[Previous entry: "Newton's alchemy manuscript found"] [Next entry: "'We should not be ashamed'"]

07/01/2005:

"A Summer Surprise"

by Gary Leupp
..."We may be looking at a summer of simultaneous crises on opposite sides of the world," says "one of Mr. Bush's closest aides" to David E. Sanger of the New York Times. Sanger takes that to mean Iran and North Korea, neither of which wants to provoke a crisis, both of which want to be left alone but are confronted with an administration that wants to defeat them while it remains in power. The summer crises if they come will be contrived, involve lies, shamelessly manipulate the stupider sectors of public opinion and probably require further assaults on civil liberties. I don't think another Korean War is in the cards; the "crisis" in Korea can simmer indefinitely. All it does is make the U.S. look unreasonable, in the eyes of the Chinese and most other people; encourage South Korean sympathy with Northern compatriots striving to stave off imperialist attack; and give the Japanese right an opportunity to jettison Japan's "pacifist" constitution. I think the real summer crisis will be the Middle Eastern one.

So Iran or Syria, I was thinking. But the fairly reputable Jane's Intelligence Digest points in another direction. It reports that Rumsfeld plans a "confrontation with Syrian troops" in the Bekaa Valley soon. That's in Lebanon, from whence the UN has confirmed that Syria, in haste, has recently withdrawn (in response to bulling U.S. demands) the troops sent long ago---at Lebanese Christians' request---to mediate in a brutal civil war. But constantly raising the bar, the U.S. insists that Syria withdraw all its intelligence agents from Lebanon too. Washington will---just watch---keep asserting without evidence that Syria's intelligence apparatus, which like any such apparatus is invisible, hard to identify or quantify, remains in Lebanon screwing with Lebanese politics in a way that, say, the U.S. CIA never screws with anybody.

Weak, divided, pulverized Lebanon may well be the next stage for U.S. aggression. That would keep the ball rolling. Bush would refer to the Bekaa Valley as "the latest battleground in the war on terrorism"---all in response to 9-11 when the terrorists attacked us. "Better get them in Lebanon than face them here," he'll spew, and some will swallow it. They'll buy the notion that Hizbollah, a Shiite-based mainstream highly popular political party with an armed wing in southern Lebanon, which embarrassed the U.S. by organizing massive demonstrations dwarfing the its client parties in Lebanon last month, is an al-Qaeda type terrorist organization. They'll surely bring up the Reagan-era Hizbollah attack on the U.S. force in Lebanon that shouldn't have been there to begin with, since it was just deployed to abet Israel's criminal invasion.
Full: counterpunch.org