Iran Military
Thursday, October 26, 2006
Lebanon FM denies UN reports
Foreign Minister Fawzi Salloukh denied U.N. reports that arms smuggled from Syria have been intercepted and seized since Resolution 1701 went into effect.
Salloukh told reporters Wednesday that no arms or ammunitions were intercepted either on land or in the sea since the Lebanese army was deployed on the country's border with Syria on August 17.
He said the border crossings with Syria are " www.blogger.com http:>Salloukh was obviously retorting to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan's report on the implementation of 1701, in which he said that arms shipments from Syria have been intercepted.
He also denied that Hezbollah was undermining the government's control and authority in the border areas with Israel as mentioned in Annan's report.
"The truth is that Hezbollah does not limit the authority of the government or the Lebanese army which has been deployed along the Blue Line with Israel," Salloukh said.
"No violation or obstruction or armed manifestation of any kind was made by Hezbollah members," he added.
In another development, a Lebanese civilian was injured Wednesday by an Israeli bomb explosion in south Lebanon.
A security source said a 14-year-old boy suffered serious injuries by the explosion of a cluster bomb, one of hundreds dropped by Israel in the region during its war on Lebanon last July and August.
The latest casualty brought up to 111 the number of people injured by Israeli cluster bombs in addition to 23 dead.
Lebanon FM denies UN reports
Foreign Minister Fawzi Salloukh denied U.N. reports that arms smuggled from Syria have been intercepted and seized since Resolution 1701 went into effect.
Salloukh told reporters Wednesday that no arms or ammunitions were intercepted either on land or in the sea since the Lebanese army was deployed on the country's border with Syria on August 17.
He said the border crossings with Syria are " www.blogger.com http:>
Foreign Minister Fawzi Salloukh denied U.N. reports that arms smuggled from Syria have been intercepted and seized since Resolution 1701 went into effect.
Salloukh told reporters Wednesday that no arms or ammunitions were intercepted either on land or in the sea since the Lebanese army was deployed on the country's border with Syria on August 17.
He said the border crossings with Syria are " www.blogger.com http:>Salloukh was obviously retorting to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan's report on the implementation of 1701, in which he said that arms shipments from Syria have been intercepted.
He also denied that Hezbollah was undermining the government's control and authority in the border areas with Israel as mentioned in Annan's report.
"The truth is that Hezbollah does not limit the authority of the government or the Lebanese army which has been deployed along the Blue Line with Israel," Salloukh said.
"No violation or obstruction or armed manifestation of any kind was made by Hezbollah members," he added.
In another development, a Lebanese civilian was injured Wednesday by an Israeli bomb explosion in south Lebanon.
A security source said a 14-year-old boy suffered serious injuries by the explosion of a cluster bomb, one of hundreds dropped by Israel in the region during its war on Lebanon last July and August.
The latest casualty brought up to 111 the number of people injured by Israeli cluster bombs in addition to 23 dead.
Lebanon FM denies UN reports
Foreign Minister Fawzi Salloukh denied U.N. reports that arms smuggled from Syria have been intercepted and seized since Resolution 1701 went into effect.
Salloukh told reporters Wednesday that no arms or ammunitions were intercepted either on land or in the sea since the Lebanese army was deployed on the country's border with Syria on August 17.
He said the border crossings with Syria are " www.blogger.com http:>
My Exit Strategy
By Rez Dog
Iraq war supporters constantly challenge critics to offer solutions to BushCheney’s fiasco in that unfortunate country. Not that most of these apologists are interested in any new ideas or thoughtful discussion; they simply want a ...
MOCKINGBIRD'S MEDLEY - http://mimuspauly.blogspot.com
By Rez Dog
Iraq war supporters constantly challenge critics to offer solutions to BushCheney’s fiasco in that unfortunate country. Not that most of these apologists are interested in any new ideas or thoughtful discussion; they simply want a ...
MOCKINGBIRD'S MEDLEY - http://mimuspauly.blogspot.com
war in iran
Coming War Iran (among others...)
By fungua mlango
Ellsberg's open call for insider disclosure of Iran Plans: The Next War (Harpers.org): "A hidden crisis is under way. Many government insiders are aware of serious plans for war with Iran, but Congress and the public remain largely in ...
Repository - http://repositagain.blogspot.com
Coming War Iran (among others...)
By fungua mlango
Ellsberg's open call for insider disclosure of Iran Plans: The Next War (Harpers.org): "A hidden crisis is under way. Many government insiders are aware of serious plans for war with Iran, but Congress and the public remain largely in ...
Repository - http://repositagain.blogspot.com
war in iran
The time to stop a war with Iran is NOW
Political Affairs Magazine - New York,NY,USA
... Please go to www.peaceaction.org and sign the "No War with Iran!" petition today! This petition is directed to Secretary of State ...
The time to stop a war with Iran is NOW
Political Affairs Magazine - New York,NY,USA
... Please go to www.peaceaction.org and sign the "No War with Iran!" petition today! This petition is directed to Secretary of State ...
Ring the alarms
was a moment that Israel's left and right had both been waiting for. The ascent of Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel is our home) party into the corridors of power was the cue for pantomime cries of "victory", "sell out", "business as usual" and "fascism" to bloom across the country's political desert.
While the "sell out" shrieks from Lieberman's far-right bedfellows were feebly predictable, the "fascism" alarm call from veteran peace activist Uri Avnery was a more serious matter. It may circulate around the left for as long as his last such heads-up about Gush Emunim before disengagement, or the one a few months later about Israeli army officers after Lebanon. Indeed, Azmi Bishara, the leader of the Balad party, has already taken up the call.
The authoritarianism and racism of Lieberman's party, especially its tub-thumping rhetoric of "transfer", a euphemism for the ethnic cleansing of Arabs from Israel, is certainly frightening. But within Israel, there is nothing unprecedented about this platform.
In 1948 David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, presided over the expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians (during what Israelis call the war of independence and Palestinians know as the naqba). The country could not have been created in its current form without their enforced flight and the land seizures that followed. For this reason, denial of a Palestinian's right of return is still seen as a litmus test in mainstream Israeli politics.
The most worrying thing about Lieberman is not that his ideas exist on a plane outside Israel's political continuum but that, in many ways, they are close to its dead centre. The proposal to transfer "the triangle", an area around Um al-Fahm where 250,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel currently live, was first brought into the press spotlight at the end of 2000 at Israel's most prestigious annual policy-making forum, the Herzliya conference.
The then prime minister Ariel Sharon publicly floated the idea again in February 2004. Opposition from Washington to a de facto violation of international law reportedly took the plan out of the headlines, but it remained in the comment pages.
In December 2005, Uzi Arad, a former Mossad director, government foreign policy adviser and current head of the Institute for Policy and Strategy, which organises the Herzliya conference, resurrected the idea in an article for New Republic.
In June of this year, during his last visit to London, the current PM Ehud Olmert went further. He said that Europeans knew from historical memory that "territories were exchanged, that populations even moved sometimes, that territorial adjustments were made in order to create better circumstances for a peaceful solution".
He added: "In one format or another, in one manner or another, at the end of the day, we will have to find ways to do it here."
So why all the fuss about Lieberman's "victory"? An editorial in the Ha'aretz newspaper yesterday gave a hint with its warning that Lieberman's "lack of restraint and his unbridled tongue, comparable only to those of Iran's president, are liable to bring disaster down upon the entire region".
Lieberman, who has previously threatened to bomb Tehran, the Aswan Dam, and (less impressively) Beirut, has been awarded the new portfolio of minister for strategic threats. In Israeli politics, this translates as "the minister for planning war with Iran", or possibly Gaza. But while his appointment is evidently a desperate move to try to ensure Olmert's political survival, it can also be interpreted as crass diplomacy or even a preparation for war.
Still, no one is proposing that Lieberman is going to bend the Knesset, Washington and the UN to his will just so he can go bananas in Persia. If a decision is taken to bomb Iran, at this stage, he looks more likely to be a second tier fall guy than a mover and shaker.
As a Russian immigrant settler who admires President Putin and the Chinese People's Liberation Army with equal ardour, Lieberman is an outsider among Israel's political elite. And he probably won't make it onto the AIPAC snack circuit either.
His support base among Israel's million or so Russian-speakers - about 20% of the country's population - reflects the particular insecurities of that community and the process of assimilating new Jewish immigrants.
While people of Russian descent in Israel often view themselves as over-achievers from the land of Chekhov and Dostoevsky, popular stereotypes depict them as aggressive drunks, primitive in their outlook, and probably not even Jewish. Indeed, as many as half of the country's Russian speakers are not Jewish in the sense of having being born to a Jewish mother or converted to Judaism. Because of this, they cannot get married in the country.
In the old Soviet Union, Russian Jews were noted scientists, doctors and musicians but as "olim hadashim" (new immigrants), they have frequently been forced into low-paid and unskilled jobs, often as security guards. Lieberman appeals to them as a man cut from the same cloth. In the Soviet Union, he had worked as a broadcaster but after emigrating to Israel, his first job was as a bouncer at a disco.
A straight-talker, unlike most politicians, when he promises to support the introduction of civil marriages and introduce greater economic help for new immigrants, he is believed. When he promises not to compromise with the Arabs, it resonates among a population whose own stake in Israeli society feels precarious at best.
Again, there is nothing unique about this. Successive waves of migrants to Israel have been required to prove their Israeliness through racism and violence. Holocaust survivors became renowned in 1948 as the most merciless of warriors; Mizrahi (or Arab) Jews as the most fearful of anti-Arab racists. The meek Orthodox religious establishment won their spurs as gun-toting hilltop bigots, and today Russians and Ethiopians are following the same trajectory.
So is the rise of Lieberman, as others on this site have argued, just a case of Israeli business as usual then? Well, not exactly.
Israeli racism may be founded on denial of the naqba but since the "war on terror" began, its freedom to act on that denial has been enhanced by the suspension of external checks and balances on its behaviour. Now, when Israel kills civilians on a beach in Gaza, international sanctions are levied against its victims. When it commits war crimes in Lebanon the US rushes through emergency military aid.
In such a climate, it sometimes feels as if there's no limit to how far rightwing reaction in the country can spread. Avnery and Bishara are right to sound an alarm.
Anti-Arab racism, for example, is currently approaching epidemic levels. Earlier this year, an opinion poll found that more than two-thirds of Israeli Jews would refuse to live in the same building as an Arab and half would not allow an Arab in their home. Among those surveyed 41% wanted entertainment facilities to be segregated, 18% said that they felt hatred when they heard Arabic spoken and 40% thought Israel should "support the emigration of Arab citizens".
The irresistible rise of Avigdor Lieberman, now the second most popular prime ministerial candidate in Israel, is not so much making racism respectable as demonstrating what happens after the fact. If it helps liberals in the outside world to wake up to what is happening in this blighted land, Lieberman will have done a favour to Palestinians, the international community - and Israeli Jews.
On the other hand, if the mixture of authoritarianism and street racism that he champions is allowed to run riot within Israeli society, the results for the region could be more convulsive than many expect, whether they involve brown-shirted Russians marching through Jaffa or not.
was a moment that Israel's left and right had both been waiting for. The ascent of Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel is our home) party into the corridors of power was the cue for pantomime cries of "victory", "sell out", "business as usual" and "fascism" to bloom across the country's political desert.
While the "sell out" shrieks from Lieberman's far-right bedfellows were feebly predictable, the "fascism" alarm call from veteran peace activist Uri Avnery was a more serious matter. It may circulate around the left for as long as his last such heads-up about Gush Emunim before disengagement, or the one a few months later about Israeli army officers after Lebanon. Indeed, Azmi Bishara, the leader of the Balad party, has already taken up the call.
The authoritarianism and racism of Lieberman's party, especially its tub-thumping rhetoric of "transfer", a euphemism for the ethnic cleansing of Arabs from Israel, is certainly frightening. But within Israel, there is nothing unprecedented about this platform.
In 1948 David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, presided over the expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians (during what Israelis call the war of independence and Palestinians know as the naqba). The country could not have been created in its current form without their enforced flight and the land seizures that followed. For this reason, denial of a Palestinian's right of return is still seen as a litmus test in mainstream Israeli politics.
The most worrying thing about Lieberman is not that his ideas exist on a plane outside Israel's political continuum but that, in many ways, they are close to its dead centre. The proposal to transfer "the triangle", an area around Um al-Fahm where 250,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel currently live, was first brought into the press spotlight at the end of 2000 at Israel's most prestigious annual policy-making forum, the Herzliya conference.
The then prime minister Ariel Sharon publicly floated the idea again in February 2004. Opposition from Washington to a de facto violation of international law reportedly took the plan out of the headlines, but it remained in the comment pages.
In December 2005, Uzi Arad, a former Mossad director, government foreign policy adviser and current head of the Institute for Policy and Strategy, which organises the Herzliya conference, resurrected the idea in an article for New Republic.
In June of this year, during his last visit to London, the current PM Ehud Olmert went further. He said that Europeans knew from historical memory that "territories were exchanged, that populations even moved sometimes, that territorial adjustments were made in order to create better circumstances for a peaceful solution".
He added: "In one format or another, in one manner or another, at the end of the day, we will have to find ways to do it here."
So why all the fuss about Lieberman's "victory"? An editorial in the Ha'aretz newspaper yesterday gave a hint with its warning that Lieberman's "lack of restraint and his unbridled tongue, comparable only to those of Iran's president, are liable to bring disaster down upon the entire region".
Lieberman, who has previously threatened to bomb Tehran, the Aswan Dam, and (less impressively) Beirut, has been awarded the new portfolio of minister for strategic threats. In Israeli politics, this translates as "the minister for planning war with Iran", or possibly Gaza. But while his appointment is evidently a desperate move to try to ensure Olmert's political survival, it can also be interpreted as crass diplomacy or even a preparation for war.
Still, no one is proposing that Lieberman is going to bend the Knesset, Washington and the UN to his will just so he can go bananas in Persia. If a decision is taken to bomb Iran, at this stage, he looks more likely to be a second tier fall guy than a mover and shaker.
As a Russian immigrant settler who admires President Putin and the Chinese People's Liberation Army with equal ardour, Lieberman is an outsider among Israel's political elite. And he probably won't make it onto the AIPAC snack circuit either.
His support base among Israel's million or so Russian-speakers - about 20% of the country's population - reflects the particular insecurities of that community and the process of assimilating new Jewish immigrants.
While people of Russian descent in Israel often view themselves as over-achievers from the land of Chekhov and Dostoevsky, popular stereotypes depict them as aggressive drunks, primitive in their outlook, and probably not even Jewish. Indeed, as many as half of the country's Russian speakers are not Jewish in the sense of having being born to a Jewish mother or converted to Judaism. Because of this, they cannot get married in the country.
In the old Soviet Union, Russian Jews were noted scientists, doctors and musicians but as "olim hadashim" (new immigrants), they have frequently been forced into low-paid and unskilled jobs, often as security guards. Lieberman appeals to them as a man cut from the same cloth. In the Soviet Union, he had worked as a broadcaster but after emigrating to Israel, his first job was as a bouncer at a disco.
A straight-talker, unlike most politicians, when he promises to support the introduction of civil marriages and introduce greater economic help for new immigrants, he is believed. When he promises not to compromise with the Arabs, it resonates among a population whose own stake in Israeli society feels precarious at best.
Again, there is nothing unique about this. Successive waves of migrants to Israel have been required to prove their Israeliness through racism and violence. Holocaust survivors became renowned in 1948 as the most merciless of warriors; Mizrahi (or Arab) Jews as the most fearful of anti-Arab racists. The meek Orthodox religious establishment won their spurs as gun-toting hilltop bigots, and today Russians and Ethiopians are following the same trajectory.
So is the rise of Lieberman, as others on this site have argued, just a case of Israeli business as usual then? Well, not exactly.
Israeli racism may be founded on denial of the naqba but since the "war on terror" began, its freedom to act on that denial has been enhanced by the suspension of external checks and balances on its behaviour. Now, when Israel kills civilians on a beach in Gaza, international sanctions are levied against its victims. When it commits war crimes in Lebanon the US rushes through emergency military aid.
In such a climate, it sometimes feels as if there's no limit to how far rightwing reaction in the country can spread. Avnery and Bishara are right to sound an alarm.
Anti-Arab racism, for example, is currently approaching epidemic levels. Earlier this year, an opinion poll found that more than two-thirds of Israeli Jews would refuse to live in the same building as an Arab and half would not allow an Arab in their home. Among those surveyed 41% wanted entertainment facilities to be segregated, 18% said that they felt hatred when they heard Arabic spoken and 40% thought Israel should "support the emigration of Arab citizens".
The irresistible rise of Avigdor Lieberman, now the second most popular prime ministerial candidate in Israel, is not so much making racism respectable as demonstrating what happens after the fact. If it helps liberals in the outside world to wake up to what is happening in this blighted land, Lieberman will have done a favour to Palestinians, the international community - and Israeli Jews.
On the other hand, if the mixture of authoritarianism and street racism that he champions is allowed to run riot within Israeli society, the results for the region could be more convulsive than many expect, whether they involve brown-shirted Russians marching through Jaffa or not.
Israel's War With Iran
The recent fighting in Lebanon may have looked to some like old news, just another battle in the long-running Arab-Israeli war. But it also represented something much more disturbing: the start of a new war between Israel and Iran.
The Israeli defense establishment, which regards Hezbollah as a frontal commando unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, certainly saw things this way. The Iranians may not have been physically present on the frontlines in Lebanon, but they were active there nonetheless. A number of Revolutionary Guard members were killed in the Israeli incursion into the town of Baalbek (close to the Syrian border) on August 1, and Israeli intelligence claims that Iranians helped Hezbollah fire the land-to-sea missile that almost destroyed an Israeli warship in mid-July. Most of Hezbollah's arms -- including modern antitank weapons and the thousands of rockets that rained down on Israel -- came from Iran (as well as Syria). Iranian advisers had spent years helping Hezbollah train and build fortified positions throughout southern Lebanon.
Iran, in fact, has been heading steadily toward a confrontation with Israel for some time now, and its aid to Hezbollah was meant to ensure that it would have a ready strategic response if Israel took action against it. From Israel's perspective, it is lucky that the war broke out when it did. Things would have been quite different if Hezbollah's patron had already been armed with nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. From Iran's perspective, accordingly, the conflict started too soon. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Tehran did not give Hezbollah's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, permission to launch a major operation against Israel on July 12. Hezbollah's strike -- which resulted in the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers and the killing of several others -- was supposed to be relatively minor, just one more in a long series of provocations across Israel's northern border. Nasrallah seems not to have expected the powerful Israeli response that followed, and he quickly proposed an immediate cease-fire and a prisoner exchange.
In the aftermath of the conflict, several questions need to be asked. Why did Israel not strike even sooner, as soon as it determined that Hezbollah was building a vast stockpile of rockets that could threaten Israeli population centers? What motivated Israel's government to strike back when it did and with such force? Why did Israel turn the kidnapping, however serious on a tactical level, into a full-scale strategic war against Hezbollah and Lebanon? And what, finally, does the aftermath of the war mean for Israel's looming showdown with Iran?
PROVOCATION
Hezbollah's stockpiling of rockets in southern Lebanon began shortly after Israel's withdrawal from the country in May 2000. From the start, Israel's then prime minister, Ehud Barak, knew exactly what was going on. But a violent new Palestinian intifada had broken out that same year and was occupying much of Israel's attention. It never even occurred to Barak to launch another large-scale military campaign in Lebanon so soon after Israel's pullout.
When Ariel Sharon succeeded ...
The recent fighting in Lebanon may have looked to some like old news, just another battle in the long-running Arab-Israeli war. But it also represented something much more disturbing: the start of a new war between Israel and Iran.
The Israeli defense establishment, which regards Hezbollah as a frontal commando unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, certainly saw things this way. The Iranians may not have been physically present on the frontlines in Lebanon, but they were active there nonetheless. A number of Revolutionary Guard members were killed in the Israeli incursion into the town of Baalbek (close to the Syrian border) on August 1, and Israeli intelligence claims that Iranians helped Hezbollah fire the land-to-sea missile that almost destroyed an Israeli warship in mid-July. Most of Hezbollah's arms -- including modern antitank weapons and the thousands of rockets that rained down on Israel -- came from Iran (as well as Syria). Iranian advisers had spent years helping Hezbollah train and build fortified positions throughout southern Lebanon.
Iran, in fact, has been heading steadily toward a confrontation with Israel for some time now, and its aid to Hezbollah was meant to ensure that it would have a ready strategic response if Israel took action against it. From Israel's perspective, it is lucky that the war broke out when it did. Things would have been quite different if Hezbollah's patron had already been armed with nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. From Iran's perspective, accordingly, the conflict started too soon. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Tehran did not give Hezbollah's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, permission to launch a major operation against Israel on July 12. Hezbollah's strike -- which resulted in the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers and the killing of several others -- was supposed to be relatively minor, just one more in a long series of provocations across Israel's northern border. Nasrallah seems not to have expected the powerful Israeli response that followed, and he quickly proposed an immediate cease-fire and a prisoner exchange.
In the aftermath of the conflict, several questions need to be asked. Why did Israel not strike even sooner, as soon as it determined that Hezbollah was building a vast stockpile of rockets that could threaten Israeli population centers? What motivated Israel's government to strike back when it did and with such force? Why did Israel turn the kidnapping, however serious on a tactical level, into a full-scale strategic war against Hezbollah and Lebanon? And what, finally, does the aftermath of the war mean for Israel's looming showdown with Iran?
PROVOCATION
Hezbollah's stockpiling of rockets in southern Lebanon began shortly after Israel's withdrawal from the country in May 2000. From the start, Israel's then prime minister, Ehud Barak, knew exactly what was going on. But a violent new Palestinian intifada had broken out that same year and was occupying much of Israel's attention. It never even occurred to Barak to launch another large-scale military campaign in Lebanon so soon after Israel's pullout.
When Ariel Sharon succeeded ...
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