printIn Israel, the reckoning over Lebanon began even before the ceasefire went into effect. Soldiers were questioning the mission. Reserve soldiers are returning home with a kitbag full of complaints,” writesAkiva Eldar of Ha’aretz newspaper. The news media was buzzing with reports about failures of intelligence, funding, and execution at the highest echelons.
As they witnessed rockets and missiles raining down on northern Israel, ordinary Israelis began grumbling about how their prime minister failed to do much more than get their men killed and level Lebanon. Now they’re calling Olmert’s stint a plain failure. Many of Israel’s pointy heads are predicting he won’t last.
Indeed, politicians and military men appear to be fair game in that country. There’s none of this, “It’s treason to criticize the troops and the commander-in-chief during a war.” Why, Israeli soldiers themselves joined in committing treason American style.
Practically nobody in Israel denies the war was a whopping failure (that camp is biggest in the US). There is no attempt, as in the US, to create a parallel universe, a Third Dimension, where reality is reversed to comport with political spin. (We even have a cable channel dedicated to sanitizing Iraq.)
Contrast the atmosphere in Israel with that in the US.
Iraq is a disgrace, a blot. The invasion was unprovoked, conducted in ignorance of Iraqi history and fractious ethnic and religious makeup. (The British fought the identical insurrection in 1920.) America’s actions in Iraq have caused thousands of civilian deaths, destroyed infrastructure, halted oil production, and saddled the American taxpayer with the burden, in perpetuity, it would appear, because to leave is to “cut and run,” say the Treason Twits.
Yet an entire military-media-industrial-congressional-complex has risen to smear anyone who states these facts. The “reality based community” is called “anti-war, anti-America, traitors, Bush-haters.”
A month after the failed war commenced, Israelis are ready to string up their leaders. Three years after the catastrophic invasion of Iraq, a good number of Americans are still quite willing to hang any sensible individual who so much as hints at the need to fire the goons in charge.
There’s another Bush on the way. Not Jeb, his kid. King George III. I did a piece on him when I was in college. Got some really fascinating quotes from a young lady of my acquaintance who went to high school with Twerp III & claimed that his secret servant agents (the other kids grew fond of the agents) would help lock George III in school closests–what’s safer than a closet, eh? I also got some nice quotes from another fellow who debated against George III & thought him somewhat of an hysteric but complemented his grooming.
“He had nice hair,” said Tal Greenberg. “You have to give him that.”
I couldn’t get confirmation from Jeb’s people regarding the closet-lockings & the quality of George III’s hair care, but I made the effort.
Naturally, I printed it.
King George III. What goes around comes around. This is apropos of nothing & everything.
At least Israeli soldiers demand accountability from their commanders and its citizens understand that they’re appointing civil servants when they vote & not electing royalty, regardless of the quality of their hair care.
Perhaps Israel should try confining its theoretical leadership to the broom closet. They’ll be safe there. Safer, maybe.
Seymour Hersh has accused the Bush Administration of collaborating with Israel in planning the invasion of Lebanon.
After observing the amateurish failute of the poorly planned and executed invasion of Lebanon, I don’t believ ANYONE planned much of ANYTHING.
Ilana, I suspected that the WMD justification for the Iraq Campaign was mostly a bumper-sticker slogan to get Congress and the public to go along with the deal. The idea of “War for Oil” is rediculous because we could have bought all the oil we wanted from Saddam any time we wanted for far less than we knew we would spend invading Iraq.
I think the real reason we went in was because the Administration believed they could be rid of Saddam and reshape Iraq into a modern, free society in one stroke. This new Iraq would make the rest of the Arab world see that there is a better way to live. Moslems would see that the Western World was not their enemy and that they could improve their lives simply by making better choices.
The Administration could not anticipate the results of this social engineering exercise because they could not comprehend the nature of the Cult of Mohammed. I think the CIA is finally beginning to understand their ideology.
It may be starting to sink in that democracy, to Muslems, is nothing but a handy tool to attain power and legitimacy.
I hope one lesson we take away from this exercise is that when we deal with a problem, we have to deal with the reality of that problem, not with what we wish that reality to be.
But Ilana, George Bush says Israel won a “victory.” (Sarcasm)
Seriously, the Israelis deserve credit for trying to hold their leaders accountable after this fiasco. Let’s hope that at some point Israel and her neighbors can peacefully coexist.
Israel’s army has conscription. For all its repugnance to liberty, conscription in a democracy does have the nice property of creating a natural political limit on the offensive use of the military. This is both in terms of giving everyone (including ruling elites) a personal stake in what the army does, as well as making it impossible to contain criticism and more generally any information about what the military is doing.
America, by contrast, is not at war. Our army is; a few warmongers think they are; but we are not. The army is thus much more the plaything of the president. The people don’t have any understanding of what’s happening in Iraq; the elites in Congress and elsewhere are just as ignorant.
It is frightfully expensive, which is what will probably end it.
I might also add that Israelis felt the effects of this war much more than the average American does with respect to Iraq; consider all those confined to bomb shelters or displaced, the destruction in the north, and the disruption to the economy. What a contrast with getting fictional reports from Fox news each day!
And again, the West will declare victory and leave. Those who supported them will be killed in the aftermath.
The tyrants of the day will point to this as another example of how they were right about the infidels all along.
–John Danforth–