Can anyone fail to be reminded,

even if they only know about it from history books, when they hear the Lebanese prime minister’s desperate pleas for help and an immediate cease fire: of Haile Selassie’s appeals for help to the League of Nations when the Italian fascists where laying waste to his country Ethiopia, or the pleas of Imre Nagy, the Hungarian premier of the 1956 uprising, over the free radio’s last transmitter, as the Soviet tanks were closing in on Budapest?

To defeat a handful of ragged terrorists, and their fireworks-night rockets, is it necessary to destroy a sovereign country, to send hundreds of thousands fleeing for their lives, to cause hundreds of deaths, and billions worth of damage, to undo a generation’s work in painful reconstruction, in a couple of days? Are these precision strikes, to destroy a small country’s infrastructure: power supply and only dairy processing plant? Or is it Israel’s favourite tactic of collective punishment?

It is now obvious that the reason for the clamour to remove Syrian forces from the Lebanon was simply to leave in defenceless in preparation for an Israeli attack.

As expected, the US congress and senate pass knee-jerk resolutions endorsing Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah and the Lebanon without calling it to exercise any restraint. Every state, given enough power and contempt for its neighbours, starts to behave like the Nazis.

The Israelis, like the Nazis before them, not being used to those they are attacking to defend themselves, react with fury to Hizbollah’s resistance. As with the Nazis, do they have a policy of 100 Arabs killed for every Israeli?

The neo-cons, like in their cowboy movies, need an identifiable bad guy, to simply the issues for their audience. This bad guy then is demonised in all the available media, and blamed for all the evil and problems the US is encountering. Of course, the current evil is terrorism (and anything which may threaten the supremacy of Israel). The bad guy can either be an individual or a country. And of course, it should be someone/some place reasonably easy for Americans to pronounce. Up till recently, it was al-Zaqarwi. After he was killed, the message was that all the problems of Iraq would be solved….. sorry, that does not seem to have happened, so a new villain is needed. Re-enter Iran/Syria (the supply of bad guys does seem to be dwindling)

Does not any intelligent person realise (and even in the neocon administration there must be a couple) that clumsy military attacks on Muslim create far more terrorists than they kill?

So we have a ‘precision’ targeting of Lebanon. It certainly is a precision attack, designed to maximise the impact of collective punishment. The usual targets are power stations, roads and other communications, and in the case of Lebanon, the diary processing plant which produces baby food for the whole region.

In the neo-con world, there must be a simple explanation (and conspiracy theory) for every setback and problem. Hizbollah would of course not have acted on its own – there must have been a puppet master in the background.

One conspiracy theory is that Iran deliberately orchestrated the raid on Israel to draw attention away from its nuclear programme at the G8 meeting. Here’s another conspiracy theory – that the whole scenario is the neo-con’s ploy to revive their flagging agenda and to bring the US electorate, literally, a brand-new casus belli.

Is it not Israel’s strategy to surround itself with a buffer zone of compliant, subject or if not compliant, shattered vassal states ?

Onward to Teheran (and just imagine what the Iranian ‘insurgency’ will be like when we get there)