Bush Admininstration Leads a Media Circus to Support Continued Bombing in Lebanon

Bush has taken to his white horse in an apparent peace making role. This seemingly high road move is an orchestrated stall tactic to allow Israel to continue it's campaign of destruction in south Lebanon while minimizing the perception of US culpability. It may work in the US, but no where else. We are witnessing a media circus designed to maintain a modicum of credibility for the Bush Administration with the US voter. More doublethink from the Dubya.
International Herald Tribune

President Bush, vowing to turn conflict in the Middle East into a "moment of opportunity" for broader change, said today that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would be dispatched to the region on Saturday with a plan for a multinational force that would help Lebanon's army take over from Hezbollah in the southern part of the country. Mr. Bush spoke this afternoon at a press conference with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, who called the conflict a "complete tragedy" with innocent Lebanese and Israeli lives lost, people displaced, and a "terrible setback" for Lebanon's democracy.

WaPo

En route to a new round of Middle East negotiations, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Saturday that she was encouraged by Hezbollah's general agreement to disarm and accept an international force in Lebanon, which she called a "positive step" that also strengthens the Lebanese government in the elusive search for a cease-fire. "Obviously we are all trying to get to a cease-fire as quickly as possible, so I'll take this as a positive step," Rice told reporters on her plane flying from Malaysia to a refueling stop in Qatar. "I think there are a lot of elements that are coming together."


Hezbollah signed on to the proposal "in principle" after negotiations Thursday with the government of Lebanon. But Hezbollah held out the caveat that more talks will be held after agreement is reached by the U.N. Security Council on an international force on the border, according to Hezbollah and Lebanese government officials. The radical Shiite Muslim movement would maintain its heavily armed militia in the south during the talks.

• The central element --- and deal-breaker -- is disarmament of Hezbollah. But this does not have to happen before a cease-fire or even soon, U.S. officials say. The goal is to get a formal commitment and to outline arrangements, possibly to eventually bring members of Hezbollah's militia into the Lebanese Army reserves or in another capacity and to get their arms into a government-controlled depot.



• A large, robust and well-armed international force will deploy to initially help with humanitarian relief and refugees, but ultimately retrain and back up the Lebanese Army as it deploys throughout the country for the first time since the civil war erupted in1975, U.S. and European officials say.



• The release of two Israeli soldiers, whose abduction on July 12 triggered the crisis. Up in the air is still the prospect of an eventual release of some Lebanese or Palestinian prisoners held in Israel jails, European officials say. Hezbollah officials said a long-sought prisoner swap was its goal in kidnapping the Israelis. This kind of "no-deal deal," in which one side releases prisoners, claiming there was no deal, is followed by the release of prisoners by the other side at a later date.



• A sensitive issue still up in the air is the fate of Shebaa Farms, the last remaining disputed area on the border, say U.S. and European officials. It is on the corner of Lebanon, Syria and Israel, which occupied it in the 1967 war. The United Nations considers the area Syrian territory but Hezbollah claims it for Lebanon, which Syria once -- but only once -- endorsed.



• A massive humanitarian effort and a donors conference are to be organized as quickly as possible to get Lebanon back on its feet. U.S. officials are deeply concerned about Lebanon's already troubled economy deepening the political and military instability.

This isn't a real proposal, it's designed to be rejected by the parties involved. Israel would never agree to Hizbullah fighters in Lebanese uniforms on it's border. Although Hizbullah has agreed in principle to disarming, they understand this is a stall and stand to benefit from the continued bombing. Syria has a veto also about the Shebaa Farms. The proposal for an international peace keeping force will take months to implement. Deployment will not happen until the fighting stops. That isn't going to happen anytime soon.
Meanwhile Israel rejects even a humanitarian ceasefire.
ABC News Online

Israel has rejected a call by the United Nations (UN) for a 72-hour pause in fighting in southern Lebanon to allow humanitarian aid to get to trapped civilians. The UN says the temporary cease-fire is also needed to enable relief workers to evacuate elderly, young and wounded people.


But Israeli Government spokesman Avi Pazner says the halt is not necessary because Israel has opened a humanitarian corridor to and from Lebanon. Mr Pazner says Israel is not blocking aid from reaching south Lebanon. "The problem is completely different," he said. "It is Hezbollah which is deliberately preventing the transfer of medical aid and food to the population of southern Lebanon in order to create a humanitarian crisis, which they want to blame Israel for." Senior Israeli Foreign Ministry official Gideon Meir says a truce would be dangerous for his country. "We cannot accept a cease-fire with Hezbollah because this terrorist organisation would exploit it to gather civilians to use them as a human shield in the combat zone," he said.

This is so much war propaganda. While it's true that Hizbullah stands to gain from every civilian killed by Israel aggression, they aren't pullling the trigger. The scale of the damage tells all.
New York Times

The United Nations estimates that between 500,000 and 700,000 Lebanese have been displaced, a giant number for a country of 3.5 million. “The scale of the problem is of an unbelievable proportion,” said Sami Haddad, the Lebanese minister of economy. “We have between 20 and 25 percent of our population that is turned into refugees. What government can cope with that?”


There is a nationwide problem of buildings and public works. The Lebanese school system is filled with people seeking shelter, according to Mr. Haddad, and school begins again in two months. With the vast scale of the destruction, even if the war stopped now, the country would still face a housing shortage for 100,000 to 200,000 people whose homes have been leveled, he said.


[...]On his two-hour drive, he saw several large convoys of refugees, all with white flags fluttering from windows. One had stopped in a grove of trees after having reached a relatively safe area. He asked the people where they were going. They said they did not know. “People seemed dazed,” he said. “Somebody crying. Somebody laughing for no reason.”


In the Tyre district, 67 villages with a population of about 275,000, less than a third of the population remained in the area, according to the mayor’s office. But in the past two days, between 600 and 700 cars have come out of the villages and now the count may be even lower.


In the early days of the conflict, a number of civilian vehicles were destroyed in attacks, mostly by Israel, so refugees began to move in convoys of dozens of cars. Early this week, two Lebanese Red Cross ambulances were destroyed in a missile attack in the village of Qana, wounding six people. An American visiting relatives in Lebanon was hit by rockets as he was trying to park his car in front of his family’s house to evacuate with a convoy arranged by the American Embassy.

Israel argues that Hizbullah hides behind civilians, justifying making nearly a million Lebanese refugees, and ultimately a quarter million homeless. Seldom do you find estimates of Hizbullah strength. Just how many fighters are there?
GlobalSecurity.org

The State Department’s 1993 report on international terrorism lists Hizbollah’s “strength” at several thousand. Hizbollah sources assert that the organization has about 5,000-10,000 fighters. Other sources report that Hizbollah’s militia consists of a core of about 300-400 fighters, which can be expanded to up to 3,000 within several hours if a battle with Israel develops. These reserves presumably are called in from Hizbollah strongholds in Lebanon, including the Bekaa Valley and Beirut’s southern suburbs. The number of members involved in combat activity in southern Lebanon is under 1,000. But it has many activists and moral supporters. After the Israeli withdrawal Hizballah reduced the number of full time fighters to about 500, though estimates range from 300 to 1,200. There are also several thousand reserves, but these lack training or experience. Hizbollah’s militia is a light force, equipped with small arms, such as automatic rifles, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, and Katyusha rockets, which it occasionally has fired on towns in northern Israel. Hizbollah forces are shown on television conducting military parades in Beirut, which often include tanks and armored personnel carriers that may have been captured from the Lebanese army or purchased from Palestinian guerrillas or other sources.

Surely Hizbullah exaggerates their numbers. The most reasonable number is the one thrown around loosely in the press, several thousand. Several thousand Hizbullah militia members have fought the famous Israeli Army to a standstill for 2 weeks. It's not by military means it survives. Israel is unwilling to take the casualties needed to defeat Hizbullah on the ground. So they instead bomb from afar, feeling killing nearly 1000 civilians, maybe 10% are Hizbullah, to save Israeli Army casualties, driving nearly a million Lebanese from their homes and destroying the homes of maybe a quarter million.
Where in the world are these numbers justified? Truly, Israelis are willing to fight Hizbullah to the last Lebanese citizen. Killing maybe 10 civilians for every Hizbullah fighter is justified?
It's not justified, and Israel, the US and the War on Terrorism will pay for it in the next generation. Hizbullah is the new hero of the Palestinian cause. Even Al Qaeda recognizes it has formidable competition.
New York Times

At the onset of the Lebanese crisis, Arab governments, starting with Saudi Arabia, slammed Hezbollah for recklessly provoking a war, providing what the United States and Israel took as a wink and a nod to continue the fight.


Now, with hundreds of Lebanese dead and Hezbollah holding out against the vaunted Israeli military for more than two weeks, the tide of public opinion across the Arab world is surging behind the organization, transforming the Shiite group’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, into a folk hero and forcing a change in official statements.


The Saudi royal family and King Abdullah II of Jordan, who were initially more worried about the rising power of Shiite Iran, Hezbollah’s main sponsor, are scrambling to distance themselves from Washington.


An outpouring of newspaper columns, cartoons, blogs and public poetry readings have showered praise on Hezbollah while attacking the United States and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for trumpeting American plans for a “new Middle East” that they say has led only to violence and repression.


[...]The Saudi royal court has issued a dire warning that its 2002 peace plan — offering Israel full recognition by all Arab states in exchange for returning to the borders that predated the 1967 Arab-Israeli war — could well perish. “If the peace option is rejected due to the Israeli arrogance,” it said, “then only the war option remains, and no one knows the repercussions befalling the region, including wars and conflict that will spare no one, including those whose military power is now tempting them to play with fire.” The Saudis were putting the West on notice that they would not exert pressure on anyone in the Arab world until Washington did something to halt the destruction of Lebanon, Saudi commentators said.


[...]There are evident concerns among Arab governments that a victory for Hezbollah — and it has already achieved something of a victory by holding out this long — would further nourish the Islamist tide engulfing the region and challenge their authority. Hence their first priority is to cool simmering public opinion.


But perhaps not since President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt made his emotional outpourings about Arab unity in the 1960’s, before the Arab defeat in the 1967 war, has the public been so electrified by a confrontation with Israel, played out repeatedly on satellite television stations with horrific images from Lebanon of wounded children and distraught women fleeing their homes.


Egypt’s opposition press has had a field day comparing Sheik Nasrallah to Nasser, while demonstrators waved pictures of both.


An editorial in the weekly Al Dustur by Ibrahim Issa, who faces a lengthy jail sentence for his previous criticism of President Mubarak, compared current Arab leaders to the medieval princes who let the Crusaders chip away at Muslim lands until they controlled them all.


After attending an intellectual rally in Cairo for Lebanon, the Egyptian poet Ahmed Fouad Negm wrote a column describing how he had watched a companion buy 20 posters of Sheik Nasrallah.


“People are praying for him as they walk in the street, because we were made to feel oppressed, weak and handicapped,” Mr. Negm said in an interview. “I asked the man who sweeps the street under my building what he thought, and he said: ‘Uncle Ahmed, he has awakened the dead man inside me! May God make him triumphant!’ ”


In Lebanon, Rasha Salti, a freelance writer, summarized the sense that Sheik Nasrallah differed from other Arab leaders. “Since the war broke out, Hassan Nasrallah has displayed a persona, and public behavior also, to the exact opposite of Arab heads of states,” she wrote in an e-mail message posted on many blogs.


[...]Perhaps nothing underscored Hezbollah’s rising stock more than the sudden appearance of a tape from the Qaeda leadership attempting to grab some of the limelight. Al Jazeera satellite television broadcast a tape from Mr. Zawahri (za-WAH-ri). Large panels behind him showed a picture of the exploding World Trade Center as well as portraits of two Egyptian Qaeda members, Muhammad Atef, a Qaeda commander who was killed by an American airstrike in Afghanistan, and Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker on Sept. 11, 2001. He described the two as fighters for the Palestinians. Mr. Zawahri tried to argue that the fight against American forces in Iraq paralleled what Hezbollah was doing, though he did not mention the organization by name. “It is an advantage that Iraq is near Palestine,” he said. “Muslims should support its holy warriors until an Islamic emirate dedicated to jihad is established there, which could then transfer the jihad to the borders of Palestine.” Mr. Zawahri also adopted some of the language of Hezbollah and Shiite Muslims in general. That was rather ironic, since previously in Iraq, Al Qaeda has labeled Shiites Muslim as infidels and claimed responsibility for some of the bloodier assaults on Shiite neighborhoods there.


But by taking on Israel, Hezbollah had instantly eclipsed Al Qaeda, analysts said. “Everyone will be asking, ‘Where is Al Qaeda now?’ ” said Adel al-Toraifi, a Saudi columnist and expert on Sunni extremists. Mr. Rabbani of the International Crisis Group said Hezbollah’s ability to withstand the Israeli assault and to continue to lob missiles well into Israel exposed the weaknesses of Arab governments with far greater resources than Hezbollah. “Public opinion says that if they are getting more on the battlefield than you are at the negotiating table, and you have so many more means at your disposal, then what the hell are you doing?” Mr. Rabbani said. “In comparison with the small embattled guerrilla movement, the Arab states seem to be standing idly by twiddling their thumbs.”

Now, it would appear that rumors that the Israelis want to settle with Hamas appears to have some truth to it.
Los Angeles Times

Israeli tanks pulled out of the Gaza Strip early Friday morning, ending an incursion that began Wednesday and left 30 Palestinians dead and a trail of damaged homes, crushed cars and uprooted trees. On the eastern edges of Gaza City's Shaaf district, deep trenches of churned earth surrounded by newly pockmarked buildings clearly showed the path taken by an estimated 50 Israeli tanks and armored bulldozers. "This used to be all olive and fruit trees," said Shaaf resident Yusuf Hamad, pointing to a wide patch of barren earth. The incursion targeted orchards used by militants for launching rockets over the border, the Israeli army said. Within hours of the tanks' withdrawal, the military wing of Islamic Jihad launched several rockets that landed near the southern Israeli town of Sderot and wounded two children, an Israeli army spokesman said.


Three Palestinians were killed Friday, including a 13-year old boy, and a man died of wounds incurred Thursday, bringing the total toll to 30 dead and at least 75 wounded over the last three days, medical sources said.