The spreading war in Lebanon has bared the bizarre contradictions and self-destructive nature of U.S. Mideast policy.

With one hand, the U.S. sends $30 million of food and blankets to Lebanon for the 20% of its population made refugees by Israel’s bombing.

With the other, it rushes planeloads of precision bombs to Israel, one of which may have destroyed a UN border observer post, killing four, including a Canadian major.

In Rome, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last week blocked international efforts by Europe and Washington’s Arab allies to halt the war. Not since Colin Powell’s grotesque lies to the UN about Iraq has American diplomacy so debased itself. Small wonder hatred for America is surging across the Muslim world.

Rice also proclaimed the U.S. was going to midwife the birth of a “new Middle East” by means of the Lebanon war. This latest absurdity comes from the same fools and right-wing ideologues that fathered the Iraq debacle.

Eric Margolis | Toronto Sun (read more. . .)

On our we/they planet, most groups don’t consider themselves barbarians. Nonetheless, we have largely achieved non-barbaric status in an interesting way — by removing the most essential aspect of the American (and, right now, Israeli) way of war from the category of the barbaric. I’m talking, of course, about air power, about raining destruction down on the earth from the skies, and about the belief — so common, so long-lasting, so deep-seated — that bombing others, including civilian populations, is a “strategic” thing to do; that air power can, in relatively swift measure, break the “will” not just of the enemy, but of that enemy’s society; and that such a way of war is the royal path to victory.

This set of beliefs was common to air-power advocates even before modern air war had been tested, and repeated unsuccessful attempts to put these convictions into practice have never really shaken — not for long anyway – what is essentially a war-making religion. The result has been the development of the most barbaric style of warfare imaginable, one that has seldom succeeded in breaking any societal will, though it has destroyed innumerable bodies, lives, stretches of countryside, villages, towns, and cities.

Even today, we find Israeli military strategists saying things that could have been put in the mouths of their air-power-loving predecessors endless decades ago. The New York Times’s Steven Erlanger, for instance, recently quoted an unnamed “senior Israeli commander” this way: “He predicted that Israel would stick largely to air power for now… ‘A ground maneuver won’t solve the problem of the long-range missiles,’ he said. ‘The problem is the will to launch. We have to break the will of Hezbollah…’” Don’t hold your breath is the first lesson history teaches on this particular assessment of the powers of air war; the second is that, a decade from now, some other “senior commander” in some other country will be saying the same thing, word for word.

When it comes to brutality, the fact is that ancient times have gotten a bad rap. Nothing in history was more brutal than the last century’s style of war-making — than those two world wars with their air armadas, backed by the most advanced industrial systems on the planet. Powerful countries then bent every elbow, every brain, to support the destruction of other human beings en masse, not to speak of the Holocaust (which was assembly-line warfare in another form), and the various colonial and Cold War campaigns that went on in the Third World from the 1940s on; which, in places like Korea and Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, substituted the devastation of air power locally for a war between the two superpowers which might have employed the mightiest air weaponry of all to scour the Earth.

It may be that the human capacity for brutality, for barbarism, hasn’t changed much since the eighth century, but the industrial revolution — and in particular the rise of the airplane — opened up new landscapes to brutality; while the view from behind the gun-sight, then the bomb-sight, and finally the missile-sight slowly widened until all of humanity was taken in. From the lofty, godlike vantage point of the strategic as well as the literal heavens, the military and the civilian began to blur on the ground. Soldiers and citizens, conscripts and refugees alike, became nothing but tiny, indistinguishable hordes of ants, or nothing at all but the structures that housed them, or even just concepts, indistinguishable one from the other.

Tom Engelhardt | Tom Dispatch (read more. . .)

So let’s pretend — just for a few minutes — that we have a president who is serious about creating a more secure world for our children and grandchildren. What lessons would this imaginary president draw from the tragedies and mistakes of the last five years?

Lesson One would surely be this: Although there’s a time and place for military force, technological military superiority is no guarantee of success. The weak will always seek — and find — asymmetrical methods of warfare against the strong.

More than two centuries ago, our own war of independence succeeded in part because we didn’t “play fair.” Our untrained soldiers wore dull, homespun clothing and sneaked around in the woods. In their proper red uniforms, the British soldiers were sitting ducks.

It’s the same today, except that all the technologies are more lethal. Any reasonably capable teenager can manufacture a homemade bomb with instructions from the Internet, and the more talented can turn lampposts into crude but effective missile launchers. In Iraq, we’re discovering all over again that technological military superiority is no match for a determined foe on fire with religious or nationalist zeal. In Lebanon, the Israelis are banging their heads against the same brick wall.

Lesson Two: If you can’t defeat your enemy militarily, you need to take away his motivation to fight. Overly aggressive military approaches only increase the bitterness that caused the conflict in the first place. Unless we want to become the permanent global cop in a permanent global police state, we need to change our approach.

We want peace in the Middle East? Stability in Iraq? An end to terrorist attacks? We may not achieve any of those things even in the best of circumstances. But we certainly won’t achieve them if we refuse to take seriously the idea that our enemies — like us — consider themselves good people, with legitimate grievances. Eliminate the grievances and you’re on the way to eliminating the conflict.

When progressives say things like this, right-wing pundits immediately sneer: “What do you want us to do, sing ‘Kumbaya’ with the bad guys?” No. But you don’t have to love your enemy — or trust him further than you could throw him — to recognize the benefits of talking to him and taking his concerns seriously.

That’s not being “soft.” It’s being realistic.

Rosa Brooks | Los Angeles Times (read more. . .)

By the late 1970s adverse experience sufficient to illuminate the utterly novel historical situation of the United States in the late twentieth century was in hand. Undoubtedly, it had the biggest heap of weapons of any country. Without question, they were the most varied, sophisticated and effective in the world at their job of killing people and blowing things up. The question was what the United States could accomplish with this capacity.

Certainly, if a conventional foe lacking nuclear arms arrayed itself in battle against the United States, it could be handily defeated. That was the mistake that Saddam Hussein made in 1990 when he sent his army out into the Kuwaiti desert, where it was pulverized from the air. But few wars in fact conformed to this conventional pattern any longer. Of far greater importance was what happened to two kinds of war that had historically been the most important — wars of imperial conquest and general, great-power wars, such as the First and Second World Wars. During the twentieth century the first kind had become hopeless “quagmires,” owing to the aroused will of local peoples everywhere who, collectively, had put an end to the age of imperialism. The second were made unfightable and unwinnable by the nuclear revolution. It was these two limitations on the usefulness of military force, one acting at the base of the international system, the other at its apex, that delimited the superiority of the superpower. (The paradox of impotent omnipotence was even more pronounced for the other superpower, the Soviet Union, which actually disappeared.)

Very possibly, the United States, with all its resources, would have been the sort of globe-straddling empire that Joseph McCarthy wanted it to be had it risen to pre-eminence in an earlier age. It was the peculiar trajectory of the United States, born in opposition to empire, to wind up making its own bid for empire only after the age of imperialism was over. Though it’s hard to shed a tear, you might say that there was a certain unfairness in America’s timing. All the ingredients of past empires were there — the wealth, the weapons, the power, hard and soft. Only the century was wrong. The United States was not, could not be, and cannot now be a new Rome, much less greater than Rome, because it cannot do what Rome did. It cannot, in a post-imperial age, conquer other countries and lastingly absorb them into a great empire; it cannot, in the nuclear age, not even today, fight and win wars against its chief global rivals, who still, after all, possess nuclear arsenals.

Even tiny, piteous, brutalized, famine-ridden North Korea, more a cult than a country, can deter the United States with its puny putative arsenal. The United States, to be sure, is a great power by any measure, surely the world’s greatest, yet that power is hemmed in by obstacles peculiar to our era. The mistake has been not so much to think that the power of the United States is greater than it is as to fail to realize that power itself, whether wielded by the United States or anyone else — if conceived in terms of military force — has been in decline. By imagining otherwise, the United States has become the fool of force — and the fool of history.

Jonathan Schell | The Nation (read more. . .) 

The reality is that the economic policies we imposed on Iraq were not some generic form of “capitalism”; they included the most radical business-state rules imaginable — policies that developing countries have vehemently resisted for over a decade. What’s more, imposing them at the point of a gun appears to have violated both international and U.S. laws. There’s nothing “normal” about it.

And while “democratization” and “free markets” supposedly go hand-in-hand, the truth is that Iraq’s economic transformation was mutually exclusive with the goal of forming a legitimate government, and the Bush administration knew it well in advance of the occupation.

That’s because it’s universally accepted — even among the most vocal proponents of the very model of corporate globalization that inspired Iraq’s new economy — that in the short-term those policies create economic pain, displacement, anger and civil unrest, as well as a lack of faith in government. That’s no way to win hearts and minds.

Even the man who implemented the shock therapy, coalition boss L. Paul Bremer, understood this quite well. Before his installation as “the dictator of Iraq” — in the words of one UN envoy — Bremer was a risk management consultant. In 2002, he wrote in a report to his corporate clients:[NO LINK] “The painful consequences of globalization are felt long before its benefits are clear… Restructuring inefficient state enterprises requires laying off workers. And opening markets to foreign trade puts enormous pressure on traditional retailers and trade monopolies.” Bremer noted that corporate globalization is “good for the economy and society in the long run, [but has] immediate negative consequences for many people,” and concluded that those consequences cause “political and social tensions.”

Joshua Holland | AlterNet (read more. . .)

Ireland is a neutral country. Under international law and in accord with its own constitution, it would seem unlikely that Ireland could participate in U.S. war plans. But, by January 2003, 36,000 U.S. troops had passed through Shannon airport, en route to the Gulf area. The plane which the Pitstop Ploughshares disarmed was a U.S. Navy C48 supply plane, designated to give logistical support to the U.S. Navy’s 6th fleet in the Mediterranean.

The five defendants were represented by three of the most talented barristers in Ireland. The final summations of each defense counsel urged jurors not only to ask whether the defendants were right to take action, but also ask why it is that the rest of us haven’t acted. Mr. Nix, praised by the prosecutor as “the last of the great orators,” noted that the prosecutor had characterized the action of the defendants “political” as if that were a bad thing. “I’ll tell you of someone who made a great political speech,” said Mr. Nix, “the greatest political speech of all time and that’s Jesus Christ.” He went on to quote the Sermon on the Mount to the jury. I could hear the pencils stop scratching, see the jaws drop all around the courtroom. It was an awe-inspiring moment. The shock was yet to come.

Mr. Nix told us he had recently been in a park where he’d listened to children laugh and shout as they happily chased ducks and each other around on the green grass. He thought a sound of universal happiness must be the sound of children playing.

But now his tone darkened. “Now Lebanon is burning,” he thundered. “Today, children swimming in a pool were bombed. A swimming pool is now filled with burning children. This is war.”

From the the Guardian that morning (7/18/06, p.4):

“Whatever the Israelis’ intended target, the bomb fell on a small water canal next to the Qasmia refugee camp [near Tyre, in southern Lebanon], home to about 500 Palestinians. Its victims were 11 children taking an afternoon swim in the canal. The first blast left a crater nearly four metres deep, burying many of the swimmers deep under the orange earth. Seven of the children were injured, three critically. Three others have not been found.
‘The scene was littered with small plastic sandals, several caked in blood.” Ismael, the father of one of the children, sat on the edge of the crater, his head in his hands weeping. “Children! Children!” he roared through his tears, “Children here! My son here.” He stood and looked down into the crater: “Is Hizbullah here? Only children here,” he said.’”

When he had finished his talk, Mr. Nix asked the jurors and all of us present: “What would rise you to action?

And that’s a question we all need to think about. As I write, the jury in Ireland is still deliberating. Five brave men and women in Dublin tonight wait to learn their futures. Thousands more in Lebanon and Iraq and in so many other places look towards theirs with utter dread and uncertainty - many will not have futures. The peace movement is on trial in Dublin, where a media blackout has eclipsed nearly all reporting of the trial. But it’s on trial everywhere, every time one of us makes our decision either to get more involved, or perhaps to sit back and watch a little. We are left with their bravery, with the suffering of so many, and with Mr. Nix’s final accusation: “What will rise us to action?” We are all of us on trial tonight.

Kathy Kelly | CommonDreams (read more. . .)

Stephen Kinzer, who spent years on various front lines for The New York Times, calls these regime changes “catastrophic victories,” but of course some were more catastrophic than others.

Most of these coups were triggered by foreign combatants and then taken over and finished by us. But four of them, in many ways the worst of the lot, were all our own, from conspiracy to conclusion. “American agents engaged in complex, well-financed campaigns to bring down the governments of Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile. None would have fallen — certainly not in the same way or at the same time — if Washington had not acted as it did.

“Each of these four coups was launched against a government that was reasonably democratic (with the arguable exception of South Vietnam). … They led to the fall of leaders who embraced American ideals, and the imposition of others who detested everything Americans hold dear. They were not rogue operations. Presidents, cabinet secretaries, national security advisers, and CIA directors approved them. … The first thing all four of these coups have in common is that American leaders promoted them consciously, willfully, deliberately, and in strict accordance with the laws.”

For all 14 regime changes, Kinzer assigns blame to the smug American belief that we are the most righteous people in the world and that we are obliged to force our version of righteousness on nations we judge to be backward — especially if they have a bountiful supply of minerals that our corporations want (i.e., oil in Iran, copper in Chile). In short, our military conquests have been launched under the glorious banner of Bible-thumping Christian capitalists.

Yes, of course, you immediately think of George Bush, but he is just the last of a long line.

Robert Sherrill | Texas Observer (read more. . .)