August 7, 2006
"Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni made a round
of phone calls to her European Union counterparts and Security Council
members Monday, ahead of a meeting of EU foreign ministers today and
Security Council discussions later this week. Livni told them that Israel
should not be pressured into an immediate cease-fire, and the harsh
pictures from Israel’s bombing of Qana on Sunday should not distract
attention from the main goal -- implementation of Resolution 1559."
-- Haaretz, Aug 1, 2006
Get
this. Israel -- a country with an unrivaled history of ignoring and
denigrating the United Nations -- has now assumed the role of enforcing UN
resolutions on its neighbors. As the above quote makes clear, the Israeli
assaults on Lebanon had very little to do with the abduction of two of its
soldiers. Tel Aviv had a plan waiting for an excuse -- an exact replay of
the events in 1982.
This is not the first time Israel has
attempted to redraw the map of Lebanon by force of arms. Since the days of
Ben Gurion, Israel has had designs on its small northern border -- the
Arab country judged most likely to implode along ethnic lines. With the
1982 invasion, Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon became the first Israeli
leaders to put the plans into action.
When Al Haig gave Sharon a green light to
invade Lebanon in 1982 -- it marked a major shift in American foreign
policy. The Reagan administration had moved the United States from merely
tolerating Israeli aggression to aiding and abetting Tel Aviv’s project to
reconfigure the map of the Middle East in order to facilitate Israel’s
expansionist dreams.
It is worth reviewing Al Haig’s support of
the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 because it demonstrates that Condi
is not exactly an original thinker. What is remarkable about her collusion
with Israel is that she bought into a Likudnik pipe dream that had failed
not once -- but twice. The same pro-Israeli neo-con operatives that
rallied around Al Haig have already recycled their 1982 blueprints to
design the "cake-walk" in Iraq. Despite the abject failure of both
ventures, these diehard Israel Firsters continue to have "new map"
hallucinations.
George Ball, the undersecretary of state in
the Kennedy and Johnson administration, gave an excellent play-by-play
account of the 1982 invasion and its aftermath in an essay titled "Error
and Betrayal in Lebanon."
Given the events of the last few weeks,
Ball’s account is instructive.
Let’s start with Israel’s excuse for the
invasion in 1982 -- the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador
to London by Abu Nidal’s hit men. "Although British Government
investigators announced that the attack was not the work of the PLO but of
a radical anti-Arafat group headed by Abu Nidal whose hit list included
PLO leaders, that did not matter to Prime Minister Begin. The London
shooting gave the Israelis their long-awaited "provocation." For the
Israelis D-Day had arrived. Within hours, waves of Israeli jets struck PLO
villages and centers on the Lebanese coast, finally goading reluctant PLO
leaders into responding with artillery fire along the frontier. On June 6,
1982, the IDF pushed north across the Lebanese border."
And guess what. Al Haig then intervened to
convince Reagan to exercise a veto of a Security Council Resolution
calling for a cease-fire. As a result of the 1982 invasion, three hundred
Marines and twenty thousand Lebanese were killed, the Lebanese civil war
was re-ignited and a new force evolved to confront the Israelis --
Hezbollah. Eighteen years later, the Israelis had to withdraw after
losing a costly war of attrition against the Lebanese resistance.
Redrawing the map of the Middle East was
also the motivation behind the invasion of Iraq -- an adventure that was
originally billed as an attempt to strip Saddam of imaginary weapons of
mass destruction. Lest we forget, it was the Israeli operatives at the
Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans who took it upon themselves to
manufacture the false intelligence used to justify the war. And it was the
Likudnik faithful at the New York Times, CNN and FOX that marketed
their lies to a gullible America. Judith Miller was certainly not alone in
volunteering her services to the OSP.
After their failure to find illicit weapons
in Iraq, the administration cooked up the pulp fiction about spreading
democracy in the region. That bit of chicanery was for domestic
consumption to cover up the abysmal failure of the original plot. As
George Ball reminds us, two weeks before the 1982 Israeli invasion, Al
Haig gave a speech that echoes the current White House pitch to market Tel
Aviv’s delusions. "The time had come to take concerted action in support
of both Lebanon’s territorial integrity within its internationally
recognized borders and a strong central government capable of promoting a
free, open, democratic and traditionally pluralistic society." Doesn’t
that sound all too familiar?
A quarter of a century later, Condi Rice is
making the preposterous proposition that by bombing South Lebanon into the
stone ages, Israel is helping guarantee the territorial integrity of her
northern neighbor. And she is delirious enough to believe that Israel is
a midwife about to deliver a New Middle East. It often seems like the
United States is prepared to remodel every country in the Middle East
except Israel -- the state most likely to invade its neighbors.
Secretary Rice likes to boast that she is a
student of history – obviously a very poor one. She constantly allows
herself to be fleeced by the same Likudnik cabal that twisted the mind of
Al Haig, another novice who didn’t have a clue about the Middle East. Yet
another trait shared by Haig and Rice is a sadistic pleasure in goading
Israel to waste Arab lives.
Even Condi must have noticed that things
have already gone wrong -- again. Far from turning on each other as
envisioned by the Likudnik architects, the Lebanese have shown surprising
resilience and solidarity. The pro-American regimes in Saudi Arabia,
Jordan and Egypt are now paying the price for giving tacit endorsement to
the Israeli-American plot to incinerate Lebanon. The steady erosion of the
legitimacy of all three governments might very well create a new map of
the Middle East -- one that will likely hold a few surprises for our
unimaginative "Russian" scholar.
In Iraq and across the Arab world, Nasrallah
has become a folk hero. That could easily translate into a Shia insurgency
against Anglo-American occupation forces in Iraq. Someone in this
belligerent administration of neo-con zombies should sober up and pay
attention to the largest anti-American demonstrations in support of
Lebanon -- currently being staged in Baghdad. Having put American forces
in harm’s way for reasons that remain a state secret -- you would think
these neo-con degenerates would give a second thought to how their
Lebanese adventure might further endanger the troops trying to survive the
quagmire in Iraq. But these Israel Firsters have a nasty tendency to think
of Israel first and last.
Aside from Olmert, there is nobody quite as
despised in the Middle East as the American president and the simpleton he
hired to run the State Department. It took quite a bit of talent to induce
the pro-western government in Beirut to give Rice the boot -- a day before
giving a warm reception to the foreign ministers of France and Iran. And
it didn’t help matters that Bush rushed precision bombs to Israel. Why
exactly does Tel Aviv need smart bombs to conduct a scorched earth
campaign?
Like Iraq, Bush has gotten himself stuck in
a situation without an exit plan. He can back down only at the risk of
losing his few remaining constituencies -- the Armageddon worshipping end
of timers in the Judeo-Christian identity movement and Israel’s public
relations brigades in the mass media boiler rooms. No chance of doing
that before mid-term elections -- regardless of the damage to American
national interests in the region.
The same Likudnik fantasists who dominated
the public debate in 1982 are back in business. At the time of Israel’s
invasion in 1982, the Likudnik operatives who pollute the mass media
landscape sold the venture as an integral part of the cold war struggle
against the Soviet Union. Even as Beirut was being bombed to rubble, Haig
was having birth pangs about forming an anti-Soviet "strategic consensus."
This time around, the very same neo-con cheerleaders are marketing the
slaughter in Lebanon as part of the "global war on terror."
When this is all over, America and Lebanon
will be left alone to pick up the tab. Israel’s losses will be paid by the
Congress -- which will grant Tel Aviv a supplemental aid package to
compensate Tel Aviv for all its troubles. It’s a matter of honoring long
standing congressional traditions. In reward for its 1982 debacle, our
illustrious Senate increased the annual tribute to Israel by $500 million.
The very last paragraph of George Ball’s
essay is a prophecy of things to come. His final comments criticized the
Israeli Lobby’s media operatives who shamelessly rewrite history after
their pipe dreams go down the drain.
There will be no deterring the indefatigable
Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, from continuing to
castigate President Reagan because "Far from cheering the Israelis on when
the went to war against Soviet-backed armies in Lebanon, Mr. Reagan kept
pressing for a cease-fire. Then, having sent in a contingent of United
States Marines, not to fight but to keep the peace, he withdrew them as
soon as they came under serious attack. And having promised to retaliate
against Syria for the attack, he no more did so than Mr. Carter before him
retaliated against Iran." Thus is history shamelessly rewritten.
Expect the revisionists in the Israeli lobby
to turn on Bush the minute they see the making of another disaster.
For the record, while all eyes are focused
on Lebanon, Israel has continued to launch vicious and indiscriminate
daily assaults on Gaza where nearly two hundred Palestinians have already
been killed. Condi’s fingerprints are all over the crime scene in Gaza and
the West Bank. It was this secretary of state who negotiated a secret and
final Israeli-Palestinian "solution" -- without bothering to consult the
Palestinians. In 2004, she took it upon herself to iron out the terms of a
resolution of the conflict in the secret "Rice-Weisglass" accords -- which
will allow Israel to annex Jerusalem and an unhealthy slice of the West
Bank. The reason for the brutal Israeli campaign in Gaza is to force the
Palestinians to agree to the terms of an agreement they have yet to hear
about.
Like Al Haig, Condi is playing out of her
league. It will take another generation of Lebanese and Palestinians to
forget her murderous duplicity and betrayal.
Ahmed Amr
is the editor of
NileMedia.com.
He can be reached at:
Montraj@aol.com.