In Solidarity

British split with Bush as Israeli tanks roll in

July 23, 2006

The Observer

Britain dramatically broke ranks with George Bush last night over the Lebanon crisis, publicly criticising Israel’s military tactics and urging America to ‘understand’ the price being paid by ordinary Lebanese civilians.

The remarks, made in Beirut by the Foreign Office minister, Kim Howells, were the first public criticism by this country of Israel’s military campaign, and placed it at odds with Washington’s strong support. The Observer can also reveal that Tony Blair voiced deep concern about the escalating violence during a private telephone conversation with the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, last week. But sources close to Blair said Olmert had replied that Israel faced a dire security threat from the Hizbollah militia and was determined to do everything necessary to defeat it.

Britain’s shift came as Israeli tanks and warplanes pounded targets across the border in southern Lebanon yesterday ahead of an imminently expected ground offensive to clear out nearby Hizbollah positions, which have been firing dozens of rockets onto towns and cities inside Israel.

Downing Street sources said last night that Blair still believed Israel had every right to respond to the missile threat, and held the Shia militia responsible for provoking the crisis by abducting two Israeli soldiers and firing rockets into Israel. But they said they had no quarrel with Howells’s scathing denunciation of Israel’s military tactics.

Speaking to a BBC reporter before travelling on for talks in Israel, where he will also visit the missile-hit areas of Haifa and meet his Israeli opposite number, Howells said: ‘The destruction of the infrastructure, the death of so many children and so many people: these have not been surgical strikes. If they are chasing Hizbollah, then go for Hizbollah. You don’t go for the entire Lebanese nation.’ The minister added: ‘I very much hope that the Americans understand what’s happening to Lebanon.’

Only hours earlier, President Bush used his weekly radio address to place the blame for the crisis squarely on Hizbollah and its Syrian and Iranian backers. He said that his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, who is due to leave for the Middle East today, would ‘make it clear that resolving the crisis demands confronting the terrorist group that launched the attacks and the nations that support it’.

Blair is scheduled to meet Bush in Washington at the start of a US visit on Friday. Senior diplomats said that it was highly unlikely there would be a major diplomatic move to restrain Israel’s planned southern Lebanon incursion at least until then.

An advance force of tanks and about 2,000 troops moved across the border yesterday, although some of the soldiers later pulled back into Israel. The advance was backed by a fierce barrage of air strikes, including a half-tonne bomb dropped on a Hizbollah outpost. Israel focused much of its fire on the village of Maroun al-Ras, on the crest of a hill less than a kilometre across the border. It was swathed in a thick swirl of smoke.

Specially armour-plated D-9 bulldozers have also been brought in to level networks of foxholes and underground bunkers dug by Hizbollah.

Israel’s army chief of staff, Dan Halutz, told reporters in Tel Aviv on Friday that any military incursion would be limited in scope. ‘We will fight terror wherever it is, because if we do not fight it, it will fight us. If we don’t reach it, it will reach us,’ he said. ‘We will also conduct limited ground operations as much as needed in order to harm the terror that harms us.’

Israeli Radio broadcast renewed warnings yesterday to civilians to flee the area by 7pm local time last night, but reports emerged of Lebanese casualties, including a seriously injured woman who was taken to a hospital in the northern Israeli town of Safed.

An adviser to Israeli Defence Minister Amir Peretz told The Observer: ‘We are finally going to fight Hizbollah on the ground. The Israeli people are ready for this, and the Sunni Muslim world also expects us to fight Shia fundamentalism. We are going to deliver.’

But he added: ‘We have no intention of conquering and holding territory. We plan to clean a strip a mile from our border of Hizbollah bunkers and rocket-launching sites … We will go in and then we will go out.’

The Israeli air force dropped leaflets on southern Lebanon this week telling residents to leave to avoid getting harmed in the fighting. Among the hundreds of thousands of people fleeing, there were few able-bodied men of military age.

Ali Suleiman, 50, from a village near the coastal city of Tyre, said his eldest son had joined Hizbollah. ‘When he dies I will send another son and another and another. Tell Mr Blair, Muslims are not afraid - not of bombs or ships or hunger. We get our power from God.’

Hizbollah has operated freely in the border region since Israel withdrew six years ago, and is believed to have amassed an arsenal of around 12,000 rockets. More than a week of air strikes have done little to prevent Hizbollah from firing rockets at areas in northern Israel, including Haifa. Yesterday more than 65 rockets fell - a dramatic increase from the previous 24 hours. Twelve Israelis were injured.

Britain’s decision to break ranks publicly with the Americans will cause deep concern in Jerusalem, and a senior Israeli diplomat was at pains last night to play down any suggestion of a rift.

He said it would be wrong to interpret Olmert’s response to Blair’s telephone call as a rebuff. ‘The tone was very positive. We agree on all major aspects of this crisis and are greatly appreciative of Britain’s position.’

The Israeli leader’s comments, the source said, merely reflected his ‘absolute determination to deal with Hizbollah and to see that the UN resolutions requiring it to be disarmed are finally carried through’. He said Olmert had insisted Israel was hitting only targets related to Hizbollah.

Senior British sources stressed that they continued to hold Hizbollah, and its Syrian and Iranian supporters, responsible for igniting the crisis. They added that both the Syrian and Iranian ambassadors to London had been called into the Foreign Office last week to drive that message home.

U.S. Speeds Up Bomb Delivery for the Israelis

July 22, 2006 The New York Times

The Bush administration is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel, which requested the expedited shipment last week after beginning its air campaign against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, American officials said Friday.

The decision to quickly ship the weapons to Israel was made with relatively little debate within the Bush administration, the officials said.

Its disclosure threatens to anger Arab governments and others because of the appearance that the United States is actively aiding the Israeli bombing campaign in a way that could be compared to Iran’s efforts to arm and resupply Hezbollah.

The munitions that the United States is sending to Israel are part of a multimillion-dollar arms sale package approved last year that Israel is able to draw on as needed, the officials said. But Israel’s request for expedited delivery of the satellite and laser-guided bombs was described as unusual by some military officers, and as an indication that Israel still had a long list of targets in Lebanon to strike.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday that she would head to Israel on Sunday at the beginning of a round of Middle Eastern diplomacy.

The original plan was to include a stop to Cairo in her travels, but she did not announce any stops in Arab capitals. Instead, the meeting of Arab and European envoys planned for Cairo will take place in Italy, Western diplomats said.

While Arab governments initially criticized Hezbollah for starting the fight with Israel in Lebanon, discontent is rising in Arab countries over the number of civilian casualties in Lebanon, and the governments have become wary of playing host to Ms. Rice until a cease-fire package is put together.

To hold the meetings in an Arab capital before a diplomatic solution is reached, said Martin S. Indyk, a former American ambassador to Israel, “would have identified the Arabs as the primary partner of the United States in this project at a time where Hezbollah is accusing the Arab leaders of providing cover for the continuation of Israel’s military operation.”

The decision to stay away from Arab countries for now is a markedly different strategy from the shuttle diplomacy that previous administrations used to mediate in the Middle East. “I have no interest in diplomacy for the sake of returning Lebanon and Israel to the status quo ante,” Ms. Rice said Friday. “I could have gotten on a plane and rushed over and started shuttling around, and it wouldn’t have been clear what I was shuttling to do.”

Before Ms. Rice heads to Israel on Sunday, she will join President Bush at the White House for discussions on the Middle East crisis with two Saudi envoys, Saud al-Faisal, the foreign minister, and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the secretary general of the National Security Council. The new American arms shipment to Israel has not been announced publicly, and the officials who described the administration’s decision to rush the munitions to Israel would discuss it only after being promised anonymity.

The officials included employees of two government agencies, and one described the shipment as just one example of a broad array of armaments that the United States has long provided Israel. One American official said the shipment should not be compared to the kind of an “emergency resupply” of dwindling Israeli stockpiles that was provided during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, when an American military airlift helped Israel recover from early Arab victories.

David Siegel, a spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington, said: “We have been using precision-guided munitions in order to neutralize the military capabilities of Hezbollah and to minimize harm to civilians. As a rule, however, we do not comment on Israel’s defense acquisitions.” Israel’s need for precision munitions is driven in part by its strategy in Lebanon, which includes destroying hardened underground bunkers where Hezbollah leaders are said to have taken refuge, as well as missile sites and other targets that would be hard to hit without laser and satellite-guided bombs.

Pentagon and military officials declined to describe in detail the size and contents of the shipment to Israel, and they would not say whether the munitions were being shipped by cargo aircraft or some other means. But an arms-sale package approved last year provides authority for Israel to purchase from the United States as many as 100 GBU-28’s, which are 5,000-pound laser-guided bombs intended to destroy concrete bunkers.

The package also provides for selling satellite-guided munitions. An announcement in 2005 that Israel was eligible to buy the “bunker buster” weapons described the GBU-28 as “a special weapon that was developed for penetrating hardened command centers located deep underground.” The document added, “The Israeli Air Force will use these GBU-28’s on their F-15 aircraft.”

700,000 Left Homeless Says Agency, Tayyar.org (Read Article Here)

July 22, 2006

More than 700,000 people have been forced to leave their homes in Lebanon, an aid worker has told Sky News.

More than 100,000 are believed to have fled to neighbouring countries like Syria, while 600,000 have escaped cities targeted by the Israel missiles.

Kassandra Nelson, of Mercy Call, described the situation as "very bad". She told Sky’s Jeremy Thompson: "We are not able to get down to the south with our supplies - the route is completely blocked. "We’re focussing on the areas just north of the border where a lot of lebanese have fled to safety."

Ms Nelson described how the town of Keyfoun, normally home to 5,000 people, has been flooded with 40,000 people left homeless by the attacks.

She added that food and water supplies in many regions are now running out. Israel announced has opened a humanitarian corridor to allow food, medicine and other aid into Lebanon - over land to Sidon and a sea corridor to Cyprus.

The Israeli announcement followed appeals from UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and many Arab and Western leaders.

Democrat Joe Biden was on CNN’s Larry King Live tonight stating that Hezbollah is “unequivocally” the villain in this current tragedy. The Senator from Delaware was, thankfully, unconvinced by the gloomy divination of World War III eagerly purported by Newt Gingrich, among others (Of course, it is true the Bush administration fancies such a broader war).

Still, Biden reaffirmed comments by other leading Democrats like Hillary Clinton and the Republicans by reinforcing the myth that only Hezbollah is guilty of terrorism and only Hezbollah is the problem and only Israel’s security is of concern. And what to do with those terrorist states Syria and Iran?

We must believe, then, that only Hezbollah and Syria and Iran can commit terrorist acts—certainly not Israel or America. Instead, in truth, Israel is committing acts of terrorism when it attacks civilians and civilian infrastructure (i.e. over 200 dead Lebanese, mostly civilians); and the US–in its wanton destruction of cities like Fallujah and Haditha, use of depleted uranium weaponry and cluster bombs on civilians, use of snipers that indiscriminately murder non-combatants, as well as countless other acts of terror—is equally guilty.

Professor Richard Falk argues that limiting terrorism to non-state actors is: “ethically unacceptable, politically manipulative and decidedly unhistorical. It is important to recall that the usage of the word ‘terrorism’ to describe political violence derives from the government excesses that spun out of control during the French Revolution.” More precisely, the US and Israel are unacceptably limiting terrorism to those they wish to subjugate. Meanwhile, the US and Israel are merely defending themselves, while Hezbollah and Hamas are vile terrorists.

This unspeak—“the War on Terror”– cannot stand.

Justifying our murder in the name of fighting terrorism reaches the very bottom of loathsome hypocrisy.

But is it any wonder Democrats are mirroring Republicans? Can we will really expect anything more from the “second” party, who only occasionally stray from pro-corporate, pro-Israel, pro-war policy? The future seems bleak for Lebanese security, along with the state of America politics.

by Rob Gregory

This article, by Robin Wright of the Washington Post, alleges that Israel has long planned this full-blown war against Hezbollah, and the captured Israeli soldiers were sufficient pretext; while, on the other hand, the US was working with Israel in hopes of including Iran and Syria in the constructed war.

The tragedy that is the War in Iraq is not enough for the Bush administration–the grand chessboard is much broader. Neocons like the "Prince of Darkness" Richard Pearle are calling for World War III, no matter the cost to Lebanon, and then possibly Syria and Iran.

Here is part of the Wright article:  

"For Israel, the goal is to eliminate Hezbollah as a security threat — or altogether, the sources said. A senior Israeli official confirmed that Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah is a target, on the calculation that the Shiite movement would be far less dynamic without him.

For the United States, the broader goal is to strangle the axis of Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria and Iran, which the Bush administration believes is pooling resources to change the strategic playing field in the Middle East, U.S. officials say."

Read the rest here.