The spirit of resistance

By Pepe Escobar

"So Israel wants to grab water (and territory) from Palestine, water (and territory) from Lebanon and oil from Iraq. This all has to do with the inevitable - the 21st-century energy wars.

A ceasefire remains "premature" (the whole world is for it, except the US, Britain and Israel). The House of Saud - supported by the US-Israel axis - has de facto encouraged a Sunni-Shi'ite war in the wider Middle East (that fear of the Shi'ite crescent again). It may take time, but the Arab street - and radical Islam - will renew efforts to try to hang the rulers of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait from lampposts sooner rather than later. Fawaz Trabulsi, a professor at the American University in Beirut, said, "Now you risk producing something worse than Hezbollah, maybe al-Qaeda No 2.

The practical result is that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah is ever more popular all over the Arab street. Kind of like the new, 21st-century Saladin. Hezbollah's moral and political cache could not but rise among peoples and movements worldwide who keep being bombed to oblivion but never had a chance to bomb back.

So this is the way the "war on terror" ends - not with a single bang but with the multi-sonic bangs of asymmetrical actors getting re-energized in their fight against the US-Israel axis. The Israeli army could not put down a Shi'ite guerrilla outfit in southern Lebanon - nor a bunch of stone-throwing Palestinian kids, for that matter. The US Army could not cope with a bunch of scruffy Sunni Arabs armed with fake Kalashnikovs. Sunnis or Shi'ites, stateless or in failed states, freedom fighters or "terrorists", they simply will not go away. Pursuing their own logic, equally impatient Washington neo-cons and Israeli Likudniks would cherish nothing better than the wholesale destruction of civilian infrastructure in Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon, and then in Syria and Iran. What happened in Iraq, and is still happening in Gaza and now in Lebanon, spells that the world will have to get used to a new reality. But against this, the asymmetricals will not only be lurking in the shadows; they will retaliate. "