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By Al Giordano
Part V of a Special Series for The Narco News Bulletin
August 14, 2006
Finally, the hard numbers are starting to come in. In the
“At this fatal juncture in Middle East history - and no one should underestimate this moment’s importance in the region - the Israeli army appears as impotent to protect its country as the Hizbollah clearly is to protect Lebanon.”
By Robert Fisk
The Independent
August 14, 2006
The real war in Lebanon begins today. The world may believe - and Israel may believe - that the UN ceasefire due to come into effect at 6am today will mark the beginning of the end of the latest dirty war in Lebanon after up to 1,000 Lebanese civilians and more than 30 Israeli civilians have been killed. But the reality is quite different and will suffer no such self-delusion: the Israeli army, reeling under the Hizbollah’s onslaught of the past 24 hours, is now facing the harshest guerrilla war in its history. And it is a war they may well lose.
In all, at least 39 - possibly 43 - Israeli soldiers have been killed in the past day as Hizbollah guerrillas, still launching missiles into Israel itself, have fought back against Israel’s massive land invasion into Lebanon.
Israeli military authorities talked of “cleaning” and “mopping up” operations by their soldiers south of the Litani river but, to the Lebanese, it seems as if it is the Hizbollah that have been doing the “mopping up”. By last night, the Israelis had not even been able to reach the dead crew of a helicopter - shot down on Saturday night - which crashed into a Lebanese valley.
Officially, Israel has now accepted the UN ceasefire that calls for an end to all Israeli offensive military operations and Hizbollah attacks, and the Hizbollah have stated that they will abide by the ceasefire - providing no Israeli troops remain inside Lebanon. But 10,000 Israeli soldiers - the Israelis even suggest 30,000, although no one in Beirut takes that seriously - have now entered the country and every one of them is a Hizbollah target.
From this morning, Hizbollah’s operations will be directed solely against the invasion force. And the Israelis cannot afford to lose 40 men a day. Unable to shoot down the Israeli F-16 aircraft that have laid waste to much of Lebanon, the Hizbollah have, for years, prayed and longed and waited for the moment when they could attack the Israeli army on the ground.
Now they are set to put their long-planned campaign into operation. Thousands of their members remain alive and armed in the ruined hill villages of southern Lebanon for just this moment and, only hours after their leader, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, warned Israel on Saturday that his men were waiting for them on the banks of the Litani river, the Hizbollah sprang their trap, killing more than 20 Israeli soldiers in less than three hours.
Israel itself, according to reports from Washington and New York, had long planned its current campaign against Lebanon - provoked by Hizbollah’s crossing of the Israeli frontier, its killing of three soldiers and seizure of two others on 12 July - but the Israelis appear to have taken no account of the guerrilla army’s most obvious operational plan: that if they could endure days of air attacks, they would eventually force Israel’s army to re-enter Lebanon on the ground and fight them on equal terms.
Hizbollah’s laser-guided missiles - Iranian-made, just as most Israeli arms are US-made - appear to have caused havoc among Israeli troops on Saturday, and their downing of an Israeli helicopter was without precedent in their long war against Israel.
In theory, aid convoys will be able to move south today to the thousands of Lebanese Shia trapped in their villages but no one knows whether the Hizbollah will wait for several days - they, like the Israelis, are physically tired - to allow that help to reach the crushed towns.
Atrocities continue across Lebanon, the most recent being the attack on a convoy of cars carrying 600 Christian families from the southern town of Marjayoun. Led by soldiers of the Lebanese army, they trailed north on Saturday up the Bekaa valley only to be assaulted by Israeli aircraft. At least seven were killed, including the wife of the mayor, a Christian woman who was decapitated by a missile that hit her car.
In west Beirut yesterday, the Israeli air force destroyed eight apartment blocks in which six families were living. Twelve civilians were killed in southern Lebanon, including a mother, her children and their housemaid.
An Israeli was killed by Hizballoh’s continued Katyusha fire across the border. The guerrilla army - “terrorists” to the Israelis and Americans but increasingly heroes across the Muslim world - have many dead to avenge, although their leadership seems less interested in exacting an eye for an eye and far more eager to strike at Israel’s army.
At this fatal juncture in Middle East history - and no one should underestimate this moment’s importance in the region - the Israeli army appears as impotent to protect its country as the Hizbollah clearly is to protect Lebanon.
But if the ceasefire collapses, as seems certain, neither the Israelis nor the Americans appear to have any plans to escape the consequences. The US saw this war as an opportunity to humble Hizbollah’s Iranian and Syrian sponsors but already it seems as if the tables have been turned. The Israeli military appears to be efficient at destroying bridges, power stations, gas stations and apartment blocks - but signally inefficient in crushing the “terrorist” army they swore to liquidate.
“The Lebanese government is our address for every problem or violation of the [ceasefire] agreement,” Israel’s Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, said yesterday, as if realising the truce would not hold.
And that, of course, provides yet another excuse for Israel to attack the civilian infrastructure of Lebanon.
Far more worrying, however, are the vague terms of the UN Security Council’s resolution on the multinational force supposed to occupy land between the Israeli border and the Litani river.
For if the Israelis and the Hizbollah are at war across the south over the coming weeks, what country will dare send its troops into the jungle that southern Lebanon will have become?
Tragically, and fatally for all involved, the real Lebanon war does indeed begin today.
by Andrew Buncombe
The Independent
August 14, 1006
The Bush administration was informed in advance and gave the “green light” to Israel’s military strikes against Hizbollah
by Dru Oja Jay
The Dominion
August 7, 2006
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by Kevin Potvin
The Republic
August 7, 2006
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by Kurt Cobb
Energy Bulletin
August 1, 2006
As I returned recently from a vacation in Canada, I took a detour along the Canadian side of the St. Clair River which divides Ontario from Michigan as it flows from Lake Huron into Lake St. Clair. The sunny, placid scene of sailboats, swimmers and the occasional motorboat or barge bore no witness to the fact that this was a border between two countries. As I passed two vast oil refineries I was reminded that I was indeed in Canada, a country so rich in oil and natural gas that that the docks next to these refineries were likely used to ship refined products to the United States which is now in perpetual need of them.
From such a vantage point it is hard to imagine that this apparently benign unconcern for where the United States ends and Canada begins might suddenly be transformed into a pitched battle of words and deeds. And yet, that is almost certainly where these two old friends are headed.
Behind this looming turnabout is one very troubling development: Natural gas production in North America has leveled off.
by Catherine Bremer
Reuters
August 5, 2006
MEXICO CITY - Mexico’s top electoral court ordered a partial recount on Saturday in a fiercely contested presidential election, angering leftists who are threatening mass protests unless all votes are counted again.
The court’s seven judges rejected demands to re-open every ballot box across Mexico and instead ordered a recount next week at 9 percent of the almost 130,500 polling stations.
Leftist challenger Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador wants a full recount of the more than 41 million votes cast in the July 2 election. His conservative ruling party rival Felipe Calderon won a razor-thin victory, but Lopez Obrador claims massive fraud.
The electoral court could still order many more ballot boxes opened.
Dozens of leftists shouted “Traitors!” outside the court building after the ruling.
“Without a solution, there’ll be revolution,” they yelled.
Lopez Obrador, a fiery anti-poverty campaigner and former mayor of Mexico City, has repeatedly said he would not accept a partial recount, raising fears of prolonged public unrest.
His supporters shut down central Mexico City all week and are threatening to extend the protests.
“Not just a small part of the vote returns, we want all the polls re-opened,” Lopez Obrador told thousands of supporters on Friday night in the capital’s vast Zocalo square.
He met with his closest advisors on Saturday afternoon to plan his next move. Some supporters warned of violence ahead.
“We are not going to allow this. We want all the polling stations, all 130,000. They are closing the path to democracy and the only thing left to us will be violence because we are not going to back down,” said Pilar Saavedra, a university office worker.
Demonstrators left four fake coffins outside the court building with the message: “Democracy, R.I.P.”
“Israel’s war strategy, backed by the US and European governments, is clear: destruction of Lebanon’s infrastructure and killing of a large number of civilians in hopes of turning the survivors against Hizbullah. General Dan Halutz, Israel’s military chief, declared that he would turn the clock in Lebanon back by 20 years unless Hizbullah were disarmed. This is the classic definition of terrorism.”
by Zafar Bangash
August 3, 2006
Media Monitors Network
Since launching its murderous assault on Lebanon on July 12, Israel has destroyed 55 bridges, ripped up almost all the major roads in Lebanon, blasted scores of apartment buildings, and bombed Beirut’s brand-new $600-million international airport, a power plant, milk factories, grain warehouses and hundreds of homes of the Lebanese: all ostensibly to “expel” Hizbullah, the Islamic resistance movement, from Southern Lebanon. Instead, more than 750,000 people have been displaced from their homes (as of July 25); this figure is likely to exceed a million soon: one third of Lebanon’s total population, as Israeli air strikes against civilian targets continue.
By Robert Fisk
The Independent
August 3, 2006
An attack on a hospital, the killing of an entire Lebanese family, the seizure of five men in Baalbek and a new civilian death toll - 468 men, women and children - marked the 22nd day of Israel’s latest war on Lebanon.
The Israelis claimed that helicopter-borne soldiers had seized senior Hizbollah leaders although one of them turned out to be a local Baalbek grocer. In a village near the city, Israeli air strikes killed the local mayor’s son and brother and five children in their family.
The battle for Lebanon was fast moving out of control last night. Lebanese troops abandoned many of their checkpoints and European diplomats were warning their colleagues that militiamen were taking over the positions. Up to 8,000 Israeli troops were reported to have crossed the border by last night in what was publicized as a military advance towards the Litani river. But far more soldiers would be needed to secure so large an area of southern Lebanon.
by Stewart Steinhauer
www.indigenius.biz
When Israel has reduced its Arab population to 3% of national total, and that Arab 3% has stopped resisting and become
