Author: James Bovard

So Bush made the supreme sacrifice, returning from his vacation in Texas to Washington to inform Americans of his latest victories in the Middle East.

His comments at the State Department yesterday came close to breaking his previous personal best in both the delusions and drivel categories.

Bush began by declaring that Hezbollah was fully liable for every bomb that the IDF dropped, regardless of many farm workers were killed and how far the victims were from any military-related target: “America recognizes that civilians in Lebanon and Israel have suffered from the current violence. And we recognize that responsibility for this suffering lies with Hezbollah. It was an unprovoked attack by Hezbollah on Israel that started this conflict.”

According to Bush’s logic, if Israel had exterminated every living thing in Lebanon, it would still be faultless.

For Bush, the latest Mideast conflict is another example of how America is bringing freedom to the world. Bush declared: “America’s actions have never been guided by territorial ambition.”

This would be news to the Mexicans, some of whom have not forgotten 1846. Or to the Filipinos, or the Puerto Ricans, or the Cubans (who lived under America’s thumb prior to 1959, after which they lived under Castro’s fist). By Bush’s standards, Thomas Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon was spurred by a desire for spiffing up his botany collection.

But Bush’s declaration is as credible as when Stalin proclaimed that the Soviet Union wanted only peace. Yet, people in Washington – people at editorial pages – swallow this crap as if being the president of the United States automatically turned a man’s mouth into the Temple of Delphi.

Now, some people may look at the title of this blog and assume that I have been too harsh on America’s Commander-in-Chief. I rest my case with the following excerpt from Bush’s comments on the Israel-Hezbollah clash:

The world got to see what it means to confront terrorism. I mean, it’s a –it’s the challenge of the 21st century, the fight against terror.  A group of ideologues, by the way, who use terror to achieve an objective — this is the challenge.

And that’s why in my remarks I spoke about the need for those of us who understand the blessings of liberty to help liberty prevail in the Middle East. And the fundamental question is: Can it? And my answer is: Absolutely, it can. I believe that freedom is a universal value. And by that, I mean I believe people want to be free. One way to put it is, I believe mothers around the world want to raise their children in a peaceful world. That’s what I believe. And I believe that people want to be free to express themselves and free to worship the way they want to. And if you believe that, then you’ve got to have hope that ultimately freedom will prevail.

But it’s incredibly hard work, because there are terrorists who kill innocent people to stop the advance of liberty. And that’s the challenge of the 21st century.

[Comments / Denunciations welcome at my blog]

Israel’s war on Lebanon is a warm-up for the U.S. war on Iran.

That is the message of Seymour Hersh’s latest superb article in the New Yorker. Hersh reveals that the Bush administration was “closely involved” in planning Israel’s attacks on Lebanon.  A former senior intelligence official informed Hersh that, beginning this Spring, “planners from the U.S. Air Force—under pressure from the White House to develop a war plan for a decisive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities—began consulting with their counterparts in the Israeli Air Force.”

Hersh notes:
The surprising strength of Hezbollah’s resistance, and its continuing ability to fire rockets into northern Israel in the face of the constant Israeli bombing, the Middle East expert told me, “is a massive setback for those in the White House who want to use force in Iran. And those who argue that the bombing will create internal dissent and revolt in Iran are also set back.”

Israel is following its own agenda.  But a Pentagon consultant informed Hersh that the Bush White House “has been agitating for some time to find a reason for a preëmptive blow against Hezbollah.”  Hezbollah’s capture of two Israeli soldiers last month provided the pretext for a massive bombing campaign than had been planned long before.

The Bush team is chomping at the bit to use the “lessons” from Israel’s war for its own on Iran.  A former intelligence officer told Hersh: “We told Israel, ‘Look, if you guys have to go, we’re behind you all the way. But we think it should be sooner rather than later—the longer you wait, the less time we have to evaluate and plan for Iran before Bush gets out of office.’” The Bush team apparently believes that they are entitled to create a few more catastrophes before Bush’s time runs out.

Hersh highlights the harebrained notion underlying the Israeli bombing campaign: “Israel believed that, by targeting Lebanon’s infrastructure, including highways, fuel depots, and even the civilian runways at the main Beirut airport, it could persuade Lebanon’s large Christian and Sunni populations to turn against Hezbollah, according to the former senior intelligence official.” 

This has backfired massively.   And yet the Bush administration appears to still believe that a U.S. bombing campaign in Iran would turn the Iranian people against the Iranian government.  

There is no evidence that Bush or Cheney have yet recognized any drawbacks, political or otherwise, from sending Americans off to die for damnfool ideas. [Comments / criticisms welcome – post at http://jimbovard.com/blog/

George W. Bush has apparently given up any aspiration of receiving an honorary award from the American Civil Liberties Union.

His administration is responding to the Supreme Court ruling striking down his military tribunals with a legislative proposal that would place far more Americans in peril of having their rights nullified. 

The Washington Post reports today:

A draft Bush administration plan for special military courts seeks to expand the reach and authority of such “commissions” to include trials, for the first time, of people who are not members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban and are not directly involved in acts of international terrorism, according to officials familiar with the proposal.

The plan, which would replace a military trial system ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in June, would also allow the secretary of defense to add crimes at will to those under the military court’s jurisdiction. The two provisions would be likely to put more individuals than previously expected before military juries, officials and independent experts said.

That last sentence evoked from me the phrase I heard most often during my  summers working as a peach picker:  No s**t.

The system would permit hearsay evidence (which the defendant would not be permitted to see) to seal their fate, including death sentences.  A U.S. government official told the Washington Post that defendants would have to count on “the trustworthiness of the system.”   (The fact that the Bush administration has almost always been wrong when it accuses people of terrorist connections was not mentioned in this piece; I dealt with that subject a few weeks ago for the Boston Globe.).

The fact that the Bush proposal would seek to empower Rumsfeld to act as legislator, jury, and executor of anyone accused of future specified crimes – based on the shabbiest standards of evidence and kangaroo court procedures – vivifies the total contempt of the Bush team for American liberty.

From Haaretz today:

As the Israel Air Force continues to investigate the air strike [at Qana], questions have been raised over military accounts of the incident.

It now appears that the military had no information on rockets launched from the site of the building, or the presence of Hezbollah men at the time.

The Israel Defense Forces had said after the deadly air-strike that many rockets had been launched from Qana. However, it changed its version on Monday.

The site was included in an IAF plan to strike at several buildings in proximity to a previous launching site. Similar strikes were carried out in the past. However, there were no rocket launches from Qana on the day of the strike.

***

I look forward to hearing the IDF’s or IDF apologists’ next “close enough for government work” rationale for killing a few dozen children.  

Nehemia Shtrasler, a columnist in Haaretz, Israel’s most respected newspaper, today explains the goal of the Israeli invasion:

“The Olmert-Peretz plan was to shell and demolish south Lebanon and south Beirut until the Lebanese public demanded that its government vomit Hezbollah out from its midst.”

With a goal of demolishing much of the part of a neighboring country, it is ludicrous to pretend that killing civilians is accidental. Laying waste trumps recognizing the lives of women and children.

Shtrasler notes, “Instead of demanding that Hezbollah be dismantled, the people of Lebanon want revenge, and they want it now. That is their response to the killing of 750 civilians and the destruction of thousands of homes, bridges, roads, villages and towns, putting Lebanon 20 years in the past.”

It will be interesting to see how many weeks or years it takes American commentators to match Shtrasler’s perceptiveness or honesty.

Israeli government public relations encountered a significant challenge today when the IDF killed dozens of children in the same location that they killed more than a hundred civilians a decade ago.   The fact that both attacks occurred in Qana, Lebanon is the sort of thing that might make even a newspaper correspondent look into Israel’s prior history of wreaking carnage on the Lebanese. (The discussion of Qana from my 2003 Terrorism & Tyranny is posted below).

One point that few people are making:  George W. Bush and the U.S. Congress bear some of the responsiblity for the 500+ Lebanese civilians who have thus far been killed by the Israeli Defense Force.  The House voted 411 to 8 to cheer on Israel after the IDF’s attacks began, and congressmen sneered at efforts to get any substantive complaint about civilian casualties in the pro-Israel resolution.  And Bush gave his blessings to the IDF even after the Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon announced on Israeli Army radio last Wednesday that “All those now in south Lebanon are terrorists who are related in some way to Hezbollah.”  

When you see the photos of corpses of young children being dragged from the Qana rubble, remember:  These are not human beings.  These are terrorists.  And Israel announced ahead of time that, because they were in south Lebanon, they were legitimate targets.  

From Terrorism & Tyranny (2003):

On April 18, 1996 the IDF artillery shelled a United Nations compound near Qana that was overflowing with 800 Lebanese civilians “who had fled from their villages on IDF orders.” The barrage killed 102 refugees and wounded hundreds of others. Hezbollah guerillas had fired Katyusha rockets a few hundred yards from the compound. A spokesman for United Nations forces in Lebanon quickly denounced the attack as a “massacre.” Maj. Gen. Dan Harel, the commander of the Israeli offensive, insisted that the shelling of the camp could not possibly have been deliberate because “that thing cannot happen in a democratic country like Israel.” Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres declared that “the sole guilty party, still on the ground, is Hezbollah. . . . We are dealing here with a horrible, cynical and irresponsible organization. Hezbollah’s grand strategy all along has been to hide behind the backs of civilians.” A United Nations investigation concluded that “it is unlikely that the shelling of the United Nations compound was the result of gross technical and/or procedural errors.” The IDF insisted that it was unaware that the camp was chock full of refugees; the UN report retorted: “Contrary to repeated denials, two Israeli helicopters
and a remotely piloted vehicle [drone] were present in the Qana area at the time  of the shelling.” An Amnesty International report concluded that the IDF “intentionally
attacked the UN compound.” A few weeks after the attack, two of the Israeli gunners involved in the shelling were interviewed by a Jerusalem newsweekly. One of the gunners commented: “In a war, these things happen. . . . It’s just a bunch of Arabs.” A second gunner said that, after bombarding the refugee camp, a commander told the gunners that “we were shooting well and to continue this way and that Arabs, you know, there are millions of them.” Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit, who had fought at Qana 18 years earlier while serving in the IDF, observed: “An Israeli massacre can be distinguished in most respects from an Arab massacre in that it is not malicious, not carried out on orders from High Above and does not serve any strategic purpose. . . . An Israeli massacre usually occurs after we sanction an unjustifiable degree of violence so that at some point we lose the ability to control that violence. Thus, in most cases, an Israeli massacre is a kind of work accident.”

[As I noted in my first blog on this subject, Hezbollah is also guilty of murder for its missile attacks on Israeli civilians.  Neither side in this conflict is exonerated by the other side’s methods or goals.]