The Ever-Expanding War

Birth Pangs and Dead Babies
By SHARON SMITH

"Yet Israel's military bombardments of Lebanon and Gaza are failing in their aims, as are the U.S.' occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan-and for the same reasons. The parallels are too striking to ignore.

Do not expect, however, either the U.S. or Israel to retreat at this juncture. The stakes are too high for both, and neither can back down because humiliation at the hands of a resistance movement spells imperial defeat. In all likelihood, the war on terror will expand to include new targets-including possibly Syria, and more likely, Iran.

As Australian journalist Ghali Hassan noted, "In fact the current Israeli aggression on Lebanon ­ a defenseless nation ­ is designed to coerce not only the Lebanese people to rise up against Hezbollah, but also to blackmail other nations and to use the war as a rehearsal for a region-wide war against Iran or Syria.

As conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer commented, "America wants, America needs, a decisive Hezbollah defeat. The defeat of Hezbollah would be a huge loss for Iran, both psychologically and strategically. Iran would be shown to have vastly overreached in trying to establish itself as the regional superpower."

In contrast, as journalist Tamim Al-Barghouti argues, for Arabs and Muslims in the region, Hezbollah, as an indigenous resistance movement, "represents an all powerful example to Arabs and Muslims who have been longing to regain some of the dignity they lost at the hands of their leaders, who look more like employees in the American bureaucracy than heads of independent states.""