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

by wsws Saturday, Jul. 22, 2006 at 1:49 PM

As the onslaught against Lebanon enters its tenth day, Israeli troops are poised for a full-scale invasion that has been prepared by murderous aerial bombardment, and the far-reaching imperialist aims of the war have become all too clear.

As the onslaught against Lebanon enters its tenth day, Israeli troops are poised for a full-scale invasion that has been prepared by murderous aerial bombardment, and the far-reaching imperialist aims of the war have become all too clear.

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.

The immediate aim of this war—the elimination of Hezbollah as a military and political force within Lebanon—is directed against all mass resistance to Israeli and American domination of the country. The Bush administration and its allies in Jerusalem see this as an essential step toward: 1) the removal of the Syrian Baathist regime, and 2) the launching of a full-scale war against Iran.

While the Israeli government and the Bush administration endlessly repeat propaganda claims that the attack on Lebanon is an act of “self defense” prompted by the seizure of two soldiers, this assertion enjoys no credibility among knowledgeable observers.

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.”

Similar assessments have been published in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, as well as numerous newspapers internationally. They simply state what is by now obvious: the Israeli attack on Lebanon is the realization of a long-planned act of aggression.

Recent events have placed in clearer perspective the significance of the February, 2005 assassination of the Lebanese multi-billionaire and former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

Hariri was killed by a massive explosion that destroyed his motorcade in Beirut four months after he resigned his post as prime minister in protest against the decision of Emile Lahoud, an ally of Syria, to extend his term as president of Lebanon. The United States and France, the country’s former colonial ruler, immediately blamed Hariri’s death on Damascus. Their anti-Syrian allies within Lebanon, predominantly based on the more affluent social layers, seized upon Hariri’s killing to launch the so-called Cedar Revolution, which resulted last year in the withdrawal of Syrian troops, which had occupied Lebanon since the 1970s.

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.

In an article published July 20, the New York Times reflected the frustration within the Bush administration and American ruling circles: “Despite the hopes raised by the so-called Cedar Revolution, which ended nearly three decades of Syrian control, the government remains trapped in the sectarian straitjacket of a system that apportions political offices by religion.” (The Times has no similar objections to the “sectarian straitjacket” of Lebanon’s neighbor to the south, which not only apportions all political power to representatives of one religion, but defines itself as a “Jewish state”).

This comment points to the real purpose of the current onslaught against the Lebanese people. Its aim is a thoroughgoing political restructuring of the country, in which the fiercely pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli sentiments of the Shiite masses are to be crushed and the power of right-wing, pro-US forces—above all, the Christian Phalange—vastly expanded.

This is an attempt to reverse the outcome of the Lebanese civil war, which raged from 1975 until 1990. The US, Israel and other imperialist powers, notably France, played a central role in inciting that long and bloody conflict and keeping it going, including the introduction of American and French military forces and an Israeli invasion in 1982 that was followed by an 18-year Israeli occupation of the south. Washington’s chief ally was the fascistic Phalange, which headed a coalition of right-wing forces arrayed against an alliance of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Lebanese Left.

Imperialist intrigue and intervention succeeded in driving the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) from Lebanon, but the eventual settlement curtailed the power of the Phalange, on the one hand, and saw the rise of the Iranian and Syrian-backed Hezbollah on the other. This is what Washington is determined to change. Significantly, the current Israeli offensive has enabled the US to move its military forces into Lebanon for the first time since they were withdrawn in the aftermath of the bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut in October of 1983.

The historical background

Israel has a long history of attempting to transform Lebanon, through a combination of military pressure and political alliances with right-wing forces in that country, into a virtual protectorate.

In March 1978, in the midst of the Lebanese civil war, Israel sent military forces across the border into Lebanon, justifying its actions as a response to PLO terrorist activity. Though compelled by international pressure to withdraw after its military operations had resulted in more than 2,000 Lebanese deaths, Israel maintained control of a 12-mile strip north of the border by sponsoring a right-wing militia, dubbed the South Lebanon Army, under the proxy leadership of one Major Saad Haddad.

Four years later, in 1982, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and his defense minister, Ariel Sharon, set into motion a far more ambitious plan to take political control of all Lebanon and expel the PLO from the country. Once again, a convenient pretext was found when an Israeli ambassador was wounded in London by a Palestinian assassin in June 1982. Though intelligence experts acknowledged that the PLO had nothing to do with this incident, the Begin government used the event as a pretext to invade Lebanon. In an operation entitled, with consummate cynicism, “Peace for Galilee,” Israeli troops swept north toward the outskirts of Beirut, which was subjected to protracted bombing.

The war forced the PLO’s expulsion from Lebanon and led to the Israeli-sanctioned slaughter of thousands of Palestinian refugees by Lebanese fascist militiamen.

The United States also became involved in the subjugation of Lebanon, with the Reagan administration stationing Marines in Beirut. But direct US participation in attacks on the poorer neighborhoods of Beirut (which were shelled by American naval vessels) created deep hostility, leading to the suicide bombing in which nearly 250 Marines were killed. The Reagan administration decided to cut its losses and withdraw from Lebanon.

The Israeli regime, however, sought to maintain control over substantial portions of south Lebanon. It was out of the popular resistance to the occupation that Hezbollah emerged as a powerful military and political force. The guerrilla war conducted by Hezbollah eventually forced Israel to withdraw its forces in 2000.

Israeli military tactics

The current war is not only about wiping out Hezbollah, but destroying any resistance within Lebanon to US and Israeli domination. This desired end goes a long way in explaining the means that are being employed. Israel is carrying out an indiscriminate bombardment of the south, the home of the poor Shiite population and the main base of support for Hezbollah. The Israeli military is deliberately targeting the entire civilian population, destroying whole villages and making the entire region uninhabitable.

The Washington Post reported Thursday that Israel has ordered all Lebanese living in the southern sector below the Litani River to evacuate the region within 24 hours.

The goal is to turn south Lebanon into a no man’s land so as to prepare the ground for the entry of either Israeli troops or a combination of Israeli and American forces, with perhaps other national contingents operating as an “international peace keeping force” with the imprimatur of the United Nations.

The Israeli offensive is above all a war against the Lebanese poor. The more affluent residential neighborhoods of Beirut and other parts of the country have been largely spared. This is in keeping with US and Israeli policy during the civil war, when they were allied with the Phalange against the Shiite masses and the Palestinian refugee population.

The unleashing of death and destruction against southern Lebanon is combined with a bombing campaign aimed at the Shiite southern suburbs of Beirut and against airports, ports, roads, bridges and power stations in the rest of the country. The objective is to wreck the country’s infrastructure. In order to remake Lebanon politically, it first must be gutted physically. This gives some idea of what US imperialism and its junior partner, Israel, have in store for the people of Syria, Iran and beyond.

Nor is there any reason to believe Israel’s disavowals of plans for a full-scale ground invasion. The more Israeli leaders discount such a move, the more likely it becomes. While the scale of the bombing in south Lebanon is sufficient to kill many thousands of people, it will not achieve Israel’s aims of destroying Hezbollah as a military and political force, and converting Lebanon into a Zionist protectorate.

Citing the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, NBC’s evening news program reported Thursday that several thousand Israeli troops have begun crossing the border into southern Lebanon.

The role of the United States

The United States is playing a decisive role in the war. It sanctioned the war in advance and is working in the closest collaboration with the Israeli military’s US-made and American-financed war machine to carry it out.

On the diplomatic level, the Bush administration is openly aligning its moves with the military objectives and political calculations of the Israeli government. Washington is coordinating US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s impending visit to the region with Israel to give the Israeli military all the time it wants to inflict maximum possible destruction in south Lebanon. As the New York Times reported on July 19, “American officials signaled that Ms. Rice was waiting at least a few more days before wading into the conflict, in part to give Israel more time to weaken Hezbollah forces.”

There is no precedent for the US government’s open opposition to a ceasefire. The Wall Street Journal, in a fairly frank assessment of US policy published July 19, began by recalling Washington’s diplomatic role when the last major conflict erupted between Israel and Hezbollah:

“Ten years ago, when Hezbollah and Israeli forces engaged in a multiweek bloodbath, President Clinton sent Secretary of State Warren Christopher to the region for six days of intensive shuttle diplomacy between Damascus and Jerusalem. In the end, he won a cease-fire deal that ended the fighting, at least temporarily.

“Today, the Bush administration has a starkly different approach.”

The US is fully and openly legitimizing war as an instrument of foreign policy. This is a continuation of its military aggression in Iraq, and an anticipation of future aggression against Syria, Iran, and other countries. It is bound up with the Bush doctrine of “preemptive war,” which has been embraced by the entire American political establishment and both parties of American imperialism—the Democrats as well as the Republicans.

Washington’s determined effort to allow Israel to continue the slaughter in Lebanon underscores that the current war is part of US imperialism’s drive, by any and all means, to establish American supremacy throughout the Middle East.

Whether this reckless and criminal military adventure will, in the short term, further this objective or lead Washington into an even deeper debacle in the region remains to be seen.
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Don't see this on American Media

by Aryeh Saturday, Jul. 22, 2006 at 1:51 PM

American media unquestioningly defends Israeli violence
By David Walsh
21 July 2006

Use this version to print | Send this link by email | Email the author

Over the past week, the American mass media has obediently fallen into line in defense of Israeli violence and aggression. As hundreds of civilians have died in Lebanon and an estimated half a million been made homeless by Israeli bombs and shells, the US media has consistently painted the conflict as a defensive action by the Zionist regime against provocations by “terrorists.”

The American public is deliberately being kept ignorant about the history and reality of the situation in the Middle East, as part of the combined effort by Washington and Tel Aviv to impose their brutal will on the people of the region.

The major television networks and cable channels, through which much of the population receives its information about world events, have played an especially foul role in concealing the real political and social questions. To watch the television news channels and network news programs for a single afternoon and evening is largely to bathe in ignorance and reaction.

This begins with the manner in which the Middle East conflict is portrayed. The language and phrases used are carefully calibrated to conform to the arguments of the Israeli government and its sponsors in the US.

The television news programs inevitably present the current conflict as a struggle between Israel and “terrorists.” Right-winger and xenophobe Lou Dobbs of CNN, for example, on Wednesday evening, in the course of a one-hour program, repeats this thought no less than eight times: “Israel tonight is stepping up its offensive against terrorists in Gaza,” “Israeli troops tonight are fighting Hezbollah terrorists in one of the biggest ground battles of this conflict,” “Hezbollah terrorists tonight are firing a barrage of rockets at cities and towns in northern Israel,” and so forth (from CNN transcripts).

Without fail, as well, any reference to the fighting must place the blame for its eruption on Hamas and Hezbollah, not long-term Israeli ambitions. Bob Schieffer, on the CBS Evening News Wednesday, for example, almost in passing, refers to Hezbollah as the group that “started the trouble in Lebanon.” Tucker Carlson of MSNBC explains that Hezbollah “sparked the conflict.” On CNN, Miles O’Brien comments, “At the same time, Israeli troops have moved into central Gaza. Six Palestinians killed in that offensive. That operation began last month after Palestinian militants kidnapped an Israeli soldier.”

No hint emerges from any of the television news programs that underlying the massive Israeli operation might be geopolitical aims, that what we see unfolding is an operation that has been long in the planning and only waiting for a pretext. Such a possibility is not even suggested.

The news on American television is nothing but propaganda. It has, in fact, a totalitarian character. No effort is made to educate the public. The news is delivered for the most part by ignorant individuals, unaware of history and social reality, simply repeating lines fed to them.

When there is any question about the nature and scope of the current operation in Lebanon and Gaza, the television news programs simply turn to the State Department or the Israeli government itself for clarification.

For example, when is an invasion not an invasion? When the Tel Aviv regime says so. O’Brien of CNN, on the Israeli incursion into Lebanon, July 19: “Israeli troops are on that side. They say it’s not an invasion, they say it’s part of an effort to root-out Hezbollah bunkers, strongholds and those rockets which continue to besiege the northern part of Israel.”

And when is the destruction of a country’s infrastructure no such thing? Also when the Israelis say so. Israel is not responsible for the destruction of bridges, roads, tunnels, apartment complexes, port facilities, factories. The “terrorists” are responsible. Israeli hands could not be cleaner. A parade of Zionist government officials appears on American television: on Wednesday alone, Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres (to borrow a phrase from Philip Roth, speaking with “all the cold authority of that voice dipped in sludge”), former prime ministers Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, Israeli ambassador to the US, Dan Gillerman.

All the veteran Israeli leaders have blood on their hands. They bandy about the word “terrorist,” but the state of Israel was formed through explicitly terrorist means and the various political figures have personally participated in or presided over deadly military operations against the Palestinian, Lebanese and Jordanian populations.

They are all well-trained practitioners of the Big Lie—that tiny Israel is under siege from its barbarous Arab neighbors. They know the “hot buttons” to push. They interact with their US interviewers like members of the same club. Israel, they seem to suggest, is “America in the Middle East,” practically the 51st state.

Peres appears at least twice on US television Wednesday, on “Hardball with Chris Matthews” on MSNBC and “Larry King Live” on CNN. Both interviewers are deferential to the veteran war criminal. Peres claims to King, “Israel didn’t start the war. Israel didn’t attack anybody. We gave back to Lebanon all the land, all the water.... We were living for six years in total peace. We didn’t hurt anybody.”

Peres, of course, is lying. Israeli history in relation to Lebanon is one of provocation, violence and criminality. Before Israel’s establishment, Zionist leaders envisioned a greater Israel that would include the southern portion of Lebanon as far as the Litani River (perhaps Israel’s military goal today in any invasion). In the 1950s, the Israeli government considered the fracturing of Lebanon, the establishment of a Christian state and the annexation of the southern part of the country.

Between 1968 and 1974, the Lebanese army recorded more than 3,000 violations of Lebanese territory by Israeli armed forces; 880 Palestinians and Lebanese were killed in the attacks. Some 150 Palestinian camps and villages in southern Lebanon were razed and olive groves and crops destroyed.

In March 1978, Israel invaded Lebanon, killing more than 2,000 people and making some 250,000 homeless. In one of the most gruesome crimes of modern times, the Israelis allowed their allies in the fascist Southern Lebanon Army to enter the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla in September 1982, where the latter carried out the slaughter of an estimated 2,000 men, women and children. An Israeli inquiry later found that Defense Minister Ariel Sharon bore “personal responsibility” for the massacre. The Israeli military proceeded to occupy southern Lebanon for another 18 years, during which time countless Lebanese and Palestinians suffered at their hands.

For the American television networks, however, history began when Hamas guerrillas seized a single Israeli soldier on June 25.

Defense of civilian deaths

On Wednesday, Netanyahu, the extreme right-winger beloved of the neo-fascists in the Republican Party, defends the killing of civilians to MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson. In keeping with the Zionist regime’s line (and the line of every imperialist bully), civilian deaths are the fault of the “terrorists,” who insist on mingling with the general population. “If you have to take out a rocket emplacement in a crowded neighborhood, you have to do it,” explains Netanyahu, to which Carlson audibly adds, “That’s right.” Carlson is an empty-headed yuppie, formerly of CNN where he was most famous for his bow tie, who suggested in 2001 that torture “may be the lesser of two evils.”

When Lebanese casualties are mentioned by the television news, they are inevitably balanced by reports of Israeli deaths and wounded, as though the figures were equivalent. On Wednesday afternoon, the Fox News Channel’s John Gibson, a fanatical right-winger, intones, “Hezbollah attacked the holy city of Nazareth,” where a rocket killed two Israeli Arabs. The various news commentators are astounded to learn that local residents blame Israel, first, for not providing bomb shelters for the predominantly Arab population, and, second, for launching its attacks on Gaza and Lebanon.

“Hundreds dead, more than a thousand wounded, half a million displaced” proclaim the various anchormen and women, not bothering to explain that the overwhelming majority of those suffering are Lebanese civilians. With a vast military preponderance, the Israelis are targeting a virtually defenseless population. Wednesday witnesses the highest daily toll of civilian casualties yet, with some 70 killed, and this fact is barely mentioned.

If the American television networks had the slightest honesty, they would have begun their news programs Wednesday with the fact that Louise Arbour of the UN High Commission on Human Rights suggested that Israel might be guilty of war crimes. She declared that the obligation to protect civilians during hostilities is entrenched in international law, “which defines war crimes and crimes against humanity.” Moreover, she argued that individual political leaders could find themselves charged with war crimes, adding, “I think one must issue a sobering signal to those who are behind these initiatives to examine very closely their personal exposure,” she told the BBC.

The International Red Cross, the enforcer of the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of war, also declared Wednesday that Israel had violated the principle of proportionality provided for in the Conventions and their protocols.

US television reports none of this on Wednesday.

The fighting is invariably described as “fierce exchanges between Hezbollah guerillas and the Israelis,” again, as though there were some sort of equivalence between the Islamic movement’s Katyusha rockets and mortars, and the Zionist military’s F-16 bombers, Apache helicopter gunships, artillery, tanks and armored personnel carriers.

Almost unavoidably, glimpses of the truth appear on American television news programs. Certain reporters on the spot in Lebanon, obviously affected by the mass suffering, provide some picture of what life is like under the Israeli siege.

Nic Robertson of CNN reports on the bombing of a food distribution warehouse in Beirut, which burns for hours. He warns of a “humanitarian crisis in the making,” with half a million people out of a population of 4 million displaced, “airports bombed, ports blockaded.” Cooking gas is difficult to find, he reports, and food will run out. CBS News carries a report from southern Lebanon—a father has lost two children to an Israeli bomb. Over the bomb crater, the father demands to know, “Do you see Hezbollah fighters here?” David Wright of ABC News notes, “Civilians have borne the weight of this war.”

One of the most moving encounters appears on ABC, with an Ethiopian woman, who works as a maid in Beirut. The young woman is crying, obviously terrified, cowering in a doorway. The reporter notes, with sympathy, “No ship is coming for her.”

The hostility of the Lebanese population to the Israeli war and the backing of the resistance cannot be entirely evaded. CBS News notes that Hezbollah is “drawing support from the war meant to destroy it.” Even a Fox News report from a park in Beirut, where the homeless are camped out, has to admit that there are “no hard feelings toward Hezbollah.” An aid worker tells the Fox reporter, “the refugees here adore Hezbollah.”

A British ITN report on the devastation of Lebanon, shown on MSNBC, however, is the most forthright piece of reporting to appear on the US television networks Wednesday.

Genuine bloodthirstiness also raises its head. Carlson of MSNBC casually asks the former prime minister Netanyahu if the latter doesn’t think it would be a good idea if Israel were to bomb Syria. Carlson likes the question so much, he asks it twice on his program.

Billionaire reactionary Steve Forbes, who sought the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, appears on Fox News to advocate “letting ’em fight” in the Middle East. Crushing Hezbollah will be good for stocks, we learn.

Brit Hume of Fox News somewhat mournfully asks his usual panel of Fred Barnes, Mort Kondracke and Mara Liasson “how long can the US hold out” against the pictures of refugees and devastation in Lebanon before it is forced to pressure Israel into considering a ceasefire. Not long, they regretfully reply.

The Israeli embassy, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the entire Zionist lobbying enterprise expend vast amount of time and money to intervene in and manipulate the US media. The lobbying in and of itself would not be successful if its aims did not coincide with American imperialist policy. Apart from that, the pro-Israel operation would simply be considered a criminal conspiracy.

How else to explain certain stories that suddenly appear on each television network and cable channel simultaneously? On Wednesday, for example, the various American news programs, as though on cue, run stories on the supposed threat posed by Hezbollah terrorist attacks in the US.

Each of the networks or channels treats the story with its own particular touch. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News pulls no punches. “Your World with Neil Cavuto,” an afternoon program, asks Wednesday, “Are Hezbollah cells a bigger threat than Al-Qaeda?” Brian Levin, “terror analyst,” and Wayne Simmons, a former CIA operative, unsurprisingly, answer in the affirmative. Simmons suggests, without providing a shred of evidence, that Hezbollah is “much more of a threat than Al-Qaeda.” Fox subsequently runs a headline, “FBI hunts for Hezbollah sleeper cells inside US.”

Not to be outdone, CNN asks its viewers, to most of whom the question has no doubt never occurred before: “How concerned are you about Hezbollah attacks in the US?” The cable channel’s Wolf Blitzer, formerly the Jerusalem Post correspondent in Washington, warns of “fears that Hezbollah is going to hit the US.”

The CBS Evening News with Bob Schieffer also introduces the allegation with a sensational headline, “Hezbollah in the US,” only later to half-debunk the story by pointing out that Hezbollah supporters in the US have never been charged or suspected of any terrorist attacks.

Another carefully coordinated story appears on CNN and other channels Wednesday: about a group of American Jews emigrating to Israel. CNN reports, “For Jehuda Saar, a father of three, the fighting only strengthened his resolve to pick up his family and leave New Jersey.” Saar comments, “Without shooting one bullet, without holding a gun, we’re Israel’s best weapon against any detractor, anyone that wants to destroy Israel.” However, 22-year-old Steven Rubin is more than eager to “shoot bullets” and “hold a gun”; he plans to join the Israeli army.

Rubin tells CNN that the current fighting “only makes me want to go there more. And it validates everything I’ve been thinking for the existence of the state of Israel to see how important everything is at this point.” More than a few of Israel’s most fanatical settlers come from Brooklyn, Queens, New Jersey and Long Island.

Conveniently, Arye Mekel, Israeli Consul General is on hand for the departure of the group of émigrés at Kennedy Airport in New York. He tells CNN: “For us, for Israel, it’s a huge boost to our morale, feeling that fellow Jews around the world are not deterred.”

One afternoon, one evening of US television news...
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Bush the war pig sends the weapons

by Matityahu Sunday, Jul. 23, 2006 at 10:53 AM

NEW YORK — 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 the Lebanese resistance movement Hizbullah, The New York Times revealed on Saturday, July22 .

Citing US officials who spoke on condition of anonymity, the Times said the decision to ship the weapons quickly came after relatively little debate within the administration.

The arms shipment has not been announced publicly. The officials who described the administration's decision to rush the munitions included employees of two government agencies, one of whom described the shipment as just one example of a broad array of armaments that the United States has long provided Israel, the Times said.

The munitions are actually part of a multimillion-dollar arms-sale package approved last year which Israel is able to tap when it needs to, the officials told the paper.

But some US military officers said the request for expedited delivery was unusual and indicated that Israel has many targets it plans to hit in Lebanon.

Pentagon and military officials declined to describe in detail the size and contents of the shipment to Israel, the newspaper said, and they would not say whether the munitions were being shipped by cargo aircraft or some other means.

An Israeli army spokesman said Saturday that Israel will pursue its war on Hizbullah with more military incursions into south Lebanon, but will not unleash a full-scale invasion "for the moment."

"It will probably widen, but we are still looking at limited operations," he said. "We're not talking about massive forces going inside at this point."

Israel has been building up its forces at the border and has called up3 , 000reserves.

Thousands of Lebanese civilians have fled north fearing Israel will invade and expand an11 -day-old bombardment of Lebanon which has killed 345 people, mostly civilians.

Lebanese families packed into cars and pickup trucks and clogged roads to the north after Israeli planes dropped leaflets on Friday warning residents of south Lebanon to flee for safety beyond the Litani river, about 20 km ( 13miles) from the border.

Foreigners have also flooded out of the country. Ships and aircraft worked through the night scooping more tired and scared people from Lebanon and bringing them to Cyprus and Turkey.

"False Promise"

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will go to the Middle East on Sunday, July23 , while resisting international pressure for an immediate cease-fire between Israel and Hizbullah.

Some US analysts doubt Rice's prospects for stopping 10 days of fighting because of her reluctance to talk to key players — Hizbullah and its backers, Iran and Syria.

Resisting calls from the United Nations, Europe and the Arab world, she said an immediate cease-fire would produce a "false promise" that would allow Hizbullah to re-emerge in the future to attack Israel, the top US ally in the region.

"An immediate cease-fire without political conditions does not make sense," she said.

"If you simply look for a cease-fire ... we will be back here in six months again," she added. "What I won't do is go to some place and try to get a cease-fire that I know isn't going to last."

As part of a political solution, Rice said there would be a need for a "robust" international force inside Lebanon but added that the United States was still discussing with its partners what its mandate would be.

US troops were not anticipated in any expanded international peace force for Lebanon, she said.

The Bush administration faced some pressure at home to do more to try to end the violence in the Middle East as US Senate Democratic leaders called on the president to immediately appoint a special envoy to the Middle East.

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Sen. Joseph Biden, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said in a letter to Bush that they were "surprised" that Rice plans only a brief stop in the region.

UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland said Friday he had formally asked the Israeli and Lebanese governments a day earlier to guarantee safe passage routes by land, air and sea into and out of Lebanon.

More than500 , 000people, over a third of them children, had been touched in Lebanon by the conflict and more than 100 , 000Lebanese were now in Syria, most of whom needed assistance, Egeland told the UN Security Council.

http://www.islam-online.net/English/News/2006-07/22/01.shtml
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