New Yorker's Sy Hersh: Bush Admin Helped Plan Israeli Offensive...

[gatorboy]

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060821fa_fact

In the days after Hezbollah crossed from Lebanon into Israel, on July 12th, to kidnap two soldiers, triggering an Israeli air attack on Lebanon and a full-scale war, the Bush Administration seemed strangely passive. “It’s a moment of clarification,” President George W. Bush said at the G-8 summit, in St. Petersburg, on July 16th. “It’s now become clear why we don’t have peace in the Middle East.” He described the relationship between Hezbollah and its supporters in Iran and Syria as one of the “root causes of instability,” and subsequently said that it was up to those countries to end the crisis. Two days later, despite calls from several governments for the United States to take the lead in negotiations to end the fighting, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that a ceasefire should be put off until “the conditions are conducive.”

The Bush Administration, however, was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah’s heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground.
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So the Bush admin. helped plan the attack on Lebanon, a country that only a year ago, he was so proud of for bringing free elections into the region.


Take that Democracy.

[regnaD kciN]

1. And, if you read the article...

...you'll find he did it partly to help the Lebanese government. :crazy: The rationale was that, if Israel inflicted enough damage to Lebanon as a whole, the Sunnis and Christians would rise up and drive out Hezbollah for getting them into this mess. (I have written elsewhere on how this is not only supremely ignorant, but shows a not-so-subtle contempt for the Lebanese. If Israel -- or the U.S. -- was attacked, would citizens everywhere demand that the government meet the attacker's demands? Of course not, but the apparent U.S./Israeli attitude was that Arabs are so cowardly and servile that they'll do anything an attacker wishes, just to stop the onslaught. I wonder how many of our "experts" are surprised that it turns out Arabs react the same way we would...by digging in their heels and raising their determination to fight to the finish?)

I can only recall the old line from Vietnam, about how "we had to destroy the village in order to save it." :eyes:

[movonne]

2. This is probably why this is such a miserable failure...whatever

chaney and bush do is a failure...it was shock and awe all over again and we saw how that turned out..

[countryjake]

4. In their eyes, wiping out the Shia majority is the way to "help"...

the shaking "democracy" of Lebanon...ensuring that the country remains properly "Lebanonized" to U.S. advantage.

No surprise that so very many civilians have been "accidentally" targeted.

[yurbud]

5. Americans expect others to react opposite of how they do

Its kind of a racist assumption that other people are little more than apes that just descended from the trees, and we have to civilize them--or eat them as bushmeat.

[MADem]

3. Well, that explains the rather anaemic execution of the plan, then

This wasn't the IDF that took on all comers from all sides back in the day....

Wonder if Rummy's crew provided the targeting data....