Views: 19
A leaderless US is allowing Israel to turn Lebanon into another Gaza
Israeli air strikes have closed the Beirut-Damascus road, which is the most important link between Lebanon and the outside world. At the same time, bombing close to Beirut International Airport threatens to shut that as well. In a swathe of southern Lebanon, Israel has ordered people to flee north to Beirut, though the capital is coming under unrelenting air attack.
The Israeli invasion is already turning Lebanon into Gaza II, with a merciless air bombardment pounding built-up areas into rubble. The Israeli excuse is that Hamas and Hezbollah are being targeted by “precision strikes”.
This strategy does not come as a surprise since the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, spelled it out on a visit to the Israel/Lebanon border last December. He said: “If Hezbollah chooses to start an all-out war, then with its own hands it will turn Beirut and southern Lebanon, not far from here, into Gaza and Khan Yunis.
All out war
In the event, it was Israel that started the all-out war when it invaded Lebanon on 1 October. Its evident goal is to crush Hezbollah, something that the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) has failed to accomplish over the past year against Hamas in Gaza, a much weaker military organisation.
The extent of this failure is unintentionally admitted by the IDF, since it continues to justify the appalling civilian loss of life it inflicts by claiming that Hamas is still present everywhere in Gaza and must be eliminated. In the Palestinian city of Khan Yunis in southern Gaza, for instance – the place identified by Netanyahu 10 months ago as an example of the kind of punishment that might be meted out to Beirut and south Lebanon – Israeli air strikes and a tank-led ground operation killed at least 51 people on Tuesday, the Palestinian health ministry said. The IDF explained that Hamas members had “command and control centres” inside the Muscat, Rimal, Bureij and Nuseirat girls’ schools.
Similar devastation is now being visited on the Lebanese as the Israeli operation there expands northwards with the same complete disregard for civilian casualties as in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. In the latter, home to three million Palestinians, 18 people sitting in a café in a refugee camp in the city of Tulkarm were killed by an Israeli air strike on Thursday. The IDF claimed that it had killed the local head of Hamas as well as “other significant terrorists”.
A dangerous fantasy
In real life, the Israeli strategy of achieving a decisive victory by decapitating Hamas and Hezbollah through killing their leaders and destroying “command and control centres” is a dangerous fantasy. It is also one with the grimmest of consequences for the Middle East and the world. Small organisations may be crippled by the loss of key leaders and larger ones temporarily degraded, but so long as they retain a hard core of popular support, they will survive.
From the IRA in West Belfast in the 70s to the Taliban in the Hindu Kush in the 2010s, a military occupation which inflicts collective punishment on whole communities is the best recruiting sergeant for a guerrilla movement. In Afghanistan, I never found the Taliban that popular before they took power, but I was deeply impressed by the detestation with which the Afghan government was regarded by almost everybody I met.
Clearly, the Israeli and American governments do not see it that way. The US, which a week ago was calling for a ceasefire in Lebanon, is now saying that a limited invasion is justified. This is only the latest repeat of an extraordinary pattern established over the past year, whereby Washington calls on Israel to show restraint, Israel ignores the plea and escalates. The US then retrospectively says that Israel has done the right thing and the supply of US arms is unimpeded. Unsurprisingly, many observers conclude that Joe Biden’s pathetically ineffectual calls for a ceasefire are merely a smokescreen so that the US can pretend publicly to be seeking to end to these wars, while in practice approving and supporting them.
Cynical realpolitik
There certainly are powerful people in Washington who agree with this cynical realpolitik. President Barack Obama derided what he called “the Washington playbook”, by which he meant the view of much of the US foreign policy establishment that most problems can be dealt with by military force. It might also be that Biden needs to look as if he is trying to make peace in order to keep on board anti-war voters and Democratic Party activists on election day next month.
Yet this argument is not entirely convincing. Israel engaging in three wars is not really in American interests, even if they are against US enemies, since they inevitably suck the US into wars not so different from those in Iraq and Afghanistan 20 years ago. Moreover, these wars will benefit Donald Trump in the election and demolish Biden’s claim to have restored America’s reputation as the guarantor of world peace and security.
Damagingly, US voters will be seeing the stumbling figure of Biden on their screens presiding feebly over an escalating crisis, which is largely of his own making. What the Democrats had wanted was for voters to forget all about Biden, like some mad uncle locked in the attic, and focus instead on Kamala Harris.
Biden sounds sane enough when he sticks to his teleprompter, but when he rambles over to talk to reporters the results are spectacularly explosive. Asked on Thursday about Israel attacking Iranian oil facilities, Biden said: “We’re discussing that. I think that would be a little… anyway” – breaking off mid-sentence. This sent the price of oil up 5 per cent.
None of the commentators discussing the problems of Hamas and Hezbollah will have in replacing their assassinated leaders have reflected on the fact that the US is also effectively leaderless.
If Israel does stop Iranian oil exports or destroy its oil refineries, then Iran will most likely act against the 30 per cent of the world’s oil trade that flows from the Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz. A strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities might or might not succeed in destroying essential equipment, but it would certainly propel Iran towards making a nuclear device.
A war between Iran and Israel backed by the US might not change the regime in Tehran, but it could easily produce a new regime in Washington – headed by Donald Trump.
Further Thoughts
All wars are information wars – none more so than the conflicts raging in Gaza and Lebanon, with sideshows in Syria and Yemen. Pundits reflect despairingly that truth is “the first casualty of the war”, but this overused saying is a little misleading.
For a start, the truth does not necessarily fare too well in peacetime, yet it is correct to assume that in wartime all combatants consider it legitimate to tell any lie useful to their side. They will be restrained, if they are wise, only by the knowledge that if they spew out too many lies, claiming false victories and denying demonstrable defeats, that they will swiftly destroy their own credibility.
The melodrama and fireworks of war, exploding shells and bombs illuminating the night sky, are gripping but deceptive. In Afghanistan in 2001, I watched pillars of fire rise over the Taliban positions as cruise missiles exploded, but when I examined the trenches later it was clear that the Taliban had abandoned them several days earlier. In Libya, the rebel fighters who were supposed to be bringing democracy and liberty to the country, were, on closer inspection, a rag-bag of gunmen paid by the Gulf states. It was depressingly obvious that, once in power, they would tear Libya apart, which is exactly what they did.
Israel has always put great efforts into the information wars in previous conflicts, but in one significant respect the work of the war propagandist has become more difficult. The universal availability of phone cameras means that it is no longer possible to pretend that airstrikes and artillery fire are hitting only military targets and that those that die are all “terrorists”, as happened in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. These days pictures of the bleeding broken bodies of children instantly expose these lies for what they are.
Beneath the Radar
I have always been interested in how countries cultivate amnesia over national defeats. But it was only this week that I realised that the anniversary of what was undoubtedly the most important and decisive battle in English history – the battle of Hastings fought on 14 October 1066 – was almost upon us.
It invariably passes unnoticed, yet the victory of the Norman-French army of William, Duke of Normandy, over an Anglo-Saxon army under King Harold, shaped the course of English history more than any other event.
Nations mostly dislike remembering defeats (unless they can be portrayed as victories such as Dunkirk or somehow glorious like Gallipoli), but it does give a skewed view of history. I was taught about the battles of Crecy and Agincourt at school and used to wonder why we had still managed to lose the Hundred Years War.
The great majority of English people, insofar as they think about Hastings at all, see its outcome as a defeat for our side. In the UK there is a curious tradition of producing excellent reports on our military failures – such as the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war – but they are published so long after the event that few read them, and governments never learn from them.
It is striking but scarcely unexpected that two of the worst scandals to erupt in the UK this year – the jailing of hundreds of innocent postmasters and sexual assaults on his staff by the late Mohammed al-Fayed, owner of Harrods – should have been exposed long ago with copious details by Private Eye in 1998. Yet this is seldom mentioned by the main news outlets who would prefer the public to forget how tardy they were in following up these stories about powerful and litigious individuals and institutions.
Private Eye Issue 951 from 29 May 1998 carried a report describing Fayed’s disgusting alleged activities. It relates how “Fayed also takes his pick of the young management trainees at Harrods. One 17-year-old school leaver who began a two-year training course at the store, was quickly poached by Fayed for his private office.”
As with many of his victims, she was sent to a Harley Street doctor “to see if you’re clean”. She was then summoned to Fayed’s Park Lane flat where she found him wearing a dressing gown. “He locked the door, offered her champagne, put his hand on her thigh…” Almost all of what is being revealed today about Fayed was not only known about, but in print a quarter of a century before he died in 2023.
INEWS