Newsletter 25 July 2006
WATCHING LEBANON
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Washington's interests in Israel's war.
Bush's strongest supporter in Europe continues to be British Prime Minister Tony Blair, but many in Blair's own Foreign Office, as a former diplomat said, believe that he has "gone out on a particular limb on this"-especially by accepting Bush's refusal to seek an immediate and total ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. "Blair stands alone on this," the former diplomat said. "He knows he's a lame duck who's on the way out, but he buys it"-the Bush policy. "He drinks the White House Kool-Aid as much as anybody in Washington." The crisis will really start at the end of August, the diplomat added, "when the Iranians"-under a United Nations deadline to stop uranium enrichment-"will say no."
Even those who continue to support Israel's war against
Hezbollah agree that it is failing to achieve one of its main goals-to rally
the Lebanese against Hezbollah. "Strategic bombing has been a failed
military concept for ninety years, and yet air forces all over the world keep
on doing it," John Arquilla, a defense analyst at the Naval Postgraduate
School, told me. Arquilla has been campaigning for more than a decade, with
growing success, to change the way America fights terrorism. "The warfare
of today is not mass on mass," he said. "You have to hunt like a
network to defeat a network. Israel focussed on bombing against Hezbollah,
and, when that did not work, it became more aggressive on the ground. The
definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and expecting a
different result."
