Bismillah,

I missed this part as I was struggling to get my son to be interested in reading this piece.  I wonder how he's going to do on the pop quiz tomorrow scheduled for Wednesday.  Hmm.

Thank you for those thoughtful words, Daniel.  Have you ever listened to Tammy Bruce?  She's a Christian radio commentator I listened to for about 10 minutes.  She was talking about the world calling Israel "dirty J..." for the attacks.  Funny thing is I hadn't heard anybody say that recently -- except Mel Gibson, whom she quoted as well -- and her.  THAT didn't even occur to me, but you can thank yourself for that.  I'd like others to have the chance to hear your point of view.  I think it would make a huge difference, whereas a lot of people out there are already expressing mine and don't have the credibilty that you do.

Because of your encouragement, I'll try harder to write more articles, not that I've written many, to papers and such.

And stay safe!

Salaamu Alaykum

At tonight's demonstration I met a lot of T.V. and Radio People that I
haven't en for a couple of months - mostly Talent. I met Amal Markas
from our Israeli Broadcasting Agency chapter of Sesame street. She was
asked to say somethings over the air and just quit. She is a world class
vocalist and actress that has been IBA's "Poster Arab" for 15 years. So
many people are quitting or being fired now. The war is not going as
planned but as much as expected. Hezbollah hits and melts back into the
population our guys follow them into towns and villages and take
casualties. Yesterday as I was leaving the supermarket an SUV rolled to a
stop in the middle of the road blocking my exit and traffic behind it. I
was about to honk when I noticed that another car with a man inside with
a cellular to his ear and his kids squirming in the car seats behind him
he to had stopped in the same strange way on the service road parallel to
me. My air conditioner in my car is on the fritz and through my open
window I heard cellphones going of all over the parking lot. Friday
shopping is sort of a guy thing here and it seems that every phone
belonging to every other man between the ages of 23 and 49 was going
off. It was Like high noon in a coo coo clock factory. From the look on
everyones face it meant that we are now really in it. That's what a major
reserve call up looks like.
Things are escalating here very fast.
Uri Puts it like this:

Uri Avnery
29.7.06

                  In the Gunsight: Syria

                        or: A Nice Little War

IT IS the old story about the losing gambler: he cannot stop. He continues
to play, in order to win his losses back. He continues to lose and
continues to gamble, until he has lost everything: his ranch, his wife, his
shirt.

The same thing happens in the biggest gamble of all: war. The leaders
that start a war and get stuck in the mud are compelled to fight their way
ever deeper into the mud. That is a part of the very essence of war: it is
impossible to stop after a failure. Public opinion demands the promised
victory. Incompetent generals need to cover up their failure. Military
commentators and other armchair strategists demand a massive
offensive. Cynical politicians are riding the wave. The government is
carried away by the flood that they themselves have let loose.

That is what happened this week, following the battle of Bint-Jbeil, which
the Arabs have already started to call proudly Nasrallahgrad. All over
Israel the cry goes up: Get into it! Quicker! Further! Deeper!

A day after the bloody battle, the cabinet decided on a massive
mobilization of the reserves. What for? The ministers do not know. But it
does not depend on them anymore, nor on the generals. The political and
military leadership is tossed about on the waves of war like a boat
without a rudder.

As has been said before: it is much easier to start a war than to finish
one. The cabinet believes that it controls the war, but in reality it is the
war that controls them. They have mounted a tiger, and can't be sure of
getting off without being torn to pieces.

War has its own rules. Unexpected things happen and dictate the next
moves. And the next moves tend to be in one direction: escalation.


DAN HALUTZ, the father of this war, thought that he could eliminate
Hizbullah by means of the Air Force, the most sophisticated, most
efficient and the generally most-most air force in the world. A few days of
massive pounding, thousands of tons of bombs on neighborhoods, roads,
electricity works and ports - and that's it.

Well, that wasn't it, as it turned out. The Hizbullah rockets continued to
land in the north of Israel, hundreds a day. The public cried out. There
was no way round a ground operation. First, small, elite units were put in.
That did not help. Then brigades were deployed. And now whole divisions
are demanded.

First they wanted to annihilate the Hizbullah positions along the border.
When it was seen that that was not enough, it was decided to conquer the
hills that dominate the border. There, the Hizbullah fighters were waiting
and caused heavy casualties. And the rockets continued to fly.

Now the generals are convinced that there is no alternative to occupying
the whole area up to the Litani River, about 24 km from the border, in
order to prevent the rockets from being launched from there. Then they
will find out that they have to reach the Awali River, 40 km inside - the
famous 40 km which Menachem Begin talked about in 1982.

And then? The Israeli army will be extended over a large area, and
everywhere it will be exposed to guerilla attacks, of the sort Hizbullah
excels in. And the missiles will continue to fly.

What next? One cannot stop. Public opinion will demand more decisive
moves. Political demagogues will shout. Commentators will grumble. The
people in the shelters will cry out. The generals will feel the heat. One
cannot keep tens of thousands of reserve soldiers mobilized indefinitely.
It is impossible to prolong a situation which paralyzes a third of the
country.

Everybody will clamor to storm forwards. Where to? Towards Beirut in the
North? Or towards Damascus, in the East?


THE CABINET ministers recite in unison: No! Never ever! We shall not
attack Syria!

Perhaps some of them really don't intend to. They do not dream of a war
with Syria. Definitely not. But the ministers only delude themselves when
they believe that they control the war. The war controls them.

When it becomes clear that nothing is helping, that Hizbullah goes on
fighting and the rockets continue to fly, the political and military
leadership will face bankruptcy. They will need to pin the blame on
somebody. On who? Well, on Assad, of course.

How is it possible that a small "terror organization", with a few thousand
fighters altogether, goes on fighting? Where do they get the arms from?
The finger will point towards Syria.

Even now, the army commanders assert that new rockets are flowing all
the time from Syria to Hizbullah. True, the roads have been bombed, the
bridges destroyed, but the arms somehow continue to arrive. The Israeli
government demands that an international force be stationed not only
along the Israeli-Lebanese border, but on the Lebanese-Syrian border,
too. The queue of volunteers will not be long.   

Then the generals will demand the bombing of roads and bridges inside
Syria. For that, the Syrian Air Force will have to be neutralized. In short, a
real war, with implications for the whole Middle East.


EHUD OLMERT and Amir Peretz did not think about that when they
decided 17 days ago in haste and light heartedly, without serious debate,
without examining other options, without calculating the risks, to attack
Hizbullah. For politicians who do not know what war is, it was an
irresistible temptation: there was a clear provocation by Hizbullah,
international support was assured, what a wonderful opportunity! They
would do what even Sharon did not dare.

Dan Halutz submitted an offer that could not be refused. A nice little war.
Military plans were ready and well rehearsed. Certain victory. The more
so, since on the other side there was no real enemy army, just a "terror
organization".

How hotly the desire was burning in the hearts of Olmert and Peretz is
attested by the fact that they did not even think about the lack of shelters
in the Northern towns, not to mention the far-reaching economic and
social implications. The main thing was to rush in and gather the laurels.

They had no time to think seriously about the war aim. Now they
resemble archers who shoot their arrows at a blank sheet and then draw
the rings around the arrow. The aims change daily: to destroy Hizbullah,
to disarm them, to drive them out of South Lebanon, and perhaps just to
"weaken" them. To kill Hassan Nasrallah. To bring the captured soldiers
home. To extend the sovereignty of the Lebanese government over all of
Lebanon. To establish a new-old Security Zone occupied by Israel. To
deploy the Lebanese army and/or an international force along the border.
To rehabilitate deterrence. To imprint into the consciousness of
Hizbullah. (Our generals love imprinting into consciousnesses. That is a
wonderfully safe aim, because it cannot be measured.)


THE MORE the nice little war continues, the clearer it becomes that these
changing aims are not realistic. The Lebanese ruling group does not
represent anybody but a small, rich and corrupt elite. The Lebanese army
cannot and will not fight Hizbullah. The new "security zone" will be
exposed to guerilla attacks and the international force will not enter the
area without the agreement of Hizbullah. And this guerilla force,
Hizbullah, the Israeli army cannot vanquish.

That is nothing to be ashamed of. Our army is in good - or, rather, bad -
company. The term "guerilla" ("small war") was coined in Spain, during the
occupation of the country by Napoleon. Irregular bands of Spanish
fighters attacked the occupiers and beat them. The same happened to the
Russians in Afghanistan, to the French in Algeria, to the British in
Palestine and a dozen other colonies, to the Americans in Vietnam, and is
happening to them now in Iraq. Even assuming that Dan Halutz and Udi
Adam are greater commanders than Napoleon and his marshals, they will
not succeed where those failed.

When Napoleon did not know what to do next, he invaded Russia. If we
don't stop the operation, it will lead us to war with Syria.

Condoleezza Rice's stubborn struggle against any attempt to stop the war
shows that this is indeed the aim of the United States. From the first day
of George Bush's presidency, the neo-cons have been calling for the
elimination of Syria. The deeper Bush sinks into the Iraqi quagmire, the
more he needs to divert attention with another adventure.

By the way: One day before the outbreak of this war, our Minister of
National Infrastructures, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, took part in the
inauguration ceremony of the big pipeline that will conduct oil from the
huge Caspian Sea reserves to the Turkish port of Ceyhan, just next to the
Syrian border. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline avoids Russia and passes
through Azerbaijan and Georgia, two countries closely aligned with Israel,
like Turkey itself. There is a plan to bring a part of the oil from there
along the Syrian and Lebanese coast to Ashkelon, where an existing
pipeline will conduct it to Eilat, to be exported to the Far East. Israel and
Turkey are to secure the area for the United States.


MUST THE sliding into a war with Syria happen? Is there no alternative?

Of course there is. To stop now, at once.

When President Lyndon Johnson felt that he was sinking into the morass
of Vietnam, he asked his friends for advice. One of them answered with
five words: "Declare victory and get out!"

We can do that. To stop investing more and more in a losing business. To
be satisfied with what we can get now. For example: an agreement that
will move Hizbullah a few kilometers from the border, along which an
international force and/or the Lebanese army will be deployed, and to
exchange prisoners. Olmert will be able to present that as a great victory,
to claim that we have got what we wanted, that we have taught the Arabs
a lesson, that anyhow we had no intention of achieving more. Nasrallah
will also claim a great victory, asserting that he has taught the Zionist
Enemy a lesson it will not forget, that Hizbullah remains alive, strong and
armed, that he has brought back the Lebanese prisoners.

True, it will not be much. But that is what can be done to cut losses, as
they say in the business world.

That can happen. If Olmert is clever enough to extricate himself from the
trap, before it closes entirely. (As folk wisdom says: a clever person is one
that gets out of a trap that a wise one would not have got into in the first
place.) And if Condoleezza gets orders from her boss to allow it.


ON THE 17th day of the war , we must recognize that soon we will be
faced with a clear choice: to slide into a war with Syria, intentionally or
unintentionally, or to get a general agreement in the North, that will
necessarily involve also Hizbullah and Syria. At the center of such an
agreement will be the Golan Heights.

Olmert and Peretz did not think about that in those intoxicating moments
on July 12, when they jumped at the opportunity to start a nice little war.
But then, were they thinking at all?