Onward to Iran through Lebanon

uchicago.edu

Seymour Hersh writes in the New Yorker what many people perhaps had suspected all along:

The Bush Administration, however, was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah’s heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground.

If this was planned well in advance by the U.S. and Israel, it now becomes obvious why Syria has been given the cold shoulder after its help with interrogating suspected Al Qaeda terrorists after 9/11.

Perhaps, Rafik Hariri's death was arranged just so the Syrian army would leave Lebanon. Leading the way for Israel to take one of the periodic Hezbollah cross-border attacks and use it as rationale for an escalation. Once Beirut was bombed and Hezbollah retaliated by firing Katyusha rockets into Israel, Israeli civilians got behind the government in full support. Giving Israel the green light to do a full aerial bombardment of Lebanon.

The LA Times had a story about how Israel was struggling in this war, and that aerial bombardment was absolutely the wrong strategy. Not only was it ineffective, it only served to highlight to the world, Israel's cavalier attitude to the loss of Lebanese civilian lives.

In a sense, the U.N. ceasefire resolution was needed as much by Israel (and the U.S.) in terms of saving face -- or at least having time to wipe the poo off their faces -- as by Lebanon in terms of staunching even more loss of civilian losses.