Updated. Please see below.
Far from bringing greater stability to the Middle East and increasing Israel’s security, it is obvious now that the military debacle that is Israel’s war against Hezbollah has achieved exactly the opposite effect.
The war that George Bush wanted as the opening act for his military intervention against Syria and Iran has instead given confidence to the Syrians and the Iranians, who see in Israel’s defeat signs of vulnerability in the west’s vaunted military prowess.
On the defensive only weeks ago, Iran and Syria are using aggressive and startlingly innovative proxies to exercise their offensive strength. Hezbollah with its network tactics is the new asymmetrical warfare model.Their gains come with equal and opposite losses. Israel, despite its celebrated military and secretive nuclear capacity, suddenly seems vulnerable, as do moderate neighbours who put too much faith in an equilibrium largely sustained at Palestinian expense.
It's particularly troubling that the Middle East may have moved past the tipping point. Land for peace is quickly becoming a better deal for Israel than its enemies, and for that reason could easily slip beyond reach.
If that's the future, then post-9/11 rhetoric will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Driven to extremes by failures to resolve real and inflated grievances, enough of the majority could join the minority to make today's political fantasy tomorrow's inescapable reality.
Two options beckon. One is to do more of the same; the other is to accept and work with the connection between actions and consequences, anger and violence, prosperity and peace.
As Travers notes in his column, it is time to move beyond the old solutions, and the old excuses (“they hate us for our freedoms”) which supply us with some level of comfort, but little in the way of progress.
Unfortunately, a major roadblock to that progress is George Bush himself, and the ill-informed American electorate.
The cease-fire and impending dispatch of Lebanese and UN forces to southern Lebanon will hopefully end this stupid, pointless war and afford Israel a face-saving way of withdrawing its head from a hornet’s nest. However, the war could easily re-ignite and Israel could end up bogged down in guerilla war in southern Lebanon, as it previously was for 18 years.Israel’s politicians will now face the wrath of voters who are rightly outraged over the fiasco in Lebanon and Hezbullah’s crowing victory. Heads will surely roll.
Americans, by contrast, will not draw the same conclusions about their inept political leadership that better-informed Israelis certainly will. George Bush, the war’s leading flag-waver, has received no rebuke from the US media or voters for his latest military debacle. Nor will he from the clapping seals in Congress and the Senate.
Lebanese and Israelis are paying the heavy price for Mr. Bush’s “reborn Middle East.”
Chalk up yet another failure for the President Who Doesn’t Admit Mistakes. Hope for solutions other than more bombs and bigger ones while the Republicans remain in power is hopeless.
The fact that our own prime minister is parroting the position of the Miserable Failure himself puts Canada in an awkward position. By tacitly supporting the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, we bear some responsibility for the debacle that followed and the results that will unfold in the months and years to come. Put succinctly, thanks to Harper and the Conservatives, we are no longer part of the solution in the Middle East, we are part of the problem.
Update: Josh Marshall comments on the fallout for Israel from the broader standpoint of the war in Iraq, the main military debacle that has destabilized the region. He also sees very little for the Israelis to be pleased with:
[C]an any defender of this policy still claim with a straight face that the US invasion of Iraq hasn't been pretty much an unmitigated disaster for Israel?I think the Israelis -- pretty much across the board -- understand that. Do the hawks in this country see that?
I really don't know if they do or not.
I can think of one very marginal advantage that has accrued to Israel's strategic position: the virtual destruction of a unified Iraqi state and thus what was at least once a fairly powerful Arab army, which was always an over the horizon threat to Israel, at least to some degree. That's one.
Against that, let's consider the following.
The vast increase in power of Iran, which is clearly the state that is the greatest threat to Israel in the Middle East.
The sharp weakening of the US's standing in the Middle East -- which amounts to a profound strategic setback for Israel in as much as US influence over the Arab and Muslim states of the Middle East has been a key factor in securing tentative acceptance of Israel by certain states in the region. Consider Sadat's switch from the Soviets to the US, as Egypt's key ally, as a backdrop to the Camp David accords.
Increased pressure on Middle Eastern regimes who've made either formal peace (Egypt, Jordan) with Israel or de facto reconciliation (like a few of the Gulf emirates.)
The dimensions of the disaster are so vast and its permutations so varied, it's hard to know quite where to start or where to end the discussion. But as number four we might say, the fact that the entire region has been set on fire. That can't be a good thing for a small country on the edge of the Levantine littoral....
This is the most maddening aspect of Bush's military misadventures in the Middle East: they accomplish the exact opposite of what they were supposed to accomplish.
we are no longer part of the solution in the Middle East, we are part of the problem.
That's precisely why I've gotten a lot crankier on the subject. Everything that's happened in recent weeks and that happens from now on has our names on it in a way that wasn't true before.
It's long past time to negotiate intelligently with governments and groups that are truly representative of their peoples. The West has been mired in those "barrages of self-righteous propaganda" that Margolis speaks of, much of which is beginning to look not only delusional but sheerly childish.
Our lists of "terrorist" organizations, for instance, are mindless and counterproductive. Hezbollah is not al-Qaeda; Lebanon must be respected as an independent nation, and Hezbollah supporters make up 40 per cent of that nation. It doesn't matter whether George Bush wants to stamp his li'l feet at them: they are a fact on the ground, and they will remain so unless we commit ourselves to wholesale slaughter.
At least we have news today that two Canadian MPs, Peggy Nash of the NDP and Liberal Boris Wrzesnewskyj, on tour in Lebanon at the moment, are promising to challenge our official position on Hezbollah. (See the regularly updated CBC report.) In this morning's Globe and Mail, Bob Rae wrote movingly of the renewed fighting in Sri Lanka, questioning our bizarre and one-sided and unhelpful demonization of one side in that conflict, simply because one side is officially the government and the other isn't. It is always more complicated than that, and people who genuinely want to help will always recognize that and try to learn from the locals.
Margolis doesn't mention in this column Hamas, but there is an even more shocking instance of the Western preference for pomposity over hard-headed intelligence. Hamas is the duly elected government of the people of Palestine. We have been supporting an occupier that has arrested over a score of Palestine's parliamentarians under cover of the war in Lebanon, including the deputy prime minister. This nonsense has to stop.
I think that part of the reason that we in the west do not understand the middle east is because we are not part of the history of it. Seriously, we are talking about a "war" of sorts that has been fought for.......how long?.....3000 years? Can the influence of any outsider mediate that kind of overpowering lust to defend the land the God gave your people? Simply put, if you think it as a "stupid pointless war" then you have no grounds to suggest that you could help stop it. These societies were living and dying long before the west came along, and ill bet my bottom dollar they'll be there long after our society is turned to dust.
And on that note, it seems to me that everything that western civilization has done in the middle east has been done to inflame the situation, not settle it.
There are many examples of societies warring, killing and generally commiting genocide, throughout history. How many societies in history have allowed slaves to integrate into thier society? How many countries have defended the right of an individual to worship the religion of his or HER choice? How many citizens can hold thier own government liable in a court of law? I grow tired of US bashing. It is only in the United States that the machine of democracy has the range to effect these changes without bloody conflict. When the Americans get bashed, they deserve it, but quite frankly, who really can cast the first stone?
Anyway..... my point, if anyone has a solution to the middle east conflict that actually addresses the concerns of all involved AND deals with the fact that none of these incumbents of war will throw dowm thier arms until they are dead....then please, put it forth. Bashing just does not solve things, solve.
OK, so what is Canada's interest in the Middle East since the USA does not notice us much. Well, I would really llike to know whether the US is to be anticipated as a paper tiger or a promoter of the next world war, and whether it is run by Bush and his hapless cronies, or by a sort of consensus of businessmen.
Bush wants to drop the A bomb on Iran and he will do a lot of conniving to get to that result. The Israelis would be ready to serve as the trigger as they did years ago in the invasion of Egypt. Bush will snigger in the back ground just as he did in the Lebanon story. The Israelis will do it because they have the wind up now that the 100 million Arabs sourrounding them have seen their vulnerablity and they know most of the populations of the west do not accept the Israel myth any more. Underneath it all one can reasonably suspect that the Israelis believe the people of the West will not support them when push comes to shove. In their religion they are the people, the human beings, and the rest or humanity are like cattle; so who can be surprized that the reciprocal of this code will show up as a wave of nasty anti-semitism. And after that comes Masada, since they cannot possibly doubt that use of the bomb will be the last act of the state of Isreal.
The parallels to August, 1914 are truly unnerving, but I do not believe Bush runs the States, groups of businesmen do, and they will not turn out to be military suicides. They will pull a few planks out from under the administration, make a few calls, and tell the Israelis it is time to make a deal with the Arabs. If you can't beat them.....
Unfortunately there is always the unforseen consequence, and with all sorts of actors making secret decisions out of fear, it is a large shadow.
Roosevelt with all his popularity and shrewdness could not get the US into a war; it is this writer's expectation that the treacherous Bush will not be able to either; but then who could bank (in 1941) on the suicidal idiocy of Japanese imperial policy.