WHO DECLARES VICTORY?
As the tenuous ceasefire takes hold, both the Israeli government and Hezbollah are declaring victory. As far as I'm concerned, nobody can declare itself a victor when so many dead bodies are stacked up on both sides of the Lebanese-Israeli border.
But if Israel's goal is to wipe out Hezbollah's power and Hezbollah's goal is to gain support, I submit that Israel is clearly the loser.
This is mostly my opinion -- and only anecdotally verified -- but I suspect that much of the world (outside the U.S.) is now more sympathetic towards Hezbollah, especially after watching the Israeli military's indiscriminate and disproportionate pounding of civilian populations, leading to over 25 times more Lebanese civilians dying than in Israel.
The Israeli massacre of dozens of children in Qana was clearly a major turning point in the court of world opinion. Since the initial reports of Hezbollah's kidnapping of the two Israeli soldiers, the international media has educated more people about the history of this conflict, which requires discussion, for starters, of the hundreds of Lebanese political prisoners illegally held in Israeli jails for several years or the dozens of Palestinian cabinet members arrested by Israel for retaliatory reasons.
I realize that a belief that Israel has acted in the wrong doesn't translate to support for Hezbollah. Myself = case in point. But at some point, each additional atrocity will lead to more people seeing Hezbollah not as a terrorist organization, but as a freedom-fighting resistance movement.
The growing number of critics of Israel's attacks have even made a YouTube star out of British politician George Galloway who infamously ripped a Sky News anchor a new one for her unbalanced coverage. (For the record, I don't support all of Galloway's views, but I do find the video below totally entertaining.)
This all begs the question: Did Israel realize how much the court of world opinion would turn against them? And if so, why would Israel keep pounding Lebanon when such actions would only strengthen Hezbollah and increase anti-Israeli sentiment in neighboring countries?
Sadly, the answer may lie in Sy Hersh's latest article, which reports that the Bush administration -- most notably, Dick Cheney's office -- was involved in planning Israel's attack on Hezbollah and considers it "a prelude to a potential American preemptive attack" on Iran.
God help us.
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