The Radicalization of the Muslim Streets

Moderate voices such as Juan Cole and Jamal are becoming increasingly shrill and radical in their repudiation of Israel and the Bush Administration as well as the hands off treatment in the US press. There silence on the facts is deafening. But the world is increasingly enraged.
Opinionated Voice

This was one authors response to Israel’s violent expanse into the Middle-East which has is being ignored by the West. The invasion itself is a serious breach of international law, and major war crimes are being committed as it proceeds, which some say is motivated by oil. Accordingly, many Muslim scholars and politicians have urged Arab and Islamic states to cut ties with Israel in support of the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples currently under seige.


Another strategy would be to withhold oil from the West until appropriate action is taken to ensure a ceasefire. A strategy that probably won’t be used as the House of Saud has just about got as far as sending “salutations to the resistance of Lebanon”. When will the oil-rich rulers of the Middle-East stop worryng about maintaining their profits and start worryng about their brothers that are dying?

The government of certain western countries are indeed ignoring it all. The US press is talking about victims at least, more than they did for Fallujiah. But they aren't talking about the stunning facts about the million refugees, nearly one thousand dead and thousands injured, $20 billion damage, all to root out two to three thousand fighters?? Crazy ideas like these start making more sense. "Paranoia strikes deep" : Stephen Stills That is frightening indeed.
Many other countries, including Muslim countries are giving little more than lip service to calling for a cease fire. A former religious teacher of Osama bin Ladin is calling Hizbullah the "Party of Satan" and forbiding prayer for them.
So far only Iran has called for an oil embargo.
I have to wonder if the US and Israel are hoping for a Shia-Sunni war, thinking that is the only way to take down Syria and Iran a notch or two. The US sometimes appears to be switching sides in the Iraqi conflict, taking on the Badr and Sadr coalition that holds power and hunts Sunnis.
There is a loose cannon in the US White House.
But the most cynical view of all comes from Newsweek. As this author sees it, Israel is willing to flirt with genocide to beat a new attitude into the Lebanese.

It’s a strange sort of deterrence that demands repeated wars. Nonetheless, Almog does have a point. Destruction and bloodshed can change a nation’s attitudes. Germany and Japan emerged from World War II ready to reconsider their futures—but that was after most major cities in both countries had been razed, millions of their people slaughtered and the traumatized survivors left starving in the rubble. By historical analogy, then, Israel might succeed in changing the Shia mindset, might succeed in provoking a sea change in Lebanon's politics. But only if Israel is willing to commit destruction in Lebanon on a World War II city-busting scale.


So the Lebanon campaign has, I would argue, brought Israel face to face with the appalling logic of deterrence by conventional means. There is an historical precedent: ancient Rome. Rome, too, had a strategy of deterrence by cost. To work, Rome found, the cost had to be horrifying. In a struggle lasting 120 years, Rome fought three wars against Carthage, its main rival in the Mediterranean. The great Carthaginian general, Hannibal, even penetrated northern Italy and inflicted on Rome a defeat of strategic proportions at Cannae. Rome realized that only total destruction would end the contest: Scipio took Carthage, slaughtered most of its inhabitants and sold the rest into slavery, razed the city and sowed its fields with salt. Scipio’s savagery did actually deter, over the next several hundred years, other ambitious Mediterranean powers. It failed, however, against the Germanic tribes that ultimately swarmed across Rome's frontiers. Why? Because they, like Hizbullah, were nonstate actors.


That leaves me to contemplate Yasir Arafat’s comment when the 1973 war ended with the Egyptian Army surrounded in the Sinai and the Israelis at the gates of Damascus. “You forget,” he told me after I remarked that a military solution didn’t look too promising for the Arab nations. “The Crusades took 200 years.” What time frame is anyone contemplating here?

Who will win in a 200 year conflict? The people with the least to lose. As I said before, the rules of war have changed. The US and Israel are living in the dark ages of the 20th century when might meant right.