Fitful Empire...

 

The UN observers who died were under the command of a New Zealander, Army officer Major General Clive Lilley (who was not present at the post), so…a snip from the report from a NZ news service:

New Zealand soldier Tekimiti Gilbert, based with the UN mine action team in the Lebanese port city of Tyre, told The Press last night that UN staff had been shaken by the deaths.

“We got the news last night and it’s very shocking and almost unbelievable. That UN position that was attacked has been there for 20 years,” he said.

“It is a well-established post and those guys that are in there are unarmed. Their sole objective is to observe.” Gilbert said the post was well-marked and well-known as a UN safe haven. It seemed “extremely unlikely” the deaths had been a mistake.

“For the time being, it is safe here. We haven’t taken any direct hits and we haven’t had any hits close by,” he said.

We seem rapacious, certainly not wise nor steadfast in our strange wars.

From Jonathan Schell:

It wasn’t just that Nixon’s wiretapping was directed against Daniel Ellsberg, war critic and leaker of the Vietnam-era Pentagon Papers; or that the “plumbers” outfit that carried out the Watergate break-in was founded to spy on, disrupt and attack war critics; or that Nixon’s persistence in trying to win the war even as he withdrew American troops from it drove him into the paranoia that led him to draw up an “enemies list” and sponsor subversions of the electoral process – it was that his entire go-it-alone, imperial conception of the presidency originated in his pursuit of his war policy in secrecy and without Congressional involvement.

    And now, thirty years later, we find ourselves facing an uncannily similar combination of misconceived war abroad and constitutional crisis at home. Again a global crusade (then it was the Cold War, now it is the “war on terror”) has given birth to a disastrous war (then Vietnam, now Iraq); again a President has responded by breaking the law; and again it falls to citizens, journalists, judges, justices and others to trace the connections between the overreaching abroad and the overreaching at home.

In consequence, not only are we condemned to repeat ourselves for the duration of the current crisis but a remarkable number of those repetitions are already repetitions of what was said thirty years ago.

Al-Ahram, Lucy Felder reports that Save the Children is now saying that a full half of the dead are children.  A few days ago, a third was being reported – and this at the end:

About 20 per cent of Lebanon’s population are on the road or in schools, or have left this tiny country. The UN reports the number of displaced as 700,000. With roughly 2,000 to 3,000 houses destroyed, according to economist Al-Hajj, and a much higher number partly ruined, no one knows yet where the legions of displaced and homeless will go once the new school term starts.

“Say there was a ceasefire today, where would they go, how would they live?” Al-Hajj asks. “Many of their homes no longer exist.”

Africa’s Mail and Guardian:

Israeli warplanes and artillery hammered Lebanon again on Thursday as the Beirut government said up to 600 people may have been killed in Israel’s 16-day-old campaign against Hezbollah guerrillas.

Israel’s inner Cabinet chose to pursue a strategy of air strikes and limited ground incursions, rather than a full-scale invasion of Lebanon to halt Hezbollah rocket fire on its towns.  [al Jazeera's take was worded a bit differently, israel knows they can take their time... ]

Lebanese Health Minister Mohammad Khalifeh said hospitals had received 401 bodies of people killed during the war launched by Israel after the Shi’ite guerrillas captured two of its soldiers and killed eight in a cross-border raid on July 12.

“On top of those victims, there are 150 to 200 bodies still under the rubble. We have not been able to pull them out because the areas they died in are still under fire,” he told Reuters.

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 UPDATE: 1:20 pm

From Reuters Alertnet:

UNITED NATIONS, July 27 (Reuters) – China on Thursday warned the United States that its opposition to a statement condemning a deadly attack on a U.N. post in Lebanon could have a “negative impact” on U.N. talks on Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

The United States was blocking a U.N. Security Council statement on Israel’s attack on the outpost in southern Lebanon, despite what council diplomats called many compromises by Beijing.

But the envoys said there was some hope a policy statement would be adopted late on Thursday.

“This is a serious matter,” China’s U.N. Ambassador Wang Guangya told reporters after a private meeting with the U.S. negotiators. “It is an attack on the U.N. peacekeepers.”

“If the Security Council cannot send a strong political message supporting our guys on the ground, it will be difficult for people to understand,” Wang said.

  

From TimesOnline:

The Cabinet said that the call up of three additional reserve divisions was meant mainly to refresh the existing troops in Lebanon. But the huge size of the mobilisation raised questions about the military’s future strategy.

“The draft is to prepare the force for possible developments as they have been presented to the Cabinet, and also to freshen the forces as needed. Using the force will require another approval by the Cabinet,” said a statement from Mr Olmert’s office after the Cabinet meeting.

Senior military commanders have been pushing for a wider campaign in Lebanon, but Amir Peretz, the Defence Minister, favours limited action, officials said. Israel Radio said that ministers made clear they had no intention of widening the conflict to confront Syria, which backs Hezbollah.

AND this tidbit:

“The editor-in-chief of Maariv newspaper says today in a front page column that the time has come for Israel to wage war in the Lebanese border villages without caring for the consequences, and not to be afraid to send soldiers into difficulty and danger in fraught hand-to-hand combat without caring how many people get killed.”

 

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UPDATE:   2:20 pm

w00t!… I think Putin just said Bite Me.

Russia signed a £1.6bn arms deal with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela today, risking a confrontation with the US, which has imposed an arms embargo on the South American country.

The outspoken Venezuelan president, who has claimed that America wants to assassinate him and pledged cheap heating fuel for London’s poor, also told reporters in Moscow that his country could develop its own nuclear programme.

“Maybe some day we will start using nuclear energy,” he said, according to Interfax. He did not specify when or how he might obtain nuclear power, but his ambitions will rile a Bush administration already deeply concerned by Iran’s nuclear programme. Moscow has agreed to build nuclear power plants for Tehran, despite Washington’s claim that the scheme is a front for a nuclear weapons programme.

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UPDATE, 6:30 pm

I guess this was a given.  All things considered…

Israel’s Government has thrown its weight behind efforts by supporters to counter what it believes to be negative bias and a tide of pro-Arab propaganda.

The Foreign Ministry has ordered trainee diplomats to track websites and chatrooms so that networks of US and European groups with hundreds of thousands of Jewish activists can place supportive messages.

In the past week nearly 5,000 members of the World Union of Jewish Students (WUJS) have downloaded special “megaphone” software that alerts them to anti-Israeli chatrooms or internet polls to enable them to post contrary viewpoints.

A student team in Jerusalem combs the web in a host of different languages to flag the sites so that those who have signed up can influence an opinion survey or the course of a debate.

They call it making the news ”balanced”… so very foxy!  And this:

Israel’s Foreign Ministry must avoid direct involvement with the campaign but is in contact with international Jewish and evangelical Christian groups, distributing internet information packs.

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