Aw, dammit, I made it through the whole Sixth War without blogging about it, but the more I read, the more I feel like it’s at least worth documenting in this little corner of the universe for posterity. So here it goes, with as little commentary or slant from me as possible — and you should know that that’s a serious challenge for me. But then, how is a guy like me supposed to reconcile such a conflicting diversity of opinions and interpretations within my own mind? Look at my two major framing biases: on the one hand, I loves me some Jewish people, having grown up in Miami and having a few seriously fine Jewesses on my “I have to figure out how to marry them” list (and a few more on my “Oh well, we tried” list); and on the other hand, from a strictly practical international affairs perspective, I can’t figure out how you can expect to spontaneously establish a religiously-based country in the middle of a disputed territory without pissing a lot of generally angry people off even more than they naturally are. I might as well try to solve the Sunday NYT crossword puzzle with a hangover for all the conundra that whole shebang implies.

BUT. There is a whole domestic political and sociocultural angle to all of that, and that’s what I’d like to inadequately document here.

Right from the get-go, let me credit John Sugg’s blog for being the straw that broke the camel’s back. I had already seen such rumblings late, late at night on C-SPAN, and in the days that followed I wondered if we’d ever hear any of these things in the MainStream Media, but no. These are the conversations nobody wants to have (and if I, belligerent so-and-so that I am, waited so long, that should tell you something), so it’s no surprise it hasn’t popped up next to your JonBenet Ramsey coverage.

Let’s try to start chronologically from my perspective: the first thing that bothered me was a press conference on C-SPAN that pointed out the most important missing element in MSM coverage of the conflict: every news account talked about the overt military action having been provoked by the kidnapping by Hizballah of two Israeli soldiers (which followed closely on the heels of the kidnapping of one soldier and killing of two others by Hamas militants). None of the MSM ever talked about any incursions that preceded such actions. It was always “Hizballah kidnapped two soldiers, Israel moved in to get ‘em back.”

Well, world news ain’t so flat:

In the Observer of 25 June, it merited a mere paragraph hidden in the “World in brief” section, revealing that the previous day a team of Israeli commandos had entered the Gaza Strip to “detain” two Palestinians Israel claims are members of Hamas.

The significance of the mission was alluded to in a final phrase describing this as “the first arrest raid in the territory since Israel pulled out of the area a year ago”. More precisely, it was the first time the Israeli army had re-entered the Gaza Strip, directly violating Palestinian control of the territory, since it supposedly left in August last year.

Here it is per original:

Gaza Strip arrests

Israeli forces have detained two Palestinians, who the army said were Hamas militants, in the Gaza Strip, in what observers said was the first arrest raid in the territory since Israel pulled out of the area a year ago.

(In a random note of media irony, the blurb immediately above it was titled “Mother of murdered child beauty queen dies.” Mmm-hmm.) So, from the Arab perspective, the conflict could be described as having begun with the kidnapping detention of two Palestinians who, in the view of some of them, were serving the same kind of role as an IDF soldier.

Okay, big deal, another under-reported round in an endless tit-for-tat of Arab-v-Jew in the Middle East, right? Well, then Sugg has to go and make me lose sleep at night by citing Robert Parry in the argument that

Bush encouraged Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to find a provocation to launch an attack against Hezbollah.

And then he has to go and point out that Seymour Hersh’s take on it is that

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.
…
According to a Middle East expert with knowledge of the current thinking of both the Israeli and the U.S. governments, Israel had devised a plan for attacking Hezbollah—and shared it with Bush Administration officials—well before the July 12th kidnappings. “It’s not that the Israelis had a trap that Hezbollah walked into,” he said, “but there was a strong feeling in the White House that sooner or later the Israelis were going to do it.”

The Middle East expert said that the Administration had several reasons for supporting the Israeli bombing campaign. Within the State Department, it was seen as a way to strengthen the Lebanese government so that it could assert its authority over the south of the country, much of which is controlled by Hezbollah. He went on, “The White House was more focussed on stripping Hezbollah of its missiles, because, if there was to be a military option against Iran’s nuclear facilities, it had to get rid of the weapons that Hezbollah could use in a potential retaliation at Israel. Bush wanted both. Bush was going after Iran, as part of the Axis of Evil, and its nuclear sites, and he was interested in going after Hezbollah as part of his interest in democratization, with Lebanon as one of the crown jewels of Middle East democracy.”

My point? My point is to reiterate the caution of a liberal activist (Sugg) that preceded me:

In August 1939, German soldiers dressed as Poles seized a German radio station and broadcast an inflammatory message. It was the justification the Nazis cited for launching what would become World War II.

Six years later, what began as a “false flag” provocation ended after the deaths of 48 million people.

(Hey, if the Bush administration can call all of us who question their strategy “Nazi appeasers,” might as well turn the same firehose back on them, no?)

In August 1964, the United States claimed North Vietnamese boats had attacked two of our destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. The uncritical press — practicing “war enabling” that would be the norm by the time George W. Bush became president — trumpeted the administration spin. The New York Times, for example, reported: “President Johnson has ordered retaliatory action against gunboats and ‘certain supporting facilities in North Vietnam’ after renewed attacks against American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin.”

Decades later, a book by investigative author Tom Wells, The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam, detailed elements of Johnson’s lie. Rather than a “response” to provocation, LBJ’s escalation really “reflected plans the administration had already drawn up for gradually increasing” attacks on North Vietnam. We wanted all-out war and we got it, based on a lie, at the cost of 50,000 American lives and 2 million, maybe 3 million, Vietnamese.

I am occasionally made to feel naive and ridiculous for doubting the good intentions of my government. But with history as our guide, what else are we to do? I’m not reaching for my tinfoil hat or anything, I’m just saying that a healthy dose of skepticism is neither stupid nor mad, especially as the drumbeat for another war grows louder and louder.



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