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So the strategy is pretty clear. The US and Israel are talking and the latter have been given room to get it done. The killing of civilians is considered an unfortunate side effect and once the clearing out of the civilian population is complete, the ground attack can begin in earnest. Mass evacuations are currently ongoing and the leaflet drops are expected to clear out the areas they plan to bomb with the understanding that the occupants have been given the appropriate notice to leave.

Those who remain are expected to be Hezbollah. With their superior fire power Israel believes it can finally get Hezbollah fighters once they're drawn out and can no longer use civilians as a human shield. Lets hope it doesn't last long.

And now for some jokes. (Secular deity) knows that we need them.

I got the first one from a comment left somewhere by an Israeli on a Lebanese blog:

In Israel, we have a joke about a guy walking on the beach and coming across a curious looking bottle. He picks it up, rubs some sand off it and (not surprisingly) a genie appears. "Let me go and I will grant you any wish!". The guy says, "It would be cool to have a highway from here to NYC". The Genie goes "common, get real". "OK" says the guy, "We have a little dispute here in the ME between us and the Pals. Let me explain... (bla bla bla). In short I want peace". The genie takes a minute and goes: "So, how many lanes do you want on that highway?"

The second came from Gareth. Thanks Gareth, I hope you don’t mind.

Jordanian intelligence officer: “For the Islamic fundamentalists, democratic reform is like toilet paper,” he said. “You use it once and then you throw it away.”

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A group of distraught Lebanese people gathered at the beach near the US embassy in North Beirut today to wave their goodbyes to US citizens being evacuated . As the last of the relieved American men, women and children were helped on to the landing craft that was to ferry them to the amphibious assault ship U.S.S. Nashville some of the Lebanese onlookers rolled out banners saying: ‘Really, really sorry to see you go’ and ‘Well that’s it, now we’re fucked’.

As the F16s scored the clear blue Lebanese sky with jet trails they could just hear, underneath the thunderous crack of bomb exploded masonry, a small child’s voice calling to the speeding landing craft ‘come back soon’.

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It has been pointed out several times that the Israel-Lebanese conflict shows, amongst other things, how blogs have become a powerful medium for providing information about how people in the middle of the conflict are dealing with the trauma. Blogs can’t be centrally controlled, so in that sense they’re democratic. However, they can also just be sounding boards for extremist views. But what is enlightening, in the blogs I’ve looked at, is the attempts to provide understanding about the complexity of the situation and in the circumstances to give a balanced account.

On Monday I mentioned a couple of Lebanese blogs that I’d heard about, but it wasn’t a thorough list. For example, I neglected to mention the Lebanese Political Journal, a blog highlighted by the Guardian (Bah!).

Today, Lebanon.Profile, a writer for that blog gives a very thorough analysis, I think. For example, he/she/they make the point:
“Hezbollah stupidly carried out an attack. The Lebanese leadership brought Hezbollah into the government worried that not doing so would start a civil war and continue the campaign of assassinations against Lebanese political leaders.”

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It seem that the US is willing to accept Israel’s ‘disproportionate use of force’ for another week at least in order to deal with Hizbollah, though Israel say it’ll take a couple of weeks. The strategy, it is argued, is designed to stem the perceived over-reach of Syria and the emboldening of Iran and to that end the US Administration is happy to ignore the killing of 230 Lebanese (and the 25 Israelis for that matter) and who knows how many more before the conflict is scheduled to end.

This suggests that despite the protest of the EU and other nations that Israel is able to continue to use extraordinary force to solve its problems because it is protected by the world’s only superpower. So what is the relationship between Israel and the US all about? Why are they given such extraordinary privileges? Is it the case, as was argued in a controversial article published in the London Review of Books in March that Israel has historically influenced US foreign policy in the Middle East, ultimately to the determent of American and indeed, the world’s security?

Well it’s a point that’s taken up in an article published in the Washington Post (dated July 16th 2006) by Glenn Frankel, where he tries to find out if the strong Israeli lobby in Washington, (he focuses on American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in particular) are actually directing US policy regarding the Middle East.

The article provides a valuable history of the US-Israeli relationship from the time that Ben-Gurion, who was to become the first Prime Minister of Isreal, was denied a 15 minute meeting with Roosevelt in 1942 to AIPAC's annual gathering in March of this year where Dick Cheney and John Bolton gave keynote addresses and where Ehud Olmert, via satellite, begins a politician's prayer of thanksgiving: "Thank God we have you; thank God we have AIPAC."

Frankel concludes that while the Israeli lobby is indeed very strong (although they are not disproportionately powerful) it is America's interests in the Middle East and how Israel fits into this that dictate the positions the Bush administration is taking at the moment.

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The New York Times can be so prosaic at times. In linguistic terms at least they are the polar opposite to Bush. Here’s how they report the news that in Bush’s opinion ‘What they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit’.

“President Bush urged tartly that Mr. Annan telephone President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, a key sponsor of Hezbollah, “and make something happen.” In Russia for a Group of 8 summit meeting, Mr. Bush expressed his views to Mr. Blair, using a vulgarity that was caught by an open microphone.”

And maybe Annan replied with astringency, ‘go do it yourself’.

Last night on Newnight, the Israeli interior minister Avi Dichter, explained perfectly why Israel feels it has the right to act unilaterally with regard to Lebanon: “In this region, unfortunately, we don’t have superpowers, so, we have to act like the so called superpowers”.

He must be referring to that superpower template: Bomb the shit of them. Invade. Destroy infrastructure more thoroughly. Watch it descend into civil war. Leave.

In the same report Dichter said that Israel won’t take Iran’s nuclear program out. That will be left to the real superpowers. Awesome.

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After seeing the blogger Beirut Springs mentioned on Newsnight, I thought it might be worth taking a look at some of the 'independent' Lebanese bloggers out there to find out how things are closer to the ground. Blogs of course, are personal opinions and as such don’t provide anything close to a full picture, but it tells us what real Lebanese (some of them anyway) are thinking at the moment.

Starting with Beirut Springs, which is run by Mustapha (you can check out the blogs Wiki profile here). His latest post provides buttons which you can attach to your blog or website to support Lebanese refugees. However, from an opinion posted on Sunday 16th July he argues that Hezbollah is stupid to be playing chicken with Israel:

“The Hezbollah statement said that if Israel doesn’t stop its “foolishness”, no target in Israel would be spared. The purpose of this of course, is to create a situation where the Israelis will be scared and tired and ask their government to go easy on Lebanon.

[Firstly, this tactic] “completely misreads the Israeli collective Psyche. When Nassrallah made a speech two days ago to the Israeli people, he sounded exactly like Bin Laden asking the Americans to vote out “George Bush the Crusader”. What was he thinking? Doesn’t he realize that the Israelis are very united around Olmert’s Actions? Don’t forget that Israelis are much more united around Olmert than the Lebanese are around Hezbollah.

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