August 16, 2006
I say:
Bush conveyed his strong personal support for the military offensive during a White House meeting with Olmert on May 23, according to sources familiar with the thinking of senior Israeli leaders.
Olmert, who like Bush lacks direct wartime experience, agreed that a dose of military force against Hezbollah might damage the guerrilla group's influence in Lebanon and intimidate its allies, Iran and Syria, countries that Bush has identified as the chief obstacles to U.S. interests in the Middle East.
As part of Bush's determination to create a "new Middle East" - one that is more amenable to U.S. policies and desires - Bush even urged Israel to attack Syria, but the Olmert government refused to go that far, according to Israeli sources.
One source said some Israeli officials thought Bush's attack-Syria idea was "nuts" since much of the world would have seen the bombing campaign as overt aggression. In an article on July 30, the Jerusalem Post referred to Bush's interest in a wider war involving Syria. Israeli "defense officials told the Post last week that they were receiving indications from the US that America would be interested in seeing Israel attack Syria," the newspaper reported.
While balking at an expanded war into Syria, Olmert did agree on the need to show military muscle in Lebanon as a prelude to facing down Iran over its nuclear program, which Olmert has called an "existential" threat to Israel.
With U.S. forces bogged down in Iraq, Bush and his neoconservative advisers saw the inclusion of Israeli forces as crucial for advancing a strategy that would punish Syria for supporting Iraqi insurgents, advance the confrontation with Iran and isolate Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
But the month-long war has failed to achieve its goals of destroying Hezbollah forces in south Lebanon or intimidating Iran and Syria.
Instead, Hezbollah guerrillas fought Israeli troops to a virtual standstill in villages near the border and much of the world saw Israel's bombing raids across Lebanon - which killed hundreds of civilians - as "disproportionate."
Now, as the conflict winds down, some Israeli officials are ruing the Olmert-Bush pact on May 23 and fault Bush for pushing Olmert into the conflict.
What a pretty little pass we have come to when Israeli officials can say "Bush is crazier than us!" The articles goes on to describe how Israel, as part of this agreement, initiated a series of low-key attacks in Gaza and Lebanon to provoke reactions from Hezbollah and Hamas. Of course, the protestations of innocence from Israeli officials cannot be taken in all earnestness: it has been known for some time that Israel was planning such an attack for years. Some Israeli officials may have worried about the timing and strategy, and may have balked at a direct and immediate attack on Syria. But the plans were devised both by Tel Aviv and Washington. Bush may be the boss of his international crime syndicate, but the Israelis are made guys. As soon as it was clear that the Israeli military wasn't up to the task, they got the cleaners in to get rid of the mess, withdrawing with the threat that, like all good terminators, they would be back. Now, they're pissed off at Iran and Syria for - get this - taking "advantage of this tragedy", because they declared Hezbollah the winners. That's from Voice of America, which goes to show that America's voice remains as stupid, callous, brutal, disingenuous and sanctimonious as it always was.
Another, rather less important, point grabs my attention. Even the llamas that Israel drafted in to help out proved to be evildoers, simply sitting on their arses when ordered to proceed through Lebanese terrain with the supplies. This is not the first time animals have proven uncooperative when used in combat. When Russian forces in World War II trained dogs strapped with bombs to run under enemy tanks, it somehow did not occur to them that the dogs would actually run under the Russian tanks they had been trained with and blow up the home team. Similarly, when the Americans tried to strap bats with incendiary devices stuffed with napalm in the hope of setting them loose on Japanese towns at dawn whereupon they would nestly in the eaves only to be detonated as the townspeople were waking up and reduce all those paper and wooden houses to ashes, they forgot to take note of the wind: during a training exercise when they tried to set them loose on a model town constructed in a New Mexico desert, the wind carried all the bats flying back to headquarters and burnt up a brand new air base. Filthy animals.
PS: See also: Ilan Pappe: Israeli Debacle Will Affect the Whole Region; Anne Ashford: Is an Arab Revolution on the Agenda?; Bassem Chit: A New Grouping of Forces is Emerging in Lebanon; Simon Assaf: The Hidden Story of Lebanese Prisoners in Israeli jails.
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