Bush’s refusal to pressure Israel to stop its war campaign is a carefully calibrated “strategy” that will in his mind bring long term peace to the Middle East, according to this analysis.
He believes the current aggression is a golden opportunity to permanently eliminate a major de-stabilizing force of Hezbollah “terrorists” (or “freedom fighters”, depending on who you ask). This is the type of rationale that guides his actions in Iraq as well. He would thus rather address the consequences of the war as a “manageable crisis” instead of continuing to serve as an “honest broker” in any Middle East peace process.
The fallacy of this line of thinking is that if you kill enough people then the conflict will go away. This completely ignores the root of the conflict, an ideology arising from hatred bred rightly or wrongly from actual or perceived wrongs against a group of people. If you fail to address the causes of the ideology then killing people will not resolve the problem, because new people will simply step into the shoes of others killed. The rampant unemployment among youth in the Middle East and even what they learn in school about the West provide almost unlimited numbers of willing suicide bombers to unleash against Israel or the US and to strengthen the ranks of groups like Hezbollah.
The foolishness of Bush’s reasoning is amply evident in the disastrous mess represented by Iraq. Instead of promoting stability and eliminating a big threat to the region in Iraq, the US is instead fomenting all sorts of unrest that it is completely incapable of quelling. That weakness is emboldening countries like Iran and Syria to behave in ways they would not were the US truly a check on their power. Israel would do well to learn from the American mistake in Iraq, especially because it was its own behavior in Lebanon in years past that gave rise to Hezbollah in the first place.
Rather than weakening the anti-West ideology, Israel and the US are strengthening it by their warmongering in Lebanon and Iraq. It is providing the validation the Arab world needs to prove that their cause against the West is a just one. They need only see the senseless bombings of cities and the slaughtering of innocent children and civilians to fuel their hatred.
I categorically condemn groups like Hamas and Hezbollah detonating suicide bombers among groups of innocent Israelis in cafes and restaurants–such behavior undermines whatever legitimacy their causes may have. Even if suicide bombers are the only weapon you have against an opponent vastly superior militarily to you, you focus on military targets in wartime and not civilians. On the other hand, how is this behavior qualitatively different from Israel bulldozing Palestinian houses and people or indiscriminately shelling Beirut? Innocent people are just as dead regardless of the method used.
The rest of the world sees what Bush and Israel do not: that the neocon ideology of shooting first and managing the damage later solves nothing and only creates far larger problems than the ones solved. As usual, the US chooses to behave like a rogue nation while paying token lip service in admonishing Israel to minimize the killing of civilians.
It is time to address the ideology behind the Middle East hostility rather than just shooting guns at the problem. Pulverizing Lebanon accomplishes nothing. The biggest obstacle is the Palestinian statehood issue. Until Israel gets serious about the subject of providing a viable permanent home for these displaced people it will continue to be perceived as an oppressor by the Arab world and will continue to be in a state of perpetual war–if not by Hezbollah then inevitably by some other group or nation that takes its place.
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