See Ken Silverstein's post  (Harper's ) : Could U.S. Troops End up in Lebanon?

new 'domino' theory: Israel's attacks will demolish Hezbollah; the Lebanese will blame Hezbollah and destroy its influence; and the backlash will extend to the Palestinians' Hamas, which will collapse

Pigs could fly .

I doubt it...there was an article yesterday at military.com that said 2/3rds of our combat troops unready.

Of course, with this administration's unwillingness to think realistically, it could happen...

Palestinians and Lebanese who are suffering, losing their homes and loved ones can take solace in the fact that their losses are just the "birth pangs of a new Middle East." Isn't it exciting!

Another problem with Condi's theory is there is no evidence that Israel wants to play their role either.

This just lets the Bush people ignore trying to talk to Syria, as they have done so well ignoring talking to North Korea.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

A consistent theme in administration miscalculations in the Middle East is that consistently seem to overestimate the numbers of potential US and Israeli freinds, and underestimate the depth of support of our antoganists.

In Iraq, they thought that if they toppled Saddam, the overjoyed and liberated Iraqi public would wave US flags, form a democracy, recognize Israel and become a US-friendly client in oil country.

In Iran, the hawks seem once again convinced that if they shove the governmnet aside, a vast US-loving public will take control, recognize Israel, and make nice with us.

Now in Lebanon, they imagine that an Israeli defeat of Hezbollah, a group which is thoroughly integrated with, and supported by, the largest sectarian group in that divided country, will cause most of Lebanon to spit Hexbollah out and make nice with Israel and the US.

No damn Hail Mary pass is too stupid for these guys. But they'll try any desperate move to avoid making deals.

Todd Gitlin writes: I do not know how to think of these people as anything other than mad.

This is self evident from the post describing Blumental's ravings about a new domino theory.

Isn't it time to learn how to think of "these people" (ie the government of the USA) as rational political operators with coherent plans rather than taking comfort in one's own total incomprehension of what's happening by simply concluding that they must be mad since your understanding of their rationale makes no sense whatever.

Does Rice actually believe that:

Israel's attacks will demolish Hezbollah; the Lebanese will blame Hezbollah and destroy its influence; and the backlash will extend to the Palestinians' Hamas, which will collapse. From the administration's point of view, the Israel-Lebanon conflict is a proxy war with Iran (and Syria) that will inexplicably help turn around Iraq

If so, she is indeed hopelessly delusional since nobody rational could possibly believe any of those propositions.

Why not learn "how to think" of obviously irrational explanations as simply being false?

Let us assume for a moment that Condi knows at least as well as Todd Gitlin and I that:

1. Israel's attacks on Hezbollah will not and indeed could not destroy Hezbollah and that Israel knows this since it fought an 18 year war with Hezbollah and had to retreat from south Lebanon six years ago while Hezbollah has grown stronger since and is now part of the government of Lebanon.

2. The Lebanese will not blame Hezbollah and destroy its influence and that Israel knows this since the Lebanese who sided with Israel in its last war such as the South Lebanese Army were completely discredited and destroyed by the Israeli defeat and nobody wants to go through another civil war for Israel's benefit.

3. Hamas will not collapse and Israel knows that since Hamas and Fateh reached an important agreement for national reconciliation immediately before the current crisis which has been hardly noticed because of the current crisis.

4. The Israel-Lebanon war is not a proxy war with Iran or Syria and Israel knows that since it is the author of this propaganda fable.

5. Inexplicable events will not inexplicably help turn around Iraq and Israel knows that because it is not heavily into whatever Blumenthal and his sources are smoking.

Given that assumption that the US Secretary of State might not be literally insane, what could be the real thinking behind current US policy?

Todd Gitlin has simply given up on attempting to analyse US policy as "too hard".

For what it's worth, here's my analysis based on the "controversial" assumption that Condi is not raving mad.

1. Neither Israel nor the US are attempting to destroy Hezbollah.

2. Both intend a settlement meeting Hezbollah's demands - a prisoner exchange ending the ongoing imprisonment of Lebanese by Israel long after it withdrew from Lebanon, and return of the small piece of Lebanon Israel retained after withdrawing on the pretext that it was actually Syrian.

3. Both are aware that failing to destroy Hezbollah and meeting its demands will actually strengthen Hezbollah rather than weaken it and that this will strengthen Hamas rather than weaken it.

4. Both are convinced that Israel must withdraw from the West Bank for any durable peace.

5. Both are aware that evacuating the settlers will be extremely difficult while a large extremist minority of Israelis determined to hold on to "judea and samaria" are able to mobilize wider opposition to "retreating under fire" and "rewarding terrorist attacks".

6. Both are aware that the Palestine Authority's proposal for an international force to replace the Israeli occupation troops is essential for actually evacuating the West Bank and that unilaterally withdrawing from Gaza instead of reaching agreement with the Palestine Liberation Organization has only resulted in unnecessary chaos.

7. Israel is demanding an international force on its borders whereas previously it opposed any such constraints for reasons other than schizophrenia.

8. The reasons are that Israel now knows that the US will not continue funding "Greater Israel" expansionism so there is no further benefit to Israel in maintaining fluid and ambiguous borders wherever its tanks last stopped.

9. Both know that no international force can be introduced into south Lebanon without Hezbollah's consent since only the Israelis are willing to spend blood and treasure on fighting Hezbollah at all and nobody else will do it for them.

10. Both expect Hezbollah to consent to an international force because both do know that Hezbollah is in fact a Lebanese national resistance rather than a proxy arm of Iran mythically bent on "killing jews" out of the sheer anti-semitic malice that Israeli propagandists portray to the weak minded.

11. Linkage between the prisoner exchange for Lebanon and Gaza and the introduction of an international force into Lebanon opens up possibilities for speeding up the evacuation of the West Bank with the introduction of an international force there to be carried out by a government that has shown just how tough and resolute it is in massacring Lebanese civilians and "forcing" the "terrorist enemy" to accept an international force in much the same sort of way that Nixon "forced" Vietnam to let the Americans depart and take their POWs with them by escalating the war to bomb Hanoi a few weeks before signing the peace agreements that had been on the table for years.

12. Removing the albatross of Israeli occupation will very explicably remove a major obstacle to democratic revolution in the region - the regimes will no longer be able to blame Israel for their own inadequacies.

13. Doing it in a way that strengthens Hezbollah and Hamas while highlighting the complete impotence of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and not even bothering to talk to Syria and Iran will help undermine the autocracies even more rapidly and will also directly help undermine sectarianism in Iraq.

14. The current policies would be insane if US policy was still in the pre-9/11 era of seeking stability and stagnation under the existing autocracies and Israel. But that policy would be insane in the light of having blown up so spectacularly with the World Trade Center towers.

15. The current policies are not insane if in fact the US does aim to end tyranny in the middle east regardless of whether or not the results of democratic revolution are anti-US islamist parties such as the Iraqi Daawa party allied to Hezbollah, (whose Prime Minister just addressed the US Congress), the Lebanese Government (including Hezbollah) or the Palestine Authority Government (Hamas), all of which came to power in US supported free elections.

16. People who regard it as sane to keep the Middle East stagnant with nothing better for young men to do than become Al Quaeda jihadis will naturally regard it as insane to undermine the status quo at all, let alone as ruthlessly as the US and Israel are now doing it. But if its really urgent to evacuate the West Bank, killing a few hundred Lebanese to speed things up in the adaptation of Israeli public opinion makes a lot more sense than Brezinzki funding Al Queda to fight the Soviets. Remember the Bushies aren't committed to democracy because they are not ruthless imperialist scum like their predecessors but because they simply have no other long term option for draining the swamps that breed real jihadis - the type that hit New York, as opposed to Hezbollah guerillas who are defending against Israeli aggression.

Contrary to enemy propaganda the US war aim in Iraq was not to establish a puppet regime in Iraq any more than it was to "disarm Sadaam". The aim was democratic change essential for draining the swamp of middle eastern stagnation that breeds jihadis.

Likewise contrary to enemy propaganda US diplomatic goals in the current crisis are not to help Israel kill Lebanese or Palestinians (and thus end up killing more of its own people) but to serve US interests by removing obstacles to the US goal of draining the swamp that breeds jihadis.

Israel crushing Hezbollah would add another obstacle to the West Bank albatross. That is not what Condi is trying to achieve.

Welcome to the new middle east.

So Israel is bombing Hezbollah in order to strengthen Hezbollah?

Yes. We not only should mention each side , each time , we should force ourselves to
think about the people of each side each time.

BTW you might want to check out Timothy
Garton Ash in today' Guardian.

An awful lot of ink has been spilled here, there, and everywhere on a pretty inconsequential event.

 I usually find your comments sound but "inconsequential" seems callous. Juan Cole has carried photos of dead children whose bodies are still alight . It's impossible for me to attach " inconsequential" to that memory.. And of course exactly the same must be said about the Israelis-including arabs- killed by Hizbollah's missles. i

I agree we haven't been reckless. Just irrelevant. 

All these newly strenghtened (by not really being defeated)newly democratic Jihadists are just going to forget that Israel exists?
Other events sadam will tellus where the WMD are hidden just before his firing squad.
Osama will be made the Lebanon Hezbollah Freedom Party's guest speaker at the UN.
Hamas will allow a Corky's Barbeque (with pig logo) to open in Gaza as a sign of it's welcoming business to the area
Condi will become baseball's commissioner as a reward for her brilliant statesmanship., rather than following Colin Powell into the useful idiot category.
and finally
The spaceship filled with aliens predicted by The Honorable Elijah Mohammed will come for his chosen people.
Ooops. I forgot my medication again. Sorry

I'm sure the omission was unintentional but I do wonder about Tony Snow's recent assessment of the number of American dead in Iraq when he said, "It's just a number." The American people and certainly the wives, husbands, children, mothers and fathers of those "numbers" can now cease their misplaced grieving knowing that their dead were not people they loved, they were numbers. Can we say the slain in Israel, Palestine, Lebanon are just numbers too and stop all this silly talk about suffering.

I was impressed by the opinions of a professor at the American University at Beirut in an interview this morning:

I’ve recently taken part in devising an opinion poll, along with a local think tank here, and the results have been published today. Basically, 87% of all Lebanese support Hezbollah's resistance against Israel today. And that includes 80% of all Christian respondents, 80% of all Druze respondents, and 89% of all Sunnis. And this, of course, is non-Shiite groups, so those which have supported the March 14 pro-American -- the March 14, sorry, alliance, which is seen as being pro-American, pro-French, anti-Syrian. So I think, you know, all this talk about Hezbollah holding Lebanon hostage and, of course, Israeli officials’ stomach-turning comments about them doing this for the sake of the Lebanese people, and other American officials making similar comments, are clearly very poor public relations exercises here. Hezbollah, by default actually, has won the support of the overwhelming majority of non-Shiites in Lebanon. And, in fact, what I also found very interesting was that of all the respondents asked, 89.5% believe that the U.S. was not an honest broker in this current conflict. In fact, only 8% of Lebanese see it as playing a balanced role. And I think this has a lot to do with, not only the U.S.’s past in dealing with the Middle East -- Arab-Israeli conflict, sorry -- but more specifically how unabashedly, not only pro-Israeli the U.S. is seen as being, but as in fact engineering this whole invasion.

I appreciate the effort. To a greater or lesser extent I could agree with much of your "analysis" except for

 Both are convinced that Israel must withdraw from the West Bank for any durable peace

If "withdraw"means "some withdrawal" sure.If it means the major settlements I doubt any Isreali government will do that.
Not would I in their place. Whatever agreements are made now by whatever "partners" will be scorned by future generations of patriotic Palestinians and the War will resume. So any Isralie sacrifices in the interests of peace will really only be in the interests
of a decade of peace.

Thanks for focussing on the central point - does Israel intend to get out of the West Bank?

It isn't a question of Israeli sacrifices but of Israeli defeat. If the US was prepared to keep funding Israeli expansionism (as the Democratic party enthusiastically, and the Republican party less enthusiastically has done for decades) then the Israeli government would not be facing defeat. It doesn't matter what you think they should do. The question is what have they decided to do (as distinct from what impressions are they giving by declaratory policy).

If I am correct and the US and Israeli governments do both intend to withdraw major settlements then denying that there is any retreat and defeat and emphasizing Israeli bellicosity and determination to fight "terrorists" and that the international force replacing Israeli occupation is something forced on the Palestinians by a triumphant Israel makes sense.

It makes sense in the same way that the Christmas bombing of Hanoi made sense in ending the Vietnam war "with honour" - ie it was vile and dishonourable but did succeed in confusing Americans about the fact that they had been comprehensively defeated and the US was no longer the superpower it previously thought it was. That confusion can still be seen in absurd theories that the US went into Iraq to setup a puppet regime as though we were still in the pre-Vietnam defeat era.

Naturally it would make sense to first withdraw the smaller settlements outside the wall while loudly proclaiming that the wall is Israel's future permanent boundary just as it made sense for Sharon to withdraw from Gaza while loudly proclaiming that he would continue expansion in the West Bank and it made sense to first create cognitive dissonance about "judea and samaria" by building a wall through it.

Israel occupying the West Bank to prevent terrorist attacks on itself has the same ring of cognitive dissonance as the US supporting the bombing of Lebanon to strengthen the Lebanese government. This stuff is intended to paralyse the cognitive processes of supporters, not opponents.

The US fighting a war in Vietnam to recover its POWs was the same sort of cognitive dissonance which smoothed the way for accepting defeat. Nixon is still regarded as the worst Presidential war-monger in the Vietnam saga (for withdrawing bellicosely) while Kennedy (who initiated the aggression "idealistically") and Johnson (who escalated it "to reach a negotiated agreement") are not hated nearly as much.

Perhaps there is some other explanation for a policy so rich in cognitive dissonance as the one Israel and the US are following in Lebanon. So far I haven't seen anyone else seriously attempting to explain what's going on (dismissing the talk of "insanity" as a non-serious admission of having nothing useful to say).

You are missing the point. There is a lot of screaming that the US should "do something" because historically the US has always rushed to back up Israel as an "honest broker" by organizing a cease-fire on Israeli terms, while Condi is leaving them dangling in a noisy demonstration of strategic futility and total isolation. That is exercising influence.

Some links illustrating Israeli bewilderment about this can be found at www.lastsuperpower.net.

The Democratic party noises about withdrawing the Prime Minister of Iraq's invitation to address Congress because they don't like what he says about Lebanon is a better example of exerting no influence.

The US isn't expected to "rush in to back up Israel" until -- and I think you're implying as much -- Israel has accomplished its goals. It hasn't, yet.

Until it does, discussion of so-called issues is nothing more than self-satisfied preening.

I don't think "mad" is the word I'd use for this group. What about "lightweights" or "stupid" or "poorly informed" or "imperceptive" or "narrow-minded" or "dumb" or "immoral" or "moronic" or "out-of-touch-with-reality" or "idiotic" or "imbecilic"? But not "mad".

Tom

Here's direct links to a couple of the articles I referred you to:

America's Weakness (previous link direct to Yossi Beilin at Haaretz is now broken)

Another round in Gaza

The tone I get from those is not self-satisfied preening at all and very far from implying that Israel can achieve its goals given more time.

The self-satisfied preening is at this site and others where people like to comfort themselves about how insane the Bushies are instead of trying to analyse whats actually happening in the world.

Even here there is more hand-wringing, angst and angry recrimination than self-satisfaction - except on the crucial "bonding" about how stupid the Bushies are.

My impression of some of your other postings is that you (Ellen) are also impatient with the orientation towards posturing instead of policy analysis here.

Why not actually engage by responding to my attempt at policy analysis in this thread.

p.s. some reminscences and opining that I just ran across by accident, not being one to go to Huffington Post regularly, that might be of interest to some here: "Things Come 'Round in Mideast" by Tom Hayden, July 23