Armageddon Strategy [View All]

[DaveT]

Just as it was impossible to say anything good about Saddam Hussein, it is equally impossible to say anything good about Hezbollah. So what?

Since when do we measure ourselves by the moral standards of terrorists?


The "argument" that Israel is "defending itself" by bombing Beirut is an insult to the world's intelligence. It is on a par with -- and integrally related to -- "We are fighting them there so that we don't have to fight them here."

It is a cynical lie. It is illogical on its face. Israel's loyal friends should hide their heads in shame for repeating this ludicrous line of crap.

It is also a lie wrapped within a much larger lie. Not only is Israel bombing Beirut for reasons other than just "defending itself" from Hezbollah -- the alleged strategic rationale of trying to induce Lebanon to exercise its sovereignty and disarm Hezbollah is a crock of crap as well.

Israel knows better than anybody that destroying the infrastructure of Lebanon while collateral damage claims hundreds of fatalities will never induce the Lebanese polity to co-operate with Israel against Hezbollah. Nobody on earth is that stupid. Not even the American neoconservatives who so laughably claimed that the Yankee invaders of Iraq would be welcomed as liberators are that divorced from reality.

No, Israel sees the chaos of sectarian civil war in Iraq, and hopes to replicate it throughout the middle east. Instead of stable governments in Beirut, Damascus, Tehran and the rest of the middle east -- Israel wants regional chaos, pitting Arab against Persian, Sunni against Shiite, secular against religious, authoritarian against democratic.

General Shinshecki knew -- as did almost the entire world -- that America invading Iraq with less than 400,000 troops would lead to chaos. The various cover stories for that war (WMD, spreading democracy, payback for attempting to assassinate Poppy) were all ludicrous on their face. To this day, most American leftists just think that Bush is an idiot and his advisers are lunatics (which are both defensible notions, by the way), but refuse to give them enough credit to suspect that they might really have a coherent strategy that provides perpetual war profits for their sponsors and a long term ambition to re-colonize the entire region.

Israel is launching Phase II of this grand Armageddon Strategy.

Chaos reigns in Iraq; and it is about to reign again in Lebanon. The propaganda has already started "linking" these two separate provinces of Hell to the terrorist regimes in Syria and Iran.

Once some kind of war can be hoked up with those two countries, we will see American and Israeli bases on the soil of each of those countries while local government by irregular militia provides what little civic life as will exist.

After a decade or so of this perpetual chaos, somehow a well behaved polity will emerge across the region -- the swamp will have been drained in the cutesy metaphor of the American neocons.



If I were an Israeli, looking back at 58 years of war, I might be ready for this Armageddon Strategy. Piecemeal wars and perpetually faltering peace negotiations have done nothing to make Israel a secure and normal country. It seems to be eternally under siege.

I honestly don't know how I would feel if I had to live with suicide bombers and night riding rocketeers.



But a truthful rendition of the Armageddon Strategy won't play in Peoria. So the propaganda gets catapulted -- WMD, democracy, self-defense, collective punishment -- all of it morally questionable, but all of it bogus.


As an American, I might even support a frank declaration of war against all the backward cultures of the world -- if I thought we could win it.

But we can't.

And neither can Israel.

Which is why these bogus rationales are so despicable. They are all based on the assumption that the American and Israeli military can remake the civilization of half a billion or so human beings -- and the further assumption that the poor dumb masses at home won't support World War III if it looks like we started it.

The fantasy of infinite power is the most dangerous delusion on earth.