Monday, July 31, 2006

Condi’s New Middle East

By Mike Whitney

"The attack on Qana was motivated by revenge. After the IDF was rebuffed by Hezbollah guerillas at Bint Jubail last week, Olmert and his cast of blundering military advisors decided to "exact their pound of flesh" by recreating the massacre they staged 10 years ago at the same location. Just like today, the attack was purposely directed at people who sought refuge at a "clearly marked" United Nations shelter. In the April 18, 1996 attack 106 Lebanese civilians were killed. As Global Reaserch.ca reports, "The July 2006 attack on the Qana UN shelter replicates with meticulous accuracy the April 1996 IAF operation, entitled 'The Grapes of Wrath’".

In the wake of the massacre, Condoleezza Rice has been told by Lebanon’s Prime Minister Fouad Siniora that she should cancel her trip to Beirut. The State Dept is "spinning" Rice’s humiliation as simply "postponing" her trip, but its obvious to those who have followed recent developments, that Rice has been slapped in the face and that America’s threadbare diplomatic strategy is in now in a state of complete collapse.

We are now, perhaps, just one crisis away from the whole, rickety scaffolding of American imperialism crashing to the ground in a heap. Imagine if riots were to spontaneously break out in Riyadh or Cairo tomorrow? The puppet regimes in the Gulf States would fall like dominos leaving the American oil giants with the dismal prospect of buying their oil on the open market rather than extracting it at gunpoint.

In just one week the mystique of Israeli invincibility has been dashed and, now, the entire Muslim world is galvanized by Israeli war crimes at Qana. Things could not be better for Hassan Nasrallah and his tough-minded band of fighters. It’ll take more than the 40,000 IOF reserves that Olmert just called up to put the genie of "Arab resistance" back in the bottle. He'd be better off suing for peace."

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