Post-war predictions













Yeah, that would be nice... But it's too early for predictions. It's quite possible that Israeli troops will end up stuck in southern Lebanon for a long time. Uri Avnery tries to draw the outlines of a few possible scenarios(thanks for the correspondent who provided me with the link):
THE DAY after the war will be the Day of the Long Knives.

Everybody will blame everybody else. The politicians will blame each other. The generals will blame each other. The politicians will blame the generals. And, most of all, the generals will blame the politicians.

Always, in every country and after every war, when the generals fail, the "knife in the back" legend raises its head. If only the politicians had not stopped the army just when it was on the point of achieving a glorious, crushing, historic victory...

That's what happened in Germany after World War I, when the legend gave birth to the Nazi movement. That's what happened in America after Vietnam. That's what is going to happen here. The first stirrings can already be felt.(read the rest of The Knife in the Back)

But I doubt very much on the basis of the current mood in Israel (emphasis on "current") that the people there would be ready to make new concessions on anything. I'm very skeptical that anything dramatic in going to happen as far as Israeli-Palestinian peace processing is concerned. In fact, it's quite possible that the two-state solution is now dead.
In any case, if you read Syndey Blumenthal in The neocons' next war this little war is just an opening to the Big One which would involve Syria and Iran. Maybe. That was after all part of the neoconservative "narrative" (see my earlier post), that Israel=Great Britain before the U.S. entered WWII. So I suppose the Hizbollah attacks on Haifa=The German Blitz on London (is Anderson Cooper playing the role of Edward R. Murrow in this narrative?). So I suppose in this fantasy Iraq and Lebanon, Hamas and Hizbollah, Syria and Iran, the U.S. and Israel are now becoming part of what is evolving into WWIII. But wait a minute. Isn't the U.S. backing a Shiite Islamic party with ties to Iran in Baghdad? Wouldn't that be like the U.S. under FDR ousting Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss and installing instead a pro-Nazi regime there with ties to Hitler instead of waiting for Hitler to do just that in 1938? Well, never mind...

Comments

Anonymous said…
Can you imagine Murrow and Severied interviewing Armegeddon novelists and preachers to provide color commentary on the war???
7:04 AM
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