Demring

Veldig interessant artikkel om krigen i Libanon i fjor sommer som hevder at Bush-administrasjonen hadde en hel håndfull fingre med i spillet.

Seven weeks before the start of the war, in his May 23 summit with Olmert, Bush strongly encouraged the Israeli prime minister to launch an attack on Lebanon soon, offering full U.S. support for the massive military operation. Just three days later, Israeli agents assassinated two Islamic militants in Sidon, leading to a series of tit- for-tat assassinations and abductions which eventually led to Hezbollah’s July 12 seizure of two Israeli soldiers, which was then used as the excuse for a war that had been planned for many months.

Dessuten antyder artikkelen hvordan Hizbollah, i likhet med Hamas, er grovt demonisert og blåst opp som trussel:

Hezbollah was down to about 500 full-time fighters prior to the Israeli assault, and a national dialogue was going on between Hezbollah and the Lebanese government regarding disarmament. As the Winograd Commission report points out, Hezbollah was not enough of a serious threat to Israel’s security that required such a massive strike against it, much less the civilian infrastructure of Lebanon as a whole. Though Hezbollah had hardly renounced their extremist ideology, major acts of terrorism were largely a thing of the past.

Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbollahs leder, har uttrykt respekt for Israels regjering for selv ha satt igang den kritiske Winograd-kommisjonen. Dette til tross for at Winograd ikke setter spørsmålstegn ved krigens nødvendighet, og ikke nevner libanesisk skadelidelse med ett ord.

Om USAs motiver har artikkelen dette å si:

While the Lebanese people, their infrastructure, and their environment suffered the most from this immoral and misguided U.S. policy, Israel was a victim as well. Just as ruling elites of medieval Europe cynically used some members of the Jewish community as money-lenders and tax-collectors in order to maintain their power and set up this vulnerable minority as scapegoats, so the United States is cynically using the world’s only Jewish state to advance its hegemonic agenda in the Middle East, thereby contributing to the disturbing rise of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiments in the Islamic world.