This article by Seymour Hersh in the latest New Yorker magazine, reveals that Israel planned the sudden war on Lebanon, in frequent consultation with the Bush Administration and Pentagon, before it's soldiers were captured by Hezbollah. The capture of the 2 Israeli soldiers was the latest in a long history of tit-for-tat military actions between Israel and Hezbollah. In the past there had been a mutual exchange of prisoners. So Hezbollah expected to trade the hostage soldiers for all or some of the Lebanese citizens imprisoned by Israel.

However this time, Israel was waiting for a pretext they could use to start a war against Lebanon. Inadvertently, Hezbollah gave Israel something they could use as their pretext.

The cost? Hundreds of Lebanese civilians and Hezbollah soldiers killed and wounded and some hundred Israeli soldiers. Billions of dollars worth of Lebanese property and infrastructure by Israeli bombs.. And the captured Israeli solders?
Still held by Hezbollah.

The Pentagon saw the planned Israeli campaign as a step toward their planned war with Iran. The U.S. war criminals who are making illegal war on Iraq based on exposed lies and have already murdered an estimated 250, 000 people, believe they had some kind of divine right to licence what Governments do in the Middle East. They have consistently blamed Iran and Syria for helping Hezbollah, who also happen to be Lebanese. They are very much a part of and accepted by Lebanese society. As well as supplying an armed defence against Israel, they also contribute to civilian life with schools, hospitals and charities. However the Israelis and Bushcons and their media have labelled them "terrorists' so as to get popular support to make war on their country - Lebanon.

Some were elected and are Cabinet Ministers. However the Bushcons and Israelis and their mass media have effective psywar techniques of demonising any Islamic opposition to their war plans. They call them "terrorists." As such, they and the civilians living in the Pentagon target countries, then qualify to be included in Bush's "war on terrorism". In Lebanon everyone in the area is a target, civilians who left their homes after being warned to do so by Israel, even hospitals, UN personnel and those who tried to rescue them after they were bombed, ambulances with prominent Red Cross emblems on their roofs were slaughtered by Israeli bombing. It is the same with the U.S. invaders in Iraq. In every case Israel and the U.S. excused these atrocities by calling them "collateral damage" "unintentional or mistakes" etc.

Israel and U.S. war strategy is to wage war on whole societies - men, woman, children, infrastructure - and call them "terrorists". They want to create a chaos of destruction in the Middle East as a preparation for a much wider and more destructive war they may make nuclear.

The people accept this great con job perpetrated by the warmongers now in charge of our treasuries, our future and our children's future. They are thoroughly conditioned to accept as true whatever information is given to them by the mass media. Mass media repeat any and all erroneous assumptions, assertions, omissions and lies by the war planners and propagandists. The people and politicians accept their lies as almost self-evident truth. Polls show that a majority of Americans, including Democratic and Republican politicians, and Israelis, support the Israelis war on Lebanon.

How many people realise how very fortunate we are that there is still a few honest, thorough journalists like Seymour Hersh with excellent contacts, who will search out the real facts and tell us in one of the few remaining honest publications like the New Yorker. Also, unless we had the Internet, we would not usually receive such information so readily. However this twilight time when truth still filters through the cocoon of lies woven by the mass media, may soon be taken away by the war criminals, as the Internet has become one of the Bushcon targets.

 

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WATCHING LEBANON
Washington’s interests in Israel’s war.

by SEYMOUR M. HERSH, August 14, 2006

In the days after Hezbollah crossed from Lebanon into Israel, on July 12th, to kidnap two soldiers, triggering an Israeli air attack on Lebanon and a full-scale war, the Bush Administration seemed strangely passive. “It’s a moment of clarification,” President George W. Bush said at the G-8 summit, in St. Petersburg, on July 16th. “It’s now become clear why we don’t have peace in the Middle East.” He described the relationship between Hezbollah and its supporters in Iran and Syria as one of the “root causes of instability,” and subsequently said that it was up to those countries to end the crisis. Two days later, despite calls from several governments for the United States to take the lead in negotiations to end the fighting, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that a ceasefire should be put off until “the conditions are conducive.”

The Bush Administration, however, was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah’s heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground.

Israeli military and intelligence experts I spoke to emphasized that the country’s immediate security issues were reason enough to confront Hezbollah, regardless of what the Bush Administration wanted. Shabtai Shavit, a national-security adviser to the Knesset who headed the Mossad, Israel’s foreign-intelligence service, from 1989 to 1996, told me, “We do what we think is best for us, and if it happens to meet America’s requirements, that’s just part of a relationship between two friends. Hezbollah is armed to the teeth and trained in the most advanced technology of guerrilla warfare. It was just a matter of time. We had to address it.”

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