Saturday, August 05, 2006

The Israeli Lobby Targets Israel

Charles Krauthammer is angry at Israel for not fighting Hezbollah hard enough in a proxy war between the U.S. and Iran which is actually designed to achieve what Krauthammer and his ilk assume are Israel's interests.

Confused? Yeah, me too. Layers and layers here, like an onion.

There's some interesting commentray on this article at TPMCafe.

One quote from Krauthammer that deserves mentioning:

Unlike many of the other terrorist groups in the Middle East, Hezbollah is a serious enemy of the United States. In 1983 it massacred 241 American servicemen. Except for al-Qaeda, it has killed more Americans than any other terror organization.

The implication is that Hezbollah is a threat to the U.S. But operations against the U.S. seem to be limited to Americans who are in Lebanon. In the case mentioned here, they were soldiers who had taken sides in a civil war and who were in the country undergoing the civil war. The idea that Hezbollah threatens the U.S. because it attacks our soldiers on its own territory is bizarre, although many neoconservatiuves have used the Marine barrack bombing to argue that Hezbollah is a threat whom we must defeat.

It seems to me that this is largely a way to try and conflate our enemies and Israel's, but it also may stem from the neoconservative belief that we have the right to do whatever we want to other countries and to force other countries to bend to our will, and that anything that prevents that is a threat to us (because we are only secure if no one else has sovereignty). This belief often comes out when neocons are discussing why other countries (e.g. IRan) should not have nuclear weapons.

In any case, the motivations behind this different pro-war factions can get rather complex, and it sometimes takes a little thought to even scratch the surface of figuring it out.

That is all.

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