notes from "good muslim, bad muslim" by mahmood mamdani (part V)

(159): As the turf war culminated in a seesaw battle for Kabul, the civil war turned vicious. When it became obvious that Hikmatyar's forces were losing ground, the Pakistani army shifted its backing to the Taliban, a group mainly comprising students it had trained since 1980 in madrassahs in the North-West Frontier Province. The ISI saw the Taliban as amenable to tight control and thus a preferable substitute for the now discredited Islamist coalition led by Hikmatyar.
(161): An old man in a mosque in Kandahar...confided about the Taliban to Eqbal Ahmed, "They have grown in darkness amidst death. They are angry and ignorant, and hate all things that bring joy to life."
(172): The shift in Hizbullah's ideological and political orientation toward a secular notion of the state was the result of a leadership struggle that followed two major changes in the region. The first was the end of Israeli occupation in Lebanon and, following it, the end of the civil war (1985-1989) between Hizbullah and Amal, two organizations vying for political leadership of the Shi'a community in Lebanon. The second was the leadership change in Iran after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, which led to a less-ideological political orientation.
(172): The Hizbullah case reinforces the lesson of the contemporary civil war in Algeria: that reform is better engineered from within than imposed from without.
(175): One can conclude, therefore, that political Islam is a modern political phenomenon, not a leftover of traditional culture. To be sure, one can trace several practices in political Islam--opium production, madrasah education, and the very notion of jihad--to the era before modern colonization. In fact, opium, madrassah education, and al-jihad al-akbar were all reshaped and remade within modern institutions as they were put in the service of a global American campaign against the "evil empire."
(181): On September 22, 1980, when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran with enthusiastic US support, he initiated a war that saw the first use of chemical weapons since the US invasion of Vietnam. Nicholas D. Kristof of the NYT reported that "the United States shipped seven strains of anthrax to Iraq from 1978 to 1988." Training in the use of chemical and biological agents had been provided to Iraqi military officers as early as the 1960s. An official army letter published int he late 1960s noted that "the US army trained 19 Iraqi military officers in the United States in offensive and defensive chemical, biological, and radiological warfare from 1957 to 1967.
(183): [on Iran-Iraq] The sentiment behind it was brazenly articulated by Kissinger in the middle of the Iraq-Iran War, perhaps because he was already out of office: "We hope they kill one another."
(183): Hussein became an example of the price that must be paid by any regime that violates the terms of its alliance with the United States. The 1991 Gulf War was literally a punishment. It was the first time the United States applied the military doctrine it had forged in Laos during the long war from 1964 to 1974: "to compensate for the absence of ground forces by an aerial bombardment of unprecedented intensity, without regard to the 'collateral damage.'"... Former attorney general Ramsey Clark charged that the administration used "all kinds of weapons in violation of international law," from explosives to depleted uranium to cluster bombs. As Iraq's infrastructure was comprehensively targeted, little thought was given to civilian casualties... Eric Hoskins, a Canadian doctor... reported that the bombardment of 1991 had "effectively terminated everything vital to human survival in Iraq--electricity, water, sewage systems, agriculture, industry, and health care."
(184): But George H.W. Bush hesitated to replace Saddam... [He] faced a double dilemma. On the one hand, the Kurdish minority was the group best organized... to take advantage of Saddam's overthrow, but its objective was a Kurdish state that would also include parts of Turkey, a close U.S. ally... On the other hand, there was also the possibility that Iraq's majority Shi'a population, which had religious and cultural ties to Iran, would assert itself, surely dimming America's hopes of isolating Iran. So Bush feared bringing even a semblance of democracy to Iraq. The alternative was to continue punishing Iraq in peacetime, so as to keep the regime from arming effectively against anyone but its own population.
(185): By the time the second war against Iraq started in 2003, the peacetime bombing of Iraq had lasted longer (since 1990) than had the US invasion of Vietnam or the war in Laos. In October 1998, US officials told the WSJ they would soon run out of targets: "We're down to the last outhouse." That was two months before President Clinton... decided to unleash a round-the-clock bombing of Iraq. Round-the-clock bombing began on December 16,1998, and ended on December 19. The mission was called Operation Desert Fox...
(185-186): The UN adopted economic sanctions as part of its 1945 charter, as a way of maintaining global order. Since then, sanctions have been used 14 times, 12 of those since the collapse of the USSR. But Iraq represents the first time a country has been comprehensively sanctioned since the Second World War, meaning that virtually every aspect of its exports and imports was controlled by the UN and subject to a US veto.
(186-187): As the concomitant humanitarian crisis deepened, Iraq and the UN finally came to an agreement on an oil-for-food program.... Iraq was allowed to sell a net amount of oil over six months (initially $1.2 billion net, later $3 billion net). The revenues went directly into a UN account. The United States and Brtain required that nearly one third of this (30 percent from 1996 to 2000, 25% thereafter) be diverted into a compensation fund to pay outsiders for losses allegedly incurred because of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Another 10 percent went to pay for UN operating expenses in Iraq. The remainder was controlled solely by the UN controller who disbursed funds to contractors and suppliers of foodstuffs and basic medicines approved by the sanctions committee. But as a working paper prepared for the UN Sub-Comission on the... noted, "Of the revenue from sale, only about half ended up going towards the purchase of humanitarian goods, the majority of the rest going towards reparations and administrative costs..."
(187-188): The effect of comprehensive sanctions was deadly. Because they followed on the heels of a war that had targeted and destroyed Iraq's physical infrastructure, there was a veritable social and demographic disaster. Yet public knowledge... was slow in coming. Part of the reason lay in the fact that the UN human-rights rapporteur... was limited to identifying human-rights violations by the government of Iraq; the rapporteur was prohibited by mandate from looking at human-rights violations as a result of the sanctions.
(189): Even in this age of mass murder, the gravity of these figures should not escape our attention... By 2000, there was a consensus in both the UN and the human-rights community about the excess child deaths directly linked to sanctions: the June 2000 report to the UN Sub-Comission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights acknowledged that the total deaths "directly attributed to the sanctions" ranged "from half a million to a million and a half, with the majority of the dead being children." Even the minimum estimate was three times the number of Japanese killed during the US atomic bomb attacks.
(190): How and by whom was such a death toll justified for so long?... The simple fact is that the United States consistently used its veto on the Security Council 661 Committee... to minimize the humanitarian goods entering the country... [T]he reason it gave most often was concern over dual use... [A]s of September 2001, the United States had blocked "nearly 200 humanitarian contracts." The most notorious were those needed to repair the damaged water and sanitation systems, given that most excess child deaths were "a direct or indirect result of contaminated water."
(191-192): Forced to take reponsibility for a policy they could neither defend nor influence, many of those in charge of implementing Iraq policy at the UN opted to resign, one after another. The first to resign was Dennis Halliday..., declaring: "We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and as terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral."
(194): Although the use of napalm was banned by the United Nations in 1980, the United States never signed the agreement.
(199): Hersh noted a February 2003 poll showing that 72 percent of Americans believed it was likely that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks.
(204-205): It was when Boutros-Ghali began to assert his independence in practice that Washington's patience ran out. He criticized Washington's preoccupation with Bosnia--"a war of the rich"--and its neglect of Somalia, where "one third of the population was likely to die of hunger," and Rwanda, where he accused the United States of "standing idly by"... In the end, Washington successfully replaced Boutros-Ghali with another African, Kofi Annan... Whereas Boutros-Ghali had been unwilling to follow the NATO command and approve American demands for aerial bombing of the Serbs on a scale more than symbolic, Kofi Annan readily obliged when he stood in for Boutros-Ghali.
(210): The United States supported the call for an international tribunal to try Khmer Rouge leaders for war crimes. When it came to drafting the terms of the tribunal, Washington demanded that the mandate of the court be restricted to the period from 1975 to 1979. Had the years before or after been included, the United States would have run the risk of itself being charged with war crimes. Any scrutiny of the pre-1975 period would have directed the court's attention to the year's of US carpet bombing in Indochina, just as an investigation of the post-1979 period would have brought to light the political cover the United States provided the Khmer Rouge, both at the UN and internationally, against the Vietnamese, who invaded Cambodia in 1978.
(215): In a recent interview with the Israeli historian Benny Morris, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak spoke of Palestinians in words that few American racists would dare utter in print: "They are products of a culture... in which to tell a lie creates no dissonance. They don't suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture. Truth is seen as an irrelevant category. There is only that which serves your purpose and that which doesn't."
(217): Unlike crime, political acts make sense only when linked to collective greivances. Whether we define them as acts of terror or of resistance, we need to recognize a feature common to political acts: they appeal for popular support and are difficult to sustain in the absence of it. If there is a logic behind the practice of collective punishment, it is the acknowledgement that collective punishment can only be a response to political acts, not criminal deeds.
(222): We need to recognize the suicide bomber, first and foremost, as a category of soldier. Does not the suicide bomber join both aspects of our humanity, particularly as it has been fashioned by political modernity, in that we are willing to subordinate life--both our own and that of others--to objectives we consider higher than life? Suicide bombing needs to be understood as a feature of modern political violence rather than stigmatized as a mark of barbarism.

lebanon intrusion:
The uprising took place during a general strike to protest the Siniora cabinet's refusal to raise the minimum wage and increase fuel subsidies in the face of rising prices in food and other basic commodities. The tense atmosphere was exacerbated by the politicized firing of a popular brigadier general in charge of security at the Beirut Airport and efforts to close down Hezbollah's telecommunication network, which had played an important role in mobilizing defenses and relief operations during the massive Israeli bombing campaign against Lebanon in 2006. The Bush administration had been strongly encouraging the prime minister to enact such policies.
(...) Lebanon's "duly elected government," a legacy of a complex system of confessional representation imposed by French colonialists as a means of divide-and-rule, consists of a slim majority made up by the May 14th Alliance, a broad coalition consisting of 17 parties dominated by center-right parties led by Sunni Muslims, a center-left party led by Druze, and far-right parties led by Christian Maronites. The opposition March 8th Alliance consists of 41 parties, led by the radical Shia Hezbollah, the more moderate Shia Amal, the centrist Maronite-led Free Patriotic Movement, as well as a various leftist and Arab nationalist parties.
(...) The resolution also over-simplifies the complicated dimensions of the conflict by putting the onus for the violence exclusively on Hezbollah. For example, the resolution accuses Hezbollah of sacking and burning the buildings housing the television studios and newspaper of a pro-government party, when it fact it was SSNP partisans that did so. Similarly, the resolution also blames Hezbollah for "fomenting riots" and "blocking roads," when in fact these were actions by trade unionists and others as part of a general strike pressing demands for greater economic justice, an agenda supported by those from across the political and sectarian divide.
(...) Though the military actions by the militias of Hezbollah and its allies were clearly illegitimate, the hyperbolic language of the resolution went to rather absurd extremes. For example, the resolution referred to Hezbollah's armed mobilization, in which its forces briefly controlled key neighborhoods in West Beirut, as an "illegal occupation of territory under the sovereignty of the Government of Lebanon." By contrast, not once in Israel's 22-year occupation of southern Lebanon between 1978 and 2000, which took place in defiance of no less than 10 UN Security Council resolutions, did Congress ever go on record condemning Israel's actions or even referring to it as the illegal occupation that it was.
(...) In reality, there is little evidence to suggest that Syrian and Iranian influence on this populist Shia party and its allies is any greater than U.S. influence on some of Lebanon's other political factions. Indeed, many Lebanese blame the United States for much of the political crisis which has paralyzed the government during the past year and which culminated in last month's violence as a result of the Bush administration's pressure on Siniora and his allies to resist any compromise with the opposition on economic, political or security issues.
(...) The resolution went as far as calling upon the United Nations Security Council to "prohibit all air traffic between Iran and Lebanon and between Iran and Syria" on the grounds that it might be used to bring in arms to the Hezbollah militia, thereby placing a large bipartisan majority in Congress on record calling for the disruption of legitimate commercial activities between foreign countries due to the possibility that a few of the thousands of annual flights may include contraband armaments. This demand is particularly ironic given that the U.S. government transports tens of billions of dollars worth of armaments to repressive governments in the greater Middle East region every year, as well as arming private militias in Iraq and separatist guerrillas in Iran.
(...) Other observers, including Paul, warned of the consequences of further U.S. meddling in Lebanon's internal conflicts. "This resolution leads us closer to a wider war in the Middle East," Paul said. "It involves the United States unnecessarily in an internal conflict between competing Lebanese political factions and will increase rather than decrease the chance for an increase in violence. The Lebanese should work out political disputes on their own or with the assistance of regional organizations like the Arab League."
(...) The resolution correctly observes how "United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1559, 1680, and 1701 call for the disbanding and disarming of all militias in Lebanon" but that "Hezbollah has contemptuously dismissed the requirements of the United Nations Security Council by refusing to disarm." However, there is nothing in the resolution regarding militias allied with the U.S.-backed prime minister, which are also required to disarm. Siniora's Future Movement militia, which Hezbollah fighters battled on the streets of West Beirut, has emerged since these UN resolutions passed without any apparent disapproval from Washington.
(...) Yet, for the Democratic-controlled Congress, as with the Bush administration, the complex cleavages of the contemporary Middle East can be simply understood as a matter of good versus evil. "We have a situation here where a democratic, freedom-loving, sovereign people are insisting on the results of their own self-determined election that they came to through democratic processes and are doing that in the face of outside interference in the form of armed opposition, murders, assassinations that are being sponsored by Hezbollah, financed by the Iranian and Syrian regimes," Ackerman said.
(...) Hezbollah's provocative military action in May, which violated its pledge to use its armed militia only in defense of the country from Israel and not against its fellow Lebanese, has hurt its standing among the country's non-Shia majority, who now see them more as advancing their own parochial interests than serving the role they had previously embraced as a national resistance movement against foreign occupation forces. Washington's support for Israel's military attacks on civilian targets in Lebanon and this latest resolution backing rival armed factions, however, does little to encourage Hezbollah to disarm or promote efforts to advance nonviolent conflict resolution and national reconciliation.

sabra and shatila at 25:
Fifteen years later, Robert Fisk, the journalist who had been one of the first on the scene, said: “Had Palestinians massacred 2,000 Israelis 15 years ago, would anyone doubt that the world’s press and television would be remembering so terrible a deed this morning? Yet this week, not a single newspaper in the United States – or Britain for that matter – has even mentioned the anniversary of Sabra and Shatila.”[12] Twenty-five years later it is no different.
(...) As soon as the peacekeeping force was withdrawn, the then Israeli Defence Minister Ariel Sharon moved to root out some “2,000 terrorists” he claimed were still hiding in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. After totally surrounding the refugee camps with tanks and soldiers, Sharon ordered the shelling of the camps and the bombardment continued throughout the afternoon and into the evening of 15 September leaving the “mopping-up” of the camps to the Lebanese right-wing Christian militia, known as the Phalangists. The next day, the Phalangists - armed and trained by the Israeli army - entered the camps and proceeded to massacre the unarmed civilians while Sharon and his men watched the entire operations. More grotesquely, the Israeli army ensured there was no lull in the 36 hours of killings and illuminated the area with flares at night and tightened their cordon around the camps to make sure that no civilian could escape the terror that had been unleashed.
(...) It took an International Commission of Inquiry headed by Sean MacBride to find that Israel was “directly responsible” because the camps were under its jurisdiction as an occupying power. [16] Yet, despite the UN describing the heinous operation as a “criminal massacre” and declaring it an act of genocide [17], no one was prosecuted.

israel's conscious crimes:
This week marks a year since the end of hostilities now officially called the Second Lebanon War by Israel. A month of fighting -- mostly Israeli aerial bombardment of Lebanese civil infrastructure and residential areas, and rocket attacks from the Shia militia Hizbullah on northern Israel in response -- ended with more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians and a small but unknown number of Hizbullah fighters dead, as well as 119 Israeli soldiers and 43 Israeli civilians.
(...) Other recent reports have revealed that one of the main justifications for Hizbullah's continuing resistance -- that Israel failed to withdraw fully from Lebanese territory in 2000 -- is now supported by the UN. Last month its cartographers quietly admitted that Lebanon is right in claiming sovereignty over a small fertile area known as the Shebaa Farms, still occupied by Israel. Israel argues that the territory is Syrian and will be returned in future peace talks with Damascus, even though Syria backs Lebanon's position. International media has ignored the UN's admission.
(...) A shocking aspect of the war was Israel's firing of at least a million cluster bombs, old munitions supplied by the US with a failure rate as high as 50 per cent, in the last days of fighting. The tiny bomblets, effectively small land mines, were left littering south Lebanon after the UN-brokered ceasefire, and are reported so far to have killed 30 civilians and wounded at least another 180. Israeli commanders have admitted firing 1.2 million such bomblets, while the UN puts the figure closer to three million.
(...) An initial report by the army, leaked to the Israeli media, discovered that the cluster bombs had been fired into Lebanese population centres in gross violation of international law. Udi Adam, head of the Northern Command at the time, apparently gave the order. A US State Department investigation reached a similar conclusion.
(...) Another claim, one that Israel hoped might justify the large number of Lebanese civilians it killed during the war, was that Hizbullah fighters had been regularly hiding and firing rockets from among south Lebanon's civilian population. Human rights groups found scant evidence of this, but a senior UN official, Jan Egeland, offered succour by accusing Hizbullah of "cowardly blending". There were always strong reasons for suspecting the Israeli claim to be untrue. Hizbullah had invested much effort in developing an elaborate system of tunnels and underground bunkers in the countryside, that Israel knew little about, in which it hid its rockets and from which fighters attacked Israeli soldiers as they tried to launch a ground invasion. Also, common sense suggested that Hizbullah fighters would be unwilling to put their families, who live in south Lebanon's villages, in danger by launching rockets from among them. Now Israeli front pages are carrying reports from Israeli military sources that put in serious doubt Israel's claims. Since the war's end, Hizbullah has apparently relocated most of its rockets to conceal them from the UN peacekeepers that have been carrying out extensive searches of south Lebanon to disarm Hizbullah under the terms of Resolution 1701. According to the UN, some 33 of these underground bunkers -- or more than 90 per cent -- have been located and the Hizbullah weapons discovered there, including rockets and launchers, destroyed. The Israeli media has noted that the Israeli army calls these sites "nature reserves"; similarly, the UN has made no mention of finding urban-based Hizbullah bunkers. Relying on military sources, Haaretz reported last month: "Most of the rockets fired against Israel during the war last year were launched from the 'nature reserves'." In short, even Israel is no longer claiming that Hizbullah was firing its rockets from among civilians.
(...) Hizbullah's movement of some rockets into villages should be condemned. But not by Israel, whose army is breaking international law by concealing its weapons in civilian areas on a far grander scale.
(...) As a first-hand observer of the fighting from Israel's side of the border last year, I noted on several occasions that Israel had built many of its permanent military installations, including weapons factories and army camps, and set up temporary artillery positions next to -- and in some cases inside -- civilian communities in the north of Israel. Many of those communities are Arab: Arab citizens constitute about half of the Galilee's population.
(...) Human Rights Watch, however, has argued that, because Hizbullah's rockets were not precise, every time they were fired into Israel they were effectively targeted at civilians. Hizbullah was therefore guilty of war crimes in using its rockets, whatever the intention of the launch teams. In other words, according to this reading of international law, only Israel had the right to fire missiles and drop bombs because its military hardware is more sophisticated -- and, of course, more deadly.
(...) The evidence so far indicates that Israel: first, established legitimate grounds for Hizbullah's attack on the border post by refusing to withdraw from the Lebanese territory of the Shebaa Farms in 2000; second, initiated a war of aggression by refusing to engage in talks about a prisoner swap offered by Hizbullah; third, committed a grave war crime by intentionally using cluster bombs against south Lebanon's civilians; fourth, repeatedly hit Lebanese communities, killing many civilians, even though the evidence is that Hizbullah fighters were not to be found there; and fifth, put its own, mainly Arab, civilians in great danger by making their communities targets for Hizbullah attacks and failing to protect them.

interview in al-ahram:
On Tuesday, Lebanon commemorated one year after the end of the 33-day US- backed Israeli war last summer that left 2,023 civilians dead and 3,740 wounded, razing to the ground entire villages and towns in south Lebanon. Lebanon's Shia population were made to pay the heaviest price during the war. The ostensible goal was to break its support and sympathy for Hizbullah, destroying the resistance movement's social and political base.
(...) The reverse effect occurred. Qasim says that the party's popularity in the aftermath of the war was never higher. "Sympathy for the party grew during and after the war, and so too our popularity. We have full support from our constituency." Qasim points out that Hizbullah has been inundated with requests, most from Lebanese youth, to join the resistance.
(...) "No one in Hizbullah's leadership made a statement about changing or amending the Taif Agreement," Qasim responds. "Our discourse has always been one of honouring Taif because it is an agreement that Lebanon reached after a period of suffering that lasted for 15 years, and therefore we cannot talk about a new agreement. In Hizbullah we believe that what is needed is to implement Taif and not to amend it."

open-air prison in gaza:
A good million Palestinians know from experience that if you occupy them militarily, coop them up in 360 square kilometers, destroy and loot their houses, cut off electricity and drinking water, regularly bomb them, make them see they have no future and if finally you blockade their economy and arm the leaders, then the very least that will happen is that they set about shooting at one another.
(...) The United States and its allies occupy that country after having submitted it to thirteen years of economic sanctions as criminal as those imposed on Palestine. They violate at will the thirty articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, human decency and common sense, while their word-gunslingers, those authoritative editorialists, offer sermons on civil war in the Arab world and the need for action by the UN : "(the Israeli) Prime Minister suggested yesterday the deployment of an International force on the frontier between Gaza and Egypt." What a super idea! Why did they not ask for it during their 40 years of occupation and wars of aggression against their neighbors from their very founding as a State? Why no calls for the UN to deploy Blue Helmets in the military airfields of the United States and Europe so as to prevent the air raids on Iraq? Why no buffer force sent to northern Israel to halt the advance of its tanks into Lebanon? Why does the UN not mount an economic boycott against Israel, responsible for thousands of deaths in the Middle East and for the destruction of Lebanon and Gaza?
(...) How come an editorialist, equipped with a style manual to talk about democracy and social principles, is not led to reflect on the fact that if the Western blockade works to impede the supply of food to Gaza but not of weapons, the Palestinians, rather than invite each other to tea and cakes, will use those weapons for a fratricidal war?
(...) At the same time, the moral condition of the editorialists prevents them from regarding the Palestinians as anything but rats who deserve the fate they suffer, for that reason they take refuge in political, social and cultural pretexts like the terrorist character, factional behavior and the presence of Islamism.

achcar interviewed on developments in iraq and lebanon:That's what they tried to achieve through the "surge", chiefly through a lot of spin. But it very blatantly failed. The major goal was to create conditions through which they would change the political alignments in Iraq and set up a new alliance that would be close to the US and enable Washington to better manoeuvre in the country. Moqtada al-Sadr was a chief target of this whole operation and we can measure its failure by the way he is now back and very much prominent in the news, after having vanished for a while.
(...) The February 2006 Samarra attack [a devastating Sunni sectarian attack on the Shia mosque there] was a watershed in the Iraqi situation. That is when the image of al-Sadr turned from one of non-sectarian Arab-cum-Iraqi nationalist into one of leader of a Shiite sectarian militia. He is trying now to restore his previous image. He probably believes that the climate is right for a new attempt -- after over a year during which the Shiites let off sectarian steam very intensively in response to the sectarian attacks they had suffered.
(...) Well there are. Al-Sadr's new tone is generally welcomed by the nationalists –in contrast to the sectarians -- among Arab Sunnis. If you put aside the al-Qaida type of anti-US anti-Shiite fanatics, there are two types of forces among the Iraqi Arab Sunnis: on the one hand, those chiefly spurred on by sectarian and anti-Iranian views, which are close to the Saudis and willing to make deals with the US against the Shiites. And, on the other hand, those who consider the US as the main, most dangerous, enemy and who are therefore willing to make an alliance with anti-US Shiite forces -- provided (as the fear of Iran is common to all Sunnis) these are forces that they deem to be independent enough from Iran. That is the case of Moqtada al-Sadr. Although he has obvious links with Tehran, which backed him increasingly over the last few years, he retains a certain degree of political autonomy and is known to be fiercely independent. His followers don't shy away from making statements criticising Iran. For instance, criticising the recent meeting between Iranian and US representatives over the issue of Iraq as unacceptable meddling into Iraq's affairs -- as did various forces among the Sunnis.
(...) It can't be so simple. I have been describing what al-Sadr is trying to do. I didn't imply that he is going to succeed. He can certainly find a certain measure of success, but a major success allowing him to be the winner in this whole confrontation is quite difficult to predict at this point. He's facing quite difficult conditions. The Allawi operation is still going on. It is essentially an attempt at building a cross-sectarian political coalition using the lure of US support in order to topple the Maliki government and bring Allawi back to the helm as the "strong man" and saviour of Iraq. Although I wouldn't bet one penny on the success of this operation, you can't exclude it totally.
(...) What is certain though is that we will see crucial changes in the coming period. For the Bush administration, the ongoing "surge" is a double or quits operation. They are under intensive pressure in the US. Although we have seen how the Democrats have shied away from pressing forward the issue of a timetable for troop withdrawal -- the issue of Iraq is prominent in the presidential election and US public opinion has become much opposed to the continuation of the war.
(...) So I can't see any winning strategy or winning card for the US in Iraq. The question is not whether the US can achieve victory or not. The failure is already there and is fundamentally irreversible. The problem is how much further harm they can do to Iraq by trying to implement crazy schemes that are doomed from the start.
[lebanon]
(...) There are two kinds of "conspiracy theory" on this issue in Lebanon: on the one hand, the pro-US or "governmental majority" forces claim that "Fatah al-Islam" are manipulated by the Syrian services. They claim that the recent clashes were provoked in order to counter the international tribunal on the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri that Washington, Paris and London had just moved through the UN Security Council. On the other hand, you have those, many of whom refer to the article by Hersh, who claim that "Fatah al-Islam" has been manipulated by the governmental majority itself, and behind them the Saudis and the United States.
(...) It is known, for instance, that the key leader of "Fatah al-Islam" had been jailed in Syria previously -- so there is no solid ground to suspect that the Syrian regime stands behind his group, except for the fact that the situation flared up just after the UNSC voted on the international tribunal.
(...) It is true as well that this brand of Sunni fanatical fundamentalism is usually linked to Saudi sources, whether official or unofficial. It might well be that, at some point, the Hariri bloc had a relationship with such a Sunni Islamic fundamentalist group, which adheres to an anti-Shiite sectarian tradition (and has eventually joined al-Qaida), with a view to a possible all-out confrontation with the Lebanese Shiites mainly represented by Hezbollah. But from that to infer that they are manipulating this group is also quite baseless.
(...) think that whatever ignited the confrontation, one thing is obvious: it has been immediately exploited for a very definite agenda. This was (1) to test the ability of the Lebanese army to confront other forces, starting with the easiest -- Palestinians, against whom Lebanese Shiite and Sunni soldiers alike can be united with no major risk of split along sectarian lines; and (2) to get the army to enter this Palestinian refugee camp in Northern Lebanon and take control of it under the pretext of fighting this group.
(...) This is why at some point Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, came out saying that he considered the penetration by the Lebanese army of the camp to be a "red line." Why did he say so, despite Hezbollah initially expressing its solidarity with the Lebanese army? Because he realised that this Palestinian camp has become a testing ground for the ability of the Lebanese army to implement a task that is part of UNSC Resolution 1559 (sponsored by Washington, London and Paris in 2004) calling for the disarming of both the Palestinian camps and Hezbollah. Nasrallah became aware that the battle of Nahr el-Bared is but a first step on a path that leads ultimately to the fight against his own forces. You can see that in the broad display of active solidarity with the Lebanese army in the ongoing confrontation: Washington is sending weapons and inciting all its allies to send whatever hardware the Lebanese army needs.
(...) The [general] situation is at a real dead end, which means that it is tense and dangerous. For months now, the country has been on the verge of a sectarian explosion, which could ignite new bloody fighting or even a new civil war.
(...) Hezbollah's strategy got bogged down completely. This is a result of the limitation inherent in their sectarian view of things, in their conception of power sharing among sectarian communities and existing power blocs. Through a series of clumsy positions, in which their alliance with the Syrian dictatorship played no minor role, they comforted the present sectarian division in this country between Shiites and Sunnis.
(...) Although at some point, it appeared at the beginning of the Israeli offensive last summer that there was a reduction in sectarianism, it soon came back very strongly. Hezbollah's sectarian nature made it easy for the Hariri camp to exploit Sunni sectarian feelings in very blatant ways. So the whole situation has got bogged down and the opposition has lost the political initiative that they had when they started their mobilisation at the beginning of last winter.
(...) The Shiite Hezbollah and Amal, the Maronite General Aoun and many other smaller forces. In sectarian terms, that means the overwhelming majority of the Shiites plus a sizeable fraction of the Christians in alliance against the majority of the Sunnis, plus the majority of the Druze and another fraction of the Christians. This is the configuration of forces in Lebanon as it stands now -- as sectarian as it used to be at the peak of the civil war.

abukhalil on the lebanese shelling:
I have never felt more isolation as someone who speaks out on Palestine as I have felt in the past few days. There is an overwhelming, unanimous competition by people and organizations to rally behind the Lebanese army and to pay tribute to the troops. Not a single political party in Lebanon has spoken out, none, against the indiscriminate shelling of the refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared. Hizbullah has taken a position in support of the army, as has the Lebanese Communist Party, and other organizations. Of course we didn't expect anything different from the March 14 movement, but among the opposition it has been a competition of who can show more support. General 'Awn, the main Christian opposition leader has been totally, unconditionally supportive of the Lebanese army and its resort to what is called the "decisive military option" -- which means to allow the Lebanese army to enter or invade the camps.
(...) What is so ironic is yes, they said all that and they said more. They used the same words uttered by the Israelis when they bombed the refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza. It's the same language the US uses in Afghanistan and Iraq: 'They are hiding behind civilians. They are using civilians as human shields. Hitting civilians is a mistake, the army cares about the civilian population.' All this propaganda of collateral damage is being used by the government.
(...) You look at Gaza and you find that the American funded, financed and armed militias of Muhammad Dahlan and [Palestinian Authority President] Mahmoud Abbas were tasked with fighting and killing other Palestinians. You look at Lebanon today and you find a Lebanese government financed, funded and armed by the American government and they are doing the same. Palestine and Lebanon have become more important not so much because of any attention that the US administration is willing to pay to those places, but particularly because of the failure of the American project in Iraq. So with victory eluding Bush in Iraq there is a desperate attempt to make some progress -- to use that cliché -- somewhere other than Iraq. And the places favored are Palestine and Lebanon because in those places there are US-armed and financed puppet militias that the US can use against its enemies and the enemies of Israel.

fisk in lebanon:
The Lebanese soldiers claim they try never to hurt civilians (I can think of another army which says that!), but did so many Palestinians have to be killed or wounded for the crimes of a few, some - we do not know how many - not even from "Palestine" but from Syria or Yemen or Saudi Arabia? Just behind me was the checkpoint where the gunmen of Chaker el-Absi (born Jericho 1955, later a MiG pilot in Libya, according to his brother in Jordan) butchered four soldiers at the weekend, slitting their throats and leaving their severed heads on the road.
(...) But victimhood - and let us not doubt the integrity or the dignity of that victimhood - has become almost a pit for the Palestinians, into which they have fallen. The catastrophe of their eviction and flight from Palestine in 1948, their near-destruction in the Lebanese civil war, their cruel suffering at the hands of Israeli invaders - the massacre of Sabra and Chatila in 1982 where 1,700 were slaughtered - and now this, have sealed these people into a permanent prison of suffering.

fisk on clashes in lebanon's refugee camps:
And then comes the crackle-crackle of rifle fire and a shoal of bullets drifts out of the camp. A Lebanese army tank fires a shell in return and we feel the faint shock wave from the camp. How many are dead? We don’t know. How many are wounded? The Red Cross cannot yet enter to find out. We are back at another of those tragic Lebanese stage shows: the siege of Palestinians.
(...) Only this time, of course, we have Sunni Muslim fighters in the camp, in many cases shooting at Sunni Muslim soldiers who are standing in a Sunni Muslim village. It was a Lebanese colleague who seemed to put his finger on it all. “Syria is showing that Lebanon doesn’t have to be Christians versus Muslims or Shia versus Sunnis,” he said. “It can be Sunnis versus Sunnis. And the Lebanese army can’t storm into Nahr el-Bared. That would be a step far greater than this government can take.”
(...) And there is the rub. To get at the Sunni Fatah al-Islam, the army has to enter the camp. So the group remains, as potent as it was on Sunday when it staged its mini-revolution in Tripoli and ended up with its dead fighters burning in blazing apartment blocks and 23 dead soldiers and policemen on the streets.

democrats and israel:
During the five weeks of fighting, 119 Israeli soldiers and 43 Israeli civilians were killed. It was the Lebanese who suffered the most, however. Massive Israeli bombardments took the lives of more than 1,100 people, the vast majority of whom were innocent civilians, and caused more than $3.5 billion in damage to the country’s civilian infrastructure and widespread environmental damage.
(...) Yet Congress continues to justify last summer’s widespread attacks on civilian targets by the U.S.-supplied Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) by claiming that Hezbollah used the Lebanese civilian population as “human shields,” thereby seeking to protect America’s closest Middle East ally from its moral and legal responsibility for its war crimes. For example, on April 25, the House of Representatives passed by a near-unanimous voice vote a resolution (H. Res. 125) claiming that “throughout the summer of 2006 conflict with the State of Israel, Hezbollah forces utilized human shields to protect themselves from counterattacks by Israeli forces.” In defense of the Bush administration’s controversial backing of Israel’s 35-day assault on Lebanon, the Democratic-led House cited President George W. Bush’s claim that “Hezbollah terrorists used Lebanese civilians as human shields, sacrificing the innocent in an effort to protect themselves from Israeli response” and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s assertion that “`Hezbollah and its sponsors have brought devastation upon the people of Lebanon, … exploiting them as human shields.”
(...) Investigations by independent human rights groups during last summer’s fighting did not find clear evidence that Hezbollah deliberately used civilians to shield their personnel or equipment from Israeli strikes. For example, a detailed study published at the end of the fighting in August by Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that they had found “no cases in which Hezbollah deliberately used civilians as shields to protect them from retaliatory IDF attack.” Similarly, Amnesty International, in a well-documented report published in November observed, “While the presence of Hizbullah’s fighters and short-range weapons within civilian areas is not contested, this in itself is not conclusive evidence of intent to use civilians as ‘human shields’, any more than the presence of Israeli soldiers in a kibbutz is in itself evidence of the same war crime.”
(...) In any case, the vast majority of Israeli strikes in civilian areas were nowhere near Hezbollah military activity. As Human Rights Watch noted, “In dozens of attacks, Israeli forces struck an area with no apparent military target. In some cases, the timing and intensity of the attack, the absence of a military target, as well as return strikes on rescuers, suggest that Israeli forces deliberately targeted civilians.” Similarly, Amnesty International reported that Israeli forces “carried out indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks on a large scale,” including “those on civilian infrastructure” and “direct attacks on civilian objects.” Furthermore, they reported that “These attacks seem to have been aimed at inflicting a form of collective punishment on Lebanon’s people” and that “based on the available evidence and the absence of an adequate or any explanation from the Israeli authorities for so many attacks by their forces causing civilian deaths and destruction, when no evidence of Hizbullah military activities was apparent, it seems clear that Israeli forces consistently failed to adopt necessary precautionary measures.”
(...) My efforts to ascertain where members of Congress get information to back up their defense of Israeli war crimes have revealed a rather startling inclination to rely on rather dubious right-wing sources for information. For example, following a speech in March, in which Senator Barack Obama repeated the myth that Hezbollah had used “innocent people as shields,” I contacted his spokesman as to what evidence the presidential hopeful had to make such charges. He referred me to a report by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Center for Special Studies, a right-wing Israeli think tank headed by the former chief of the Mossad which maintains close ties to the Israeli government. Despite repeated requests, Obama’s office was unable to provide any other source supporting the senator’s charge. This underscores serious concerns among human rights activists that Obama and other leading Democrats, like President Bush, have the same propensity to believe the findings of ideologically-driven right-wing think tanks above those of objective scholarship, reputable journalists, or principled human rights groups and other nonpartisan organizations.
(...) A recent HRW report notes how “Human Rights Watch and Israeli and Palestinian organizations documented numerous cases of Israeli forces using Palestinian civilians as human shields.” Similarly, Amnesty International has reported how Israeli occupation forces in the West Bank “have often used Palestinians effectively as human shields, endangering their lives in violation of international humanitarian law. There have been no Congressional resolutions condemning Israel’s use of human shields, however. Congressional Democrats essentially share the Bush administration’s practice that if you are perceived as an adversary, your crimes will be exaggerated or even manufactured, while it you are perceived as an ally, your crimes will be covered up.
(...) Perhaps the ultimate reason is that the Democrats’ agenda is essentially the same as the Republican administration and their Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill: to cover up for abuses of international humanitarian law by the United States and its allies and discredit human rights organizations that challenge these practices as a means of enhancing the hegemonic role of the United States in the Middle East and elsewhere.

cheney and imperial strategy:
[the imperial arc] Since coming to power in January 2001, the neo- conservatives, especially the ultra-neoconservatives championed by Cheney, were obsessed by a single goal: reordering the world in a way that would establish Washington's global hegemony for the 21st century and ensure that no other power, such as China, could contest America's perch at the pinnacle of the new order. The key to accomplishing this goal, they thought, lay in seizing control over the world's major oil reserves, and Iraq, which sits atop one of the largest oil reserves and which was crippled by a decade of sanctions, was the obvious place to start. Of course, they had the minor problem of having to take a detour through Afghanistan due to that country's immediate connection with 11 September, but they dealt with that as quickly as possible and, as soon as they toppled the Taliban, redirected their guns towards Iraq. Then, following the occupation of Iraq, they shifted their sights to the Iran-Syria-Hizbullah- Palestinian resistance axis, which they felt formed a major impediment to their designs to reshape the Middle East to their liking. Moreover, such was their hubris that they imagined they could cajole, blackmail and twist the arms of the US's European and Arab allies into the service of their policy.
(...) Despite the rapidity of the rise of the Iraqi resistance and the recalcitrance of the resistance on the Lebanese and Palestinian fronts, the Bush administration remained convinced that its plans were proceeding as intended. All these mere glitches meant was that implementation would take a little longer than expected -- a reading of the situation that seemed confirmed by the assassination of Rafik Al-Hariri that set into motion dynamics that would lead to Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon and pressure to disarm Hizbullah, the Iranian nuclear crisis that opened an avenue to clamp down on Iran politically and economically, and Sharon's massive offensive against Palestinian resistance factions.
(...) The most likely purpose of Cheney's tour, therefore, is to lay the diplomatic groundwork and secure support for a military strike against Iran. Cheney undoubtedly thinks that there is enough anti-Iranian paranoia in the region to facilitate his task. However, he also knows that the Arabs will also want to see some progress on the Arab-Israeli front, so he certain to perform the types of gestures that we have seen from the Americans before when they were gearing up for a war in this region. Today, in order to show how serious he is about getting the negotiations ball rolling again, he will give some play to the Arab peace initiative. But play is about as far as it will go; firstly, because Cheney is mostly interested in playing for time and, secondly, because an acceptable settlement has never been more out of reach than it is at present. So probably the most we will see will be some preliminary talks while preparations are put into place for a strike against Iran, which could take place much sooner than many imagine and probably no later than October or November. It was not just for show that Cheney climbed aboard an American aircraft carrier in the Gulf and shouted threats at Iran.

legacy of summer 2006:Israel bombed an oil refinery in Jiyyeh, south of Lebanon's capital, Beirut, during its conflict with the armed wing of Lebanese political party Hezbollah last July. The bombing caused the refinery to spew an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 tonnes of fuel oil into the Mediterranean Sea. It was Lebanon's worst environmental disaster, say environmentalists.
(...) US state development agency USAID awarded a US $5 million contract to US company Seacor Environmental Services to clean roughly 60km of shore north of Byblos. Lebanon's Environment Ministry oversaw the work. In January, a USAID press release said the job was done, but Lebanon's Ministry of Environment clarified that "phase one" was completed - the removal of free-floating oil and oil in danger of going back into the sea.
(...) Bahr Loubnan clean-up supervisor and local resident Raif Nader said many beaches in the area had not been touched. "They didn't do anything here. USAID told us Mother Nature would wash the rocks. Why does it cost $5 million just to let it wash back out to sea?"

bishara as traitor?:
Hezbollah Deputy Secretary General Sheikh Naim Kassem denied Saturday his organization paid off or received intelligence reports from former MK Azmi Bishara during the Second Lebanon War.

hezbollah and the media:
Kalb claims the media gave Hezbollah, which he calls "a closed sect" (that doesn't sound too good) "total control of the daily message of journalism and propaganda" and this fact "victimized Israel" because the latter is 'an open society" whereas Hezbollah is " a closed society, that engages in " undemocratic control of the media", is militant, secretive, a religiously fundamentalist sect, a state within a state, subnational(not good)'Party of God", , resisting 'the infidel' and seeking 'divine victory' and supported by Iran and Syria (!) )and, if that is not enough, is similar to the Madhi army. Kalb never mentions that Israel is supported by the US to the tune of 15.1 million dollars a day or 300 times more than the CIA claims Hezbollah gets in foreign aid each year and receives 83% of its weapons from the US.
(...) The same job the UN has been tasked with doing since 1978, as it has documented more than 18,000 Israeli violations of Lebanese territory including its air and sea space.The Harvard study complains that the UN did not report on Hezbollah movements, thereby exhibiting anti-Israel bias. Fact check: Excuse me Marvin but if the IDF with the latest US technology and night vision equipment, scores of cameras mounted on Israeli Heron, Searcher Mk II, or Hermes 450 drones, and close up satellite imaging could not find Hezbollah fighters the UN observers along the blue line dodging Israeli shells were unlikely to. (On July 26 Israel did bomb the UN post near Khaim killing four UN observers-Canadian, Chinese, and Finnish) Moreover, the UN mission is to report crossings of the 'blue line' (only Israel was doing that), not to survey what is going on inside Lebanon.
(...) Kalb's research found that "the media showed too much destruction of Lebanon and in its reporting did not credit Israel's argument that international law allowed Israel to bomb civilian areas if soldiers were hiding within these homes." Israel used this same argument during its 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996, invasions, as it does in Palestine today. In the summer of 2006 it was very easy for the media to find evidence in Lebanon. 950,000 civilians were bombed out of their villages and the 32,000 homes destroyed and were crowded into public parks in Beirut and schools and all over north Lebanon and Syria. The media had lots of eye witness sources regarding the destruction of Lebanon and they properly reported what they learned. Kalb cites Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni's statement to the The New York Times, following the slaughter at Qana, "When you go to sleep with a missile, you might find yourself waking up to another kind of missile" as authority. Israel later admitted there were no missiles fired from Qana, and no Hezbollah in the area, but that it had made a mistake in killing those 28 civilians hiding in the shelter. Kalb might want to inform diplomat Livni that none of the 10 adults or 18 children had gone to sleep with a missile at Qana.
(...) Hezbollah was not hiding from Israeli forces among the civilians. Contrariwise, they were eager to engage Israel every chance they got. Typically Hezbollah fired their missiles from camouflaged areas such as banana groves, orchards, dense foliage, bunkers, holes in the ground, sides of rocky hills and valleys not from houses or towns. They knew very well that Israel would not hesitate to bomb civilian houses which they have been doing since the late 1960's. After a particular mission, Hezbollah fighters would ditch their weapons and try to sleep. Only rarely making their way back to their villages to check on their families or property.
(...) With respect to Israel's admitted mistake of bombing the Qana shelter, according to NGO-Lebanon, Israel made 6,979 'mistakes' in bombing during the 33 day July War. Maybe Kalb finds that statistic acceptable given that Israel launched more that 17,000 attacks at more than 8,000 targets, including 300,000 artillery shells and approximately 4.8 million cluster bombs. The juggernaut international Israeli press operation did. Most of the media did not.
(...) When one side trespasses, captures soldiers or commits a hostile act that does not allow the other side, in retaliation, to slaughter hundreds of civilians and destroy much of the country. The related principle of international law is the obligation to discriminate between civilian and military targets. Israel's responsive killing of more than 1,250 civilians, nearly 1/4 of them children, many fleeing in convoys waving white flags, or following Israeli orders to flee, or hiding in cellars with no fighters in the area, was indeed disproportionate to the capturing of the two soldiers. The international media properly reported these war crimes.
(...) Kalb fails to mention the reams of available material on the subject of Israel's illegal "disproportionate" bombing, which he denies occurred, including many testimonies from the Israeli military to the effect that Israel "lost it" early in the conflict, after being repeating ambushed and not being able to locate Hezbollah fighters and in a vengeful frenzy carpet bombed much of south Lebanon creating a free fire killing zone.
(...) "What we did was insane and monstrous, we covered entire towns in cluster bombswe fired 1,800 cluster bombs, containing over 1.2 million cluster bomblets" (IDF head of just one rocket unit quoted in Ha'aretz on 9/12/06)
(...) "In the last 72 hours we fired all the munitions we had, all at the same spot, we didn't even alter the directions of the gun. Friends of mine in the battalion told me they also fired everything in the last three days-ordinary shells, clusters, whatever they had." (Israeli reservist in an artillery battalion, quoted in Ha'aretz on 9/8/06)
(...) The reason is that Hezbollah films most of its battles live because over the years Israel undercounts its causalities and over counts Hezbollah's (Kalb uses Israel's claim of 600 Hezbollah killed in the July war when the actual figure is 264).
(...) Al Manar viewership is often higher in Israel during conflicts than Israeli stations because Israelis have greater confidence in Al Manar for truthful reporting than their own government fed stations. Despite this well known fact, scholar Kalb, perhaps recalling his days as a reporter in the USSR, smears Al-Manar: "for reports and information about the war, Al-Manar was to Hezbollah what Pravda was to the Soviet Union." Israeli TV viewers don't agree.

robert fisk on olmert:
[fisk falters?] Yes, Hizbollah provoked last summer's folly [?] by capturing two Israeli soldiers on the Lebanese-Israel border, but Israel's response - so totally out of proportion to the sin - produced another debacle for the Israeli army and, presumably now, for its Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert.
(...) Insisting the two captured Israeli soldiers should be released and the militarily powerless Lebanese government should be held responsible for their capture was never going to produce political or military results favourable to Israel. One would have to add that Tzipi Livni's demand for the Prime Mnister's resignation sits oddly with her support for this preposterous war.
(...) Day after day, for 34 days after 12 July, the Israeli air force systematically destroyed the major infrastructure of Lebanon, repeatedly claiming it was trying to avoid civilian casualties while the world's press watched its aircraft blasting men, women and children to pieces in Lebanon. Israelis, too, were savagely killed in this war by Hizbollah's Iranian-provided missiles. But it only proved the Israeli army, famous in legend and song but not in reality, could not protect their own people. Hizbollah fighters were told by their own leadership that if they would just withstand the air attacks, they could bite the Israeli land forces when they invaded.

sectarian situtation in lebanon:
Lebanese President Emile Lahoud said the killing was carried out after "conspirators and outside powers" failed to drive his country into internal confrontation. "The recent killing is the same as what happened in 1975," Lahoud told IPS at the presidential palace in Beirut. "They want civil war here, but we won't allow it." The 1975 incident the President referred to occurred Apr. 13 of that year when unidentified gunmen fired on a church in the Christian east Beirut suburb Ain el- Rummaneh, killing four people, including two Maronite Phalangists. The Phalange is a large Christian militia. Hours later, Phalangists killed 27 Palestinian civilians in a bus in the same suburb. That was the trigger for the infamous 15-year Lebanese civil war, which left an estimated 100,000 dead, as many seriously injured, and nearly a million displaced from their homes.
(...) Many blame the current U.S.-backed government of Siniora and his allies like Saad Harriri and Walid Jumblatt for creating a difficult situation. "Outside forces helped create the current political tensions which may have led to these killings," 32-year-old English language teacher Raed el-Amine told IPS. "The pro-government groups are more responsible for this because they've focused more on disunity by playing the sectarian game."

lebanon and reconstruction (jamail):
Starting from within hours of the ceasefire, about a million people who had fled southern Lebanon began to return, many to wrecked homes. One of the towns almost completely destroyed was Bint Jbail, less than 5km from the Lebanese-Israeli border.
(...) "We support the opposition to the government because we want our rights and we want justice and support in rebuilding from the war," he said. "At least the head of the government should come see what happened to his own country."
(...) Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora never visited southern Lebanon to see what happened during the war. "Instead he went on holiday to Jordan. Is it possible for a prime minister not to know or care about his own country?"
(...) "They can bomb us one day and we'll rebuild the next because we are not afraid of them," he said. "But the rebuilding is on our own, with the help of Qatar and Hezbollah and Iran, but not from our own impotent government."
(...) Amnesty International stated after the war ended that many of the attacks on Lebanon's civilian infrastructure were collective punishment, and not the "collateral damage" that Israel claimed. United Nations Development Programme spokesman Jean Fabre had estimated in August 2006 that economic losses to Lebanon from the month-long war amounted to "at least 15 billion dollars." According to the Lebanese government, more than 1,100 civilians were killed during the war. Also, 43 Israeli civilians died from rockets fired by Hezbollah.
(...) The fighting is over but tension continues to hang over the region. A Lebanese soldier at a border post who asked not to be named told IPS that Israeli warplanes have been flying into Lebanese airspace nearly every week in violation of the UN-brokered ceasefire agreement. "We see the drones (unmanned espionage aircraft) nearly every single day," the Lebanese soldier added. This IPS correspondent too observed an Israeli warplane overhead in southern Lebanon, and at least one military drone.

deconstructing giuliani and ´terror´:
In a discussion with journalist David Ignatius in February 2006, Nassrallah categorically set his group apart from al-Qaeda and its action that he considers is fanning Sunni-Shiite tensions in Iraq and increasingly in Lebanon. "I believe the most dangerous thing we confront is the so-called Zarqawi phenomenon," he said. "This is a creed of killing without any responsibility -- to kill women, children, to attack mosques, churches, schools, restaurants."
(...) Interestingly the antipathy is not based on religion, but rather on al Qaeda terrorism which Hezbollah rejects. The fact is that the Iraq war debacle has led to a "surge" (that Bush/ McCain word again!) of al Qaeda fighters here in Lebanon. They are threats to Hezbollah as well as to the American University of Beirut and the American Embassy. Al Qaeds's numbers and influence are growing and, based on interviews by Americans with some al Qaeda leaders, they have major plans here. If al Qaeda to be contained it will likely be Hezbollah who does it. We Americans should engage with Hezbollah not defame it.
(...) where is Rudi's evidence to support his New Hampshire campaign claim that "going back to the 90's there were all those Americans killed by the PLO and Hezbollah and Hamas"? ... Rudy, if you actually misspoke about the '90s', rather than seeking to mislead your audience, and actually meant to say the 1980's, maybe thinking of the April 17, 1983 bombing of the American embassy or the October 1984 bombing of the marine barracks show us the proof? At the time of these events the PLO had left Beirut, Hamas would not exist for nearly a decade, and Hezbollah was a long way from being fully organized. Moreover, Hezbollah and has never been contradicted in its consistent denials of involvement. Again, where is the proof Rudy? Was Rudy thinking about the kidnapping of US hostages? Hezbollah's position on the Western hostages is unchanged; "We are neither directly nor indirectly responsible for the taking of the hostages' Nassrallah as repeatedly stated.

on situation in lebanon (jamail):
In sum, there are four main political parties which participated in a sprawling protest on December 10, 2006, probably Lebanon's largest ever, immediately followed by the launching of a sit-in against the U.S./France/Saudi Arabia-backed government.
(...) The parties are as follows: Hezbollah led by the charismatic Hassan Nasrallah, The Free Patriotic movement led by former Christian general Michael Aoun, the Amal movement led by Nabih Berri, and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. There are other smaller groups, like the Christian Marada movement, also involved.
(...) The opposition insists that the cabinet resign in favor of a national unity government. Siniora’s cabinet continues to refuse this demand, and is basically in survival mode as the political deadlock persists.
(...) "We're here demanding full participation of all different groups in the political decision making of our country," a 27-year-old organizer named Jirgus told me, "One of the advantages of this sit-in is that Lebanese people from the north are meeting Lebanese people from the south and different religions are uniting." I asked him how long he would continue to protest. "As long as this government continues with their pro-U.S./Israel policies and continues to choose not to allow all people fair representation, we are left with only this choice. Our opposition will continue."
(...) A student with the Marada movement named Mohammad teaches primary school and comes to the camp each evening after his work is done. "Our goal is companionship with the government's goal is to serve corporate interests," he said, "We have two million of Lebanon's four million people that are not represented by these elitists who only care about their own interests. I'll stay here as long as it takes. The government didn't leave us with anything, so we have nothing to lose."
(...) A student named Aran from the Free Patriotic Movement, who has been at the sit-in from the first day told me, "It's new for us to be together with all of these other groups. It is good because Muslims, Christians and all of the confessions are here together. We hope this experiences will be diffused throughout the entire society."
(...)Ali Hamir, a translator standing outside the main tent in which families were gathering and children played, told me he was there as an independent and not affiliated with any political. "I'm here as a Lebanese," he said, "We are peacefully contesting the government to show that people without a voice are actually the majority. It is only the rich people who have a voice in this current government, while the middle and lower classes are not listened to. There is a class mentality in this government." He waved his arm across the air and added, "These people are not sheep. Most of them are educated and know how to live in peace. We are open-minded and want to live with all communities, but we are opposed to class-based oppression."
(...) Courses in the following Majors by the teacher Condoleeza Rice: 1) Sectarian conflict. 2) Taking countries' resources by force. 3) Corruption and theft. 4) Constructing and deconstructing security apparatuses. 5) Taking control of free countries' sovereignty