XPost: uk.politics.misc, soc.culture.palestine, soc.culture.egyptian   
   XPost: soc.culture.israel, soc.culture.lebanon   
   From: o@o.org   
      
        A war without borders in the making   
                     By Kaveh L Afrasiabi   
      
                     A day after killing four United Nations workers, Israel's   
   cabinet has simultaneously called up reservists and announced that there   
   will be no "major offensive" inside Lebanon. This in light of Hezbollah's   
   tough resistance and continued ability to fire rockets at Israel more than   
   two weeks after the latter declared its military objective of finishing off   
   Hezbollah.   
      
                     Since then, Israel has lost the sympathy of much of world   
   opinion. The United States finds itself completely isolated in its   
   uncritical support for Israel and its "clean break" policy aimed at   
   dominating the region.   
      
                     "A massive blow to Hezbollah has not yet happened,"   
   lamented an Israeli pundit, and another one, Meron Benvenist, writing in the   
   liberal paper Ha'aretz, gloomily predicted that "the major losers in this   
   conflict will be the people of Israel".   
      
                     Well, don't tell that to the Palestinians, whose leaders   
   are warning of Israel's unilateral "forgotten war" on them, or the Lebanese   
   people, one-fourth of whom have been turned into refugees, with the rest   
   subjected to daily bombardments and missile and artillery strikes.   
      
                     War and realignment   
                     The US and Israel have pinned their hopes on somehow   
   telescoping this growingly messy conflict to their rosy expectations of a   
   "new Middle East". Accordingly, the region would be cleansed of radical   
   Islamists and turned into a bastion of secular democracy. So goes the   
   discursive subterfuge first penned by Israeli Vice Premier Shimon Peres a   
   decade ago, now adopted by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, whose   
   weak performance at the Rome conference was aptly captured by a CNN   
   headline, "Rice versus the world".   
      
                     Of course, the Arab and Muslim reading of the underlying   
   meaning of this high-brow jargon is considerably different, ie, as a   
   linguistic complement to Israel's warmongering aiming to destroy the   
   Palestinian government, annihilate the defiant Hezbollah, weaken Syria and,   
   perhaps, set the stage for a future attack on Iran's nuclear facilities,   
   with or without US cooperation.   
      
                     Already, the Arab media are awash with pointed criticism   
   of the US policy of backing Israel's destruction of the fledging democracies   
   in Lebanon and the occupied territories. After all, Hezbollah is a part of   
   Lebanon's coalition government and, per an Israeli media report, only two   
   months ago an Israeli general stated that Hezbollah was moderating and   
   integrating in Lebanon's political process.   
      
                     But that was then, and Peres is now quoted warning the   
   Lebanese government, "It is us or Hezbollah. This is a war for life and for   
   peace."   
      
                     Similarly Rice, on her trip to Jerusalem, stated, "I have   
   no doubt that there are those who wish to strangle a democratic and   
   sovereign Lebanon in its crib." The question is, of course, who is the true   
   culprit if not Israel, which has set Lebanon back at least 50 years,   
   according to its prime minister.   
      
                     Concerning the latter, there are already visible signs of   
   US-Israeli intelligence cooperation on Hezbollah targets, not to mention the   
   United States' replenishing Israel's arsenal, irrespective of the United   
   States' own laws forbidding Israel's use of US-purchased weaponry for   
   offensive purposes.   
      
                     Thus the million-dollar question: Will this conflict lead   
   to a geostrategic realignment? Certainly pro-Israel pundits, such as the New   
   York Times' Thomas Friedman, hope so. In his recent dispatch from Damascus,   
   Friedman asks: "Can we get the Syrians on board? Can we split Damascus from   
   Tehran? My conversations here suggest it would be very hard, but worth a   
   shot."   
      
                     Friedman at least shows consistency. A few years ago, this   
   author met him briefly in Tehran prior to the United States' invasion of   
   Iraq, when he was similarly trying to drive a wedge between Tehran and   
   Baghdad, writing disingenuously that "Tehran should really not be a part of   
   the axis of evil".   
      
                     But, of course, Tehran and Damascus know better than to be   
   fooled by the present US-Israel "divide, destroy and conquer" shenanigans   
   superbly pushed by the compliant US media. Little surprise, then, that both   
   Syria and Iran find themselves subjected to a great deal of disinformation.   
      
                     In Syria's case, the Syrian news agency denied a report by   
   Sky News, dated July 25, that Damascus was giving vital information about   
   al-Qaeda to the US and had expressed willingness to act as mediator between   
   Tehran and Washington.   
      
                     Iran, on the other hand, reacted strongly to a report in   
   the New York Sun that scores of its Revolutionary Guards had died fighting   
   alongside Hezbollah, stating in a press release that Iran had "no military   
   presence whatsoever in Lebanon".   
      
                     The US-Israel design on Syria conforms with what Stephen   
   Walt, dean of the Kennedy School of Government, has written about   
   "bandwagoning" as a form of alliance, that is, "Bandwagoning involves   
   unequal exchange: the vulnerable state makes asymmetrical concessions to the   
   dominant power and accepts a subordinate role."   
      
                     But in light of the hegemonist intentions of Israel, its   
   superior offensive capabilities and proximity of its threats to Syria, it is   
   highly unlikely that Syria will relinquish its strategic alliance with Iran   
   for the sake of appeasing Israel, no matter how diligently the pundits in   
   the US media try to sell that to Damascus, still ruled by a Ba'athist   
   ideology militating against the notion of allowing Lebanon's metamorphosis   
   into an Israeli satellite at the end of this bloody conflict.   
      
                     Rather, Syria's national interests dictate guarding itself   
   against the current maneuvers to weaken its regional alliances and to set it   
   up in a long-term US-Israeli grand design to remap the Middle East according   
   to the whims and interests of Israel.   
      
                     In fact, the present conflict has exposed Israel's   
   military weaknesses and vulnerabilities. As an Israeli analyst has put it,   
   "Israel does not have the overwhelming strategic superiority that it thought   
   it had." With Hezbollah single-handedly delivering a major blow to Israel's   
   military prestige irrespective of the blows it has received so far, any   
   Syrian or other Arab willingness to succumb to the combined "carrot and   
   stick" pressure politics of the US and Israel and thus appear as betraying   
   their own historic self-understanding and ideology is, indeed, a remote   
   possibility.   
      
                     Meanwhile, in light of al-Qaeda's call on all Muslims to   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)