The cease fire in Lebanon appears to be holding at this moment, thank God. Just a Goddamned shame it couldn’t have been called a month ago before well over a thousand people were killed in Lebanon (Robert Fisk reports the number at around 1,300 as some of the collapsed buildings hit by the IDF are excavated) and more than 140 in Israel. Did I say “couldn’t”? It’s really more a case of “wouldn’t”. Bush, Cheney, and pals were anxious to see the birth of their “new Middle East,” after all, so many more hundreds of men, women, and children had to die needlessly, many more had to be grievously wounded, lose their homes and livelihoods, etc., before the administration and the Israeli government chose to accept virtually the same terms as they could have had shortly after the conflict began. It looks as though Olmert and Peretz had had enough, realizing that victory does not come easy in southern Lebanon even with vastly superior military technology and a strategy that involves massive civilian casualties and collective punishment. Well, it was gripping while it lasted, eh, fellows?

So what does this new Middle East look like? Well, let’s see. From the wreckage of Lebanon, Hezbollah has emerged as a world-class fighting organization, able to hold off one of the most sophisticated military machines in the world — a feat which has earned them the admiration of virtually the entire Arab world, including sectarian communities in their own country who were their sworn enemies not so long ago. The craven Bush administration, apparently high on the latest round of strategic Kool-Aid being ladled out by the likes of Iran-Contra felon Elliott Abrams, was expecting Christian, Sunni, and Druze Lebanese to turn on the Shi’a community as a result of Israel’s savage attacks on their country. Perhaps they were stoked up by memories of last year’s “Cedar Revolution” and the ejection of Syrian troops from Lebanon. If so, they severely miscalculated… yet again. Hezbollah may receive arms and support from Iran and Syria, but it is an indigenous force with its loyalties fixed firmly in the soil of southern Lebanon. You don’t fight that fiercely for something that isn’t yours. So this entire exercise simply entrenched Hezbollah more deeply in Lebanon’s political and cultural life, enhanced their reputation as a resistance movement, and demonstrated that the concept of mutual assured destruction now applies to local, non-nuclear conflicts between Israel and its immediate neighbors.

This brings us back the the “vision” thing, as pappy Bush used to say. What is Lebanon’s role in America’s grand strategy? Pretty simple. Disarm the one force capable of deterring a neighboring power that has attacked invaded their country half a dozen times in the last 25 years. Let Western capital roll over their economy. And keep their mouths shut. That was the plan for Iraq, as well — in fact, that’s the goal for every nation in what’s referred to as the “developing world”. The model is to have formal democratic institutions in the sense that there will be elections every few years. But all the key decisions regarding the ownership and distribution of national resources, public services, and trade and investment policy, will be made by bankers and investors in the “developed” world. This is what Bush calls “freedom” — for the impoverished majorities in these countries, it means abandoning hope of a better life and resigning oneself to penury in a global consensus built to benefit multinational corporations. It’s the “freedom” you find in Guatemala and Nicaragua.

My guess is, that’s part of what makes people fight so damned hard. They can see where this is headed.

luv u,

jp

Yes, friends, we do still have a color coded terror alert system (not heard from since just after the 2004 Democratic National Convention) and it’s cranked up to red after this week’s thwarted terror plot in Britain. Another hijacking plan involving long-distance flights, this time apparently focusing on ten aircraft, though I believe the 9/11 strategy originally called for more than 4 or 5 planes. Bush’s comments following the announcement seemed particularly rambling and incoherent, covering the usual talking points about those who “hate our freedoms,” then stumbling off even further into numbskull territory. His painfully qualified-sounding observation that we are “safer than we were on 9/11” sounded a bit like when he was lowballing the number of Iraqi dead to “around thirty thousand”, give or take. This man should never work without a script. In any case, the national security establishment was full of self-praise at having averted a major catastrophe of the type we can expect to see attempted with greater frequency in the months and years ahead, thanks to their ham-fisted policies over the last five years. So, well done… I think.

Still, this near miss (or as George Carlin might term it, “near hit“) fills me with dread. Maybe it’s just paranoia born of anticipating the inevitable fallout from the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon, but I can’t help but wonder – why such an obvious scenario? Why attempt an attack using the very system that is most closely watched by the authorities? Might this be an elaborate diversion, a rouse to distract us from some far more novel operation now in progress? I hope not, but I know this has occurred to others besides myself. It would be reckless to assume that this would never have occurred to groups like al Qaeda, as well. The malign brilliance of the 9/11 plot was that it completely blind-sided our national security establishment and used the failings of our profit-obsessed commercial aviation system and the atrophied regulatory bodies that oversee it as weapons against us, to terrifying effect. Someone – I doubt bin Laden – was bright enough to look closely at our society, discern where the structural weaknesses are, and proceed accordingly. If they’re smart enough to pull that off, it seems to me they’re probably too smart to rely solely on a plot that uses those same resources, which while still vulnerable are much more highly scrutinized by intelligence and law enforcement than they were prior to September 2001.

So while our homeland security secretary and various anti-terrorism officials pat themselves on the back for a job well done, there may be some more subtle conspiracy under way on the part of the “evil doers”. Lord knows we’re open to attack across a broad spectrum of the national infrastructure, from ground transportation to chemical plants to power generation facilities and so on. Our homeland security funding is a shambles, with money being sent in all kinds of strange directions per the usual congressional pork-barrel allocation process. Just a few miles from where I live, there’s a training facility where people in hazmat suits practice for the terror attacks of yesteryear, effectively closing the door on that empty barn. Sure, it generates a few jobs and it makes it look like our politicians are doing something to make us safer, but when you’ve got a top-level leadership that doesn’t think New York City has any important landmarks worth protecting; one that has demonstrated its inability and unwillingness to respond to predictable disasters like Katrina; a national political culture that has done more to breed terrorism in the last five years than Osama might have dreamed possible in 2000, there’s no question but that we have a major problem here.

By the way, we now have a cease fire agreement for Lebanon that allows the IDF to keep dropping bombs “defensively.” More payback on the way, I expect… so keep your heads down, my friends.