To Our Countries - لبلادي

لبلادي عمل من إعداد وإنتاج وتنفيذ مجموعة شباب يقيمون في السويد وهم من سوريا و العراق و لبنان و فلسطين. على أمل السلام

To Our Countries is a project produced by a group of youths who live in Sweden and are originally from Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine.

Iraq’s Iranian Ruler: General Qasem Soleimani

"He is the most powerful man in Iraq without question, Nothing gets done without him."

[Iraq's former national security minister, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, told the newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat]

Soleimani is in charge of Iran's foreign policy in the following nations: Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. He is the commander of the "Quds Force" which are part of Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps.

He has deployed 3 battalions of Quds Force to Iraq. Each battalion is 500 men and above.

Soleimani always resorts to the military option, instead of a peaceful political resolution to solve any problem.

Which ever nation he is interferes in, destabilization, death, destruction and terror follows. 

Israeli War Crimes Shows How The West Lost Respect For International Law

One Norwegian officer left Lebanon, with a typed report on torture, taped to his chest

Odd Karsten Tweit was always a very obsessional chap. Every story he covered, he always wanted to dig deeper, study further, hear one more tale of horror, one more joke, one more historical fact. We all covered the story of Israel’s wars in Lebanon, in 1978, in 1982, in 1996, in 2006. Over the years, I covered the story of Israel’s torturers in Khiam jail in southern Lebanon, the massive Ansar prison camp in 1982, the frightful interrogation of Lebanese and Palestinian inmates.

But Karsten has put together a book of immense research which will remain the volume on Israel’s shame in Lebanon and its historical defeat. That’s the title of the English edition – Goodbye Lebanon: Israel’s First Defeat. His detailed questioning of torture victims – hanged by their arms, electrocuted, in one case apparently raped and in another mistreated in an Israeli hospital – have an unstoppable power to convince. Not only did he cover the events on the ground in southern Lebanon, he interviewed Israeli veterans in Israel itself.

He reported constantly on Norwegian television and radio; he wanted to learn so much of the vicious Israeli-Hezbollah guerrilla war that he actually took time off to serve in the Norwegian UN battalion n southern Lebanon, wearing the blue beret. Now that is obsession for you.

It is a terrible tale, stories which upset many of the UN peacekeepers, especially military doctors, as evidence mounted of the Israeli brutality on prisoners in Lebanon and inside Israel itself. One Norwegian officer even left Lebanon via Tel Aviv with a typed report on torture taped to his chest for the eyes of a Norwegian government minister.

Prisoners at Ansar were grossly mistreated. Outside the walls of Khiam prison, I visited a post of UN unarmed truth supervisors who told me they could hear the screams of tortured men and women at night. Karsten did the same. Israeli interrogators were present, Karsten says. Israel denied responsibility, saying Khiam was under the control of their local Lebanese militia. The UN did not believe it.

There are also stories of great courage. Two out of the four men who managed to escape from Khiam were hunted through the night and only reached Beirut with the secret help of UN soldiers. They had been inspired by Allied escapes from prison camps in the Second World War. “The prisoners in Stalag III had managed to get hold of equipment by bribing a German guard,” Karsten writes. “In Khiam, such an attempt would likely have meant more torture and confinement in the ‘chicken cage’, the 90-cubic-centimetre enclosure used for extra-severe punishment.”

It was only thanks to an Israeli lawyer that Lebanese prisoners held in Israel – illegally under international law – managed to have their cases heard. Many were held for years without trial, as they were in Khiam, naked during interrogations, refused visits from the International Red Cross, wounds untended or untreated for days.

And I wondered, reading this shameful narrative, why we were so surprised when we found that the American military were torturing and killing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. Karsten says at one point that Israeli soldiers in the occupation zone in southern Lebanon – the Israelis called it a ‘security zone’, a description that many newspapers gutlessly repeated – were joint Israeli-American nationals. Did any of them also serve in the American army in Iraq?

The mass prison camp at Ansar sounds like a hot version of Guantanamo. And when the US repeatedly vetoed UN Security Council resolutions condemning Israel’s treatment of Lebanese civilians, I wonder whether somehow that’s when American governments lost their respect for international law – as they showed in their treatment of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan (or the Iraqi invasion itself).

There are painful details of the torment of Western hostages in Lebanon and the merciless judgements bestowed on informers by Hezbollah. There are not many good guys in Karsten’s reporting. In the end, it turned out that the prisoners of the Israelis were hostages too – the Israelis called them “bargaining chips”, another phrase the press used freely – and they were freed to secure the release of Israeli prisoners or their bodies.

Khiam is long gone. The war in Lebanon is now outclassed by the bloodbath in Syria. Karsten’s work is a reminder that cruelty has no geographic boundaries. How much more is there to learn about the horrors of Lebanon? Or Afghanistan? Or Iraq? Or Syria?

By Robert Fisk

The Death Of The Modern Middle East

Musrtaza Hussain submits the following alanysis:

As Syria continues its descent into an anarchic civil war and Iraq is increasingly ravaged by sectarian infighting, a terrifying vision of the future of the Middle East is increasingly coming into view. In his 2008 book "Israel and the Clash of Civilizations", the veteran British journalist, Jonathan Cook, cites a 1982 policy paper by former Israeli foreign ministry official Oded Yinon which seems to presciently forecast the monumental events gripping the region today:

"The total disintegration of Lebanon into five regional localized governments is the precedent for the entire Arab world… Iraq can be divided on regional and sectarian lines just like Syria in the Ottoman era. There will be three states in the three major cities."

The Sykes-Picot Agreement - which divided the Ottoman Empire after World War I and created the Middle East as we know it - is today violently breaking apart in front of the eyes of the world. The countries of Syria and Iraq; formerly unified Arab states formed after the defeat of their former Ottoman rulers, exist today only in name. In their place what appears most likely to come into existence - after the bloodshed subsides - are small, ethnically and religiously homogenous statelets: weak and easily manipulated, where their progenitors at their peaks were robustly independent powers.

Such states, divided upon sectarian lines, would be politically pliable, isolated and enfeebled, and thus utterly incapable of offering a meaningful defence against foreign interventionism in the region. Given the implications for the Middle East, where overt foreign aggression has been a consistent theme for decades, there is reason to believe that this state of affairs has been consciously engineered.

The End Of Iraq

Away from the focus of major news media - numbed as it has become to stories of unconscionable Iraqi suffering - Iraq this past April recorded its deadliest month in five years, with over 700 killed in sectarian violence throughout the country. Describing the aftermath of a deadly car bombing in his neighbourhood, school teacher Ibrahim Ali gave voice to the dread and foreboding felt by many Iraqis for their country:

"We asked the students to remain inside the classrooms because we were concerned about their safety… [they] were panicking and some of them started to cry…. We have been expecting this violence against Shiites due to the rising sectarian tension in the country."

The unacknowledged truth behind the past decade of bloodletting in Iraq is that the country itself effectively ceased to exist after the 2003 US invasion. The northern province of Iraqi Kurdistan is today anindependent country in all but name and is increasingly moving towards formal recognition of this fact - while Sunni and Shia Iraqis have come to see themselves more as distinct entities than as part of a cohesive nation. Iraqi Sunnis, a once-empowered minority, have taken up arms in recent months against the Shia-dominated government of Nouri al-Maliki and have staked their terms in a manner which acknowledges the irredeemable nature of a continued Iraqi state. In the words of Sunni cleric Mohammad Taha at a rally in Samarra:

"Al-Maliki has brought the country to the abyss... this leaves us with two options: Either civil war or the formation of our own autonomous region."

There is evidence to suggest that this state of affairs was not an unintended consequence of the 2003 invasion. The American architects of the Iraq War - while couching their justifications for war in the rhetoric of liberation - had for years previously openly acknowledged and predicted that an invasion would result in the death of Iraq as a cohesive state. In a follow-up to their 1996 policy paper "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" - a report published by leading neoconservative intellectuals, including Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, which advocated a radical reshaping of the Middle East using American military power - the report's authors acknowledged the inevitability of Iraq's demise post-invasion. 

Predicting that after violently deposing the country's government: "[Iraq]… would be ripped apart by the politics of warlords, thieves, clans, sects and key families" - the same individuals would nonetheless become the leading advocates of just such an invasion. The post-invasion decisions by the occupying authority to dissolve the army, patronise sectarian militias anddeath squads and destroy Iraq's civilian infrastructure viewed in this light are far more comprehensible. The chaos which has enveloped the country since 2003 has not been an unintended consequence, but rather the one which was predicted years earlier by the war's architects and then perfectly executed. Today the partition of Iraq is mapped out by American think-tanks seeking put a final end to that country and divide it into its contingent ethnic and religious parts.

In this light it is worth contrasting the sectarian powder-keg Iraq is described as today with Iraqi attitudes during the early days of the American invasion. A 2004 New York Times article entitled "Sunni-Shiite Cooperation Grows, Worrying US Officials" described the broad-based support provided by Shia Iraqis to their Sunni co-citizens under siege by American forces in the country. In the words of one Iraqi regarding the supposed religious bifurcation in the country:

"These [sectarianisms] were artificial distinctions. The people in Fallujah are starving. They are Iraqis and they need our help."

The need to counter and undermine such episodes of inter-religious national unity in order to achieve the objectives of the invasion was recognised early by US military officials. As stated by Lt General Ricardo Sanchez:

"The danger is we believe there is a linkage that may be occurring at the very lowest levels between the Sunni and Shia… we have to work very hard to ensure that it remains at the tactical level."

The handiwork of such efforts is evident today in the horrific charnel house into which the country has descended today. Where Iraqis once saw themselves as citizens of a contiguous nation, the unconscionable events of the past decade have given primacy to religious identity over all else. Iraq's once vibrant and influential Christian community has been nearly driven to extinction, while Sunnis and Shias are locked in a seemingly intractable sectarian conflict which appears ready to rip the country into its final pieces. In the words of one Iraqi man, who initially welcomed the invasion with its promises of liberation only to watch in horror as his own family was torn apart by American bombs and bullets:

"I wish the Americans had never come. They ruined our country. They planted divisions… They made us cry for the days of Saddam Hussein."

The Dissolution Of Syria

When Syrians, swept up in the once-transcendent spirit of the Arab Spring uprisings, undertook their own revolution against the corrupt, myopic regime of Bashar al-Assad, few had any idea it would lead to the dystopian reality of massacres and foreign predations the country faces today. The revolution - a legitimate, democratic uprising against a despotic government - provided a prize opportunity for the country's neighbours to violently exploit Syrian unrest to further their own venal interests.

The tragic result of this situation is the vicious proxy war playing out today in the streets of Aleppo, Homs, Deir ez-Zor and countless other cities and towns throughout the country. A once-proud nation - long recognised as the cultural and historical jewel of the Levant - has been reduced to a grim battlefield between the West and its Gulf allies on one hand and the Syrian government and its allies in Iran, Russia and Hezbollah on the other. The Israeli airstrikes perpetrated with impunity onto Damascus this past week are yet another illustrative example of the depths of turmoil to which Syria has sunk.

As analysts openly discuss the "Somaliasation" of Syria and growing factions within the country call for military intervention to break the state up into small ethnic and religious enclaves - literally, "into pieces" - the prospect of a united Syria grows more remote by the day. Again, just as in Iraq, the benefactors of Syria's dismemberment will be the external actors which seek hegemony in the region and have never hidden their desire to see the country collapse.

As early as 2011, a particularly frank prescription for the future of Syria was given by Lawrence Solomon, who called for a radical redrawing of the country's borders to facilitate Western interests:

"There is a better end game… Syria's dismemberment into constituent parts. US and NATO countries… should confine Alawites to a state in the central Western part of the country where they are predominant… the West has no cause to favour appeasement… over the many gains to be had through a dismemberment of Syria."

As risible as Solomon's suggestions seemed at the time, the unfathomable reality is that today just such a situation is occurring - as analysts dispassionately discuss the possibility of an independent Alawite state in Lattakia and the fragmenting of the rest of the country into separate portions for Kurds, 

Sunnis, Shias, and the many other ethnic and religious groups which once made up the diverse tapestry of modern Syria.

In the background of this all echoes the policy plan for Syria illustrated in "A Clean Break", whose influential authors counselled open confrontation with Syrian interests throughout the region and explicitly called for menacing the country's territorial integrity itself. 

Oded Yinon's prescription for dissolving Syria and Iraq - which at one time appeared arrogantly grandiose - today seems almost inevitable. The legitimate democratic aspirations of the Syrian people have been overtly hijacked by a foreign agenda which long predated their own revolution -and which increasingly looks ready to dissolve the country they sought to liberate.

Towards A New Balance Of Power

In a 2007 piece for The New Yorker, the Pulitzer-Prize winning American investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, reported on what White House insiders called "the Redirection" of US policy in the region. Seeking to reassert influence in the aftermath of the disastrous invasion of Iraq, the US deliberately became party to the fomentation of sectarian conflict throughout the Middle East.

In words that today seem utterly prescient, Hersh wrote:

"The US has taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to al-Qaeda."

The extremist groups fighting today in Syria - many of whom openly state their allegiance to al-Qaeda and who have terrorised not just the Syrian government, but also the secular activists who were the progenitors of the revolution itself - are the fruit of this explicitly sectarian policy.

Furthermore, as Hersh noted this policy has: "brought Saudi Arabia and Israel into a new strategic embrace", a claim widely viewed as impossible at the time but which over the intervening years has become increasingly acknowledged by both sides. Indeed, official recognition of this new alliance appears to be increasingly imminent, as reports emerged this week of a US-brokered defence pact between Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the UAE to guarantee mutual interests in the region.

These changes represent no less than a sea change in Middle Eastern politics, as the old order experiences its final violent convulsions and makes way for a new Western-backed alliance to exert its hegemony over the region. In this new environment, once-cherished concepts of self-determination and independence will be suffocated under the financial, political and military might of an unprecedented new axis of control exerted from the centers of power in Washington, Tel Aviv and Riyadh.

The nations of Syria and Iraq today are little more than political fictions, crushed underfoot by foreign military and political intervention and devoured from the inside by politically-fomented sectarian hatreds. The same terrifying dynamic increasingly threatens to envelop Lebanon as well, as the former Arab states continue their fragmentation into innumerable weak and ethnically-homogenous political enclaves.

For the people of the region, the scenes playing out on the streets around them and being broadcast to the world at large represent nothing less than the end of Sykes-Picot borders and the dissolution of the Middle East as they once knew it. As war continues to spread from the borders of Iraq and Syria and into the countries beyond, the endgame for the regions upheaval - when it finally, mercifully, comes - looks increasingly as though it will entail the establishment of many of the "Blood Borders" which Oded Yinon and his ideological peers have long sought to create.

The Next War: Destination “Lebanon”

By Rev. Richard Skaff,

As in every crime scene we need to first assess who the instigators might be, and who would benefit from these acts of violence. Should we just gather the usual suspects and bury the truth? Or should we expand our horizon and explore other possible suspects.

Ironically and for decades, most of the sudden acts of violence in Lebanon have been committed by unknown hands and have gone unclaimed, leaving room for speculation and accusations, which is a convenient way to lay the blame on a specific person, group, party, sect, or country, resulting in the creation of a mistrustful and paranoid atmosphere that reinforces divisiveness.

It is no secret that Lebanon’s relationship with Syria has been toxic for many years despite the proximity between the two countries and the political declarations by their politicians who pronounce them as two closely-knitted nations.

Syria has been engulfed for the past year in an alleged civil unrest aiming at regime change just like in Egypt, Iraq, Libya and other neighboring Arab Countries under the guise of a revolutionary Arab spring financed by Western and Saudi money. These sham revolutions have been instigated, fueled, and staged by western powers and their proxies in the Middle East like the Israelis and the Saudis.

The Western intelligence agencies in Syria as in Libya, Egypt, and Iraq have unleashed once again their mercenaries known otherwise as the Mujahedeen or Al Quaeda fighters who were once trained and financed by the Central Intelligence Agency, Mossad, and other Western Intelligence apparatus to fight Soviet Troops during the Soviet-Afghani war in the 1980s. These mercenaries have been moved from one hot spot to another to fuel and destabilize countries that are not fully aligned with US policies. The destabilization process usually begins with instigation, bribes to local politicians and peasants to create a fertile breeding ground for recruiting criminals who become well-paid resistance fighters. Subsequently, the undesirable regimes will buckle and their leaders are dethroned and assassinated. Meanwhile the US media is grooming and preparing the American public to accept and support another low intensity conflict in a far region of the earth. By the time they are done the public is fearful and fully behind their president to take down another evildoer that threatens American interest and sovereignty. Remember that you have to give a dog a bad name before you kill him. The media is always ready for this entertaining task that terrifies the proles and improves their ratings. You must also realize that people love pseudo-wars that are easily won, because they vicariously act out their instinctual aggression through these military exercises called wars by our politicians and the media.

Mr. Obama doesn’t need another mini-war or a terror attack to win this coming election despite the multimillion dollar theatrics of a pseudo-democracy. His inept opponent was picked by the elite to ensure an easy win, because Mr. Obama has continued his predecessor’s policies and completely fulfilled what is expected of him despite the caustic rhetoric that get the proles excited. Therefore, and after the election is over, Syria, the poor country with no significant resources that borders Israel, an old Soviet client, and a current Russian ally will be fully embroiled in deeper violence that will eventually obliterate its secular regime that was once supported by the U.S., which will result in a total disintegration of that country into small, fanatic, allegedly independent, and homogeneous principalities bickering with each other and under the indirect control of the Israeli Zionist regime. The Western plan for the Middle East coincides with Yinon’s vision to redraw the region and the new re-mapping has to go through Syria.

Lebanon and Iran will follow. Iran would be the toughest to divide because of its homogenous Shiite population, but the nuclear weapon card will be played to its fullest.

Lebanon’s alleged past “Civil War” was a financed prototype for balkanizing countries, and a prospective model for the entire region and the world. Unfortunately, Lebanon that was once called the Switzerland of the Mediterranean will never have peace and will continue to have bloodshed until “Hezbollah” “God’s party” is totally disarmed and destroyed in order to ensure the security of Israel and the re-division of that country. The Israeli intelligence has been extremely active in Lebanon for years in a continuous effort to destabilize it, or to create incidents of provocation that will justify an invasion of the country or an assassination of powerful Lebanese political figures.

Meanwhile, the great Colonial Western Powers will deem these financed and pre-planned conflicts in the Middle East as zealous, barbaric and uncivilized, which will give them high moral ground and the green light to justify and maintain their blood sucking strategy to impoverish these nations and send them back into the middle ages. Ironically, these western nations that claim sophistication and magnificence acquire their superpower through their innate and natural parasitic mechanism that allows them to forcibly or manipulatively attach themselves to any host country and suck the blood (oil, resources, gold, etc) out of it, then, slowly leave it to die. At the same time, these resource vampires arrogantly promulgate their new aristocracies on the graves of other nations, and proclaim grandeur and superiority by attributing it to their Christian love, morality, and democratic ideology.

Finally, Lebanon will continue to bleed as the whole Middle East will continue to hemorrhage until every drop of oil and resource are totally depleted, and then and only then, the Near East where the dawn of Western Civilization began will be left alone to quietly perish.

Via: "Global Research"

U.S. Planned To Take Out 7 Middle Eastern Countries:



1. Iraq
2. Syria
3. Lebanon
4. Libya
5. Somalia
6. Sudan
7. Iran

Israel's Deliberate Use Of Disproportional Force

By Belen Fernandez,

There has now been cross-border drone movement in the opposite direction, with Lebanon's Hezbollah confirming responsibility for the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) shot down earlier this month over Israel's Negev desert. According to Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, the drone was an Iranian model assembled in Lebanon and was called Ayoub after one of the organisation's martyrs.

Of course, Ayoub's flight resulted in nothing as nefarious as headless babies. Israeli officials speculated that the drone may have been dispatched to photograph the Dimona nuclear research centre, the euphemism for Israel's illicit nuclear arsenal. It also enabled Nasrallah to deliver one of his signature lengthy speeches about the capabilities of Hezbollah and the vulnerabilities of the enemy, and provided fodder for those in Israel preparing for the next war with Lebanon.

Qana remembers last summer's massacre (2007)

As the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reported in August of this year, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has warned Lebanon that any provocation by Hezbollah against the Jewish state will now merit retaliation against the nation as a whole. Given Israel's horrific track record with regard to distinguishing between civilians and combatants - and its habit of directly targeting civilian infrastructure - we might be forgiven for failing to discern how Netanyahu's warning constitutes an updated policy rather than a reiteration of business as usual.

Casualties of Israel's strategy in the last war with Lebanon in 2006 included major bridges and power plants, children obeying Israeli orders to evacuate their southern villages, and yet more residents of Qana - the victims of the second murderous "mistake" to have occurred in the town in just over a decade.

Various massacres of civilians in residential buildings also took place in the southern suburbs of Beirut - the Hezbollah stronghold known as Dahiya, vast swathes of which were flattened by Israel during the war - and established a useful precedent for future Israeli-Lebanese conflagrations. As Amos Harel noted in Ha'aretz this past summer:     

"For four years now, Israel is threatening to torch Lebanon should Hezbollah create a cross-border provocation. In October 2008, the Northern Command chief at the time, Gadi Eizenkot, presented what he called the 'Dahiya doctrine'.

In the next confrontation, Eizenkot said at the time, Israel will expand the destruction capability it showed when it bombed Dahiya...

'In every village from which shots were fired toward Israel, we will impose disproportional force and cause great damage and destruction. As far as we're concerned, these are military bases,' Eizenkot said in 2008".

Considering Israel's recent history in Lebanon, The Jerusalem Post's post-Ayoub editorial concerning the dangers posed by the "various... flying objects that have infiltrated our skies" functions as little more than an exercise in tragicomedy. Titled "The UAV lesson", the editorial declares Ayoub's trajectory "a major provocation and a blatant violation of Israel's sovereignty, even if the drone's mission was only to gather intelligence and/or test Israel's defences. Espionage is a form of aggression too"

.

... there is no question whatsoever about which party takes the cake for blatant violations of sovereignty. A notorious fan of espionage itself, Israel repeatedly breaks the sound barrier over Lebanon with its jets - an activity that would seem to qualify not only as sovereignty violation but also as a form of aggression aimed at terrorising the population.

As for more direct forms of terrorism, Israel's "flying objects" have killed, maimed, and dispossessed on a scale that no armed group in Lebanon has come close to replicating in Israel. In 2006, the UN General Assembly's Human Rights Council documented Israel's use of drones in Lebanon for purposes other than espionage, such as military bombardments of hospitals and farming communities.

Via: "Al-Jazeera"

Lebanon: Playing With Political Fire

Nearly all civilians were killed in Israel's horrific attack on July 21, 2006 when they destroyed buildings like these in the densely populated residential Haret Hreik neighborhood in the southern suburb of Beirut. The pretext for the aerial invasion was the military capture of two Israeli soldiers on the 12th of July 2006 inside Lebanon.


By Brenda Heard
Source: "Moqawama"
Tuesday, Jul 12, 2011
Courtesy Of "Axis Of Logic"

Sometimes the timing is flagrant, like the recent commotion in Greece. In the very hours of forbidding the passage¹ of the aid flotilla to Gaza, the financially strapped Greek government welcomed the approval of an €8.7 billion² aid payment from the European Union. With Israels' position as an EU-groupie, even the Associated Press³ couldn't resist smirking at Greece's underlying ‘incentive to cozy up to its rich Mediterranean neighbor'.

Political manoeuvring also thrives on more subtle timing, as for example in the case of the notorious indictments of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. Widely announced⁴ as imminent in December 2010, they somehow found themselves on the backburner when the Arab uprisings claimed every corner of Middle East news coverage. Some six months later, on the heels of the formation of a Lebanese government non-hostile to the targeted Hizbullah-in the very hours between finalising⁵ the government's policy statement and its being subject to⁶ a parliamentary vote of confidence-only then were the indictments set into motion⁷. Bored of battling the credibility of Arab protests, international media eagerly shifted to the new sensational headlines.

Particularly when it comes to the Zionist project, the Western Israeli Alliance has often banked on timing-on distraction and exploitation. Five years ago, for instance, Israeli forces repeated the pretext-invasions of 1978 and 1982. Five years ago, Israeli forces renewed their aggressive campaigns of 1978 and 1982. With the full backing of their Western allies, five years ago Israeli forces again attacked Lebanon.

The pretext for the lethal aggression was the military capture of two Israeli soldiers on the 12th of July 2006. But as the report by the AP Jerusalem Bureau Chief declared⁸ on the second day of bombardment, such a

"Crisis allows Israel to pursue strategic goals / Analysis: Kidnappings give Israel excuse to neutralize Hamas, Hizbullah."

This early assessment astutely foretold the post-war testimony of then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who would boldly concede his designs.

The political manoeuvring had been going on for years. Perhaps anxious to convince the Israeli Inquiry that the aggression had not been a knee-jerk reaction, Olmert testified⁹ before the Winograd Commission that his decision to launch a broad military operation was made as early as March 2006, four months before the soldiers' capture. Olmert stated that his predecessor, Ariel Sharon, had already been making preliminary plans, including a list of targets in Lebanon. Olmert further stated that he had held several meetings (in January, March, April, May and July 2006) on potential military action against Lebanon.

Olmert testified¹⁰ these meetings concluded that Israels' goal in a military operation would be the implementation of Security Council Resolution 1559¹¹, which they believed would eliminate Hizbullah's resistance capability. Olmert stated that he was informed in May 2006 by National Security Council head Giora Eiland and by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak that the Lebanese government would agree to implement Resolution 1559 in return for an Israeli withdrawal from Sheba Farms.*

Lebanon Massacre will Live in Infamy,by Ghali Hassan, Axis of Logic, July 24, 2006

With thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians held as prisoners in

Israel, detentions and negotiations for mutual release had been standard fare in the region-a reality Olmert alluded to in his testimony. Following the high profile capture of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit on 25 June 2006 (by Palestinian forces who wanted Palestinian women and children prisoners released by Israel in exchange for the safe return of Shalit), Olmert testified¹² that ‘he was certain there would be a similar attempt to kidnap soldiers on the Lebanese border. He ordered the IDF to prevent this'.

So the powerful Israeli military was meant to be on high alert. They were allegedly warned and ready. Yet on 12 July-a mere 17 days later-they somehow failed to prevent the capture that ever since has been labelled the justification for the war. A timely pretext it would seem.

Such a practical assessment of political strategy was in fact pronounced by the Winograd Commission when it concluded ¹³ the July War had been, after all, a ‘serious missed opportunity'. Israeli policy, it stated, had wavered between two main options:

"The first was a short, painful, strong and unexpected blow on Hizbullah, primarily through standoff fire-power. The second option was to bring about a significant change of the reality in the South of Lebanon with a large ground operation, including a temporary occupation of the South of Lebanon and 'cleaning' it of Hizbullah military infrastructure."

Despite the damage and the deaths they had inflicted, the Israeli forces had failed to meet their true objective, that of renewed occupation of South Lebanon.

The prompt accusation of Hizbullah's actions being the casus belli in July 2006 settled into a general public acceptance of blame both within and beyond Lebanon. Such is the magic of timed political manoeuvring. The public listened nervously, for example, as The New York Times cried out¹⁴the typical news:

"With two more soldiers captured today, Israel launched a major military offensive on a second front, sending armored forces into southern Lebanon in response to a brazen border raid by the militant group." [emphasis added]

By the time the Winograd Commission revealed its final report in January 2008, the international public had already well digested the message that Israel had had no choice but to attack Lebanon. The public then merely grimaced at the reminder of Israels' failure to destroy Hizbullah. The New York Times captured¹⁵ their plaintive reaction:

"‘When its 2006 war against Hizbullah ended after six weeks, Israel was aghast. An operation meant to cripple the Shiite militia and end its dominance of southern Lebanon had ended with the group if anything stronger."

The final Winograd report explained away any seeming weakness in Israel by faulting those political and military elites who had grown complacent in Israels' ‘position of social, political and military strength', whose passive belligerence had dulled their fighting edge. And so the international public seemed undisturbed that the Winograd Commission, in possession of Olmert's testimony of premeditation, acknowledged¹⁶ that Israel had in fact been orchestrating the situation:

"Overall, we regard the 2nd Lebanon war as a serious missed opportunity. Israel initiated a long war, which ended without its clear military victory. A semi-military organization of a few thousand men resisted, for a few weeks, the strongest army in the Middle East. . . . Israel did not use its military force well and effectively, despite the fact that it was a limited war initiated by Israel itself." [emphasis added]

Israel did not need to go to war; Israel chose to go to war. Even if we acknowledge that the soldiers' capture brought to light a problem that had to be dealt with-namely the prisoner issue-there were alternatives to war.

Rather than admit the unjust nature of holding thousands of political prisoners, however, Israel chose to try to extinguish any resistance to their continued detention. Israel masked its fury by pointing indignantly to its prey. The politics of power relies on the manipulation of perception. It is high time we looked at an objective reality.

*Clearly substantiated by reports in April/May 2006 on Lebanese PM Siniora's visits with US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair on this issue: see for instance:

Bush vow on Hariri murder probe and Siniora wants pressure on Israel

(The original publisher, Moqawama placed each use of the term Israel, Israel's in quotation marks, e.g. "Israel" indicating a lack of recognition of Israel as a legitimate entity. While in sympathy with Moqawama's intent, editing by Axis of Logic included a removal of this punctuation for more fluid reading.)

Brenda Heard, founder and director of Friends of Lebanon. Based in London, UK, Friends of Lebanon has been created to provide a worldwide community to celebrate and support Lebanon. Friends of Lebanon wants not only to help rebuild Lebanon, but also to provide the education and understanding needed to prevent the reoccurrence of such mindless acts of violence. Together we can and will build a better and more peaceful Lebanon.

Source: Moqawama

References

1. Announcement on the Flotilla
2. Europe:Agrees Greece Aid Payout
3. Analysis: Alliance Shifts behind Greece-Gaza Stand
4. Lebanon awaits Hariri indictments on tenterhooks
5. Committee Finalizes Lebanon Cabinet Policy Statement
6. Parliament to debate ministerial policy statement next week
7. Confirmed Indictment Submitted to the Lebanese Authorities
8. Crisis Allows Israel to Pursue Strategic Goals
9. Report: Interim Findings of War Won't Deal with Personal Failures
10. Ibid. (Haaretz)
11. UN Security Resolutions Concluded
12. Report: Interim Findings of War Won't Deal with Personal Failures
13. CFR: Winograd Commission Final Report
14. Israeli Forces Enter Lebanon After 2 Soldiers Are Seized
15. NYT Topics: Winograd Commission
16. CFR: Winograd Commission Final Report

The Hezbollah Apocalypse

By Nicholas Noe
July 8, 2011
Courtesy Of "The National Interest"

In the opening weeks of the year 2000, Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Lebanon’s militant Shiite movement Hezbollah, granted a series of lengthy interviews to the Arab media that directly addressed the gravest threat hitherto seen to his party’s continuation as “The Resistance”: a looming peace agreement between Syria and Israel.

Acknowledging that such a deal would necessarily obligate Hezbollah as well as Lebanon (given the tens of thousands of Israeli and Syrian troops occupying different swaths of the country), Nasrallah answered the provocative question of what he would do when the Star of David flag was raised over the Israeli embassy in Beirut by saying that this would, in fact, represent a victory for the “rationale of resistance” which had forced an end to Israeli occupation. Still, he and his constituents would “refuse to normalize” the relationship in the coming years.

No trade, no Israeli tourists visiting South Lebanon, he suggested.

Backs turned.

Crucially though, no rockets and no car bombs.

The end of violent resistance.

The “Syria Track,” of course, collapsed spectacularly in March of 2000, largely as a result of a dispute over a few hundred meters of shoreline around Lake Tiberius which the Syrians and the Israelis refused to concede (although U.S. President Bill Clinton didn’t help matters by lying to the dying president of Syria, Hafez al-Assad, promising him that he had the shoreline in his pocket as a means to cajole Assad into coming to Geneva to sign a deal).

Eleven years on from this intensely regrettable episode, Hezbollah again faces a major existential challenge, but this time the ending, if there is to be one, looks decidedly more violent and open to all possibilities.

Indeed, much to its surprise and chagrin, the party is now besieged.

The Iranian regime, and the supreme guide for Hezbollah, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is involved in a bitter power struggle.

Syria, where Hezbollah finds much of its logistical support—or “strategic depth”—is in crisis.

And it is Hezbollah’s stalwart backing of the Assad regime, which even Hamas has bucked, that is largely eroding its vital claim to reason and genuine public support at home and in the Middle East more broadly (even though most of Hezbollah’s enemies think it relies only on a toxic mixture of fear and brainwashing to sustain its power, officials and cadres have long deemed the party’s ability to appeal to reason as indispensable).

In a similar vein, even though the party has done a good job of discrediting the Special Tribunal for Lebanon that is set to try Hezbollah members (and possibly others) in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Premier Rafik Hariri, the indictments for the murder of a leading Sunni in the Middle East, when combined with Hezbollah’s use of arms in May 2008 against its mainly Sunni opponents in the streets of Beirut, has only exacerbated the sectarian divisions and outright hatred which many of its opponents—and Hezbollah itself—rightly view as the most potent offensive weapon it faces in the field.

Across the border in Israel, Nasrallah’s multifaceted strategy and multiple pronouncements vis-à-vis his most bitter enemy are also fast unravelling.

For the last few years, Nasrallah had been able to masterfully appeal to those in the region who yearned for a final settlement as well as those who yearned for a total victory over Zionism.

On the one hand, he exhorted, Hezbollah’s critics and opponents in the Arab world should use the growing—though still asymmetric—military strength of Hezbollah and its Resistance Axis allies in the region (mainly Syria, Iran and Hamas) to force Israel into a two-state, negotiated solution. Though Hezbollah did not want this to come to pass, he admitted, the only way to get Israel to change its bargaining position is to increase your side’s military power in the field.

On the other hand, since the internal contradictions of the Resistance Axis states were lessening, Nasrallah stressed, while Israel’s were growing, time was on the side of those who would prefer to patiently wait and see a one-state solution rise from the internal implosion of Zionism (on account of demography, emigration as a result of growing fear over military encirclement, corruption, international deligitamazation etc.).

Unfortunately for Nasrallah, all of the resistance clocks appear to be ticking down far faster than Israel’s, where the economy is humming along and the United States is funding a massive effort to “Iron-Dome” the country against the threat of the Resistance Axis’s rockets and WMDs.

All of this, understandably, begs the question: What will Hezbollah do in this next stage?

Should Assad’s multiplying list of enemies, including Saudi Arabia and Turkey, choose to go in for the kill, either bluntly or obliquely, Hezbollah, it now seems evident after meeting with party officials, is prepared to use all necessary means to fight back, and fight back widely.

A collapse of the Levant leg of the Resistance Axis is simply unacceptable for Hezbollah. And seeing no reasonable options for escaping such an outcome in a "just" manner (a course that was available in March 2000 when the party was ready to lay down its arms), Hezbollah will have little choice but to become a part and parcel of one last climactic conflict.

Since the Assad regime’s threshold for doing the same is probably lower (and far more incendiary with its WMD capability), the actors now consolidating themselves to boil Assad (and secondarily Hezbollah) to the breaking point, including many influential voices in Washington and European capitals, need to very carefully consider the wisdom of the road that they are going down—a road that will, in all probability, bring great destruction to the region, including to Israel whose home front will undoubtedly be a main frontline.

Saying this, however, does not have to mean simply withering away in the face of a threat. Instead, it could mean—it should mean—that outside actors who hold such comparatively great power (Israel alone could probably bomb both Syria and Lebanon back into the Stone Age whereas its opponents cannot), might finally have to find a means and a discourse to grant concessions to far weaker, though to many still detestable, parties—a course that would actually fatally undermine their ability and desire to exercise violence over time, either against their own people or against other nations.