Michael Carmichael: Hizbullah Strikes Back

After weeks of what has been described as a vastly disproportionate bombardment, Israel suffered its heaviest losses yesterday when thirteen of its soldiers lost their lives in pitched battle against the highly disciplined forces of a heavily outnumbered but intensively resurgent Hizbullah.

In an abrupt volte face, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert reversed his perennial position on his immediate military objectives. Reflecting the current realities on the battleground, Olmert stated that he will now be content with a weakened Hizbullah rather the total obliteration of the rebel militia.

On the same day of the turning of the tide in the conflict, the Rome Summit failed to get any result on a ceasefire which was originally proposed by Hizbullah. The rebels are now comprised of the United Nations, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Canada and Cyprus who voted for an immediate ceasefire. The Empire of the United States and Britain voted against ceasefire. Thus, the battle rages onward.

Following yesterday’s heated exchanges between Kofi Annan and various spokesmen for Israel over the deaths of four UN observers, new evidence has emerged that has destroyed the credibility of Israel and strengthened the rebellious Secretary General of the UN.

In Europe, reports confirmed that the UN issued no less than sixteen pleas for the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) bombardment to stop, but their pleas went unheeded. Images of a huge mushroom cloud over the site of the UN observation post have now been published in newspapers across the globe, providing a stark backdrop for yet another case of severe collateral damages in the latest of the ill-conceived wars in the Middle East. Amidst a rising tide of international outrage over the UN deaths, Ehud Olmert issued a belated apology for the killings.

Today, more images of dead Lebanese women and children adorn the front pages of the European press where they are in stark juxtaposition with images of Israeli tanks blasting their cannons at the villages, towns and redoubts of the war-torn Lebanon.

Abandoned by their Arab allies who are now demanding an immediate ceasefire, America and Britain suffer more disgrace while Israel continues its increasingly difficult rampage.

Yesterday, the Jedi Council led by Noam Chomsky, Edward Galleano and Harold Pinter and a larger group of public intellectuals signed a letter urging an immediate ceasefire while reminding the world that the origin of the current cycle of violence was launched when Israel seized hostages – an incident that went virtually unreported in the global media.

In retaliation for the deaths of entire families who were killed by IDF bombardment of Gaza and the seizing of Corporal Gilad Shalit by Hamas and two more Israelis by Hizbullah, Israel launched its attack announcing that it would create a ‘sanitized’ zone in the south of Lebanon. When Hamas and Hizbullah proposed a prisoner exchange, Olmert rejected the offer locking him into the role of Jabba the Hutt.

The Israeli policy of ‘sanitizing’ an entire region of Lebanon described as a 1.5 kilometre zone along the border echoes the ethnic-cleansing announced by Serbia during the Bosnian conflict in the 1990s that prompted NATO to launch its intervention to prevent what was the most serious case of European genocide since the Holocaust.

The contrast between the forces of Israel and Hizbullah is stark. Israel has 12,000 heavily armed Imperial shock-troops on the border with the Lebanon, while Hizbullah has a much more feeble force of 6,000 elite fighters tops. The IDF is moving into the Lebanon aboard Merkava IV tanks alongside at least 80 Armoured D-9 Bulldozers – obviously to destroy the housing of Lebanese civilians in order to ‘sanitize’ Olmert’s Security Zone. At the same time, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) have launched more than one-thousand five-hundred air attacks on the Lebanon supported by a huge phalanx of US-built Apache attack helicopters. Now the Empire’s decades long plan of arming Israel to the teeth is beginning to make sense. They are using the IDF to clear a pathway for the mooted oil pipeline from the Mosul field.

In contrast, Hizbullah and Hamas are Davidesque – actually they are the Ewoks of this epic tragedy. With only 15,000 short-range Katyusha rockets, a smattering of Sagger anti-tank missiles and the much more common rocket-propelled grenade launchers, Hizbullah is wielding a comparative sling-shot against the heavy-weight artillery of the IDF and IAF. To our knowledge, neither Hamas nor Hezbollah have any air force, not even one Millenium Falcon nor even one Starfighter, to stand up against the plethora of IAF TIE fighters streaking across the skies of the Lebanon and bombarding the cities, towns and villages below.

Increasingly uncomfortable in her roll as the understudy of John Bolton as the American Imperialist version of Darth Vader, Condoleezza Rice has presided over yet another dismal failure of US diplomacy in the fiasco that was the Rome Summit. With her British counterpart, Margaret Becket, clumsy but game in her supporting role, Rice as Vader met Kofi Annan in debate in Rome and came away with a noticeable tremble in her normally Vulcan tone during the post-summit press conference.

Kofi Annan is rising to his role as the Luke Skywalker of this particular piece of nightmarish military theatre, while George Bush and Dick Cheney are both safely ensconced in the White House (Death Star) jointly presiding as Galactic Emperor over the unfolding travesty of war crimes and a rising mountain of corpses of women and children that have been the hallmark of their Imperial reign.

With only a few months left in his term as Secretary General of the UN, the final conflict between Annan-Skywalker, Rice-Bolton-Vader and Bush-Cheney-Galactic Emperor may soon take place in a Gotterdammerung version of the return of the Jedi, masterminded by the gnomelike Joda-ish intellectuals who are shaping the tides of battle with their invocations on the blogosphere.

The curtain may be rising on the final chapter of this particular chaotic tragedy for the cruel denouement of blood, gore, dead babies and the genocidal onslaught of an Empire in the iron grip of the Dark Side that has paralysed our planet.

References
1.
Haaretz - Morality is not on our side
2. The Independent - Smoke signals from the battle of Bint Jbeil send a warning to Israel
3. The Independent - Babies among dead on Gaza front line
4. Guardian - The summit fails. War rages
5. Guardian - Israel's heaviest losses fuel doubts over strategy
6. Guardian - Frustration as summit fails to end conflict
7. Guardian - The neocon resurgence - The delusional US mindset that made the Iraq war a disaster has resurfaced in Lebanon
8. Guardian - The Glory that was Rome – a Martin Rowson cartoon
9. Chomsky - Israel, Lebanon, and Palestine

Michael Carmichael
Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
The Planetary Movement
Oxford
United Kingdom
Website www.planetarymovement.org

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