Saturday, August 5, 2006

Sowing the Seeds of 9-11's

Americans should know who Robert Fisk is.

Fisk is Britain’s most highly decorated foreign correspondent. He has received the British International Journalist of the Year award seven times, most recently in 1995 and 1996. His specialty is the Middle East, where he has spent the last twenty-three years. Currently Fisk is the Beirut correspondent for the London Independent.

Here are Fisk's latest words:
. . . .as the Lebanon war continues to destroy innocent lives - most of them Lebanese - the conflict seems to be increasingly aimless. The Israeli air force has succeeded in killing perhaps 50 Hizbollah members and 600 civilians and has destroyed bridges, milk factories, gas stations, fuel storage depots, airport runways and thousands of homes. But to what purpose?

Does the United States any longer believe Israel's claims that it will destroy Hizbollah when its army clearly cannot do anything of the kind? Does Washington not realise that when Israel grows tired of this war, it will plead for a ceasefire - which only Washington can deliver by doing what it most loathes to do: by taking the road to Damascus and asking for help from President Bashar al-Assad of Syria?

What in the meanwhile is happening to Lebanon? Bridges and buildings can be reconstructed - with European Union loans, no doubt - but many Lebanese are now questioning the institutions of the democracy for which the US was itself so full of praise last year. What is the point of a democratically elected Lebanese government which cannot protect its people? What is the point of a 75,000-member Lebanese army which cannot protect its nation, which cannot be sent to the border, which does not fire on Lebanon's enemies and which cannot disarm Hizbollah? Indeed, for many Lebanese Shias, Hizbollah is now the Lebanese army.

So fierce has been Hizbollah's resistance - and so determined its attacks on Israeli ground troops in Lebanon - that many people here no longer recall that it was Hizbollah which provoked this latest war by crossing the border on 12 July, killing three Israeli soldiers and capturing two others. Israel's threats of enlarging the conflict even further are now met with amusement rather than horror by a Lebanese population which has been listening to Israel's warnings for 30 years with ever greater weariness. And yet they fear for their lives. If Tel Aviv is hit, will Beirut be spared. Or if central Beirut is hit, will Tel Aviv be spared? Hizbollah now uses Israel's language of an eye for an eye. Every Israeli taunt is met by a Hizbollah taunt.

And do the Israelis realise that they are legitimising Hizbollah, that a rag-tag army of guerrillas is winning its spurs against an Israeli army and air force whose targets - if intended - prove them to be war criminals and if unintended suggest that they are a rif-raff little better than the Arab armies they have been fighting, on and off, for more than half a century? Extraordinary precedents are being set in this Lebanon war.

In fact, one of the most profound changes in the region these past three decades has been the growing unwillingness of Arabs to be afraid. Their leaders - our "moderate" pro-Western Arab leaders such as King Abdullah of Jordan and President Mubarak of Egypt - may be afraid. But their peoples are not. And once a people have lost their terror, they cannot be re-injected with fear. Thus Israel's consistent policy of smashing Arabs into submission no longer works. It is a policy whose bankruptcy the Americans are now discovering in Iraq.

And all across the Muslim world, "we" - the West, America, Israel - are fighting not nationalists but Islamists. And watching the martyrdom of Lebanon this week - its slaughtered children in Qana packed into plastic bags until the bags ran out and their corpses had to be wrapped in carpets - a terrible and daunting thought occurs to me, day by day. That there will be another 9/11.
Click on the link below to read the first portion of Fisk's column.

A Terrible Thought Occurs to Me - That There Will Be Another 9/11

10 comments:

  1. Fisk and the Independent are fantastic, and very few in Britain would be able to state what the majority thinks. He's a good bloke.

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  2. Bush has proven to have been no better friend to Olmert than Blair was for Bush.

    Friends don't allow friends to drive drunk.

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  3. If professionals like Fisk were the standard in the news media we would all be better informed and not prone to zionist propaganda. Remember when John Malkovich was calling for Fisk's murder during a visit to England?

    http://www.robert-fisk.com/articles77.htm

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  4. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd say the world was being gamed the way it was in the darkest days in the 20th Century.

    Bush has taught Olmert that the way to hide war crimes in Iraq was to get a proxy war in Lebanon. And Olmert has learned the lesson: the proxy war in Lebanon helps the Isrealis keep the crimes in Gaza out of the spotlight.

    Like I said, if I were a conspiracy theorist, I would have more to say on this subject.

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  5. Israel's current campaign, planned well before the killing and abduction of its soldiers, is part of the first offensive on Iran, which is clearly Israel's and the US's ultimate target. Lebanon has to be pacified, taken completely out of the picture before any serious action can be taken against Iran.

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  6. Robert Fisk's final words (above) provide the context:

    ...a terrible and daunting thought occurs to me, day by day. That there will be another 9/11.

    for today's news:

    Plot to Bomb Jets Is Thwarted in Britain

    The Bush-Olmert recruiting plan for Al Qaeda is delivering. Call it pay-back, blow-back, or get-back, we are reaping what our leader has sowed: fear, isolation, long lines of travelers wanting just to get somewhere safe. Like the internal migrations of people in Iraq and Lebanon. Not quit there yet, by a long shot, but only a blind fool doesn't get the message of what might be in store for us.

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  7. I find myself in complete agreement with comments made above. I do not feel Recidivist's comments too much of a reach not to grasp. His dots are definitely connected.

    And I thank Dr. Maxtor for his revelation. New to me.

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  8. Interesting point Recidivist. I agree that your theory seems plausible. The problem is what will they do with Iran once they have it? Look at the trouble we are having taming Iraq.

    There will be another 9/11 Vigilante. It is inevitable. It hasn't happened yet because al Qaeda is still putting the plan together. They are not in a hurry because they are convinced that victory is theirs and it doesn't matter when it happens just that it happens.

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