War in The Middle East

[Davo88]

Re: War in The Middle East

Israel attacks Christian heartland of Beirut

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20060803/mideast_olmert_060804/20060804?hub=TopStories

the strikes early Friday hit the affluent Christian locality of Jounieh, north of the capital, for the first time.

The bombing on the picturesque coastal resort marked a sharp expansion of Israel's attack on Lebanon, which now threatens Christian areas where Hezbollah has no support and no presence.

[Armenian]

Re: War in The Middle East

TODAY'S EVENTS

Meanwhile, fierce fighting on the ground along the border continued, and Hezbollah said in a statement broadcast by the group's Al-Manar TV station that guerrillas had killed six Israeli soldiers near the villages of Aita al-Shaab and Markaba. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed that three Israeli soldiers were killed by a Hezbollah anti-tank missile during ground operations in Markaba where the militant group had been launching rockets.

Three Israeli civilians were killed by Katyusha rockets. Many more
injured Friday as approximately 200 more rockets from Lebanon hit northern Israel, including Kiryat Shemona, Sdeh Nehemia and Safed

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Hundreds of thousands of Shiites chanting "Death to Israel" and "Death to America" marched through the streets of Baghdad's biggest Shiite district Friday in a show of support for Hezbollah militants battling Israeli troops in Lebanon.

Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president, said he has recalled his country's ambassador to Israel to show his "indignation" over the military offensive in Lebanon. In a televised speech on Thursday, he called the Israeli attacks "genocide". He said: "It really causes indignation to see how the state of Israel continues bombing, killing ... with all of the power they have, with the support of the United States."

Katoghikos Aram Keshishian

Tehran Times Political Desk

BEIRUT (MNA) -- Resistance is not only a right but also mandatory for the Lebanese nation, Primate of the Diocese of Lebanon Bishop Kegham Khatcherian told the Mehr News Agency here on Friday. The Armenian Orthodox bishop condemned Israel’s continuing attacks on Lebanon, saying that the massacre and displacement of innocent people is not acceptable in any interpretation of international law. “Over the course of history, any nation whose lands were occupied had the right to resistance.

“If a group is attacked in our country, it means all other groups have been targeted. We are like a family in Lebanon, and we should be united,” he added. Khatcherian noted that the doors of all Christians’ houses are open to Lebanese refugees during the war. He expressed hope that the diplomatic efforts to return calm to Lebanon will bear fruit as soon as possible. Describing Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah as a wise and patriotic figure, he said, “We will support those who favor a ceasefire in the war.” RS/ END MNA

All in all - another good day for Allah

[Artsakh]

Re: War in The Middle East

Israel Aims to Annihilate Lebanon
04.08.2006 21:15 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Israel’s aim is to annihilate Lebanon. Civic constructions and state infrastructure are being demolished, Lebanese Ambassador to Armenia Gebrail Jaaray said. In his words, last night 3 bridges were destroyed in the north of Lebanon and restoration of each will demand $50 million. “During 22 days of Israel's operation the damage caused to Lebanon reached $5 billion this figure increases day by day. 15 thousand of flats were completely destructed, the number of displaced persons reached a million. Numerous visits of high rank officials have been fruitless so far. The war is going on,” he said.

The Ambassador also remarked that 8 Lebanese and some 10 thousand Palestinians are kept in hostage in Israeli jails. “The Near East is an explosive and conflict zone. It’s a long way for peace here,” he said.

The Ambassador presented the decision of the Lebanese government consisting of seven items that should be fulfilled to stop the war. These are the exchange of war prisoners and hostages, withdrawal of the Israeli troops beyond the Lebanese border, deployment of Lebanese army throughout the country, deployment of U.N. peacekeepers in the south Lebanon, observation of the agreement of 1949 on ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon, proclamation of Lebanon a calamity zone and rendering humanitarian assistance to it. “Lebanon receives major part of assistance from Saudi Arabia and France. We also highly appreciate the aid rendered by the Armenian government. This proves that our nations are bound with fraternal friendship ties,” he said.

The Chief of Mission also remarked that two days ago the spiritual leaders of all the confessions in Lebanon including His Holiness Aram I of Cilicia issued a statement in support of the government’s decision.

[Artsakh]

Re: War in The Middle East

Barbarian Annihilation of Civilians Being Carried Out in Lebanon
04.08.2006 21:02 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Demolition of Lebanon and annihilation of its population is a recurrent step of aggression against Syria and Iran. The initial stage of this plan was the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, Armenian political scientist Levon Melik-Shahnazaryan told a PanARMENIAN.Net reporter. In his words, Israel and the U.S. do not even try to conceal their purpose. “Though the military power of Israel is sufficient in case with Lebanon, the immediate participation of the U.S. will become necessary at the final stage. Nevertheless Iran will be too tough for them,” he said.

At the same time he remarked that a barbarian annihilation of civilians that cannot be justified is being carried out in Lebanon. “Not only Israel but the whole international community is to blame for it. A country with centuries-old civilization and a unique system of co-existence of various confessions and ethnic groups is being demolished. The developments in Lebanon cannot be assessed from a political standpoint without taking into account the humanitarian constituent of the problem,” the Armenian political scientist said.

[Anonymouse]

Re: War in The Middle East

This is the second time I am cleaning up this thread with unnecessary posts and rants. The only people that seem to be focusing on the issue and topic are Armenian, Davo88 and Deadsy. The rest of you, and you know who you are, please stop it. Stop derailing the topic and focus on what is going on. Yea we can sit and blame and name call and insult, but let's stick to the issue. This is the second time I am warning about this. It's a perfectly good and legitimate topic that is very prescient, and it's a shame if it has to get closed because people cannot engage in a rational discussion and control their emotional outbursts and personal bias'.

[Otto3]

Re: War in The Middle East

sorry

[Armenian]

Re: War in The Middle East

Iran supplies Hizballah with a battery of upgraded Zelzal missiles that can reach Israel’s nuclear reactor in Dimona

August 4, 2006, 11:09 PM (GMT+02:00)

This disclosure by DEBKA-Net-Weekly 264 was confirmed Friday, August 4, by Ali-Akbar Mohtashami-Pour, former Iranian ambassador to Damascus and Tehran’s senior liaison with Hizballah. The acquisition of an improved Zelzal through Syria with a range of 350-400 km was behind Hassan Nasrallah’s threat to bomb Tel Aviv if Beirut came under another Israel air attack. Tel Aviv is 150 km north of Dimona and therefore well within range of the improved Zelzal missile. The DEBKA-Net-Weekly report added: The battery consists of 16 missiles which, fired from northern or central Lebanon, can hit the Negev town of Beersheba which is some 34 km west of the nuclear center.

Iran knows that a missile attack on the Dimona reactor, even if it is a direct hit, will not do much harm because the nuclear installations are buried deep underground and guarded by anti-missile defenses. But both Tehran and Hizballah are after the psychological impact on Islamic and world opinion of aiming the first Muslim missile against Israel’s atomic center. Earlier, Hizballah said there would be no ceasefire until the last Israeli soldier leaves Lebanon. France submitted draft UN resolution on Lebanon http://www.debka.com/index.php

Picture Source: http://www.acig.org/artman/publish/article_249.shtml

[Anonymouse]

Re: War in The Middle East

This is some very good analysis and I was surprised this was even posted from Salon.com.

The neocons' next war

By secretly providing NSA intelligence to Israel and undermining the hapless Condi Rice, hardliners in the Bush administration are trying to widen the Middle East conflict to Iran and Syria, not stop it.

By Sidney Blumenthal

Aug. 03, 2006 | The National Security Agency is providing signal intelligence to Israel to monitor whether Syria and Iran are supplying new armaments to Hezbollah as it fires hundreds of missiles into northern Israel, according to a national security official with direct knowledge of the operation. President Bush has approved the secret program.

Inside the administration, neoconservatives on Vice President Dick Cheney's national security staff and Elliott Abrams, the neoconservative senior director for the Near East on the National Security Council, are prime movers behind sharing NSA intelligence with Israel, and they have discussed Syrian and Iranian supply activities as a potential pretext for Israeli bombing of both countries, the source privy to conversations about the program says. (Intelligence, including that gathered by the NSA, has been provided to Israel in the past for various purposes.) The neoconservatives are described as enthusiastic about the possibility of using NSA intelligence as a lever to widen the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and Israel and Hamas into a four-front war.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is said to have been "briefed" and to be "on board," but she is not a central actor in pushing the covert neoconservative scenario. Her "briefing" appears to be an aspect of an internal struggle to intimidate and marginalize her. Recently she has come under fire from prominent neoconservatives who oppose her support for diplomatic negotiations with Iran to prevent its development of nuclear weaponry.

Rice's diplomacy in the Middle East has erratically veered from initially calling on Israel for "restraint," to categorically opposing a cease-fire, to proposing terms for a cease-fire guaranteed to conflict with the European proposal, and thus to thwarting diplomacy, prolonging the time available for the Israeli offensive to achieve its stated aim of driving Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon. But the neocon scenario extends far beyond that objective to pushing Israel into a "cleansing war" with Syria and Iran, says the national security official, which somehow will redeem Bush's beleaguered policy in the entire region.

In order to try to understand the neoconservative road map, senior national security professionals have begun circulating among themselves a 1996 neocon manifesto against the Middle East peace process. Titled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," its half-dozen authors included neoconservatives highly influential with the Bush administration -- Richard Perle, first-term chairman of the Defense Policy Board; Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense; and David Wurmser, Cheney's chief Middle East aide.

"A Clean Break" was written at the request of incoming Likud Party Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and intended to provide "a new set of ideas" for jettisoning the policies of assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Instead of trading "land for peace," the neocons advocated tossing aside the Oslo agreements that established negotiations and demanding unconditional Palestinian acceptance of Likud's terms, "peace for peace." Rather than negotiations with Syria, they proposed "weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria." They also advanced a wild scenario to "redefine Iraq." Then King Hussein of Jordan would somehow become its ruler; and somehow this Sunni monarch would gain "control" of the Iraqi Shiites, and through them "wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria."

Netanyahu, at first, attempted to follow the "clean break" strategy, but under persistent pressure from the Clinton administration he felt compelled to enter into U.S.-led negotiations with the Palestinians. In the 1998 Wye River accords, concluded through the personal involvement of President Clinton and a dying King Hussein, the Palestinians agreed to acknowledge the legitimacy of Israel and Netanyahu agreed to withdraw from a portion of the occupied West Bank. Further negotiations, conducted by his successor Ehud Barak, that nearly settled the conflict ended in dramatic failure, but potentially set the stage for new ones.

At his first National Security Council meeting, President George W. Bush stunned his first secretary of state, Colin Powell, by rejecting any effort to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. When Powell warned that "the consequences of that could be dire, especially for the Palestinians," Bush snapped, "Sometimes a show for force by one side can really clarify things." He was making a "clean break" not only with his immediate predecessor but also with the policies of his father.

In the current Middle East crisis, once again, the elder Bush's wise men have stepped forward to offer unsolicited and unheeded advice. (In private they are scathing.) Edward Djerejian, a former ambassador to Israel and Syria and now the director of the James Baker Institute at Rice University, urged on July 23, on CNN, negotiations with Syria and Iran. "I come from the school of diplomacy that you negotiate conflict resolution and peace with your enemies and adversaries, not with your friends," he said. "We've done it in the past, we can do it again."

Charles Freeman, the elder Bush's ambassador to Saudi Arabia, remarked, "The irony now is that the most likely candidate to back Hezbollah in the long term is no longer Iran but the Arab Shiite tyranny of the majority we have installed in Baghdad." Indeed, when Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki came to Washington in the last week of July he preceded his visit with harsh statements against Israel. And in a closed meeting with U.S. senators, when asked to offer criticism of Hezbollah, he steadfastly refused.

Richard Haass, the Middle East advisor on the elder Bush's National Security Council and President Bush's first-term State Department policy planning director, and now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, openly scoffed at Bush's Middle East policy in an interview on July 30 in the Washington Post: "The arrows are all pointing in the wrong direction. The biggest danger in the short run is it just increases frustration and alienation from the United States in the Arab world. Not just the Arab world, but in Europe and around the world. People will get a daily drumbeat of suffering in Lebanon and this will just drive up anti-Americanism to new heights." When asked about the president's optimism, he replied, "An opportunity? Lord, spare me. I don't laugh a lot. That's the funniest thing I've heard in a long time. If this is an opportunity, what's Iraq? A once-in-a-lifetime chance?"

The same day that Haass' comments appeared Brent Scowcroft, the elder Bush's national security advisor and still his close friend, published an Op-Ed in the Washington Post written more or less as an open letter to his erstwhile and errant protégé Condoleezza Rice. Undoubtedly, Scowcroft reflects the views of the former President Bush. Adopting the tone of an instructor to a stubborn pupil, Scowcroft detailed a plan for an immediate end to the Israel-Hezbollah conflict and for restarting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, "the source of the problem." His program is a last attempt to turn the president back to the ways of his father. If the elder Bush and his team were in power and following the Scowcroft plan, a cease-fire would have been declared. But Scowcroft's plan resembles that of the Europeans, already rejected by the Bush administration, and Rice is the one offering a counterproposal that has put diplomacy into a stall.

Despite Rice's shunning of the advice of the Bush I sages, the neoconservatives have made her a convenient target in their effort to undermine all diplomatic initiatives. "Dump Condi," read the headline in the right-wing Insight Magazine on July 25. "Conservative national security allies of President Bush are in revolt against Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, saying that she is incompetent and has reversed the administration's national security and foreign policy agenda," the article reported. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a member of the Defense Policy Board, was quoted: "We are sending signals today that no matter how much you provoke us, no matter how viciously you describe things in public, no matter how many things you're doing with missiles and nuclear weapons, the most you'll get out of us is talk."

A month earlier, Perle, in a June 25 Op-Ed in the Washington Post, revived an old trope from the height of the Cold War, accusing those who propose diplomacy of being like Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who tried to appease Hitler. "Condoleezza Rice," wrote Perle, "has moved from the White House to Foggy Bottom, a mere mile or so away. What matters is not that she is further removed from the Oval Office; Rice's influence on the president is undiminished. It is, rather, that she is now in the midst of and increasingly represents a diplomatic establishment that is driven to accommodate its allies even when (or, it seems, especially when) such allies counsel the appeasement of our adversaries."

Rice, agent of the nefarious State Department, is supposedly the enemy within. "We are in the early stages of World War III," Gingrich told Insight. "Our bureaucracies are not responding fast enough. We don't have the right attitude."

Confused, ineffectual and incapable of filling her office with power, Rice has become the voodoo doll that Powell was in the first term. Even her feeble and counterproductive gestures toward diplomacy leave her open to the harshest attacks from neoconservatives. Scowcroft and the Bush I team are simply ignored. The sustained assault on Rice is a means to an end -- restoring the ascendancy of neoconservatism.

Bush's rejection of and reluctance to embrace the peace process concluded with the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections. This failure was followed by a refusal to engage Hamas, potentially splitting its new governmental ministers from its more radical leadership in Damascus. Predictably, the most radical elements of Hamas found a way to lash out. And Hezbollah seized the moment by staging its own provocation.

Having failed in the Middle East, the administration is attempting to salvage its credibility by equating Israel's predicament with the U.S. quagmire in Iraq. Neoconservatives, for their part, see the latest risk to Israel's national security as a chance to scuttle U.S. negotiations with Iran, perhaps the last opportunity to realize the fantasies of "A Clean Break."

By using NSA intelligence to set an invisible tripwire, the Bush administration is laying the condition for regional conflagration with untold consequences -- from Pakistan to Afghanistan, from Iraq to Israel. Secretly devising a scheme that might thrust Israel into a ring of fire cannot be construed as a blunder. It is a deliberate, calculated and methodical plot.

http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/fairenough/salon027.html

[Otto3]

Re: War in The Middle East

i will start digging a family bunker and buy supplies...

[Illuminator]

Re: War in The Middle East

My post was on topic:


Christian shrine destroyed in southern Lebanon

In a separate development, an ancient Christian shrine was destroyed as a result of Wednesday’s Israeli raids on southern Lebanon. According to archimandrite Sergius in the town of Deir Mimas, an Israeli missile flattened the St. Mamant of Caesarea church, one of the oldest in the Middle East built where the Christian martyr died in the 3rd century AD. The temple was fully restored last year.

03.08.2006

http://www.vor.ru/index_eng.phtml?view=east_eng&id=138