Middle East erupts

[Ibby]

I dont agree with everything he says, maybe not even the majority of what he says, but you give nothing for me to agree or disagree with. All you do is spout off bullshit about how "communists are going to fight with me anyway" (meaning that anyone who fights with you is a commie?) and that only a communist could possibly think the US is wrong in any way.

Did you know that back in the cold war, being gay used by the McCarthyists as proof of liberalism and therefore communism?

And I'm not even going to start on that little anticommunist rant of yours. I'm definitely not going to defend the communist regimes, but what the FUCK does that have to do with the Israel/Lebanon conflict?

To sum up, so you can't bullshit out of this one like you did with your last post...
TW IS NOT A COMMUNIST, capitalized for effect.
Show me a SINGLE thing tw has said that is remotely communist. Prove it, like you completely failed to do with your useless 'tw is a communist!!!!11!one!!!eleven' thread.


...tool.

[Hippikos]

Did you know that back in the cold war, being gay used by the McCarthyists as proof of liberalism and therefore communism?

Not anymore?

[Ibby]

No, but UG's argument that being liberal and not agreeing with him equalling communism is just as ridiculous.

[Hippikos]

Ah... them naughty pinkoliberalcommietreehuggin bastards...

[Undertoad]

If the cease-fire doesn't hold, whose fault will it be: Israel's, or the US? Time to pay attention, and keep your scorecards handy.

Times (UK)

TODAY was supposed to be the day when the much maligned army of Lebanon took control of its borders and policed the UN ceasefire.

Instead, its military commanders were left humiliated and its troops stranded as Hezbollah told them not to try to disarm its fighters.

The first infantry units were preparing to head south yesterday when Hezbollah demonstrated who exercised the real control by announcing that it had no intention of surrendering a single weapon.

[Trilby]

^^I am sure we, the Great Satan, are at fault for this and I am breathlessly awaiting some Brit to spell it all out for me.

Why does zippyt get to say "Fuck 'em" and nobody cares but when I say it...

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

If the cease-fire doesn't hold, whose fault will it be: Israel's, or the US? Time to pay attention, and keep your scorecards handy.

Well this morning the French announced they would not disarm Hezbullah by force, so I guess we know what to expect.

[Trilby]

Originally Posted by MaggieL

the French announced they would not disarm Hezbullah by force

This is a surprise?

[DanaC]

Ok I got to page two and decided not to read any further. So....forgive me if I repeat something someone else has said later in the thread.

What the hell is all this crap about what Israel being flattened? Have you seen what they've done to The Lebanon? Israel is probably the only country in that region who ISNT going to be flattened. Quite apart from anything else, Israel is a nuclear nation, yep that'right they gots the bomb. They are the regional superpower. Why are they the regional superpower? Because they have the absolute and total support of their 'allies' the USA.

Why is Bush in any way responsible for what's going on over there? Well, giving Israel permission to flatten the fuck out of Southern Lebanon and vetoing calls for an immediate ceasefire spring to mind. The neo-con American govt. has its part to play in this, as does my own cowardly govt.

When the arabs launch an attack (of any kind) our governments condemn them in the strongest possible terms. When Israel launches an attack we are silent. When they respond to arab attacks disproportionately and destroy whole towns, a country's infrastructure and kill civilians indiscriminately, we don't condemn, we 'urge restraint'.

We are happy in the West to name Hezbollah as guilty of warcrimes when they hide their people and weapons amongst civilians. We are much less keen to name Israel guilty of warcrimes when they engage in collective punishment (as they did with the Palestinians just prior to Hezbollah's entry into the fray)

This is why my government and the American government are partly responsible for the current crisis. We have dealt with the region so unevenly, that we no longer have any voice with the Arab side, meanwhile we waste what voice we have with Israel by being complicit in the scale of their response.

I love by the way, that Israel calls its army a 'Defense Force'. That's so cute. The way they defend their country by tramping through someone elses. I remember seeing a great picture of an israeli soldier defending his country by holding a gun to palestinian child's head, in palestine:P

[9th Engineer]

tw does not give facts as much as he asks questions. I tracked down the answers to a bunch of his questions regarding Hamas and Hezbollah expecting the them to have an effect on my opinion, they turned out to be irrelevent. Plus, I think he's gone off the deep end with all the apocalyptic
shit he's been throwing around. I don't care how much someone disagrees with me, if they accuse me of wanting to bring about the End of Days and the return of Christ I'm not going to take them seriously.

[tw]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

If the cease-fire doesn't hold, whose fault will it be: Israel's, or the US? Time to pay attention, and keep your scorecards handy.

UT asks an important question. Whereas this conflict once threatened to draw others into a big war, it now appears to be getting a logical response.

However the ceasefire is grossly flawed. It mostly ignores underlying reasons and threatens to put a too small and too lightly armed international peace force between two sides who have not yet been hurt sufficient to want peace. Hurt enough only to want a pause. A pause that still does not address the underlying disagreement.

From the New York Times:

U.N. Council Backs Measure to Halt War in Lebanon
A senior administration official in Crawford, Tex., where Mr. Bush is on vacation, said that it increasingly seemed that Israel would not be able to achieve a military victory, a realization that led the Americans to get behind a cease-fire.

Which answers how long Condi Rice could run interference for Israel. NY Times continues:

The Lebanese are also likely to be unhappy with the resolution’s failure to order Israel to relinquish control of Shebaa Farms, an area of the border that it seized in 1967 and that, while declared to be part of Syria by the United Nations, is claimed by Lebanon.

The resolution simply asks the secretary general to develop ideas on how to solve the dispute and report back on his findings in 30 days.

The resolution does not order the return of abducted Israeli soldiers, an original reason Israel cited for going to war, nor does it meet Hezbollah requests for release of prisoners held by Israel. The measure says it is “mindful of the sensitivity of the issue of prisoners and encouraging of the efforts aimed at urgently settling the issue of the Lebanese prisoners detained in Israel.”

The Washington Post adds further background:

Annan said the United Nations' failure to act sooner has "badly shaken the world's faith" in the body. "I would be remiss if I did not tell you how profoundly disappointed I am that the council did not reach this point much, much earlier," he said.

The United States and France dismissed Lebanese demands for an immediate cease-fire that would prohibit Israel from carrying out even defensive military actions. Instead, the resolution requires Hezbollah to immediately cease all attacks, while calling on Israel to immediately cease only its "offensive military operations."

Ceasefire is a flawed compromise. It will be enough in the short term. But the world needed a long term solution. Ceasefire may have been too early for all sides to address real reasons for conflict - including too many Israeli centrist still thinking like extremists.

One more problem. Israel has done about 20 years of damage to Lebanon. The country is $40billion in debt due to the last unjustified Israeli attack on Lebanon. As Dr Landis of U of Oklahoma notes, who in their right mind is going to loan any money to Lebanon? That makes Lebanon unstable and a festering pool of extremism. It makes the Lebanon government unstable and weak. Another wound that was healing until Israel tore that wound wide open again. This so that the Israeli government could brag to its extremist that it too had a 'big dic'.

The entire conflict was unnecessary - a classic result of leaders with too much ego and too little respect for why healing takes 30+ years. They simply put the Middle East right back to 1980s.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's government will fall as Israelis learn how weak this man was. He is a pathetically weak leader. He took a cheap and knee jerk reaction to appear strong and politically correct rather than act like a leader. He is weak and not leadership material - which is obvious once this latest war is analyzed from a logical and unemotional perspective. Sharon's and Arafat's leadership skills both were so superior to Olmert - who has about as much leadership ability as Gerald Ford.

That's a shame because it puts Likud right back in power.

[Trilby]

Dana, parts of that post above don't even sound like you. I know how emotional all this is...it pisses me off, too.

I see all your points. I also see that hzblh was the first to muddy the waters by kidnapping the Israeli soldiers, that hzblh uses women and children as shields and hzblh has NO interest in a peaceful co-exsistance with Israel. It is very hard for me to see where the fault lies with Israel. It is tantamount to declaring someone 'bad' for defending themselves. Arabs are masters of victimization--just ask them. OBL is pissed about things that happened 600 years ago. Hzblh, hammas and the palestinians will never never be satisfied with ANY concession Israel makes because their aim is the destruction of an entire people. Pres. of Iran has said the Holocaust was 'blown out of proportion'---what a laugh. The Holocaust is blown out of proportion but the suffering of Arabs is real. You don't see any jaundice in that?

[Undertoad]

Israel doesn't give a crap about Shebaa Farms. Sharon's final policy seems the most sensible of all: withdraw to defendable borders. They would gladly give up that land, but they need to give it up in a way that doesn't seem to grant a victory that empowers the wrong assholes.

When figuring out which side is aggressive and which defensive, the tie-breaker should be in favor of the side that doesn't have an AK47 on its flag.

(And a globe.)

[tw]

Originally Posted by 9th Engineer

I tracked down the answers to a bunch of his questions regarding Hamas and Hezbollah expecting the them to have an effect on my opinion,

Answer was never intended to affect your opinion. Answer was to teach you about yourself. The difference between Hamas and Hezbollah are so massive that the difference should have been common knowledge. Since you had to 'track down the answer', then your knowledge of the Middle East - of facts and trends most relevant - is near zero. You don’t yet have about one decade worth of learning to have a grasp of the Middle East. It is fabulously complex. You have a vast ignorance of the entire region if you did not know, immediately, the difference between Hamas and Hezbollah. You have a Daily News, Fox News perspective which means you have not yet started to learn.

Imagine someone who claims to know all about America and yet does not even know who Abraham Lincoln is. That is 9th Engineer in the Middle East.

Someone who does not even know the difference between Hamas and Hezbollah is then fodder for propagandists - ie AIPAC. Do you see AIPAC spin every week? Or again, is your grasp of the region so minimal that you don't even know the difference between AIPAC spin verses reality? Not knowing the difference between Hamas and Hezbollah also means you have no idea why, for example, kidnapping two Israeli soldiers is no different from a crash on the mid-town expressway. Welcome to a region where all parties are that immoral or that jaded. Where lies (political spin) is normal because all sides are so far apart.

Politicians in the region are so far apart as to speak even nonsense rhetoric - for example Israel should be moved to Europe. They don't really think this. It is how you measure your political adversary - how you measure whether he wants to talk or instead wants to hype on that political fiction. Welcome to the Middle East where so many Americans cannot even see through the Hezbollah propaganda of 'destruction of Israel' which is nothing more than a bargaining chip and rhetoric to hype your less intelligent extremist supporters. And yet those in America who have no grasp – don’t even know the difference between Hamas and Hezbollah – could never understand what is an honest point of conflict and what his propaganda hype. Everyone in the Middle East – even Israel – routinely hypes nonsense.

The fact that you had to look up Hamas and Hezbollah means you can not even see through propaganda from AIPAC – or even know what is AIPAC and Christian Zionist spin. The fact that you had to look up Hamas and Hezbollah says you don’t yet have a clue about mostly everything in the region.

Try learning some perspective. You have about 10 years of learning ahead of you. Robert Baer’s books might be a good beginning. Or read the Economist – every issue every week. You have not yet started to learn about the Middle East – because you did not even know something as fundamentally equivalent as “the House of Representatives verses the Senate”.

[tw]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Israel doesn't give a crap about Shebaa Farms. Sharon's final policy seems the most sensible of all: withdraw to defendable borders.

If Israel does not car about Sheeba Farms, then why does the problem remain? Those defensible borders were defined in 1967. Sharon instead represented zionists who literally deny Palestinians have any right to land. And so the massive West Bank land grab. Meanwhile, Sharon that was dying suddenly reversed himself.

When figuring out which side is aggressive and which defensive, the tie-breaker should be in favor of the side that doesn't have an AK47 on its flag.

Classic 'big dic' thinking also used by Gen Curtis LeMay to destroy the United States. "We are already at war with the Soviet Union and the American public does not know it yet".

UT - your solutions are constantly found in a 'big dic' perspective - as if pre-emption solves everything. Only mental midget extremists such as George Jr believe such rediculous childish notions. I can routinely count on you to promote AIPAC rhetoric. I can always count on you to call for military solutions rather than negotiated settlements. Even your believe in WMDs was based in pre-emptive and militarist emotion - not in any viable facts. Same people that also want to fight in a bar.

Same people who did not even know the only purpose of war - a negotiated settlement.