Prometheus 6

Soderberg's analysis only serves to illuminate the great gulf in perceptions between all the affected parties. Her take on the root cause of the current crisis is not shared by fully one side of those embroiled in the conflict. Soderberg, for example, wants to continue promoting the implmentation of UN Resolution 1559 but she and people who share her views remain silent on the status of UN Resolutions 242 and 338. If Israel can ignore UN Resolutions and its supporters conveniently overlook that fact then what justification can be offered to Hezbollah to obey Resolution 1559. 

My problem is I can't find the line that seperates the current crisis from every other one since the establishment of Israel.

None exists.

Even blind supporters of Israel (i.e., the government of the USofA) will acknowlege this...though they don't want to discuss it beyond that point.

I believe this is a reversing of cause and effect.  Israel's national government may be regarded as a "subsidiary" of Blue Team neoconservatives within the US government. 

The objection has been raised that Israel's strategic endeavors often conflict with stated US policy, as, for example, the 1982 invasion of Lebanon (which wrecked US efforts to team up with Syria and broker a conservative outcome there).  This objection assumes that the US government is cohesive, and has a single motive. 

In fact, the US foreign policy establishment is a community of sometimes fratricidal players.  For almost 40 years the Blue Team has been fighting its way to mastery of the establishment, and it has proven itself quite willing to sacrifice broader US interests to accomplish mastery. This has been disastrous for Israel as well as for the United States (to say nothing of the Lebanese and Palestinians).

Once you sagely likened the US to a chessboard, a metaphor I really liked.  If there were a game like chess, that had many potential players, with coalitions and meta-rules (i.e., different sets of rules and rules about which rules applied when) then we could call that came "n-chess" and speak of the polity as an "n-chessboard."  We could take the metaphor a bit further and point out that adjacent countries are part of this chessboard.  International boundaries and different systems of governance in different countries constitute different rules.  But n-chess has meta-rules, so those areas are still in play.

I would invite you to think of Israel as a corner of the n-chessboard where the squares are really small and there are lots of wormholes.*  In the nations of Europe and East Asia, there's a long tradition of very high levels of national cohesion; legitimacy is conferred through large, stable coalitions within the society.  But that tradition is gradually breaking down.  In the Americas and the Middle East, there is a tradition of adversarial relations and coalition building.  Conflict is constrained by honor and costly obligations; the marginal cost of victory increases as a "player's" zone of control expands.  Other players focus their attention on big changes in power and control, so that massive and decisive victories are ALWAYS regarded as an-naqba by the other players.

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*wormholes: in the game of n-chess, the usual set of rules [in ordinary chess] for allowed moves is complicated by the fact that a player can sometimes treat two squares far apart from each other on the board as if they were adjacent; as, for example, the squares on the other end of the "wormhole" are occupied by an allied player.  Since this is n-chess, not diplomacy, an ally is another player, not another country.  

Womrholes MAY exist if the space between the two ends is occupied by an enemy.

I would invite you to think of Israel as a corner of the n-chessboard where the squares are really small and there are lots of wormholes.

WAY too complicated.

"Hezbollah's success demonstrates that legitimacy (which translates into funding, recruits, safe-havens, etc.) is increasingly gained through victory on the battlefield (and to a lesser extent, good works and stability). It will get worse. Here's why. If you look at this through the lens of global guerrillas, you will see Hezbollah's success serves as both a catalyst and validation for the emerging marketplace (bazaar) for violence and security. As we have seen in Iraq and other global locales, this marketplace has a long ("fat") tail of demand and supply. As global chaos heats up, the diversity and intensity of demand/supply will grow to challenge (in aggregate) that of provided by nation-states. Hezbollah, within this context, is an entrepreneurial success story. It is being paid in legitimacy." 

I would agree with PT Cruiser (as usual) that she's being selective about which UN resolutions matter.  Soderberg's position is actually more revisionist history; she was US ambassador to the UN (1997-2001) during a period when the Clinton Administration had mostly capitulated the GOP on foreign policy.  Despite the Pentagon studies of the 1983 Beirut bombings, which arrived at no conclusions as to the perpetrators, and despite the claims by the Free Revolutionary Islamic Movement (FRIM), which identified the actual suicide bombers, Soderberg assumes Hizbullah perpetrated them. 

Despite the fact that Syria has traditionally been extremely helpful to US interests in Lebanon, and repeatly contributed to a favorable outcome (often thwarted in the execution by other parties), it has suffered from a characteristic superpower mistrust of strong nonaligned parties.  By selectively ignoring the many occasions in which the US interlocutors in the conflict were either blindsided by their own government, or were treacherous in their dealings with the Damascus reresentatives, she contributes to the fiction of an irrationaly perverse Syria in cahoots with Iran. 

Eventually Charlie Brown (Syria) got tired of Lucy (US) yanking away the football, and worked out a modus vivendi between Amal and Hizbullah.  And remember, the 1981 Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights is totally illegal; this annexation, and the Blue Team's success at keeping it off the table, has been a brilliant method of killing off Arab cooperation with the USA.  Why collaborate with a superpower that won't even get your illegaly occupied territory back?  At least with Jordan, the annexation of the West Bank (by Jordan, 1949) was a legal fiction, recognized by the Arab League as provisional to the creation of a Palestinian state.  The Hashemites didn't want it.

I think it is important to read what folks who describe themselves as cultural conservatives or libertarians are writing and saying about this chapter in the Middle East conflict. The following is an excerpt from a piece titled Welcome to My Parlor written by William S. Lind who works for the Free Congress Foundation.   

Welcome to my parlor, says the Hezbollah spider to the Israeli fly. The Israeli high command continues to express its faith in the foxfire of air power to destroy Hezbollah, but, as always, it’s not working. Lebanon is taking a pounding, to be sure, but Lebanon is not Hezbollah. Slowly, reluctantly, Israel is edging toward a ground invasion of Lebanon, for which Hezbollah devoutly prays. When air power fails, what other choice will Israel have?

“They’re guerrillas. They’re very smart.�