Binge and Hangover

The Editors

THE LORDS OF empire set out to show that the United States, not Iran or any
other potential rival, will rule the “new” Middle East. Unable to attack Iran
directly, however, they instead employed the willing regional branch office
of the U.S. military-industrial complex, the Israeli Defense Force, to destroy
Lebanon. A war that began as a triumphal imperial binge has ended, at least
as of August 14 if the fragile ceasefire holds, with uncertainty and a hangover.
(The ceasefire’s fate, following the failed Israeli commando raid in the Bekaa
Valley, is uncertain as we go to press.)

The facts of the war are clear enough and well documented. The operation
was a long-planned joint U.S. and Israeli strategy, as reported in detail
by the San Francisco Chronicle (July 21, 2006), awaiting only a pretext to
sell it as “a war for Israel’s national survival.” The main source was not
some maverick or anonymous leak, but a prominent Israeli academic militarist
Gerald Steinberg, who boasted that this was the “best-prepared war in Israel’s
history” with a three-week timetable for overwhelming victory. Further, as
Seymour Hersh’s reporting reveals, proponents of air power in the Pentagon
as well as Dick Cheney envisioned not only smashing Hezbollah in Lebanon,
but demonstrating how U.S. air power on a massively greater scale could bring
“victory” over Iran.

As it turned out, Israel’s Lebanon bombing and expeditionary campaign ended
only after five weeks, and with nothing like the promised smashing victory.
We believe it will go down, in the historical long run, as a chapter in a
slow-motion Israeli national suicide. Immediately, however, it has meant the
destruction of the country of Lebanon, the subjection of its population to
starvation in the manner of a medieval siege conducted with state-of-the-art
military technology, the greatest oil spill and ecological disaster in the
history of the eastern Mediterranean, and — mostly hidden from the headlines
— a concentrated murderous Israeli assault on the Palestinian Gaza and West
Bank population.

It is not a question of whether it was the United States or Israel that initiated
this carnage — it was both, with closely coinciding interests. For the Israeli
state the local agenda remains crushing the Palestinian nation, and the regional
priority is to demonstrate Israel’s value to the imperial superpower in wiping
out any potential Arab resistance to U.S. dominance. But the driving factor
prolonging the war was the global agenda of U.S. imperialism. That is why
it continued long past the point where the impossibility of “a complete defeat
and disarming of Hezbollah” was clear.

What astonished the world was that, after a full month of war, the Israeli
assault failed. The Katyusha rockets were still falling in northern Israel
— mostly landing at random (except for one apparent sophisticated hit, reported
by Robert Fisk, on a secret air command facility), not very relevant militarily
and with Arab citizens of Israel almost half the civilian victims, but terrifying
the population and crippling economic activity. (As the Israeli antiwar campaigner
Uri Avnery observed, both in northern Israel and southern Lebanon it was the
poor who lacked the means to leave and were forced to remain behind after
the more affluent had packed and fled.)

If Hezbollah’s rockets had a strategic rather than symbolic purpose, it was
perhaps to force Israel to give up reliance on air power alone and undertake
a massive ground invasion — a scenario that would imply weeks or months of
brutal fighting and possibly hundreds of deaths for the invading army. Faced
with this prospect, in the second week in August a divided Israeli cabinet
— its meetings interrupted so that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert could place
phone calls to the U.S. Secretary of State — voted for “a decisive ground
operation to the Litani River,” then placed it on hold.

That was roughly where matters stood as the UN cease-fire resolution was
adopted — at which point Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz ordered a
final full-scale ground operation, during which Israel suffered its worst
one-day military loss, with 24 soldiers killed, when the war was already supposed
to have ended.

War Crimes and Futility

Put aside, for the moment, the overwhelming weight of the historical record
of Israeli aggression against Lebanon. Put aside the fact that an Israeli
withdrawal from Shebaa Farms (the piece of Lebanon still occupied by Israel
from 1967) and releasing Lebanese prisoners held by Israel would have prevented
this horror. Suspend all judgment temporarily on the immediate responsibility
for starting the war, and ask instead: Once it began, what made this war continue
to the point of the slaughter in Qana, the bombing of farm workers in northern
Lebanon, neighborhoods in south Beirut and civilian convoys, the blockading
of aid and creation of total “humanitarian disaster” throughout the country?

One week after the war broke out, several facts were already completely clear.
First, Israel could smash anything in Lebanon anytime it chose. Second, Hezbollah
was both politically and militarily entrenched and could not be removed by
lightning Israeli air or ground power. Third, the Syrian regime could not
be isolated or ignored. Fourth, the Iranian regime can’t be isolated either
— not only because it provides sophisticated weaponry to Hezbollah, but because
of the implicit threat that if pushed to the wall, it could give that kind
of assistance (as it hasn’t so far, for good reasons) to allied militia forces
inside Iraq.

In short, everyone’s “point” had been made. Even in the lunatic logic of
warmaking, then, it was time to use the available machinery (i.e. the United
Nations) to move to a quick cease-fire and political negotiations. The primary
reason this didn’t happen was that for the U.S. administration, no outcome
was acceptable short of 100% Hezbollah defeat and surrender. Given its defeat
in Iraq, the Bush gang saw Lebanon as the chance to reverse its fortunes,
a proxy war to smash the influence of Iran and soften it up for the next round
of “regime change.” To accomplish this absurd dream, Washington is willing
to bravely fight to the last Lebanese civilian, and to sacrifice the Lebanese
government along with as many Israeli lives as necessary. Even while Condoleezza
Rice went running around the Middle East like a headless chicken with nothing
to offer anyone, she was shadowed by the obscene Elliott Abrams (the pardoned
1980s Iran-Contragate felon who resumed his government career in this administration)
calling the White House to report her if she engaged in any actual diplomacy.

For three weeks, Bush and Rice and Bolton continued to block any Security
Council resolution that didn’t “address fundamental issues” — by which they
meant eliminating the existence of any force that can fight back. This began
to change only as it became clear that the Israeli assault wasn’t a success,
and as Arab governments (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan) that secretly backed
the U.S.-Israeli war could no longer ignore the anger of their own peoples.

A second factor was the tangle of Israeli politics. For the Israeli military
command, the popular trauma over Hezbollah rockets provided an unusual (short-term)
mandate to “go all the way” in Lebanon, to demonstrate Israel’s military supremacy
without restraint and in the process, to shoot off all the cool stuff in their
arsenal and get more, courtesy of the generous U.S. taxpayer. For a coalition
government headed by Ehud Olmert and his junior partner Amir Peretz, neither
of whom have strong military credentials, this war was calculated to restore
their stature after the post-“disengagement” drive to starve the people of
Gaza failed to produce a Palestinian surrender.

As it turns out, the carnage in Lebanon seems more likely to destroy military
and political careers in Israel than to bolster them. Not only are sectors
of the Israeli military now blaming each other for the failure, but the political
backlash is beginning — even among Israel’s most hawkish U.S. partisans. The
warmongering neoconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, a leading advocate
of the view that “the West is in a war with fundamentalist Islam that will
last for our lifetimes” and an aggressive proponent of the very policies that
could make this drivel a self-fulfilling prophecy, warns that an Israeli failure
to crush Hezbollah will cause American policymakers to question its usefulness
as a strategic ally (God forbid).

There is one other force, to be sure, that would prefer the slaughter in
Lebanon to go on and on. That’s al-Qaeda, the global totalitarian-religious
jihadist movement that loathes, as its main rivals, Shiite Muslims and successful
nationalist resistance forces — exactly the two things that Hezbollah represents.
Al-Qaeda needs to recruit to its brand of terrorist jihad from the rubble
of defeat; it cannot grow where a movement like Hezbollah succeeds.

This is not to imply that Hezbollah is left-wing in the context of Lebanese
politics; indeed its political success began with the defeat and decline of
the secular left. The point, however, is that (like HAMAS in Palestine) Hezbollah
wages a national struggle that gives fanatical terrorism of the Osama bin
Laden or al-Zarqawi type no room to operate. While jihadists in Iraq promote
Sunni-Shia intercommunal slaughter, Hezbollah has reached out beyond Lebanon’s
traditional sectarian-communal politics and become a national resistance force
in the eyes not only of Shia Muslims, but also Sunni and Christian Lebanese.

And the Winner Is?

Amidst this horror, no one can say that the Lebanese people have “won.” To
repair even the physical wreckage of the country may take as long as in Iraq,
and that is the smallest part of the unimaginable damage to the psychology
of the population, the political structures and the hope that had just been
reborn in recent years.

The people of Israel have lost a great deal too — not only in the numbers
of dead, which are absolutely tragic yet small by comparison with the losses
in Lebanon, and the economic losses which will be reimbursed by the U.S. Treasury
and Zionist fundraising, but in the loss of their sense of security and the
hope for a “normal” life.

The choice the Israeli population faces is now clear, and the short-term
prospects for that choice are not encouraging. The choice is whether to make
peace with the Arab world and the Palestinian people, by a clean and complete
break with the policies of Occupation and the delusion of security through
overwhelming firepower; or to carry through the Zionist program of crushing
the Palestinian nation by annexation and the “unilateral” creation of Bantustans,
and adopting a perspective of permanent war-and-threat-of-war against the
rest of the Middle East.

The war was popular in Israel, both because of the trauma of real rockets
falling in northern Israel and the myth that “victory” was possible with the
use of sufficient force. But hopeful signs began to emerge as the myth dissipated:
Antiwar demonstrations that began with a few hundred hardcore activists grew
to rallies of five thousand Israeli citizens, Jewish and Arab together demanding
peace. Some Israeli pilots, aware that their orders to bomb civilian houses
were a crime against humanity, deliberately missed the targets. A few soldiers
and reservists publicly refuse to serve and face prosecution, while a much
larger number of reservists simply don’t show up and are ignored by the military
which can’t afford to arrest them all.

The American people are certainly losers: Along with the war in Iraq, this
disaster has made us poorer and less free at home, and more despised and hated
around the world, than at any time in history. Everyone understands the meaning
of the rapid U.S. re-supply of 5000-pound bombs to the Israeli air force,
and the expedited shipment of cluster bombs — with the meaningless exhortation
for Israel to be “careful” in using them!

Hezbollah is the political winner in this war. Far from turning against it,
most of the Lebanese population — and not only the Shia community — see in
it the standard-bearer for national resistance and dignity. The biggest question
left hanging after this bloody inconclusive war is the status of the looming
confrontation with Iran.

If logic were to prevail, the backfire of the U.S. proxy war with Iran, waged
in Lebanon by the Israeli military to show the world that the United States
rules the Middle East, should have proven the reverse. U.S. power can incinerate
a country, a region or the world, but Iran has the capacity to resist, not
only on its own but through its allies and clients.

Arab governments that calculated the U.S.-Israeli onslaught would wipe out
an Iranian-allied movement and isolate the Tehran regime will think harder
before they sign on to the next imperial venture. And European states, which
stand to be devastated by an oil price shock and the terrorism that an uncontrollable
Middle East conflagration could produce, should be applying the brakes — hard.

But there is an alternative logic, especially for a U.S. administration whose
leading “thinkers” inhabit a reality-free zone of their own creation. If the
conquest of Iraq is a disastrous failure, they argue, it can be “solved” by
taking on Syria and Iran too. One power-drunk calculation might be that Iran’s
“deterrent asset” in Lebanon, Hezbollah, can no longer militarily attack Israel
and that Iran is now ripe for the taking. If these ideologically-driven strategists,
most of whom have no actual military experience, really believe they “won”
in Lebanon and what’s needed is only the “will” to proceed to the next regime
change, the potential danger to the world is unimaginable.

Make no mistake: The course that U.S. imperialism has set toward confrontation
and global catastrophe cannot be stopped by international resistance alone.
It requires also an antiwar movement at home, independent of the twin U.S.
war parties, that can organize the deep loathing of the American people for
the dreadful consequences of a war that is now spreading outward from Iraq,
to Lebanon and beyond.