The Israelis have been taken over by neo-cons as the Americans have, it is just less obvious from the outside in view of Isr. history, the military tradition there, our polarised visions of it, etc. (I think.)
Greed, empty slogans -shades of Orwell- a reliance on personal relations or networks, a belief in a domineering kind of force, be it personal or in-groupy, or military, and in the case of some of ‘em, getting advice from on high, are not appropriate for accomplishing anything.
Reality bites. And hard.
With that kind of crap, you can’t manage a bus-line, a plastic flower factory, a baby-sitting service, oil pipe lines, not to mention a huge military or a Gvmt.
They excuse themselves with chatter about creative chaos and birth pangs and all the rest. Arrogant loons. I agree with CP.

Posted by: Noirette | Aug 14 2006 15:21 utc | 3

So, basically, the IDF is to live on the ground, plundering the occupied country to pass the coming winter? Looks like deja-vu…

Posted by: CluelessJoe | Aug 14 2006 15:31 utc | 5

ceasefire begins

Fighting ended at 0500 GMT, although in one later clash, Israeli soldiers fired on a group they said were militants.
….
Within hours of the ceasefire, Israeli soldiers shot at a group of Hezbollah fighters in the town of Hadatha in south Lebanon, killing one of them, the army said.
A spokesman said an Israeli patrol felt “under threat” when the fighters approached it and had not broken the terms of the ceasefire.

Posted by: annie | Aug 14 2006 16:08 utc | 7

@Elie:

Unlikely. A trait only evolves if there is regular need for it. As far as we know, at least, there has never been a time period when any animal overran the world so thoroughly that it had to commit mass suicide to save the environment.

In fact, that’s really the point: human beings just aren’t made for warfare more complex than “yell, bite, and throw things”. As far as genetics are concerned, significant radioactivity at ground level is this sudden hazard that’s sprung up practically overnight. So is the possibility of being blown up. At a very deep level, humans don’t expect other humans to be able to kill large numbers of people suddenly and at will.

Posted by: The Truth Gets Vicious When You Corner It | Aug 14 2006 16:57 utc | 9

One ends up wondering if the evil motivations people like myself sometimes impute to the ‘neocons’, such as killing a great many Arabs to control energy in the ME (to make it brief and stereotypical – all typical old fashioned leftist stuff, kinda Chomskyesque) is a case of over-attribution, an attempt to explain senseless and random actions by relating them to hidden (and therefore evil rather than good) intents couched in long term plans, etc.
I’ve always said that the US would not attack Iran, based on the idea that in fine reality does count, some things just ain’t do-able, are perceived as such, even when the calculation itself is based on a skewed world-view.
Where, though, is the fine line, at what point does reality kick in?
A tentative answer lies in the fact that these people, just like the Mafia, or other rogue groups, such as those who run the ‘illegal’ drug industry, rely on a stable environment in which to act. There is no drug trade if street drugs are made legal; the Mafia has no power at all in Somalia, which has no Gvmt. last time I looked.
(OK, there are many reasons why the traditional Mafia is not active in Somalia – I’m trying to make a general point. In Somalia everyone is mafya, to use the Russian spelling, and the traditional branch would face competition it could not handle.)
And that, I feel, explains in part, the heartfelt and noble insistence on ‘Democracy’ – it is necessary, to have a free hand, for a steady, hearts-and-flowers landscape to exist, with people working hard and glued to their TV screens, earning ‘decent’ money by working for MacDos or Halliburton, gloriously free to set up subversive art shows, join the Eurovision contest, send their misses to Beauty pageants, build amusement parks that will rake in cash.
Possess cell phones!
Become, as some would put it, the slaves of the new colonialism.
The contradictions are obvious, and insuperable. I’m not thinking cultural, but economic….I need not outline them here. The project has failed. Afgh, is rather special, but in Iraq, many middle class people believed, hoped, they would get rid of Saddam, and be ‘free’ but they did not understand what that entailed.
They did not grasp that the neo-lib model is not just goodies but means having all of industry and farming taken over by the PTB.

Posted by: Noirette | Aug 14 2006 17:01 utc | 11

b, I like the sublimimal Defence force in your post.

Posted by: Cloned Poster | Aug 14 2006 17:10 utc | 13

And further south, Operation Summer Rains (IMEMC News, 13 August):

According to the latest Palestinian Health Ministry reports, since the June 26 military attack [on Gaza] codenamed ‘Summer Rains’ … begun, the Israeli occupation army has killed 203 Palestinians, including 58 children and 25 women, and wounded 783 others, including 281 children, and 86 women. 72 of the injured have had limbs amputated.

Posted by: Dismal Science | Aug 14 2006 17:16 utc | 15

@Dodo – Not really. As Angry Arab says, this was common practice after the previous (1982) invasion already.
This not about soldiers stealing. That happens inevitably and the command should try to prevent it. The issue is much bigger.
The Bad moral – the soldiers are asking for food. I bet they have enough MREs with them and enough water to survive a few days. Any soldier knows that you always take as much of that stuff with you as possible because you never know what will happen next. But MREs aren´t hummer tails and that’s why they are complaining. Such folks are not willing to fight.
Unprepared operations – they had 30 days to plan and prepare for going up to the Litani and the plans are in the drawer since at least 2000. Still they don´t manage to get a grip on the simplest operational stuff.
Command hybris – the General who is responsible to feed the troops anytime whereever they are seems not to care about this and even brags. If the logistic sergeant in my company would have shown such contempt for the privates they would have taken him around a corner for a short but emphatic beating. Then, as an officer, I would have made him peel potatoes 12 hours a day for the next month without any leave.
The IDF never had much of a moral compass towards its enemies, but it would take care of itself. That is gone (and here is where the Kibbuzim picture is gone) and with it the IDF, at least its Army component, as an operating force is broken.

Posted by: b | Aug 14 2006 17:56 utc | 17

Lebanon’s middle class is disillusioned with America

The Lebanese educated middle class are asking Washington: “Why have you forsaken me?” as Lebanon’s existence is bombed to smithereens.�The current war is traumatizing Lebanon’s Western-oriented middle class, as it witnesses the destruction of its hopes for a prosperous and independent Lebanon, as Israel, backed by the United States, systematically destroys Lebanon and places the destiny of 4 million Lebanese in serious jeopardy.
…..
Lebanese journalists, authors, academics, and public figures, who have worked for decades to cure the social ills that wracked Lebanon and are not fond of radical sectarian ideologies, will not accept to be at the receiving end of Israeli bombs that pretend to be helping them get rid of Hizbullah. There is a strong belief in Lebanon that disarming Hizbullah is better dealt with as an internal Lebanese matter through dialogue, as opposed to using violent means, especially by an outside power that will only strengthen the hand of the radicals and weaken the moderates.
This sentiment was echoed by Jamil Mroue, publisher of The Daily Star, and by other enlightened commentators in Beirut. Mroue told The New Yorker magazine (August 7, 2006): “Even after September 11, 2001, there is this expectation in the United States and Israel that some unspoken middle class is just sitting there waiting to inherit the ruins of whatever country it is that they are obliterating. But there is no calculation that, if they flatten Lebanon and Nasrallah comes out �

this is Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper , Rami G Khouri is their editor-at-large . They write that our feedback is important to them.

Posted by: annie | Aug 14 2006 18:33 utc | 19

from annie’s link:
The current war is traumatizing Lebanon’s Western-oriented middle class, as it witnesses the destruction of its hopes for a prosperous and independent Lebanon….
No doubt.
Lebanon had no income tax, only 10% VAT on goods and some services.
No redistribution, from the sex, tourist, building trade. Not to say that tax is a necessity, it all depends on complex parameters.
As far as I can see, the poor quarters, regions, were really suffering and angry, leaving room for the Hezb. who provided both some social services and a communal spirit, hope.
While the Gvmt. danced to the tune of easy money, all those Gulf tourists who need to go somewhere else to – have fun – gamble and f*ck – leaving all those petro dollars behind.
Fine. That can be managed. Spain dit it, in a way. Did the Lebanese Gvmt. study Spanish history?

Posted by: Noirette | Aug 14 2006 19:29 utc | 21

At a very deep level, humans don’t expect other humans to be able to kill large numbers of people suddenly and at will.
truth, this sentence takes me back to that argument we had about exterminating certain members of society for our own survival.
at some point the dissonance between the reality of one’s current predicament and real safety becomes too great to keep one’s head in the sand without risking your derriere getting blown off.
i think this is why there is so much howling coming from the masses around the world over the reaction to the islam/fascist meme. at some point all the terror news is going to snap back. i believe it has started which is why we have the orange/red alerts, the attempts to monitor and control these reflexes.
i read somewhere that the prevelance in suicide amoungst teenagers was a bellweather for decay of a society. Teenage and young-adult violence is a growing epidemic. Both suicide and homicide in the adolescent age group (13 to 21 years old) have risen dramatically in the past twenty years
teenage violence

The properly-functioning social system is an organism. It is an organic whole of internally-connected members who share a single, unconscious process. Reinforcement of the separate ego, which is disconnected from the unconscious, social, organic whole, leads to a dysfunctional social system in which internal and self-organizing processes are replaced the external contingencies of conditioned learning. This leads to a different kind of self-organizing system that is, fundamentally, based on violence. This is the so-called natural selection or survival model that science now holds to be the fundamental way of nature.
The organic social organism that is comprised of internally-connected members has an intelligence which guides it toward a stable and renewable future. Internal self-organization organizes the species and social groups into a collective mind system that is united on an unconscious level. The other kind of self-organizing, dynamical system, in which members are internally disconnected, and which operates on the principle of natural selection, is, by its nature, unstable. The supreme irony of social Darwinism is that, when it assumes a central role in self-organization of a social organism, it does not lead to survival, but to death or extinction.
….
The inner gray matter of the brain is closely linked with the autonomic nervous system, giving emotions the visceral quality of feelings of the heart and gut. Autonomic feelings are the core of our emotional constitutions, and it is at this level that we are most receptive to the feelings of others. The cerebral cortex is socially conditioned to suppress our receptivity to autonomic feelings, leading to the emotional or internal disconnection of people and groups of people. In the place of the organic unity that is the proper condition of human social health, social conditioning of the outer brain works on social reward and punishment, generating greed and fear as the principles of social engagement.
…
Violence and sociopathy are collective phenomena that can and do effect large groups of people. Sociopathic behavior that is sanctioned or permitted by society may be no less immoral or harmful than that which is punished by law. Sociopathy is a phenomenon of the collective mind that arises through the emotional disconnection of individuals in social groups, which brings about the decay of the social cohesion of society as a whole. Individual sociopathy can only be addressed in the context of collective or societal sociopathy.

Posted by: annie | Aug 14 2006 20:41 utc | 23

Let me get out my hankie for the Lebanese middle class. Let’s see, it’s here somewhere.

Posted by: Thrasyboulos | Aug 14 2006 21:11 utc | 25

Uncle $cam. No class war here. Just recent (and not so recent) history. You paying attention? Beyond the last three weeks, that is.

Posted by: Thrasyboulos | Aug 14 2006 21:37 utc | 27

blogger munir umrani pretty much sums up my opinion on that daily star / lebanese middle class article

I’ve often wondered why many so-called educated Arabs and Muslims viewed the Bush Administration’s Middle East policy as a precursor to Democracy and liberation in the first place. It’s occupation and an attempt at recolonization. It’s ironic that it took Israel and the U.S.’ destruction of Lebanon’s infrastructure to help them realize it.

and the hollowing out of the middle class right here in the united settlers of america may help create a more radical climate of opposition. less house slaves to act as a buffer ‘tween massa & us out here on the plantation.

Posted by: b real | Aug 14 2006 22:35 utc | 29

actually that’s incorrect because the christians are getting slaughter there too. should i have said arab? persian?

Posted by: annie | Aug 14 2006 22:59 utc | 31

I can take an insult, lysias. No problem.
The Lebanese middle class can stick their Cedar Revolution neocon bullshit where the sun don’t shine. I feel sorry for them, but they’re last in line. And very last is the Daily Star.

Posted by: Thrasyboulos | Aug 14 2006 23:57 utc | 33

i’ve been thrashed!

Posted by: annie | Aug 15 2006 0:32 utc | 35

I tend to agree with Thrasyboulos, and I think that our Angry Arab friend would too, but the business class — which was only too eager to profit from being the whorehouse of the middle east — is standing in line for the Cedar roto-rooter treatment too, and way ahead of the middle class.
Yes, one can feel sorry for human suffering AND understand that between the cupidity and the stupidity a lot of that suffering was enabled.
Same with Americans, who will suffer more and more in the coming years. Sympathize, but don’t excuse.

Posted by: Malooga | Aug 15 2006 1:22 utc | 37

Admit it, you’ve become somewhat of a news junkie.
“Mike Wallace is back from Tehran, where he obtained
an exclusive interview with Iran’s outspoken president,
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad!” (and then proceeded to insult
the hell out of His Excellency with Wallace’s rolled
eyes, shaking head, subtle verbal put-downs, and his
“get out of here” scoffing blow-offs, like he was
interviewing some junior mafiosa in Little Bedrock.)
Diesel went up over $3.59 today.
It’s so on, baby! You can feel it crawl up your brain
stem, like spiders on the inside of your skull, your
very own psychic early warning system, everyone has it.
On the drive into the city, had this medulla migraine
that would’ve brought down a horse. It’s so on, baby!
Right Blogistan cuts straight to the chase. Bomb Iran!
Bomb Iran! Bomb Iran! Hersh posts a tell-all in NYT’s
that Cheney is just setting all the dominoes in place,
ready for a Great Satan trump of Israel’s Cold Play.
I work at a mortgage credit bank now as a programmer.
We buy small loan companies for their portfolios, now
that interest rate increases have capped the housing
market, and then we roll the portfolios for cash flow.
Just rolling people up into faceless profits, and fuck
them if they can’t afford to live, drive and eat.
My boss came in late, dragging his tail, and sat down
in my cubie. “Nothing exciting to report on the weekend,
pretty much sitting around, listening to the news too.”
He must’ve spent it pass-out drunk. Everyone is cutting
back on discretionary spending. Sure, dollars will soon
be valueless, but money will get you through times of no
crap, better than crap will get you through times of no
money. You can’t sell crap, except on Wall Street and DC.
Showed him a little spreadsheet projection of our flatline
cash flows, against Japan’s drying up their free money biz,
against the collapse of Doha, against the likely continued
rise in Fed interest rates, against likely market meltdown
when Cheney marches on Tehran, as oil goes to $132 (yupp, that’s right) and the US oil companies take full advantage
of the run-up apriori, just a week before Cat 5 Hurricane
Ari slams Corpus Christie, and Bush announces US naval, air
force and ground troop holding actions have just about used
up our Strategic Oil Reserves in time for winter.
“We’re fucked,” he summarized, and threw the paper back
at me. “So what else is new?” Everyone seems moribund now,
stuck in place, like on a red-hot summer day when you stick
to your car’s vinyl seat covers, and die swimming in sweat
in the snail-crawling commute back home. Nothing is moving.
“The gap between our dreams and our actions is our world,”
Bruce Springsteen is said to have written. My boss has a
better analogy. “Hold your hands out, and fill your left
hand from your dreams, and your right hand with shit. Which
hand is gonna fill up first?” By which, of course, he means
get off the crapper, and start wanking on those phone calls.
But it will not be this day.
He left right after lunch. The receptionist made the rounds
about 2:30, asking where everyone went. “To talk with their
stock brokers about reallocating their portfolios to a more
Pan-ASEAN flavor,” I tried to make light-hearted fun.
That afternoon break we never take, came and went as I
let the office door hit me on the ass, heading for the
parking garage. The freeway was already jammed with
poor schleps like me, trying to make it home one last
time before darkness descends.
3:30PM, Ides of August, 2006, USA.
It’s so on, baby!

Posted by: Taft Hartley | Aug 15 2006 1:46 utc | 39

“If what they need to do is take water from the stores, they can take,” Mizrahi told Army Radio.

I seem to be the only person so far who has noticed the similarity between this (“stealing” described as “taking”) and what happened with the captioning of wire service photos from flooded New Orleans.
The photographers had posted various photographs of stranded Orleanians wading through the water, carrying goods which had been removed illegally from stores.
The captions on the photographs showing blacks indicated that those persons had “stolen” the merchandise in question.
The captions on the photographs showing whites referred to their having “found” the merchandise.
—

Posted by: marquer | Aug 15 2006 2:54 utc | 41

Don’t need no stinkin water in them camps…

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Aug 15 2006 3:55 utc | 43

One kool aid drinker farting in his armchair

The Israeli government, while announcing the acceptance of a UN ceasefire from Monday, has still sanctioned the IDF to push its forces quickly and very effectively up to a defensible line along the Litani River. About 30,000 Israeli soldiers will now be able to seal off the whole of south Lebanon and finally spring the trap on some 700 or more Hezbollah fighters still thought to be in the area.
To the IDF, the cessation of fighting simply means stopping its offensive forward movement, but places no restrictions on mopping-up operations inside the greatly expanded territory now under its control and, of course, the final destruction of all remaining Hezbollah resistance.
Israel has finally achieved some sort of a military victory after prolonged resistance by Hezbollah. Frankly, the outcome was never in real doubt, though the IDF was certainly made to fight hard and, indeed, for far too long in straightforward military terms

And a man on the ground

Far from humiliating Iran and Syria – which was the Israeli-American plan – these two supposedly pariah states have been left untouched and the Hizbollah’s reputation lionised across the Arab world. The “opportunity” which President George Bush and his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, apparently saw in the Lebanon war has turned out to be an opportunity for America’s enemies to show the weakness of Israel’s army. Indeed, last night, scarcely any Israeli armour was to be seen inside Lebanon – just one solitary tank could be glimpsed outside Bint Jbeil and the Israelis had retreated even from the “safe” Christian town of Marjayoun. It is now clear that the 30,000-strong Israeli army reported to be racing north to the Litani river never existed. In fact, it is unlikely that there were yesterday more than 1,000 Israeli soldiers left in all of southern Lebanon, although they did become involved in two fire-fights during the morning, hours after the UN-ceasefire went into effect.

Posted by: b | Aug 15 2006 5:45 utc | 45

b-, I think you’ll enjoy Uri Avnery’s discussion of the war & the failure of the IDF etc. posted now on antiwar.com.

Posted by: jj | Aug 15 2006 5:57 utc | 47

@jj – thanks – Avnery’s piece: What Has Happened to the Israeli Army?

The main lesson of the war, beyond all military analysis, lies in the five words we inscribed on our banner from the very first day: “There is no military solution!”
Even a strong army cannot defeat a guerilla organization, because the guerilla is a political phenomenon. Perhaps the opposite is true: the stronger the army, the better equipped with advanced technology, the smaller are its chances of winning such a confrontation. Our conflict – in the north, the center, and the south – is a political conflict, and can only be resolved by political means. The army is the instrument worst suited for that.

Posted by: b | Aug 15 2006 8:54 utc | 49

He has described wistfully, and at great length, the daily assault of fact which eventually sadly forced him to conclude that the socialist rhetoric
could you recommend a brief (ha!) read of chomsky that might encapsulate this eventualiy?

Posted by: annie | Aug 15 2006 15:57 utc | 51

the interview w/ james peck in the chomsky reader covers that period, though not at great length.

This was 1947, and I had just turned 18. I was deeply interested, as I had been for some years, in radical politics with an anarchist or left-wing (anti-Leninist) Marxist flavor, and even more deeply involved in Zionist affairs and activities – or what was then called “Zionist”, though the same ideas and concerns are now called “anti-Zionist.” I was interested in socialist, binationalist options for Palestine, and in the kibbutzim and the whole cooperative labor system that had been developed in the Jewish settlement there (the Yishuv), but had never been able to become close to the Zionist youth groups that shared these interests because they were either Stalinist or Trotskyite and I had always been strongly anti-Bolshevik. We should bear in mind that in the latter stages of the Depression, which I was growing up, and even in subsequent years to an extent, these were very lively issues.
I intended to drop out of college and to pursue these interests. The vague ideas I had at the time were to go to Palestine, perhaps to a kibbutz, to try to become involved in efforts at Arab-Jewish cooperation within a socialist framework, as opposed to the deeply antidemocratic concept of a Jewish state (a position that was considered well within the mainstream of Zionism).
Peck: Was it after college that you went to live on a kibbutz in Israel?
Chomsky: I went for a few months while I was at the Society of Fellows, in 1953. … It was a short visit [6 weeks], and I returned to Harvard, planning to come back, maybe to stay, in a few years. … My wife, meanwhile, went back to the kibbutz for a longer visit. We planned then to return to stay, but by then I had obtained a research position at MIT…
Peck: Were you active in political organizations in earlier years in the United States?
Chomsky: I didn’t have any affiliation to any group, the Zionist left or elsewhere. Partly it was that I’m not much of a “joiner,” I guess. Furthermore, every organization that I knew of, on the left at least, was Leninist, either Stalinist or Trotskyite. I was always very anti-Leninist, and I simply didn’t know of any group at all that shared my views. This was true of the Zionist left, and of much of the American left at the time, as far as I knew. This was the early forties that we’re talking about.

Posted by: b real | Aug 16 2006 2:28 utc | 53

thanks malooga and b real. i will try to get to that interview tonight.

Posted by: annie | Aug 16 2006 3:05 utc | 55

I don’t know…Is this all bullshit or does it explain a lot of the unexplainable?

Posted by: pb | Aug 16 2006 3:19 utc | 57

The socialist Kibbutzim philosophy was the nectar on the outstretched paws of the Venus Flytrap.
from malooga’s 52 link..

The other factor was there was a lot of pressure to compel them to go to what was then Palestine, later Israel. Turns out the — we sort of half-knew this, being inside the Zionist youth movement, but nothing like what has since come out in the archival record. The Zionist movement in the Yishuv, the Jewish community, essentially took over the camps and ran them and controlled the food and resources and others. It wanted — there was a fixed — an official policy of getting able-bodied people, men and women, I think it was ages 17 to 35, and getting them sent off to Palestine, essentially to be cannon fodder. The others — the children, the older people — they didn’t care much about. But they really did make efforts not to have them sent to Britain or France, to the limited extent that they would accept them. They preferred for them to be a kind of psychological weapon against the British, in favor of immigration to Palestine, which was the only place that really might welcome them, was trying in every way to get them to come. The first study of this just came out a couple of years ago in Hebrew. A friend of mine, Yosef Grodzinsky — actually an English version of it has just appeared, and Common Courage Press is publishing it. I don’t know what the English title is [ed. In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews and Zionists at the End of World War II], the Hebrew title [ed. Chomer Enoshi Tov] translates as “Good Human Material,”
…..
just ideological rigidity. Everyone read the same newspaper, thought pretty much the same thoughts. So, although I had mixed feelings, I very much liked the environment and the interactions and the — so on, but there were a lot of aspects to it that were hard to accept.
…..
once I was working in a field with, again, an older man from the kibbutz, and we were carrying irrigation pipes around or something like that, and I noticed a pile of rocks on a hill, and I asked him what that was. He sort of changed the subject and wouldn’t talk about it, but later he took me aside a couple of days later and said, “Look, that was an Arab village. It was a friendly village, but when the fighting came close, we felt we couldn’t accept their being there, so we drove them out and destroyed the village.” This is a kibbutz way at the left, dovish, bi-nationalist end. Actually they were Buberites, mostly came from Germany.
…
I didn’t know then what we know now, but it was pretty clear there was no doubt that it was a pretty violent expulsion. I mean, now even the major Israeli historians like, say, Benny Morris — he’s the main historian of this — simply calls it, the phrase he uses is translated as ethnic cleansing, but the literal meaning is ethnic purification. That’s part of the Zionist ideal. It’s purification of the land, redemption of the land, purification of the land. And to do that, you have to get rid of this alien entity. In fact, Benny Morris, who has done more than anyone else at recording the horrible details, praises it. He says it didn’t go far enough. That’s the only way a Jewish state could have been established. At that point, at that time, most of those details were not known, although I must say I saw some of it, enough to have a sense right at the time, and later when I was living — I was living in Israel a little bit later for a while.

in other words, the zionist vision clashed w/his vision “opposed to a Jewish state. In fact, it was socialist radical, favored Arab-Jewish class cooperation in a socialist Palestine” the fly trap being that once you got there, you became part of the ‘purification’ instead of the origianl ideal?

Posted by: annie | Aug 16 2006 19:36 utc | 59