Month: August 2006

JERUSALEM – Israeli commandos snatching Hezbollah operatives deep inside Lebanon. Israeli soldiers battling Hezbollah fighters in villages along the Lebanese-Israel border. Thousands of troops streaming into south Lebanon. Hezbollah rockets again raining down by the dozens on towns in northern Israel. Fighter planes renewing their bombardment of targets inside Lebanon. Just over two days ago, … Continue reading “Olmert’s War Easier to Start Than Stop”

Entering the fourth week of war between Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia and Israel, the George W. Bush administration’s ambitions to transform the Arab Middle East into a pro-Western, more democratic region are fading fast. Not only is Washington’s thus-far staunch support for Israel losing Arab "hearts and minds" at an astonishing pace, but the "moderate" governments … Continue reading “US Watches Dreams of Transformation Dissolve”

In the 1920s, H. L. Mencken was considered a man of the Left, due to his opposition to prohibition and the cultural know-nothingism of what he mockingly called "the booboisie." By the 1930s, however – although his views had changed not one whit – he was being derided as a right-wing extremist by the New … Continue reading “War: The Great Clarifier”

Here are some interesting points raised this week by a leading commentator and published in a respected daily newspaper: "The Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert embeds his soldiers in Israeli communities, next to schools, beside hospitals, close to welfare centers, ensuring that any Israeli target is also a civilian target. This is the practice the … Continue reading “Winning the Propaganda War”

The day after the war will be the Day of the Long Knives. Everybody will blame everybody else. The politicians will blame each other. The generals will blame each other. The politicians will blame the generals. And, most of all, the generals will blame the politicians. Always, in every country and after every war, when … Continue reading “The Day After the War”

Israel’s war against Lebanon is about reestablishing its conventional deterrence. That is the ultimate goal, even though a frequently stated purpose of that war is to disarm Hezbollah as a fighting force in Lebanon, or even to neutralize it. The most telling aspect of Israel’s confrontation with Hezbollah is that Hezbollah provoked the Jewish state … Continue reading “Israel’s Bid to Reestablish Deterrence Is Failing”

On the April day in 2003 when American troops first pushed into Baghdad, historian Marilyn Young noted a strange phenomenon. In a single rush, the Vietnam War vocabulary had returned to our media. She promptly dubbed Iraq, “Vietnam on crack cocaine.” It’s true that, for a while, the administration played an eerie opposites game, spending … Continue reading “Flunking Counterinsurgency 101”

Last Wednesday at the Rome Summit, Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora reportedly asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, "Are we children of a lesser God? Is an Israeli teardrop worth more than a drop of Lebanese blood?" If America’s callous indifference to his repeated requests for a cease-fire were not enough, Siniora received another answer … Continue reading “Children of a Lesser God”

The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 Ron Suskind Simon & Schuster, 2006 366 pp. When George W. Bush came to Washington, a lot of Republicans talked about how the “adults” had taken over American foreign policy. For a time it looked like the claim might be true. After … Continue reading “Readings in the Age of Empire”

In systematically failing to distinguish between Hezbollah fighters and civilian population in its three-and-a-half-week-old military campaign in Lebanon, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have committed war crimes, according to a report released by Human Rights Watch Wednesday. The 50-page report, "Fatal Strikes: Israel’s Indiscriminate Attacks Against Civilians in Lebanon," detailed nearly two dozen cases of … Continue reading “Rights Group Accuses Israel of War Crimes”