Billmon:
[F]or Shrub to argue that being the former colonial power in Lebanon makes France the ideal candidate to pull quasi-occupation duty there now says a lot about the character of the "new" Middle East.
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August 21, 2006
WB: A Close Relationship
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“They understand the region as well as anybody.”
Superficially they certainly do. They do know that there are Shi’a and Sunni muslims for example. However the French fucked up the Levant more than anybody by creating a sectarian state named Lebanon, which was designed for Christian supremacy. That they are still deluded about it all is borne out by the fact that they were the prime movers behind resolution 1559, which kicked out the Syrians.
Posted by: Guthman Bey | Aug 21 2006 19:20 utc | 1
Billmon is his update says:
My only quarrel with Matt’s analysis is that I don’t think the status quo ante is what the Israelis wanted, nor is it “better” for them — unless Matt means better than having hundreds of rockets a day pouring down on northern Israel.
Dear Billmon – the status quo ante, i.e. between 2000 and 2006 was 2 (TWO) Hisbullah rockets were going down on “Northern Israel” which for, Israeli purpose, includes the Syrian Golan heights. Check the UNIFIL records available on the UN website.
That is what Matt means. Not your “hundreds of rockets” phantasie.
Actually according to the Lebanese Speaker of Parliament, Nabib Berry, UNIFIL’s statistics counted about 100 Hezballah ceasefire violations since 2000 and 11,700 by Israel. (source Angry Arab).
Posted by: Guthman Bey | Aug 21 2006 19:45 utc | 3
The Cheneyites and their silly friends are learning the hard way that when you adopt the stance, “We don’t talk to X.” You lose to everyone that does. The cost of rhetoric is having no voice when it counts. But I do enjoy the silence.
Posted by: Diogenes | Aug 21 2006 19:51 utc | 4
The Israelis sure wish they had the status quo back. At least there still was the “myth” of the invincible and mighty IDF. Now that the deterrence that myth provided has been shattered its the new Middle East. Mubarak, King Abdullah of Jordan, the Saudi royals and the Jublatt’s in Lebanon can’t openly be seen supporting Israel as they have to watch their own back. Nasrallah has been turned into a super-hero across the Islamic sectarian divide. Iran has been emboldened further – as if Iraq was not enough. The “mighty” IDF will have to take another bite of the Hezbollah apple sooner than later to restore at least some shred of the myth. The Hezbollah disruption of the commando raid in Baalbek last week to apparently abduct a Hezbollah leader only increased the pressure on the IDF further. When and what will they do next.
Posted by: ab initio | Aug 21 2006 20:01 utc | 5
Someone obviously forgot to mail this week’s talking points to Bibi:
Pamela: Prime Minister Netanyahu, this is Pamela from Atlas Shrugs. I’d like to express my deep-felt thanks for taking time out of your hectic schedule to speak with me and my esteemed colleagues. I think very little of the cease-fire. I think it’s a terrible mistake. That being said, what I’d like to know is, why Israel wouldn’t trust its safety to France when, on the 14th of July, Chirac accused Israel of intending to destroy Lebanon and what of the meeting of the Foreign minister Douste-Blazy with his Iranian counterpart in Beirut declaring praise for Iran as, quote, “a stabilizing country in the region”? Now, the French shun military action unless it’s undertaken by underdogs in civilian clothing using underhanded tactics. What happens when Israel is fired upon? Will Israel fire upon these soldiers? Will Israel risk killing a French soldier? I just think that Israel’s so exposed on this. I don’t understand the thinking. Can you help us understand the thinking of the cease-fire?
Netanyahu: I’m not sure I can. I think it’s fraught with (unintelligible). Evidently a goal of the government, the disarming of Hezbollah, destroying the missiles, removing the missile threat, and seeing that goal has not been met, and I don’t think the putting in of an expanded UNIFIL force will in any way (unintelligible) of dealing with Hezbollah. As far as, apparently there a real concern that instead of, if they won’t do that job that they’re supposed to do, so kind of way the idea is what we have to do, or what we have to do to the next round. That’s the real concern that we all share, and I agree with you that it’s not a force that is going to help Israel. (unintelligible) Secondly, … that particular statement by France’s foreign minister was remarkable, saying that Iran is a force of stability in the Middle East. I don’t know if he’s talking about the same Middle East we’re living in, and I’m not sure he’s living on the same planet we’re living in. But Iran is the single greatest threat to our civilization. It is professing a mad ideology which … that involves a millennial, suicidal apocalypse which…
Ann Lieberman: Mr. Prime Minister, this is Ann Lieberman at Boker Tov Boulder.
Netanyahu: Can you hear me now?
Ann Lieberman: Yeah, do you want to go on?
Netanyahu: I said that it’s professing a millennial, suicidal, apocalypse, in which millions are supposed to have gone from both sides, and they’re quite content with the possibility that their own people will die, because they’ll all reach an Islamic heaven, so for that purpose there they’re building atomic bombs, and they’ve already built missiles to launch them, and I take note of the fact, and the French government should take note of the fact, that those missiles have longer reach than Israel. They now reach Paris and London, and I stress Paris. So this is a global threat of a fantasy ideology that wants to wipe away the West. It’s not a local conflict between Israel, the Jewish State, and this mad ideology, any more than Hitler’s decision to destroy the Jews ended with the Jews. In both cases Jew hatred is the beginning of aggression, and not its end. Eventually, the entire world gets consumed with the (unintelligible). The only difference is of course that Hitler did not succeed in developing the bomb, and went to war before he did, whereas Ahmadinejad might do the opposite, and our world will be in terrible jeopardy, fully trapped. The fact is that many Europeans don’t get the basic point. Iran and its proxies call us the Little Satan. They call America the Great Satan, and Europe is the middle-sized Satan, and being in the middle could be an uncomfortable situation. They’re neither all, … they’re in the middle. That’s exactly where they are. They’re in the middle of a great conflict that is aiming to destroy their society, their civilization, including from Islamic radicals within France, and they don’t get it. It’s about time they got it.
Pamela: I’ll say.
Rick Richman: Go ahead, Boker Tov.
Ann Lieberman: Mr. Prime Minister, this is Ann Lieberman at Boker Tov Boulder. I heard from an Israeli family who paid a shiva call on a family who lost their son in Lebanon, and they were told, that according to the father of the soldier, the commanding officer informed him that his son’s tank was hit not by an Iranian missile, but by a French missile. I’m sorry?
Netanyahu: According to what?
Ann Lieberman: That their son’s tank was hit by a French missile, not by an Iranian missile. And I haven’t heard this anywhere else, and I wonder if the Israeli people are going to put up with having French UNIFIL forces on the border, and if the Israelis are going to overthrow this government. And maybe this is not the time to discuss it, but I wonder who else they could look to but to you, and Likud, to replace the Olmert government.
Netanyahu: I don’t know of French missiles. I know of Iranian and Syrian missiles. It may be that Syria was supplied by other countries, I don’t know. But I know that … of weapons from France to the Hezbollah, but I know of many many direct … from Iran and Syria. As far as the political process inside Israel, I decided that as long as we’re in the thick of war, at this time our soldiers are still in Lebanon, (unintelligible) that I’ll defer political pressures to a later date. Even though we have a bit of a concern over failures of preparation for the war, or identifying the threats, or organizing the way the war has been managed, obviously all these things will have to be dealt with, but there will be time in the future to deal with it.
Don’t accuse me of perpetuating the blood-libel canard, but it does sound like he has been drinking at least bloody marys for breakfast, instead of orange juice. Somebody should recommend the little purple pill….
He’s going to be Israel’s next leader — unless Sharon proves that he is really Jesus Christ disguised as the circus fatman — so we should start to think about Israel’s reactionary lurch rightward. More on this later.
Posted by: Malooga | Aug 21 2006 20:01 utc | 6
“That is what Matt means. Not your “hundreds of rockets” phantasie.”
Phantasie? b, you must have been living on a different planet than me over the past month. Hundreds of rockets a day isn’t the status quo ante, it’s the ALTERNATIVE to the status quo ante — as the Israelis discovered once they mashed up the status quo. I thought what I wrote was reasonably clear, but I not clear enough for you, I guess.
Posted by: billmon | Aug 21 2006 20:07 utc | 7
Well, of course, warfare isn’t all fun. Right — stop that! It’s all very well to laugh at the military, but when one considers the meaning of life, it is a struggle between alternative viewpoints of life itself. And without the ability to defend one’s own viewpoint against other perhaps more aggressive ideologies, then reasonableness and moderation could, quite simply, disappear! That is why we’ll always need an army, and may God strike me down were it to be otherwise.
Grahamn Chapman (General)
Monty Python’s Meaning of Life
And the only way to defeat this ideology in the long-term is to defeat it through another ideology, a competing ideology, one where government responds to the will of the people. And that’s really — really the fundamental question we face here in the beginning of this 21st century is whether or not we believe as a nation, and others believe, it is possible to defeat this ideology.
President Bush
Press Conference
August 21, 2006
Posted by: bkieft | Aug 21 2006 20:11 utc | 8
Shrub is far too absurd a figure to have ever been a Monty Python character. Although there was this giant hedgehog . . .
Posted by: Billmon | Aug 21 2006 20:13 utc | 9
I was just kind of waiting for the lightning bolt after he said it.
🙂
Posted by: bkieft | Aug 21 2006 20:19 utc | 10
I think Shrub might be suffering from a stray log in his eye-d-ology.
Posted by: Malooga | Aug 21 2006 20:20 utc | 11
@GB: The French put the Bekka valley in Lebanon so that they could hold onto it longer. As far as I know, it was historically part of Syria.
@Ab inito: “Israel” is not a singularity. Some Israelis wish they had the status quo back, some are salivating at the prospects of “transfer” coming closer due to the collapse of the center-right, some are planning to leave and so on. The hapless Olmert may not have realized that his buddies in Washington will not be too unhappy if he is replaced with their oh-so-American-accented right wing pawn who will put an end to this settlement withdrawal nonsense and start fixing the “demographics” with an iron hand, and one of those nice religious militias that seem so indispensible in the rest of the middle east.
Posted by: citizen k | Aug 21 2006 20:22 utc | 12
citizen k
The state of Israel has been a “singularity” in terms of their policy towards their neighbors. Use of force to dominate. Not much has changed in that stance since the 1940s. Now they have met an adversary who could not be overrun. So they’ll apply even more force and as you say start “fixing the demographics”.
Posted by: ab initio | Aug 21 2006 20:41 utc | 13
bkieft,
Well, speaking of Monty Python and Shrub – do you recall the skit with the exploding bushes…..? Voila!
Posted by: Anonymous | Aug 22 2006 0:19 utc | 14
Citizen,
it is true that one part of Lebanon, the so-called Mont Liban, had a specific regional identity and enjoyed varying degrees of autonomy during the 400 years of the Ottoman empire, but so did many other areas, which never became countries. (That is actually the Pearl/Pipes fantasy: that all these areas should become independent Bantustans). When the French used their post-WW1 mandate in the region to cobble together a state for the Maronite Christians, they added not only the Bekaa valley, which had been part of the same province as Damascus, but also the area around Tripoli in the North, and the South of Lebanon, whose center is Tyr. Neither of these areas have at any time participated in the “Lebanese identity”. Regional and for the most part pro-Syrian parties have always dominated there.
There is no such thing as a polity named Lebanon. It has always been a (mainly) Maronite fiction.
Posted by: Guthman Bey | Aug 22 2006 0:52 utc | 15
“The real beneficiaries of the French manuever (whether or not they realize it) were the Americans…”
No disagreement there, but forget the Shrubbery, what about the help it lends to any reasonable Dem who wants to use the determined diplomacy strategy to strike a domestic blow against the dopey doctrine of disengenuous destructionism?
.
Ab Inito:
What words will you use when, as seems likely to me, Israel become a true colonial empire?
Posted by: citizen k | Aug 22 2006 1:43 utc | 17
reasonable Dem?
I don’t hear any barking from that peanut gallery, except to call for more troops.
Posted by: Malooga | Aug 22 2006 2:45 utc | 18
I don’t hear any barking from that peanut gallery, except to call for more troops.
gore?
Posted by: annie | Aug 22 2006 2:58 utc | 19
I don’t hear any barking from that peanut gallery, except to call for more troops.
gore?
And Kucinich as well… but I’m not falling all over myself to have this tired, old debate again. Barring some notable exceptions, Dems are indistinguishable from Republicans, and if they take back Congress they will enfuse the system with enough hope coupled with the same kleptocracy only to slow down the inevitable, but last I checked, hope and I-told-you-so’s didn’t put food into anyone’s bellies or save a dying economy.
My only two real questions as regards the so-called opposition party are:
a.) Who would really want to inherit the reins of this mess?, and
b.) Where the hell were you when we needed you?
Any mention of the Democrat Party that does not address either of those questions (and I am satisfied that the answer to both of them involves the word “plutocrat”) seems to me to be academic and masturbatory.
Posted by: Monolycus | Aug 22 2006 3:13 utc | 20
Western Europe has relationships to North Africa and the Middle East that are not different in kind from our own relationships to countries south of the border. Yes, the colonial history matters, but it also matters that the (formerly?) colonized have been moving into Western Europe for the past fifty years. The texture of Mediterranian relationships is approaching the density and complexity of Western European relationships, themselves not unlike the relationships between fifty North American states and twelve (?) Canadian provinces. So it’s no wonder that France, Germany, Spain and Italy are moving heaven and earth to chill out the fighting throughout the Near and Middle East. We’d do exactly the same, perhaps, if Colombia went to war with Mexico. My point is that NONE of this complexity is known or recognized by the U.S. government. It goes far beyond the complexity of the arrangements in place during the colonial era, the world wars, and the Cold War. The only analogy within our boarders would be the tensions between North and South after the Civil War. Suffice it to say that we didn’t want, and never will want, a repetition of that experience. Shipping our violence overseas is our favorite way of defusing it. Summing it all up, I doubt that Europe will allow us to continue our mindless adventures in the Middle East. Folks over there are moving heaven and earth to put the brakes on.
Posted by: alabama | Aug 22 2006 3:36 utc | 21
monolycus 20, i agree w/you on this point. excuse me, i have been working like a dog and feel extremely lazy. w/out commentary my post meant nothing. i was thinking about gore today and his mums the word except w/the environment. i am curios. no, i have no faith in the dems. i do however have some faith in the reasonableness of gore. i also don’t consider him part of a peanut gallery.
no i don’t want to have this tired, old debate again either. but i long for determined diplomacy strategy.
Posted by: annie | Aug 22 2006 4:08 utc | 22
@Billmon – If the status quo ante you referred to is the same status quo ante you cited from Matt Ygelsias, than the “hundreds of rockets” are wrong. Yglesisas definitly means pre-war status, not pre-ceasefire status.
Dick Cohen’s latest in the WaPo is painful to read. Not only is it based on a reading of history through the lens of famed non-specialist Niall Ferguson, the AEI’s favourite Brit these days, but it relies upon a misreading of what happened both in 1938 and last week:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/21/AR2006082101143.html
An evisceration is in order.
Oh, and Guthman Bey’s right: the ‘Phoenician’ self-identification of Mont-Liban didn’t stretch far past… Mont-Liban.
Posted by: ahem | Aug 22 2006 5:47 utc | 24
@ab inito
“Start fixing the demographics?”
What do you think Israel has been doing all this time? Wake up and smell the coffee mate.
Posted by: Bea | Aug 22 2006 12:51 utc | 25
@Billmon – If the status quo ante you referred to is the same status quo ante you cited from Matt Ygelsias, than the “hundreds of rockets” are wrong. Yglesisas definitly means pre-war status, not pre-ceasefire status.
b, you totally misread my post. I don’t have the time or the inclination to straighten it out for you now, but I was not saying that Hizbullah was firing hundreds of rockets into Israel before the war started.
Posted by: Anonymous | Aug 22 2006 19:09 utc | 26
@Billmon – If the status quo ante you referred to is the same status quo ante you cited from Matt Ygelsias, than the “hundreds of rockets” are wrong. Yglesisas definitly means pre-war status, not pre-ceasefire status.
when billmon says I don’t think the status quo ante is what the Israelis wanted, i interpreted it to mean that israel wasn’t looking for the status quo ante ( a few rockets)
i interpretted nor is it “better” for them (meaning the few rockets not hunderds) — unless Matt means better than having hundreds of rockets a day pouring down on northern Israel.
what was israel looking for if it wasn’t the statud quo anti??
what was billmon stipulating when he said that’s not what they were looking for? could he have meant a robust international peacekeeping force protecting them for the upcoming war.
Posted by: annie | Aug 22 2006 19:44 utc | 27
Monocyclus–
Re: your a. and b. above…..wanting and having to do something are not the same thing but they can lead to the same result….and just because we needed them before doesn’t mean we don’t need them now.
Just being a pragmatist for the moment even though my heart wants much, much more
Posted by: Anonymous | Aug 22 2006 20:55 utc | 28