See Ken Silverstein's post  (Harper's ) : Could U.S. Troops End up in Lebanon?

new 'domino' theory: Israel's attacks will demolish Hezbollah; the Lebanese will blame Hezbollah and destroy its influence; and the backlash will extend to the Palestinians' Hamas, which will collapse

Pigs could fly .

I doubt it...there was an article yesterday at military.com that said 2/3rds of our combat troops unready.

Of course, with this administration's unwillingness to think realistically, it could happen...

Palestinians and Lebanese who are suffering, losing their homes and loved ones can take solace in the fact that their losses are just the "birth pangs of a new Middle East." Isn't it exciting!

Another problem with Condi's theory is there is no evidence that Israel wants to play their role either.

This just lets the Bush people ignore trying to talk to Syria, as they have done so well ignoring talking to North Korea.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

A consistent theme in administration miscalculations in the Middle East is that consistently seem to overestimate the numbers of potential US and Israeli freinds, and underestimate the depth of support of our antoganists.

In Iraq, they thought that if they toppled Saddam, the overjoyed and liberated Iraqi public would wave US flags, form a democracy, recognize Israel and become a US-friendly client in oil country.

In Iran, the hawks seem once again convinced that if they shove the governmnet aside, a vast US-loving public will take control, recognize Israel, and make nice with us.

Now in Lebanon, they imagine that an Israeli defeat of Hezbollah, a group which is thoroughly integrated with, and supported by, the largest sectarian group in that divided country, will cause most of Lebanon to spit Hexbollah out and make nice with Israel and the US.

No damn Hail Mary pass is too stupid for these guys. But they'll try any desperate move to avoid making deals.

Todd Gitlin writes: I do not know how to think of these people as anything other than mad.

This is self evident from the post describing Blumental's ravings about a new domino theory.

Isn't it time to learn how to think of "these people" (ie the government of the USA) as rational political operators with coherent plans rather than taking comfort in one's own total incomprehension of what's happening by simply concluding that they must be mad since your understanding of their rationale makes no sense whatever.

Does Rice actually believe that:

Israel's attacks will demolish Hezbollah; the Lebanese will blame Hezbollah and destroy its influence; and the backlash will extend to the Palestinians' Hamas, which will collapse. From the administration's point of view, the Israel-Lebanon conflict is a proxy war with Iran (and Syria) that will inexplicably help turn around Iraq

If so, she is indeed hopelessly delusional since nobody rational could possibly believe any of those propositions.

Why not learn "how to think" of obviously irrational explanations as simply being false?

Let us assume for a moment that Condi knows at least as well as Todd Gitlin and I that:

1. Israel's attacks on Hezbollah will not and indeed could not destroy Hezbollah and that Israel knows this since it fought an 18 year war with Hezbollah and had to retreat from south Lebanon six years ago while Hezbollah has grown stronger since and is now part of the government of Lebanon.

2. The Lebanese will not blame Hezbollah and destroy its influence and that Israel knows this since the Lebanese who sided with Israel in its last war such as the South Lebanese Army were completely discredited and destroyed by the Israeli defeat and nobody wants to go through another civil war for Israel's benefit.

3. Hamas will not collapse and Israel knows that since Hamas and Fateh reached an important agreement for national reconciliation immediately before the current crisis which has been hardly noticed because of the current crisis.

4. The Israel-Lebanon war is not a proxy war with Iran or Syria and Israel knows that since it is the author of this propaganda fable.

5. Inexplicable events will not inexplicably help turn around Iraq and Israel knows that because it is not heavily into whatever Blumenthal and his sources are smoking.

Given that assumption that the US Secretary of State might not be literally insane, what could be the real thinking behind current US policy?

Todd Gitlin has simply given up on attempting to analyse US policy as "too hard".

For what it's worth, here's my analysis based on the "controversial" assumption that Condi is not raving mad.

1. Neither Israel nor the US are attempting to destroy Hezbollah.

2. Both intend a settlement meeting Hezbollah's demands - a prisoner exchange ending the ongoing imprisonment of Lebanese by Israel long after it withdrew from Lebanon, and return of the small piece of Lebanon Israel retained after withdrawing on the pretext that it was actually Syrian.

3. Both are aware that failing to destroy Hezbollah and meeting its demands will actually strengthen Hezbollah rather than weaken it and that this will strengthen Hamas rather than weaken it.

4. Both are convinced that Israel must withdraw from the West Bank for any durable peace.

5. Both are aware that evacuating the settlers will be extremely difficult while a large extremist minority of Israelis determined to hold on to "judea and samaria" are able to mobilize wider opposition to "retreating under fire" and "rewarding terrorist attacks".

6. Both are aware that the Palestine Authority's proposal for an international force to replace the Israeli occupation troops is essential for actually evacuating the West Bank and that unilaterally withdrawing from Gaza instead of reaching agreement with the Palestine Liberation Organization has only resulted in unnecessary chaos.

7. Israel is demanding an international force on its borders whereas previously it opposed any such constraints for reasons other than schizophrenia.

8. The reasons are that Israel now knows that the US will not continue funding "Greater Israel" expansionism so there is no further benefit to Israel in maintaining fluid and ambiguous borders wherever its tanks last stopped.

9. Both know that no international force can be introduced into south Lebanon without Hezbollah's consent since only the Israelis are willing to spend blood and treasure on fighting Hezbollah at all and nobody else will do it for them.

10. Both expect Hezbollah to consent to an international force because both do know that Hezbollah is in fact a Lebanese national resistance rather than a proxy arm of Iran mythically bent on "killing jews" out of the sheer anti-semitic malice that Israeli propagandists portray to the weak minded.

11. Linkage between the prisoner exchange for Lebanon and Gaza and the introduction of an international force into Lebanon opens up possibilities for speeding up the evacuation of the West Bank with the introduction of an international force there to be carried out by a government that has shown just how tough and resolute it is in massacring Lebanese civilians and "forcing" the "terrorist enemy" to accept an international force in much the same sort of way that Nixon "forced" Vietnam to let the Americans depart and take their POWs with them by escalating the war to bomb Hanoi a few weeks before signing the peace agreements that had been on the table for years.

12. Removing the albatross of Israeli occupation will very explicably remove a major obstacle to democratic revolution in the region - the regimes will no longer be able to blame Israel for their own inadequacies.

13. Doing it in a way that strengthens Hezbollah and Hamas while highlighting the complete impotence of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and not even bothering to talk to Syria and Iran will help undermine the autocracies even more rapidly and will also directly help undermine sectarianism in Iraq.

14. The current policies would be insane if US policy was still in the pre-9/11 era of seeking stability and stagnation under the existing autocracies and Israel. But that policy would be insane in the light of having blown up so spectacularly with the World Trade Center towers.

15. The current policies are not insane if in fact the US does aim to end tyranny in the middle east regardless of whether or not the results of democratic revolution are anti-US islamist parties such as the Iraqi Daawa party allied to Hezbollah, (whose Prime Minister just addressed the US Congress), the Lebanese Government (including Hezbollah) or the Palestine Authority Government (Hamas), all of which came to power in US supported free elections.

16. People who regard it as sane to keep the Middle East stagnant with nothing better for young men to do than become Al Quaeda jihadis will naturally regard it as insane to undermine the status quo at all, let alone as ruthlessly as the US and Israel are now doing it. But if its really urgent to evacuate the West Bank, killing a few hundred Lebanese to speed things up in the adaptation of Israeli public opinion makes a lot more sense than Brezinzki funding Al Queda to fight the Soviets. Remember the Bushies aren't committed to democracy because they are not ruthless imperialist scum like their predecessors but because they simply have no other long term option for draining the swamps that breed real jihadis - the type that hit New York, as opposed to Hezbollah guerillas who are defending against Israeli aggression.

Contrary to enemy propaganda the US war aim in Iraq was not to establish a puppet regime in Iraq any more than it was to "disarm Sadaam". The aim was democratic change essential for draining the swamp of middle eastern stagnation that breeds jihadis.

Likewise contrary to enemy propaganda US diplomatic goals in the current crisis are not to help Israel kill Lebanese or Palestinians (and thus end up killing more of its own people) but to serve US interests by removing obstacles to the US goal of draining the swamp that breeds jihadis.

Israel crushing Hezbollah would add another obstacle to the West Bank albatross. That is not what Condi is trying to achieve.

Welcome to the new middle east.

So Israel is bombing Hezbollah in order to strengthen Hezbollah?

Yes. We not only should mention each side , each time , we should force ourselves to
think about the people of each side each time.

BTW you might want to check out Timothy
Garton Ash in today' Guardian.

An awful lot of ink has been spilled here, there, and everywhere on a pretty inconsequential event.

 I usually find your comments sound but "inconsequential" seems callous. Juan Cole has carried photos of dead children whose bodies are still alight . It's impossible for me to attach " inconsequential" to that memory.. And of course exactly the same must be said about the Israelis-including arabs- killed by Hizbollah's missles. i

I agree we haven't been reckless. Just irrelevant. 

All these newly strenghtened (by not really being defeated)newly democratic Jihadists are just going to forget that Israel exists?
Other events sadam will tellus where the WMD are hidden just before his firing squad.
Osama will be made the Lebanon Hezbollah Freedom Party's guest speaker at the UN.
Hamas will allow a Corky's Barbeque (with pig logo) to open in Gaza as a sign of it's welcoming business to the area
Condi will become baseball's commissioner as a reward for her brilliant statesmanship., rather than following Colin Powell into the useful idiot category.
and finally
The spaceship filled with aliens predicted by The Honorable Elijah Mohammed will come for his chosen people.
Ooops. I forgot my medication again. Sorry

I'm sure the omission was unintentional but I do wonder about Tony Snow's recent assessment of the number of American dead in Iraq when he said, "It's just a number." The American people and certainly the wives, husbands, children, mothers and fathers of those "numbers" can now cease their misplaced grieving knowing that their dead were not people they loved, they were numbers. Can we say the slain in Israel, Palestine, Lebanon are just numbers too and stop all this silly talk about suffering.

I was impressed by the opinions of a professor at the American University at Beirut in an interview this morning:

I’ve recently taken part in devising an opinion poll, along with a local think tank here, and the results have been published today. Basically, 87% of all Lebanese support Hezbollah's resistance against Israel today. And that includes 80% of all Christian respondents, 80% of all Druze respondents, and 89% of all Sunnis. And this, of course, is non-Shiite groups, so those which have supported the March 14 pro-American -- the March 14, sorry, alliance, which is seen as being pro-American, pro-French, anti-Syrian. So I think, you know, all this talk about Hezbollah holding Lebanon hostage and, of course, Israeli officials’ stomach-turning comments about them doing this for the sake of the Lebanese people, and other American officials making similar comments, are clearly very poor public relations exercises here. Hezbollah, by default actually, has won the support of the overwhelming majority of non-Shiites in Lebanon. And, in fact, what I also found very interesting was that of all the respondents asked, 89.5% believe that the U.S. was not an honest broker in this current conflict. In fact, only 8% of Lebanese see it as playing a balanced role. And I think this has a lot to do with, not only the U.S.’s past in dealing with the Middle East -- Arab-Israeli conflict, sorry -- but more specifically how unabashedly, not only pro-Israeli the U.S. is seen as being, but as in fact engineering this whole invasion.

I appreciate the effort. To a greater or lesser extent I could agree with much of your "analysis" except for

 Both are convinced that Israel must withdraw from the West Bank for any durable peace

If "withdraw"means "some withdrawal" sure.If it means the major settlements I doubt any Isreali government will do that.
Not would I in their place. Whatever agreements are made now by whatever "partners" will be scorned by future generations of patriotic Palestinians and the War will resume. So any Isralie sacrifices in the interests of peace will really only be in the interests
of a decade of peace.

Thanks for focussing on the central point - does Israel intend to get out of the West Bank?

It isn't a question of Israeli sacrifices but of Israeli defeat. If the US was prepared to keep funding Israeli expansionism (as the Democratic party enthusiastically, and the Republican party less enthusiastically has done for decades) then the Israeli government would not be facing defeat. It doesn't matter what you think they should do. The question is what have they decided to do (as distinct from what impressions are they giving by declaratory policy).

If I am correct and the US and Israeli governments do both intend to withdraw major settlements then denying that there is any retreat and defeat and emphasizing Israeli bellicosity and determination to fight "terrorists" and that the international force replacing Israeli occupation is something forced on the Palestinians by a triumphant Israel makes sense.

It makes sense in the same way that the Christmas bombing of Hanoi made sense in ending the Vietnam war "with honour" - ie it was vile and dishonourable but did succeed in confusing Americans about the fact that they had been comprehensively defeated and the US was no longer the superpower it previously thought it was. That confusion can still be seen in absurd theories that the US went into Iraq to setup a puppet regime as though we were still in the pre-Vietnam defeat era.

Naturally it would make sense to first withdraw the smaller settlements outside the wall while loudly proclaiming that the wall is Israel's future permanent boundary just as it made sense for Sharon to withdraw from Gaza while loudly proclaiming that he would continue expansion in the West Bank and it made sense to first create cognitive dissonance about "judea and samaria" by building a wall through it.

Israel occupying the West Bank to prevent terrorist attacks on itself has the same ring of cognitive dissonance as the US supporting the bombing of Lebanon to strengthen the Lebanese government. This stuff is intended to paralyse the cognitive processes of supporters, not opponents.

The US fighting a war in Vietnam to recover its POWs was the same sort of cognitive dissonance which smoothed the way for accepting defeat. Nixon is still regarded as the worst Presidential war-monger in the Vietnam saga (for withdrawing bellicosely) while Kennedy (who initiated the aggression "idealistically") and Johnson (who escalated it "to reach a negotiated agreement") are not hated nearly as much.

Perhaps there is some other explanation for a policy so rich in cognitive dissonance as the one Israel and the US are following in Lebanon. So far I haven't seen anyone else seriously attempting to explain what's going on (dismissing the talk of "insanity" as a non-serious admission of having nothing useful to say).

You are missing the point. There is a lot of screaming that the US should "do something" because historically the US has always rushed to back up Israel as an "honest broker" by organizing a cease-fire on Israeli terms, while Condi is leaving them dangling in a noisy demonstration of strategic futility and total isolation. That is exercising influence.

Some links illustrating Israeli bewilderment about this can be found at www.lastsuperpower.net.

The Democratic party noises about withdrawing the Prime Minister of Iraq's invitation to address Congress because they don't like what he says about Lebanon is a better example of exerting no influence.

The US isn't expected to "rush in to back up Israel" until -- and I think you're implying as much -- Israel has accomplished its goals. It hasn't, yet.

Until it does, discussion of so-called issues is nothing more than self-satisfied preening.

I don't think "mad" is the word I'd use for this group. What about "lightweights" or "stupid" or "poorly informed" or "imperceptive" or "narrow-minded" or "dumb" or "immoral" or "moronic" or "out-of-touch-with-reality" or "idiotic" or "imbecilic"? But not "mad".

Tom

Here's direct links to a couple of the articles I referred you to:

America's Weakness (previous link direct to Yossi Beilin at Haaretz is now broken)

Another round in Gaza

The tone I get from those is not self-satisfied preening at all and very far from implying that Israel can achieve its goals given more time.

The self-satisfied preening is at this site and others where people like to comfort themselves about how insane the Bushies are instead of trying to analyse whats actually happening in the world.

Even here there is more hand-wringing, angst and angry recrimination than self-satisfaction - except on the crucial "bonding" about how stupid the Bushies are.

My impression of some of your other postings is that you (Ellen) are also impatient with the orientation towards posturing instead of policy analysis here.

Why not actually engage by responding to my attempt at policy analysis in this thread.

p.s. some reminscences and opining that I just ran across by accident, not being one to go to Huffington Post regularly, that might be of interest to some here: "Things Come 'Round in Mideast" by Tom Hayden, July 23

I read your lengthy comment; I judged it sensible, analytical, and well put together. But given the political constraints operating on any American politician, I judged it, as well, irrelevant.

My comment, however, was directed at Prof. Gitlin's criticism of Rice's (Bush's?) Levantine (Israeli, Palestinian, Lebanese Shi'i, Arab, etc.) policy which criticism is based upon the conventional assumption that the US has significant influence over Israeli tactics and strategies.

But Israel broke free of American constraints long ago. You may think -- indeed, I may think -- that Israel is making geopolitical and military mistakes, that it is acting immorally. What we think -- what Condi and GWB think-- is, however, irrelevant.

Israel is in the saddle

I follow your logic but it's hard for me to understand the scenario which results in Israeli political support for those really major settlements being evacuated. Trimmed perhaps to ensure that the West Bank portion of the resulting Palestinian state is "contiguous".

I agree that "insanity" is a cop out.

What would be the function of the buffer zone? I'm not being facetious, but trying to understand the IDF, rather than international peace enforcement, performing in such a zone.

While it's not attractive, I suspect a serious peace enforcement unit is going to have to be equipped and authorized to use deadly force on either side firing on the other. This is one of the differences between peacekeeping and peace enforcement.

I'm simplifying, but the ranges of the relevant weapons on both sides, assuming a no-fly zone, is on the order of 20 miles, give or take 5-10. I am assuming Grad 122mm rockets on the Hezbollah side and 155mm howitzers on the Israeli side.

Again it's ugly, but until an international force has the capability and will to at least resist an Israeli, as well as a Hezbollah, attack, while the Israeli political class may hate that, an increasing part of the rest of the world may not accept anything less.

In this sort of situation, without a general acceptance on either side that it can get along, a Hezbollah rocket firing crew has to have the gentle hint that if they fire, they will probably die. In like manner, if Israeli forces fire on UN vehicles or installations, they may die. Israel is certainly capable of escalating to overwhelm anything but a major first-world intervention force, but there are consequences if it does so. Some of the suggested nations are not trivial forces.

I believe a necessary, but often not mentioned, part of a buffer is creating a qualified no-fly zonem, which obviously affects the Israelis more than Hezbollah. I also believe that air operations can be constructed to be grudgingly acceptable for both sides. For example, both sides will want photography of the areas adjacent to the borders. There are several ways to do this, including the bilateral arms control techniques used between the US and Russia: each side provides appropriate aircraft to carry a bi-national intelligence team.

Within the buffer proper, there would need to be room to stage both operating bases for armed helicopters, and also gun or missile batteries for counterfire on violators shooting from outside the zone. Fixed-wing air could be used on such violators, but, unless it already is in the air over the non-buffer area, its response time will not be as fast as reasonably precise artillery.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Removing the albatross of Israeli occupation will very explicably remove a major obstacle to democratic revolution in the region - the regimes will no longer be able to blame Israel for their own inadequacies. Doing it in a way that strengthens Hezbollah and Hamas while highlighting the complete impotence of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and not even bothering to talk to Syria and Iran will help undermine the autocracies even more rapidly and will also directly help undermine sectarianism in Iraq.

I found your policy analysis intriguing if byzantine.

Iran will not be ignored.  It is too powerful and has too much influence in the region.  However, it may be that what has been trumpeted in the world press as failure in Rome may not be so if "back channel negotiations with Iran are taking place right now.

On July 28, 2006 - 7:01am flavius said:

no option but to withdraw from the West Bank since it obviously cannot solve its strategic impasse by bombing Lebanon

Couldn't the IDF occupy a buffer zone ? Not an attractive option but perhaps less unattractive than abandoning the West Bank.

Particularly if , like me , the Israeli political class has no confidence that any palestinian peace will be more permanent than those in Northern Ireland, Chechyna , Kosovo or countless other sites of century old intermittent hostility.

I'm afraid the answer to Rodney King's "Can't we just get along " is "No".

====

I'm assuming that was a response to mine above posted incorrectly as a new sub-thread by not using the reply link immediately under the posting being replied to.

Anyway, the first paragraph is a quote from mine above, so I'll respond to it.

My understanding is that Olmert is currently posturing about either occupying a 2km buffer zone or, more likely, keeping it clear of Hezbollah armed forces by regular bombing, artillery and raids.

That may or may not be something Israel could do as a form of chest thumping demonstrations of mighty impotence. Presumably it could be effective in preventing the future capture of Israeli soldiers by cross border raids but it obviously doesn't contribute anything at all to preventing rocket attacks from further back than 2km let alone resolving the strategic impasse Israel is in as a result of continuing to occupy a hostile population in the West Bank and to imprison an even more hostile population in the Gaza strip.

My point is that since these sort of options, like the attack on Lebanon as a whole, are so obviously pointless, they would only be undertaken if the Israeli government is in fact planning to withdraw from the West Bank and is thumping its chest for purposes of internal morale.

If the Israeli government was in fact still grimly determined to hold on to "judea and samaria" (as a minority still is) it would be exuding sweet reasonableness instead of using up all its political capital in the US public opinon as well as getting the whole region and the rest of the world up in arms against it. Governments only behave this "irrationally" when they have a primarily domestic agenda for strategically futile military action (like Nixon's Xmas bombing of Hanoi).

Don't forget that the current hysterics about rather minor damage to Israel from Hezbollah rocket attacks arises only in response to a large scale bombing campaign against Lebanon following Hezbollah's capture of an Israeli POW to exchange for prisoners Israel still holds.

That in turn was triggered by massive Israeli shelling, bombing, taking civilian hostages (members of the legislature and cabinet) and generally rampaging through Gaza in response to the capture of an Israeli soldier to exchange for Palestinian prisoners still held by Israel.

That in turn was triggered by Hamas ending a ceasefire it had voluntarily accepted for the last year in response to continued Israeli routine shelling of Gaza's beaches killing most of a Palestinian family.

That routine shelling is in turn a response to occasional rather primitive qassam rockets fired in the general direction of Israel by factions fed up waiting for a political resolution to the grim conditions Palestinians are still living under.

All this should still be fresh enough in people's memories of current events not to have been drowned out by the propaganda about Iran having suddenly become Israel's main problem and Hezbollah being its tool for exterminating jews.

What follows is that Israelis are not going to enjoy any peace while they continue to deny Palestinians their own state. Stuff about how Hamas refuses to recognize the State of Israel is fine for PR in America but it doesn't change the underlying reality that the State of Israel exists and the State of Palestine does not exist and its territory is under Israeli military occupation.

So it isn't a question of whether some option is more attractive to Israel than abandoning the west bank or not, Options like buffer zones and bombing Lebanese infrastructure do not contribute in any way towards enabling Israel to resolve the problems arising from its continued occupation of the West Bank. Israel is simply demonstrating that it does not HAVE any attractive options that would enable it to continue doing so.

As for lacking "confidence that any palestinian peace will be more permanent than those in Northern Ireland" etc - I'm sure that's true. Nevertheless both the British and Irish were much better off when the Irish Free State was created and Britain withdrew from its attempt to militarily occupy territory on which the Irish Free State now exists. The "troubles" in Northern Ireland occurred because the nationalist minority in the North remained under harsh oppression by the loyalist majority. With a million or so Arabs treated as second class citizens of a "Jewish State" within the 1967 borders you can be reasonably certain there will be a civil rights movement and "troubles" there too. They will not be resolved by attacking either Lebanon or the West Bank any more than Britain could resolve its Northern Ireland troubles by attacking Eire.

Whether or not Israel does temporarily occupy or clear a buffer zone as part of its attack on Lebanon the end result can only be a peace agreement on Hezbollah's terms - a prisoner exchange and Israeli withdrawal from all Lebanese territory including the tiny Shebaa farms area as well as any buffer zone. The interesting thing is not that very simple agreement but the more complex agreements that can be connected to it by the linkage with events in Gaza and the West Bank and the important role of an international force in enabling the evacuation of the settlers from the West Bank.

I've replied to flavius here.

There is not the slightest possibility of any country offering troops for a peace enforcement mission with any authorisation to use deadly force against either Israel or Hezbollah. Australia's foreign minister for example has described it as a suicide mission

Consequently discussion of the tactics and equipment for such a force is irrelevant.

The role of an international force would be to make Israel look as though it won something when and if it accepts Hezbollah's terms for peace while at the same time enabling Hezbollah's armed forces to be integrated into the Lebanese national army without looking as though it had been defeated by Israel.

Don't forget that contrary to the impression created by Israeli propaganda, Hezbollah is the largest political party in Lebanon and part of the Lebanese government and its militia is not a shadowy terrorist organization but recognized as a Lebanese national resistance force responsihble for having driven Israel out of south Lebanon and keeping them out when the Lebanese army, weakened by civil war, could not do so. With reform of the Lebanese electoral system Hezbollah is likely to become one of the dominant parties in the coalition government (though not likely to become the majority like Hamas in the Palestine Authority or the islamist coalition ruling Iraq).

Hezbollah can stand down from guarding Lebanon's border (very effectively - so far Israel has only penetrated a couple of kilometres whereas previously Israel had reached Beirut by this time). But it will only do so when Israel has returned Lebanese prisoners and all Lebanese territory at which time an international force would be acceptable to strengthen the Lebanese army in the border areas instead of Hezbollah.

If both sides have not actually agreed to stop fighting, no international force will step in to be shot at by either of them and at the first sign of renewed hostilities any international force would leave.

The more important role of such a force would be the linkage with a replacement for the Israeli occupation forces in the West Bank that would assist the Palestine Authority in reducing attacks on Israel by smaller rejectionist factions once there is an agreement for Israel to withdraw, while lifting the draconian Israeli siege, checkpoints etc that are choking life under the occupation.

In both cases the role would primarily be policing - not returning fire in response to rocket attacks.

Well, I appreciate you taking the time and effort to look at this metaphor, that I had assumed you had used cavalierly.

To delve a little deeper into this; how far would you extend this metaphor? What to you mean by "draining"? And for that matter, what is a "stagnant society"? It would seem to me that these are pejorative terms that allow those who wish to to ignore the human dimensions, and contribute to a view closer to sociopathological than empathetic. An empathetic view not necessarily being sympathetic, but one that puts one in another's shoes, as it were, to better gauge the other's motivations and possibly likely responses, in many ways, a productive exercise. Would the American revolutionaries have been rightly considered "mosquitoes" "breeding in the swamp" of colonial society (maybe a stretched analogy, but perhaps you can see my point)?

And, if we are wedded to this metaphor I can't help but think of the change in opinion lately about swamps and their benefits to terra firma and the ecological web supporting dry land inhabitants. The draining of many swamps has led to some recent calamitous scenarios. But I digress from my main point. Which is: no matter how dispicable some acters in the ME seem (especially when economic, social and historical contexts are manipulated freely), they are nevertheless humans, not insects and their motivations as well as the nebulous "root causes" (another questionable metaphor laced with assumptions) can better be understood by not de-humanizing them.

I do not want to come off as overly strident and would emphasize that in comparison to much that has been posted hereabouts I still would call your posts thought provoking and hope that you don't take my points as personal attacks. This being a necessary addendum when using this medium.

Would the American revolutionaries . . . ?

Consider the sweating, slapping Hessians marching in early Summer across Central New Jersey to the Battle of Monmouth. Mosquitos? If it weren't 1778, we'd be talking B-29s!

But seriously; metaphors should be adopted cautiously.

The "swamp metaphor" implies a failed society and easily translates (morphs?) into an unthinking acceptance of Bernard Lewis's view of the Muslim world; the "mosquito" image into approval of Gen. Dan Halutz' vision of blocks of apartments tumbling down upon Arab larvae.

Interesting .May even be correct . It's certainly a full fledged theory. I'm out of my league here so I'll say no more.

I'd recommend Mark Twain theraputic wisdom, rmrdooo:

I took to drinking as a toothache preventative.  It works: I've never had a toothache! 

Neoboho

A few minutes ago AP reported that Hizbullah politicians signed onto a peace package. You may read it here.

Arthur Dent wrote

That would be stupid. I thought the game plan was to let the Democrats win control of at least one House so that they would be forced to split over Iraq etc in time for the next Presidential election.

Seems like an example of  "being too clever by  half." For several reasons. Including:

o the rep congressional leaders would have to cooperate in a scheme under which they would losetheir power and perks for the benefit of the prospective rep candidate.

o various rep  backers would have to agree to permit short term damage to their own interests for the benefit of that prospective rep candidate .

o Bush would have to permit himself to be harried for the next two years by committees with subpoena powers....for the benefit of  that etc etc.

If the Reps lose either house in November it will be because they've failed not succeeded.

Yeah , I know , I know . The spirit is willing but the mind/finger coordination is weak.

I agree that US and Iran have common interests (including against Iraqi Baathists and Sunni "nationalists" as well as Al Quaeda and Taliban), but strongly disagree with your explanation of US focus on Iran. My view that it is primarily a distraction to give Israelis something more remote than the Palestinians to mobilize against is elaborated in a March posting here and also in Policy on Iran at www.lastsuperpower.net where a totally different approach on Iraq can also be found.

Freely elected Iraqi national unity government is now dealing with Iraq and US has responsibility to continue helping them until they ask it to leave and then leave. Egypt, Saudi Arabia et al are only interested in stabilizing their own autocracies by proving democracy doesn't work in Iraq. Inviting them to help stabilize the only democratic government in the region is just a mealy mouthed version of "cut and run" leaving the region a stagnant swamp breeding jihadi mosquitoes as before.

If my combination of supporting the US presence in Iraq and opposing US backing of Israel in Lebanon sounds totally eccentric, please note that at least one government also takes that position - namely Iraq whose Prime Minister Howard Dean recently tried to prevent from addressing Congress because of his refusal to denounce Hezbollah and insistence on denouncing Israel at the same time as welcoming US support against islamo-fascism.

PS Your NYTimes link for AP report was broken and I don't understand the point you were making about it.