which shows the Army convoy crossing what is, I think, the strategically vital Jisr al-Khardali (Mustard Bridge), an area beneath Marjayoun that I know well.
So who do we suppose it was who built these emergency structures? I am almost certain it would have been engineers from Hizbullah’s long-practiced “Jihad al-Buna” (The Jihad of Building) organization.
Hizbullah builds many kinds of bridges, of course– political as well as physical. For example, Juan Cole links to an Arabic-language news report saying that Hizbullah leader Sayed Hasan Nasrullah has defended Lebanon’s “March 14” bloc against Bashar al-Asad’s accusation that they are all just Israeli and American tools.
Right now, Hizbullah’s need to keep good relations with the rest of the Lebanese government evidently outweighs its need to keep good relations with Bashar. Bashar, after all, is not about to cut them off at the knees. Indeed, his support for them will have to (in his own interest) continue and perhaps even grow over the weeks ahead, regardless of what Nasrullah says about him in public. But Nasrullah does need to keep a good working relationship with the March 14 bloc as he shoe-horns Hizbullah into the position he wants it to be in, in south Lebanon and the rest of the country, over the vital days and weeks ahead.
It’s probably worth reiterating that Nasrullah is an extremely astute and experienced political operator within intra-Lebanese politics. ( You can see some description of that in my Boston Review piece.)
Al-Hayat is only one of many newspapers that is reporting [Arabic] today on the deal between Hizbullah and the rest of the Lebanese government that has allowed the Lebanese Army’s rapid deployment to the south and a Hizbullah agreement to keep its weapons south of the Litani hidden (for now).
A future stage of this relationship might indeed involve– as often discussed previously– the incorporation of most or all Hizbullah units into the national army, perhaps in the form of a territorially based reserve or auxiliary force. At a minimum, such a force should have a single, unified command which comes under truly national Lebanese control.
(Interesting, in this context, to see this AP report of the Lebanese authorities having arrested a Lebanese general, Brig. Adnan Daoud, after he was seen on Israeli and Lebanese television last week, schmoozing and jovially drinking tea with Israeli occupation force officers who had just captured his barracks in Marjayoun. Lebanon has, of course, remained in a state of unresolved war with Israel since 1948, and has suffered horrendous damage from repeated Israeli attacks and incursions since 1968.)
Politicians in the west have been so happy in the past to see Lebanon gain its national independence from all foreign tutelage. So if the Lebanese government chooses to establish a territorial or auxiliary force in the way outlined above, then no foreign government would want to interfere with that nationally made decision, I assume?
… Gosh, the news just keeps pouring in, doesn’t it? Here, we learn that those fearsome French who were expected to “lead” or “be the backbone of” the beefed-up UN force are now reported by Le Monde as being prepared to contribute to it a princely “10 officers and 200 military engineers.”
This definitely looks more and more like Round One to Hizbullah. And of course, while Hizbullah’s leadership has been extremely carefully to do what it can to keep its version of “Lebanese national unity” flourishing, and while Hamas and Abu Mazen have also taken a significant new step toward Palestinian national unity, in Israel the highest levels of strategic and military decisionmaking seem to be falling into increasing discord amidst hails of cross-cutting accusations about responsibility for the failure of the 34-day war against Lebanon. (E.g., here and here.)
I do note, however, that the disunity in Israel’s national command authorities could allow some devastating military adventurism to arise there. This, in a country with (by conservative estimates) some 100 to 200 nuclear warheads…
Please, will the adults in the international community pay attention to this risk and exert all possible efforts to end the long-festering irresolution of three vital strands of the Israeli-Arab conflict before things get even worse?

Good questions about Blair’s claimed terror plot

Craig Murray is the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan who lost his job over his refusal to go along with Blair/Bush plan to hide Uzbekistan’s ghastly torture record. He writes in this post on his blog that,

    Unlike the great herd of so-called security experts doing the media analysis, I have the advantage of having had the very highest security clearances myself, having done a huge amount of professional intelligence analysis, and having been inside the spin machine.

So this what Murray says there about the “terror plot” that was announced with such fanfare by Tony Blair (and indeed, also by George W. Bush) last week:

    None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn’t be a plane bomber for quite some time.
    In the absence of bombs and airline tickets, and in many cases passports, it could be pretty difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever rash stuff they may have bragged in internet chat rooms.
    What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for over a year – like thousands of other British Muslims. And not just Muslims. Like me. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests.
    Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed the details of this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes – which, rather extraordinarily, had not turned up in a year of surveillance. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have their ways of making people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary information this way…
    We then have the extraordinary question of Bush and Blair discussing the possible arrests over the weekend. Why? I think the answer to that is plain. Both in desperate domestic political trouble, they longed for “Another 9/11”. The intelligence from Pakistan, however dodgy, gave them a new 9/11 they could sell to the media. The media has bought, wholesale, all the rubbish they have been shovelled.
    We then have the appalling political propaganda of John Reid, Home Secretary, making a speech warning us all of the dreadful evil threatening us and complaining that “Some people don’t get” the need to abandon all our traditional liberties. He then went on, according to his own propaganda machine, to stay up all night and minutely direct the arrests. There could be no clearer evidence that our Police are now just a political tool. Like all the best nasty regimes, the knock on the door came in the middle of the night, at 2.30am. Those arrested included a mother with a six week old baby.
    For those who don’t know, it is worth introducing Reid. A hardened Stalinist with a long term reputation for personal violence, at Stirling Univeristy he was the Communist Party’s “Enforcer”, (in days when the Communist Party ran Stirling University Students’ Union, which it should not be forgotten was a business with a very substantial cash turnover). Reid was sent to beat up those who deviated from the Party line.
    We will now never know if any of those arrested would have gone on to make a bomb or buy a plane ticket. Most of them do not fit the “Loner” profile you would expect – a tiny percentage of suicide bombers have happy marriages and young children. As they were all under surveillance, and certainly would have been on airport watch lists, there could have been little danger in letting them proceed closer to maturity – that is certainly what we would have done with the IRA.
    In all of this, the one thing of which I am certain is that the timing is deeply political. This is more propaganda than plot. Of the over one thousand British Muslims arrested under anti-terrorist legislation, only twelve per cent are ever charged with anything. That is simply harrassment of Muslims on an appalling scale. Of those charged, 80% are acquitted. Most of the very few – just over two per cent of arrests – who are convicted, are not convicted of anything to do terrorism, but of some minor offence the Police happened upon while trawling through the wreck of the lives they had shattered.
    Be sceptical. Be very, very sceptical.

(Hat-tip to Jonathan Schwarz of A Tiny Revolution for the Murray link.)
So yes, Murray has persuaded me to be very skeptical. When I was writing this JWN post last Saturday about the Blair government’s “revelations”, I did consider for a while whether to refer to the plot as an “alleged plot”, or not, and finally decided not to.
I guess sometimes I’m just too naive. I would have found it hard to believe that the British police and other government agencies could be so politicized and so craven as to undertake this big, much-publicized “reveal and takedown” operation on the basis of such very, very shaky “information.” And as Murray notes, the timing of it all certainly did look extremely political.
Actually, the idea that the British government agencies might have participated in an intensely politicized exercise in this way makes me even more scared than I was last week about the (alleged, and definitely still not proven) plot itself.
Here’s what Murray wrote, very sensibly, on Aug. 10 itself:

    We wait for the court system to show whether this was a real attempted attack and, if so, it was genuinely operational rather than political to move against it today. But the police’ and security services’ record of lies does not inspire confidence.

Right. Testing and openly establishing the facts of the matter is one of the key functions of a well-run court system. Wouldn’t it be great if the 500 men who’ve now languished in Gitmo for more than four years, and the other hundreds languishing in other US-run “black hole” prisons around the world, could also rely on a court hearing that would show us all– the public in whose name they have been captured and detained this long– whether there was any evidence against them, and if so, what?

Great military/strategic commentary from Pat Lang and Co.

Here’s AP this evening:

    Hundreds of Israeli soldiers walked out of Lebanon on Tuesday — some smiling broadly and pumping their fists, others weeping or carrying wounded comrades — as a cease-fire with Hezbollah solidified after a shaky start. The process was expected to accelerate over the coming days…
    Many of the infantry soldiers smiled with joy as they crossed back into Israel. Members of one unit carried a billowing Israeli flag. Some sang a traditional Hebrew song with the lyric: “We brought peace to you.” Others wept as they returned to their country, exhausted by the fighting.
    Some of the troops had been so disconnected from the news that they asked if Israel had managed to free two soldiers whose capture by Hezbollah on July 12 sparked the fighting. Israel had not. Several tanks headed back into Israel as well, including one that had been damaged and was being towed by a military bulldozer…

Here’s my fellow Virginian Col. Pat Lang, posting on his blog ‘Sic Semper Tyrannis 2006’, yesterday:

    A basic lesson of history is that one must win on the battlefield to dictate the peace. A proof of winning on the battlefield has always been possession of that battlefield when the shooting stops. Those who remain on the field are just about always believed to have been victorious. Those who leave the field are believed to be the defeated.
    Lee remained on the field a day after both Antietam and Gettysburg waiting to resume the fight. McClellan and Meade did not respond and Lee then moved away withdrawing to the south. He is thought to have been defeated in both battles although both could be argued to have been a “draw.”

I really have to put a link to Lang’s blog onto my sidebar here. He is a smart analyst of Middle Eastern military affairs and strategy.
As I understand it the main reason the IDF soldiers are flooding back into Israel is because they were all spread out in southern Lebanon and extremely vulnerable to renewed attacks from the Hizbullahis who remain embedded within the indigenous population of the region. Oh, also the IDF’s ground operations inside Lebanon had nearly all turned out to be a fiasco from start to finish, with the units ill-supplied and almost completely untrained in waging any kind of ground operations other than beating down the doors of cowering Palestinian families and staffing checkpoints throughout the whole West Bank. (See this great Akiva Eldar article on the IDF’s many problems.)
So yes, getting out fast maybe has been the better part of valor for them.
Meanwhile, South Lebanese who had earlier fled from the terror Israel was raining on them in their homes have been returning to their communities in a surge of slowly moving humanity. Hizbullah is from and of this population, so the pipe-dreams of the French, the Bushites, or other westerners who think that somehow they can build a Hizbullah-disavowing bastion among the South Lebanese will certainly remain just that.
(The people of South lebanon have had an earlier ugly experience with a too-zealous French component of UNIFIL before now, back in 1982, and rapidly sent it packing.)
Hizbullah knows how to rebuild war-shattered towns and villages, how to provide community services, how to meet the needs of the people. Their people have, after all, seen this movie of displacement and return, ruin and rebuilding, many times before over the past 28 years. All the western aid organizations are worlds behind them in trying to address the situation in the south.
Here’s another thing Lang writes in that post:

    What is clear is that Hizbullah’s forces remain in place all over the disputed zone and that its command and control of its forces remains effective. How can you know that? Easy. The day before the cease fire Hizbullah fired 250 rockets into Israel and since the cease fire has fired none. This represents unmistakable evidence of effective command.

Here, too, are some quotes on Hizbullah’s military effectiveness from my good friend Timur Goksel, former political advisor to UNIFIL in Lebanon:

    Goksel points out: “These people have been fighting the Israelis for eighteen years in south Lebanon. People forget that. They already know the Israelis. And they fought them when they occupied Lebanon and since then they have been preparing for a guerrilla war again.” In addition, Goksel highlights the remarkably dispersed nature of the Hizbollah guerrilla forces, which operate in small units with very little communication through to any overall chain of command. Much of what is done is according to previously agreed tactics; this makes it very difficult for the Israelis to disrupt communications because it is simply not very important for units to coordinate with each other or with a notional “centre”. (see “Hizbollah’s lack of structure its strength”, Asia Times, 10 August 2006).

And on Nasrallah:

    “He’s a very good student of everything to do with Israel: the politicians, the Army,” says Timur Goksel, a former senior adviser to the U.N. forces in Lebanon who has met the Hizbullah eader dozens of times. For religious guidance, Nasrallah relied increasingly on the heads of the Iranian revolution: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whom he idolized, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who in 1989 would become Khomeini’s successor as Iran’s spiritual leader and supreme political authority. In the 1980s, after Iran created Hizbullah to fight Israel’s troops in Lebanon, the militia also took up the struggle against Lebanon’s original Shiite movement, known as Amal. The two rival groups disagreed over the power of the ayatollahs and over which ones to follow. In 1988, skirmishes among the militias broke out into open combat—and Nasrallah was on Hizbullah’s front lines. “He was always on the ground with the fighters,” says Goksel, who was based with the United Nations in South Lebanon at the time. “They loved him for it. He has the full loyalty of the fighters from that time.” (see Babak Dehghanpisheh and Christopher Dickey, in Newsweek, Aug. 21-28, 2006 issue.)

(You can also see some interesting quotes from Goksel in my long Boston Review article on Hizbullah, last year.)

Imshin’s view from north Tel Aviv

I’ve kept the link to Imshin’s blog Not a Fish, Provincially Speaking on my sidebar just about since the beginning of this blog. Even for a good while when Imshin wasn’t posting anything new there I kept the link up, because I like the fresh way she writes about her life as a “sassy Israeli working mother.” And though I frequently disagree with her, there’s a lot of things she has written that I agree with and that make me admire her values and her views
She even put that “Provincially Speaking” subtitle onto her blog after I’d accused her of having a fairly provincial worldview.
Well, another word for provincial could be “grounded”. All well and good.
So I wonder how representative of broader Israeli thinking her view of the recent Israeli assault on Lebanon has been? If it is broadly representative, then that could explain some things that have been going on in Israeli politics that need a lot of further consideration.
Here’s what she was writing August 10th:

    I started this blog in 2002 because I was so upset about the lies being told about Israel all the time. Lies being told and being believed.
    I don’t care any more. It doesn’t matter.
    My mother-in-law often tells about life in Tel Aviv during the 1948 war…
    That war was a fight to survive. A terrible terrible war, killing one percent of the Jewish population and many newcomers, Holocaust survivors fresh off the boats. It was touch and go. Us or them.
    Never since has Israel’s home front been so targetted. Not even when we sat in air shelters here in Tel Aviv during the Gulf War of 1991. Not even near.
    Never, until now.
    This is still a fight to survive. And anyone who thinks differently is deluded.
    Still we’re the bad guys.
    Brave kids are fighting for us in Lebanon, getting wounded, getting killed. Whole families have been sitting underground for weeks, many others are refugees. People are being killed and wounded in their homes, thousands of homes have been destroyed. By an organization described by some foreign media as a ‘resistance movement’. Resistance against what exactly?
    Against Israel’s existence. They are quite clear about that.
    The situation is that Lebanon has to burn right now if Israel is to survive. I’m sorry for the people on the other side, but that is the way it is. Us or them. In that respect we are not doing nearly enough for the enemy to get the picture. No, for the enemy to cease to be.

You know, at some theoretical level, I know that when people say or do hateful things, they do so out of their own fear… and the best way to respond is to be compassionate toward the place in them where they experience that fear.
I think I can clearly see that Imshin was writing these really hateful things because she was deeply fearful, and I can understand where that fear comes from. (I’ve spent plenty of nights huddling in corridors and basements under the assault of incoming rockets and artillery… Actually, many more than she has, since she lives in Tel Aviv, not further north.) And maybe when you’re living right in such a coccoon of fear it is hard for you to think logically about all the consequences of your own words and actions?
But “Lebanon has to burn right now if Israel is to survive”? Where does that come from, Imshin? You are far too smart and sophisticated to think that that is any kind of a recipe for Israel’s longterm wellbeing.
… So now, I hope that with ceasefire along your country’s northern border you can finally climb out of your mental bunker and see things a little more clearly.
Imshin, if you are really concerned about Israel’s longterm wellbeing, as I certainly believe you are, then how come you can’t see that this depends on your country being able to build decent and fair relationships with all of your neighbors? You can’t just hope to “burn” them all while you yourselves remain living in self-righteousness and peace… Can you?

After the war, the battle for the broader peace

This latest Israeli war on Hizbullah and the whole of Lebanon may not be over. But whether it is or not, it’s already time to discuss important questions about the nature of the peace that should follow . And I’m not talking here only about the shape of the post-war order in Lebanon (which seems to be the extent of George Bush’s ever-myopic purview), but more importantly, the shape of the post-war order in the whole Arab-Israeli arena.
Several Israelis have already noted– realistically, in my view– that the strategic defeat Ehud Olmert has suffered in Lebanon represents a defeat for his favored stance of “unilateral convergence” in the West Bank, as well. As several Israeli and other commentators have pointed out, Barak’s unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 did not prevent Hizbullah’s rockets from raining down on northern Israel, and Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 did not stop Hamas’s rockets from raining down on southern Israel. So why would anyone imagine that a unilateral withdrawal from portions of the West Bank would leave central Israel any safer than the north or the south?
Good question.
The problem as I see it is that in any withdrawal that’s quite unilateral, then Israel does not have an interlocutor on the other side of the line who has signed any commitments regarding non-aggression, and who has been given enough incentives in the course of that negotiation that they are prepared to enforce those commitments. Instead of that, the success of a Barak- or Sharon-style unilateral withdrawal depended solely on Israel’s ability to use military deterrence to prevent aggressions against it, including the use of wall-hopping rockets, from the people on the other side of the line. And in the absence of any negotiated agreement– during the negotiating of which the non-Israeli party would have received non-trivial benefits including economic incentives, Israeli promises of non-aggression, etc– then the propensity of the people on the other side of the line to be deterred by Israel’s military might actually be quite low.
So the supposition I expressed earlier in the year, that a de-facto situation of “parallel unilateralisms” might continue fairly stably between the Israelis and Gaza for two or three years has been proven false. Israel’s vision of military deterrence of its immediate neighbors has failed, and the Sharon-Olmert vision of unilateralism with regard to the Palestinians has taken a body blow along with it, too.
Bibi Netanyahu was, of course, one of the first to point out the link between Olmert’s setback in Lebanon and the failure of Sharonist unilateralism. And I agree with him. Where I strongly disagree with him is over what other kind of policy Israel should follow, instead.
For his part, Yossi Beilin, the leader of the faintly leftwing Meretz Party, has also started asking some tough questions about this topic… Including whether it would not have been better for Israel to have sought to include Syria in the diplomatic effort to resolve the Lebanon crisis, instead of excluding it… and also, whether the aftermath of this war should see the convening of a comprehensive Israeli-Arab peace conference along the lines of the Madrid conference of October 1991.
Beilin is completely right. His proposal that a Madrid-type conference be convened is completely in line with what I called for in my CSM column last Thursday. He is also right to note that,

    the gaps in the matter of the final status arrangements have been greatly narrowed over the last 15 years. In Israel of 2006, there is a near-consensus about a Palestinian state, and Israel’s prime minister is ready to give up 90 percent of the West Bank, unilaterally. The Clinton document, the Bush “vision,” the Road Map, the Arab League Summit decision of 2002 and the Geneva Initiative all paint a clear picture of a permanent Israeli-Palestinian agreement. The public and secret talks with the Syrians since 1991 also sketch, nearly completely, the outline of an Israeli-Syrian agreement.

But how about the politics of such a bold move? Beilin notes that in 1991, it was the US that took the initiative, poking and prodding a reluctant Israel to take part in the Madrid conference. But, he adds,

    This time it will be Olmert’s job to persuade President Bush that prying Syria out of the Axis of Evil, peace with Lebanon and an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are practical moves, which – if they work – could save the Middle East and help achieve the reforming vision Bush believes in so much.

H’mm. I am certainly not holding my breath that Olmert will show such wisdom and initiative. But if the sane (i.e. non-US) parts of the “international community” as a whole could gather themselves strongly enough around the idea of a speedy, comprehensive, and fair Middle East peace, and could gather enough Israelis and enough Arab governments and people around this plan, too, then perhaps the US citizenry and its government could also become sufficiently persuaded that this is a good and long overdue idea?
Anyway, this battle for the nature of the post-war regional order is already being joined within Israeli society. So right now, all the other governments of the world should make clear to the Israeli voters and leaders that after two Qanas there will be no further international tolerance for Israel’s continued recourse to militarism and colonialist expansion. And that it is time to conclude that kind of a fair peace that will allow Israelis, Palestinians, and Syrians all flourish.
(Should any of this actually be controversial at all?)
Meanwhile there should be no further subsidizing at all of any policies, pursued by any party in the Arab-Israeli theater, that are belligerent, militaristic, and aggrandizing… And there should be no double standards on this, at all. The world has seen the ghasty results of the Israel-excusing double standards that have been pursued in the Middle East up until now.

Value changes in Israel, too

Back in March, I wrote in this CSM column about some Israelis “sip[ping] lattes in lavish shopping malls as conflict with the Palestinians seems comfortably distant.” Some commenters here on JWN grew intriguingly apoplectic about that, which was an honest description of something I saw in several places, especially in greater Tel Aviv.
I think, though, that I was getting close there to remarking on something significant about the change in Israel’s values and self-image over the years. Long gone, apparently is the self-image Israelis used to like to project of being hardy, egalitarian “pioneers” committed to building a new and better society there. Instead, we have this report in today’s HaAretz, indicating just how far the erosion of that image has gone:

    Senior sources in the Israel Defense Forces General Staff and field officers who took part in the war in Lebanon said on Tuesday that Chief of Staff Dan Halutz, who went to his bank branch and sold an NIS 120,000 investment portfolio only three hours after two soldiers were abducted by Hezbollah on the northern border, cannot escape resignation.
    The sources say there is a clear ethical flaw in the chief of staff’s behavior during the hours when soldiers were killed in Lebanon and others were attempting to rescue wounded. Halutz should resign the moment the military completes its pullout from south Lebanon, they said.
    At this stage, it does not appear that Halutz intends to resign of his own accord.
    Several hours after the July 12 abduction, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert declared war on Hezbollah and Israeli warplanes began bombing targets deep inside Lebanon.
    But as the country’s political and military echelons met urgently to discuss the possible declaration of war, Halutz went at 12:00 P.M. to sell an investment portfolio, the Ma’ariv newspaper reported on Tuesday…

Personally, I don’t have anything against Israelis, individually or collectively, becoming rich and living a west-European-style lifestyle. I do, however, have considerable objections to my government giving the largest swathe of the “aid” dollars it gives to any country, to Israel– at a time when the GDP per capita there is already well over $20,000. And I do have an objection to Israelis continuing (many of them) to live off reparations that they received for properties that were seized from their families in the early 1940s in Europe, at a time when they still refuse to discuss giving any reparations, themselves, for properties seized from Palestinians in 1948 and indeed for all the considerable material damage Israel has visited on Palestinian and Lebanese civilians over the decades since then.
Anyway, if Israelis want to focus on getting rich, and spend their time sipping lattes in malls, that’s great. Just let them finish concluding their unfinished business with their neighbors, first. Like, they should get out of all (or darn’ nearly all) of the lands they occupied during the war of 1967 and have been exploiting and benefitting from heavily ever since… Like, they should settle up the many other claims still outstanding against them since 1948… Once they’ve done all that, sure, partying and making money on both sides of the present “Green Line” would be good.
(And meantime, they should know that the privations they are continuing to visit on their neighbors will ensure that these neighbors’ claims on Israel can never be simply wished away, however much many Israelis might want to do that.)
Actually, one could be pretty hopeful about the desire that many Israelis now have to live relatively luxurious, European- or US-style lifestyles. After all, in Portugal, back in 1970s, it was the desire of the new generation of army officers to be free of the constraints of conscription, and the constant waging of colonial wars that made that system necessary, that finally persuaded those officers to go home from their colonial outposts and lead the country’s peaceful, democratic, anti-Salazar revolution.., And as a collateral benefit of that desire the younger Portuguese had for a Carnaby Street lifestyle, the rapidly democratizing Portugal shucked off its vast colonial holdings like an uncomfortable old skin. Maybe the new generation of Israelis could be like that, too? Wouldn’t that be interesting?

Ann Kerr and American values

My dear friend Ann Kerr, with whom Bill and I spent the past weekend in California, had a heart-rending op-ed in yesterday Christian Science Monitor that’s appropriately titled The murder of American values in Lebanon.
Her piece is a tiny out-take from the big project she’s working on, in which she has gone back to interview four Arab women who were her room-mates when she did a year’s undergraduate study at the American University of Beirut (AUB) back in the mid-1950s. These women are Lebanese, Palestinian, Iraqi, and Syrian. They are Christian and Muslim. They have all, it seems, led fascinating lives much marked by all the political turmoil through which their families have passed.
Ann is currently writing these interviews up into a book. (She has already published two: this one, and this one.)
Another thing that has marked Ann’s life deeply is that her husband, the distinguished scholar of Middle Eastern politics Malcolm Kerr, was murdered in 1983 in his office in Beirut, where he was the newly installed President of AUB. His assailants were reportedly Lebanese Shiite militants affiliated with a pre-Hizbullah network, who struck him (presumably) because he was a prominent symbol in Lebanon of the US, which gave Israel a green light for the military assault and subsequent, debilitating occupation of one third of Lebanon that the IDF had launched just the previous year.
Those networks were acting in a quite anti-humane and illegal way when they targeted killed and kidnapped civilians in Lebanon in those days. Yes, they were acting out of their own intense pain, after an Israeli military operation that killed an estimated 17,000-19,000 Lebanese and Palestinian people in lebanon, the vast majority of them civilians. But still, that was no excuse.
I never knew Malcolm Kerr, though he was a good friend and colleague of my spouse’s– and he was always someone who had tried to understand the Arab viewpoint and worked for balance and fairness in US Middle East policy. Over the years, though, I came to know Ann and to love and admire her a lot. She and her four kids were, quite understandably, devastated by Malcolm’s killing. But they notably did not let that grief and anger become transformed into any kind of broader anger against “all Arabs” or “all Muslims” or “all Shiites”. Just the opposite. In the years since 1983, Ann has been a constant advocate for better understanding between US citizens and all the peoples of the Middle East. For some years, she led a program that took smart US students on visits to a number of Arab countries. She wrote and published those two earlier books. The first is a poignant evocation of Malcolm Kerr’s life– he grew up at AUB in the 1940s, since his parents both also taught there– and of their life together, the family they founded, and the grief the family suffered after his killing… The second book is built around many of the beautiful watercolor landscapes Ann has painted in various countries of the Middle East over the years…
Anyway, nowadays whenever we’re together Ann and I often talk for hours. We differ on some issues (pacifism, the value of the US-style trial system, etc.) But we agree on much, much more than we disagree on! Three or four years ago she persuaded me to join the “Leadership Council” of a DC-based organization called Churches for Middle East Peace, which does some excellent if low-key advocacy work on Middle East peace issues
Anyway, it was great to see her CSM op-ed. Its argument, incidentally, picks up well on the theme in this specially commissioned column that I wrote actually on September 11, 2001. That one appeared in the 9/13/2006 edition of the paper. It was titled Don’t let our values be a casualty, too, and it started like this:

    We may not know for many days yet how high the human casualties of Tuesday’s attacks will mount. But we should take care that some of our country’s basic values don’t fall casualty to the attacks, too…

But goodness, back then these were the main values that I listed as being in possible jeopardy: “Things like our capacity to reason calmly, our sense of caring for one another, and a basic optimism that – in spite of these horrifying acts -there are still things we can do to make the world a better place.” If only I could have seen back then that it would be not only those capacities in the US population that would be sadly undermined over the years that followed by our government (and the vast complicit parts of the news media), but also many fundamental portions of the US Constitution and the country’s respect for the rule of law, as well.
I guess I couldn’t even conceive of that back then.
So yes, all of us, inside and outside the United States, have reason to mourn the murder of many of the best of American values over the past five years.

Israel’s failed ‘field test’ for a possible US attack on Iran

Sy Hersh’s latest article in the New Yorker tells us that the Bush administration– and in particular, Dick Cheney and his (previously indicted) Middle East hatchet-man, Elliot Abrams– were “closely involved” in the planning of Israel’s terrifying and lethal assault against Lebanon, hoping that this could be, essentially, a “field test” for the tactics that the US might use in a future attack against Iran.
If so– and Hersh makes a good case that this was indeed the reason for the generous diplomatic and military support that the Bushites gave to the Israelis throughout the assault– then the spectacularly unsuccessful politico-military results of the field test, from the US-Israeli perspective, must have left the Iranian mullahs sleeping much more comfortably in their beds…
Hersh writes:

    The Bush Administration… was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks.President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah’s heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground.

His sourcing is his oft-used mix of (nearly always un-named) “security consultants”, “former intel officials”, etc, though he does cite a number of intriguing named sources. The piece seems to me to be highly credible.
The main ways in which Cheney was hoping that the Israeli assault could help a future, still-possible US assault against Iran were– according to Hersh’s quite intelligent-sounding sources– twofold:

    (1) Israel’s assault could itself serve as, essentially, a testing ground in which tactics and weapons that the US might use against Iran in the future could be field-tested and evaluated– that’s the “prelude” business Hersh refers to– and
    (2) By “taking down” Hizbullah’s capacity to launch blistering rocket attacks against Israel, the Israeli military would remove one of the main factors that might otherwise act as a strong deterrent against any US attack against Iran, maing such an attack more conceivable.

Hersh’s piece reveals a number of significant things about strategic decision-making inside both Israel and the Bush administration.
First, and most evident, is that the Israeli “plan” for taking down Hizbullah was one that relied almost totally on the use of airpower and other forms of stand-off weaponry (ship-launched missiles, drones, etc). This would clearly be the most plannable way in which the Bushites might be planning to attack Ira, since the US, like Israel, harbors an intense wariness to getting bogged down in a ground war.
But of course the “airpower plan” developed and used by IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz failed miserably at taking down Hizbullah’s military capacity– even while it had the entirely predictable political effect of uniting the Lebanese population more firmly around Hizbullah than it had been for the past three or four years.
Interesting results for the “field-test” of tactics that might be used against Iran, huh?
I note that the many Iranian commentators whose work I read, who include many democrats and reformers, are nearly all united in saying that any US military attack against Iran will cause the Iranian population– including them themselves and other dissidents and reformers inside and outside the country– to rally much more strongly around their existing national government than they have for many years, too.
Honestly, though, I don’t think anyone needed a “field test” of the use of widespread anti-infrastructure bombing tactics to be able to reach the conclusion that they would be (a) politically extremely counter-productive, as well as (b) of limited operational value against a well-prepared opponent. My parents stayed in London for much of the Blitz: Bush and Cheney had only to talk to members of the older generation of Londoners (or indeed, of Dresdeners) to find out that air bombardment by foreigners causes a population to rally ever closer round the national flag, not to seek that particular moment in history to rally for deepseated political change.
Worth noting, too: While many Israelis were apparently stunned to discover over the past month that– notably unlike the western powers during their 1999 air assault against Serbia– their own population at home was vulnerable to a hail of rockets launched by Hizbullah in return for the Israeli air assault against Lebanon, the US’s military planners presumably understand quite well that (1) Iran has quite substantial missile and other forces arrayed along its lengthy coast on the northeast of the Persian/Arabian Gulf, and (2) that the supply lines and logistics bases for the US military presence in Iraq and in other Gulf countries are all concentrated either within or on the southwest coast of that same body of water.
… Oh, and did I mention that, number (3), a significant portion of the world’s internationally traded oil supplies also pass through the Gulf, on ships that load at vast terminals arrayed along its southwest coast and then pass through the extremely narrow Straits of Hormuz, which are bordered on one side by Iran?
(Re #2 in that list, Hersh notes that within the Bush administration D. Rumsfeld has acted with uncharacteristic self-restraint throughout the Israeli assault on Lebanon so far. Hersh quotes an un-named “U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel” as saying, “Air power and the use of a few Special Forces had worked in Afghanistan, and [Rumsfeld] tried to do it again in Iraq. It was the same idea, but it didn’t work. He thought that Hezbollah was too dug in and the Israeli attack plan would not work, and the last thing he wanted was another war on his shift that would put the American forces in Iraq in greater jeopardy.” Well, if Rumsfeld felt that Israel’s war on Lebanon put the US forces in Iraq in greater jeopardy, imagine what effect a US assault on Iran would have on them… )
So altogether, I don’t think Israel’s field test of an airpower-focused assault has gone very well for Cheyney and the other mad-eyed militarists within the Bush administration, do you? Israel’s spectacular failure in achieving either the dismantlement-by-force of Hizbullah’s military capacity or its dismantlement-by-politics (i.e., by turning the Lebanese population against Hizbullah) means that Iran’s leaders must be feeling very relieved indeed today. Indeed, just today, the Speaker of the Iranian parliament announced that the Islamic Republic of Iran would not accept the suspension of uranium enrichment.that had been called for in a recent Security Council resolution. That Islamic Republic News Agency report linked to there tells us that the Speaker, Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel

    said the recent resolution passed last week by the United Nations Security Council on Iran’s nuclear case has no legal and logical justification.
    …[H]e reiterated that the inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have witnessed no deviation from civil and peaceful activities in Iran’s nuclear program.
    “We believe that the balance between rights and duties should be observed in international organizations,” he said, stressing that the international bodies should not dictate anything to countries while refusing to recognize their rights.
    “If Iran is to be deprived of its inalienable rights, there will be no reason for the country to remain a member of the international bodies and the IAEA,” he added.

Well, I for one am very concerned about both the possibility of nuclear proliferation and the current presence of actual nuclear weapons within the Middle East. Let us all of us work to make the whole region into a zone quite verifiably free of all weapons of mass destruction.
That would include requiring the extremely belligerent government of Israel to give up its nuclear weapons, and the extremely belligerent US to take all its nuclear weapons-bearing ships completely out of the Gulf and the Middle East area as a whole. And yes, of course it would also require Iran and all other states of the region to submit completely to IAEA or even IAEA-plus inspections; and would require all these actors to comply in full with the conventions against chemical and biological weapons.
Colonial-style militarism and double standards really have no place in the kind of 21st century I seek to build. All of these conflict and concerns– every single one of them!– can certainly be resolved through negotiation and other nonviolent means, if only (1) we all make every effort to discover, develop, and actually use such forms of conflict resolution, and (2) we base all these efforts on a simple and strong commitment to the equality of all human beings. There are no states or peoples that have any legitimate claim to be given any “special” treatment. All the peoples of the Middle East have long histories of suffering. The challenge now is to help them– and the rest of us!– to get out of the well-turned cycles of increasingly lethal violence.