 |
|
Amuse
Blogs
Food
Life
Links
News
Pictures
Rants
Site
Tech
Words
(One of the many Hezbollah fighters incapacitated by Israeli strikes in Lebanon. Except, of course, that he's five years old.)
It should be patently obvious by now that this war-by-proxy between the United States and Iran is a deliberate and calculated action by both sides to further their aims against one another by building a framework that can be used for justifying military escalation.
In particular, the useless jetting about by Condoleezza Rice spouting off an unsupportable cease-fire plan to other governments who will hear none of it would be laughable were it not for the serious consequences of such blatant stalling. It's been established that the Israelis sought and received American political support for this action a year ago, waiting for the right pretext to make their move. Foolishly (or perhaps cunningly) Hezbollah gave them the opening they were waiting for, not unlike the way Al Quaeda gave Bush carte blanche on 9/11.
But the gambit has not worked out quite the way Israel and the American neocons expected it would (about par for the course for the PNAC crowd), despite Israel's quick military success, and the Bush Administration's ploy of delaying a diplomatic solution to give Israel time to finish up threatens now plays into the hands of the Iranians, as have almost all of their efforts.
On the positive side, as long as Bush plays a stalling game, I think it's unlikely that the military conflict will widen. New Gingrich has been running around in public with the drool pouring down from his slavering mouth while he declares this World War III, and the neocons have been sickeningly fast to embrace that idea. Even that poor old sot Christopher Hitchens has been granted a little more time to babble on about how Allied war crimes in WWII are really the fault of the "appeasers" and if we'd learn from their example, the innocents of Lebanon would not have to die at the hands of the Israelis. Anything to rationalize an American foreign policy that has failed utterly, eh Chris?
Tell that to the little boy in the picture. Or this family. Or this woman in Beirut. Given that the Israelis decided a year ago that they were prepared to accept their own civilian casulties to further their aim and have shown absolutely no reluctance to kill Lebanese civilians and U.N. observers, there is little point in asserting any equivalence between Israeli and Hezbollah airstrikes. This is cold-blooded and calculated murder. Meanwhile, the mullahs in Iran get to shore up their international support without having to take on direct military action.
If this game plan continues in the way most of the neocon agenda has gone, the stalling game won't last forever. Bush will eventually commit American troops, and will almost certainly get a justification for attacking Iran directly -- a Hezbollah rocket hitting an American armored vehicle, a suicide bomber, something -- a rationalization that will score with American public opinion where months of saber-rattling and threatening words have failed to sway people. It's beyond repulsive to watch these machinations play themselves out knowing the consequences they hold.
© BrianKaneOnline.com 2000-2007