As Lebanon bleeds: a savage and unwinnable gambit

Meanwhile neo-cons’ intellectual base deserted them as their Iraq experiment bankrupted them. But with merely a little provocation, Hezbollah got Israel to pounce back and give Hezbollah the re-charge it needed, just as neo-cons are attempting, with the likes of Michael Young and Bush’s apologia in the face of mayhem, to use the Hamas-Hezbollah axis as reason to expand the mission in the Middle East and go after Syria, if not Iran.

Michael Young: “ Israel can brutalize Lebanon all it wants, but unless something is done to stop Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, from exporting instability to buttress his despotic regime, little will change.” Young might as well have been ghost-writing the words of John Bolton, the American ambassador to the United Nations. “President Bush has made clear that Syria and Iran must be held to account for supporting regional terrorism and their role in the current crisis.”

What does that mean, held to account, in Bush administration lingo? “Smoke them out,” as Bush infamously said of the risibly at-large bin Laden posse.

Hezbollah can give up the two Israeli soldiers tomorrow. It won’t disarm unless the Lebanese Government forces it to. It’s more likely to press its own latest lunge at savagery with its usual nothing-to-lose brazenness at others’ expense. And the Lebanese government’s shard of legitimacy has just been pulverised by Israel’s assault, which makes the Lebanese Government look the impotent knave it’s been all along.

Of course Hezbollah needs to be eliminated. But it can’t happen from without. Israel is only reinforcing Hezbollah’s hand and retarding its disintegration, the way the American occupation in Iraq reinforces the insurgency’s hand. Force, that appetising recourse of the post 9-11era, has been every crisis’ most lethal seductress.

So to suggest that Israel is looking for a solution here, to suggest that it’s playing for peace, is to be as cynical as those imbeciles who claim Israel is being “humanitarian” by raining leaflets of evacuation warnings before dropping its tonnage of barbarism in civilian zones.

When rogue goes against rogue, and a rogue-in-chief stands by from his Roman-themed colonnades a Potomac away, a just solution is not only not being sought; it’s a virtual impossibility. What we’re seeing in Lebanon today is what we saw there in 1982: an assault justified by the false rhetoric of self-defence, but actually a seeding of further hatreds and regression. In 1982, Hezbollah bloomed from the seeds. What’s being seeded this time? Heaven help us. Heaven help the Lebanese.