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Green Light or Proxy War?

I’ve always maintained that the “pro-Israel” position of the Bush administration, formulated and influenced by hardline American Likudniks (whom, it must be said, are hardly representative of mainstream Israeli thinking) is actually fundamentally bad for Israel. Its infantile, aggressive maximalism precludes Israel from doing what it will take to live at peace with its surroundings, […]

I’ve always maintained that the “pro-Israel” position of the Bush administration, formulated and influenced by hardline American Likudniks (whom, it must be said, are hardly representative of mainstream Israeli thinking) is actually fundamentally bad for Israel. Its infantile, aggressive maximalism precludes Israel from doing what it will take to live at peace with its surroundings, instead demanding a confrontational approach in keeping with Jabotinsky’s “Iron Wall” in which Israel’s survival depends on crush and humiliating the Arabs. Bush may talk the language of “Arab liberation,” but his contempt for Arab democracy is plain — just look at his response to the Hamas election victory. His administration appears to be dedicated to a remaking of the Middle East on America’s terms through violent social engineering. The depth of their failure in Iraq appears not to have deterred them from another adventure in Lebanon, this time using Israel as their agent of “change.” And if hundreds of Lebanese children are killed in Israeli air strikes, they’re just victims of the “birth pangs of a New Middle East.” ~Tony Karon

Via Leon Hadar

It would be slightly, but not entirely, baffling if Washington believed that destroying Lebanon would somehow contribute to the general transformation of the region in some way that wasn’t disastrous, especially given how much hot air the administration and its hangers-on blew at us during the “Cedar Revolution.”  If the Cedar Revolution with its anti-Syrian protests in the streets of Beirut really was Washington’s right answer for Lebanon last year (and you would be right to be very skeptical of that claim), why would leveling Beirut and discrediting the elected Lebanese government be part of the new goal?  In any event, as The Economist noted last month in its article on the retreat of democratic reform across the Arab world, Lebanese politics did not become more “democratic” with this so-called Revolution, but instead the “Revolution” simply empowered the local bosses, who are divided along sectarian lines, and obviously empowered and emboldened Hizbullah.  Perhaps in some convoluted way democratising Lebanon was always intended to empower Hizbullah, all the better to provoke a conflict? 

If we considered all of the hot air about democracy to be propaganda covering Washington’s hegemonic and “pro-Israel” goals (which, as Mr. Karon correctly notes, may not be doing Israel any real good), things make a little more sense, though it remains unclear why Washington would actually go ahead in encouraging elections, whether in Lebanon or Iraq, that would almost by definition bring governments to power that are hostile to the interests of Israel.  Perhaps there the government is seesawing between the two neocon poles of ludicrous democratism and irresponsible hegemonism, and we happen to be in the middle of a hegemonist phase?  With this administration’s incompetence, it is often difficult to gauge what they intended to do, since they so very often fail in realising their stated goals.

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