What is it good for? More sales of Powerpoint to the military.
Blood stains the walls in the Lebanese village of Brital; relative of 3 women killed in a Hizbullah rocket attack on Arab el Aramsheh collapses with shock; man killed after an Israel drone fired a missile at a motorcycle in Tyre.What's become most chilling about the war in Lebanon has been how Israel has repeatedly ratcheted up the rhetoric. Every day the conflict is "escalated". Today is no exception.
This might be because the diplomatic end-game is in sight, and Israel has still completely failed to stop Hizbullah from launching their katyushas into Northern Israel. For a ceasefire or "cessation of hostilities" to take hold, Israel has got to at least look as if it has got something out of this otherwise pointless conflict. All they've got to show at the moment is a lot of dead soldiers and civilians on their own side, and the near full-scale destruction of the southern half of Lebanon, something that is not going to be quickly forgotten by the wider world. From claiming at the beginning that they would destroy Hizbullah, the militia has instead held out against the IDF for longer than an Arab army ever did. The Lebanese army might be deployed to southern Lebanon, but will Hizbullah be forced to disarm immediately? It seems highly unlikely.
The other possibility is as George Monbiot and others over the last few weeks have suggested, that this war was pre-meditated and planned in advance, with Israel waiting for the right time to launch the destruction of Hizbullah and most of the country's infrastructure. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, a three-week campaign was planned for. The officer's power-point demonstration of how the war would be fought is almost an exact replica of how the Israeli bombing and military action has panned out:
The first week concentrated on destroying Hezbollah's heavier long-range missiles, bombing its command-and-control centers, and disrupting transportation and communication arteries. In the second week, the focus shifted to attacks on individual sites of rocket launchers or weapons stores. In the third week, ground forces in large numbers would be introduced, but only in order to knock out targets discovered during reconnaissance missions as the campaign unfolded. There was no plan, according to this scenario, to reoccupy southern Lebanon on a long-term basis.
In the New Statesman, John Kampfner reveals how the actions of Blair and Beckett in not calling for an immediate ceasefire have all been a part of how Britain knew in advance of Israel's planned attack. It's only now that the 3 weeks are up that the diplomatic stance has changed, with Blair today jetting of on holiday, hopeful that the UN resolution will be quickly passed.
Unfortunately for Israel, those 3 weeks have not been enough. The missiles continue to rain down on Haifa, 250,000 have fled the north of the country, and anyone remaining in the town of Kiryat Shmona is to be evacuated. Yet even this is now in dispute. On CNN on Sunday, the Washington Post journalist Thomas Ricks went on CNN and told the show's host, Howard Kurtz, that Israel was purposefully not destroying some Hizbullah rocket launchers, so that the offensive in Lebanon could continue to be justified.
As time seems to be running out, Israel is going to even greater lengths to "finish" the job before it is forced to. Yesterday they told the UN that engineers sent to fix a bridge between Beirut and Sidon that they'd be targeted if they did so. A further curfew is now imposed on the area below the Litani river - any vehicle on the road is now a target. Anyone remaining in the area is left with a wonderful choice - remain where you are and face the possibility of being blown up in your house, like countless others across the country have, or be blown up trying to flee. In an attack that'll be familiar to those in Afghanistan, where firing into the air has brought out the US F16s, a funeral parade was blown up in the town of Ghaziyeh. Reports differ on the amount killed, with ynetnews suggesting 14, and 1 killed in another raid 5 minutes later, while the Guardian says it could be either 6 or 1. The BBC has also finally got round to reporting on the environmental disaster facing Lebanon's coastline, known about for at least a week but only dealt with in-depth now.
As Blair sets off to wherever it is he's going, he can at least know that's he got one more friend to add to his ever shortening list. Binyamin Netanyahu, former prime minister, has saluted what Bush would most likely call his "moral courage":
He said Hezbollah regarded Israel as "the first step on the way to an Islamic empire" and "would not last a day without Iran, where its fighters are trained".
"It is a mad wisdom and it should not be dismissed because it's mad, just as Hitler - he started off as an attack on the Jews and this is the same thing," he said.
Who could possibly disagree with that analysis? Anyone who opposes what's going in Lebanon, as Stephen Pollard has already shown, clearly wants all the Jews in the region to die in a second Holocaust. Even Netanyahu is moderate compared to this guy though:
Israel should have given Lebanon an ultimatum like this: "Until our abducted soldiers are returned and the rocket fire at our communities ends, we will destroy the communities of southern Lebanon via aerial bombardment, methodically going from south to north, and we will begin within 24 hours." In this way, we would not have endangered even one soldiers in battle.
It's not genocide and ethnic cleansing when Israel does it. Honest.
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