Antiwar.com Blog

I know the president doesn’t read newspapers, but would someone please slip him the latest from George Will? Tell him it’s about baseball, and highlight this part:

The administration, justly criticized for its Iraq premises and their execution, is suddenly receiving some criticism so untethered from reality as to defy caricature. The national, ethnic and religious dynamics of the Middle East are opaque to most people, but to the Weekly Standard — voice of a spectacularly misnamed radicalism, “neoconservatism” — everything is crystal clear: Iran is the key to everything.

“No Islamic Republic of Iran, no Hezbollah. No Islamic Republic of Iran, no one to prop up the Assad regime in Syria. No Iranian support for Syria . . .” You get the drift. So, the Weekly Standard says:

“We might consider countering this act of Iranian aggression with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait? Does anyone think a nuclear Iran can be contained? That the current regime will negotiate in good faith? It would be easier to act sooner rather than later. Yes, there would be repercussions — and they would be healthy ones, showing a strong America that has rejected further appeasement.”

“Why wait?” Perhaps because the U.S. military has enough on its plate in the deteriorating wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which both border Iran. And perhaps because containment, although of uncertain success, did work against Stalin and his successors, and might be preferable to a war against a nation much larger and more formidable than Iraq. And if Bashar Assad’s regime does not fall after the Weekly Standard‘s hoped-for third war, with Iran, does the magazine hope for a fourth?

As for the “healthy” repercussions that the Weekly Standard is so eager to experience from yet another war: One envies that publication’s powers of prophecy but wishes it had exercised them on the nation’s behalf before all of the surprises — all of them unpleasant — that Iraq has inflicted. And regarding the “appeasement” that the Weekly Standard decries: Does the magazine really wish the administration had heeded its earlier (Dec. 20, 2004) editorial advocating war with yet another nation — the bombing of Syria?

Neoconservatives have much to learn, even from Buddy Bell, manager of the Kansas City Royals. After his team lost its 10th consecutive game in April, Bell said, “I never say it can’t get worse.” In their next game, the Royals extended their losing streak to 11 and in May lost 13 in a row.

I can’t endorse the whole piece, but the portion above is critical. We are being pushed and pulled into something that will make the current disaster but a fond memory.

Via.

On Saturday, belligerent simp Michael Totten posted a letter from a liberal Lebanese friend, addressed to Israel:

You’ve made this country unliveable for the people fighting to disarm Hezbollah.

Guess what? I’m leaving. Yep. Me.

Where am I going? Syria. Didn’t want to, but I have to. The people we marched against are the ones you sent us begging to. The people who assassinated our leaders, kept us from having an operating democracy, and who armed Hezbollah are laughing it up because they’ve won the game because of you.

Bashar Assad said Lebanon would be destroyed if he left. I didn’t know the Israelis would play into his game. It’s not surprising that Syrian-allied Hezbollah started the mess, but you guys are just vicious. …

I tried to sympathize with you. I didn’t support Hezbollah, and if you look at the posts before this conflict began, I was maligning the political parties that oppose Hezbollah for not doing enough.

I even gave you guys the benefit of the doubt at the beginning of this, as did most Lebanese. Even the Shia, Christians, and Druze in South Lebanon understood your position. Not any more. Oh, well.

I’m a refugee.

Within a few hours, Totten had to close the comments for that post as his idiot readers poured hatred on his Lebanese friend. After a bunch of mandatory Israel-is-always-right-in-principle bullsh*t, Totten wrote:

There is no alternate universe where the Lebanese government could have disarmed an Iranian-trained terrorist/guerilla militia that even the Israelis could not defeat in years of grinding war. There is no alternate universe where it was in Lebanon’s interest to restart the civil war on Israel’s behalf, to burn down their country all over again right at the moment where they finally had hope after 30 years of convulsive conflict and Baath Party overlordship. …

Israel should not have bombed Central Beirut, which was almost monolithically anti-Hezbollah. They should not have bombed my old neighborhood, which was almost monolithically anti-Hezbollah. They should not have bombed the Maronite city of Jounieh, which was not merely anti-Hezbollah but also somewhat pro-Israel.

Israelis thinks [sic] everyone hates them. It isn’t true, especially not in Lebanon. But they will make it so if they do not pay more attention to the internal characteristics of neighboring countries. “The Arabs” do not exist as a bloc except in the feverish dreams of the Nasserists and the Baath.

And, um, in the online shrieking of his neoconfreres, who are always cheering on every effort by the U.S. or Israel to beat the ragheads into submission. But whatever. Michael Totten finally saw through a glass, if only darkly; there’s hope for everyone.

There are many reports on those killed in Lebanon, as of this post, it stands at 204, “all but 14 of them civilians.” The 14 includes 9 Lebanese soldiers.

Almost every day in Gaza, Israel says that they have killed one or more militants.

But there are no reports I have been able to find of Hezbollah militants killed in the last few days of bombardment of Lebanon.

I am sure that if the Israelis were aware of any Hezbollah killed we would hear about it. I also believe that Hezbollah would announce the deaths of any of their officials or fighters. But we have heard nothing.

Israeli officials have stressed that they are focusing on Hezbollah targets, yet they seem to be killing only civilians (and a few Lebanese soldiers). Are they that inept? I doubt it.

What if India got to play by Israeli rules?

The sacred – and the profane.

The innocent – and the shameless.

The powerless – and the brazen.

Whenever there’s a crisis in Lebanon, the “mainstream” media hauls out Michael Young, to give events the right spin, and this time he has really outdone himself. His op ed piece in the New York Times this morning, “Israel’s Invasion, Syria’s War,” is dizzying in its illogic. Young ignores the ruthless invasion of Gaza, and the slaughter of Palestinian beachgoers, and swallows whole the pretext proffered by the Israelis that they are striking because their soldiers were captured — oh, wait, I mean “kidnapped.” Hezbollah, says he, and not Israel, has “crossed the line.” He should tell that to the relatives and loved ones of the fifty-plus Lebanese civilian victims of Israeli aerial bombardment.

“A second line that Hezbollah crossed was its evident coordination of strategy with Hamas; this went well beyond its stated aim of simply defending Lebanon and left Israel feeling it was fighting a war on two fronts.”

The rest of the region must lay prone, and passively accept getting f*cked by the IDF as they bomb, strafe, and slaughter their way through the occupied territories. Anything more is “crossing the line.” Israel, you see, has a “right” to “defend itself,” as our President puts it, but those Ay-rabs most certainly do not. And the beat goes on: 

“The third line crossed was domestic. By unilaterally taking Lebanon into a conflict with Israel, Hezbollah sought to stage a coup d’état against the anti-Syrian parliamentary and government majority, which opposes the militant group’s adventurism.”

It is Israel, and not Hezbollah, that has taken Lebanon into a conflict with Israel: Tel Aviv knows perfectly well that the canton-ized “confessional” state of Lebanon is a fiction, held together by a watery glue that could easily dissolve, and the Israelis are doing their best to achieve just that. The Lebanese government is in no way responsible for the actions of Hezbollah, and Young — a resident of Beirut, by the way — is in the unenviable position of explaining to his neighbors that the Israelis are perfectly justified in bombing them all to perdition. A fifth-columnist’s lot in life is surely hard, but Young surpasses himself in this instance.

The reality is that the Israelis are targeting a government supported not only by the U.S., but aso by the Lebanese people; They are bombing tourists at Beirut airport, stranding thousands of Americans and Europeans, and — under the thinnest of pretexts — starting a war that can only end in a regional conflagration. And Young, the single-note ideologue, blames …. Syria. If Young was caught in a traffic jam on the Golden Gate Bridge, he would doubtless ascribe blame to Bashar al-Assad.

In the Bizarro World of Young and his Aounist-Likudnik confreres, it is Syria, and not the invading Israelis, who “continue to eat away at Lebanese independence.” Israel’s blitzkrieg strikes at civilians in Lebanon and the occupied territories, but it is Syria that is “the nexus of regional instability.” And the solution? No mention that the Israelis should get out of Lebanon — it is Hezbollah, not the voracious Israelis, who must disarm.

Young’s whole argument amounts to saying to the Israelis: Hey, don’t bomb over here — go after the Syrians (and the Iranians) instead! Yet surely even he realizes that Lebanon will be swept up in any Israeli-Syrian conflict, and that his own city will become a battleground in a regional war.

Not until the very last line of his screed does Young manage to say that Israel “must cease its attacks” — an odd position for someone who has spent the previous fourteen paragraphs justifying them.