The (true) conservative Paul Craig Roberts has been one of the most outspoken critics of the Bush administration, calling for Bush and Cheney's impeachment long ago. He has now written an
incisive piece on what is happening in the Middle East.
Israel has ordered all the villagers [in southern Lebanon] to clear out. Israel then destroys their homes and murders the fleeing villagers. That way there is no one to come back and nothing to which to return, making it easier for Israel to grab the territory, just as Israel has been stealing Palestine from the Palestinians.
The article goes on to say what are the implications of what Israel is doing in Lebanon, with US support, for the rest of the Middle East. The prospects are not good; we may have reached a turning point.
Roberts makes clear that the US has now completely lost any credibility as being anything other than an Israeli puppet when it comes to the Middle East. The fault lies not just with Bush: Congress has enthusiastically backed Bush for giving Israel a completely free hand.
Does it make you a Proud American that "your" president gave Israel the green light to drop bombs on convoys of villagers fleeing from Israeli shelling, on residential neighborhoods in the capital of Beirut and throughout Lebanon, on hospitals, on power plants, on food production and storage, on ports, on civilian airports, on bridges, on roads, on every piece of infrastructure on which civilized life depends? Are you a Proud American? Or are you an Israeli puppet?
On July 20, "your" House of Representatives voted 410-8 in favor of Israel's massive war crimes in Lebanon. Not content with making every American complicit in war crimes, "your" House of Representatives, according to the Associated Press, also "condemns enemies of the Jewish state."
Roberts scathingly makes clear who "enemies of the Jewish state" are, as far as our government, both the White House and Congress, are concerned:
They are the Palestinians whose land has been stolen by the Jewish state, whose homes and olive groves have been destroyed by the Jewish state, whose children have been shot down in the streets by the Jewish state, whose women have been abused by the Jewish state. They are Palestinians who have been walled off into ghettos, who cannot reach their farm lands or medical care or schools, who cannot drive on roads through Palestine that have been constructed for Israelis only. They are Palestinians whose ancient towns have been invaded by militant Zionist "settlers" under the protection of the Israeli army who beat and persecute the Palestinians and drive them out of their towns. They are Palestinians who cannot allow their children outside their homes because they will be murdered by Israeli "settlers."
The Palestinians who confront Israeli evil are called "terrorists." When Bush forced free elections on Palestine, the people voted for Hamas. Hamas is the organization that has stood up to the Jewish state. This means, of course, that Hamas is evil, anti-semitic, un-American and terrorist. The US and Israel responded by cutting off all funds to the new government. Democracy is permitted only if it produces the results Bush and Israel want....
Another enemy of the Jewish state is Hizbollah. Hizbollah is a militia of Shia Muslims created in 1982 when Israel first invaded Lebanon. During this invasion the great moral Jewish state arranged for the murder of refugees in refugee camps. The result of Israel's atrocities was Hizbollah, which fought the Israeli army, defeated it, and drove it, with its tail between its legs, out of Lebanon. Today Hizbollah not only defends southern Lebanon but also provides social services such as orphanages and medical care.
To cut to the chase, the enemies of the Jewish state are any Muslim country not ruled by an American puppet friendly to Israel. Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the oil emirates have sided with Israel against their own kind, because they are dependent either on American money or on American protection from their own people. Sooner or later these totally corrupt governments that do not represent the people they rule will be overthrown. It is only a matter of time.
A turning point has been reached, because the House of Representatives resolution -- voted for at the very moment when Israel is indiscriminately bombing civilians and deliberately destroying a pro-American Arab country -- gives decisive proof of what bin Laden has been saying all along: that America is Israel's puppet.
With hope and diplomacy dead, henceforth America and Israel have only tooth and claw. The vaunted Israeli army could not defeat a rag tag militia in southern Lebanon. The vaunted US military cannot defeat a rag tag, lightly armed, insurgency drawn from a minority of the population in Iraq, insurgents, moreover, who are mainly engaged in civil war against the Shia majority.
What will the US and its puppet master do? Both are too full of hubris and paranoia to admit their terrible mistakes. Israel and the US will either destroy from the air the civilian infrastructure of Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and Iran so that civilized life becomes impossible for Muslims, or the US and Israel will use nuclear weapons to intimidate Muslims into acquiescence to Israel's desires.
Indeed, this has begun already. Today's NY Times
reports that the Israeli military has put on hold plans for an invasion of southern Lebanon. It recognizes that it is unable to beat Hezbollah on the ground, since Hezbollah is what drove Israel out of Lebanon during its last occupation in the first place. Now Israel is planning for "more punishing airstrikes to try to eliminate Hezbollah military assets and stockpiles, which the Israelis say are distributed and hidden through the civilian population, in houses, garages and apartments." Since there is no way to tell from the air in which houses and apartments military targets are hidden, the only way of "protecting Israel" is to pound all of southern Lebanon into rubble.
Newt Gingrich could be right. This could be the start of World War III. There is no way of telling how this will spill over into the US occupation of Iraq or affect the stability of oil-producing US-client states in the Gulf. As far as America itself goes, the saddest thing is that in giving their unqualified support for Israel's ethnic cleansing, Bush and Congress have betrayed the American people and America itself, by placing the perceived self-interest of a foreign power over American self-interest and the wishes of the American people. What polls have been taken show that unlike Congress, most Americans do not support what Israel is doing.
[UPDATE 27.7.2006] On the Counterpunch Web site today, Tanya Reinhart, Professor of Linguistics at Tel Aviv University, notes the following:
The "new Middle East" has been a dream of the Israeli ruling military circles since at least 1982, when Sharon led the country to the first Lebanon war with precisely this declared goal. Hezbollah's leaders have argued for years that its real long-term role is to protect Lebanon, whose army is too weak to do this. They have said that Israel has never given up its aspirations for Lebanon and that the only reason it pulled out of Southern Lebanon in 2000 is because Hezbollah's resistance has made maintaining the occupation too costly. Lebanon's people know what every Israeli old enough to remember knows - that in the vision of Ben Gurion, Israel's founding leader, Israel's border should be "natural", that is - the Jordan river in the East, and the Litani river of Lebanon in the north. In 1967, Israel gained control over the Jordan river, in the occupied Palestinian land, but all its attempts to establish the Litani border have failed so far.
As I argued in Israel/Palestine, already when the Israeli army left Southern Lebanon in 2000, the plans to return were ready. But in Israel's military vision, in the next round, the land should be first "cleaned" of its residents, as Israel did when it occupied the Syrian Golan Heights in 1967, and as it is doing now in southern Lebanon. To enable Israel's eventual realization of Ben Gurion's vision, it is necessary to establish a "friendly regime" in Lebanon, one that will collaborate in crushing any resistance. To do this, it is necessary first to destroy the country, as in the U.S. model of Iraq. These were precisely Sharon's declared aims in the first Lebanon war. Israel and the U.S. believe that now conditions have ripened enough that these aims can finally be realized.Burning Lebanon: Israel's New Middle East