http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2006/07/23/18290729.php
War on Lebanon Planned for
at least a Year The Bush Administration's Grand Strategy
and the Birth Pangs of Terror
by juan cole (reposted) Sunday Jul 23rd,
2006 8:29 AM
Israeli war planes hit the cities
of Sidon, south Beirut and Baalbak on Saturday and Israeli ground troops
fought a hard battle to take over the village of Maroun al-Ras, said to be a
Hizbullah rocket-launching site. The
Israeli bombing of Sidon hit a religious complex linked to Hizbullah. The
BBC reports that 'The UN's Jan Egeland said half a million people needed
assistance - and the number was likely to increase. One-third of the recent
Lebanese casualties, he said, appeared to be children. 'Matthew
Kalman reveals that Israel's wideranging assault on Lebanon has been planned
in a general way for years, and a specific plan has been in the works for over a
year. The "Three Week War" was shown to Washington think tanks and officials
last year on powerpoint by a senior Israeli army officer:
"More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army
officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to
U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks, setting out the plan
for the current operation in revealing detail."
The Israelis tend to launch their wars of choice in the
summer, in part because they know that European and American universities will
be the primary nodes of popular opposition, and the universities are out in the
summer. This war has nothing to do with captured Israeli soldiers. It is a
long-planned war to increase Israel's ascendency over Hizbullah and its patrons.
But since Hizbullah's short-range katyushas can only hit targets 3-4
miles away, and were mainly being fired at the occupied Shebaa
Farms, why worry about it so much? 1. If Hizbullah forced Israel out
of the Shebaa Farms, it might increase pressure for it to give back the Golan
Heights, East Jerusalem, and all of the West Bank-- the other territories stolen
by Israel in 1967. The Israelis have their own Domino Theory, which haunts them
the way the original haunted Lyndon Johnson-- and just as foolishly.2.
Some of Hizbullah's missiles might have been able to hit sensitive
Israeli chemical or nuclear sites, or just cause panic by hitting Israeli
cities. There was zero likelihood of Hezbollah launching such a strike
unprovoked. But this capacity formed at least a slight drag on the Israeli
ability to strike Iran and the Palestinians with impunity. The destruction of
the Hizbullah arsenal may be the precursor of even more drastic action against
the Palestinians and perhaps a bombing raid on Iran's nuclear research
facilities near Isfahan.Israel is a regional superpower, the only
nuclear power in the Middle East proper, and possessing the most technologically
advanced military capability and the most professional military. Since Egypt
opted out of the military struggle for economic reasons and since the US
invasion broke Iraq's legs, there is no conventional military threat to Israel.
Israel seeks complete military superiority, for several reasons. One impetus is
defensive, on the theory that it has to win every contest and can never afford
to lose even one, given its lack of strategic depth (it is a geographically
small country with a small population, caught between the Mediterranean and
potentially hostile neighboring populations). But the defensive reasons are only
one dimension. There are also offensive considerations. The Right in
Israel is determined to permanently subjugate the Palestinians and forestall the
emergence of a Palestinian state. This course of action requires the constant
exercise of main force against the Palestinians, who resist it, as well as
threats against Arab or Muslim neighbors who might be tempted to help the
Palestinians. Thus, Iraq and Iran both had to be punished and weakened.
Likewise, the Israeli Right has never given up an expansionist ideology. For
instance, the Israelis have a big interest in the Litani River in south Lebanon.
If and when the Israeli military and political elite felt they needed to add
territory by taking it from neighbors, they wished to retain that
capability.The remaining challenges to complete Israeli military
superiority and freedom of movement are 1) asymmetrical forces such as Hamas and
Hizbullah guerrilla cells wielding rockets and 2) the menace of future
unconventional challenges such as an Iranian nuclear weapon (circa 2016 if in
fact the Iranians are working on it, which is not proved). Given the alliance of
Shiite Hizbullah with Shiite Iran, one capability shielded the other.
That this war was pre-planned was obvious to me from the moment it
began. The Israeli military proceeded methodically and systematically to destroy
Lebanon's infrastructure, and clearly had been casing targets for some time. The
vast majority of these targets were unrelated to Hi
