The real aims of the US-backed Israeli war against Lebanon

international | anti-war / imperialism | other press Friday July 21, 2006 16:06 by T

Wider objectives

This article brings to attention two articles relating to the real aims of the US backed Israeli war against Lebanon. The first discusses the backdrop of geopolitical events preceeding it and explains that this war had in fact been planned well in advance and the two soldiers being kidnapped was merely a trigger.

The second article dissects the private conversation between Bush and Blair caught on microphone at the G8 summit.

The Israelis have now been more than 10 days carrying out terrorist acts on a massive scale. More than 200 innocent civilians have been murdered by them and the whole population of Lebanon has now been terrorised. Indeed this is more deaths than the Madrid, London or Mumbai bombings. Of course it is so incredibly hypocritical the way Israel and the US go on about terrorism when this is exactly what they are doing, except on a far larger scale than any terrorist group.

According to http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/jul2006/leba-j21_prn....shtml it says:


With the full political, financial and military backing of the United States, the Zionist regime is attempting to transform Lebanon into an Israeli protectorate. This military operation is a continuation and escalation of the imperialist geo-political restructuring of the Middle East and Central Asia that began with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and whose goal is the establishment of US domination of the entire region.

and

As the Financial Times of London wrote in its lead editorial of July 17, “Israel’s massive bombardment of Lebanon by land, sea and air in response to Hezbollah’s cross-border raid last week is now about a great deal more than recovering two Israeli soldiers seized by Islamist guerrillas—and it probably always was.”

It goes on to speculate that the assassination of the former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri may not have been carried out by Syria as widely implied but as a covert operation by the Americans and Israelis because soon after they had the Cedar Revolution which installed more pro-American regime, although since it hasn't panned out exactly the way they wanted, it is time to remold the country to suit them.


If, in fact, the Syrian regime was behind the killing, it carried it out because it had become convinced that Hariri had lent his support to a US-Israeli plan to drive Syria out of Lebanon, in preparation for an assault on the Hezbollah movement, which enjoys mass support among the impoverished Shiite population and dominates the south of Lebanon. It was well aware that this would be followed by an offensive against the Baathist regime in Damascus itself.

It is, on the other hand, eminently possible that the killing was a provocation organized by Israeli or American intelligence agencies for the purpose of creating a pretext for carrying through the same plan.

In either case, the current Israeli offensive is the implementation of precisely such an operation. The Cedar Revolution itself produced disappointing results in the eyes of the Israelis and Americans. Under the terms of a United Nations Security Council resolution co-sponsored by Washington and Paris, Syria was obliged to withdraw its troops from Lebanon. The power of its Hezbollah ally, however, remained intact.

Indeed, at the height of the anti-Syrian agitation, marked by well-publicized demonstrations in Beirut organized by Maronite Christian forces and other Lebanese parties aligned with Washington, Hezbollah organized far larger counter-demonstrations that brought hundreds of thousands into the streets of the capital. With the specter of a new civil war before it, the government that emerged from the Cedar Revolution felt obliged to make a settlement which included the admission of Hezbollah representatives into the cabinet.


The second story found at: http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_1013.shtml titled: Were plans for a Middle East war escalation exposed in Bush-Blair exchange? -dissects those part of the private conversation that the corporate press studiously avoided. There is a surprising amount of information in it and it raises many questions -much more than answeres, but if read in conjunction with the above article they tally togther quite well.

For example he writes:

Blair : Who, Syria?

Bush: Right.

Blair: I think this is all part of the same thing. What does he think? He thinks if Lebanon turns out fine, if we get a solution in Israel and Palestine, Iraq goes in the right way, he's [inaudible ] . That's what this whole thing's about. It's the same with Iran.

The inaudible word is critical. Without the word, the passage is hard to interpret. Blair seems to be characterizing Syrian president Bashar Assad as somewhat naive (a �solution in Israel and Palestine,� and happy endings in Iraq, as well as Iran are far fetched), as well as a dupe who is willing to play along with Anglo-American and Israeli plans.

Note: some media reports, including the San Francisco Chronicle, have the last line of this passage as �It�s the same with Iraq.� An error, or an intentional lie?