cheers
August 14, 2006, 12:19am
1
<p>As I suspected, Fisk sites US sources when he speculates that Israel planned the invasion of Lebanon long in advance of the ‘trigger troop’ kidnappings. The surprise, for me, is that the Hizbollah strategy appears to be the start of a long term military campaign which was also long in the planning and funding. Are the Israelis really surprised? If so, wouldnt’ that be a failure for Mossad?</p>
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The Israeli army, reeling under the Hizbollah’s onslaught of the past 24 hours, is now facing the harshest guerrilla war in its history. And it is a war they may well lose. </p>
<p>In all, at least 39 - possibly 43 - Israeli soldiers have been killed in the past day as Hizbollah guerrillas, still launching missiles into Israel itself, have fought back against Israel’s massive land invasion into Lebanon.</p>
<p>Israeli military authorities talked of “cleaning” and “mopping up” operations by their soldiers south of the Litani river but, to the Lebanese, it seems as if it is the Hizbollah that have been doing the “mopping up”. By last night, the Israelis had not even been able to reach the dead crew of a helicopter - shot down on Saturday night - which crashed into a Lebanese valley.</p>
<p>Officially, Israel has now accepted the UN ceasefire that calls for an end to all Israeli offensive military operations and Hizbollah attacks, and the Hizbollah have stated that they will abide by the ceasefire - providing no Israeli troops remain inside Lebanon. But 10,000 Israeli soldiers - the Israelis even suggest 30,000, although no one in Beirut takes that seriously - have now entered the country and every one of them is a Hizbollah target.</p>
<p>From this morning, Hizbollah’s operations will be directed solely against the invasion force. And the Israelis cannot afford to lose 40 men a day. Unable to shoot down the Israeli F-16 aircraft that have laid waste to much of Lebanon, the Hizbollah have, for years, prayed and longed and waited for the moment when they could attack the Israeli army on the ground.</p>
<p>Now they are set to put their long-planned campaign into operation. Thousands of their members remain alive and armed in the ruined hill villages of southern Lebanon for just this moment and, only hours after their leader, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, warned Israel on Saturday that his men were waiting for them on the banks of the Litani river, the Hizbollah sprang their trap, killing more than 20 Israeli soldiers in less than three hours.</p>
<p>Israel itself, according to reports from Washington and New York, had long planned its current campaign against Lebanon - provoked by Hizbollah’s crossing of the Israeli frontier, its killing of three soldiers and seizure of two others on 12 July - but the Israelis appear to have taken no account of the guerrilla army’s most obvious operational plan: that if they could endure days of air attacks, they would eventually force Israel’s army to re-enter Lebanon on the ground and fight them on equal terms.
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<p><a href=“http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article1219037.ece[/url] ”>http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article1219037.ece</a></p> ;
<p>Also, fascinating: what Condi had to say to Time Magazine about the difficulties of predicting the motivations and actions of a totalitarian state such as Iran–based upon her years as a USSR analyst.</p>
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TIME: ON IRAN, IS IT POSSIBLE TO BYPASS PRESIDENT MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD AND REACH OUT TO A MORE PRAGMATIC FACTION?</p>
<p>RICE: I don’t know how to read internal politics in Iran. And I’m probably more cautious about trying to do this than most people because I used to try to read the politics of a totalitarian state [the U.S.S.R.], and we almost always had it wrong.</p>
<p>We have to treat Iran as a whole. Rather than trying to play to one side or another, which I can assure you we don’t understand, I think it’s preferable to continue to lay out the strategic choices for Iran as to their nuclear program, support for terrorism, support for democratic change. And if there are indeed voices in Iran who are susceptible to the argument that Iran’s deepening isolation is a problem, then they will emerge.
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<p><a href=“http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1223371-2,00.html[/url] ”>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1223371-2,00.html</a></p> ;