Monday, July 31, 2006
Tell me again about those Innocent Civilians
or: pull the other one—it’s got bells on
Ramirez©
America’s concept of Hezbollah will always be defined by Oct. 23, 1983, when a suicide bomber killed nearly 245 U.S. servicemen at the Beirut airport in the Marines’ worst one-day loss since the World War II invasion of Okinawa. But it is 23 years later and Hezbollah now lives in the mainstream of Lebanese politics, not in the small Iranian-controlled terror cells that attacked American soldiers and took American hostages in the 1980s.
Today Hezbollah is a strong social and political movement headed by an articulate and charismatic cleric, Hassan Nasrallah, who enjoys considerable popularity among many Lebanese. It has two government ministers, 14 members of parliament and an experienced and efficient guerrilla force far stronger than the Lebanese army. Most critically, Hezbollah has the devotion--not just the support--of many of Lebanon’s Shiite Muslims, who make up almost half the country’s population.
... U.S. policy in the area will fail, with disastrous consequences regionwide but especially in Iraq, as long as Washington accepts Israel’s caricature of Hezbollah as a bunch of fanatics who “want their own people as human shields ... [and] civilian casualties on both sides.”
“The military situation for us is perfect,” a Hezbollah official told me last week as Israeli ground forces inched deeper into south Lebanon, taking heavy casualties. “The Israelis are destroying everything. Even children are saying they have nothing to lose now.”
...Have the U.S. and Israel forgotten the lesson of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon: that force resolves nothing?
RTWT.
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