July 19, 2006
The Bush administration has given Israel a week to inflict maximum carnage on Lebanon, "say diplomatic sources":
The
Bush administration, backed by Britain, has blocked efforts for an
immediate halt to the fighting initiated at the UN security council,
the G8 summit in St Petersburg and the European foreign ministers'
meeting in Brussels.
"It's clear the Americans have given the
Israelis the green light. They [the Israeli attacks] will be allowed to
go on longer, perhaps for another week," a senior European official
said yesterday. Diplomatic sources said there was a clear time limit,
partly dictated by fears that a prolonged conflict could spin out of
control.
...
George Bush last night said that he
suspected Syria was trying to reassert its influence in Lebanon.
Speaking in Washington, he said: "It's in our interest for Syria to
stay out of Lebanon and for this government in Lebanon to succeed and
survive. The root cause of the problem is Hizbullah and that problem
needs to be addressed."
Tony Blair yesterday swung behind the US
position that Israel need not end the bombing until Hizbullah hands
over captured prisoners and ends its rocket attacks. During a Commons
statement, he resisted backbench demands that he call for a ceasefire.
It is not at all clear that it will be over in a week: Israeli commanders say that it will be several weeks.
If they're serious about breaking Hezbollah, rather than simply
terrorising Lebanese society and its fragile government, then they
would be likely to take months if not years. Blair, of course, could
not be more craven. UK imperialist strategy has been for some decades
to ride on the coat-tails of American power, but I would be willing to
bet that this policy is controversial even among Whitehall mandarins
used to doing whatever the Americans say. Regardless, the US-UK axis is
directly culpable for the wave of atrocities currently engulfing
Lebanon. Let's look at some of those. According to the Lebanese Daily
Star, the latest targets of the Israeli assault are milk and medicine. Reuters reports
that Israel has "killed 230 people, all but 26 of them civilians" and
"About 100,000 Lebanese have fled their homes to escape the violence".
Meanwhile, Israel has sent tanks into Palestinian refugee camps and killed nine people and wounding 45. An attack on Srifa kills tens of civilians, but merits only a few measly sentences. According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, Israel is using toxic weapons on the civilian population. Socialist Worker carries eyewitness reports
from Lebanon: white phosphorous shells explode, sonic booms are set
off, poor neighbourhoods are levelled, people have to pay £500 if they
want a taxi ride to neighbouring Syria... but what for? Will Syria be
safe from attack? A doctor from the al-Awda hospital in Palestine says
Israeli tanks are destroying agricultural land - having starved the
Palestinians for months, having taken away their power supply, having
razed the infrastructure, they are making sure that the Palestinians
have nothing left.
Everything is licensed because "Hezbollah
started it n they're the bad guys n they're gonna git their asses
kicked." Everyone insists, certainly American senators like McCain are
making a hobby of it now, that no other state would behave differently.
Hillary Clinton said,
with the ruthless nullity of her class: "I want us here in New York to
imagine, if extremist terrorists were launching rocket attacks across
the Mexican or Canadian border, would we stand by or would we defend
America against these attacks from extremists?" This should give Mexico
and Canada pause for thought at the very least, and one doesn't expect
her to imagine that Palestinians might also like to defend themselves
from attack, as might Lebanese people. Their desire to survive is
simply irrelevant.
Israel has been yearning for war, and that too is eminently understable to any American senator.
Meanwhile,
the crushing conformity of the media continues apace. Why even discuss
it? They tell us some people died once in a while. Then they allow Bush
or someone to remind us that Iran or Syria is to blame. Then they clamour about the evacuation of Westerners.
Then they tell us about the heatwave and the difficulties in filling in
forms. They even have a Labour MP sitting in front of a camera ready to
discuss this inanity. Protests happening across the country (I know of
several that happened only last night) are ignored. Eli Stephens notes the dehumanising language:
the obliteration of poor Shi'ite neighbourhoods is described clinically
as "Israeli warplanes pounded Hezbollah's stronghold in south Beirut".
My intention, for what it's worth, is to reduce my time spent watching
television news from a couple of hours a day to zero. It is
demobilising, it dulls the senses, it cripples one's thinking with sheer insanity.
The mindless subservience of a mannered reporter with rolled-up shirt
sleeves standing in the baking sun not more than a few hundred yards
away from devastation while simply uttering the Israeli line without
hesitation or deviation is a compelling spectacle, but I personally
can't take any more of it.
Parenthetically, Angry Arab
reports on the curious standards of Human Rights Watch in relation to
this brazen assault - summarised brutally, Hezbollah is condemned,
while Israel is asked some polite questions. HRW is the same outfit
that greasily evaded saying anything about the US-backed terror in
Haiti for months and eventually only did so reluctantly and with some
glibly dilute apologia. Groups like HRW aren't completely useless, any
more than the New York Times is completely useless, but it is worth
bearing this sort of thing in mind for the future.
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