In the Gunsight: Syria or, A Nice Little War By Uri Avnery

30 July, 2006 — Ann

Email Despatch 29.7.06

IT IS the old story about the losing gambler: he cannot stop. He continues to play, in order to win his losses back. He continues to lose and continues to gamble, until he has lost everything: his ranch, his wife, his shirt.

The same thing happens in the biggest gamble of all: war. The leaders that start a war and get stuck in the mud are compelled to fight their way ever deeper into the mud. That is a part of the very essence of war: it is impossible to stop after a failure. Public opinion demands the promised victory. Incompetent generals need to cover up their failure. Military commentators and other armchair strategists demand a massive offensive. Cynical politicians are riding the wave. The government is carried away by the flood that they themselves have let loose.

That is what happened this week, following the battle of Bint-Jbeil, which the Arabs have already started to call proudly Nasrallahgrad. All over Israel the cry goes up: Get into it! Quicker! Further! Deeper!

A day after the bloody battle, the cabinet decided on a massive mobilization of the reserves. What for? The ministers do not know. But it does not depend on them anymore, nor on the generals. The political and military leadership is tossed about on the waves of war like a boat without a rudder.

As has been said before: it is much easier to start a war than to finish one. The cabinet believes that it controls the war, but in reality it is the war that controls them. They have mounted a tiger, and can’t be sure of getting off without being torn to pieces.

War has its own rules. Unexpected things happen and dictate the next moves. And the next moves tend to be in one direction: escalation.

DAN HALUTZ, the father of this war, thought that he could eliminate Hizbullah by means of the Air Force, the most sophisticated, most efficient and the generally most-most air force in the world. A few days of massive pounding, thousands of tons of bombs on neighborhoods, roads, electricity works and ports – and that’s it.

Well, that wasn’t it, as it turned out. The Hizbullah rockets continued to land in the north of Israel, hundreds a day. The public cried out. There was no way round a ground operation. First, small, elite units were put in. That did not help. Then brigades were deployed. And now whole divisions are demanded.

First they wanted to annihilate the Hizbullah positions along the border. When it was seen that that was not enough, it was decided to conquer the hills that dominate the border. There, the Hizbullah fighters were waiting and caused heavy casualties. And the rockets continued to fly.

Now the generals are convinced that there is no alternative to occupying the whole area up to the Litani River, about 24 km from the border, in order to prevent the rockets from being launched from there. Then they will find out that they have to reach the Awali River, 40 km inside – the famous 40 km which Menachem Begin talked about in 1982.

And then? The Israeli army will be extended over a large area, and everywhere it will be exposed to guerilla attacks, of the sort Hizbullah excels in. And the missiles will continue to fly.

What next? One cannot stop. Public opinion will demand more decisive moves. Political demagogues will shout. Commentators will grumble. The people in the shelters will cry out. The generals will feel the heat. One cannot keep tens of thousands of reserve soldiers mobilized indefinitely. It is impossible to prolong a situation which paralyzes a third of the country.

Everybody will clamor to storm forwards. Where to? Towards Beirut in the North? Or towards Damascus, in the East?

THE CABINET ministers recite in unison: No! Never ever! We shall not attack Syria!

Perhaps some of them really don’t intend to. They do not dream of a war with Syria. Definitely not. But the ministers only delude themselves when they believe that they control the war. The war controls them.

When it becomes clear that nothing is helping, that Hizbullah goes on fighting and the rockets continue to fly, the political and military leadership will face bankruptcy. They will need to pin the blame on somebody. On who? Well, on Assad, of course.

How is it possible that a small “terror organization”, with a few thousand fighters altogether, goes on fighting? Where do they get the arms from? The finger will point towards Syria.

Even now, the army commanders assert that new rockets are flowing all the time from Syria to Hizbullah. True, the roads have been bombed, the bridges destroyed, but the arms somehow continue to arrive. The Israeli government demands that an international force be stationed not only along the Israeli-Lebanese border, but on the Lebanese-Syrian border, too. The queue of volunteers will not be long.

Then the generals will demand the bombing of roads and bridges inside Syria. For that, the Syrian Air Force will have to be neutralized. In short, a real war, with implications for the whole Middle East.

EHUD OLMERT and Amir Peretz did not think about that when they decided 17 days ago in haste and light heartedly, without serious debate, without examining other options, without calculating the risks, to attack Hizbullah. For politicians who do not know what war is, it was an irresistible temptation: there was a clear provocation by Hizbullah, international support was assured, what a wonderful opportunity! They would do what even Sharon did not dare.

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The Iraq War is a Huge Success: The Economics of Creative Destruction

30 July, 2006 — Ann


By Aseem Shrivastava – 29 July 2006 ICH

“If he that shared the danger enjoyed the profit, and, after bleeding in the battle, grew rich by the victory, he might show his gains without envy. But, at the conclusion of a ten years’ war, how are we recompensed for the death of multitudes, and the expense of millions, but by contemplating the sudden glories of paymasters and agents, contractors and commissaries, whose equipages shine like meteors, and whose palaces rise like exhalations!

“These are the men who, without virtue, labour, or hazard, are growing rich, as their country is impoverished; they rejoice, when obstinacy or ambition adds another year to slaughter and devastation; and laugh, from their desks, at bravery and science, while they are adding figure to figure, and cipher to cipher, hoping for a new contract from a new armament, and computing the profits of a siege or tempest.” Samuel Johnson

The secret of capitalist success, the great economist Joseph Schumpeter famously argued, is “creative destruction”. The dynamics of capitalist competition generate technological innovations at a rapid clip, each superior method causing the obsolescence of prevailing techniques, old machines giving way to new in a ceaseless cycle of growth and prosperity.

Imperialistic wars, Schumpeter believed, were signs of atavism, harking back to humanity’s more anachronistic, primitive impulses. However, he failed to see that such wars brought forth another form of creative destruction which capitalism finds most handy in its onward march.

The reigning view among most critics of the war on Iraq is that it has been a fiasco. No weapons of mass destruction were found, nor any link with the terrorists who plotted 9 — 11. Most importantly, more than 3 years after Bush declared the end of the war, the insurgency in Iraq is stronger than ever. Undeclared civil war is threatening to break up the country. Hundreds of thousands of innocents may have been murdered by the American invasion, in addition to the deaths of over 2500 US soldiers, and the end is not in sight. So, it has become a commonplace to suggest that the whole enterprise has been a disaster from all possible points of view.

This is a fundamentally mistaken view, a victim of the red herrings thrown at the public by Washington warlords and their ideologues.

Is there reason to believe that the war, far from being a disaster, has actually proceeded quite well from Washington’s point of view? That the view that the war has been a fiasco is merely a convenient smokescreen of innocence helpful to keep in check public perceptions of the monstrous crimes of leaders in Washington and London?

First, and easily forgotten, the obvious success of the Iraq adventure has been to get rid of that rotten dictator Saddam Hussein. Democracy has dawned on an Islamic land. Thanks to American blessings, people can now elect their own representatives to govern them, even if they get their heads blown off every now and then when they step on to the streets.

Looking beyond that, however, there are some sobering facts. Let’s begin with the lessons history teaches. The dominant view is that the Vietnam War was lost by the US. It was driven out of Vietnam. 58,000 Americans died in the war, apart from the millions of Indo-Chinese. All this may be true. However, if you look at it from the perspective of American corporate elites, rather than from the perspective of the majority of Americans, Washington succeeded in its primary goal, which was to prevent an alternative model of independent Third World development (something like what Cuba has tried and Venezuela is trying these days) from taking root. Vietnam was not allowed to set an example which might have generated a domino effect across the developing world, much to the loss of the United States, which would have become a less indispensable nation. True to American plans, Vietnam is an open — market economy today, dependent on a globalized economy led by the US.

Moreover, the military spending on the Vietnam War consolidated the policy framework of Military Keynesianism which had been learnt to be of great economic use since the days of World War II. Key to this approach is the enrichment of weapons manufacturers and reconstruction industries who have an assured market. The military purchases are deficit — financed by the Federal government at the cost of the tax — paying public. Reconstruction costs are levied on the tax — paying public of the destroyed nation. Weapons dealers like Lockheed — Martin and United Technologies got handsome contracts from the Pentagon. Companies like Kellogg, Brown and Root and The Louis Berger Group (both invited to bid for reconstruction contracts in Iraq) got plenty of business when they were asked to build harbors, roads, bridges, airports and military bases in the period of post — war reconstruction in Vietnam.

The hidden agenda of the US government in Iraq has been three fold. Firstly, to take control of the world’s second largest oil reserves, thereby seizing one of the key oil spigots of competitors like Japan, China and the EU. Secondly, to prevent the dollar — based world oil market from transacting in Euros, something Iran, Iraq and Venezuela were attempting since 2002, when the Euro was launched. Thirdly, the establishment of permanent US military bases in the strategic heart of the world. (The US has built the world’s largest embassy – employing 5000 people – in Baghdad).

In all three respects, the war has been a resounding success. US oil companies have taken charge of Iraqi oil. In the future it is through them that Japan, China, EU and any other competitors will have to buy oil from the region, something that gives the US formidable leverage. The oil market continues to transact in dollars, fragile as it is as a global reserve currency. Iranian experiments with the Euro Bourse have not taken off.

The war has also achieved some other remarkable, unmentionable goals for Washington.

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Israel’s secret war: the humanitarian disaster unfolding in Palestine By Anne Penketh in Gaza City

30 July, 2006 — Ann

Published: 29 July 2006 The Independent

A 12-year-old boy dead on a stretcher. A mother in shock and disbelief after her son was shot dead for standing on their roof. A phone rings and a voice in broken Arabic orders residents to abandon their home on pain of death.

Those are snapshots of a day in Gaza where Israel is waging a hidden war, as the world looks the other way, focusing on Lebanon.

It is a war of containment and control that has turned the besieged Strip into a prison with no way in or out, and no protection from an fearsome battery of drones, precision missiles, tank shells and artillery rounds.

As of last night, 29 people had been killed in the most concentrated 48 hours of violence since an Israeli soldier was abducted by Palestinian militants just more than a month ago.

The operation is codenamed “Samson’s Pillars”, a collective punishment of the 1.4 million Gazans, subjecting them to a Lebanese-style offensive that has targeted the civilian infrastructure by destroying water mains, the main power station and bridges.

The similarities with Israel’s blitz on Lebanon are striking, raising suspicions that the Gaza offensive has been the testing ground for the military strategy now unfolding on the second front in the north.

In Gaza, following the victory of the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas in January, Israel, with the help of the US, initiated an immediate boycott and ensured the rest of the world fell into line after months of hand-wringing. Israel has secured the same flashing green light from the Bush administration over Lebanon, while the rest of the world appeals in vain for an immediate ceasefire.

The Israelis, who launched their Lebanon offensive on 12 July after the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hizbollah fighters, intend to create a “sterile” zone devoid of militants in a mile-wide stretch inside Lebanon.

In Gaza, Palestinian land has already been bulldozed to form a 300-metre open area along the border with Israel proper. And in both cases, the crisis will doubtless end up being defused by a prisoner exchange. With Lebanon dominating the headlines, Israel has “rearranged the occupation” in Gaza, in the words of the Palestinian academic and MP, Hanan Ashrawi. But unlike the Lebanese, the desperate Gazans have nowhere to flee from their humanitarian crisis.

Before Israeli tanks moved into northern Gaza, yesterday, 12-year-old Anas Zumlut joined the ranks of dead Palestinians, numbering more than 100. His body was wrapped in a funeral shroud, just like those of the two sisters, a three-year-old and an eight-month-old baby, who were killed three days ago in the same area of Jablaya.

In the past three weeks, the foreign ministry and the interior ministry in Gaza city have been smashed, prompting speculation that Israel’s offensive is not only aimed at securing the release of Cpl Gilad Shalit, or bringing an end to the Qassam rocket attacks that have wounded one person in the past month and jarred the nerves of the residents of the nearest Israeli town of Sderot.

“At first we thought they were bombing the Hamas leaders by targeting Haniyeh and Zahar,” a Palestinian official said, referring to the Palestinian Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister. “But when they targeted the economy ministry we decided they wanted to completely destroy the entire government.”

The only functioning crossing, Erez, is closed to Palestinians who are almost hermetically sealed inside the Strip. As the local economy has been strangled by donor countries, Gaza City’s 1,800 municipal employees have not been paid since the beginning of April. Families are borrowing to the hilt, selling their jewellery, ignoring electricity bills and tax demands and throwing themselves on the mercy of shopkeepers.

Western officials say they hope the pressure will coerce Hamas into recognising Israel but the Palestinians believe the real goal is the collapse of the Hamas government – six of whose cabinet members have been arrested, the rest are in hiding.

The signs on the ground are that Israel’s military pressure is proving counter-productive. There is the risk of a total breakdown of the fabric of society at a time when the main political parties, Fatah and Hamas, are at each other’s throats. “The popularity of Hamas is increasing,” says the Palestinian deputy foreign minister, Ahmed Soboh, from the comparative safety of his West Bank office in Ramallah.

The situation has become unbearable for Gazans, says Nabil Shaath, a veteran Fatah official who is a former foreign and planning minister. Through the window, small fishing boats are anchored uselessly in the harbour, penned in by Israeli sea patrols.

All mechanisms for coping are being exhausted.

Mr Shaath, who had a daughter, Mimi, late in life, says that he tried “laughter therapy” with his five-year-old at home in northern Gaza. “Every time there was a shell, I would burst out laughing and she would laugh with me. But then the Israelis occupied everything around us, and there were tanks, and shrapnel in the garden, and she saw where the shells were coming from, and she was terrified. So Mimi now gets angry when I laugh.”

Only a few miles away, on the other side of the border, the Israeli army says it is taking pains to minimise civilian casualties. Hila, a 21-year old paratrooper who is not allowed to give her last name, says the Hamas fighters in Gaza – like Hizbollah in Lebanon – deliberately mingle with the civilian population as a tactic. Weapons are stored in the upper storeys of houses where families live downstairs, she says. “The terrorists deliberately choose places where we can’t retaliate.”

But these places are being hit. And Mr Shaath is scornful of the disproportionate Israeli reaction to the Palestinian rockets. Five Israelis have been killed by the 10km range Qassams since 2000.

Mrs Ashrawi believes Samson’s Pillars are no closer to falling. “Israelis think they are searing the consciousness of the Palestinians and the Lebanese with a branding iron. But if people have a cause they will never be defeated.”

Day 17

* Israeli aircraft kill 12 in southern Lebanon, with hill villages near Tyre among the targets.

* Hizbollah fires a new long-range missile, the Khaibar-1, at Afula south of Haifa, the furthest a Hizbollah rocket has landed inside Israel.

* At least six people are wounded in rocket attacks on northern Israel. One rocket hits a hospital in Nahariya.

* US State Department describes Israel’s remarks that the Rome conference gave it a ”green light” to continue its attack on Lebanon as ”outrageous”.

* Emergency relief co-ordinator Jan Egeland asks Israel and Hizbollah for a 72-hour ceasefire to allow evacuation of the elderly.

* Israeli aircraft attack homes owned by Palestinian militants and a metal workshop in the Gaza Strip, wounding seven, doctors say.

* Death toll:

At least 459 people, mostly civilians, in Lebanon

* 51 Israelis, including 18 civilians, according to Reuters’ tally.

* Israeli military says 200 Hizbollah fighters killed, Hizbollah has said 31 of its fighters killed.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article1202850.ece

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Beware of the ‘New Order’ Israel is imposing By Siddharth Varadarajan

30 July, 2006 — Ann

The Hindu 29 July 2006
No peace or stability can emerge in West Asia through occupation, subjugation, and the military slaughter of civilians.

ON JULY 28, 1989, a detachment of heavily armed Israeli commandos descended upon the southern Lebanese village of Jibchit. The time was 2 a.m. They burst into the home of Sheikh Abdul Karim Obeid, leader of the Hizbollah militia, beat up his wife, and shot dead a neighbour before bundling the Sheikh and two other men into a helicopter. One of those seized was a young man named Hashem Fahaf who had no connection to Hizbollah, the other was the Sheikh’s bodyguard.

According to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which carries a helpful if damning account of the kidnapping on its website, “Israel had hoped to use the sheikh as a card to affect an exchange of prisoners and hostages [held by Hizbollah] in return for all Shiites held by it.”

So brazen was Israel’s action that the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed a resolution (No. 638) calling for the “immediate safe release of all hostages and abducted persons, wherever and by whomever they are being held.” Needless to say, Tel Aviv ignored the resolution. After all, kidnapping non-combatants, including minors, and holding them hostage, was an integral part of Israel’s military strategy. In May 1994, Israeli soldiers abducted a prominent Lebanese businessman and former commander of the Shia Amal militia, Mustafa al-Dirani, and brought him into Israel. The aim of that kidnapping was to try and get information about the location of Ron Arad, an air force navigator who had been shot down over Sidon in 1986 during Israel’s ongoing aggression against Lebanon.

Mr. Fahaf, whose presence Israel refused to recognise for years, spent 11 years in jail before the Supreme Court finally ordered his release. He was allowed to return home along with 18 other Lebanese nationals who — the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported in August 2003 — had been held “according to the official version … as `bargaining chips’ for Ron Arad”. Two of those released had been kidnapped as boys and had grown into adulthood in captivity.

Sheikh Obeid and Mr. Dirani were finally released in 2004, after being held hostage by the Israeli government for 15 and 10 years respectively. Both men spent extended periods of time at Camp 1391, dubbed Israel’s Guantanamo, a prison whose existence the Israeli authorities do not freely admit to. There, Mr. Dirani was raped, sexually abused, and tortured by Israeli soldiers . A lawsuit filed by him against the State of Israel is currently pending before a judge in Tel Aviv. He is claiming NIS 6 million ($1.5 million) in damages.

The 2004 release was part of a general prisoner swap brokered by the German government in which Hizbollah released an Israeli businessman and reserve colonel seized in 2000 in order to force Tel Aviv to free Sheikh Obeid. Hizbollah also returned the bodies of three Israeli soldiers killed in action. In exchange, Israel set free the Sheikh, Mr. Dirani, and 33 other Lebanese and Arab hostages, as well as 400 Palestinian prisoners. It also returned the bodies of 59 Lebanese nationals killed by its security forces over the years.

It is necessary to recall this entire sordid episode in order to put in perspective Hizbollah’s foolish action of seizing two Israeli soldiers across the blue line dividing Lebanon from Israel. Thanks to Israel, kidnapping and hostage-taking — as well as the targeting of non-combatants and even children — have become “acceptable” military tactics in the region though one would be hard pressed to come across any reference to Sheikh Obeid or Mr. Dirani in the international news coverage that followed Hizbollah’s action. The Shia militia wants Tel Aviv to free the handful of Lebanese prisoners still in Israeli jails who were promised freedom in 2004 but never released. Most prominent among them is Samir Kuntar, captured in 1978 during a guerrilla raid on an Israeli settlement near the Lebanese border. Kuntar was found guilty of killing a civilian man and his young daughter and sentenced to more than 500 years in prison by an Israeli court. The Israeli authorities may baulk at releasing a “convicted child killer.” But in rejecting the possibility of a negotiated settlement and indiscriminately bombarding Lebanon, Tel Aviv has turned its own soldiers into the executioners of children. When a well-marked United Nations post takes a direct hit and ambulances are struck — according to a recent dispatch by Robert Fisk — with missiles that pierce the Red Cross and Crescent symbol right at the centre, it is hard to accept the Israeli claim that all civilian deaths were unintended.

Real war aims

Recalling the recent history of kidnappings is also necessary for another reason: To puncture the myth that the disproportionate and utterly criminal Israeli military response that is pulverising Lebanon and its people today is somehow driven by an urge to free its two kidnapped soldiers.

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Lebanon demands return of Shebaa Farms

30 July, 2006 — Ann
By Cilina Nasser in Beirut Sunday 30 July 2006

Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora attends a news conference in Rome February 16, 2006. (AFP)

Siniora: Re-taking the Shebaa Farms would be a victory for all Lebanese

 
   
   
   

Fouad Siniora, the Lebanese prime minister, has said that if Israel wants secure borders it must withdraw from the disputed Shebaa Farms area it has occupied since 1967.

Israel, which has bombarded Beirut’s suburbs and southern Lebanon with aircraft and artillery since July 12, has said it wants to weaken Hezbollah so that the Lebanese government can disarm the group.

In an interview with Aljazeera.net late on Friday, Siniora said his government cannot force Hezbollah to disarm as long as Israel continues to occupy the Shebaa Farms.

He said: “I’d like to remind you that the Shebaa Farms is not a property of Hezbollah. It’s a property of Lebanon and it’s for all the Lebanese.

“So anyone who would say that giving this land back to Lebanon would be considered a victory for Hezbollah is mistaken. This issue has to be looked at in totality. Lebanon gets back its land and, ultimately, Israel gets a safe border.”

Israel withdrew from the country in May 2000 but it maintained control over the Shebaa Farms that is claimed by Lebanon.

The UN says that the Shebaa Farms are Syrian territory captured in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

Ceasefire plan

Siniora also cited Lebanon’s casualty figures as indication of who was paying the price for the recent conflict.

“Do you think that Israel has been bombing Hezbollah fighters? No, this is a war against Lebanese civilians.”

Factbox: The Shebaa Farms

The Shebaa Farms is the name given to a 10 km sq area of farmland at the point where the Lebanese, Syrian and Israeli borders meet.

The Shebaa Farms were first occupied by Israel in the wake of the 1967 War, also known as the Six Day War.

On Saturday, the UN said at least 600 Lebanese have been killed and over 3,220 injured in the conflict so far while nearly 800,000 have been displaced.

Siniora said: “Israel cannot win this war. Yes, it can kill; but it cannot win the war.”

His comments came a day after two Hezbollah ministers agreed to his seven-point package delivered Wednesday at an international conference in Rome.

The package calls for an immediate ceasefire to be followed by the release of Lebanese and Israeli prisoners, Israeli withdrawal behind the border and the return of Lebanese displaced by the fighting.

The two cabinet ministers representing Hezbollah voiced their reservations over some parts of the plan, such as the call for spreading Lebanese government authority over the entire country and strengthening an international force in south Lebanon.

But Siniora told Aljazeera.net that Lebanon can no longer afford to be heavily bombarded by the Israelis every few years. That’s why, he insisted, the country should get to a situation where the Lebanese authorities are the only body that could hold weapons.

Disarming Hezbollah

So far, the council for development and reconstruction has estimated Lebanon’s losses due to the destruction of infrastructure in this war alone to be over US$2billion.

However, the prime minister said that confining arms to the Lebanese army would have to be done only after Israel pulls out from the Shebaa Farms.

Siniora and Condoleezza Rice in Rome on 26 July

He said: “Hezbollah has expressed many times that it has the following objectives: liberating Lebanese occupied land, getting maps of all landmines planted in southern Lebanon during the Israeli occupation, and securing the release of our detainees who are held in Israeli jails.”

He further said that those who want Hezbollah to disarm they should work on removing the causes that are enabling the Shia group to keep its weapons rather than exerting pressure on it.

“There are reasons why Hezbollah’s military wing exists. If we take them away, there will be no reason for it to continue.”

Establishing security

Siniora said: “If Israel does not want to withdraw from Shebaa, it means it does not want to establish stability in the region. Who is really causing the violence here? It’s the warring party insisting on aggression by keeping other people’s lands.”

Siniora warned that the continuation of the Israeli wide-scale attack on Lebanon would only lead to more deaths and destruction that would fuel hatred.

The premier refrained from criticising George Bush, the US president, and Tony Blair, the British prime minister, for failing to call for an immediate truce following their meeting Friday to discuss the Middle East crisis. Asked if they have let him down, he said: “I don’t like to use the word disappointment.”

Aljazeera
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MSF: Aid corridors ‘an illusion’

30 July, 2006 — Ann

Aid groups say they cannot get supplies to isolated areas

 
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Friday 28 July — An international medical charity has said that Israel’s promised humanitarian aid corridors in south Lebanon are an illusion and that rockets have landed close to its teams two days in a row.

“It’s a kind of humanitarian alibi because in effect there is no real humanitarian access in the south,” said Christopher Stokes of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) or Doctors Without Borders.

“The international community is deluding itself, if it believes there is.”

Aid convoy hit

On Friday, suspected Israeli shells fell near an aid convoy in south Lebanon, wounding at least three people, witnesses told Aljazeera.

They said the convoy, organised by Lebanese civil defence workers, was returning from the village of Rmeish to the port city of Tyre after evacuating dozens of civilians.

One vehicle was damaged and three civilians were wounded. Some foreign and local journalists were in the convoy.

MSF praised the courage of Lebanese relief workers and medical staff, saying they were the ones doing most of the humanitarian work in the area.

“We have had contacts [with the Israeli army]. They have not been very productive, in terms of having contacts for security guarantees and we not been given any encouragement that we would have the guarantees to work in the south,” Stokes said.

Stokes made his remarks as the International Committee for the Red Cross, announced it was increasing its appeal for aid to Lebanese affected by the fighting to $81 million.

Unable to move supplies

Robin Lodge, of the World Food Programme (WFP) said the organisation had been unable to move supplies trucked to Tyre beyond to villages in the south.

Lebanese civilians continue to be|
injured by Israeli air raids

He said the best they could do at the moment was inform the warring parties of where and when they wanted to deliver aid.

“But for security reasons we are not able to get the areas south of Tyre,” he said. “We are keenly aware of the needs.”

The UN estimates there are up to 800,000 people in Lebanon displaced by the fighting and bombing.

It said there are nearly 600 schools being used as shelters, with between 100 and 1,200 people in each school.

The Lebanese authorities say up to 600 civilians have been killed during the 17-day Israeli onslaught.

UN withdraws observers

Meanwhile, the UN said its peacekeeping mission in south Lebanon had withdrawn eight unarmed observers from two observations posts along the border with Israel.

The move brought to four the number of unoccupied UN bases in the area, out of a total of more than 40 outposts.

UN observers had been pulled out of a base at Marun al-Ras five days earlier after an Italian peacekeeper was seriously wounded by Hezbollah small arms fire.

A second base was left unmanned after it was destroyed by an Israeli air strike on Tuesday that killed all four observers on duty there.

The four were part of the UN Truce Supervision Organisation, a unit of about 155 observers under the command of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL, which has about 1,990 troops in the area.

Aljazeera + Agencies

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There is an alternative to this unnecessary war By Adrian Hamilton

29 July, 2006 — Ann

Eisenhower ended the Suez war in 1956, and America could do it now

By Adrian Hamilton 27/07/06 The Independent and reproduced here

Parallels with the past never really work. Historical events are too specific to give themselves easily to analogy. But the coincidence of the 50th anniversary of the Suez crisis (Nasser nationalised the canal on 26 July 1956) and the latest outbreak of war holds some terrible lessons not so much in what is the same as in how much has changed over the past half-century.

The most obvious difference is in the extent to which the US has moved from an arms-length relationship with Israel under President Eisenhower, who threatened to withdraw all aid to Tel Aviv, and even get it expelled from the UN if it didn’t withdraw its invading troops from Egypt, to President Bush, who has openly supported Israeli assault on Lebanon and refused to back calls for a ceasefire.

There is, too, as Douglas Hurd pointed out yesterday, a world of difference between the way the international community under the UN cohered around a peaceful settlement in 1957 and the position today, when UN efforts, as we can see from the discussions in Rome, hardly count.

But the greatest, and most dispiriting, difference between then and now lies in the reaction to war itself. In his address to the nation immediately after the British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt, Eisenhower – who, after all, had come to fame and position through war – utterly condemned the resort to violence. “In all the recent troubles in the Middle East,” he said. “there have indeed been injustices suffered by all nations involved. But I do not believe that another instrument of injustice, war, is the remedy for these wrongs.”

Richard Nixon later purportedly said that Eisenhower lived to regret condemning the allied invasion, but there is absolutely no evidence for this other than Nixon’s word, and even this is dubious. Indeed, Eisenhower in his valedictory address on leaving office in 1961, warning of the power of the “military-industrial complex”, re-emphasised his view with even greater vigour.

Now it seems to be taken for granted that war, the most terrible act that man can inflict on this planet, is the first recourse rather than the last, as if there was no alternative.

But there is an alternative. Instead of invading Iraq three years ago, we could have waited until the final report of the inspectors. And if the objective was regime change, then would it have really been impossible to have bribed, seduced or pressured such a change at a fraction of the $200bn that has been spent so far? Or could we not have ended Iraq’s isolation and open it up to the kind of influences that brought down the Berlin Wall? It wasn’t because there were no alternatives that we went to war. It was just that Bush, Blair and their supporters in the press never considered them.

And the same now with the Lebanese war. If the objective of the Israelis was really the emasculation of the Hizbollah and a secure border, then the incursion into Israeli territory to seize hostages was the perfect opportunity for a diplomatic squeeze. Given Hizbollah’s strained relations with the Lebanese government, a UN resolution in place and an Arab world nervous of Iran and the Shia, it was the perfect occasion to rally the international community behind a concrete move to disarm Hizbollah and put in an international force to patrol the border – solutions which are likely, after all, to form the basis of any settlement now.

Instead Israel chose a course which has undermined the Lebanese government, made Hizbollah into heroic freedom fighters, further radicalise Arab politics and put the US firmly into the role of friend-of-Israel and enemy-of-the-Islamic world. On all the evidence so far, the Israeli cabinet never considered any other option than war, with an astonishing 90 per cent of support from a population not one of whom raised the question “Should we be doing this?” At least Suez saw a substantial questioning in the UK.

So, too, with the situation as it has developed to date. There is a viable alternative to letting the war go on until Israel feels it has done its worst, and that is to call an immediate ceasefire. All this talk from Condoleezza Rice, that you cannot call a halt to fighting until an overarching peace can be envisaged, is just specious nonsense – obscene, in fact, when you consider the loss of life and the destruction of Lebanon it entails.

Of course, you can call a halt to the fighting before talking. That is how such wars have ended through the ages. Eisenhower did it in 1956, and America could do it now with the same threats that Eisenhower employed. If Bush, with Blair in support, prefers not rein in Israel, it isn’t because he doesn’t see the means. It’s because he doesn’t want to. The question the public should be asking is “why not?”. – a.hamilton@independent.co.uk

Posted in Activism, Empire, War and Terror, History, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, Palestine Peace, USA. Leave a Comment »
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