[Dean's World] Mary Madigan: Canaries in a coal mine.

[notify at powerblogs.com]

Posted by Mary Madigan:
Canaries in a coal mine.
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1154960602.shtml


   French author and philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy [1]Ponders the War in
   Israel and Lebanon.

     The problem, she explains, is not just the people killed: Israel is
     used to that. Itâs not even the fact that here the enemy is aiming
     not at military objectives but deliberately at civilian targets â
     that, too, is no surprise. No, the problem, the real one, is that
     these incoming rockets make us see what will happen on the day â
     not necessarily far off â when the rockets are ones with new
     capabilities: first, they will become more accurate and be able to
     threaten, for example, the petrochemical facilities you see there,
     on the harbor, down below; second, they may come equipped with
     chemical weapons that can create a desolation compared with which
     Chernobyl and Sept. 11 together will seem like a mild prelude. For
     that, in fact, is the situation. As seen from Haifa, this is what
     is at stake in the operation in southern Lebanon. Israel did not go
     to war because its borders had been violated. It did not send its
     planes over southern Lebanon for the pleasure of punishing a
     country that permitted Hezbollah to construct its
     state-within-a-state. It reacted with such vigor because the
     Iranian President Ahmadinejadâs call for Israel to be wiped off the
     map and his drive for a nuclear weapon came simultaneously with the
     provocations of Hamas and Hezbollah. The conjunction, for the first
     time, of a clearly annihilating will with the weapons to go with it
     created a new situation. We should listen to the Israelis when they
     tell us they had no other choice anymore...

   According to [2]Dick Cheney, our war in Iraq was fought, not to fight
   terrorism or to bring democracy to the Middle East; it was fought to
   remove the destabilizing force represented by Saddam Hussein.

     The Bush Administration hadnât publicly raised the possibility of
     invading Iraq, but in August, 2002, seven months before the war
     started, Cheney warned that Saddam would be able to seize control
     of the world's economic lifeline if he acquired weapons of mass
     destruction: "Armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror, and
     seated atop ten per cent of the world's oil reserves, Saddam
     Hussein could then be expected to seek domination of the entire
     Middle East, take control of a great portion of the worldâs energy
     supplies, directly threaten Americaâs friends throughout the
     region, and subject the United States or any other nation to
     nuclear blackmail."

   We also relied on "America's friends" in the region, our al-Qaeda
   supporting Saudi allies, to maintain stability in the Middle East.

   We're seeing the results of the [3]headless chicken strategy now. Our
   Wahhabi allies were pretty good at fooling our government, pretty bad
   at winning the respect of Muslims. Ahmadinejad and his ilk are
   ascendant, making the dream of stability in the Middle East less
   possible every day.

   Maybe it always was an impossible dream. Sometimes, a perfect storm of
   events causes a region, and the majority of a population, to demand
   war. It happened in Europe during the early half of the last century.
   It happened in America during the civil war. That's what seems to be
   happening in the Middle East now. How can we inflict peace on a region
   when people don't seem to want it? As one [4]Egyptian blogger said:

     ..we- the majority of us anyway- don't want peace with Israel, and
     are not interested in any real dialogue with them. We weren't then
     and we are not now. The Entire peace process has always been about
     getting the land back, not establishing better relations. Even when
     we do get the land back, it's not enough. People in Egypt lament
     daily the Camp David treaty that prevents us from fighting. In Gaza
     they never stopped trying to attack Israel. In Lebanon Hezbollah
     continued attacking even after the Israeli withdrawel. And the
     people- the majority of the arab population- support it. Very few
     of us are really interested in having any lasting Peace or
     co-existance. I mean, if our left is asking for war, what do you
     think the rest of the population is thinking?

     I think that the Israeli want peace with us because they don't want
     their lives disrupted. They don't want to have the IDF soldiers
     fighting in Gaza, rockets coming into their towns from Hamas or
     having to go to wars against Hezbollah to get their soldiers back.
     I think they want peace because they want their peace of mind. They
     view us as if we were a headache. We view them as if they are a
     cancer.

   Henri-Levy sees the humanity in the Israelis, so regularly hidden in
   the press, here:

     ...Up north again, near the Lebanese border, I travel from Avivim
     to Manara, where the Israelis have set up, in a crater 200 yards in
     diameter, an artillery field where two enormous batteries mounted
     on caterpillar treads bombard the command post and rocket launchers
     and arsenals in Marun al-Ras on the other side of the border. Three
     things here strike me. First, the extreme youth of the
     artillerymen: they are 20 years old, maybe 18. I notice their
     stunned look at each discharge, as if every time were the first
     time; their childlike teasing when their comrade hasnât had time to
     block his ears and the detonation deafens him; and then at the same
     time their serious, earnest side, the sobriety of people who know
     theyâre participating in an immense drama that surpasses them â and
     know, too, they may soon pay a steep price in blood and life.
     Second, I note the relaxed â I was about to say unrestrained and
     even carefree â aspect of the little troop. It reminds me of
     reading about the joyful scramble of those battalions of young
     republicans in Spain described, once again, by Malraux: an army
     that is more friendly than it is martial; more democratic than
     self-assured and dominating; an army that, here, in any case, in
     Manara, seems to me the exact opposite of those battalions of
     brutes or unprincipled pitiless terminators that are so often
     described in media portraits of Israel...

   [5]Media portraits haven't been [6]too accurate lately..

References

   1. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/06/magazine/06israel.html?ex=1155096000&en=3456b926f01c49f6&ei=5087%0A
   2. http://www.energybulletin.net/2384.html
   3. http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1146587793.shtml
   4. http://www.sandmonkey.org/2006/07/17/our-left-their-left/
   5. http://drinkingfromhome.blogspot.com/2006/08/extreme-makeover-beirut-edition.html
   6. http://www.alarmingnews.com/archives/005026.html