Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion
Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute
Wiping off the Face of the Map (Reprint)
This bothered enough of the right people that I thought I'd reprint from Saturday. Note for the humorless: it is an editorial photo-cartoon, not news analysis.
Beirut before and after courtesy This site.
The difference between Ahmadinejad and Olmert is that the Iranian president is a blowhard. The one who had practical plans to wipe a country off the map was Olmert.
posted by Juan Cole @ 8/07/2006 12:01:00 AM
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Winner, October 5, 2007, Scott Nearing Award for Courageous Scholarship (Awarded by the Graduate Students of the Political Science Department, University of Pennsylvania).
Winner, 2005 James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, Hunter College.
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19 Comments:
Israel wants to make a real impression upon the world. It doesn't want to join some countries in being the most generous, the most peaceful, the most cultured or the most loved. That's boring!
No, Israel wants to change the earthscape is such a way as it can be seen from outer space. What better way to be noticed than levelling a country like Lebanon. To hell with the cedars.
Of course, to be fair, it has had a trial run in Jenin and the Gaza Strip. And, of course it has real competition. America is currently engaged in levelling Iraq after having had a trial run in levelling Afghanistan.
Perhaps they will join forces and level Syria and Iran together, give the Martians a real buzz!
I question whether it is a case of too many bombs and too few real targets.
Think about it.
America rushes three loads of bombs (worth millions of dollars) to Israel, and what are those bombs being used for? A refrigeration truck. A three-story uncompleted house. A car full of Lebanese army officers.
If you were conducting a preflight meeting of pilots, would you give the above as targets? The pilots would laugh at you.
Nice article on War Crimes.
And another.
I spent the day yesterday in legislative committee meetings. (I serve on several, one for each professional organization.) A few memes I tried to get across:
1. There was no intelligence failure. There was pseudo-intelligence related treachery in the Office of Special Plans as explained by Karen Kwiatkowski among others.
2. The failure of the unitary executive principle means that Bush and his lesser cohorts (ha!) have exposure to the death penalty for deaths at Guantanamo under US law.
3. The US Army is broken and Bush continues to demand more from it.
4. The dollar is vulnerable and the trillion dollar war is making an oil-shock/China manuevering dollar crisis imminent.
5. And yet, Israel attacks a country that was supposed to be a friend. The War Crimes committed against the Christians in Lebanon might mean US citizens, someday, face interrogations if they try to travel to certain countries in Europe.
Just showing this photo doesn't really prove anything. I happen to be in a position to comment definitively on this bombing, so perhaps you'd like to hear some details. The fifth house on the north side of what used to be a street running east-west across the middle? A known terrorist hideout. And lots of the neighbors would let them borrow cups of lentils and stuff when they ran short. Some of the other ones couldn't have been bombed by Israel, because we weren't even bombing in those areas. Those ones in the corner, though, that, we admit, might have been an accident. We promise to investigate.
I saw this photo yesterday, and was
disturbed by the lack of context. I
found this region easily in google
maps. You can find it here.
I would guess that the photographed
area measures about 1500 by 4500 feet.
Israel's image is in tatters everywhere but the USA. In an essay published today, Jostein Gaarder, author of the global bestseller Sophie's World, excoriates Israel in the style of the Book of Amos. It will probably appear in several European newspapers soon, but an unofficial translation to English is here.
Though I have reservations about some of his rhetoric, Gaarder's condemnation is indicative of the mood throughout much of Europe.
Aside from destroying the entire Lebanon, what's going to happen when first Cyprus, then Turkey, then Greece, and beyond them, the rest of the countries in the Med notice that Amerisrael is deliberately destroying the entire region's beaches by blasting holes in Beruit's power station oil tanks? 2/3s of Lebanon's beaches are ruined- if Spain's experience is any guide, for at least 30 years- and there is enough oil left in those tanks to do at least the eastern half, if not the whole mediterranean. And Amerisrael is preventing crews from repairing the holes and cleaning up the spill. This is a deliberate act of environmental genocide directed not just against Lebanon, but against the whole world. How long before Turkey and Greece (and Italy, and Spain) conclude that they are at war- not with Hizbollah, but with Amerisrael?
Two opinion polls, one by CNN and one by LA Times show that the majority of the American public still backs Israel in this war against Lebanon...
Prof. Stephen Zunes calls it a “Jihad Against Hezbollah” but it also seems to be an Evangelical Jihad for the Apocalypse.
The other difference between Ahmadinejad and Olmert - Olmert actually HAS nukes.
Nice work. Western hypocrisy never ceases to amaze me.
I don't know beans about peak oil Juan but I do know lunatics when I see em. Nothing about IsraelBush's strategy makes any sense at all to a sane observer.
Neither does the UNSC dithering about this "cease fire" resolution. Lebanon has rejected it and amazingly, CNN's Bring It On, Mission Accomplished gaggle of retired military experts pronounced it DOA, farce and fantasy.
What an idle exercise.
Well, the brave generals who cheered the Spearhead into Baghdad have a new idea for slaughtering other people's kids.
Get this. One of them actually said "Let Israel enforce UNSC 1551 and disarm Hezbollah"
On the lookout for flying pigs...
Wolf Blitzer, as you say, may deserve a pass. His colleagues deserve their second retirements as does the Meshugener Olmert
From today's Washington Post on Israel's fraying support for war...
I fought the same battles against the same enemy in the same places 16 years ago," said Ido Ahronson, 36, a Jerusalem computer technician who served in Israel's previous conflict in Lebanon. "We didn't accomplish anything then, and I don't see how we can accomplish that much now. How would you feel if George Bush decided to send you back into Vietnam?
Gee lemme think on that one.
Dan L: there's what looks like a football field in the lower left corner, which you can use to get a sense of scale.
How about the Lat & long for independant confirmation that the photo is of Beirut? Google Earth is an excellent tool for this.
I already posted an older photo a few days ago, here it is again
Beirut hayat suburb before (from Google Earth: lat/long: Lat/Long 33.854451,35.506568 North=left)
Beirut Hayat suburb on 22/Jul
(from DigitalGlobe sample imagery)
Compare with aftenposten.no's image/article which claims that the photo is from 31 Aug and you can see that it is the same suburb.
It's easy to check Google Earth for the Beirut area. No doubt about it. These photos are unmistakably "before" and "after" views of a neighborhood in South Beirut.
Iraqi Shiites and American forces fighting.
The American media unable to tell a story.
Another Katrina like nightmare unfolding due to ignorance and this insidious passivity of our leadership.
I remember reading Steve Gilliard a year plus back - he wrote about the scenario of an American fighting retreat back to Kuwait.
At the time I thought it almost implausible; now I hope the goons who have been writing up Operation Persian Puncture have turned their sweaty little fingers to the work of how to get 130,000 people out of a country on the fly.
Flamingbear, I found the area on Google Earth at 33 degrees 51 minutes 17.61 seconds north, 35 degrees 30 minutes 30.01 seconds east, which is indeed Beirut. The area of the rectangle at the center of the photo where most of the damage is concentrated is around 0.18 square miles.
To get an idea of the massive scale of the devastation wrought by the Isrealis on Beirut have a close look at the darkish rectangle on the bottom left hand corner of the two pictures. It is a soccer pitch. The ruined areas in the picture are therefore equivalent to the area of about 7 or 8 soccer pitches.
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