Bad news from Lebanon.
An Israeli air strike killed at least 40 Lebanese civilians, including 23 children, on Sunday, prompting Lebanon to tell U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice she was unwelcome in Beirut before a ceasefire.
Hundreds of protesters chanting “Death to
Israel, Death to America” stormed the U.N. headquarters in Beirut, even though witnesses said Hizbollah officials tried to discourage them.Rice, who plans to stay on in Israel, said she was deeply saddened by the air raid on the southern village of Qana, but stopped well short of calling for an immediate ceasefire.
This tragic massacre is probably the nail in the coffin of Israel’s ill-advised temper tantrum. There are two schools of thought (at least) on what is going on. One school takes the Israelis at face value. They hoped to punish Hizbollah, eliminate their rocket stockpile, and turn Lebanese public opinion against the Shi’a terror group. If this is what they set out to do, they have failed in the most spectacular way. Hizbollah has never been more popular and Israel was hit by 115 rockets today alone. Of course, I do not think Israel is so stupid as to have miscalculated this severely. They may be surprised at the resiliency of the rocket launchers, but they certainly didn’t think bombing Lebanon’s infrastructure and their northern areas was going to turn the Lebanese against Hizbollah.
I still maintain that this war was planned at Beaver Creek in June, in a meeting between Benjamin Netanyahu and Dick Cheney (and possibly Rumsfeld) and that Netanyahu reported back to Olmert.
What are their strategic aims? They can only be to widen the conflict with a minimum goal of regime change in Damascus. The first aim, therefore, is to get American troops positioned in Southern Lebanon. Once there, and taking fire, they will ratchet up the rhetoric and begin taking actions against Syria. To carry out this plan, first Israel overreacts to a border confrontration. Then the world demands a cease-fire. Israel demands peacekeepers. The world is unable to provide them. The U.S. decides to do it themselves and blame the international organizations and Europe for their hypocrisy and impotence.
It’s not that complicated, really. It’s devilish and borderline insane. But it actually makes quite a bit more strategic sense than what they are selling publicly…which is that Israel is pursuing a hearts-and-minds campaign for the soul of Lebanon by killing their women and children and destroying their infratructure and tourist trade.
It makes strategic sense because there is now a kind of Shi’a crescent extending from Beirut to Teheran. And that crescent is opposed to both U.S.-Israeli interests and to our Sunni client states in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Emirates, and Egypt. Regime change in Syria is the best way to isolate Iran and keep their proxies off Israel’s doorstep. At least, that is the theory.
[Meteor Blades has a good diary on this. It’s where I got the sources for this article.]
