Antiwar.com Blog

So they’re sending more troops to Iraq, and of course the ostensible reason is to help quell the ever-spreading insurgency, with their purported destination said to be Baghdad. But there’s another possibility: are they positioning to move against Syria? Damascus is next, says Bashar al-Assad — and the he’s mobilized the Syrian army to back up his contention.

Every day the Israelis bomb closer to the Syrian-Lebanese border: it wouldn’t take much to push them over the edge. As I wrote on July 21:

“Bashar al-Assad is a pincer movement away from being deposed. A right hook from U.S.-occupied Iraq and a left from the Israelis would knock out the last remaining Ba’athists “ 

I see Antiwar.com blogger Margaret Griffis is on the case ….

UPDATE: An Israeli airborne commando unit has dropped into Baalbeck, about 12 miles from the Syrian border. CNN reports they have taken control of a Hezbollah hospital:  Israeli special ops are said to have checked the identification papers of all medical personnel and patients, supposedly looking for a “high value” target, perhaps a member of Hezbollah’s “shura” or high command.

This report, however, claims that the raid was prompted by a belief that the two captured Israeli soldiers — remember them? — were being held there:

“The Israeli army confirmed Wednesday that paratroopers landed in helicopters near the city Baalbeck in north-eastern Lebanon and that a number of ‘terrorists’ were taken prisoner. The prisoners were brought to Israel and “all soldiers returned to to their base in Israel” without any casualties, said an Israeli army spokeswoman without giving further details of the overnight raid. 

“… Lebanese security sources said that reports from the area suggested that Israeli troops were pursuing suspicions that two abducted Israeli soldiers were being held or treated inside the hospital.”

According to the Israeli Defense Forces, an Israeli patrol heard an explosion on the Syrian side of the border late Sunday evening. Upon further investigation, they discovered an exploded mine placed inside a tire that was subsequently set on fire. This incident could be an attempt by unknown parties to draw Syria into the conflict between Israel and Lebanon, or it could be merely an accident. Israel claims the explosion injured no soldiers.

IDF officials suggested that the mine could be an attempt by Hezbollah to encourage Syria to join the fighting, but the border crossing is far from Hezbollah territory and well within a UN buffer zone. On the other hand, Syrian Ambassador to the UN, Bashar Ja’afari, warned on Saturday that Washington and Tel Aviv were looking for a “pretext to extend the conflict.” For their part, Syrian troops readied for any potential conflict.

The border at Al Qunaytirah is at the edge of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. The area has long been the source of disputes between Israel and Syria as to which country destroyed the now-abandoned city during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War; however, the UN eventually condemned Israel for its actions in the province. Syria has maintained mines in the area as a deterrent to further Israeli incursions, so it is possible that this was merely an older, deteriorating mine suffering a malfunction.

While repeating that they are definitely not trying to involve Syria, the Israelis also promised to target any Syrian vehicles that might be carrying weapons into Lebanon. Any accidental deaths of Syrians entering Lebanon could also be a source of increased tensions at this time.

From Haaretz today:

As the Israel Air Force continues to investigate the air strike [at Qana], questions have been raised over military accounts of the incident.

It now appears that the military had no information on rockets launched from the site of the building, or the presence of Hezbollah men at the time.

The Israel Defense Forces had said after the deadly air-strike that many rockets had been launched from Qana. However, it changed its version on Monday.

The site was included in an IAF plan to strike at several buildings in proximity to a previous launching site. Similar strikes were carried out in the past. However, there were no rocket launches from Qana on the day of the strike.

***

I look forward to hearing the IDF’s or IDF apologists’ next “close enough for government work” rationale for killing a few dozen children.  

Nehemia Shtrasler, a columnist in Haaretz, Israel’s most respected newspaper, today explains the goal of the Israeli invasion:

“The Olmert-Peretz plan was to shell and demolish south Lebanon and south Beirut until the Lebanese public demanded that its government vomit Hezbollah out from its midst.”

With a goal of demolishing much of the part of a neighboring country, it is ludicrous to pretend that killing civilians is accidental. Laying waste trumps recognizing the lives of women and children.

Shtrasler notes, “Instead of demanding that Hezbollah be dismantled, the people of Lebanon want revenge, and they want it now. That is their response to the killing of 750 civilians and the destruction of thousands of homes, bridges, roads, villages and towns, putting Lebanon 20 years in the past.”

It will be interesting to see how many weeks or years it takes American commentators to match Shtrasler’s perceptiveness or honesty.

For up-to-the-minute news on the Israeli-Lebanese conflict, see our Lebanon news page.

Frank Rich notes (“The Peculiar Disappearance of the War in Iraq“) that the Iraq occupation has been going so badly for so long that Americans are tired of hearing about it:

CNN will surely remind us today that it is Day 20 of the Israel-Hezbollah war — now branded as Crisis in the Middle East — but you won’t catch anyone saying it’s Day 1,230 of the war in Iraq. On the Big Three networks’ evening newscasts, the time devoted to Iraq has fallen 60% between 2003 and this spring.

This is happening even as the casualties in Iraq, averaging more than 100 a day, easily surpass those in Israel and Lebanon combined.

President Bush at last started counting those Iraqi bodies publicly — with an estimate of 30,000 — some seven months ago. (More recently, The Los Angeles Times put the figure at, conservatively, 50,000.)

Niall Ferguson is one of the few supporters of the Iraq invasion whose writing is worth reading. He argues that a US-led classical liberal empire should dominate the world, as the British Empire once did.

Back in 2003 Ferguson participated in a fascinating debate on “The British Empire and Globalization,” in which he concluded that “British rule was on balance conducive to economic growth.” Evidence includes the British Empire’s encouragement of free trade, British institutions’ wealth-creation record, and the failure of post-colonial economies to match Britain’s economic growth rate. Ferguson sites Jeffrey D. Sachs and A. M. Warner’s 1995 paper, “Economic Reform and the Process of Global Integration,” [pdf file here], which found that among poor countries in the ’70s and ’80s, “the open economies grew at 4.49% per year, and the closed countries grew at 0.69% per year.” Since economic openness encouraged economic growth in the ’70s and ’80s, it probably did the same in earlier times, and since the British Empire enforced economic openness it probably encouraged economic growth.

Ferguson and his critics agree that the “white dominions” (Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), the United States, and Britain itself — nations founded on British institutions and predominantly peopled by the British and their descendants — are some of the world’s most economically successful nations.

Continue reading “Some Thoughts about Colonialism on Day 1,230 of the Iraq Occupation”