Israel's path to total war

One of the most malignant aspects of the new chapter in the Arab-Israeli conflict is the myth of Israel as the assaulted party, lavishly propagated by the White House and the infinite pro-Israel pundits in the US media, including the editors of the New York Times, who have labeled Israel's blatant aggression against the nation of Lebanon as "legally and morally justified".

Never mind that the rest of the world, including the European Union, does not share this perception of who is mainly at fault for the deadly cycle of violence that has gripped the Middle East again. The irony is that one can detect greater voices of dissent and opposition to Israel's massive, disproportionate response to the token kidnapping of a few of its soldiers than is the case in the "pluralistic" US media, nowadays sheepishly toeing the official line.

This line was expressed by President George W Bush in his press conference alongside President Vladimir Putin on Sunday when he stated firmly, "In my judgment, the best way to stop the violence is to understand why the violence occurred in the first place. And that's because Hezbollah has been launching rocket attacks out of Lebanon into Israel."

Sure, Hezbollah conducted a raid across the border and kidnapped two Israeli soldiers, and that as a show of solidarity with the much-repressed Palestinians, but the rocket attacks on Israel were in response to Israel's massive bombardment clearly pre-planned to attain the dual objective of defanging Hezbollah and creating a regime change in Lebanon, perhaps as a prelude to a wider war on Syria and Iran.

Gideon Levy in the liberal Israeli paper Haaretz has put it cogently: "In Gaza, a soldier is abducted from the army of a state that frequently abducts civilians from their homes and locks them up for years with or without a trial - but only we're allowed to do that. And only we're allowed to bomb civilian population centers."

The White House-led masterly mischaracterization of the chronology of events culminating in the widening war show how nicely adapted are the standards of public relations that serve the Israeli war machine, currently pressing hard to pave the road for a future attack on Iran, by either the US or Israel itself, without the fear of any retaliation through Lebanon, thus depriving Iran of one of its multiple lines of defense.

Little wonder, then, that the pro-Israeli pundits in Washington are wasting no time in pushing for an attack on Iran. "Why wait?" asks William Kristol of the Standard Weekly, rationalizing his warmongering bid in the form of "It is our war, too." More

World War III Has Already Begun