AN AMERICAN-ISRAELI DEFEAT?

f i r s t d r a f t


Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (1975) defines defeat as follows:

1....DESTRUCTION 2: frustration by nullification or by prevention of success...3 an overthrow esp. of an army in battle...4 the loss of a contest.


With this definition in mind, here’s how things look:


Re. 1: DESTRUCTION.

The Pentagon and its Israeli bully haven't destroyed Hezbollah, and could not–by the Israelis’ own “sudden” realization.

Re. 2: frustration by nullification or by prevention of success.

Israel has not nullified Hezbollah and Hezbollah so far (and it looks plain for later) has prevented it from disarming it. If anything, Hezbollah has succeeded in showing Israel for the second time (Mr. Saddam Hussein did it first) that it can take the war to Israel's territory, balancing somewhat Israel’s air power use against civilians. According to various press reports, in the next battle, Hezbollah will have ground-to-air missiles.

Re. 3: an overthrow esp. of an army in battle.

Israel has certainly failed to overthrow Hezbollah in its weeks of bombardments, incursions, and occupation. Nor has Hezbollah been able to achieve the reverse. The difference: Hezbollah hadn’t set that as a goal; Israel had.

Psychologically, however, the story is more dismal for Israel: A militia has been able for weeks to balance the powerful Israeli army! This militia for instance has been able to neutralize that army's Mirkava tank. And it wasn’t a story solely about a tank. The very surprise of the Israeli armed forces by Hezbollah’s ability to neutralize the workhorse of those forces brought out yet another and more severe failure. Israeli intelligence, while busy through its right-wing Israel-obsessed informants--some of them pseudo-friends!--and right wing Lebanese Christians here spying on me–-developing my file-- (Please refer to the series of articles, “Chance Encounters,”) has missed the fact that Hezbollah had missiles (Russian-made Metis-M) that can disable the Mirkava. Yet more dismal for Israel: its intelligence failure indicates intelligence success for Hezbollah. That party after all had succeeded in hiding the fact that it had those Russian missiles.

In addition, Hezbollah has rained thousands of (imprecise) rockets onto Israeli towns, a (sorry but psychologically very effective) balance to the Israeli air force’s devastation of Lebanon’s infrastructure and its mowing down of innocent civilians. Quite a feat psychologically and if one accounts for probable future progress.


Re. 4: the loss of a contest.

Neither Israel nor Hezbollah have objectively lost a contest. Subjectively, however, Hezbollah has won the contest in that it has penetrated the Israeli shield of security around its territory.

*******************

MEDIOCRE STRATEGY, MEDIOCRE RESULTS


The Pentagon unleashed its Israeli bully against Lebanon’s civilians. Its goals, one surmises, were as follows:

A. TO DISARM HEZBOLLAH

The mechanics of that goal have followed an old established stratagem that the harmful idiots had used in the past: To murder civilians wholesale in the hope that these would accept any solution that would entail the disarming of the party causing trouble to the Pentagon and its Israeli army.

The Pentagon can rest assured that that strategy, tried before by its harmful idiots during the Lebanon civil war, did not (then,) and could not (now) produce the hoped-for results. If anything, my sense is that the longer the battles rage, the more the majority of the Lebanese will side with Hezbollah, and the more recruits for Hezbollah in Lebanon and across the Arab and Islamic world. Worse for Lebanon and the region, the harmful idiots' game might get out of hand (as it did during the Lebanon civil war) and the results would be disastrous--and their spillover into the oil countries tremendous. (Get ready for a recession.)

This is not only logical; it’s also practical.

Logically: why should the Lebanese sects side with the strangers who have destroyed their country, and line up against their own next-door neighbors–the Lebanese Shiites?

Logically, too: why would the Lebanese blame Hezbollah for the devastation of their country having witnessed an absolute Israeli restraint in facing up to Syria? After all, the Israelis themselves claim that Syria is behind Hezbollah. What gives? What kind of cowards are these who target defenseless civilians, yet avoid at all cost a confrontation with the armed forces of the one country the murderers of civilians claim is behind Hezbollah?

(In no way is SaudiPolitics calling for an American attack on Syria. This would be disastrous for U.S. troops in Iraq. I mention this scenario only to bring out the dishonesty, abject mediocrity, and callousness of the Pentagon’s strategy: that of mowing down defenseless civilians in order to disarm Hezbollah. If anything, as far as SaudiPolitics is concerned, from an Arab perspective, it’s absolutely important to keep Syria strong. For instance, Turkey Is damming the Tigris river and threatening the welfare of all in Iraq and Syria. Should Turkey not release a fair share of the water to Syria and Iraq, would the Saudi army (!) come to the assistance of Iraq and Syria? Would Egypt? Jordan? Any of Israel’s Arab allies?)


On a practical level, if Iranian money pours into Lebanon and is distributed fairly by Hezbollah to all the civilians who were hurt by Israel’s targeting, regardless of sect, one would expect that this absence of corruption, and Iran’s generosity, would be compensated by popular approval.

To put it bluntly: Hezbollah is not a corrupt party, while the Saudi and American proxies in Lebanon are eminently the opposite. The Saudi and American proxies have robbed Lebanon’s public purse blind. Not Hezbollah.

(Hezbollah and Mr. Berri did their share to bankrupt the Lebanese state by putting a majority of the Shiites on the state’s payroll–not by pocketing the money themselves.)

An illustration of Hezbollah’s organizational acumen can be found in Tibneen, a southern Lebanese town which population includes Christians and Shiites. Historically, after an Israeli bombardment and destruction of homes, Hezbollah would repair first the homes of the Christians. Then repair the homes of the Shiites.



2. INTERNATIONAL FIGHTING TROOPS

The Pentagon should by now have learned, after killing over 900 Lebanese civilians, that its strategy of murdering civilians to place pressure on the Lebanese to disarm Hezbollah will not work. Not only is Hezbollah smarter than the Pentagon, but the non-Shiites of Lebanon should be reluctant to engage in a civil war.

Why? For one, logically, why should they fight their own self--their neighbors--to make up for America's failure in the neocon (Jewish right wing and its liberal adorers) Middle East? For another, practically, they would lose that war and would end up in a queue as refugees in Cyprus, standing in front of the U.S. embassy, fighting the elements, waiting for an American visa and being treated like dirt.


(Worrisome: Al-Manar, the Hezbollah online newspaper, is replete with references of treachery against it by Saudi and American Lebanese proxies. Wonder whether this pent-up anger and sense of being stabbed in the back by fellow Lebanese would translate into yet another war of assassination against these proxies and thier people. The queue in front of the American embassy in Nicocia might after all become reality, even in the absence of a full-fledged Lebanese civil war.)


Hezbollah should be expected to unleash, overtly and covertly, against any foreign troops coming into Lebanon to constrain it. The international troops wouldn’t stand a chance. If Iraq has taught us anything it is that troops “allied” to the U.S. are fast to pack their bags at the first sign of trouble.

(That's the problem with alliances built of the evolving of assets who later become leaders, instead of on solid mutual goals.)

So, give up on this idea.

As for the idea of training by the U.S. of Lebanese troops: Once again, the harmful idiots don’t seem to appreciate that politics is everything.

The members of the proposed 7000-men-and-woman Lebanese army, to be trained by the US, would be Lebanese, wouldn’t they? And they would be prone to the ups-and-downs of Lebanese politics, wouldn’t they? And Hezbollah should still be able to stage an operation or two similar to the one when it kidnaped Israeli soldiers? And Israel should be expected to retaliate by murdering Lebanese civilians, wholesale, shouldn’t it?

Do the harmful idiots for a moment think that the 7000-strong Lebanese army would be immune to the impact of Israel’s killing of Lebanese children on its allegiance? Do you think that Hezbollah women are not Phoenician enough to know how to mate with members of that army, allowing Hezbollah to infiltrate it? (For the right price, maybe the harmful idiots can offer to castrate the men in the 7000-strong American-trained army. They’re idiot enough to consider the idea.)

It’s getting late. So here’s what you need to do to secure the oil away from China and India:

1. Get a Palestinian state established on all of the 1967 lands. It doesn’t matter that the Islamists would rule it for now. With enough cargo, the harmful idiots should be able to reverse that–or at least balance it out.


2. Give the Joulan back to its owner and pay restitution for the water you’ve stolen since 1967. There are principles and treaties for the use of water running from one country to another. Mediate the matter. If you need more than your share, pay for it.

3. Pay reparations to the Palestinian refugees and to Lebanon.

4. Raise interest rates so that the expansion in China and India would taper off, necessitating less need for the precious oil resource. (The Federal Reserve bears the burden on this one, since the alternative–-raising taxes by the President and Congress–-is a near political impossibility.)

5. Prepare for problems at home (e.g., a spike in the crime rate, the evolution of non-tax paying barter markets) since higher interest rates will mean higher unemployment. Get public work programs going.

6. America’s forte (and genius) is technology. So, instead of squandering the public purse on idiotic and harmful schemes overseas, invest at least some of that money in the (actual) security not of foreign countries but of this country–ours!-- such as in alternative energy sources.