US military may "rescue" Americans in Lebanon

From: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/jul2006/mide-j15.shtml
"US military intervention in Lebanon is also likely. US media reports Friday suggested that the initial planning for such an intervention was well advanced, with 2,200 Marines to be deployed as a helicopter-borne force that would land near Beirut on the pretext of protecting the 25,000 American citizens now trapped in Lebanon by the Israeli blockade."

"Separate or joint US and Israeli air strikes against Syria and Iran, and even a ground invasion of Syria, are also possible. Certainly the main focus of the Bush administration, the congressional Democrats and Republicans, and the American media has been to blame Syria and Iran for the crisis, claiming that those regimes were pulling the strings in Hezbollah."

The Bush administration will not retreat from Iraq and cannot maintain the status quo, as the country slides deeper into civil war and popular opposition to the war mounts among the American people. A sizeable section of the US ruling elite, frustrated by the quagmire in Iraq, believes that the only hope of military success lies in “expanding the problem,” as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has put it. They believe that Iran is using its growing influence on the Iraqi Shiite parties and militias to undermine US control of the puppet regime established in Baghdad, and that a military confrontation with Tehran is inevitable.

The Wall Street Journal is the semi-official voice of these layers, and it published an editorial Friday, entitled “States of Terror,” which openly advocated military action against both Syria and Iran. The editorial declared, “There will be no resolution in Lebanon and Gaza until the regimes in Syria and Iran believe they will pay a price...”

Criticizing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for her pro forma appeal that “all sides must act with restraint,” the Journal said, “The White House has cited Syria and Iran as the culprits behind this week’s events, but more forceful words and action are called for.”

"The mushrooming crisis in the Middle East is a predictable consequence of the massive military intervention by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the increasingly aggressive and reckless policy of American imperialism throughout the region. This includes the carte blanche given by the Bush administration to Israel to use its US-financed and US-built war machine against its neighbors and against the persecuted and oppressed Palestinian people."

"The policy of United States and Israel is based on a never-ending cycle of war. The Bush administration rests its entire foreign policy on the belief that American military power and high-tech weaponry can solve every problem. The Zionist project is similarly predicated on unrestrained use of force against the Palestinians and other targets, such as Hezbollah. Both policies have proven to be disastrous for the people of the region, including the Jewish population of Israel."

"As a US client state, Israel has long been dependent on a vast flow of economic and military aid from Washington. For the last decade, it has sought to exploit the unchallenged international supremacy of the United States, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, to reject any negotiations for a territorial settlement with the Palestinians and instead impose its dictates unilaterally on the Palestinian Authority."

"This was the content of the Sharon government’s withdrawal last year from Gaza, closing down a handful of unviable settlements in order to draw an international border with 1.5 million Palestinians on the other side, insuring a Jewish majority in Israel and the remaining occupied territories for at least another decade."

"Similar concerns are driving the Olmert government’s policy of wall-building and resettlement on the West Bank. While planning to abandon a handful of Zionist settlements, Olmert’s government is drawing the new border unilaterally to give the best land to the Israelis, including all of Jerusalem, while the Palestinians are relegated to a rump state on barely 60 percent of the occupied territory."

"In the last few days, the American media has been filled with denunciations of Hamas and Hezbollah, portraying them as terrorist organizations and fitting targets for a massive escalation of military force. But in the final analysis, the real target of the United States and Israel is not this or that organization, but the oppressed masses throughout the Middle East. They aim to destroy the will to struggle of the tens of millions of people who have never accepted the Zionist dispossession of the Palestinian people, and who will never accept the US conquest of Iraq and the establishment of a neo-colonial stooge regime in Baghdad."

"There is a profound sense in which the policies of the United States and Israel appear counterproductive and self-defeating. The Bush administration played a major role in creating the current Lebanese government, and the forced withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon has been touted as one of its few foreign policy successes in the Middle East. Yet the Israeli attacks threaten to undermine and discredit the regime in Beirut, which is compelled to stand by impotently while Lebanese citizens are slaughtered, now in the dozens, soon perhaps in the hundreds and thousands."

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