Lebanon war drags on: Mossad says Hezbollah can fight "for a long time to come"; Chinese furious about dead UN peacekeeper, new Hezbollah rocket reaches Afula

Mossad and IDF disagree over damage to Hezbollah
By Ze'ev Schiff and Amos Harel, Haaretz Correspondents, and The Associated Press
Last update - 11:05 28/07/2006

The heads of two Israeli intelligence agencies disagree over how much the Israel Defense Forces assault has damaged Hezbollah, although both agree that the group has been weakened.

The Mossad intelligence agency says Hezbollah will be able to continue fighting at the current level for a long time to come, Mossad head Meir Dagan said.

However, Military Intelligence chief Amos Yadlin disagrees, seeing Hezbollah as having been severely damaged.

Both intelligence chiefs agree that Hezbollah remains capable of command and control and still holds long-range missiles in its arsenal, they said at a security cabinet meeting Thursday.

Yesterday there were protesters at Grand & Summit Avenues here in St. Paul. The first were a group of Jewish guys - Hassids I think. I stopped by to talk with them for a minute, but I didn't want to get confrontational. I mentioned how the Israeli government's decision-making process had been hasty, as reported in Haaretz (and noted here), the government hadn't actually looked at the possible consequences of its action. 'What about Hezbollah's process?' one replied. True enough. I wished them luck and was on my way. Later some peace protesters showed up across the street. I had no camera, but the photos would have been interesting.

That's the rough thing about it all. Everyday people in the middle of it get fucked over, injured and dead. Their societies are set back years as the belligerent groups get the upper hand, and the wheel keeps turning around and around.

It was Friday evening, the sun was setting, and soon it was Shabbas, one of the more perilous periods of reflection in some time. I can't say I would know what to do, what Israel's shrewd decision at this next turn ought to be. It is now clear to the directors of Israel's intelligence services that Hezbollah's ability to fire rockets into Israel is not going to be curtailed by military action anytime soon, and they are perfectly aware that Hezbollah's strategy is to bog Israel down in a very hot occupation as long as possible. If the Shiite organization survives (which it will, in one form or another) then they can claim their victory – a pyrrhic one, as always. Hezbollah has a new type of rocket with a range of around 90 kilometers that they launched at Afula.

Hezbollah unveils new rocket; UN official fears war will last into late August; Canada winds down evacuation from Lebanon
Jul. 29, 2006. 01:00 AM; KATHY GANNON - ASSOCIATED PRESS

NAQOURA, Lebanon—A top UN peacekeeping official said yesterday he feared the war in southern Lebanon would continue until late August and voiced fears Israel would flatten Lebanon's southern villages and destroy Tyre "neighbourhood by neighbourhood'' if Hezbollah rockets keep landing in the Jewish state.
At UN peacekeeping headquarters in Naqoura, barely a stone's throw from Israel, political affairs officer Ryszard Morczynski said Tyre would become a target of intense Israeli attacks because Hezbollah was firing rockets from the city's suburbs into Israel's northern port of Haifa.
Hezbollah boasted yesterday of a new kind of rocket it called the Khaibar-1 that it fired deeper inside Israel than the hundreds of others since the outbreak of fighting more than two weeks ago........
The guerrillas said they used the Khaibar-1 — named after the site of a historic battle between Islam's Prophet Muhammad and Jewish tribes in the Arabian peninsula — to strike the Israeli town of Afula.
"With this, the Islamic Resistance begins a new stage of fighting, challenge and confrontation with a strong determination and full belief in God's victory," Hezbollah said in a statement.
Five of the rockets crashed into empty fields outside Afula, causing no injuries. Still, Israel deployed a Patriot interceptor missile battery north of Tel Aviv, believing the area could be in range of Hezbollah's barrages.
Israel said the Khaibar-1 rockets were renamed, Iranian-made Fajr-5s. They have four times the power and range of Katyusha rockets, making them able to hit Tel Aviv's northern outskirts.
The United Nations decided to remove 50 observers from the Israeli-Lebanon border, locating them instead at better-protected posts with 2,000 lightly armed UN peacekeepers. The move comes days after Israeli bombs hit a UN observer station, killing three observers, while a fourth — Canadian Maj. Paeta Hess-von Kruedener — is missing and presumed dead.
About 12,500 Canadians have fled Lebanon, out of about 40,000 believed to be in the country, and Foreign Affairs officials said the evacuation effort is in its final phase. Ships ferrying Canadians out of Beirut yesterday and today were the last planned daily trips.

Grand Strategy or Lack Thereof: Beyond those battered few thousand meters of South Lebanon, there is the matter of Grand Strategy, the highest order of statecraft and international politics. The whole thing still looks like a Clean Break war. It's built on the same fanciful foundation as the war in Iraq. The true neo-conservatives launched the war in Iraq with a set of goals – among them was rebalancing the Middle East to make Israel and the United States the dominant or hegemonic powers. The major Neo-con strategy was to manipulate the balance of power between Sunnis and Shiites. Oddly, President Bush himself apparently didn't know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites when he invaded Iraq, according to some reports, so he didn't realize that his war would turn Iraq into an Iranian satellite state, and apparently his advisors didn't tell him. This is peculiar (video/source):

Oborne: I traveled to Boston to meet a former U.S. diplomat who had been a leading authority on Iraq for over a decade. A chance remark made just two months before the war, hinted at how the complexities of Iraq had bewildered Americans at the highest levels.
Peter Galbraith - former U.S. diplomat: January 2003 the President invited three members of the Iraqi opposition to join him to watch the Super Bowl. In the course of the conversation the Iraqis realized that the President was not aware that there was a difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. He looked at them and said, "You mean...they're not, you know, there, there's this difference. What is it about?"

....For the United States to launch a war where the president is not aware of this very fundamental difference between Sunni and Shiite Arabs is really stunning. It's a bit like the U.S. president intervening in Ireland and being unaware that there are two schools of Christianity - Catholics and Protestants.

Bush might have thought twice about invading, had he known that the majority religious Shiite parties are very, very much like Hezbollah. (the Neo-cons knew it: they thought it would be a great way to scare the hell out of Saudi Arabia).

Iraq's ruling Dawa Party: Hezbollah's Cousin: Right now, the Iraqi Dawa Party and Prime Minister Maliki support Hezbollah, infuriating Israel's supporters in Washington. It is obvious why they do. Dawa, one of the core Shiite parties now controlling (most of) Baghdad, and its government backed with so much American blood and treasure, well, those Dawa guys support Hezbollah over Israel. Dawa and Hezbollah are not "the same" but as political and religious movements, they are part of the same current, very close in their interests, and their work as Iranian allies. Dawa has a history of operating like a secret society, terrorist organization and mysterious influencer of events from the East, essentially. (the Hashshashin - the mythical Cult of the Assassins - were called al-da'wa al-jadīda - and seemed a bit similar) Dawa operated a secret connection to fellow Shiites through the worst of times in Lebanon, Iraq and elsewhere. They were tied right into the bloody 1991 Shiite rebellion in Iraq. Be sure to check out Juan Cole's background on Dawa here and here.

In 1980s Lebanon, branches of Dawa were part of the Shiite side of the civil war – and they wanted the West out of there. 200 million Americans are hearing every day that Hezbollah blew up the Marine Barracks. But the vast "Hezbollah" entity of today didn't exist at all then. Who blew up Western stuff all the time? Shiite "fanatics" linked to the Dawa Party. Hezbollah and Dawa are very hard groups of people, enmeshed deeply within the whole population.

As Juan Cole added:

February 11, 1984, Saturday: Trial Of Bomb Blast Defendants Opens
By ALY MAHMOUD (KUWAIT) - Associated Press

Twenty-one defendants accused of bombing the U.S. and French Embassies last December were formally arraigned today, as their trial began under extreme security.....

Five people were killed and 86 injured in the rash of bombings on Dec. 12. Besides the U.S. and French embassies, four Kuwaiti targets were bombed.

The prosecution has demanded the death penalty for 19 of the defendants. The others are believed to have played a lesser role in the bombings in and around the capital of this oil-rich Arab nation . . . Of the other defendants, 17 are Iraqis; two, Lebanese, three, Kuwaitis and two are stateless. Most of them said they belonged to Al-Dawa (Islamic Call) Party, an Iraqi movement of Shiite Moslem fanatics who are pro-Iranian, said court sources who asked not to be identified.

The Chinese are furious: The Israelis have bombed the hell out of UN positions in South Lebanon, killing 4 UN observers including a Chinese one, and the Chinese are furious about it, as well as America's actions in the UN to take the pressure off Israel. This was part of a strategy to get that pesky international community out of the way where it won't see Israeli atrocities. Fortunately for the Lebanese, their country isn't sealed off like the West Bank and Gaza, and even if American viewers don't see a lot of carnage, the rest of the world does.

It should be noted that China has many interests in Iran's oil and natural gas fields. If the crisis with Iran escalates, China will be directly involved, defending Iran.

Lebanese Refugee Tsunami: And of course, the Lebanese population is churning all over the place, tossed out of their homes, with results unknown. Chris Allbritton at Back-to-iraq.com is reporting on this situation, currently down in the battered Lebanese city of Tyre. This chaos will take a few more weeks to become fully realized by the world. These refugees will slosh around this hot, hot summer, and who knows where they'll end up? That alone is a huge, shocking problem that the Israelis have generated with an unreal, frightening vigor. I didn't expect this right now, especially from a dorky-looking non-general named Ehud Olmert.

Neo-cons expanding the war: For some of them (of course, Michael Ledeen type guys, obviously) goal was to spark a broader regional war, a great settling of scores, a Battle Royale from the Mediterranean, across the Levant, into Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Central Asia and Saudi Arabia. Whenever the crisis heightened, Ledeen said, "Faster Please," and there it went.

After the neo-conservatives' crappy war plan in Iraq shattered the country, I thought that would be the last massive war they'd be allowed to spark. I thought that the "realists" and experienced military people would sense that they were in too deep, and would reel things back. Clearly, I didn't give the neo-cons enough credit.

That's the spooky subtext to everything happening now. Israel has local interests in setting a deterrent on their northern border, while the United States has an interest in a stable Lebanon that isn't folded into some massive war. That's the reality, but to the Neo-cons and other lunatic hawks that yet again dominate our televisions, there's a vast illusion that Hezbollah can be made to evaporate like a saucer of water with a touch of strategic bombing, and HAMAS will topple after the U.S. sends a few letter bombs to Syria's president Assad. The Neo-cons still have a firm belief they have that demonstrations of force will make all these boisterous Arabs fold their cards. They see this as a golden opportunity to join Israel and American wars into one colossal mega-war... They always forget that Israel's enemies are not America's.

These guys don't understand fourth-generation warfare at all. They are trapped in a mindset of total war against enemy populations. They want to bomb away the enemy populations, rather than negotiate on shared interests. They view these enemies as an existential threat, rather than a threat to the interests of their state. And of course, these days all the hawks cannot even explain a difference between the interests of the United States and Israel.

The Prisoner's Dilemma: The jail is the heart of the state. (all this time we thought it was General Motors - but they're pretty much fucked)

Aside from the actual acts of the war, the presentation of this war to the Israeli and American publics is interesting. It revolves around the morality of negotiations, pure and simple. Is it moral to force Israel to negotiate with HAMAS and Hezbollah on the issue of their captured prisoners – and, as we never hear about, the thousands of Arab prisoners, including Lebanese, held by Israel. The morality of Israel's Arab prisoners is marked at "terrorist," and that is the end of an unspoken rule here in the United States.

Of course, the Bush Administration is facing its own prisoner crises, as their clever decision to quit the legal system altogether has produced a creepy shadow zone – of secret prisons that infuriate the Europeans, extraordinary renditions, torture: a vast, violent cancer in America's intelligence system.

Iraq's Abu Ghraib was a prisoner's dilemma as much as the Extremely Bloody Deal About Four Soldiers ripping up vast, unstable areas of the Middle East right now. In Iraq we have a matrix of private contractors who: develop "intelligence" by holding prisoners, interrogating them, running teams around, going out to on raids with U.S. troops. This kind of stuff is how those Blackwater mercenaries got hung from the bridge in Fallujah.

No less an authority than Janis Karpinski, the general blamed for Abu Ghraib, announced that Israelis had operated in Abu Ghraib, evidently as contractors. Regardless of how proper it is for "third-party nationals" to roam America's foreign (expanding!) military prisons, the matter of Iraqi prisoners is... salient, to say the least. It is obvious that the U.S. practice of rounding up lots of people and dumping them in places like Abu Ghraib is resonating with the Israeli prisoner issue.

Bomb your way out: And then there is the matter of tons upon tons of American bombs subtly being passed to Israel and blown up all over the place, pissing off British citizens. Subtle as... bombs all over the place, killing the "innocent" and the "guilty." It is eerie, to say the least, that the United States is propelling the conflict higher and higher, quite apart from Israel's actual interests.

Well, that's all for now. Check out this video of the ambassador to the Arab League on Lou Dobbs. He gives Lou the old-one-two, and Lou sucks. Glad I don't have CNN now.