[BRIEF NOTE] Three Lebanon Articles

[rfmcdonald]

First, Leila Fadel's "Lebanon gripped by anti-American sentiment", from the Mercury News.

Last year, Lebanon was the beacon of the Bush administration's vision of a new Middle East. There were free elections without Syrian influence, women's rights, a free press and free speech.

Today, much of this nation feels deserted by America as Israeli warplanes dropping American-made weapons destroy apartment blocks, bridges and roads. After four weeks of bombardment, the feeling is increasingly shared by Shiite and Sunni Muslims, Christians and Druze.

Israeli and American officials thought Israel's counterattack against Hezbollah would turn more Lebanese against the militant Shiite group, but members of the new independent government worry that the war will turn Lebanon into a bastion for extremism. With every civilian death, anger rises, among both the displaced poor living in parks and the well-off still eating pasta salads in cafes.

"You cannot see the Middle East only through the eyes of Israel," said Misbah Ahdab, a Sunni Muslim member of parliament who was in the political movement that forced Syria to leave Lebanon last year. "Either this is settled immediately and we hurry and work to rebuild, or it will be a mini-Iraq and all the extremists will come to Lebanon to fight Israel."

Second, Sornia Verma's "'The future of Lebanon leaving' as exodus grows", from the National Post.

Estimates of the number of Lebanese nationals who have already fled to neighbouring Arab countries run upwards of 250,000 -- a staggering number in this nation of 3.5 million people.

But as Lebanon reels from a month of punishing air strikes and braces for further fighting, government officials predict the exodus will swell to include hundreds of thousands more in the weeks and months to come.

The fear is that these Lebanese are leaving for good, never to return for much more than a visit, or to collect the family and belongings they are leaving behind.

"We're talking about losing an entire generation. The war is happening in the south, but the future of Lebanon is leaving out the back door," said a Lebanese government official from the Ministry of General Security.

[. . .]

Young people in their late 20s and 30s, who are old enough to remember the violence of the civil war and Israel's occupation of the south are also young enough to leave and start fresh somewhere else.

Local observers fear the trend of university-educated people leaving will only radicalize those who are left.

"Those who are leaving are those who can afford to leave and generally speaking these are politically liberal people," says Minia Boujaoude, a columnist with the left-leaning daily As-Safir.

"We need these people to rebuild Lebanon as a modern country. It can't fall to Hezbollah," she said.

Third, the fourth post in James R. MacLean's "Sixth Arab-Israeli War" series.

The fact is that Israeli attacks on Lebanon and Gaza have not been convincingly directed at the eleusive Hizbullah; instead, the object appears to be to invert a traditional strategy employed by al-Fatah in 1976 (al-Mashriq). Then, Arafat hoped--according to Robert Fisk--that the atrocity he provoked would arouse global condemnation of his adversary, whom he could not defeat militarily. The Israeli government and its supporters abroad insist that groups like Hizbullah are intentionally provoking slaughters by hiding among civilians, in order to bring down IAF bombings. But in reality, since the bombings are confirmed to not be accidents, and not be tactically useful (since everyone knows Hizbullah is gone by the time the IAF bombing or shelling occurs), it would appear the real strategy is to kill civilians until Hizbullah loses its resolve. In fact, this is a fairly old counterinsurgency strategy, one embraced by many occupying powers through history. As a method of warfare, it leads inevitably to radicalization of the enemy and a brutalization of tactics. Ehud Olmert's successor as prime minister of Israel, or perhaps his successor's successor, will have to deal with that. So will the Israeli citizens whose trust in their leadership is being traduced so cruelly.