Holte's corner

An Awful War

Posted from Mar De Plata:

This was a truly awful war. There is never anything that isn´t awful about any war, but this one was truly awesomely ugly. On the other hand one had to admire the intelligence of those directing it. At least of most of them. Something I could never do with the previous generation of this conflict. There was something diabolically clever about the way Nazrullah, with the help of Syria and Iran, manipulated Israel.

Israel was drawn into responding to an attack on its troops, which provided a justification for Hezbollah to commence a long thought out plan to bombard the entire country with rockets. This in turn allowed Iran and Syria to test and refine their designs. All the while provoking Israel to do what any country would do in the same situation.

Would the world have protested if Syria were attacked by Hezbollah rockets and responded by attacking the positions and command centers from which the rockets were launched? Would the United States have tolerated rocket attacks on San Diego from Mexico? Would the world have protested if Syria had bombed the launch sites and killed 10,000 people with its own less accurate weapons? Of course not. Yet somehow the entire world labelled Israel as the aggressor and reported on poor pitiful "civilians" who were killed because they were purposefully put in harms way by Hezbollah. Somehow the world ignores the massive efforts to kill Israelis by these groups. But one has to admire Nazrullah, he seems to have predicted this reaction and provoked it. Nazrullah played the propaganda game well and with the cooperation of CNN and most other News Channels as well. The only exception was Fox, but unfortunately Fox is the exception that proves the rule.

At the same time I have to admire the Israelis. They did miscalculate in thinking that air power would be enough to soften Hezbollah positions and that they could avoid a massive incursion. On the other hand, they also knew that had they launched a massive incursion from the beginning they´d have been labeled as aggressors. So they got labelled as aggressors anyway for trying to minimize civilian damage and thus not killing enough of their enemies to stop them right away. They did try to minimize civilian casualties, but the Arabs wanted civilian casualties so they could talk about martyrs, and that was unavoidable. They warned people to flee contested areas -- and the plain fact is that most people didn´t try to flee until it was late. Once Israel saw that their air war was going to fail they finally launched incursions. And they met a prepared, violent, seriously mortal enemy in the process.

They did some damage to Hezbollah, one can see the bodies of the insurgents being removed from the towns they defended, labelled cynically as ¨civilian¨ casualties. But the fact is that their every move was anticipated, and they took casualties in the process -- most of them in the international media and among the two faced among the politicians in their ¨allies¨ and the rest of the world. By the end of the war they had succeeded in Uniting Lebanon around Hezbollah. That was some accomplishment.

Finally we get to the only fools in this battle. And I´m afraid to say they live in my country. The only ones who played the propaganda game the way the Arabs used to play it were the Republican Right wing. My progressive left wing friends all played to the Arab conductors. I´m sure this war even played a role in the defeat of ¨moderate¨ politicians in this last election.

I already complained about how Randi Rhodes, one of my favorite people, saw this war as a Republican plot. It was in a way. Syria and Iran are playing the Republican Right Wing´s game, and doing it well. If the US wants an enemy they are darn sure that they are willing to provide them with one. It tickles the cockles of their pride to be taken so seriously. When have Arabs deserved to be taken seriously before? Their real problem up until now hasn´t been Israel, it has been their own ineptitude, but with the US invasion of Iraq and the misunderstanding of what is going on on both left and right in my country, they´ve finally found somebody more inept than they are-- us. It is sick. With Friends like these for Israel, who needs enemies?

The US has been like the ¨boy who cried wolf¨here. Fox news was fairly accurate about this war -- but because they are such ideologues and cheer-leaders about Iraq -- nobody was listening. I found myself agreeing with Olivar North -- which truly scares me. They are pro Israel for the wrong reasons, and advocating the wrong methods. They seem to have been the ones pushing Israel to use Air War, even providing the mis'named ¨smart bombs¨whose failures killed so many civilians. Somehow the US is more of a target of hatred universally than ever. Indeed the Arabs see Israel as the US´s puppet and hate us more than they do Israel. All those weapons being tested on Israel, as the Israeli Ambassador noted, are also ultimately aimed at intimidating or harming seriously the United States. Iraq didn´t have Nukes, and we attacked it knowing that. But Iran, whatever progressives like me would like to believe, really does aim at getting nukes. And they´ve already avowed that their first target would be Israel.

The Christian Right would like to see that happen, but I don´t think the rest of us would. We can´t avoid it by not being willing to see it for what it is. We can pray that if they actually get the damned things (literally) they will wake up enough not to use them. I really don´t think that the US can use bombs to stop them.

The only good thing that has come out of this war, is that maybe people will start to realize that diplomacy and conflict resolution are as necessary as guns in order to resolve things here. Somehow we have to get people talking before they hurt each other the way we did during World War II. Maybe they are almost to that point. I hope it doesn´t take a nuke falling on Haifa, followed by nukes falling on Tehran and Damascus. I also pray that we can avoid planes falling out of the sky and Fanatic ¨Islamo-Fascist¨ Moslems getting what they wish:

70 virgins, all over 80, male and built like sumu wrestlers.

Posted by cholte at August 16, 2006 11:32 PM