Jim Devine wrote:
according to Greg Palast:
-- Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's approval rating in June was
down to a Bush-level of 35%. But today, Olmert's poll numbers among
Israeli voters have more than doubled to 78% as he does his bloody
John Wayne "cleanin' out the varmints" routine. But let's not forget:
Olmert can't pee-pee without George Bush's approval. Bush can stop
Olmert tomorrow. He hasn't.
-- Hezbollah, a political party rejected overwhelmingly by Lebanese
voters sickened by their support of Syrian occupation, holds a mere 14
seats out of 128 in the nation's parliament. Hezbollah was facing
demands by both Lebanon's non-Shia majority and the United Nations to
lay down arms. Now, few Lebanese would suggest taking away their
rockets. But let's not forget: Without Iran, Hezbollah is just a
fundamentalist street gang. Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can
stop Hezbollah's rockets tomorrow. He hasn't.
.
I found Juan Cole's synopsis of Hezbollah's hiztory refreshing this
morning. It includes an insightful factoid about the PM of Iraq, and
the stink in congress over his failure to condemn HZb [tm]:
.
The US Congress, aside from a strange inability to recognize the
disproportionate use of force when it sees it, does not seem to
realize that the Dawa Party of Iraq, from which Nuri al-Maliki hails,
is a revolutionary Shiite religious party
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Dawa_Party> not that much
different from the Lebanese Hizbullah.
The members of Congress also don't seem to realize that the Iraqi Dawa
helped to *form* the Lebanese Hizbullah back in the early 1980s. The
Dawa was in exile in Tehran, Damascus and Beirut and it formed a
shadowy terror wing called, generically, Islamic Jihad. The IJ cell of
the Dawa attacked the US and French embassies in Kuwait in 1983, in an
operation probably directed by the Tehran branch, which was close to
Khomeini.
My understanding is that Nuri al-Maliki was the bureau chief of the
Dawa cell in Damascus in the 1980s. He must have been closely involved
with the Iraqi Dawa in Beirut, which in turn was intimately involved
in Hizbullah. I am not saying he himself did anything wrong. I don't
know what he was doing in specific, other than trying to overthrow
Saddam, which was heroic. But, did they really think he was going to
condemn Hizbullah and take Israel's side?
And if he did, do they think that the Shiite religious parties that
backed him would let him stay in office (they are the Supreme Council
for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Islamic Dawa, and the Sadr
Movement of Muqtada al-Sadr)?
.
It's ALL more complicated than Greg Palast's simple one-track
muckraker-mind can handle,
He DOES try though.
I suspect in the long run, he'll be more like the 'Heraldo Rivera' of
the left rather than the 'Robert Fisk...
Leigh
http://leighm.net/
