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by By Bill Van Auken
Wednesday, Aug. 09, 2006 at 11:03 PM
On Tuesday, Israeli warplanes struck the southern Lebanese town of Ghaziyeh, killing at least 14 people. Missiles demolished civilian homes just as some 1,500 mourners were participating in a procession to bury 15 of their relatives and neighbors slain just the day before. The explosions sent the crowd running in panic, dropping shrouded corpses in the street.
Ghaziyeh’s normal population of 23,000 has reportedly been swelled by a wave of refugees. It is a predominantly Shiite town near Sidon, a region where most of the population is composed of Sunni Muslims. Many people from further south had fled there to stay with relatives and friends. There was no indication that the town was used to launch rockets against Israel or had any intrinsic strategic significance. The objective was merely to further terrorize people who have already suffered the loss of their homes and seen members of their families massacred in the relentless Israeli bombardment of southern Lebanon. The aim is to force them to flee further north, or kill them. Israeli planes have dropped leaflets on southern Lebanon announcing an open-ended curfew, violation of which is punishable by death from the air. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) has warned that any vehicles on the roads will be struck. Anyone disobeying these orders will be considered a terrorist and a target for Israeli bombs, missiles and shells. This threat, combined with the escalating air war against the south, has effectively shut down attempts by the International Red Cross and other relief agencies to bring desperately needed food, water and medical supplies into the ravaged south. The bombing of roads and the destruction of the last bridge crossing the Litani River into the southern city of Tyre has cut off the region from rest of Lebanon and the rest of the world. The head of the International Red Cross, Jacob Kellenberger, accused Israel of violating the Geneva Conventions—that is, committing a war crime—by threatening aid convoys with military attack. Kellenberger dismissed Israel’s claims that its leaflets warning of imminent air strikes somehow justified violent attacks on civilians. “By letting down leaflets, you cannot get rid of your responsibilities under international humanitarian law,” he said. The Israeli practice is akin to a serial murderer telephoning death threats to people before killing them and then blaming the victims for their own deaths, because, after all, “they were warned.” This is the real context in which the United Nations Security Council is going through the motions of considering a US-French resolution designed not to end the fighting, but to allow it to continue until US-Israeli objectives are met. This document demands that Hezbollah disarm, while it allows the 10,000 Israeli troops occupying Lebanese territory to remain and permits Israel to continue “defensive” air strikes and artillery bombardments. It essentially demands that Hezbollah, a mass movement of Lebanon’s impoverished Shiite population, commit suicide and that the government of Lebanon accept the status of an occupied protectorate. By presenting an utterly unacceptable proposal, Washington aims at provoking Lebanese rejection and then using this supposed opposition to “peace” as a justification for continuing the month-old war. In a further indication that it has no intention of compromising on the terms of its UN diktat to the Lebanese people, the Bush administration Tuesday dismissed a Lebanese proposal to send 15,000 Lebanese troops to the south to take control of the area from the Israeli army. A State Department spokesman declared that the Lebanese army is not “a robust enough entity to be able to, on their own, exercise total control of that southern area of Lebanon.” This word “robust” is endlessly repeated to describe a proposed multinational force to be sent into the region. It is a euphemism for an occupation army that will utilize murderous force against the local population to achieve US and Israeli war aims. In a rare moment of candor at the UN, the Qatari foreign minister told the Security Council on Tuesday: “It is most saddening that the council stands idly by, crippled, unable to stop the blood bath which has become the bitter daily lot of the defenseless Lebanese people.” He warned that adoption of the US-French resolution posed the “danger of civil war in Lebanon.” This is no idle threat. The proposed smashing of Hezbollah would be seen by the Shiite population as an attempt to disenfranchise and oppress them, reversing the results of Lebanon’s previous civil war and restoring the power once wielded by Israel’s traditional ally in the country, the Maronite Christian right. Such social reengineering of the country—carried out under George Bush’s slogans of “freedom” and a “new Middle East”—would undoubtedly ignite a new round of bitter sectarian warfare. What the US-Israeli offensive aims to accomplish as its immediate goal is the thorough ethnic cleansing of southern Lebanon. This is a term that never appears in the mainstream media in relation to the present war in Lebanon. It appears only in the occasional stories following the continuing tensions in former Yugoslavia, where US-led NATO forces intervened in 1999 with a savage bombing campaign against Serbia, which was carried out under the pretext of halting ethnic cleansing in the province of Kosovo. The end result has been a thorough ethnic cleansing of the Serb population at the hands of the Kosovar nationalists whom Washington supported. In the Israeli offensive against south Lebanon, the media invariably refers to air strikes and ground assaults against “Hezbollah strongholds,” a formulation meant to conceal the fact that the real target is the Shiite population as a whole. Missiles, cluster bombs and artillery shells are employed to massacre men, women and children in order to terrorize the entire population and send them fleeing north. Unlike the wave of moral outrage generated by the US media over the alleged ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, which was critical in conditioning public opinion and providing a pretext for Washington’s war against Serbia, there is no similar condemnation of Israel for the mass expulsion of a population. One major television network, the ineffable Fox News, expressed more concern for the lost dogs of northern Israel than for the Lebanese women and children buried beneath the rubble of buildings demolished by US-supplied Israeli bombs. The IDF has had little success in defeating Hezbollah or even halting its rocket attacks against Israel, but its strategy against the civilian population has proven effective. While more than 1,000 Lebanese have been killed and approximately 3,500 wounded—the majority of them women and children—one million Lebanese, fully a quarter of the national population, have been turned into refugees, most of them driven from their homes in the south. Ethnic cleansing is nothing new for Israel. The very foundation of the Israeli state was bound up with the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and farms. The Zionist leaders employed massacres and terror to drive out the native population. As the well-known Israeli historian Benny Morris acknowledged in a 2004 interview with the Israeli daily Haaretz, “A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore, it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads.” In 1967, with the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, military terror was once again utilized to drive hundreds of thousands of Palestinians off their land, paving the way for the Zionist settlements in the occupied territories and Israel’s claims over all of Jerusalem. There is no reason to believe that anything different is being planned for Lebanon. Once again Israel, in the name of “security,” is driving an Arab population off of its land. Where does this process end? There is every indication that the IDF is now being deployed to conquer Lebanese territory between the Israeli border and the Litani River, 18 miles to the north. A new senior officer known to favor a far more extensive ground assault, Deputy Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Moshe Kaplinsky, has been placed in charge of the Lebanon operation. Haaretz reported that his mission would be “to coordinate land, air and sea operations in case of a widescale offensive.” There is more at work in the current Lebanon war, however, than Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing against the country’s Shiite population and the potential annexation of Lebanese territory. Prodding the Israeli government to intensify its attacks is the Bush administration. It sees the IDF offensive as a means of furthering its own objective of setting the stage for new wars of aggression in the Middle East, to achieve “regime change” in Iran and Syria and bring the extensive oil reserves of the entire region under uncontested US control. This is the reality behind the Bush’s rhetoric, casting the conflict as one between “freedom” and “democracy,” on the one side, and “Islamic fascism,” on the other. If anything in the present war recalls the crimes of fascism, it is not the Lebanese, who are fighting an Israeli army that his invaded their land, but rather the regimes in Washington and Israel, which are utilizing overwhelming military force to conquer an oppressed people. Like the one-sided wars waged by fascist regimes that shocked the world’s conscience in the 1930s—from the rape of Ethiopia to the incineration of Guernica—the destruction of Lebanon contains the seeds of a global conflagration.
-World Socialist Web Site
www.wsws.org
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by repost
Thursday, Aug. 10, 2006 at 4:58 AM
Ehud Olmert’s political party, Kadima, currently leading the murderous charge in Lebanon, was forged out of Likud, and Likud out of Herut, the political party of Zeev Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism, a movement at odds with socialist Zionism and taking its cues from Benito Mussolini and fascism.
In 1940, Avraham Stern, inspired by Jabotinsky, formed Irgun Zvai Leumi be-Yisrael, or simply Lehi, a terrorist group dedicated to killing not only officials and soldiers of British colonialism in Palestine, but anybody, regardless of race or religion (including Jews), who stood in the way of realizing a “homeland in the Land of Israel within the borders delineated in the Bible,” as Stern declared in his 18 Principles of Rebirth (see David Ohana’s Zarathustra in Jerusalem: Nietzsche and the “New Hebrews”). Stern and Lehi, also called the Stern Gang, attempted to team up with the Nazis during the Second World War, declaring a “common interests could exist between the establishment of a new order in Europe in conformity with the German concept, and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people as they are embodied by the NMO (Lehi).”
“Neither Jewish morality nor Jewish tradition can negate the use of terror as a means of battle,” an article published in a Lehi underground newspaper stated in 1943. “We are quite far from moral hesitations on the national battlefield. We see before us the command of the Torah, the most moral teaching in the world: Obliterate—until destruction. We are particularly far from this sort of hesitation in regard to an enemy whose moral perversion is admitted by all…. But primarily terror is part of our political battle under present conditions and its role is large and great.” In other words, as commanded in the Old Testament (the reference to “obliteration” is taken from Exodus 17:14 and Numbers 14:45), enemies should be destroyed completely and their “remembrance” blotted out for all history. Such mass murder and brutality, uncoupled from any moral restraint, “shakes the Yishuv [settlers] from their complacency” (see the Wikipedia entry on Lehi and the justification for terrorism).
After assassinating Lord Moyne in Cairo in 1944, followed by the murder of the UN Mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte in 1948 (Bernadotte was assassinated in part for revealing the depth of Zionist efforts to murder and ethnically cleanse Palestinians), Lehi was integrated into the Israeli Defense Forces on May 31, 1948, and a member was elected to the first Knesset. In short, terrorism became a military and state policy after the British decided to withdraw from the Palestine Mandate and the UN General Assembly approved a 1947 UN Partition Plan dividing the Palestine into two states (or rather one state, as the Israelis not only reneged on the promise to abide by the plan, but began ethnically cleansing Arabs in short order).
In the months prior to declaring a Zionist state (in fact, declared one day before the expiry of the Palestine Mandate), according to British Colonial Office and Foreign Office files, “the Irgun Z’vai Leumi and the Stern Gang, in coordination with the Hagana, committed the infamous massacre of Deir Yassin, where 250 men, women and children were butchered and many of their houses blown up over their heads,” writes the Palestinian Christian Issa Nakhleh, a representative of the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine in New York City 1947-1948 (see Nakhleh’s Encyclopedia of the Palestinian Problem, Chapter 7, Zionist Crimes and Terrorism in Palestine; at the end of this chapter there is a detailed description of numerous terrorist crimes committed by Irgun-Hagana).
The details of the crimes committed by Zionist terrorist organizations in 1948 are … verbatim reports photocopied from the War Office, Colonial Office and Foreign Office files i d Public Record Office, Kew Gardens, Surrey, the United Kingdom. Following is a summary of the types of crimes committed by Zionist terrorists in 1948:
1. Sneak attacks on many Arab villages, resulting in the death of many men, women and children.
2. Blowing up of bridges in different parts of the country.
3. Blowing up of Arab houses and hotels.
4. Firing on Arab cars and killing many Arabs.
5. Robbery of Barclay’s Bank.
6. Assaulting British officers walking alone.
7. Firing into cafes and streets and cars, killing many innocent civilians.
8. Blowing up Arab trucks and killing occupants.
9. Attacking Arab shepherds and stealing their flocks.
10. Throwing hand grenades into churches.
11. Robbery of arms, ammunition, trucks, provisions and equipment from British Army depots.
12. Throwing bombs into Arab markets, killing and injuring many men, women and children.
13. Blowing up of trains and killing many passengers; in one incident alone, 40 Arabs were killed.
As Nakhleh notes, it was the fascist orientation of the Jabotinsky Zionists that permitted and excused these terrorist crimes. “By reason of their very objectives, Nazis and Zionists are fascists, a fact confirmed by their methods of doing things, and their attitude toward human life. This is demonstrated in their attitude toward war,” a method of war completely at odds with international humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions, a fact demonstrated once again with the invasion and ethnic cleansing of Lebanon. In essence, the bombardment and invasion of Lebanon is a repeat of the 1948 expulsion of the Palestinians:
In the first period of the Zionist war for the partition of Palestine, the Zionist forces bombarded indiscriminately every possible Arab village with mortar fire, killing innocent men, women and children. In some cases the villagers fled the murderous fire on their own; in other cases Arab authorities recommended flight to the villagers to escape the murderous fire raining down upon them for no apparent military reason…. In many cases the Zionists killed Palestinian villagers by bombardment from the air, the same type of war crime they continued for decades afterwards against Palestinians in refugee camps…. When bombing and shelling and the shooting of unarmed civilians to set an example of the fate awaiting those who would remain in their village was insufficient to force the Palestinians out, the Zionists would simply order the inhabitants to leave…. After expelling those Palestinian Arabs they had not murdered, the Zionists wantonly burned and destroyed the houses of the inhabitants they had expelled…. Many times Palestinian Arabs from villages on main roads fled temporarily for safety to nearby villages, expecting to return to their homes when the fighting died down. When they tried to return home, they found that the Zionists had wantonly destroyed their homes to make it impossible for the indigenous Arab populace to return. (Nakhleh, Chapter Nine, The Conspiracy to Expel and the Expulsion of Palestinian Arabs 1948-1950).
Although the pro-Israel (and some would contend Zionist controlled) corporate media engages in nothing short of a herculean effort to portray Israel’s invasion and bombardment of Lebanon as a justified response to Hezbollah provocation, the fact is Israel is repeating what is now an established historical pattern. In a preface to Livia Rokach’s Israel’s Sacred Terrorism, Nasser H. Aruri writes:
The personal diary of Moshe Sharett [the second prime minister of Israel, 1954-1955] sheds light … by amply documenting the rationale and mechanics of Israel’s “Arab policy” in the late 1940s and the 1950s. The policy portrayed, in its most intimate particulars, is one of deliberate Israeli acts of provocation, intended to generate Arab hostility and thus to create pretexts for armed action and territorial expansion. Sharett’s records document this policy of “sacred terrorism” and expose the myths of Israel’s “security needs” and the “Arab threat” that have been treated like self-evident truths from the creation of Israel to the present, when Israeli terrorism against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and against Palestinians and Lebanese in South Lebanon, has reached an intolerable level. It is becoming increasingly evident that the exceptional demographic and geographic alterations in Israeli society within the present generation have been brought about, not as the accidental results of the endeavor to guard “Israel’s security” against an “Arab threat,” but by a drive for lebensraum.
In addition to the Nazi philosophy of Lebensraum (ethnically cleansing an area in the interest of colonial settlement), the Israeli scorched earth policy in Lebanon, as in Gaza and the West Bank, is designed to destroy the economic infrastructure of the Arabs (a process well along in the latter areas). “The exact parallel between Nazi Germany’s willful destruction of the economies within Axis-occupied Europe, and Israel’s willful destruction of the economy of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is of fundamental importance,” notes Issa Nakhleh. “The destruction of the economies of Nazi-occupied Europe was not implemented solely for the purpose of exploiting the assets and labor of the occupied nations. It was not simply transitory wanton destruction in acts of war. It was for the purpose of expanding the Third Reich through the integration of the territories of occupied nations into Nazi Germany and utilizing the destruction of the economies of the indigent inhabitants as a prelude to their expulsion” (Chapter Nineteen, the Willful Destruction of the Palestinian Economy in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip).
In grotesque fashion, the corporate media papers over the repeat of these crimes by Olmert and the supposed “centrist” Kadima dominated government of Israel, refusing to note the obvious pattern of pathological and murderous Zionist behavior. Instead of noting or even hinting at the fascistic character of this behavior, we are told “some civilians are more innocent than others” (Dershowitz) and Hezbollah is responsible for Israel’s extermination of hundreds, possibly thousands of Lebanese civilians. “The Zionist and Israeli leaders have followed in the footsteps of the Nazis. 3,000 Zionist and Israeli political and military leaders, during a period from 1939-1989, participated as organizers, instigators and accomplices in the commission of crimes of terrorism, crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide against the Palestinians and peoples of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt,” writes Nakhleh in the preface to his online book.
All members of the Hagana, Palmach, Irgun Z’vai Leumi, the Stern Gang, the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund are charged with these crimes. Many of them became Presidents, Cabinet Ministers, Generals, officers of the Armed Forces and continued to participate in the commission of the aforementioned crimes. Many of them occupy high positions in Israeli society. It seems that participating in the commission of these crimes was, and still is, an essential qualification for advancement in the Israeli government and charged with these crimes are still at large, enjoying the fruits of their crimes. They are referred to as heroes. Many of them are being honored and received as heads of State, Prime Ministers, cabinet ministers, high government officials and scholars of an allegedly democratic state. The Palestinians who have been victims of these crimes are until today condemned to a life of a nation in exile deprived of all their rights. Their homeland is occupied. Thousands of them were murdered, hundreds of thousands have been imprisoned and tortured, suffering until today under barbaric Israeli occupation.
The victims are called terrorists, murderers and criminals and the real terrorists and war criminals are being received as respectable representatives of a democratic society.
kurtnimmo.com/?p=510
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by the sky
Thursday, Aug. 10, 2006 at 8:03 AM
This year, we are told, the Muslim commemorations associated with their calendar date 27 Rajab will occur on August 22. On this a most celebratory date in the Islamic calendar, best-selling author and Islamic scholar Robert Spencer reminds that the Prophet Muhammed made his ascension into heaven from the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, an event known as the Miraj. “[T]he Night Journey has become firmly embedded in the Islamic consciousness,” Spencer notes, “such that Muslims today celebrate it as one of the central events of Muhammad’s life.” And now, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has selected that as an auspicious date to create a light over the skies of Jerusalem such as the world has never seen since the Miraj.
If as the president of the Reform Party in Syria, Farid Ghadry claims, “Ahmadinejad is planning an illumination of the night sky over Jerusalem to rival the one that greeted the Prophet of Islam on his journey,” then it is difficult to imagine anything other than a full-scale Iranian nuclear attack. As Spencer continues, “a nuclear attack on Jerusalem or even an all-out conventional assault against Israel by Iran would be consistent with Ahmadinejad’s oft-repeated denials of Israel’s right to exist and recent predictions that its demise was at hand.” These observations are the latest from a growing list of ominous portents from Iranian and Syrian leaders too horrific to ignore.
Assuming the worst case – a default mental mode for military planners – what ought we to expect to happen the next several weeks? A possible scenario can be constructed based on events of recent weeks and months, although the groundwork for this action has taken years to develop. Let us try to outline what Ahmadinejad and his surrogates in Syria and inside Hezbollah might have on their minds.
To begin we review what we know for certain: 1) Iran has been focused on acquisition of nuclear weapons, working for years with the AQ Khan group and North Korea; 2) Iran has for all intents and purposes declared war on Israel and America (though the U.S. has not understood Iran’s commitment), outlining its war policy as one of utter extermination; 3) Iran has worked unceasingly with North Korean scientists and engineers to improve missile technology, resulting in several models of varying ranges and payloads, and with highly improved mobility over SCUDs; 4) Iran has used surrogate movements and states to support clandestinely attacks on Israel and America (the latter inside Iraq); 5) Iran has positioned large numbers of technologically advanced weapons and the troops from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard to assist inside Lebanon and Syria.
We have confirmed that Iran was a sponsor and participant in North Korea’s early July 2006 missile tests, and have shown rather convincingly that the real testing was the ability to deploy rapidly missile units, each capable of firing several weapons independently. The capstone of the test was that multiple missiles fired on schedule, each simulating many, and that the tests were frighteningly successful. Equally important was that the public misunderstood the real purpose of the tests and vastly underestimated the value derived from them.
If we were investigating this as a possible murder case we’d look for motive, weapon, and opportunity. Motive is easy. Ahmadinejad want to wipe Israel and America off the map. How do we know? Because he told us, repeatedly, in great detail, and with utmost sincerity. Weapons? We are looking at a slate of which we’re told intelligence analysts were unaware. While this is doubtful, it may be factual that analysts were cautious about numbers of missiles and rockets deployed and the willingness of the Hezbollah enemy to employ them. Those doubts ought to be resolved as hundreds of rockets rain down on Israel and increasingly capable weapons are discovered. Opportunity? Made to order, on order. It was an Ahmadinejad-created opportunity, a directed Hezbollah attack on Israel designed to bring in America and allies. It’s all happening, per Iranian plan, and its right there for us to see.
In a July 27 NY Sun op-ed, premier radio talk show host John Bachelor addresses the opportunity issue. The behavior of Syria, Bachelor notes “is meant to provoke Israel and pull America directly into the fighting.” Syria, as Bachelor points out, issued an unacceptable ultimatum to the U.S. “Knowing that America cannot agree….Syria and its sponsor, Iran, are preparing for the next stage of the escalation.” That next stage he affirms is a “shooting war.” To what point? This is where the weapons come into the picture.
Ahmadinejad has an apocalyptic future vision. Unlike previous nuclear opponents, Soviet Russia and China, for example, for whom a policy of mutually assured destruction was a suitable deterrent, the Iranian leader and his mullocracy lust for as much violence as possible. He openly calls for massive destruction in Israel, Europe, and America, and welcome any and all retaliation as the necessary precursor to activate the mysterious 12 Imam. The suspended-life Imam, buried beneath the Shia Mosque of the Golden Dome, Samara in Iraq, will return to this world as the Madhi, the Caliph to lead hordes of Muslims to global victory, only if preceded with sufficient violence. Ahmadinejad believes this just as certainly as Adolph Hitler believed in his Thousand Year Reich and the superiority of the Aryan race. And in a manner similar to his mentor Hitler, Ahmadinejad is willing to sacrifice his life to achieve his ultimate goal.
Consequently Iran has accelerated nuclear weapons development (or purchase) and missile technology. It has a broad array of weapons including several classes of missiles. Some like the Farj Class, as Michael Krauss and Peter Pham note in Foundation for the Defense of Democracy this July, were built “with Chinese and North Korean assistance,” and are capable of slinging a 200 pound warhead between 25 and 45 miles. “Israeli intelligence estimates that several hundred Fajr rockets have been delivered so far,” they say. These can go further and carry more than the generic “Katyushas.” Ken Timmerman notes that the Fajrs carry a 110 pound warhead, but what makes them so fearsome is “the tiny ball bearings packed inside” designed as a terror weapon to kill and maim civilians.
Additionally, the Iranians have smuggled several of the Zelzal Class into Lebanon for Hezbollah use. These are heftier weapons, also known as Shehab Class missiles, derived from the North Korean Nodong Class, built with Iranian financial backing. These can fly up to 1600 kilometers carrying a payload of almost a ton. Even with conventional loads these are formidable terror weapons. Bachelor notes that these missiles are “on their mobile launchers, under Iranian rocket crews” parked in Syria waiting the order to attack. Once given the green light crews will “push over the border crossings, park about 15 meters inside Lebanon, and launch on Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.”
Reinforcing the threat, Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah leader, warned that “deeper” attacks would be forthcoming. The Israelis, Bachelor says, have accounted for more than 36 such missiles inside Lebanon. They’ve already killed some, but how may more wait across the Syrian border? Dozens? Hundreds? Using the tactics just rehearsed in North Korea suppose Syria, backed to the hilt by Iran, having provoked an Israeli or American strike which provides them sufficient excuse, then floods across the border. Many specially trained battalions with scores of Zelzals and smaller payload missiles dispersed among them will lead. It is probably that many of the weapons and units are already pre-positioned.
These Zelzal missiles if properly dispersed and simultaneously launched – if, in other words, the tactical model developed by the Soviets, taught to the Iranians, and just practiced in front of the world in North Korea is followed – we could expect that existing Israeli missile defense systems would be overwhelmed. Radars would pick scores, perhaps hundreds of missiles launched from a very short distance away all converging on Israeli cities. It would be impossible for upgraded Patriot or any other deployed system to get them all. The leakers would certainly penetrate. Are they going to carry conventional explosives, a serious enough threat by itself, or will these be the ones that carry the dirty warheads, the small fission devices, or the VX nerve gas? Is this the “day or rejoicing” that Ahmadinejad threatens? Does anyone really want to wait until mid August when this attack is launched to learn?
In this scenario inaction is not appropriate. Nor is the reprehensible laundry list of appeasement initiatives drafted by State Department Arabists acceptable. The options for a diplomatic solution have already expired. State has played its hand, and sterner leadership must take charge. Both Syria and Iran must be faced squarely and confronted with the consequences of their actions before they can attack. Iran is clearly attempting to use an attack on Israel to build momentum for an overthrow of that country combined with a defeat of America in Iraq. Rather than wait defensively America must strike Iran, taking out leadership, nuclear, and missile targets. Simultaneously every Iranian revolutionary group must be supported and turned loose to foment revolution inside Iran.
Syria has to be taken out immediately. Leadership targets - regime, Hezbollah, and Iranian - must be attacked and friendly forces put into the border area for missile suppression. U.S. units watching Syria’s back door can strike and raid, thereby collapsing Syrian resistance. Israeli forces need to continue to press Hezbollah terrorists inside Lebanon to keep them off balance. It is critically important that America and Israel supported by whatever allies have the courage to assist, take the fight immediately to the perpetrators. By waiting for a first-strike we are put in a position of playing a retaliation game after we have already endured unacceptable losses in population and perception. Once America and Israel are seen as weak enough to defeat, then the international jackals will all join in for the kill. This is what our enemies hope to accomplish.
How realistic is this plan politically? Probably not very, and that is what is going to be a major setback, possibly one from which it will be extraordinarily difficult to recover. Complicating American reaction to these events is the paralyzing idea prevalent among many Americans that by solving Iraq our troubles in the region are over. This naïve perception is clouding America’s grasp of the scope, breadth, and reality of the threat. We face a crisis of major proportions. Hesitation may be fatal.
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