v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Steve Hurd

Mouthpiece

Not right

Israeli bombing victims

Viewing life, from a protected capital

Vallejo Nocturno 2006 - watching art, watching death

Inexcusable

The wrong way

Pablo's balcony

Vallejo Nocturno 2006 - Pablo's stuff

The way things are

Tony Karon's perceptive Rootless Cosmopolitanism site provides us with accurate analysis on the way things are developing:

Listening the millenarian rubbish pouring out of the mouths of Bush and Blair last Friday about this being a fight led by the U.S. and its allies for a “new Middle East” of freedom from tyranny blah blah — oblivious to the reality that every time Arab electorates have been given the option to vote in a democratic election, they have returned governments profoundly at odds with U.S. and Israeli policy, and the U.S. has ended up ignoring them, or trying to overthrow them… But repudiating Bush’s increasingly brittle and shrill rationalizations is not my purpose here (and Blair, quite frankly, knows better, which is why the court of history will judge him even more harshly).

I’ve always maintained that the “pro-Israel” position of the Bush administration, formulated and influenced by hardline American Likudniks (whom, it must be said, are hardly representative of mainstream Israeli thinking) is actually fundamentally bad for Israel. Its infantile, aggressive maximalism precludes Israel from doing what it will take to live at peace with its surroundings, instead demanding a confrontational approach in keeping with Jabotinsky’s “Iron Wall” in which Israel’s survival depends on crush and humiliating the Arabs. Bush may talk the language of “Arab liberation,” but his contempt for Arab democracy is plain — just look at his response to the Hamas election victory. His administration appears to be dedicated to a remaking of the Middle East on America’s terms through violent social engineering. The depth of their failure in Iraq appears not to have deterred them from another adventure in Lebanon, this time using Israel as their agent of “change.”

Plainly, the region has no interest in being remade in the manner in which Bush envisages. I strongly recommend the coverage of Rami Khouri, the excellent Jordanian analyst of Arab affairs at Beirut’s Daily Star, who makes clear that the region’s politics have indeed been remade, with the pro-U.S. autocracies having discredited themselves beyond repair, and the new motive force of Arab politics is the Islamist movement representing resistance to Israel and the U.S. and responsive, clean government in comparison to the autocracies.

Also read his 6 fallacies post which speaks more truth about the current situation than any other Western article on the situation

Protests over the indescriminate actions against Lebanon and Palestine

From My Way

logistical inanities

Directly from The War In Context:

The claim that Israel is somehow indifferent to the deaths of innocents in Lebanon -- and Israel's own claim that Hezbollah uses human shields to mask its operations -- are both superficial explanations of a much more complex political problem. According to both Israeli and American defense experts, the Qana tragedy is the direct result of the failure of the U.S. and Israel to provide a political resolution to the current crisis.

There is little question that, eighteen days after Israel's ferocious military response to the abduction of two of its soldiers and the killing of eight others, the IDF has yet to show that it is capable of decisively defeating Hezbollah in open battle or significantly degrading Hezbollah's military capacity. As a result, IDF senior officers have stridently argued that Hezbollah infrastructure strong points and marshalling stations not yet included in IAF strike packages because of their proximity to civilian concentrations be "put on the table."

Over the last 48 hours, and in the run-up to Condoleezza Rice's return to the region, pressures have mounted inside Ehud Olmert's cabinet to expand the IAF's target list to include these marginal sites, despite their proximity to high concentrations of Lebanese civilians. The calculation of the IDF's senior command, and the argument they used with Olmert, was that while expanding the target list might lead to increased civilian deaths in Lebanon the prospective military gains from successfully degrading these high value but high-cost targets was too good to ignore.

Olmert and his defense minister hesitantly gave permission to expand the target list on Friday afternoon, I have been told. Included on the target list were Hezbollah command and control centers in Tyre and in the string of towns south and east of that city. Striking these sites, it was thought, would have a decisive political -- and not just military -- impact, by degrading Hezbollah's missile capacity. Significantly bringing down the actual numbers of rockets launched against Israel would allow the U.S. and Israel to declare that the current operation was a success, thereby establishing the ground from which the U.S. could argue that the "terrorist threat" from Lebanon had been defeated. Bringing down the number of rocket strikes on Israel would also allow the IDF to claim a victory in its campaign -- an absolute necessity given the current Israeli political environment.

Reports from the ground in Lebanon confirm that the IAF has expanded its target envelope, hitting sites that were considered off limits just 48 hours previously. Unfortunately, as nearly every military expert knows, precision weapons are not that precise -- and a miscue of even ten meters can make a huge difference. This is what happened at Qana. Nor, it seems, do IDF officers take seriously the more graphic defense of IAF targeting, as justified because Hezbollah uses human shields. Israel also co-locates many of its basing operations in cities and amongst the civilian population -- simply because of the ease of logistics operations that such co-locations necessitate. "The human shield argument just doesn't wash and we know it," an IDF commander says. "We don't expect Hezbollah to deploy in the open with a sign that says 'here we are.'"

Moral superiority of the invisible

From CounterPunch and Jonathan Cook:

Our media are no less responsible for this evasiveness. They make sure "we" -- the publics of the West -- never countenance the thought that a society like our own, one we are always being reminded is a democracy, could sink to the depths of inhumanity required to murder unarmed peacekeepers. Who can be taken seriously challenging the Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni's assertion that "There will never be an [Israeli] army commander that will intentionally aim at civilians or UN soldiers [sic]"?
      
Even the minority in the West who have started to fear that Israel is "apparently" slaughtering civilians across Lebanon or that it is "apparently" intending to make refugees of a million Lebanese must presumably shrink from the idea that Israel is also capable of killing unarmed  UN monitors.
      
After all, our media insinuate, the two cases are not comparable.
      
There may be good reasons why Lebanese civilians need to suffer. Let's not forget that they belong to a people (or is it a race  or, maybe, a religion?) that gave birth to Hizbullah. "We" can cast aside our concerns for the moment and take it on trust that Israel has cause to kill the Lebanese or make them homeless. Doubtless the justifications will emerge later, when we have lost interest in the "Lebanon crisis". We may never hear what those reasons were, but who can doubt that they exist?
      
The "apparent" murder of four UN monitors, however, is a deeper challenge to our faith in our moral superiority, which is why that "apparently" is held on to as desperately as a talisman. No civilized country could kill peacekeepers,  especially ones drawn from our own societies, from Canada, Finland and Austria? That is the moral separation line that divides us from the terrorists. Were that line to be erased, we would be no different from those whom we must fight.

Israeli negotiations

Driving to the supermarket this morning I heard this news-if it isn't obvious what the game is now to most of us, then I guess the American media can portray even acts as such as this filled with a relevance that few of us can fathom-from The Guardian:

It was an unremarkable three-storey building on the edge of town. But for two extended families, the Shalhoubs and the Hashems, it was a last refuge. They could not afford the extortionate taxi fares to Tyre and hoped that if they all crouched together on the ground floor they would be safe.

They were wrong. At about one in the morning, when some of the men were making late night tea, an Israeli bomb pulverised the house. Some witnesses describe two explosions a few minutes apart, with survivors desperately moving from one side of the building to the other before being hit by the second blast. By tonight, more than 60 bodies had been pulled from the rubble, said the Lebanese authorities, 34 of them children; there were only eight known survivors.

The bombing, the bloodiest single incident in Israel's 18-day campaign against Hizbullah, drew instant condemnation from around the world and sparked furious protests outside the UN headquarters in Beirut. The Lebanese prime minister, Fouad Siniora, accused Israel of committing "war crimes" and called off a planned meeting with the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice. Israel apologised for the loss of life but said it had been responding to rockets fired from the village.

Mohamad Qassim Shalhoub, a slim 38-year-old construction worker, emerged with a broken hand and minor injuries, but he lost his wife, five children and 45 members of his extended family. "Around one o'clock we heard a big explosion," he said. "I don't remember anything after that, but when I opened my eyes I was lying on the floor and my head had hit the wall. There was silence. I didn't hear anything for a while, but then heard some screams."

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